“Information is going everywhere, bleeding out of we thought was cyberspace and back into the real world: increasingly, many tasks we perform every day not only constantly require us to move between different media, but actually have us move from the digital to the physical environment and back.

Computation is everywhere, and so are search and interaction. It’s time to move beyond the computer screen to design information space in these new ubiquitous ecologies.

The book presents an holistic, heuristics- and methodology-driven approach to information architecture and user experience for the design of ubiquitous ecologies, emergent systems where old and new media and physical and digital environments are designed, delivered, and experienced as a seamless whole.”

- Table of contents
- Manifesto
- Anticipatory papers

(via InfoDesign)

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

“Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.”

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The problem apparently lies in the taxes levied by national governments that can make the cost prohibitive.

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“At its simplest, slow stands for a focus on quality, authenticity, and longevity rather than a mindless adherence to the faster and cheaper ethos.

This issue is about planning not only for tomorrow, but for the next year, and the next generation. Because if progress isn’t permanent, can it even be called progress at all?”

Here are the longer articles:

Hurry up and wait
We asked some of the world’s most prominent futurists — Julian Bleecker (Nokia/Near Future Laboratory), Esther Dyson, Jamais Cascio (Worldchanging), Bruce Sterling, John Maeda (RISD), and Alexander Rose (Long Now Foundation) — to explain why slowness might be as important to the future as speed.

Slow burn
Money—not the paper stuff in your wallet, but the bits of data that whip around the world in billions of instantaneous transactions each day—moves too fast.

Built to last
Designer/inventor Saul Griffith argues that we need to stop buying things and then throwing them away so quickly. In short, we need more “heirloom design.”

Mass reduction
Welcome to slowLab, a collective of designers applying a cradle-to-cradle philosophy to consumer goods.

Turning the tables
Tracing the slow-food movement back to its feisty Italian roots.

Pushing the limits
In Oregon, radical antisprawl laws aim to save the state’s bucolic paradises. But with land-hungry suburbs on the prowl, can these goats be saved?

One article, entitled “From people to prototypes and products: ethnographic liquidity and the Intel Global Aging Experience study“, documents how a large-scale, multi-site, ethnographic research project into aging populations, the Global Aging Experience Study, led to the development of concepts, product prototypes, and products for the independent living market.

Successfully leveraging the output of ethnographic research within large organizations and product groups is often fraught with challenges. Ethnographic research produced within an industry context can be difficult for an organization to thoroughly capitalize on. However, careful research design and sound knowledge transfer activities can produce highly successful outcomes that can be thoroughly absorbed into an organization, and the data can lend itself to re-analysis. Our research was conducted by the Product Research and Innovation Team in the Intel Digital Health Group, and the work was done in Europe and East Asia, eight countries in all. Using a mixed methodology, our research examined health and healthcare systems in order to chart the macro landscape of care provision and delivery. However, the core of our study was ethnographic research with older people, and their formal (clinical) and informal (family and friends) caregivers in their own homes and communities. Data from this study were organized and analyzed to produce a variety of tools that provide insight into the market for consumption by teams within the Digital Health Group. As the results of the research
were driven into the Digital Health Group and other groups within Intel, it became clear that the Global Aging Experience Study possessed what we term ethnographic liquidity, meaning that the data, tools, and insights developed in the study have layers of utility, a long shelf life, and lend themselves to repeated and consistent use within and beyond the Digital Health Group.

- Download article
- Download research brochure

Stanford researchers awarded $6.27 million to study energy efficiency and human behavior
The Stanford team will use the money to develop technologies that provide consumers with information about energy consumption in an engaging and usable way.

Never mind what people believe—how can we change what they do? A chat with Robert Cialdini
When it comes to energy, policymakers are often confronted with human behavior that seems irrational, unpredictable, or unmanageable. Advocates for energy efficiency in particular are plagued by the gap between what it would make sense for people to do and what they actually do. Efforts to change people’s behavior have a record that can charitably be described as mixed.

