“In response to two strong global vectors: the rise of pervasive information technologies and the privatization of the public sphere, Marc Böhlen and Hans Frei propose hybrid architectural programs called Micro Public Places (MMPs). MPPs combine insights from ambient intelligence, human computing, architecture, social engineering and urbanism to initiate ways to re- animate public life in contemporary societies. They offer access to things that are or should be available to all: air, water, medicine, books, etc. and combine machine learning procedures with subjective human intuition to make the public realm a contested space again.”

The Situated Technologies Pamphlets series, published by the Architectural League, explores 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 way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities?

As reported on by Jocelyn Bailey in Core77, Sir Cox reflected on the four biggest questions that business should be asking about the future: the shift to emerging markets, the ageing rich world, carbon pricing, and a lack of capital.

Sir George Cox is a Board Member of NYSE-Euronext, Director of Shorts, former Director General of the Institute of Directors and the past Chairman of the Design Council. He is also the author of the renowned Cox Review of Creativity in Business (2005).

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“Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and co-evolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held assumption that systems respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion is simply wrong. According to resilience thinking, systems are in constant flux; they are highly unpredictable and self-organizing, with feedbacks across time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmarks of complexity.”

A key feature of complex adaptive systems is that they can settle into a number of different equilibria. [...] Historically, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change that way. [...]

Resilience science focuses on these sorts of tipping points. [...] How much shock can a system absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different? That, in a nutshell, is the essence of resilience.”

I really enjoyed the discussion on the importance of redundancy and social equity in resilient systems:

“Society strives for efficiency by trying to eliminate apparent redundancies, but things that seemed redundant in a stable climate turn out to be valuable when conditions change. [...]

When it comes to human populations, ecologists are hesitant to stretch metaphors too far—a biodiverse ecosystem is not the same as a diverse population. [But] it’s important that you have institutions and functions in society that also overlap. If one member of the group is lost, there will be another that can maintain the function, so the function of the system as a whole is maintained. [...]

Social equity and access to resources will also emerge as hugely important components of resilience. Though human behavior is new territory for resilience experts, numerous social scientists have documented the erosion of civic engagement, and even violence, in areas marked by high levels of social stratification.”

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More information:
- Stockholm Resilience Centre
- The Urban Network
- URBIS
- Resilience 2011

The Seattle Times argues that while communication and gaming gadgets have convenienced and connected us in ways never before possible, they may also be profoundly hurting our ability to be social, empathic and involved with each other. The signs are everywhere — from the near collisions on city streets where drivers are too busy texting to pay attention to the virtual relationships on Facebook and the addiction to video games.

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This is the essence of Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd’s keynote speech at SXSW Interactive. And here is Danah’s write-out of the talk.

Here are a few of the reviews, from which I have distilled some telling quotes:

Techcrunch:

“Boyd says that privacy is not dead, but that a big part of our notion of privacy relates to maintaining control over our content, and that when we don’t have control, we feel that our privacy has been violated. This has happened a few times recently. [...]

To help underscore her points, she recalled and discussed a number of major privacy blunders from Facebook and Google. [...]

Boyd then transitioned to talk a bit about the fuzzy lines between what is public and private. She says that just because people put material in public places doesn’t mean it was meant to be aggregated. And just because something is publicly accessible doesn’t mean people want it to be publicized.”

CNET News:

“For Boyd, her years of research have been eye-opening into the divergence between what users want–and their emergent behavior–and the ways tech companies interpret those desires. “Often,” she said, “companies trying to build efficiencies into their systems profoundly misunderstand what they’re trying to be efficient about.” [...]

“There’s a big difference between publicly available data and publicized data,” she said, “and I worry about this publication process, and who will be caught in the crossfire.”

“We are going to see a continued emergence of new tools that complicate the boundaries between the public and the private, and technology will continue to make a mess of it.”

“Ultimately, then, for the people who build these systems,” Boyd said, “it is imperative that they ask questions about what people really want and what people want to achieve.”

“For marketers, it’s essential to remember that the accessibility of people’s information online doesn’t necessarily indicate that they want to be seen by you. Just because you can interpret people,” Boyd said, “doesn’t mean you’re going to get it right. Just because you see something doesn’t mean you know what’s going on.”

And to the systems designers on hand for her keynote, Boyd had one final message: “As designers, you need to think through the implications and ethics of what you’re doing,” she said. “You are shaping the future. How you handle those challenges will shape the future.”

More reviews in The New York Times and the Daily Telegraph (including the delightful quote: “Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy.”)

If you want to know more about a certain attraction (currently only 10 key destinations are tagged), you just download a free mobile app, scan the associated Microsoft Color Tag with your mobile phone, and you’re automatically connected to relevant online resources (as described on a Microsoft blog).

