Homesense was a research project that looked at how we might design smart homes from the bottom up, in an environment of open innovation.

Using open source tools Homesense brings the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home.

“The Homesense project was an open research project around the topic of bottom-up smart homes initiated by Tinker London. In mid-2009, founder Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino wrote a blog post highlighting what the opportunities were for a large-scale open source interrogation of the “smart home” concept. Often explored in closed R&D environments, it was possible to think of the results being more relevant and accurate if the participants could build their own solutions to their problems rather than operating under the assumption that most people would accept top-down design. An existing relationship with EDF R&D via Arduino workshops led to a sponsorship from EDF R&D for 50% of the projectʼs value (£58K or so at the time). Partners in the project also included two PhD students from the HighWire group at Lancaster University, Natasha Carolan and Richard Wood who helped design the packaging for the tools available to users in this experiment. The project was eventually wrapped in mid-2011 and technical tools featured at the New York Museum of Modern Artʼs exhibition on smart objects: Talk to Me.”

After almost 2 years, here is finally the final report outlining all the work & findings.

View/download report

Since September 2011, Niti Bhan, an emerging markets design strategist, has been wholly immersed in the cyber cafe industry in Sub Saharan Africa, specifically peri urban and rural Kenya in East Africa.

She and her colleagues were tasked to assess the market and value the opportunity space for Village Telco, a social enterprise start up whose mission is to enable affordable access to voice and data communications in challenging environments.

“Since their intended target audience was to be cyber cafes (internet cafes) and this industry is very much a grassroots mom-and-pop corner store and part of the informal economy, little information was available that was easily accessible.

We took inspiration for our qualitative approach and methodology from the field of human centered design, specifically design planning (now also known as innovation planning), as taught by Larry Keeley of the Doblin Group at the Institute of Design, IIT Chicago. Our outcomes from the field were intended to inform Village Telco’s market entry strategy, including pricing and business model recommendations for their Mesh Potato device.

We were also permitted to share our insights openly on the blog, a factor that was much appreciated given that the focus of the study allowed us a wide ranging glimpse of how the internet, the mobile phone and communications technology was being adopted across significantly different parts of the country, allowing us a worm’s eye view of how innovation diffuses across socio-economic and cultural boundaries, in real time.”

Read all Niti’s posts on her Kenya project

Recently Dianna Miller had a chance to talk to Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and researcher, and the director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research. Genevieve Bell will be one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 12.

Dianna talked with her about social research, myths, design research and several other interesting subjects.

DM: What new skills and knowledge should interaction designers who’ve been focused on screen-based projects be developing now to design for smart objects and environments?

GB: I think there is a lot to be gained for reading the work in material culture from neo-Marxism through the Manchester School and the various American reinterpretations of cultural studies. There is much to be gained from the theoretical perspectives that have been rehearsed in that body of work. I think we need to continue to privilege thinking holistically. Even if you are not designing for the whole system or the whole environment, I suspect you need to understand it. For me, that means we also need to attend to ideas of power, both social and political, as it has much to do with these news spaces we find ourselves exploring.”

Dianna Miller is professor and program coordinator for the Service Design BFA/MFA program at Savannah College of Art & Design. She has twenty years experience as an interaction designer, user researcher, project manager, and content strategist. In 2003, she completed studies at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

Read interview

Dirk Knemeyer has published a call to rely on foundational science(s) to better understand users.

“The preponderance of research and publications on user studies deal more with principals and practices of the discipline and less with understanding the users themselves, much less in a deep, multi-disciplinary scientific way.

The future of design will belong to those who are able to untangle what people do and why, even those who can predict and understand – using a scientific basis – what people are likely to respond to and why and how, as opposed to simply making gut decisions.”

Read article

Larry Dignan discusses – in a conversation with David Ginsberg, director of insights and market research at Intel, and Tony Salvador, senior principle engineer of the Experience Insight Lab at the company – how Intel is boning up on its soft sciences to divine what drives customers to buy a certain device and what characteristics matter.

Ginsberg was a Clinton/Kerry campaign manager and a researcher at Penn Schoen. Salvador was the first ethnographer to join Intel.

The combination of demographics with social, neurological and market research gives Intel insights into product design as well as customer targeting.

Read article

The Danish Alexandra Institute (see also previous post) published in 2009 an anthropological user study of needs, motivations and barriers in relation to energy consumption in the home.

It was part of the MCHA project (Minimum Configuration – Home Automation) that focused on IT solutions that help to optimise and reduce energy consumption in homes.

“This guide is a presentation of the results of a qualitative user study of patterns in user needs, motivations and barriers in relation to energy consumption and willingness to change consumption behaviour. The objective is to develop an energy control unit for the home which will help users to understand and control their energy consumption and ultimately encourage them to change consumption habits.

The guide contains a presentation of the MchA project, a project funded by the Danish Enterprise and Construction Agency, and the user involvement methods applied during the project. A result of the user study is for example the definition of four ‘user profiles’ and 11 relevant themes that are interrelated. In this guide we have decided to refer to these themes as ‘user voices’ because they express the different motivations, needs and barries that are at play in a more or less conscious inner dialogue in the users before he or she takes action. These motivations and barriers open a window of opportunity for an energy control unit. At the back of each user voice card, you will find details and recommendations for an energy control unit.

The recommendations are not exhaustive, and the intention is that different readers should contribute additional opportunities, depending on the context in which the cards are used.

The guide can be read from one end to the other. It can also be used as an easy-to-read tool that provides an insight into relevant themes in the users’ consumption behaviours. The guide is meant as an inspiration on how to respond to several user voices and user profiles at the same time and thus reflect on how these different and often conflicting user voices influence consumption behaviours in the home.”

Download guide

In a long interview, Matias Duarte, Android’s head of user experience, explains how Google conducted deep user ethnographic studies to understand how people were using their smartphones and other devices.

What is the soul of the new machine?

This isn’t a design or product question. It’s a philosophical question. What is this thing? What is it supposed to do? How will it do it? How do we get there? [...]

This question sparked deep user studies at Google on mobile phone use, what Matias described as “Serious baseline ethnographic research which hadn’t happened before.” He tells me that the company spent a great deal of time and effort watching how and why regular people used their smartphones. Not just Android phones, but all smartphones. The company even had employees “shadow” users, visiting them at their homes and workplaces to watch how they interacted with their devices. Matias wouldn’t share numbers, but intimated that the study was a significant undertaking.

“A lot of what we found confirmed what I thought for years. At Danger, we had this idea that smartphones were not for a certain kind of person. They were for everyone. Smartphones were the way phones were supposed to be.”

“What we heard from everyone we talked to in the study was that they love these things [smartphones], they are a part of their lives. They’re incredibly passionate about them. They can’t live without them. That was awesome. But we also heard a lot of things we didn’t like to hear.”

