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The UK Design Council has just launched a new programme called Public Services by Design.
The success of public services is increasingly measured by their ability to provide personalised responses to an ever advancing set of challenges – while operating within tight budgetary constraints. To achieve success in the face of such demands requires the public sector to take innovative approaches to the creation and development of its services. Design has a clear role to play here as the process for turning ideas into results that are cost effective, efficient, and deliver the right experience for the public. Public Services by Design is being set up in response to the ‘Innovation Nation’ White Paper, which challenged the Design Council to help government create services that are not only cost effective, but that connect the public into the heart of policy making. - Read full story |
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13 December 2008
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13 December 2008
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded UC Irvine a $1.7 million grant to create a new research institute focused on the growing use of mobile technology in providing banking and financial services to people in developing countries.
The Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion will be the first to explore how the world’s poorest people spend, store and save money. The institute will study how these habits are affected by the emerging mobile banking industry, known as “m-banking,” which could make financial services and the security they provide available to millions of poor people for the first time. It also will fund research in developing countries, host conferences and provide scholarships to those who conduct such research. An archive on the emerging m-banking industry for use by researchers in the U.S. and around the world also is being planned. [...] UCI anthropologist Bill Maurer will serve as the institute’s founding director. He is widely known for his research on the anthropology of money, finance, law and property. The institute officially launched Thursday, Sept. 18, at the beginning of the “Everyday Digital Money” workshop, that Putting People First reported on earlier. |
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13 December 2008
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Over the last few years many terms have been proposed to describe the future of the internet: pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, physical computing, to the frustration of some. In the end the Internet of Things seems to have won and I am very pleased about that, as it is a term which is immediately graspable and distinctively non-jargon.
Now that the European Commission has put its formidable shoulders under the Internet of Things, people everywhere are starting to take notice. On 30 January the LIFT conference people are helping the Swiss applied ICT research incubator TechnoArk with its upcoming conference Transformeurs 2009 (in French) on January 30 on the topic “Internet of things, internet of the future?”. Daniel Kaplan (CEO of the FING), David Orban (of the Open Spime project, also known as Bruce Sterling’s alter-ego Bruno Argento) and Jean-Louis Fréchin (ENSCI and NoDesign) are the keynote speakers. Laurent Haug and Nicolas Nova of LIFT will moderate the workshops. (via Laurent Haug) |
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12 December 2008
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Bruce Sterling looked at the KashKlash questionnaire results and condensed it all into four narrative future scenarios. An excerpt from the last one:
KashKlash is a lively platform where you can debate future scenarios for economic and cultural exchange. Besides Bruce Sterling, the initial collaborators are Régine Debatty (of we-make-money-not-art), Nicolas Nova (LIFT) and Joshua Klein (author and hacker), who have been collaborating on initiating the discussion. The public domain project is conceived and led by Heather Moore of Vodafone’s Global User Experience Team and run by Experientia, an international forward-looking user experience design company based in Turin, Italy (Also, make a note of Bruce’s forthcoming book, The Caryatids) |
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11 December 2008
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MIT’s Technology Review reports on how touch interaction on small and large displays could be the next big thing.
(via Usability in the News) |
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11 December 2008
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I am currently watching a live webcast from the World Bank in Washington on mobile banking in emerging markets. If you are near a computer, you might want to check in too (there is 2.3 hours to go at the time of writing - the webcast runs from 2 to 5 pm, Washington DC time, on 11 December).
Update 20 December: videos are now online. |
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10 December 2008
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The launch this Sunday of a Putting People First group on Facebook has been quite a success: nearly 250 members in just a couple of days. If you haven’t yet joined, do so now, as we hope it will become a rich networking tool, where you can share news, post events and check job announcements (and more).
Two other Facebook groups could be of interest too: the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea group is for alumni in the broad sense of the word of the meanwhile defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea; and KashKlash provides you with insight, background and provoking ideas on the future of value exchange (and while you are at it, also visit KashKlash.net and fill out the questionnaire). |
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10 December 2008
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Mobile advertising specialist Alan Moore, founder of the communication consultancy SMLXL, was asked by Microsoft US to write a paper on the future of the mobile society. It is available as a whitepaper.
(via London Calling) |
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9 December 2008
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Designing for Services in Science and Technology-Based Enterprises was an interdisciplinary research project (2006-2007) initiated by Saïd Business School (SBS) at the University of Oxford.
The study explored how academics, service designers, and science and technology entrepreneurs understand the designing of services in science and technology-based enterprises, and featured three case study projects in which service designers helped early stage science and technology enterprises (re)design their services. The companies involved were:
The project website has just been updated with some valuable downloads: a short film following the service design and innovation consultancy live|work working with personalised medicine company g-Nostics. a publication bringing together insights from a range of disciplinary perspectives; (via Lucy Kimbell) |
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9 December 2008
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A year ago I wrote about Adam Greenfield’s pamphlet Urban computing and its discontents.
