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.

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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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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)

But then his son — who had gone into “cloud design,” God help him — started referring to bricks as “brixels.”

A brick house was a byword for solidity. “Solid as a brick house.” For a brick house to be malleable, temporary, gaseous, was a weird, crazy, extreme idea — as crazy as a trip to the moon. But a brixel was a brick: a mobile brick. A smart brick that was also a phone. A brick built around a phonechip, phones so high tech, so cheap, that they were cheaper than bricks. So that yesterday’s crown jewels, mobile phones, because building blocks.

Brixels locked together like children’s toys, and they were picked up and dropped, not by honest union bricklayers, but by little blind robots like an iPod lashed to Roomba. It took very little machine intelligence to move “brixels” around or to stack a huge wall out of “brixels.” A wall of brixels grew overnight. It was extravagantly patterned, like a computer screensaver. It was gorgeous. It was magnificent. It was very Italian.

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)

“Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone, the touch screen has gained recognition as a practical interface for computers. In the coming years, we may see increasingly useful variations on the same theme. A couple of projects, in particular, point the way toward interacting more easily with miniature touch screens, as well as with displays the size of walls.”

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(via Usability in the News)

Mobile Banking for Poor People: Pioneer Perspectives
a CGAP roundtable and webinar

Dec. 11, 2008 | 2:00pm – 5:00pm
World Bank Headquarters, Washington DC | online at http://technology.cgap.org

Join CGAP for a lively discussion on how mobile phone banking can deliver a range of financial services to poor people and change lives for the better.

By the end of 2008, the UN says there will be four billion mobile phone connections globally. Millions of air-time resellers and retail agents in developing countries make it possible to distribute financial services at far lower cost than through traditional channels.

Yet in many ways, it is still early days for mobile phone banking. Examples of successful large-scale implementations that target poor customers, and deliver products other than payments and transfers are rare. CGAP, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is working to increase the numbers of such successful m-banking projects. CGAP has provided technical advice, market research and funding to the following organizations. The goal is to increase the reach and scale of financial services for poor people worldwide.

Panelists

• Nick Hughes, Vodafone Group
• Rizza Maniego-Eala, Globe Telecom (Philippines)
• Sam Kamiti, Equity Bank (Kenya)
• Ali Abbas Sikander, Tameer Bank (Pakistan)
• Bold (Mongolia)
• Brian Richardson, Wizzit (South Africa)
• Carl Johan Rosenquist, c/o Maldives Monetary Authority (Maldives)

Hear real-world experiences with implementing mobile banking solutions at scale, in multiple markets, with a diverse range of clients.

Update 20 December: videos are now online.

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).

“When it comes to mobile telecommunications, it is often said that what works in one country, does not work in another. I wholeheartedly refute that argument. Human beings are more alike than we care to admit. We are programmed to be a “we species”—a social networking species with an innate need to connect and communicate. I often muse on the reason why SMS is ubiquitous as a communication mechanism. It is because we as a species do, in fact, constantly communicate via short messages, a behaviour that we learnt millennia ago.

That is why we are inevitably moving towards the Mobile Society, where our mobile devices become the remote control for our daily lives. Because any technology that allows us to better connect, communicate, share knowledge and information, and get stuff done will be widely adopted.

The Mobile Society is completely different to the industrial society. It requires a new logic and a new way of thinking of how to create business, civil governance, health care, and education. The mobile society is seen as both an opportunity and a threat because it signifies a reordering of business models, new flows of communication, and the appearance of new gate keepers in the information distribution wars. Resistance is a natural response when society changes structurally. As a consequence, there are differing points of view on what exactly the Mobile Society can deliver, depending on who you are.”

Download whitepaper

(via London Calling)

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:

• IDEO (consultancy) and Prosonix (science enterprise - particle engineering)
• Radarstation (consultancy) and Oxford Gene Technology (science enterprise - mico-arrays for research)
• live|work (consultancy) and g-Nostics (science enterprise - personalised medicine).

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.
The film follows the designers as they go through some of their process, and finds that service designers do three things that distinguish their work from that of others. Firstly, the designers looked at the human experience as a whole and in detail. Secondly, they made the service tangible and visible. Finally, they created service concepts.

a publication bringing together insights from a range of disciplinary perspectives;
Particular focus is on the practices of an emerging discipline of service design grounded in the arts and humanities. Three case studies in which service design companies worked with science and technology-based enterprises are discussed.

