The project, which was presented last week in Istanbul, Turkey (and only got covered, it seems, by the Turkish press), also includes a book and downloadable pdf (315 pages).

The Future Agenda programme brought together informed people from around the world to analyse the crucial themes of the next ten years. Fifty workshops in twenty-five locations took place and resulted in a unique view of the next ten years. The website reports on the key conclusions.

In the opening section, Vodafone details what it sees as the four macro-scale certainties for the next decade – the things that, unless there is an unexpected, massive and fundamental global shift, will most definitely occur and so are the certitudes upon which everything else is built. These certainties are 1) a continued imbalance in population growth, 2) more key resource constraints, 3) an accelerating eastward shift of economic power to Asia, and 4) pervasive global connectivity.

The second section explores some of the key insights gained into how the world and our lives will probably change over the next decade. These are the key changes that will occur in many different areas, some influenced by just one of the four certainties, others by two or more. These changes are detailed by providing both the signals from today that give evidence to support the direction of change and the future implications over the next ten years. They are grouped into six clusters – health, wealth, happiness, mobility, security and locality – which seem to encompass all the issues highlighted. Each change that is depicted in this section is variously linked to a number of others.

The Future Agenda team invited students of the the Innovation Design Engineering Department (IDE) of the Royal College of Arts to create some solutions to the challenges we face. IDE focuses on using cutting edge product design experimentation and systems thinking to tackle important real world issues with advanced technical design (and) within social parameters. Short videos show the results of this RCA project.

UNIST was founded in 2009 in the industrial city of Ulsan, and aims to foster world-class education in science and technology, with top-notch students (top 3% of student intake), faculty (20% foreign), and facilities. All courses are conducted in English. UNIST, which already has a substantial online programme, also aims to be Korea’s first mobile campus: students can watch lectures, get their assignments and track their grades using smartphone apps whenever and wherever they need them.

Traditionally design in Korea has been art-based and offered through art schools. DHE is aiming to change this, by driving global industry collaboration and encouraging a multi-disciplinary approach in research and education. All students have two cross-discipline majors from Integrated Industrial Design, Engineering & Systems Design and Affective & Human Factors Engineering.

The main focus of the Experientia-UNIST/DHE collaboration will be on human-centred design and on applying this powerful innovation approach in the education of future designers and engineers, and in conducting effective applied research projects.

Experientia will support UNIST/DHE in the development of its educational programme, through adding a horizontal user experience driven didactic approach; defining a comprehensive research methods course; contributing specific expertise in areas such as interaction design, interface design and industrial design, amongst others; and organising projects workshops, teacher seminars and summer camps.

Other ideas currently being explored involve student and staff/faculty exchange, co-operation in joint research projects (possibly as part of wider European research initiatives), an in-depth longer-term collaboration on yachting design, and possible joint publications or presentations at international conferences.

In the following months Experientia and UNIST/DHE will work on shaping the specifics of the collaboration agreement through further discussions and project agreements.

Experientia has a long-term commitment to design education and research. Its partners and collaborators have been lecturing and teaching design at important international universities and design schools for many years, including the Academy for Art and Design in Berlin, Germany. Banff New Media Institute (Banff, Canada), Design Center Busan (Busan, South Korea), Domus Academy (Milano, Italy), IED (Torino, Italy), Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Ivrea, Italy), Jan Van Eyck Academy (Maastricht, Netherlands), Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy), Politecnico di Torino (Torino, Italy), Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI, USA), Samsungʼs Innovative Design Laboratory (Seoul, South Korea) and Umea – Institute of Design (Umea, Sweden). Experientia has also been involved in several regional and European research projects.

Links:
- Experientia
- UNIST
- Korea Times: UNIST to foster elites in science, tech fields
- Korea Times: Universities’ English-friendly policy has pros and cons
- Joong Ang Daily: Unist aims to be Korea’s first mobile campus

“Magitti is a next generation location-based mobile app, currently in commercial trials in Japan. It goes further than popular apps like Foursquare and Gowalla. As well as using GPS data to figure out where you are, Magitti computes a user’s preferences and context. It then makes recommendations of near-by places to go, based on that personal data. [...]

