Access to big data is growing at an incredible pace. With increased information from various sources available on smartphones and tablets, many companies now realize winning services will be those that transform big data elements into personalized data experiences.

The key to creating great service experiences lies with uncovering data and using it in meaningful contexts that have real benefits to users.

Recent advances in wearable tech, location-based data and sensors are driving greater interest by consumers in personalized data experiences. Google Glass and the Nike FuelBand are pushing boundaries on what users can expect inside the services of tomorrow.

For designers, however, data presents a very interesting challenge: How can we better understand the value of data and leverage it to make digital experiences more meaningful?

Jason Napolitano, service design lead at Fjord, provides some examples of emerging companies that are embracing the conceptual power of data to create truly breakthrough services.

Service Design by Industrial Designers
By Froukje Sleeswijk Visser
Technical University Delft
2013, 104 pages

Design practice is changing. The applications of design skills, knowledge, activities and processes seem to become wider everyday. More and more designers are tackling complex societal issues, and apply their design skills to projects where product development no longer plays a big role. Many refer to these applications as ‘service design’.

This book is aimed at people who want to learn more about the current dynamics and challenges the wave of service design brings to design practice. We critically reflect on recent developments related to service design and specifically on the consequences for the education of a new generation designers to deliver value to design practice.

It is the result of a think tank at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology with a group of 25 master students, 8 staff involved in service design research and education, and 9 design practitioners.

Dr.ir. F. Sleeswijk Visser (Froukje) is Assistant Professor, Design Conceptualization and Communication, at the Department of Industrial Design of the Technical University of Delft.

The IxDA gathered in Toronto, Canada’s largest center for design, for its 6th annual conference. Here are the video records of the breakout talks that took place (grouped thematically).
 

AGILE / LEAN

Josh Seiden: A designer’s introduction to lean startup [15:04]
Josh Seiden introduces you to the key ideas of Lean Startup, talks about the amazing opportunities for designers this movement presents, and shares case studies of how he and his partners have used the techniques of Lean Startup as the foundation of their design studio.
 

BUSINESS

Johanna Kollmann & Martina Schell: Lean startup in design consulting: lessons learned [35:01]
As fast, user-centered development gains acceptance, many startups have successfully adopted a Lean Startup philosophy. But, why is it that many agencies and their clients still struggle to apply this methodology to larger-scale projects?

Matthew Connors: Print, snap, tap, track: using interactive print analytics to empower your design [25:32]
This session discusses the convergence of ink on paper and mobile through interactive apps that transfers the rapidly improving camera functionality and capabilities of iOS and Android devices to allow print readers to engage in various types of interactivity.

Nir Eyal: Stop designing apps and start designing habits [33:01]
Companies need to know how to harness the power of the desire engine to improve peoples’ lives, while consumers need to understand the mechanics of behavior engineering to protect themselves from manipulation. More and more developers realize that their success hinges on understanding user behavior.
 

CONCEPT DESIGN

Adam Little: Realism in design – communicating authentic experiences for the real world [10:02]
Drawing on examples from outside of the design world, we will see how artists and film makers have used the spirit of realism to create lasting works that are authentic and truthful.
 

CONTEXT

Jason Brush: The dream of the 90s is alive [43:35]
This personal talk excavates key ideas and media from the 1990s, which we may have forgotten, that, twenty years ago, inspired a generation to embrace digital technology and invent the world we live in today, and investigates how the many of the dreams that drove the 1990s — whether we realize it or not — may be alive today still.

Julia Barrett: Social networks suck – social computing frees you [33:12]
Most browser and mobile applications are designed to suck you in and away from the people that are right near you. We’re often busy updating our statuses instead of talking to the people we’re ‘statusing’ about.

Trip O’Dell: If UX can kill it probably will: designing for the 70 mph interface [36:36]
How do you create a great experience when you have to balance a user’s desire for a “killer app” with one that will not get them killed?
 

EDUCATION / COMMUNITY

Gretchen Anderson: Driving impact not serving shareholders – lessons from the non-profit world [11:24]
This session shares the tools we use to orient our organization, GreatSchools, toward the impact we seek to achieve and how those in the for-profit space can benefit from their use too.

Michael Wolf: Interaction design for learning [35:38]
The talk introduces the audience to the background and theory of interactive learning environments, whilst presenting exciting examples of interaction design projects in the field.