See also: Part 1 and Part 2

2020 vision: Our team of futurologists peers into mists of time
Reflections on UK politics, the environment, leisure, literature, the arts, fashion, celebrity, business, US politics, and sport.

The world in 2020: A glimpse into the future
Reflections on society, transport, health, politics, and the arts.

The world in 2020: Thrift, hard work – and no smoking
Reflections on social affairs, the economy, religion, crime, and the natural world.

“In the coming months, the likes of Microsoft, Hitachi and major PC makers will begin selling devices that will allow people to flip channels on the TV or move documents on a computer monitor with simple hand gestures. The technology, one of the most significant changes to human-device interfaces since the mouse appeared next to computers in the early 1980s, was being shown in private sessions during the immense Consumer Electronics Show here last week. Past attempts at similar technology have proved clunky and disappointing. In contrast, the latest crop of gesture-powered devices arrives with a refreshing surprise: they actually work.”

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“Several studies, including one to be published later this month by the Commonwealth Fund, conclude that the Danish information system is the most efficient in the world, saving doctors an average of 50 minutes a day in administrative work. And a 2008 report from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society estimated that electronic record keeping saved Denmark’s health system as much as $120 million a year.

Now policy makers in the United States are studying Denmark’s system to see whether its successes can be replicated as part of the overhaul of the health system making its way through Congress. Dr. David Blumenthal, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who was named by President Obama as national coordinator of health information technology, has said the United States is “well behind” Denmark and its Scandinavian neighbors, Sweden and Norway, in the use of electronic health records.”

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The paper, originially commissioned for the World Economic Forum, discusses the opportunities and critical success factors for scaling m-services – services and products for development delivered over the mobile platform. It discusses some of the barriers for scaling m-services and it addresses how industry, donors, and civil society organizations can move from some of the many promising pilot projects in m-health, m-agriculture, and m-payments to economically viable m-services that increase the quality of life and drive economic growth for the poorest of people.

Read paper

“In the last year, Yahoo Labs has bolstered its ranks of social scientists, adding highly credentialed cognitive psychologists, economists and ethnographers from top universities around the world. At approximately 25 people, it’s still the smallest group within the research division, but one of the fastest growing.

The recruitment effort reflects a growing realization at Yahoo, the second most popular U.S. online site and search engine, that computer science alone can’t answer all the questions of the modern Web business. As the novelty of the Internet gives way, Yahoo and other 21st century media businesses are discovering they must understand what motivates humans to click and stick on certain features, ads and applications – and dismiss others out of hand.”

Interestingly, the core value of Yahoo is shifting to the user experience:

“The most prominent example is the company’s search engine. It was originally Yahoo’s raison d’etre, but the company is now in the process of replacing its core search technology with Microsoft Corp.’s Bing tool. As part of the deal, it is moving about 400 search engineers over to the Redmond, Wash., software company.

Yahoo has emphasized it is now competing in search through the front-end user experience, positioning results based on what people are most commonly seeking.”

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“Over roughly the last 10 years, China and India have given way to a huge rise in technology outsourcing. Jobs are outsourced from companies like Microsoft, Google, T-Mobile, Honeywell, and many others. In Microsoft I’ve worked with teams in both India and China developing software for a variety of uses. Having our headquarters in the US, I usually work with small satellite teams in these countries. I couldn’t help but wonder why these countries who had become huge in the area of software technology, struggled so much in the area of user experience and UI innovation. [...]

Given the issues and connections I was seeing, I decided to go straight to the source and start to ask the offices I had worked with, as well as other designers I found through my various networks about these issues. These are just the initial thoughts I’ve started to gather. I plan to interview many more people with what I’ve deemed my curiosity research project, but thought it would be interesting to share a few of the insights I’ve gathered thus far to give a view to others who work with these countries. Given the format of Johnny Holland, I’ve kept these short, but often there are great (and sometimes very amusing) stories behind each point.”

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For years, the design field focused primarily on developing products that were attractive and convenient for consumers. Now, however, the industry is increasingly eyeing service design, which involves providing products that offer up benefits to society.