[It is] a mobile recommender service that recommends outdoor leisure activities to you based on your current time and location. More than that, it accounts for the user’s “digital situation as identified by messages they’ve been exchanging or documents they’ve been looking at.”

Begole explained that the app infers the user’s likely leisure activity and then helps partition the types of information they’d be interested in.”

Read article

Further background
- Blogpost by Begole where he discusses PARC’s work on contextual intelligence
- Case study on the role of ethnography in the Magitti development

Homesense is an epic piece of open research that explores how people can build their own DIY smart homes using open hardware and supported by local experts. The concepts for Homesense came out of the failure of top-down design to give us the ‘smart homes’ of the future, and wondering how a more democratized system of innovation could make that design process better. The project has sponsored by EDF R&D, and supported by the HighWire research group at Lancaster University.

“Since early Spring a huge amount has been going on behind the scene – little duck-legs paddling furiously under the surface of the water – and, now that the project is live here’s a run-down of where we are and how we’ve got here so far.”

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“Smartphones actually could tap into one of the same pathways in the brain that make slot machines so addictive, according to Judson Brewer, the medical director at the Yale Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic. One of the reasons gambling is so addictive is that it taps into a powerful associative learning pathway.

Associative learning means that your brain is trained to make you feel either good or bad after a certain event. Winning a jackpot feels great, so gamblers get a very strong hit of good-feeling chemicals when they win, which makes them want to do it again. “That forms an associative memory,” says Brewer. “Wanting is the stickiness that creates the glue between what you just did and that feeling.”

It turns out that reinforcing that reward intermittently creates a more powerful need than offering a reward consistently. If people hit the jackpot every time they pulled a lever, gambling would be boring. But because they don’t know when the reward is going to come, they want it that much more. Smartphones, in a way, also channel intermittent rewards.”

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Design Interactions Research
The Design Interactions program at the Royal College of Art, led by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, has launched a brand new research site, showcasing projects done by tutors, research fellows and research associates over the last few years. As well as working on applied research exploring themes and topics developed with external partners funded through a mixture of research council, European Union, cultural, academic and industrial organisations, Interactions at RCA is working towards establishing a theoretical framework for conceptual, critical and speculative design practices in relation to science and technology.

“What happens when you decouple design from the marketplace, when rather than making technology sexy, easy to use and more consumable, designers use the language of design to pose questions, inspire, and provoke — to transport our imaginations into parallel but possible worlds?

Our research explores new ways design can make technology more meaningful and relevant to our lives, both now, and in the future, by thinking not only about new applications but implications as well.

It focusses on exploring interactions between people, science and technology on many different levels. We’re concerned not only with the expressive, functional and communicative possibilities of new technologies but also with the social, cultural and ethical consequences of living within an increasingly technologically mediated society.

We do this through design-led research projects which are disseminated internationally through exhibitions, publications and conferences. Our research is funded through a mixture of research council, EU, cultural, academic and industrial organisations.

As well as working on applied research exploring themes and topics developed with external partners, we are working towards establishing a theoretical framework for conceptual, critical and speculative design practices in relation to science and technology.”

The challenges of teaching sustainability
The RCA’s Approach, by Clare Brass and Octavia Reeve (on Core77)

“It is normally taken for granted that economic growth is vital for maintaining economic health, but research has shown that wellbeing depends less on material goods than on our lifestyles. The New Economics Foundation in the UK publishes a global Happy Planet Index, which measures the combination of environmental impact and wellbeing, to quantify the environmental efficiency with which—country by country—people live long and happy lives.