Sami Nerenberg: Design for America – students creating local and social impact – No video available as yet
Design for America (DFA) is an award-winning nationwide network of interdisciplinary student teams and community members using design to create local and social impact.

Rob McMahon, Ken Reddick & Dave Holland: Intuitive Interfacing – No video available as yet
The use of interactive media in the Royal Ontario Museum’s Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants from Gondwana exhibit.
 

GAMING

Kunal Patel: Badges are the backup quarterbacks of game design [33:21]
While badges, points, and leaderboards can be used to create compelling digital products outside of games, how can we be sure they were the cause of success? Plenty of terrible games employ points and encourage competition, but what separates the good from the bad?

Ryan Coulter & Greg Martin: Navigating the media minefield [36:07]
So you’re designing a media UI — the one, multi-platform content solution that finally solves the living room, forever. It’ll be thoughtful, coherent, social and beautful to behold.

Timothy Garrand: Tell Me a Story But Make It Interactive! [28:02]
What interactive game narrative can teach us about UX process design.
 

HEALTHCARE / WELLNESS

Andy Goodman & Marco Righetto: Hack you – the human body is the next interface [33:15]
Today’s breakthroughs in “Bodytech” include a host of incredible innovations that will to transform our bodies, communication, society – even the human psyche. This provocative presentation will address emerging “smart medicines,” medical technologies, synthetic biology, robotics and organic body part replacements.

Audrey Richard-Laurent: Compliance – design to facilitate a healthcare service [11:49]
How to connect patients to their illness and the medical staff, while complying to the constraints of patient management in the care system?

James Senior: Designing a compassionate healthcare experience [33:26]
This session aims to inspire designers working in healthcare & wellness to keep compassion at the heart of our UX practice.

Juhan Sonin: Hacking Health – Designing for and understanding my health – No video available as yet
This presentation traces the evolution of the author’s health design experience covering open source solutions to interoperability and policy to the design of health stations and corporate clinic experiences.

Sweta Mohapatra: Health on the go – designing electronic health records for mobile [11:20]
This talk covers some of the lessons learnt from building mobile EHR applications, the types of design problems that need solving when designing an application based on desktop software, and the complexities of designing applications where patients’ lives are at stake.
 

METHOD

Derek Vaz: Bury the wireframe – a primer in interaction prototypes [14:16]
This talk discusses why interaction designers should abandon printouts for interaction prototypes, how to introduce them into your process and showcase real world examples and success stories.
 

MOBILE

Behzad Aghaei: Towards buttonless touch interaction [25:31]
Presentation of an interaction concept that attempts to replace traditional buttons or tap interactions with gestures for list navigation and contextual actions.

Calvin Tennant: Moving past the navbar – No video available as yet
This presentation addresses the shortcomings of the navbar and introduce alternate navigation methods.

Michael Costantino: Toucha toucha toucha touch me [16:42]
Comparing standard touch-based input in iOS with musical gesture and how MIDI might provide a framework for us to think about touch.

Nate Archer: Beyond responsive [10:33]
If we have learned anything from the recent push to mobile, we need to anticipate the future sooner rather than later; not only the next wave of formats, but everything after that.
 

PROCESS

Carla Diana: Making meaning in an Internet of Things [38:22]
The Internet of Things presents a juicy opportunity for designers to pioneer new territory in rich interaction, but it also can backfire, filling people’s lives with more frustrations over technology than ever before.

Chris Pennell & Jessica Bailey: Designing for Complexity – What Did I Get Myself Into? [08:44]
In an ideal world, UX designers get to learn all about the people who use these types of systems – what they do, and why they do it – in order to design and redesign experiences that meet users’ needs. But what do we do when the information available is less than ideal?

Dan Saffer: Microinteractions – Designing with details – No video available as yet
The difference between a good product and a great one are its details: the microinteractions that make up the small moments inside and around features.

Dane Petersen: On aircraft and craft [11:00]
This talk discusses self-imposed principles, and how they can inform the way we think about our own design experience.

Davide Casali: Social experience design – shifting the focus where really matters [36:55]
Too much focus on external metrics will harm in the long term the effectiveness of your social strategy as well as your company as a whole.

Jason Alderman: Learning visual design to become a better unicorn [18:25]
Designer and author Cennydd Bowles refers to hybrid designers as “unicorns”–those mythical creatures who not only can do user research, information architecture, and interaction design, but ALSO can make gorgeous interfaces.