“The current trend is to create designs that improve services in the public domain as well as at corporations,” said Lee Young-sun, a chief design officer at the Korea Institute of Design Promotion. As Baik Jong-won, a professor at the Kaywon School of Art and Design, puts it: “Design that had been merely about making a contribution to beautifying a city environment is now turning into a means of resolving social issues these days.”

Read full story:
- Designing with the public good in mind
- Satisfying customers drives design advances

(via Core77)

“Here’s one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation.

If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.”

Read full story

Check also this New York Times review.

Prepare for descent: interaction design in our new future
Jeffrey Wong
Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Currently, sustainable interaction design seems primarily focused on behavior change, in the hope of averting irreversible destruction of the environmental systems that make our civilization possible. Underlying this idea is the assumption that the right technology can change behaviors of society-at-large quickly enough to avert irreversible damage. While trying seems more appropriate than doing nothing, current work in Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) is often lacks the scope necessary to foster immediate and deep change needed to avert crises. This paper argues that SID researchers should approach the problem at higher levels to have the massive effects that are necessary. SID should also consider the the design context to be a world radically altered by environmental damage; solutions that fit into today’s lifestyles risk irrelevance. SID researchers can target viable futures by designing for very different social, economic, and humanitarian circumstances than the contexts we currently take for granted. SID allow the projected economic declines to free society from a consumption culture. Research priorities may then shift from prevention and awareness to supporting social, economic, and spiritual structures of society that human happiness possible.

Motivating sustainable energy consumption in the home
Helen Ai He and Saul Greenberg
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Calgary
Technologies are just now being developed that encourage sustainable energy usage in the home. One approach is to give home residents feedback of their energy consumption, typically presented using a computer visualization. The expectation is that this feedback will motivate home residents to change their energy behaviors in positive ways. Yet little attention has been paid to what exactly motivates such behavioral change. This paper provides a brief overview of theories in psychology and social psychology on what does, and does not motivate sustainable energy action in the home.

Visible sustainability: Carbon Label 2.0
Daniela Busse and Wenbo Wang
SAP Labs, LLC
The investment in sustainability research at SAP has been increasing constantly. Of all sustainability parameters, Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions produced in the manufacturing, transporting, use, and disposing of a product (aka a product’s carbon footprint), might be the most representative. Next to its more formal efforts on its product lines supporting businesses with their sustainability needs, SAP also held an internal design challenge earlier in 2008 encouraging employees to design a “carbon label” that would communicate this carbon footprint to the consumers of products that were manufactured or sold by SAP’s customers. In response, we conducted some exploratory field research in the form of user interviews, iterated on a design proposal for this carbon label (including a concept investigation), and presented a solution to effectively communicate a product’s carbon to the panel of judges. The final call is still out on this competition, but we posit that the work we did as part of this project shows how a sound user centered design process is critical in making consumer facing sustainability solutions. Given that SAP is one of the major software makers concerned with sustainability solutions for its customers, we hope to firmly situate user centered design practices in the design of upcoming products in SAP’s “green suite” of products. We would like to introduce our work to this CHI workshop on defining the role of HCI for sustainability, invite feedback, and hope to contribute to the broader discussion on this topic.

A sustainable identity: creativity of everyday design
Ron Wakkary
School of Interactive Arts & Technology, Simon Fraser University
In this paper we explore sustainability in interaction design by reframing concepts of user identity and use. Building on our work on everyday design, we discuss design-in-use: the creative and sustainable ways people appropriate and adapt designed artifacts. We claim that reframing the user as a creative everyday designer promotes a sustainable user identity in HCI and interaction design.

Sensing opportunities for personalized feedback technology to reduce consumption
Jon Froehlich, Kate Everitt, James Fogarty, Shwetak Patel, James Landay
DUB Institute, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Most people are unaware of how their daily activities affect the environment. Previous studies have shown that feedback technology is one of the most effective strategies in reducing electricity usage in the home. In this position paper, we expand the notion of feedback systems to a broad range of human behaviors that have an impact on the environment. In particular, we enumerate five areas of consumption: electricity, water, personal transportation, product purchases, and garbage disposal. For each, we outline their effect on the environment and review and propose methods for automatically sensing them to enable new types of feedback systems.