“With Android, people were not responding emotionally, they weren’t forming emotional relationships with the product. They needed it, but they didn’t necessarily love it.”

Matias says that the studies showed that users felt empowered by their devices, but often found Android phones overly complex. That they needed to invest more time in learning the phones, more time in becoming an expert. The phones also made users feel more aware of their limitations — they knew there was more they could do with the device, but couldn’t figure out how to unlock that power.

Read interview

(summary article)

When people expect to be able to access information in the future, they tend to have reduced memory for the actual information, but enhanced memory for where to find the information. A feature article on UX Magazine:

“Researchers found that when we expect to be able to access information in the future, we tend to have reduced memory for the actual information, but enhanced memory for where to find the information.

Thus, while we do measurably worse at remembering that the capital of Vermont is Montpellier, we apparently remember with greater accuracy, where on the bookshelf the atlas is located.

These findings suggest that making sites memorable as the repository of information may be the key to gaining return visitors.”

Read article

The market research industry is built for the 20th Century mass production model, which is rapidly disappearing, argues Sam Ladner. The “mass audience” is gone and a fragmented diverse populace has taken its place. This new “audience” defies the easy aggregation of summary statistics on which market research so often relies.

“Market researchers may argue that with proper segmentation, you can understand every niche within the long tail. This may be true, but to truly understand the diversity between people, your task is not simply to “summarize” the audience, but to delve deeply into the dynamics of what makes them different.

This is why design research is a better fit for today’s long-tail economic model. Context matters. Design research is all about understanding the context because it is rooted in qualitative methodologies, and ethnography in particular. Designers solve contextual problems.”

Read article

Debbie Millman of DesignObserver.com interviewed design anthropologist Dori Tunstall on the insights that anthropology brings to consumerism and branding, and about the powers of transformation in design and designers.

“Dori Tunstall is a Design Anthropologist, meaning she tries to understand how the processes and artifacts of design help define what it mean to be human. Design Anthropology argues that by taking into account how others see and experience the world differently, products and services can be designed that work with people and nature rather than disrupt them.

Dori is an Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia as well as Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Design.”

Listen to audio

“Shoes, cars and other love stories: Investigating the experience of love for products is the title of the doctoral dissertation (and a book!) by Beatriz Russo Rodrigues (Brazil) at the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands.

“People often say they love a product. What do they really mean when they say this, and is this a phenomenon that is relevant to the field of design? Findings from a preliminary study in this thesis indicated that people describe their love as a rewarding, long-term, and dynamic experience that arises from a meaningful relationship built with products they own and use. Inspired by existing approaches to the experience of love from social psychology, research tools are developed for the closer study of person-product love. Using those tools the research in this thesis investigates how person-product interactions are linked to the experience of love and how these influence love over time. The findings reveal how the experience of love arises from person-product relationships, how love relationships develop over time, and which factors can provoke change in the love experience and love relationships over time. These findings present opportunities for design researchers and designers to foster rewarding experiences and long-lasting person-product relationships. Person-product love relationships can bring emotional rewards that benefit people’s wellbeing and stimulate sustained efforts to keep loved products for longer.”

Download thesis

(via InfoDesign)

Intel’s corporate anthropologist Genevieve Bell has written an elegant introductory article for the BBC site on the role of anthropology in the corporation – particularly aimed at a lay audience.

“Ultimately, my team’s role is about making sure the product development processes start from an understanding of what people care about when it comes to technology.

And that as an organisation, we are literally testing our silicon against that ideal at each and every step of the way.”

Read article

Hivos (The Netherlands) and the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”.

This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around ‘digital revolutions’ in a post MENA (Middle East – North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

The conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class, education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide spectrum of style and content.

Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?
The first part, To Be, looks at the questions of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations? The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?
In the second section, To Think, the contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes, logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.

Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?
To Act is the third part that concentrates on stories from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging information and technology contexts.

Book 4: To Connect: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?
The last section, To Connect, recognises the fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by these new processes of technologised change.

(via Luca De Biase)

The draft proceedings of EPIC 2011, the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, currently taking place in Boulder, CO, USA, are available for download during the conference.

They contain drafts of papers and workshop abstracts, and photos and abstracts from Pecha Kuchas and Artifacts.

Print proceedings will be mailed to conference participants and will be available through Anthrosource from October 21.

Download draft proceedings (pdf, 385 pages)

An essential part of any design activity is understanding the context one is working in, particularly the social context. Eventually when proposals are made, these too must be measured by their likely impact on the people who will use and live with them.

The Helsinki Design Lab (an entity within Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund) has created a Design Ethnography Field Guide which is a booklet that participants of the HDL Studios use when venturing into the field to see the reality of a system as it is lived and experienced on the ground. It is intended to be the minimal starting point for this kind of activity. They supplement this document with group discussions to prepare participants and adjust the booklet as needed in different situations.

The download page also contains some other resources that may be a useful starting point.

And obviously more resources can be found on this very blog.

Applying Anthropology in the Global Village
Christina Wasson (Editor); Mary Odell Butler (Editor); Jacqueline Copeland-Carson (Editor)
288 pp. – Nov, 2011
Left Coast Press
Hardback (978-1-61132-085-5)
Paperback (978-1-61132-086-2)
[Amazon link]

Synopsis

The realities of the globalized world have revolutionized traditional concepts of culture, community, and identity—so how do applied social scientists use complicated, fluid new ideas such as translocality and ethnoscape to solve pressing human problems? In this book, leading scholar/practitioners survey the development of different subfields over at least two decades, then offer concrete case studies to show how they have incorporated and refined new concepts and methods. After an introduction synthesizing anthropological practice, key theoretical concepts, and ethnographic methods, chapters examine the arenas of public health, community development, finance, technology, transportation, gender, environment, immigration, aging, and child welfare. An innovative guide to joining dynamic theoretical concepts to on-the-ground problem solving, this book is also an excellent addition to graduate and undergraduate courses.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler, Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
1. Public Health in Global Localities: Managing Infectious Disease, Mary Odell Butler
2. Transportation and Infrastructure: Culture on the Move, Mari Clarke
3. Community Development in Globalizing Cities: Housing and Finance, Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
4. Sex Trafficking: Feminist Anthropological Practice, Susan Dewey
5. Climate Change and the Global Environment, Shirley J. Fiske
6. International Migration and Aging, Madelyn Iris
7. Neoliberalism and the Privatization of Social Services, Susan Racine Passmore
8. Internationalism and Systems Thinking in Community and Public Health, Eve C. Pinsker
9. Localizing the Global in Technology Design, Susan Squires and Christina Wasson
Conclusion: Globalization, Community Research, and the Politics of Science, Jean J. Schensul
Index
About the Authors

Ken Banks adds some further reflection to the matter, and thinks the book is a must-read “for anyone interested in how anthropology can be usefully applied in the modern world.