So what can we as educators do to enhance those valuable skills that designers have and get them using those skills to redesign not only the products that we buy but also the lifestyles that we live and the systems that organise our lives, making them better for people? Design education needs to position itself in such a way that designers are trained to design good customer experiences with the lowest possible environmental impact. “

The ASSIST project, in collaboration with Enthoven Associates, is focused on improving mobility and communications for people with motor disabilities, whereas the EVENT project (conducted with FutureProofed) supports Kortrijk Xpo in becoming the most sustainable trade fair and congress complex in Belgium and one of the top five most sustainable fair complexes in Europe by 2020.

With these applied research projects, Flanders InShape aims to augment the efficiency and effectiveness of product development in Flanders and to improve the competitive position of Flemish companies through the development of products with higher added value for the customer.

ASSIST – Improving mobility and communications for people with motor disabilities

The Assist project, which Experientia conducts in collaboration with acclaimed Belgian design consultancy Enthoven Associates and care organisations Centrum voor Zorgtechnologie and In-HAM, aims to develop new concept ideas for assistive technologies for people with motor disabilities, using a people-centred design process. Although aimed at a Flemish context, the project focuses on international technological and design projects.

In the first phase of the project, Experientia has conducted a comprehensive benchmarking of current assistive device solutions for people with walking difficulties. The benchmark explores both on-body assistive devices, which are always in contact with motor disabled people, such as wheelchairs, rollators and standers; and assistive environments, including public transportation, mobile applications and accessibility.

Experientia will also contribute to the creation of scenarios for use during contextual observation to validate the design opportunities found in the benchmark. Enthoven Associates is currently conducting the user research and jointly the partners will then take the insights further, supported by a creative workshop to generate ideas, into design concepts.

EVENT – Sustainable event management project

The Event project sees Experientia team up with Futureproofed, a sustainable design consultancy, and Kortrijk Xpo, a conference and trade fair venue in Kortrijk, Belgium, to explore ways to make events more sustainable. The ambitious goal of this project is to make Kortrijk Xpo the most sustainable trade fair and congress complex in Belgium and one of the top five most sustainable fair complexes in Europe by 2020.

Trade fairs, congresses and events are key areas of concern for sustainability, because they involve a large number of diverse players both directly and indirectly (e.g. stand builders, lighting installers, textile manufacturers, etc.) and because time criteria often become more important during assembly, disassembly and transport, than any concern for sustainability.

This project will explore how impact can be best achieved, though good planning, preparation and usage of the right materials and products.

Futureproofed will carry out a carbon footprint analysis of Kortrijk Xpo, whereas Experientia will benchmark international best practice on sustainability for trade shows, expositions, and major public events. Together with Futureproofed, we will build a behavioural change framework, and conduct participatory workshops and concept development for more sustainable practices.

This exciting project builds on the themes that Experientia is currently exploring in our Low2No project in Helsinki, and is in keeping with our overall company commitment to sustainability.

The research was prompted by a recent surge in sharing startups driven by social technology, a generational shift, and new consumption patterns brought on by economic and environmental crisis.

Read article

UPDATE: New related articles
- Study reveals big opportunities in the sharing economy
- Has the business of sharing finally reached the tipping point?

“In the study, published last month in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan — all psychologists at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver — condemn their field’s quest for human universals.

Psychologists claim to speak of human nature, the study argues, but they have mostly been telling us about a group of WEIRD outliers, as the study calls them — Westernized, educated people from industrialized, rich democracies.

According to the study, 68 percent of research subjects in a sample of hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals came from the United States, and 96 percent from Western industrialized nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology — making a randomly selected American undergraduate 4,000 times likelier to be a subject than a random non-Westerner.”

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The international conference, which is the conclusion and culmination of the Communia Thematic Network project (the European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain), was organised by the Politecnico of Torino’s NEXA Research Center for Internet and Society (that also coordinated the network) and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and aimed at defining a shared vision of the future of universities as knowledge institutions and identifying the main steps leading from vision to reality.