Broadening human horizons through green IT
Bill Tomlinson
University of California, Irvine
Environmental concerns such as global climatic disruption occur over long time periods, large distances, and vast scales of complexity. Unassisted, humans are not well equipped to deal with problems on such broad scales. Throughout history, technological innovations have enabled human cultures to engage with broader suites of problems than we would otherwise be able to address. In particular, information technology (IT) involves tools and techniques for dealing with vast bodies of information across wide ranges of time, space, and complexity, and is thus well suited for addressing environmental concerns. While IT carries with it a number of significant environmental challenges (e.g., power consumption, ewaste), the opportunities for improving the sustainability of human civilizations that are enabled by IT are significantly greater than these drawbacks. This paper presents the idea of “extended human-centered computing” – that computing should focus on humans not only to satisfy their immediate needs and desires, but also to extend their horizons with regard to environmental sustainability and other broad scale concerns.

Design for Sustainable Behaviour: investigating design methods for influencing user behaviour
October 2009
This research aims to develop a design tool for product and service innovation which influences users towards more sustainable behaviour, reducing resource use and leading to a lower carbon footprint for everyday activities. The paper briefly explains the reasoning behind the tool and its structure, and presents an example application to water conservation with concept ideas generated by design students.

Choice architecture and design with intent
June 2009
Motivation – Choice architecture (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008) is a phrase of the moment among politicians and economists seeking to influence public behaviour, but the relevance of the concept to designers has received little attention. This paper places choice architecture within the context of Design with Intent—design intended to influence user behaviour. Research approach – The concepts are introduced and choice architecture is deconstructed. Findings/Design – Affordances and Simon’s behavioural model (1955) help understand choice architecture in more detail. Research limitations/Implications – This is only a very brief, limited foray into what choice architecture is. Originality/Value – User behaviour can be a major determinant of product efficiency: user decisions can contribute significantly to environmental impacts. Understanding the reasons behind them, a range of design techniques can be identified to help users towards more efficient interactions. Take away message – The intended outcome is a useful design method for helping users use things more efficiently.

‘Smart meters’: some thoughts from a design point of view
June 2009
Lockton’s response to the three most design-related questions in the smart meter consultation by the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change

Design for behaviour change: The design with intent toolkit v.0.9 [poster]
April 2009
The Design with Intent Toolkit aims to help designers faced with ‘design for behaviour change’ briefs. The poster* features 12 design patterns which recur across design fields (interaction, products, architecture), and there are also 35 more detailed here on the website.
>> See also these blog posts on what is happening with the toolkit: part 1 and part 2

Influencing interaction: Development of the design with intent method
April 2009
Persuasive Technology has the potential to influence user behavior for social benefit, e.g. to reduce environmental impact, but designers are lacking guidance choosing among design techniques for influencing interaction. The Design with Intent Method, a ‘suggestion tool’ addressing this problem, is introduced in this paper, and applied to the briefs of reducing unnecessary household lighting use, and improving the efficiency of printing, primarily to evaluate the method’s usability and guide the direction of its development. The trial demonstrates that the DwI Method is quick to apply and leads to a range of relevant design concepts. With development, the DwI Method could be a useful tool for designers working on influencing user behavior.

Design with intent: Persuasive technology in a wider context
June 2008
Persuasive technology can be considered part of a wider field of ‘Design with Intent’ (DwI) – design intended to result in certain user behaviour. This paper gives a very brief review of approaches to DwI from different disciplines, and looks at how persuasive technology sits within this space.

Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour
May 2008
User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’. Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energyor other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed.

“The framing of the argument includes the unspoken premise that once upon a time in some hypothetical past attention wasn’t scarce, we didn’t suffer from too much information, and we had all the time in the world to reason about the world, our place in it, and therefore to make wise and grounded decisions.

But my reading of human history suggests the opposite. In the pre-industrial world, business people and governments still suffered from incomplete information, and the pace of life always seemed faster than what had gone on in earlier times. [...]