In a series of blog posts Rebecca S. Kuchar of Sylver Consulting illustrates the challenges and rewards of orchestrating global and multi-cultural research.

A first focus is on France and Rebecca talks with Caroline Baker, founder and managing director of European Market Research Associates (EMRA). Born and raised in the U.K., Caroline is a top-notch qualitative researcher who moderates in both French and English, and in the interview she explores some of the language and cultural issues she has observed over the past 28 years that she has been living and working in France.

A recommended read.

Part 1 | Part 2

The commonly held belief that the internet is turning an entire generation into solitary web-junkies is a myth, according to new research. In a paper to be presented to a gathering of Nobel prize winners later this month, three influential economists claim their work demonstrates the internet is actually making us more socially active.

“The three economists found that once adults had access to broadband, their attendance at theatres, cinemas, bars or restaurants actually increased. They also found evidence that far from curtailing children’s extracurricular experiences, a broadband internet subscription at home increased the number of children’s out-of-school social activities, such as sports, ballet, music, painting lessons, or joining a youth club.”

Read article
Download paper

Four interesting articles in Research Magazine, a UK industry magazine.

This month we… browsed a virtual supermarket
Robert Bain explores a simulated supermarket used to research products and store designs.

Behind the sofa
Simon Lidington thinks researchers have forgotten the art of conversation. Turns out all you need is a sofa, a video camera and some cool interactive transcript technology to get people talking.

Slow down! You move too fast
Attempts to curb speeding on the roads usually involve a mix of scary messages and the threat of fines or driving bans. But behavioural economics is starting to be applied to this social issue in creative ways, says Crawford Hollingworth.

Mobile research: No time like the present
Jay Pluhar of research software and services provider MarketTools says that when it comes to adopting mobile research techniques, fortune will favour the brave.

Kevin Miller, global head of insight at in-flight magazine publisher Ink discusses how the environment impacts airline travellers psychologically and in turn affects their choice of media.

“The airline passenger journey, from home to boarding the plane and beyond, is a dynamic and emotional experience, with many media messages and retail choices along the way. But how can we measure these changing emotions and the effect they have on the passenger’s state of mind? And what messages types are most likely to be understood in these states of mind?

Recent research by psychologists, specialising in the field of ethnography (the observation of respondents in the natural environment) has identified the passenger experience to be an unusually highly dynamic and stimulating experience. Hannah Knox, a British-based behavioural psychologist has described airports as “An increasingly intensive use of space where anything might happen…”

Red Border has carried out in-airport and cross-media ethnography, identifying distinct emotional zones in the flyer’s journey, as well as the experience of magazine reading.”

Read article

Tablet platforms break traditional paradigms of computer and mobile use, shows ethnographic and interview-based research conducted over the last year by UX research firm AnswerLab.

“We have learned that although many people purchased iPads thinking they would be “big iPhones,” nearly everyone said the iPad exceeded their expectations. Yet the tablet platform breaks the mold from certain commonly accepted paradigms on traditional computer and mobile platforms, and raises unique concerns and potential barriers to adoption in some areas. As a guide for developers, designers, and product managers, we have identified three key trends across our tablet UX research and provide five lessons for creating tablet experiences.”

Read article

Sarah Brooks of Shareable has just published the second part of her interview with the Italian design strategist Ezio Manzini, who is one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable design, author of numerous design books, professor of Industrial Design at Milan Polytechnic, and founder of the DESIS (Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability) network of university-based design labs.

Manzini speaks particularly about a community-supported agriculture project in Milan, that I like very much:

“At present, the most relevant project we have in this field is Nutrire Milano (Feeding Milan). It is an initiative promoted and developed in Milano by Slow Food, Politecnico di Milano, Facoltà di Scienze Gastronomiche and several other local partners. This project aims at regenerating the Milanese peri-urban agriculture (that is the agriculture near the city) and, at the same time, at offering organic and local food opportunities to the citizens. To do that implies to promote radically new relationships between the countryside and the city. That is, to create brand-new networks of farmers and citizens based on direct relationships and mutual support.

The project’s first step had been recognizing the existing (social, cultural and economic) resources and best practices. Moving from here, a strategy has been developed considering the emerging trends towards a new possible synergy between cities and their countryside (as the ones towards zero-mile food and proximity tourism). On this basis, a shared and socially recognized vision has been built: the vision of a rural-urban area where agriculture flourishes, feeding the city and, at the same time, offering citizens opportunities for a multiplicity of farming and nature related activities.

To enhance this vision, the program is articulated in local projects (which are several self-standing projects, each on of them supporting, in different ways, a farmer’s activity) and framework actions (including context analysis, scenario co-creation and communication, promotion and coordination of the different individual local projects).

It is remarkable that, in a large project like this (a five-year project involving a very wide regional area), thanks to its adaptability and scalability, a first concrete result (a very successful Farmers’ Market) has been obtained in less than one year since starting-up, that two other initiatives will be realized in the next years and that several others are underway and will be implemented in the near future (keeping in account the very concrete experiences of the first three ones).”

Read full interview

In a long post on reBoot, Panthea Lee has laid out some basic principles, approaches, and tools of design research so public institutions can better understand how it serves their work.

As pointed out by Tricia Wang, the article is extremely helpful in its clear distinction between design research and market research:

“Market research identifies and acts upon optimal market and consumer leverage points to achieve success. Its definition of success is not absolute, though metrics are often financial. Design research, on the other hand, is founded in the belief that we already know the optimal market and consumer leverage points: human needs. Unearthing and satisfying those needs is thus the surest measure of success. Through this process, we earn people’s respect and loyalty.”

Interesting too, the case study about rural education in Suriname.

Read article

On June 23, CHI Netherlands organised Chi Sparks, its bi-annual conference, and the keynote videos are now available.

The theme of this year’s Chi Sparks conference was ‘HCI research, innovation and implementation’, and more in particular the very important contributions that good HCI research makes in realizing successful, innovative, new products or services that have a genuine impact on people’s lives.

User experience research and practice – two different planets? [video 32:56]
Virpi Roto, user experience researcher, Aalto University and University of Helsinki, Finland
Good user experience (UX) is increasingly important for profitable business: once utility and usability are taken for granted, successful companies design for experiences. But how to manage the fuzzy thing called user experience in product development? Can UX research help UX work in practice? This talk discusses the impact of business goals on UX research and the transfer of UX research results into practice.

User-centered design – a reality check [video 36:09]
Jasper van Kuijk, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft
In the past years scores of methods for user-centered design have been developed – and validated. But do they really work? In reality that is. In practice user-centered product development is hectic and messy, at best. This presentation discusses barriers and enablers for usability in the development practice of electronic consumer products, identified through three case studies across 10 product development groups.