Jason Ulaszek & Brian Winters: Setting course – design research to experience roadmap [38:19]
In this session you’ll learn how to turn design research activities into a mental model, identify potential new business opportunities and derive business and experience direction from your newly found consumer insight.

Josh Cothran: Personas made personal [14:38]
This talk provides an overview of the Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), highlights research and thought leadership relating personality types to technology usage, examines controversies and limitations of the MBTI and shares ways to use personality types to support and communicate design, including a brief case study.

Judith Siegel: CNN and the UX challenge of presenting long-form stories [10:01]
How is design and user experience considered when constructing pages and templates for these stories? How does the editorial process differ and adapt to web-based journalism?

Ron Goldin: Design and the mobile startup – Toronto edition [33:54]
Design and the Mobile Startup: Toronto Edition is the third in a series of discussions about how great mobile products emerge from the chaos and uncertainty that is startup culture.

Sander Viegers: Designer as connector [11:55]
The story of adding 722 emoticons to Windows 8 and designing the invisible parts of the UX by connecting people.

Silvia Calvet: Switch on and design for good everyday [22:22]
This presentation is about how to adopt a new awareness to add human and ethical strand into our everyday work.

Susan Dybbs: Beautiful failures [11:45]
In this talk Susan Dybbs shares failures from three categories: relationships, results and process. Each story has its own foreboding indicator that provides opportunity for reflection but also an opportunity to reframe the failure as something to be celebrated.
 

ROBOTICS

Matthew Powers: Smart and beautiful – designing robots and intelligent machines [33:50]
Think about the design implications of robots and intelligent machines working in our world, does not only include considering the physical and interaction design, but also the robot’s impact on our social ecosystem.
 

SERVICE DESIGN

Franco Papeschi: Innovation, investment, influence and impact: design that fosters change [38:04]
In this session, Papeschi presents an approach that goes beyond user-centred design and activity-centred design: impact-driven design.

Sara Cantor Aye: Designing everything but the food [34:59]
This year, in partnership with the SAIC, Greater Good Studio designed and built a new public school cafeteria. While that sounds like an architecture project, it really means designing interactions between kids and food, staff, space and other kids!
 

STRATEGY

Azmina Karimi: Grandma likes my Facebook status – how older adults are influencing the digital enterprise
This talk helps us understand the digital practices of older adults, and new opportunities it can create for the social and business models of our clients and brands.

Carina Ngai: Failed futures [15:01]
To design meaningful futures, designers will need to embrace a different perspective: It’s no longer about out of the box thinking, but finding the right box to frame the opportunity space.

Cindy Chastain: New frontiers – the UX professional as business consultant [47:17]
This talk is meant to be both a thought starter as well as a lively group discussion around how UX can begin to play a substantive role in a company’s digital strategy.

Iram Mirza & Jannie Lai: You’ve been asked to re-design the wheel [15:08]
…and while you are at it “make it like Apple”!

Jan Moorman: Measuring user delight using the Kano methodology [39:44]
Learn why and how this methodology can be harnessed in design strategy decisions.

Jonathan Rez: Tomorrow’s news [15:54]
In this session Rez highlights some of the issues with current news websites and apps and presents a number of proposals for the delivery of tomorrow’s digital news.

Juan Cartagena: Getting what you want
This talk covers the mistakes we made, what we have learnt from them, and how we now lead users to do what we expect with our “dietary” approach to UX.

Matt Walsh: Tense up – creating positive tensions in experiences [47:32]
A few months ago we asked designers to finish this sentence: “One of the best ways I’ve seen positive tension created in an experience is…”

Peter Stahl: Rhythm, flow and style [32:37]
Your choice of rhythmic style, and how it’s expressed, can set up predictable behavior patterns and foster intuitions and extrapolations that will result in an engaging, rewarding experience.

Stephen Gay & Rich Redka: Ignite potential – value exchange networks [34:23]
Services are shifting from an era in which companies created and delivered monolithic offerings to passive consumers, to an era in which services exist as networks of value co-creation.

The IxDA gathered in Toronto, Canada’s largest center for design, for its 6th annual conference. Here are the video records of the keynotes and panel discussions that took place.

KEYNOTES

Albert Shum: Connecting – emerging themes for interactions [36:59]
This session will share some of the design thinking behind emerging interactions themes and provide ways for design making that will help us create holistic human experiences to enrich people’s lives.