The event addressed questions such as: How is the role of universities as knowledge creating, sharing, and applying institutions going to change due to the Internet? How should universities use cyberspace to best implement their mission with respect to society? Taking into account the characteristics of the new generations of students, faculty and staff, how should the informational and the spatial (both physical and virtual) infrastructures of universities be shaped to improve learning, discovery, and engagement? What about the new opportunities to enhance the civic role of universities – who prepare people for citizenship and contribute to the public sphere – in our democratic societies?

Videos of all sessions are now online, although in a still somewhat rough format (they are now working at processing the videos further):

Monday 28 June
The first day of the conference covered the relevant history and traditions of universities, moved through the current state of play, and focused on the emerging landscape of universities, articulating both their changing role in society, the significant challenges these institutions are facing for the future and, more specifically, their role vis a vis the increasing commons of knowledge facilitated by the Internet.

Morning session (video link)

• Kick-off [00:12:56]: Juan Carlos de Martin, NEXA Center for Internet & Society, in conversation with Charles Nesson, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• Keynote [00:53:20]: “Universities in the Age of the Internet” by Stefano Rodotà, University of Rome
• High Order Bit [01:46:00]: “Arduino, Open Source Hardware and Learning by Doing” by Massimo Banzi, tinker.it, arduino.cc
• Plenary [02:03:45]: “Digital Natives” with John Palfrey, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Marco de Rossi, Oilproject.org, and Urs Gasser, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Afternoon session (video link)

• Plenary [00:01:19]: “Information Infrastructure” with Alma Swan, Key Perspectives Ltd., Stuart Shieber, Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Office of Scholarly Communication at Harvard University, and Martin Hall, Salford University, UK
• High Order Bit [01:27:13]: “African Universities as Knowledge Centers: Challenges and Opportunities” by Boubakar Barry, African Association of Universities
• Plenary [01:41:45]: Physical/Virtual Spatial Infrastructure” with Antoine Picon, Harvard University and Jef Huang, EPFL

Tuesday 29 June
The second day attempted cross-sectional reorientation, by examining universities’ emerging responsibilities as ‘horizontal’ themes, especially as they intersect with future challenges described in the first day’s ‘vertical’ tracks.

Morning session (video link)

• High Order Bit [00:01:12]: “Individual and social evolution: through digital gaming, out of the box” by Carlo Fabricatore, Initium Studios & University of Worcester
• Plenary [00:14:52]: “Universities as Civic Actors or Institutions” with Marco Santambrogio, University of Parma, Italy, Colin Maclay, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Maarten Simons, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, Jan Masschelein, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and Juan Carlos De Martin, NEXA Center for Internet & Society

Afternoon session (video link)

• Plenary [00:01:00]: “Universities as Platforms for Learning” with Catharina Maracke, Keio University, Japan, Marco De Rossi, Oilproject.org, Carlo Fabricatore, Initium Studios & University of Worcester, Delia Browne, Peer-2-Peer University, Stephan Vincent-Lancrin, OECD, and Jean Claude Guedon, University of Montreal
• High Order Bit [01:15:46] by Joy Ito, Creative Commons
• Plenary [01:33:11]: “Universities as Knowledge Creators” with Carlo Olmo, Politecnico di Torino, Phillippe Aigrain, Sopinspace, Janneke Adema, Coventry University, Mary Lee Kennedy, Harvard Business School, and Terry Fisher, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• Plenary [02:49:56]: “In Search of the Public Domain” with Lucie Guibault, Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam, Patrick Peiffer, Luxcommons, Jonathan Gray, Open Knowledge Foundation, Sirin Tekinay, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey, Ignasi Labastida, University of Barcelona, Philippe Aigrain, Sopinspace, and Paolo Lanteri, WIPO

Wednesday 30 June
The third day combined the three tracks and the cross-sectional issues with an orientation towards solutions and next steps.