Motors and Music – explorations of tangible interaction [video 48:26]
Bill Verplank, Stanford University
Human-computer interaction is spreading into every-day objects like phones, cars, toys, books and instruments. Many interactions are implicit (the door “does the right thing” when I approach); others are more “explicit” (I push it). How do you know what the door is doing (e.g. “not allowed”)? Can you control it more expressively (e.g. “fling”). If the door has a motor in it; can we “feel” the force/motion/inertia/reluctance?
Music and musical performance are a challenge to HCI. Some of the best performances require precise expressive motions. I will describe experiments which use active force feedback (haptics) in the design of musical controllers. There are lessons for a broad range of interaction designers.

(via InfoDesign)

Jacquelyn Krones, a Senior Product Manager from Microsoft, is in charge of an ongoing ethnographic research project on understanding search behavior.

“I would say the other big insight for us was around knowledge creation, which is also called “sense-making” in the information science academic discipline. We have really seen a shift over the past several years that we’ve been doing ethnography.

In 2004 people really said that knowledge lives with experts and the experts help them make decisions.

In 2007, people said that search engines actually had all of the knowledge in the world and it was just there for them to go out and pull it out. And now, in 2010, people told us that they created their own knowledge, that even though the search engine never really had all the knowledge in the world, it was linked to information.

People are much more sophisticated now in how they think about that. They say “The search engine’s a great tool for getting access to information, but I need to look at that information and contrast and compare it, and come to my own conclusion about what the right answer is for me. And when I do that, that’s knowledge, but before that, it isn’t knowledge.” People have a sense that knowledge is something that they are actively creating and that is very personal to them.”

Read article

Niti Bhan, the emerging markets strategy specialist, went to Kenya to participate in the Pivot 25 conference and wrote this guest contribution on her experience there.
[Disclosure: Experientia has worked with Niti on an extensive emerging market research project in 2008].

“I’ve just returned from Kenya where I was one of the judges for Pivot25, the first East African (and possibly African) mobile web developers app and startup competition.

Sponsored by the likes of Google, Samsung, Nokia and Tigo (where on earth where Safaricom and Airtel?) as well as the World Wide Web Foundation and the World Bank, Pivot25 showcased the local developer community’s offerings and shone a spotlight on the launch of the mLab, an incubation facility for such ventures.

The teams knew the odds and we saw them overcome their challenges. There was a wide range of skills, talent and quick thinking entrepreneurial attitude on display by the presenters as they gave their pitches to the judges and the audience. We all know that first impressions matter and the overall winner, MedKenya, is being sponsored by the conference to attend Demo in San Francisco this coming fall. I want to see what they think of the Valley’s startup culture from the inside track and I want to see what the Valley makes of them.

Reflecting on my observations after two weeks in the field, I see an elasticity in the transitional nature of this rapidly evolving landscape. The penetration of the mobile phone in sub Saharan Africa has doubled in the three short years since we went out into the field for the Out of Africa project I conducted with Experientia for a major mobile phone company.

That was then, this is now. We had to get our feet wet and print a local business card in Nairobi because of the sheer nature of the disruption that is taking place in the mobile platform and its attendant variety of industry players, movers and shakers and money.

This as good as time as any to talk about the Interface Innovation project I did for Kevin Farnham, CEO of Method back in 2005. The five year statue on non disclosure is over and one can already see the future through the small handheld screen. One worldwide river of information in all manner of media afloat out there to be snagged and reeled in using the best fishing lines and bait. Google as the OS by which to experience this inter-networked world wide web of humanity of ours. Kevin would have long debates around the future of branding in this environment. After all, if you’re experiencing reading this article via your mobile phone, which brand is controlling your experience?

The one on your handset? The one flashing on the top right hand corner of the screen connecting you to the rest of the world?

Or the one whose vision of the world correlates enough with yours that you choose to see the world through their interface.

Today, looking back at our conversations and now being able to look at the present and its fringes out in East Africa, innovation is already a matter of brand equity. You cannot afford to be seen as stodgy and slow, now matter how good your work may be. Sometimes timing is more important than perfection.

We’re already seeing an interest in tapping the informal economy which is primarily cash based and through a variety of sources such as kitchen farming, trading, specialising and cooperating fiscally.

Normal segmentation models based on income available to spend tends to skew the results. The rural population is actually far wealthier than the urban, its simply a tendency towards minimizing liquidity in a cashless environment of value exchange.

Variations on the prepaid model successful in the mobile industry seem to be the ones that work the best. However, the advent and successful adoption of mobile money transfer systems such as mPesa who permit holding onto cash electronically for periods of time are influencing change in the lower income traders and businessmen. Float and working capital are available in a manner that weren’t earlier. Cash circulates and that triggers a growth cycle.

We are watching a whole new industry and its attendant ecosystem emerge here in Nairobi, Kenya. The mobile information technology industry, where the concepts of time and space and money are far more sensitive to the environment due to the real time nature of the data flow.

Literally a case of “watch this space” carefully and learn.”

MIT technology and society specialist Professor Sherry Turkle presents – during a June 1 talk at the RSA in London – the results of a fifteen year exploration of the colossal impact technology has had on our lives and communities.

Thirty years ago we asked what we would use computers for. Now the question is what we don’t use them for. Now, through technology, we create, navigate and carry out our emotional lives. We shape our buildings, Winston Churchill argued, then they shape us. The same is true of our digital technologies. Technology has become the architect of our intimacies.

Online, we face a moment of temptation. Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, we conduct “risk free” affairs on Second Life and confuse the scattershot postings on a Facebook wall with authentic communication. And now, we are promised “sociable robots” that will marry companionship with convenience. Technology promises to let us do anything from anywhere with anyone. But it also drains us as we try to do everything everywhere.

We begin to feel overwhelmed and depleted by the lives technology makes possible. We may be free to work from anywhere, but we are also prone to being lonely everywhere. In a surprising twist, relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down.

MIT technology and society specialist Professor Sherry Turkle has spent fifteen-years exploring our lives on the digital terrain. Based on interviews with hundreds of children and adults, she visits the RSA to describe new, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude.

Chair: Aleks Krotoski, academic, journalist and host of the Guardian’s Tech Weekly.

Video (20 min): vimeo – youtube – download (mp4)
Audio (64 min): download mp3

Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net and FrontlineSMS, reports on how Activate 2011, the one-day conference in London on technology and development, made clear it’s not just about technology, but who uses it and how.

“As the day drew to a close, I was left with one lingering thought as I headed to catch my train home. Technology is most interesting when it’s powered by people, not the other way round. Let’s keep it that way.”