Unfortunately, very little thinking and design has gone into the design of the resources and information one finally gets access to: not mobile specific, not very relevant, and not very much in depth.

The project seems gimmicky and remains at the level of a technical or marketing experiment. The user experience is poor and disappointing. Clearly no experience designer or service designer was involved here.

How is it possible that Microsoft still launches projects that are portrayed as providing value for real people, but in fact do not provide any meaningful value for them at all? Unless Microsoft Italia urgently does some drastic work on the user experience, the value here is only one of public relations for the entities involved.

- Download press release
- View video

“Service design is a relatively new discipline that asks some fundamental questions: what should the customer experience be like? What should the employee experience be like? How does a company remain true to its brand, to its core business assets and stay relevant to customers?

Design is a highly pragmatic discipline. That is why it is of such interest to business: it gets results. But if at its heart lies the idea of experience, then, as this supplement shows, the methods and ideas behind service design can equally be applied to the public sector. We reveal how service methods can help design experiences that are more efficient and more effective.

We also take a look at developments in sustainability for transport and water systems, as well as at changes in the voluntary sector, where the question: “Can design help change the world?” is increasingly gaining relevance.”

Articles cover service innovation management in major industries, service reform in the public sector, sustainability in the financial sector, car design as service ecosystem design, environmental design and social innovation. Much attention is devoted to methodology. Also included are interviews with Dan Pink (author), Joe Ferry (Virgin Atlantic) and others.

In addition to high-def project videos, you can also find videos of a few lectures and presentations.

vimeo.com/channels/experientia
youtube.com/experientiasrl

“The report, “Smart Regulation: A cleaner, fairer and more competitive EU” addresses this and shows how smart EU regulation — that improves consultation with “end-users”, such as businesses and consumers, throughout the legislative process — will support growth and recovery in the current economic climate, maximise the European Union’s social and environmental benefits, while reducing burdens and costs.”

Note the use of the term “end-user“:

“We use the term ‘end-user’ to capture everyone who is affected by regulation – both those who incur costs as a result of compliance and those who receive its benefits. In many cases, these groups can often be the same. People who ‘use’ regulation should be able to understand why it is needed, what its benefits are and that the costs it may impose are necessary and proportionate.

We believe that making end-users central to the policy-making process – by being aware of their needs, seeking their views, using these views and demonstrating the value of their contributions – is the best way to achieve this aim. End-users are best placed to provide relevant, up-to-date information, which can improve the quality of the evidence on which decisions are based.”

The Commission, state the authors, should reinforce and apply user-centric approaches when developing new legislation. This will help ensure that the legislation is well targeted and effective and increase the likelihood of compliance.

USER-CENTRIC APPROACH TO IDENTIFYING REGULATORY BURDENS

There are many examples across the EU where Member States and the Commission can draw inspiration on how to seek views and communicate with end-users:

Kafka (Belgium) – Belgium’s Kafka initiative introduced an online contact point, www.kafka.be where citizens can submit comments on existing regulations and make proposals for their improvement and simplification. The proposals received on the website have formed the basis of a reform programme – the Kafka Plan – for the entire Federal Government. Over 200 specific simplification projects have been implemented under the plan, ranging from the abolition of paper accounts to the improvement of home-working regulations.

Burden Hunters Project (Denmark) – The Burden Hunter project applies user-centric innovation techniques to allow users themselves to identify the red tape that causes them most irritation. Civil servants have conducted visits to businesses to see first- hand the regulatory challenges they face. The user-centric approach allows businesses themselves to set the agenda for regulatory action and help develop solutions to cut administrative burdens. Work is ongoing to deliver results on a range of problems within nine areas perceived as particularly irritating, including government inflexibility, lack of mutual obligation and complexity. The Burden Hunter project has led to identifying a number of new initiatives to cut red tape.

Simplifying Together (France) – France has developed a framework that focuses on ‘life-events’ in order to better understand the burdens faced by businesses. These include key points in the life of a business, such as starting up, moving premises or hiring an employee. Using this framework, and through a broad process of consultation with the users of regulation, they have developed a programme to reduce the number of processes, the cost and the time to navigate these events.

- Read press release
- Download executive summary
- Download report

“Beyond making us all more productive and efficient, we ask how we can build technology to help us be more expressive, creative, and reflective in our daily lives.

Our group considers a broad range of human values, aims to understand their complexity, and puts them front and centre in technology development. An important aspect of this endeavour is the construction of new technologies that, in turn, we ourselves can shape. In so doing, we may create new ways that help us to actively realise our aspirations and desires, to engage with or disconnect from the world around us, to remember our past or to forget it, to connect with others or disengage from them. Important here are technologies which ultimately make our lives richer, and which offer us choice and flexibility in the things that we do.