There is no golden past that we have fallen from, and it is unlikely that we are going to hit finite human limits that will stop us from a larger and deeper understanding of the world in the decades ahead, because we are constantly extending culture to help reformulate how we perceive the world and our place in it.”

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[Muhtar] Bakare launched Kachifo [an independent literary publishing house in Lagos, Nigeria] in 2004, after a successful career in banking. The business started out publishing an online magazine, Farafina. In a paper he delivered in 2006 at the biennial conference of the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK), Bakare commented on the decision to launch online: “It proved to be a useful strategy… Start-up costs were low and we had an immediate global reach. Which would prove useful later on, in commissioning new articles or titles, and in contracting out editorial work.”

Five years later, Bakare is still a confident believer in the power of the internet to revolutionize the African publishing industry. “The internet is our own Gutenberg moment,” he told the Oslo audience. “The internet is going to democratize knowledge in Africa.”

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(via @jranck)

Here are the scores:

• 7.3 – Nokia — Remains in first place with good scores on toxics use reduction, but loses points on energy.
• 6.9 – Sony Ericsson — Moves up with top marks on toxics elimination but weak on recycling.
• 5.3 – Toshiba — Good score on toxics elimination but needs to meet upcoming phase out commitment by March 2010.
• 5.3 – Philips — Loses points for failing to lobby for phase out of hazardous substance in legislation.
• 5.1 – Apple — Continues to improve, scoring best on eliminating toxic chemicals and e-waste criteria.
• 5.1 – LG Electronics — LG score improves, but is still penalized for postponing date for toxics phase out.
• 5.1 – Sony — Maintains overall score with better energy total, but needs to lobby for stronger chemicals legislation.
• 5.1 – Motorola — Slightly reduced score, due to lack of lobbying for stronger chemicals legislation.
• 5.1 – Samsung — Big drop due to penalty point for failing to meet commitment to phase out hazardous substances.
• 4.9 – Panasonic — Score unchanged, strongest on energy but poor on e-waste and recycling.
• 4.7 – HP — Improved position thanks to clear support for global emissions reductions, but needs to lobby for improved chemical legislation.
• 4.5 – Acer — Score unchanged but Acer is lobbying for stronger chemicals legislation.
• 4.5 – Sharp — Loses points due to poor information on toxics elimination and fails to support stronger chemicals legislation.
• 3.9 – Dell — Reduced score on energy criteria and penalty point for delaying toxics phase out till 2011.
• 3.5 – Fujitsu — Improved score due to support for global carbon emission reductions and cutting its own emissions.
• 2.5 – Lenovo — Score unchanged, with penalty point for indefinite delay on toxics phase out.
• 2.4 – Microsoft — Reduced score, fails to support strong chemicals legislation.
• 1.4 – Nintendo — Nintendo remains in last place with the same score.

Interestingly, Samsung (disclosure: Experientia client) actually dropped substantially, compared with the previous three ratings (September 2009, July 2009 and March 2009), and this despite Samsung’s “Eco-Management 2013” plan (see also here) that establishes a set of goals to make Samsung a leading eco-friendly company by 2013. The plan aims to develop new, environmentally friendly products while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions in their production.

Greenpeace’s argumentation:

Samsung drops down the ranking from 2nd place to joint 7th (tied with Sony and Motorola), as a result of a penalty point imposed for backtracking on its commitment to eliminate brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in new models of all products by January 2010 and PVC by end of 2010. Its new timeline for removing BFRs and PVC in new models of notebooks is 1 January 2011 but there is now no time line for removing these substances in TVs and household appliances. It also loses points for failing to show support for improvements to the revised EU RoHS Directive (Restriction of Hazardous Substances in electronics); specifically, a methodology for further restrictions of hazardous substances, and an immediate ban on BFRs, chlorinated flame retardants (CFRs) and PVC vinyl plastic.

Samsung apparently still has some work to to, but working with the company recently, we know that they can be incredibly quick. So we wouldn’t be surprised to see them move to the top three again in the next survey.