Read article

OTHER ACTIVATE 2011 CONTENT

Activate 2011: Mobiles look set to play a big role in Africa’s development
A race is on to find what mobiles can do in areas such as public health, governance and education as they are likely to be the only internet connection for most Africans for years to come

Hillary Clinton adviser compares internet to Che Guevara
Alec Ross says ‘dictatorships are now more vulnerable than ever’ due to protest movements on Facebook and Twitter

Video: World Bank Institute: We’re also the data bank
Aleem Walji, practice manager for innovation at the World Bank Institute, which assists and advises policy makers and NGOs, tells the Guardian’s Activate summit in London about the organisation’s commitment to open data.

Video: Google’s Africa policy manager: ‘Africans enjoy technology’
Ory Okolloh, Google’s policy manager for Africa and a Kenyan lawyer and activist, tells the Guardian’s Activate summit in London that Africans don’t view technology simply as a tool of development.

Video: Hillary Clinton adviser: internet weakens dictators
Speaking at the Guardian’s Activate 2011 conference in London, Alec Ross, Hillary Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation at the US state department, discusses the role of social media in the Arab Spring.

Ethnography and The Corporate Encounter
Reflections on Research in and of Corporations
Edited by Melissa Cefkin
Berghahn Books
2010, 262 pages

Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of critical inquiry such as anthropology. In addressing these issues, the contributors explore how researchers encounter and engage sites of organizational practice in such roles as suppliers of consumer-insight for product design or marketing, or as advisors on work design or business and organizational strategies. The volume contributes to the emerging canon of corporate ethnography, appealing to practitioners who wish to advance their understanding of the practice of corporate ethnography and providing rich material to those interested in new applications of ethnographic work and the ongoing rethinking of the nature of ethnographic praxis.

Melissa Cefkin is a cultural anthropologist with experience in research, management, teaching, and consulting for business and government. Currently based at IBM Research in the area of services research, she earned her PhD from Rice University and remains dedicated to pursuing a critical understanding of the intersections of anthropological practice within business and organizational settings.

Related:

Last weekend, the Financial Times Magazine reports on one chapter of the book that describes how two Intel researchers, Dawn Nafus and Ken Anderson, observed the rituals of everyday life in Intel’s corporate “jungle”.

“Ironically, while Intel worshipped the idea of free-flowing innovation, the way employees communicated was subject to a rigid but unspoken set of cultural “rules”. Post-it notes were deemed acceptable, and used to “push the boundaries”. This, however, “delegitimized knowledge which did not come in the form of bold, sweeping statements required of ‘out-of-the-box’ performances,” they write. PowerPoint and whiteboards were acceptable; communicating through dance was not. And “if your inspiration [for innovative ideas] happened to come from ‘suspect’ sources, such as religious texts, this can be smuggled in only through disguise.”

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DPPI 11, the 5th conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, will take place in Milan at the end of this month, with leading roles for two Experientia partners: Mark Vanderbeeken will act as co-chair of the user-centred design track while Jan-Christoph Zoels will be part of a roundtable discussion.

The conference will take place at the Milan Polytechnic on 22-25th June, with the focus on “How can Design Research serve Industry? – Design visions, tools and knowledge for industry,” thus trying to stimulate the discussion on user driven design within the context of other design approaches and its role for industries.

Mark will co-chair the track on “Innovative ways to explore User Centred Design”, in partnership with Anna Meroni, Assistant Professor in Service and Strategic Design at the Milan Polytechnic, as well as researcher in the DIS (Design and Innovation for Sustainability) research unit of the Polytechnic’s acclaimed INDACO department.

Jan-Christoph will participate in a Thursday evening roundtable discussion together with Federico Ferretti (Continuum), Christian Palino (IDEO), and Jon Kolko (Frog Design).

The DPPI conference originally began through the desire to move away from talking purely about usability, and look at the role of experience in human-product interaction. As products and services in mature markets become increasingly standardised, the DPPI organisers realised there was a space to debate the the end-user’s perception of products, and to explore a more experiential approach to innovation.

The conference will provide a mix of workshops, paper presentations and other activities. It aims to get participants “listening, doing, researching, designing, discussing, learning and having fun.”

Keynote speakers are:

• Prof. Bruce Brown, professor of design at the University of Brighton and co-editor of Design Issues Research Journal (published by MIT press)
• Jon Kolko, founder and director of Austin Center for Design
• Dr. Donald Norman, co-founder and principle of the Nielsen Norman Group, IDEO fellow, and professor at the Department of Industrial Design, Kaist (South Korea)
• Dr. Ezio Manzini, coordinator of DESIS International of the INDACO department at the Milan Polytechnic
• Dr. Roberto Verganti, professor of management of innovation at the Milan Polytechnic, and visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School

As a member of the conference’s scientific committee, Mark has also been responsible for reviewing some of the conference papers.

Registration for the conference is still open.

The number of times that Google has failed at delivering a successful ‘social’ product is in danger of rising to an embarrassing degree. Google Wave is no longer actively developed for use; Buzz has experienced low usage, and seems to most to yield little value; Latitude never gained traction like Foursquare has; Orkut (Google’s Facebook like social network) is perhaps its most successful project but can claim little popularity outside of Brazil and India. Recently the latest attempt to make headlines is ‘+1’, but this is yet to prove itself and opinion is divided on whether it is following a pathway to success.

So why can’t Google win at social, asks columnist Joseph C Lawrence on Memeburn. His answer:

“It is all about users’ expectations and habits. Most people who work in the web understand the principles of user centred design, but this is usually limited to interface design and information architecture. The principles go far deeper than this, and can help to explain why Google is having no joy in the social sphere.”

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New Media Technologies and User Empowerment
Jo Pierson, Enid Mante-Meijer and Eugène Loos (eds.)
Peter Lang – International Academic Publishers
May 2011
317 pages
ISBN 978-3-631-60031-3

Synopsis

Recent developments in new media devices and applications have led to the rise of what have become known as ‘social media’, ‘Web 2.0’, ‘social computing’ or ‘participative web’. This shift in ICT, from unidirectional to conversational media of mass self-communication has lowered the technological thresholds for everyday users to cooperate for their own benefit, to participate in online environments and social network sites, to co-create business value and to become ‘produsers’ or ‘pro-ams’. At the same time, we see an evolution towards people-centred design and user-driven innovation in the design of new media technologies. This has created new opportunities and heightened expectations regarding user empowerment in different societal arenas.

However, the question remains to what extent users and communities interacting in an all-IP new media ecosystem are empowered (and not disempowered) to express their creativity and concerns in their social and cultural environment and to obtain a prominent role in the process of new media design and innovation. The book attempts to answer this question through a collection of chapters that scrutinise this issue. The different chapters focus on the way that social and economic opportunities and threats enable and/or constrain user empowerment.

This work consists of four major sections, each of which examines the (potential) empowerment/disempowerment of users in relation to new media technologies from a different angle. The chapters in the first section describe different theoretical perspectives on user roles and user involvement in the new media ecosystem, referring to interpretative, positivist and critical schools of thought. Based on these overall guiding frameworks, we then explore the leverage users have, both on content level and on technological level. This refers respectively to the second and third section of the book. In the fourth section different case studies are presented, each of which highlight how user empowerment manifests itself in different new media sectors and environments (such as publishing, the music industry and social networking sites).