Morning session (video link)

• High Order Bit [00:01:08]: “Why Academia Needs to Rediscover the Commons” by Jean Claude Guedon, University of Montreal
• High Level Keynote [00:28:00]: “Digital Culture, Network Culture, and What Comes Afterward” by Bruce Sterling
• High Order Bit [01:35:44]: “From Elites, To Masses: Drivers of Excellence in Communication, And Participation” by David Orban, Humanity+ & Singularity University
• Student session [01:49:58]: “Public universities, public education: From the Bologna Process to Cyberspace”, chaired by Chiara Basile, Politecnico di Torino

Afternoon session (video link)

• Final Session: “Synthesis and Proposals” with Stephan Vincent-Lancrin, OECD, Francesco Profumo, Rector Politecnico di Torino, Mario Calabresi, La Stampa, Herbert Burkert, University of St. Gallen, Jafar Javan, UN Staff College, Charles Nesson, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Chiara Basile, Politecnico di Torino, Sirin Tekinay, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey, Juan Carlos De Martin, NEXA Center for Internet & Society, and Urs Gasser, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Energy Life includes a mobile phone application and an ambient interface that makes use of the home lighting and lamps as a means to communicate with the user. It provides feedback about consumption habits, and empowers users to become active and responsible consumers.

The efforts are part of a European Union research project that is creating new ways to allow consumers to follow and better understand their use of energy.

The technology developed in the project is being set up in two different pilot si­tes – one Nordic (Sweden/Finland) and one Southern European (Italy). In each site, studies are carried in a home environment. The research is highly multidisciplinary and combines a variety of approaches in the area of user studies, user-centred design and evaluation.

- Read article
- View video

During recent interviews with the San Francisco Chronicle, Marlow and Patil described the trends they are seeing.

“Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook, for example, has developed a “Gross National Happiness Index” that measures the positive and negative sentiments expressed in status posts. [...]

The team hopes to refine its data mining to answer questions such as how happiness may be contagious or what level of influence different groups of friends have on one another.”

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A group of graduate students at IIT Institute of Design have developed tools that apply findings from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics to the design process. These tools provide a head start on framing research as well as developing new strategies for solving user problems.

Brains, Behavior and Design: 5 tools to understand and influence decision-making is a collection of their research and a toolkit that includes factors, short-cuts, strategies and exercises to help us understand human behaviour throughout the design process.

The students are currently testing these tools in real world design problems in domains like healthcare and sustainability.

“Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and co-evolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held assumption that systems respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion is simply wrong. According to resilience thinking, systems are in constant flux; they are highly unpredictable and self-organizing, with feedbacks across time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmarks of complexity.”

A key feature of complex adaptive systems is that they can settle into a number of different equilibria. [...] Historically, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change that way. [...]

Resilience science focuses on these sorts of tipping points. [...] How much shock can a system absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different? That, in a nutshell, is the essence of resilience.”

I really enjoyed the discussion on the importance of redundancy and social equity in resilient systems:

“Society strives for efficiency by trying to eliminate apparent redundancies, but things that seemed redundant in a stable climate turn out to be valuable when conditions change. [...]

When it comes to human populations, ecologists are hesitant to stretch metaphors too far—a biodiverse ecosystem is not the same as a diverse population. [But] it’s important that you have institutions and functions in society that also overlap. If one member of the group is lost, there will be another that can maintain the function, so the function of the system as a whole is maintained. [...]

Social equity and access to resources will also emerge as hugely important components of resilience. Though human behavior is new territory for resilience experts, numerous social scientists have documented the erosion of civic engagement, and even violence, in areas marked by high levels of social stratification.”

Read full story

More information:
- Stockholm Resilience Centre
- The Urban Network
- URBIS
- Resilience 2011

“Beyond making us all more productive and efficient, we ask how we can build technology to help us be more expressive, creative, and reflective in our daily lives.

Our group considers a broad range of human values, aims to understand their complexity, and puts them front and centre in technology development. An important aspect of this endeavour is the construction of new technologies that, in turn, we ourselves can shape. In so doing, we may create new ways that help us to actively realise our aspirations and desires, to engage with or disconnect from the world around us, to remember our past or to forget it, to connect with others or disengage from them. Important here are technologies which ultimately make our lives richer, and which offer us choice and flexibility in the things that we do.