Adam’s pamphlet was the firsts in a nine-part series that aims to explore the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the ways we conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing, and what do technologists need to know about cities? How are these issues themselves situated within larger social, cultural, environmental, and political concerns? Two other pamphlets have been published meanwhile:
They are part of Situated Technologies, a project by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, is a co-production of the Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), and the Architectural League of New York. The project also organised a symposium and is planning a major exhibition in September 2009. Architecture and Situated Technologies was a 3-day symposium in October 2006 that brought together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of “situated” technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary city. Participants at the symposium featured Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Richard Coyne, Michael Fox, Karmen Franinovic, Anne Galloway, Charlie Gere, Usman Haque, Peter Hasdell, Natalie Jeremijenko, Sheila Kennedy, Eric Paulos, and Kazys Varnelis. Videos are available online. Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City is a major exhibition, curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League of New York, that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. It will examine the broader social, cultural, environmental and political issues within which the development of urban ubiquitous/pervasive computing is itself situated. The exhibition will combine a survey of recent work that explores a wide range of context-aware, location-based and otherwise “situated” technologies with a series of commissioned projects by multi-disciplinary teams of architects and artists, including:
(via Fabien Girardin) |
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8 December 2008
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7 December 2008
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As an experiment, I created two new Facebook groups today:
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea Putting People First Let me know on Facebook itself if this is something that you find useful. |
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7 December 2008
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| The Tactical Technology Collective, an international NGO helping human rights advocates use information, communications and digital technologies to maximise the impact of their advocacy work, has just released “Mobiles in-a-Box“, a collection of tools, tactics, how-to guides, and case studies designed to help advocacy organizations use mobile technology in their work.
Included are sections on conducting surveys and petitions, mobile fundraising, creating a mobile website, setting up an SMS hub, and more. (via ShareIdeas) |
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7 December 2008
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| If you are interested in bottom-up innovation within emerging markets using mobile phones, the recent MobileActive08 conference (more here) in Johannesburg, South Africa generated a wealth of materials. Below are some videos:
Mobiles and news gathering at Al Jazeera Money, mobiles, micro-business No difference in how Zambian men and women use mobile phones Measuring social impact of mobiles Microsoft launches ‘Midas’ Mobiles and citizen media Banking the unbankables Mymsta - a loveLife conception Gary Marsden, mobile interaction designer Social SMS gets message across Erik Hersman of whiteafrican.com Freedomfone’s fresh look at radio Save sea-life with your cell Burma’s GenX activists Mobile’s ‘Dark Side’ Mobile use in low income areas Mobile phones in rural development and agriculture Here is the full list of videos |
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7 December 2008
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Podcamp Barcelona’s Chris Pinchen interviewed Nokia’s Adam Greenfield at Visualizar ‘08 (Madrid, Spain) the day after the US elections.
Their conversation ranged widely over subjects including corporate Situationism, fear of ubicomp, the technological disparity between everyday life in the US and that in other parts of the world, and the odd and occasionally uncomfortable freedoms afforded anyone living in a culture to which they are not native. Listen to interview: part 1 | part 2 (via Adam Greenfield) |
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7 December 2008
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Over the last week, I have been helping out Marcia Caines with editing her thoughtful review of the Saint-Etienne design biennial (She helped me out before on editing my piece on the Turin design policy conference).
Take a look, it is a very insightful write-up with some provoking questions at the end. |
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7 December 2008
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A team at IDEO led by Tatyana Mamout and Jessica Hastings has been working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently to develop a toolkit to help NGO’s apply human centered design methodologies to the work they do with small holder farmers.
IDE, one of the NGO’s supported by Gates, collaborated closely with the team and co-developed the toolkit and tested it in the field. The toolkit can be downloaded here and while it would need to be adapted for use in other categories it may be a useful starting point for others who are working on design problems for the poor and under served. (via Tim Brown) |
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7 December 2008
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Ruth Kikin-Gil is the UX Design Lead at Microsoft’s Office Labs, a Microsoft innovation group which focuses on the future of productivity and information work, and an alumnus of the acclaimed Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
In this 20-minute audio interview, Qixing Zheng, a UX advisor at Microsoft Canada, talks with Ruth about her work and the Office Lab in general. |
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3 December 2008
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1 December 2008
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We all live in a digital world, although it means different things to different people. In her inaugural public lecture as Adelaide’s Thinker in Residence, Intel’s Genevieve Bell will explore how digital technology is shaping our lives, our culture, and our future.
Dr Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist and ethnographer with both an academic and industry background. Her research has provided considerable insight to the importance of culture in the adoption and adaptation of technology. She is currently the Director of User Experience in Intel Corporation’s Digital Home Group in the United States. Listen to lecture (mp3, 48 min, 16.5 mb) |
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