Jer Thorpe: Data & human experience [41:57]
By framing data in a human context, we can use it more effectively, and ultimately foster better practices for data-focused design.

John Bielenberg: Rubber ducks and hockey gloves (or, how to jump the ingenuity gap) [38:22]
How do you unlock the ingenuity that exists within people and organizations? Welcome to Future Blitz, the process of using rapid ingenuity to address your greatest challenges.

Kate Hartman: Social prosthetics – technology and the human form [43:54]
What gizmo can we use to read our minds, expose our hearts, or settle disputes? What gadget can improve our communication with house plants or buildings or glaciers?

Paul Adams: How to design social experiences [46:52]
Paul talks about the social design process, how it differs from classic user-centred design methods, and will explain why he thinks UX professionals will need to change how they work to be successful in the future.

Ravi Sawhney: Our power to empower – the satisfaction of designing for social impact [27:04]
Creating social impact is one piece of a very large world that flows through our fingertips as we conceive and create not only new user experiences but in fact new, highly empowered users… everywhere.

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

Data depth and ingenuity [46:19]
Panel with Jer Thorp, Todd Silverstein, Andrew Crow & Ben Fullerton
Big Data…so what? Have you heard it isn’t the size of the data, but what you do with it that matters? Cutting across industry and domain, we’ve invited some of the top creative minds to discuss and debate the value of information, in an information age. What to look for, how to determine what is important in the loads of data captured, and why making meaning out these mountains of digits can be so valuable.

Design led startups [40:21]
Panel with Ben Fullerton, Todd Silverstein, Raphael Grignani, Josh Seiden & Suzanne El-Moursi
This panel brings together a group of designers and entrepreneurs to discuss the real value of design in the startup world, how designers can think about entering the entrepreneurship world and what it takes to “jump ship” and start your own company.

Interaction design education workshop report back [1:13:10]
Panel with Dave Malouf, Haig Armen, Kendra Shimmell, Kristian Simsarian & Dianna Miller
The workshop co-organizers and the topic session facilitators present their session topics as well as communicate the next steps this group of people have planned in relation to interaction design education.

IxDA 10th anniversary panel [59:02]
Join members of the IxDA leadership – past and present – for a look at how our community has evolved between 2003 and 2013. Learn how IxDA started. Discover some of IxDA’s secrets: key moments, inflection points, lessons learned, and how it’s impacted peoples’ lives and work. Hear about where IxDA is today and where it’s going – what are our ideas & goals for the future and how we might get there through working together.

Open Brands: The future of brands is OPEN [52:14]
Panel with Matt Walsh, Donald Chestnut, Steve Baty & Suzanne El-Moursi
The role of interaction design in building an open brand.

ReDux Live: IxD13 [40:29]
Panel with Cliff Kuang, Jeroen van Geel & Lin Yee Yuan
With their fresh eyes and ears they shared from their perspectives the big ideas, trends and predictions from IxD13 and reflected on them while we were still together as a community in Toronto.

The great UX debate [1:02:32]
Panel with Robb Stevenson, Lou Lenzi, Angel Anderson, Donald Chestnut & Mikkel Michelsen
Following the outstanding success of the ‘Great IxDA Debate’ at Interaction12, Dublin, SapientNitro & IxDA have joined forces once again to organize another ‘Great UX Debate’ at Interaction13, Toronto.

Killed at Launch: A complete disregard for user experience leads to drastic action
by Pete MacKie
A failure to account for UX results in an e-commerce being pulled offline shortly after launch.

POP UX! Clued Into Curiosity
by Andrew Zusman
Clue, the classic murder-mystery board game, shows designers how to create an information gap and a narrative that leads users to the other side.

A few days ago, I reported on the news that SAP has become the first major sponsor of the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF).

Today, Rikke Friis Dam, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the The Interaction Design Foundation, provides an overview of the kind of resources IDF provides, largely free of charge.

“Some problems do genuinely lend themselves to Big Data solutions,” writes Gary Marcus in The New Yorker.

“But not every problem fits those criteria; unpredictability, complexity, and abrupt shifts over time can lead even the largest data astray. Big Data is a powerful tool for inferring correlations, not a magic wand for inferring causality. The field has thus far apparently yielded only modestly improved weather prediction, and had little, if any, impact on challenges such as getting computers to program themselves.” [...]

“The more complex a problem is, and the more particular instances differ from those that came before, the less likely Big Data is to be a sure thing.