The book is based on interdisciplinary research. It offers innovative insights based on state-of-the-art academic and industry-driven ICT user research in various European countries. This work will appeal to post-graduate students and researchers in the field of media and communication studies, social studies of technology, digital media marketing and other domains that investigate the mutual relationship between new media technologies and society.

Contents

• Yves Punie: Introduction: New Media Technologies and User Empowerment. Is there a Happy Ending?
• Enid Mante-Meijer/Eugène Loos: Innovation and the Role of Push and Pull
• Valerie Frissen/Mijke Slot: The Return of the Bricoleur: Redefining Media Business
• Serge Proulx/Lorna Heaton: Forms of User Contribution in Online Communities: Mechanisms of Mutual Recognition between Contributors
• Aphra Kerr/Stefano De Paoli/Cristiano Storni: Rethinking the Role of Users in ICT Design: Reflections for the Internet
• James Stewart/Laurence Claeys: Problems and Opportunities of Interdisciplinary Work Involving Users in Speculative Research for Innovation of Novel ICT Applications
• Marinka Vangenck/Jo Pierson/Wendy Van den Broeck/Bram Lievens: User-Driven Innovation in the Case of Three-Dimensional Urban Environments
• Mijke Slot: Web Roles Re-examined: Exploring User Roles in the Media Environment
• Philip Ely/David Frohlich/Nicola Green: Uncertainty, Upheavals and Upgrades: Digital-DIY during Life-change
• Eva K. Törnquist: In Search of Elks and Birds: Two Case Studies on the Creative Use of ICT in Sweden
• Levente Szekely/Agnes Urban: Over the Innovators and Early Adopters: Incentives and Obstacles of Internet Usage
• James Stewart/Richard Coyne/Penny Travlou/Mark Wright/Henrik Ekeus: The Memory Space and the Conference: Exploring Future Uses of Web2.0 and Mobile Internet through Design Interventions
• Sanna Martilla/Kati Hyyppä/Kari-Hans Kommonen: Co-Design of a Software Toolkit for Media Practices: P2P-Fusion Case Study
• Ike Picone: Mapping Users’ Motivations and Thresholds for Casually «Produsing» News
• Stijn Bannier: The Musical Network 2.0 & 3.0
• Enid Mante-Meijer/Jo Pierson/Eugène Loos: Conclusion: Substantiating User Empowerment

Authors

• Jo Pierson is Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel – Department of Communication Studies / SMIT (Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication)
• Enid Mante-Meijer is emeritus Professor at Utrecht University – Utrecht School of Governance
• Eugène Loos is Professor at the University of Amsterdam – Department of Communication Science / ASCoR (Amsterdam School of Communication Research).

Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India, together with Shikoh Gitau and Gary Marsden of the University of Cape Town, have published their ethnographic insights in mobile-only internet use in urban South Africa.

“Using an ethnographic action research approach, the study explores the challenges, practices, and emergent framings of mobile-only Internet use in a resource-constrained setting. We trained eight women in a nongovernmental organization’s collective in South Africa, none of whom had used a personal computer, how to access the Internet on mobile handsets they already owned. Six months after training, most continued to use the mobile Internet for a combination of utility, entertainment, and connection, but they had encountered barriers, including affordability and difficulty of use. Participants’ assessments mingled aspirational and actual utility of the channel with and against a background of socioeconomic constraints. Discussion links the digital literacy perspective to the broader theoretical frameworks of domestication, adaptive structuration, and appropriation.”

Read paper

At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in September last year, Justin Rattner, the director of Intel Labs, announced a new research division, called Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) and headed by Genevieve Bell, and also presented a new vision of context-aware computers and mobile devices.

Now the Intel website provides some more background on Intel’s work on Context Aware Computing.

“Context-awareness can make computing devices more responsive to individual needs and help to intelligently personalize apps and services. Using self-learning mechanisms, sensor inputs, and data analytics, Intel research teams are engaged in a number of projects that promise to take machine learning beyond the lab to practical, real-world applications.”

Most interestingly, the site goes into some depth on Intel’s current projects that explore the boundaries of context-aware computing:

• Online Semi-Supervised Learning and Face Recognition: Use face recognition in place of a password to log in to any protected site. The self-learning techniques being refined by this project can be adapted to many areas of context awareness.
• Context Aware Computing—Activity Recognition: This project is developing techniques so that your computer can adapt to your patterns of activity and, based on your needs and expectations, instruct and guide you on a daily basis.
• Context-Aware Computer—Social Proximity Detection: Your friends, family, and co-workers all play a role in determining how your daily activities unfold. This project identifies ways to use the proximity of people important in your life to adjust communications and to help coordinate activities.

There is also more information on Intel’s Tomorrow Project & Futurism initiative.

“The project features science fiction stories, comics and short screen plays based on current research and emerging technologies and examines their affect on our future. “

Check the stories by Douglas Rushkoff, Ray Hammond. Scarlett Thomas and Markus Heitz. The next one is by Cory Doctorow, it seems.

Hubert Guillaud of the French online magazine InternetActu interviewed Stefana Broadbent, anthropologist and digital ethnographer, who in the last 20 years has been investigating the evolution of digital activities both at home and in the workplace, and has now written a book about her insights: L’intimité au travail : la vie privée et les communications personnelles dans l’entreprise (also available as an eBook)

Stefana is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at the University College London, where she is in charge of the Digital Anthropology programme. Between 2004 and 2009 she developed the User Observatory at Swisscom.

Read interview

Two new articles on UX Matters:

User research Is unnatural (but that’s okay), Part I
by Jim Ross
From the perspective of a participant, user research is not very natural. We ask participants to try to act naturally in the artificial environment of a lab, or we impose ourselves on their environment and hope our presence doesn’t affect their behavior. We often forget how unnatural user research can be and what effect it can have on participants.

Part II: Making user research more natural
To minimize the negative effects of these unnatural aspects of user research and get more realistic results, there are many things we can do to keep user research as natural as possible.

There should be limits to usability
by Peter Hornsby
People generally regard improving the usability of products or systems as a major part of our role as UX designers. While there are tradeoffs in all aspects of design, our assumption has generally been that products and systems that are easier to use are preferable to those that are harder to use. However, despite what seemed to be a common understanding, a number of articles have recently reported on research that suggests increased ease of use can be detrimental. This column examines the research underlying these conclusions and looks at some lessons UX designers can learn from them.

Dr. Ralph-Christian Ohr, a Swiss product manager, reflects thoughtfully on the recent strong discussion on user-led innovation.