(via Lucy Kimbell)

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:

Urban Versioning System 1.0
by Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque
What lessons can architecture learn from software development, and more specifically, from the Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement? Written in the form of a quasi-license, Urban Versioning System 1.0 posits seven constraints that, if followed, will contribute to an open source urbanism that radically challenges the conventional ways in which cities are constructed.

Situated Advocacy
A special double issue featuring the essays “Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy” by Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey, and “Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces” by Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko.

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:

• Too Smart City by Joo Youn Paek (artist and interaction designer, artist in residence, LMCC) and David Jimison (founder Mobile Technologies Group, Georgia Tech and Honorary Fellow, Eyebeam)
• BREAKOUT! Escape from the Office by Anthony Townsend (research director, Technology Horizons Program, Institute for the Future), Tony Bacigalupo (co-founder, CooperBricolage), Georgia Borden (associate director, DEGW), Dennis Crowley (founder dodgeball.com), Laura Forlano (Kauffman Fellow in Law, Information Society Project, Yale Law School), Sean Savage (co-founder, PariSoMa) and Dana Spiegel (executive director, NYCwireless)
• Natural Fuse by Haque Design + Research (led by Usman Haque)
• Trash Track by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab (led by Carlo Ratti)
• Amphibious Architecture by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (architects and co-directors, Living Architecture Lab, Columbia University), and Natalie Jeremijenko (artist, director, xdesign Environmental Health Clinic, New York University)

(via Fabien Girardin)

“Visualization comes in the form of still images, moving ones and three-dimensional models that depict elusive, often abstract phenomena such as the movement of Internet traffic, scientific theories or a city’s emotional landscape.” [...]

“There’s one simple reason why visualization is becoming so important, and that’s our desire to understand what’s happening in the world at a time when it’s becoming harder and harder to do so.”

The article is in part based upon conversations with Paola Antonelli (MoMA), as well as Ben Fry and Casey Reas (Processing).

[Casey was a former colleague of mine at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea].

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Interaction Design Institute Ivrea
This group is open to all who ever worked, studied, consulted or visited Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and liked what happened there. It complements an existing and popular email list.

Putting People First
This new Facebook platform for Putting People First readers grew out of the need some of you sometimes feel to post things quickly and share it within our professional community. This new Putting People First space is yours. Use it to share, to announce, to post, to plug.

Let me know on Facebook itself if this is something that you find useful.

Included are sections on conducting surveys and petitions, mobile fundraising, creating a mobile website, setting up an SMS hub, and more.

(via ShareIdeas)

Mobiles and news gathering at Al Jazeera
Safdar Mustafa, head of Al Jazeera’s mobile media unit, describes some trials where mobile phones were used for news gathering in Chad and the Sahara.

Money, mobiles, micro-business
Jonathan Donner, from Microsoft, talks about the transformation that has been brought upon the way small/informal businesses function using mobile devices (specifically mobile phones). He provides an anecdote on one businessman he knows - a baker, whose business flourished due to the use of a mobile phone he acquired. Included in this video are examples of how this technology enhances the efficiency of product/service delivery by informal businesses.

No difference in how Zambian men and women use mobile phones
Here Kutoma Wakunuma discusses whether women how women are using mobile technology including what are the barriers and social implications. Dr Kutoma revealed that there is no difference in how men and women use cellular phones and also no difference in the socio-economic potential of mobile usage. She unveiled that mobiles phones decrease isolation among women in society and provide easy and fast communication, especially as the price of mobile phones is becoming cheaper by the day. She added that cellular phones encourage job creation for women who sell airtime and those who run public phone stations. They help in emergencies and danger and have made a major impact in health information as some people access counselling through mobile phones on an anonymous basis.

Measuring social impact of mobiles
Dr Peter Benjamin, the General Manager at Cell-Life, together with Patricia Mechal, the Millenium Villages Project advisor hosted a workshop at the MobileActive08 conference. The workshop, on Mobile Metrics and Evaluation explored the importance of investigating the social impact of initiatives that introduce mobiles into societies expecting the impact to be an inherently positive one. The workshop also dealt with how such initiatives tend to be ignorant of the negative repercussions such projects may have.