In the years to come, scientists and engineers will develop a clearer picture of the circumstances in which Big Data can and can’t make a big difference; for now, hype needs to be tempered with caution and a sensitivity to when humans should and should not remain in the loop. As Alexei Efros, one of the leaders in applying Big Data to machine vision, put it, Big Data is “a fickle, coy mistress,” inviting, yet not without risk.”

This is an exciting time to be a digital designer, as the future of digital interaction is all around us, writes Nev Fordyce, reflecting on his SxSW experience.

“What many have touted as the rise of the ‘Digital Native’, may be better described as the arrival of the ‘Digital Born’.

This new species will benefit extensively by the promise of the three new pillars of interaction design. Through the implementation of gestural, wearable and neural technologies the Digital Born will simplify their everyday life, amplify their learned knowledge, and even extend their natural life.”

Jan-Christoph Zoels, one of Experientia’s founding partners and our creative director, is going to be a lot in Milan next week.

Aside from his participation on Monday 8 April at the IxDA organized “The Long View of Interaction Design,” he will also speak on Thursday and Saturday.

On Thursday 11 April he will be one of the invited speakers at “The Future of Design,” an evening conference (7 to 10 pm) organized by frog design at their Milan studios.

The theme of the event is “Designing the Future, The future of Design”: “With technology embedded where we work, live, and play, the pace of innovation is increasing. Connected products and services create a new complexity for companies and consumers alike. Making sense of it by designing the human experience has never been more important and strategically relevant than today, but how can we design the future in a meaningful way?

The other speakers are Mark Rolston (Chief Creative Officer, frog), Paolo Ciuccarelli (Associate Professor, Communication Design, Politecnico di Milano), and Tjeerd Hoek (Vice President Creative, frog Europe).

On Saturday 13 April (3 to 4 pm) he is one of the panelists at the UNStudio Platform Dialogues at at Emporio Building, Opificio Courtyard, Via Tortona 31, Milan. Experientia and UNStudio, the famous Dutch architectural design studio led by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, have previously collaborated on the design of sustainable buildings, environments and behavioral change.

The theme of the Saturday talk is the “Interface“: Whether it is as a portal to the World Wide Web or active nano-technologies, the communication between users and materials is no longer only one-way. The surfaces and objects through which we communicate and design provide new tactile and virtual feedbacks. This Dialogue – which will also involve Markus Benz (CEO Walter Knoll) and Birgit Lohmann (Associate Editor-in-chief Designboom) will explore the current and future possibilities of Interfaces with each other and through materiality.

The other UNStudio Platform Dialogues are also worth checking out:

DESIGNING (FOR) CO-CREATING
TUESDAY, 9 APRIL – 11.00 – 12.00
Panelists:
Ben van Berkel – Co-Founder/ Principal Architect UNStudio
Jurgen Bey – Director/ designer Studio Makkink & Bey and director PROOFFLab
Leo Schouten – Founder / director PROOFF

MATERIAL ATTAINABILITY
FRIDAY, 12 APRIL – 15.00 – 16.00
Panelists:
Gabi Böhm – Senior Architect/Project Manager, Premier Composite Technologies
Micol Costi – Director of Materials Research Material Connexion Italia
Giammichele Melis – Associate Director Buro Happold
James O’Callaghan – Director Eckersley O’Callaghan Structural + Facade Engineers
Federica Sem – Managing Director Permasteelisa Interiors

The April 2013 EthnographyMatters edition is edited by Nicolas Nova, consultant and researcher at the Near Future Laboratory, and is about combining qualitative and quantitative data.

In his introduction, Nova writes:

“While ethnography generally draws on qualitative data, it does not not mean that quantitative approaches shouldn’t be employed in the research process. Combining the two leads to a “mixed-method approach” that can take various forms: data collection and analysis can be either separated or addressed together, and each of them can be used in service of the other. Of course, this isn’t new in academic circles and corporate ethnography but there seems to be a renewed interest lately in this topic.

One of the driving forces of this renewed interest is the huge amount of information produced by people, things, space and their interactions — what some have called “Big Data“. The large data sets created by people’s activity on digital devices has indeed led to a surge of “traces” from smartphone apps, computer programs and environmental sensors. Such information is currently expected to transform how we study human behavior and culture, with, as usual, utopian hopes, dystopian fears and *critical sighs* from pundits.