SDS does this through the bringing together of social science, design and computer science. We believe that by understanding human values, we open up a space of new technological possibilities that stretches the boundaries of current conceptions of human-computer interaction.”

Some of their projects can be viewed online, but I was quite intrigued by the wealth of recent publications (2009 & 2010) which I grouped under a number of thematic headings:

Family archives
- Passing on and putting to rest: Understanding bereavement in the context of interactive technologies
- Opening up the family archive

Household messaging
- Designing a technological playground: A field study of the emergence of play in household messaging
- Bridging the gap between grandparents and teenagers: Lightweight vs. heavyweight contact
- Resilience in the face of innovation: Household trials with BubbleBoard

Social practices
- Collocated social practices surrounding photos
- Desiring to be in touch in a changing communications landscape: Attitudes of older adults
- Machine intelligence

Studies of technology use in the home
- Who’s hogging the bandwidth?: The consequences of revealing the invisible in the home
- Understanding family communication across time zones
- Home video communication: Mediating “closeness”
- Home curation versus Teen Photography: Photo displays in the family home
- Photo displays and intergenerational relationships in the family home

Supporting autobiographical memory
- Now let me see where I was: Understanding how Lifelogs mediate memory
- Narrative, memory and practice: Tensions and choices in the use of a digital artefact
- Fixed in time and “time in motion”: Mobility of vision through a SenseCam lens
- Reflecting on oneself and on others: Multiple perspectives via SenseCam

Specific projects
- Glancephone
- Hybrid interactive surfaces
- TellTable (also here)
- VPlay

Internet on Mobiles: Evolution of Usability and User Experience (pdf)
Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy presented at Helsinki University of Technology (Espoo, Finland) on 11 December 2009.

The mobile Internet is no longer a new phenomenon; the first mobile devices supporting web access were introduced over 10 years ago. During the past ten years technology and business infrastructure have evolved and the number of mobile Internet users has increased all over the world. Service user interface, technology and business infrastructure have built a framework for service adaptation: they can act as enablers or as barriers. Users evaluate how the new technology adds value to their life based on multiple factors.

This dissertation has its focus in the area of human-computer interaction research and practices. The overall goal of my research has been to improve the usability and the user experience of mobile Internet services. My research has sought answers to questions relevant in service development process. Questions have varied during the years, the main question being: How to design and create mobile Internet services that people can use and want to use? I have sought answers mostly from a human factors perspective, but have also taken the elements form technology and business infrastructure into consideration. In order to answer the questions raised in service development projects, we have investigated the mobile Internet services in the laboratory and in the field. My research has been conducted in various countries in 3 continents: Asia, Europe and North America. These studies revealed differences in mobile Internet use in different countries and between user groups. Studies in this dissertation were conducted between years 1998 and 2007 and show how questions and research methods have evolved during the time.

Good service creation requires that all three factors: technology, business infrastructure and users are taken in consideration. When using knowledge on users in decision making, it is important to understand that the different phases of the service development cycle require the different kind of information on users. It is not enough to know about the users, the knowledge about users has to be transferred into decisions.

The service has to be easy to use so that people can use it. This is related to usability. Usability is a very important factor in service adoption, but it is not enough. The service has to have relevant content from user perspective. The content is the reason why people want to use the service. In addition to the content and the ease of use, people evaluate the goodness of the service based on many other aspects: the cost, the availability and the reliability of the system for example. A good service is worth trying and after the first experience, is it worth using. These aspects are considered to influence the ‘user experience’ of the system. In this work I use lexical analysis to evaluate how the words “usability” and “user experience” are used in mobile HCI conference papers during the past 10 years. The use of both words has increased during the period and reflects the evolution of research questions and methodology over time.

Related to her thesis, is her article “Mobile internet: Past, Present, and the future“.