SDS does this through the bringing together of social science, design and computer science. We believe that by understanding human values, we open up a space of new technological possibilities that stretches the boundaries of current conceptions of human-computer interaction.”

Some of their projects can be viewed online, but I was quite intrigued by the wealth of recent publications (2009 & 2010) which I grouped under a number of thematic headings:

Family archives
- Passing on and putting to rest: Understanding bereavement in the context of interactive technologies
- Opening up the family archive

Household messaging
- Designing a technological playground: A field study of the emergence of play in household messaging
- Bridging the gap between grandparents and teenagers: Lightweight vs. heavyweight contact
- Resilience in the face of innovation: Household trials with BubbleBoard

Social practices
- Collocated social practices surrounding photos
- Desiring to be in touch in a changing communications landscape: Attitudes of older adults
- Machine intelligence

Studies of technology use in the home
- Who’s hogging the bandwidth?: The consequences of revealing the invisible in the home
- Understanding family communication across time zones
- Home video communication: Mediating “closeness”
- Home curation versus Teen Photography: Photo displays in the family home
- Photo displays and intergenerational relationships in the family home

Supporting autobiographical memory
- Now let me see where I was: Understanding how Lifelogs mediate memory
- Narrative, memory and practice: Tensions and choices in the use of a digital artefact
- Fixed in time and “time in motion”: Mobility of vision through a SenseCam lens
- Reflecting on oneself and on others: Multiple perspectives via SenseCam

Specific projects
- Glancephone
- Hybrid interactive surfaces
- TellTable (also here)
- VPlay

Web 3.0 promises a world where people and objects are seamlessly connected through an all pervasive network, no longer controlled through devices such as mouse and keyboards but through speech, gestures and even our very thoughts. It is a web that will become truly mobile and global.

But the will this vision work in reality? How will such an all pervasive network, if it does emerge, be made safe and secure against attacks and corruption?

Who will ultimately control the web – big business or the community? And will the developing world finally take centre stage in this new silicon Babylon?

Listen to programme

IBM’s two-year research program, which also involves the National Institute of Design of India and Tokyo University, will explicitly focus on making cell phones easier to use, for both the elderly and the illiterate. Moreover, the software it develops will be open-source, so all governments and businesses can take advantage.

- Read full story
- Read press release

MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy was a joint commission by the UK Cabinet Office and the Institute for Government. It shows how the latest insights from the science of behaviour change can be used to generate new and cost-effective solutions to some of the current major policy challenges, such as reducing crime, tackling obesity and climate change.

In their joint foreword to the report, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, and the Executive Director of the Institute for Government, Sir Michael Bichard, said that behavioural theory has the potential to help policy makers deal with some of the difficult issues ahead and achieve more for less:

“Many of the biggest policy challenges we are now facing – such as the increase in people with chronic health conditions – will only be resolved if we are successful in persuading people to change their behaviour, their lifestyles or their existing habits. Fortunately, over the last decade, our understanding of influences on behaviour has increased significantly and this points the way to new approaches and new solutions.

“So whilst behavioural theory has already been deployed to good effect in some areas, it has much greater potential to help us. To realise that potential, we have to build our capacity and ensure that we have a sophisticated understanding of what does influence behaviour. This report is an important step in that direction because it shows how behavioural theory could help achieve better outcomes for citizens, either by complementing more established policy tools, or by suggesting more innovative interventions.”

- A practical guide to MINDSPACE
- Full version of the MINDSPACE report

Nikki Barton, head of digital design at Nokia Design Studio, points out that a good design delivers the goods that are not only pretty to look at, but also work the way people want them to. [...] “As all the models must be user-friendly, designers often spend hours observing how people all over the world use and interact with their phones. They then bring back their new insights to the studios.” [...]

For Younghee Jung, her work as a phone designer is mostly about forecasting future trends, focusing on people. “People’s behaviour and motivation change slower than technology, but simultaneously guide its development,” says the research leader at Nokia Research Center. [...]

For design manager Robert Williams, his work revolves around giving people a better mobile experience. He is responsible for creating the icons used on Nokia phones.

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“Only a few years ago, digital services were about bandwidth, wireless protocols, and emerging standards for mobile television. To the keen observer, however, there has recently been a significant shift from antennas to services that might completely change the way we as citizens live, work and interact with technology around us. [...]

From the integrated digital services in the transportation system of Paris, to the integration of mobile and online public services of the City of Westminster, the way citizens interact with the city in which they live is changing rapidly.

Around the world, groundbreaking services are already being piloted to allow the visually impared to move seemlessly around cities, to solve congenstion problems once and for all through intelligent and personalised car pooling, and implement sensor-networks in cities to create a smart city that only cleans the streets, turn on the street lights, and empties the harbage bins when there is a need.”