Although most of the work of Big Data has focused on quantitative analysis, it is interesting to observe how ethnographers relate to it. Some offer a critical perspective, but others see it as an opportunity to create innovative methodologies to benefit from this situation.

Aside from Rebekah Rousi’s post (featured here yesterday), EthnographyMatters will feature various case studies and perspectives on the implications of mixed-methods approaches, including Fabien Girardin (on how he used sensor data to yield field observations in a study for Le Louvre in Paris), Alex Leavitt (discussing his research on Tumbler using a computational ethnography perspective), Tricia Wang (sharing her thoughts about the opposite of Big Data, in what she calls “thick data”) and David Ayman Shamma from Yahoo! Research (describing his personal perspective on the topic).

SAP has become the first major sponsor of the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF), writes Gerd Waloszek on the SAP Design Guild blog.

The HCI encyclopedia, which recently appeared in its second edition, is one of IDF‘s major assets. But IDF offers designers a plethora of free educational materials:

• Free Textbooks: 100+ expert authors on how to design interactive systems. Used by universities and tech companies around the world.
• Free Educational Videos: HD video interviews with leading technology designers and professors. Filmed around the world.
• Free Educational Images: Royalty-free images suitable for learning, teaching, publications or just plain fun.
• Free Wiki Bibliography: The world’s largest wiki bibliography. A goldmine of research on designing interactive products.
• Free Toolbox: A curated toolbox of essential products/tools for interaction designers. Our paying members get significant discounts.
• Free Conference Calendar: A curated calendar of great conferences – ideal opportunities for learning and professional networking.

In addition, IDF supports a professionals association that “is meant for those who want to invest in their career” (membership cost is $98). Thanks to SAP’s sponsorship, membership in this association and access to the resources is free for SAP employees (they will find the respective information on SAP-internal Websites).

In the future, IDF will, among others, cooperate closely with SAP’s new User Experience Community.

IDF is overseen and guided by a distinguished executive board of industry experts and leaders in the field of high tech, software design, and user experience. Members include Michael Arent from SAP and SAP’s former Vice President of User Experience Dan Rosenberg.

On 11 April, Experientia president Michele Visciola will be a guest speaker at the Town Re-coding seminar (pdf), a Turin event to discuss perceptions, tensions and actions for change in the physical and social spaces of cities.

The Italian-language seminar involves the Polytechnic of Turin, the University of Turin, the Alma Mater Studiorum, and the University of Bologna.

The Turin initiative is part of a wider series that started with an inaugural event in Ravenna ten days ago, and will conclude in a conference – again in Ravenna – on 28-30 June 2013.

Guest speakers at the Turin seminar will explore new models for economy and consumption, and ways to reimagine urban spaces.

Michele will speak on “Ethnographic Research and the Evolution of Culture,” looking at ways to positively design and shape changes in the urban arena, so that they will be easily and sustainably adopted by people.

Michele has published multiple articles on behavioural change and participatory design in urban environments, and on natural selection in cultural innovation.

Rebekah Rousi, a researcher of user psychology and PhD candidate of Cognitive Science at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, describes on EthnographyMatters how the combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection was fruitful in her analysis of elevator usage.

“A few years ago a leading elevator design and manufacturing company gave me the task of examining how people experienced and interacted with elevators. The scope included everything from hall call buttons, to cabin interior design and perception of technical design. When given the brief, the artistic director noted country specific design features (or omissions) and even mentioned that there may be observable elevator habits I would want to take note of. Then, on our bidding a corporate-academic farewell she added that I might want to consider the psychology of the surrounding architectural environment. With that, I was left with a long list of to-do’s and only one method I could think of that would be capable of incorporating so many factors – ethnography. Ethnographic inquiry provides a framework in which the researcher’s own observations and experiences of the phenomenon under study – in this case elevator users’ behaviour in relation to the elevators, other users and the surrounding architectural environment – can be combined with “insiders’” opinions and insights.”

As we move towards a quantified society, one shaped by data, we start to dismiss things that are unquantified, writes Om Malik of GigaOm. Empathy, emotion and storytelling — these are as much a part of business as they are of life.

“The problem with data is that the way it is used today, it lacks empathy and emotion. Data is used like a blunt instrument, a scythe trying to cut and tailor a cashmere sweater.” [...]

“What will it take to build emotive-and-empathic data experiences? Less data science and more data art — which, in other words, means that data wranglers have to develop correlations between data much like the human brain finds context. It is actually not about building the fanciest machine, but instead about the ability to ask the human questions. It is not about just being data informed, but being data aware and data intelligent.”