The Mobile Internet is no longer a new phenomenon; the first mobile devices supporting Web access were introduced over 10 years ago. During the past 10 years many user studies have been conducted that have generated insights into mobile Internet use. The number of mobile Internet users has increased and the focus of the studies has switched from the user interface to user experiences. Mobile phones are regarded as personal devices: the current possibility of gathering more contextual information and linking that to the Internet cre- ates totally new challenges for user experience and design.

But many adults don’t see it that way-yet. During a talk at a recent US educational conference, Ito projected an image of a newspaper article that appeared after DYP issued its first press release. The researchers reported that kids are engaging in diversified and valuable dimensions of learning online. The banner headline reporting their findings proclaimed, “Chill Out, Parents.”

“That outtake focused more on inter-generational tension than on our findings,” Ito said. “The headline assumes that parents are uptight, or should be, about kids’ online activity.”

Today’s kids are growing up in a radically different media environment than their parents-and teachers-did. They are connected 24/7 to peers, to entertainment and to information. “Visceral, interactive, immersive experiences are available when and where kids want them,” Ito said.

The availability of all that compelling entertainment and information has created a gap, Ito says, between in-school and out-of-school experience. Schools need to figure out how to leverage the power of kids’ engagement with media for learning in school as well as outside it.

- Read presentation transcript
- Read article about Ito’s presentation

The research project, in collaboration with the UTS Centre for Real-Time Information Networks, explores technical approaches to sensing the presence of mobile phones in transit environments (bus, train, ferry etc.) as well as pedestrians, in order to provide real-time data on such activity, potentially informing urban planning and transport planning decisions. Such approaches might reveal how the city is being used, in real-time.

Disclosure: Experientia is working with Arup on the Low2No project in Helsinki, Finland.

Approach – Hardware – Sensing

The centre helps establish and promote Danish design research, disseminate knowledge, and build Danish and international networks among research institutions, enterprises and the general public.

The latest DCDR Webzine (nr. 25) contains three interesting articles:

Design research – a catalyst for innovation (editorial)
In the first issue of Mind Design in 2010, Director Dorthe Mejlhede takes stock of the activities in the Danish Centre for Design Research in 2009 and of the platform that the centre has created for current and future design research. Design research can act as a catalyst for innovation and as a source of value creation for companies and for society at large. That is why it is so important to continue to expand and support the design research environment, Dorthe Mejlhede points out.

Is design philosophical?
At first glance, design and philosophy inhabit different worlds. Design is often aimed at physical and concrete action, while philosophy is abstract and reflective. However, there are certain fundamental philosophical questions to be asked about the essential nature of design and the design process, as explained by Per Galle, an associate professor of design theory at The Danish Design School, the director of CEPHAD, Centre for Philosophy and Design as well as the main organiser of CEPHAD’s conference in January at The Danish Design School.

Using creativity to enhance consumer awareness
An Industrial Ph.D. project involving the Danish savings bank Middelfart Sparekasse and Kolding School of Design aims to design tools that draw on the creativity in our thinking and reflections. Specifically, Ph.D. scholar Kirsten Bonde Sørensen seeks to develop a new service for current and prospective customers to help them uncover their unrecognised knowledge and emotions and make them more aware of their own needs and values. The project also aims to illustrate a new type of consumer communication that is not about persuasion but rather about making consumers aware of their own values and dreams.

The report notes that a primary catalyst of change in closing the connectivity gap is the accelerated adoption of mobile phones within emerging economies. Robust market competition, affordable pricing, liberalized regulation and bottom-up innovation have coalesced to create a vibrant multistakeholder ecosystem.

Along with highlighting the rapid adoption rate of mobile phone usage within emerging economies, the report focuses on the question: “What’s next?” While the adoption of baseline voice and data services has been shown to have a material economic and social impact in emerging economies, it is essential that the evolution of communication services remains economically sustainable, innovative and socially inclusive.

- Read press release
- Download report