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“A student of design, Medhi has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs) to allow any illiterate or semi-literate person on first contact with a computer, to immediately know how to proceed with minimal or no assistance.

As Medhi points out, in text-based conventional information architecture found in mobile phones and PCs, there are a number of usability challenges that semi literate people face. By using a combination of voice, video and graphics in an innovative way, Medhi has overcome this challenge.

Medhi discovered the kind of barriers that illiterate populations face in using technology through an ethnographic design process involving more than 400 women from low-income, low-literate communities across India, the Philippines, and South Africa.”

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In the latest issue of Science, Allcott and co-author Sendhil Mullainathan, of Harvard, advocate passage of a bill currently in Congress that would fund more behavioral research about energy consumption. The authors also note initiatives like that of OPOWER, a Virginia company, which has found that the user-friendly energy reports it sends to consumers can influence behavior enough to reduce household energy use by 2 percent, at minimal cost (OPOWER is an affiliate of Ideas42, an MIT-linked think tank to which Allcott also belongs). MIT News spoke with Allcott about how behavioral economics addresses our energy needs.

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Steve Portigal:
“I feel like there’s this tension that goes on in business and especially in marketing, this conceit that we can take humans—you know, messy, irrational, organic—and somehow cut them open and figure out the binary, rational, predictable, money-making algorithms that determine what they do. You see all this harnessing of science, you know, whether it’s neuro-this or lie detector-that or psychotherapy-this that gets used in the service of, not helping people, but helping marketers crack the nut of what people want, where is the desire center in the brain. You know, that we can learn things about people in a way that is “true”—that is predictable and true, and will determine consumption patterns. I find the idea that we should be able to do that just fascinating, because that’s not the world of people that we live in as people, so why as marketers or designers or producers do we think that we should turn people into things that they really aren’t?”

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“Writing in the British Journal of Education Technology in 2008, a group of academics led by Sue Bennett of the University of Wollongong set out to debunk the whole idea of digital natives, arguing that there may be “as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations”.”

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Shum was offered the job of director of “Mobile Experience Design” for the Windows Phone group, with the challenge to recreate the operating system’s user interface in a way that would let users “emotionally” connect with Windows smartphone.

The work of Shum and his colleagues on redesigning the mobile user experience for Microsoft customers is the first visible result of this effort, and Windows Phone 7 was unveiled last month.

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To showcase our latest projects, ideas and methodologies, we have redesigned our website – www.experientia.com – giving it a fresh look, and creating a brand new experience for the viewer. The site follows top user experience standards, and will be easily updatable with new projects, staff and news as we continue to grow.

The new site is visually engaging, with slideshows featuring our work, and also content rich, sharing our methodologies and our ideas about some of the most important questions in experience design today. Our design aesthetic is evident throughout the site, in the impeccable attention to detail and the eye-catching composition.

What’s new
Our innovative filtering approach helps people to quickly and easily find their way to our services, and a library of some of our most exciting and representative projects. Content can also be accessed through pictures, making the site highly visual, and exploring new directions in filtering content, particularly for a corporate website. All content can be accessed in multiple ways, designed to meet different needs and points of view, such as through services, past projects, and the common challenges that businesses face. Integrated into our services and methodologies are actual projects from the last four and a half years, showing how we work in action, and our great results.

The projects on the site are a selection, chosen to reflect the breadth and width of areas we deal with, and our varied expertise. In addition to this, the viewpoints section “Our Perspectives”, shares our thoughts on some of the most vital issues and developments in experience design today. These will change regularly, creating an interesting focal point for frequent visitors to our site.

The site also offers a portal to our popular and successful blog, Putting People First, where Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken explores daily insights on user experience, experience design and people-centred innovation.

Currently in English, we envision an Italian version being online in the next few months. The site is online at www.experientia.com.

For more information on Experientia contact us at info at experientia dot com.

A couple of their research reports are highly recommended reading:

The diffusion of environmental behaviours: The role of influential individuals in social networks
An investigation into the notion of ‘green’ mavens, with a view to identifying specific opportunities for communications and policy.
> Summary report
> Technical report

Public understanding of sustainable energy consumption in the home
Brook Lyndhurst was commissioned by Defra [the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] to conduct qualitative research into public understanding of sustainable energy consumption in the home. Through the course of 12 focus groups, in-home energy audits and follow-up, in-depth interviews, we were able to identify how energy attitudes changed across different segments of the UK population, e.g. ‘dark green’ consumers, wastage focused etc. This innovative segmentation analysis enabled us to make policy recommendations to Defra across five key behaviour goals, notably installing domestic micro-generation, insulation products and energy efficient appliances.