“There has been quite a lot of discussion recently about a post by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen, titled “User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea”. Their major claim is: “Great brands lead users, not the other way around.” As expected, this lead to controversial discussions in terms of customer’s role in the process for innovation. The response reminded me of the reaction to one of Roberto Verganti’s polarizing posts.

It’s interesting to see that those discussions mostly result in ‘either-or’ positions – assuming that customer-centered and vision-centered approaches exclude each other. As innovation is about managing tension, I think a ‘both-and’ approach tends to be more promising.

Innovation aims at providing value to customers. Customers eventually decide whether or not an innovative offering is going to be adopted and to become successful. Therefore, the customer needs to be put in the centre of innovation considerations.”

Read article

Simplifying the workplace so customers can allocate more time and resources to their core business is fundamental to the innovation incubating today in Xerox’s labs – and is the purpose of prototype customer care software revealed by the company this week.

The software uses Web-based 3D virtual reality imaging to give Xerox customers instant access to live support for their printer or multifunction device.

Xerox scientists say the prototype pinpoints ways to ease customer frustration, shorten customer care calls and free up workers to focus on their real business.

To help develop the prototype, ethnography researchers at Xerox’s Research Centre Europe studied the way customers responded to printer issues and examined the calls coming in to service centers.

Read article (including demo video)

LiveMint.com, the Indian online partner publication of the Wall Street Journal, reports on India’s first Design!publiC conclave “on design thinking and the challenge of government innovation,” which took place in New Delhi on 18 March.

The event — which was organised by the Center for Knowledge Societies, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and with support from, amongst others, the Centre for Internet and Society — brought together influential thinkers in Indian government, including Arun Maira of the National Planning Commission, R. Gopalakrishnan of the National Innovation Council and Ram Sewak Sharma of the UIDAI, as well as members of leading corporate and development sector agencies.

In the lengthy article Aparna Piramal Raje, director of BP Ergo, describes the approach advocated at the conclave:

“Design thinking denotes an approach to problem-solving, with three distinct aspects. First, users are studiously followed and analysed employing ethnographic tools. Human needs, attitudes, preferences, challenges, their context and the immediate environment are documented using multimedia technology.

These in-depth observations generate insights into the heart of a given problem. Based on these, design thinkers collaborate and brainstorm to conceive a set of possible solutions. Prototypes of these solutions are created, tested and validated to arrive at a final solution. [...]

Design thinking’s biggest strength—the last mile, or the citizen-government interface—is the biggest pain point for government service providers. User-centricity forms the foundation for all design thinking; they are typically the weakest link in any government programme. Greater sensitivity to everyday interactions between citizens and government services can result in enhanced standards of living through better housing, transportation, health, education, among other necessities of daily life, the panellists said.”

Make sure to watch the video that is embedded in the article.

Excerpt from the Design!publiC vision text

“The problem of governance is perhaps as old as society, as old as the rule of law. But it is only more recently — perhaps the last five hundred years of modernity — that human societies have been able to conceive of different models of government, different modalities of public administration, all having different effects on the configuration of society. The problem of governments, of governmentality, and of governance is always also the problem of how to change the very processes and procedures of government, so as to enhance the ends of the state and to promote the collective good.

Since the establishment of India’s republic, many kinds of changes have been made to the policies and practices of its state. We may think of, for instance, successive stages of land reforms, the privatization of large-scale and extractive industries, the subsequent abolition of the License Raj and so and so forth. We may also consider the computerization of state documents beginning in the 1980s, and more recently, the Right To Information Act (RTI). More recently there have been activist campaigns to reduce the discretionary powers of government and to thereby reduce the scope of corruption in public life.

While all these cases represent the continuous process of modification, reform, and change to government policy and even to its modes of functioning, this is not what we have in mind when we speak of ‘governance innovation.’ Rather, intend a specific process of ethnographic inquiry into the real needs of citizens, followed by an inclusive approach to reorganizing and representing that information in such a way that it may promote collaborative problem-solving and solutioneering through the application of design thinking.

The concept of design thinking has emerged only recently, and it has been used to describe approaches to problem solving that include: (i) redefining the fundamental challenges at hand, (ii) evaluating multiple possible options and solutions in parallel, and (iii) prioritizing and selecting those which are likely to achieve the greatest benefits for further consideration. This approach may also be iterative, allowing decisions to be made in general and specific ways as an organization gets closer and closer to the solution. Design thinking turns out to be not an individual but collective and social process, requiring small and large groups to be able to work together in relation to the available information about the task or challenge at hand. Design thinking can lead to innovative ideas, to new insights, and to new actionable directions for organizations.

This general approach to innovation — and the central role of design thinking — has emerged from the private sector over the last quarter century, and has enjoyed particular success in regards to the development of new technology products, services and experience. The question we would like to address in this conference is whether and how this approach can be employed for the transformation public and governmental systems. [...]

[More in particular,] in this conclave, our interest is to explore how design thinking and user-centered innovation might help [governmental and quasi-governmental] organizations better accomplish their mission and better serve their beneficiaries. We also seek to explore and establish particular modalities through which governance innovation can be achieved, as well as to identify key stakeholders and personalities gripped of the challenge of governance innovation. Our larger goal is to craft a path forward for integrating design thinking and innovation methodologies in the further re-envisioning, refashioning and improvement of public services in India and elsewhere in the world.”

The conclave seems to have been extremely well prepared, given the wealth of supporting materials that are available online:

Design!publiC blog

Press release
CKS organizes “Design Public” conclave – lays foundation for creating a national framework for governance innovation. High-level officials from Government of India work together with design and Innovation Experts at “Design Public” conclave

Conclave Note
Concise document that covers vision, case studies, programme and attendees

Case studies of governance innovation
Mainly European examples (unfortunately) from Denmark, UK and Norway

Glossary on design, innovation and governance
Glossary of terms that are often used by designers and innovation specialists. Also includes key terms related to governance and state-craft.

Bibliography on governance innovation
[Pleasantly surprised to find my own name there, as well as the one of Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels]

Design!publiC Book
A combination of all the above, including a detailed introduction to the design innovation ideas that were explored at the Design Public Conclave, the complete Design Public bibliography, the glossary of design terms, case studies of design innovation being applied to government, and bios for the guests that attended the conference.

Seattle Times technology reporter Sharon Pian Chan profiles Bill Buxton, principal researcher at Microsoft Research.

“Bill Buxton is multiplatform the way Leonardo da Vinci was multiplatform.

The Microsoft researcher is a technologist, a designer, a musician, an author, outdoorsman and a nationally ranked equestrian.

He has spent decades working on the future of tech, but he paddled the rivers of Saskatchewan last summer in 1,000-year-old technology: a birch-bark canoe sealed with tree sap and bear fat.

At Microsoft, Buxton is a researcher who also has been charged with spreading the “design matters” message to engineers who would rather hack code than clay.”