Data and data sets are not objective, writes Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, in the Harvard Business Review.

They are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks, and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.

She argues that the next frontier is how to address these weaknesses in big data science.

“Social science methodologies may make the challenge of understanding big data more complex, but they also bring context-awareness to our research to address serious signal problems. Then we can move from the focus on merely “big” data towards something more three-dimensional: data with depth.”

In the book The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg explains how habits are formed and what it takes to break an ingrained habit. The book references a 2006 study from Duke University that found that 40% of the actions that people perform each day are habits, not purposeful decisions. Habits impact our daily lives in many different ways, even in how we interact with websites and applications. Being aware of how habits may influence interactions users have with your products can help you design better user experiences.

Dr Anne Galloway (@annegalloway) is Senior Lecturer, School of Design and Principal Investigator, Design Culture Lab, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Trained in sociology and anthropology, Anne teaches courses in design and culture, and researches relations amongst people, places, animals and technologies.

Here are the five things that make her nervous about Ubiquitous Computing:

1. Technological determinism & defeatism
Or, the cultural belief that technological development and progress is inevitable, and we have to adapt.

2. Technological solutionism
Or, the cultural belief that technology is the best solution to life’s problems.

3. Quantification imperatives
Or, the cultural belief that everything can and should be measured, and that everyday life would be better if all our decisions were based on these data.

4. Connection & sharing imperatives
Or, the cultural belief that everyday life would be better if more information was transmissible and accessible to people.

5. Convenience & efficiency imperatives
Or, the cultural belief that people would be better off if there were more technologies to make daily life more convenient, and common tasks more efficient.

Consumers insist that they treasure their online privacy. But their mouse clicks tell a far different tale, as the experiments of a behavioral economist show.

In a series of provocative experiments, Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has shown that despite how much we say we value our privacy — and we do, again and again — we tend to act inconsistently.

The people behind the upcoming Interaction14 conference invite you to attend a panel discussion in Milan on the “Long View of Interaction Design”.

On Monday 8 April at 6pm (on the eve of the Salone del Mobile), Claudio Moderini, Fabio Sergio, Jan-Christoph Zoels and Todd S. Harple will debate with Alok Nandi on how to design for those interaction design challenges that go beyond the immediate consumer product/service launch cycle.

What if your interaction design has to be integrated in a hospital or a building or a city? How do you design if your creation has to last 10, 20 or even more years into the future? What tools can you use as an interaction designer? How do you make it adaptive and resilient? How to avoid obsolescence?

Speakers

• Anna Meroni, Assistant professor of service and strategic design, Polytechnic University of Milan (IT)
• Claudio Moderini (@claudiomoderini), Director of the Master Programme in Interaction Design at Domus Academy, Milan (IT)
• Fabio Sergio (@freegorifero), Executive Creative Director, frog design, Milan (IT)
• Jan-Christoph Zoels, Founding Partner and Creative Director, Experientia, Turin (IT)
• Todd S. Harple (@tharple), Research Scientist / Anthropologist / Ethnographer, Intel Corporation, Hillsboro (USA)
• Alok Nandi (@aloknandi), Chair of Interaction14, Amsterdam (NL) and moderator of the discussion

Attendance: free and open to the public

Location: Domus Academy, via Carlo Darwin 20, Milan (Navigli area)

Live streaming: Yes! The event will be available in streaming live (and recorded for viewing afterwards). Join us on Monday at 6pm Italy time by clicking here.

Hashtag: #ixda

Sponsor in kind: Domus Academy (thank you!)

Disclosure: I am the behind the scenes organizer of it all.

As gadgets get more complicated, UI’s must be able to teach their users over time. Philip Battin shows how flow can be used to improve the user experience in interactive electronic consumer products in an article for FastCo.Design.

“More and more interactive products are being returned. In 2002, 48% of all returned products were technically fully functional but were rejected for failing to satisfy user needs (28%) or purely due to users’ remorse (20%). Even though a product may have all the features one can hope for, complexity and bad user experience can prevent users from integrating it into their lives.

User experiences are subjective and dynamic, but by and large, interactive products are not designed to take people’s changing capacity and experience into account. But they could. Here, I present a model for how designers can use the fundamentals of video games and the psychological principles of flow to design enhanced user experiences.