Microsoft launches ‘Midas’
Microsoft representatives Fredrik Winsnes and Ian Puttergill talk on the MIDAS prototype, a mobile survey application for developing contexts.
MIDAS is based on a Microsoft driven research initiative based in India, to develop an SMS application for improving the farmer’s access to timely and critical information.
The MIDAS prototype allows farmers to send an SMS query pertaining to details about the local crop market, and an almost immediate response is sent back with the appropriate details.
The project is about making farming efficient, and increasing availability.

Mobiles and citizen media
David Sasaki and Juliana Rotich discuss the role of Global Voices online and Ushahidi.com in leveraging citizen media during the post-election violence in Kenya.

Banking the unbankables
Jesse Moore of GSMA development fund facilitated a workshop at mobileactive08 which evaluated mbanking and mpayment and the evolution of these services within the market. The social impact these services could have on people who are not banking, how mobile banking and payments would work and the future of this service were topics addressed in the workshop.

Mymsta - a loveLife conception
Trina DasGupta, loveLife Mobile Marketing Specialist shares the process that went into creating mymsta.com. A youth website geared at guiding the youth towards making their move. Mymsta is about mobilising young people towards positive change. Its about giving them a forum to share their views, on everything from relationships to employment.

Gary Marsden, mobile interaction designer
Interview filmed at MobileActive08 in Johannesburg, featuring Gary Marsden from the University of Cape Town.

Social SMS gets message across
Activists are boosting their social campaigns by piggy backing on “please call me’s”, flashes and beeps.
Please call me’s are free messages that cellphone users send to get friends and loved ones to call them back.
Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India) and Robin Miller (Praekelt Foundation) tell how to use please call me’s to maximise social campaigns and call-centre traffic.

Erik Hersman of whiteafrican.com
Interview with Erik Hersman from whiteafrican.com, shot at MobilActive08 in Johannesburg.

Freedomfone’s fresh look at radio
Mobile’s answer to radio is the Freedomfone. Freedomfone gives users access to dial-up information and services over their mobile. Dubbed ‘dial-up radio’, the service will be invaluable in societies where many people own cellphones but draconian governments have restricted access to newspapers and the airwaves.

Save sea-life with your cell
eMobile phones are becoming the latest gadget used for environmental activism. iVeri payment technology has developed a mobile system for the Southern Africa Sustainable Seafood Institute (sassi)where the public can text a query. The system then sends back a prompt short message reply informing the consumer who is about to make a seafood purchase about the sustainability of the sea life product and other health parameters.

Burma’s GenX activists
Digital Democracy 2.0’s Emily Jacobs and Marc Belinsky show how Burmese (Myanmar) youth use cellphones to communicate with the outside world on political issues that are suppressed by the government.

Mobile’s ‘Dark Side’
“What are the real risks of mobile surveillance?” Al Alegre, executive director of the Foundation for media alternatives has conducted research in 5 Asian countries to investigate the dark side and vulnerabilities in digital interactions and discovered there are threats both internal and external.

Mobile use in low income areas
The use of mobiles in South Africa has increased over the years in low income areas. Tino Kreutzer a masters student at UCT conducted a pilot study into how the youth in low income areas are using mobiles, what this data means and where can researchers go now that they have this data available.

Mobile phones in rural development and agriculture
Ugo Vallauri, David Newman and Jonathan Campaigne discuss small farm productivity issues which are key to economic growth and poverty reduction. They discuss how farmers are not effectively linked to the larger industry and therefore how mobiles phones can be used to help with this area. Farmers use these phones which allow people to enter markets and improve access to partners thereby improving their likelihoods and food security.

Here is the full list of videos

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)

Take a look, it is a very insightful write-up with some provoking questions at the end.

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)

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.

“For many designers, Agile is already a fact of life (and for those less accustomed, some recommended reading follows at the foot of this article). We are reaching the point where we must either acclimatize or risk being bypassed. The good news is that Agile does allow us to still do the things we hold dear—research, develop a vision, and test and improve our designs—we just need new techniques. Now is the time to get real, and prove design can adapt, if we want to stay relevant in these increasingly unreal times.”

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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)