Read article

Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research: An Introduction
Paperback, 376 pages
AltaMira Press; Second edition
2010
[Amazon link]

The Ethnographer’s Toolkit series begins with this primer, which introduces novice and expert practitioners alike to the process of ethnographic research, including answers to questions like: who should and can do ethnography, when it is used most fruitfully, and how research projects are carried out from conceptualization to the uses of research results. Written in practical, straightforward language, this new edition defines the qualitative research enterprise, links research strategies to theoretical paradigms, and outlines the ways in which an ethnographic study can be designed. Use Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research as a guide to the entire Toolkit or as a stand-alone introduction to ethnographic research.

Margaret D. LeCompte is professor of education and sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Jean J. Schensul, founding director of the Institute for Community Research, continues as full time Senior Scientist. She holds adjunct appointments in the departments of Anthropology and Community Medicine at the University of Connecticut and directs qualitative methods and ethnography in the interdisciplinary research methods core of the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS.

David Sherwin reflects on the frog design blog about the SXSW conference, starting from the questions raised in the contribution by Genevieve Bell (director of Intel’s Interactions and Experience Research Lab) there entitled “Our devices: how smart is too smart?“.

“Our current devices are terrible at determining context, especially with regard to how we relate to other people via our existing social networks. Today’s devices “blurt out the absolute truth as they know it. A smart device [in the future] might know when NOT to blurt out the truth.” They would know when to withhold information.”

Read article

DPPI 11, the 5th conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, will take place in Milan, Italy this year and Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken is part of the scientific committee.

The DPPI conference originally began through the desire to move away from talking purely about usability, and look at the role of experience in human-product interaction. As products and services in mature markets become increasingly standardised, the DPPI organisers realised there was a space to debate the the end-user’s perception of products, and to explore a more experiential approach to innovation.

This year the conference, which will take place from the 22-25th June, at Milan Polytechnic, will have the general theme: “How can Design Research serve Industry? – Design visions, tools and knowledge for industry,” thus trying to stimulate the discussion on user driven design within the context of other design approaches and its role for industries.

The conference will provide a mix of workshops, paper presentations and other activities. It aims to get participants “listening, doing, researching, designing, discussing, learning and having fun.”

Keynote speakers are:

• Prof. Bruce Brown, professor of design at the University of Brighton and co-editor of Design Issues Research Journal (published by MIT press)
• Jon Kolko, founder and director of Austin Center for Design
• Dr. Donald Norman, co-founder and principle of the Nielsen Norman Group, IDEO fellow, and professor at the Department of Industrial Design, Kaist (South Korea)
• Dr. Ezio Manzini, coordinator of DESIS International of the INDACO department at the Milan Polytechnic
• Dr. Roberto Verganti, professor of management of innovation at the Milan Polytechnic, and visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School

As member of the DPPI 11 scientific committee, Mark Vanderbeeken is responsible for reviewing some of the conference papers.

Organisers have been pleased to note that this year the committee received an unprecedented number of responses to their call, giving them a deep pool from which to select the highest quality content for the conference.

Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken will be one of 15 international Jury Captains for the inaugural year of the Core77 Design Awards.

The Core77 Design Awards which have just been launched is positioned as “a global design award aimed at recognizing and celebrating design excellence, enterprise and intent.”

“Recognizing excellence in all areas of design enterprise, the Core77 Design Awards celebrates the richness of the design profession and its practitioners. Dedicated jury teams around the world will judge 15 categories of design endeavor with the top professional and student entries winning the inaugural trophy, and Winners, Runners Up, and Notable entries published in the Awards Gallery and across the Core77 online network. “

The award covers 15 design categories – Products, Soft Goods / Apparel, Furniture / Lighting, Graphics/Branding/Identity, Packaging, Interiors/Exhibition, Interactive/Web/Mobile, Transportation, Service Design, Design for Social Impact, Strategy/Research, Design Education Initiative, DIY/Hack/Mod, Speculative Objects/Concepts, and Never Saw the Light of Day – and submissions are due by 3 May 2011.

Interestingly, Core77 has developed an innovative, low carbon impact jury concept:

“Instead of bringing everyone to one location, we took a new approach to assembling the jury, distributing the field globally. No plane fuel, more legroom. Our Jury Captains are based in 13 cities spread around eight countries. Each will recruit four people from their area to form a locally-based multidisciplinary Jury Team. They get to do the judging in their own location, and we’ll provide the snacks. Once their results are finalized and validated, the teams will reconvene for a live web broadcast revealing their Winners, Runners-up and Notables, and the reasoning behind their choices. And they’ll do it all without jet lag.”

Mark Vanderbeeken will be the jury captain of the Strategy/Research category – which is vaguely described as “projects that are predominantly strategic or research focused” – and judging will be done in either Milan or Turin, Italy.

We will soon let you know the fellow judges in this category.

Last week Experientia participated in Ecobuild 2011 (London, UK) to showcase its work in user-centred sustainable design for the built environment, and in particular its experience of Low2No, a major low-to-no carbon impact development in Helsinki Harbour, Finland.

The Low2No project is run by Sitra, the Finnish innovation fund, and Marco Steinberg, Sitra’s head of strategic design, made a strong case study presentation about Low2No at Ecobuild.

Experientia’s contribution to the Low2No project is to understand contexts, habits and beliefs that influence sustainable change in behaviour and design solutions that offer people control over their consumption and allow them to see the effects of their actions on the environment.

Renewable energy, smart grids and sustainable technologies will only make an impact if we also address the underlying behavioural issues of our energy use. Rather than individual smart meter designs, Experientia is therefore working on integrated demand management solutions, that is, a holistic approach in which advanced smart meters actually become an access point for social networking tools and services in the community, by offering things like bookings, deliveries, schedules for communal services, and information about public transport solutions.

At Low2No, Experientia applies its user research methods to evaluate the impact of the architectural and design choices on residents’ behaviours.

Experientia also led the mixed use planning of a regional and seasonal food hub offering a restaurant, cafe and natural/organic supermarket, an eco laundry and a communal sauna for the Low2No block. Engaging prospective residents early in various stages of the design of service and residential design, helped to understand people needs, desire, fears and expectations. This helped in addressing issues such as multi-story timber construction, natural vs centralized/decentralized ventilation systems, flexible layout of living spaces and the planning of smart systems to reduce residential carbon footprints in the post-occupancy phase.

Experientia researched the user requirements for smart systems to design smart home assistants:
- provide contextual real-time feedback
- analyse personal consumption (energy, water, waste…)
- incentivise reduced consumption through social reward systems
- integrate controls – holistic approach
- design intuitive and meaningful interface controls

We will soon post more extensive background information on our Low2No experience, approaches and learnings.

Listen to Marco Steinberg presentation (audio file recorded by Mark Vanderbeeken)