Experientia

In a video published by Intel on its YouTube channel, one of the company’s ethnographers describes some of the background research behind the new design of the device, which is aimed primarily for education in emerging markets.

Intel looked closely at how students collaborate and move around in classroom environments. The new tablet feature was implemented so that the device would be more conducive to what Intel calls “micromobility”. Intel wants students to be able to carry around Classmate PCs in much the same way that they currently carry around paper and pencil.

We want to offer more choices to meet the diversity of student learning needs across the world,” said Intel Emerging Markets Platform Group manager Lila Ibrahim in a statement. “Our ethnographic research has shown us that students responded well to tablet and touch screen technology. The creativity, interactivity and user-friendliness of the new design will enhance the learning experiences for these children. This is important for both emerging and mature markets where technology is increasing being seen as a key tool in encouraging learning and facilitating teaching.”

In the past, user participation in editorial publications was limited to writing “letters to the editor.” On the web, users take an active role in shaping the message through their comments and debates.

Bond Art + Science looked at how traditional media and online publications invite, manage and benefit from user participation, and identified some best practices and common pitfalls:

• How are users asked to register to contribute?
• How do site moderators manage comments to ensure quality?
• What are the best ways to treat user comments as content?

View slideshow

(via InfoDesign)

This new book, which grew out of the digital natives project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, investigates “what it means to grow up in a mediated culture and the ways in which technology inflects issues like privacy, safety, intellectual property, media creation, and learning,” (as introduced by Danah Boyd). Here is the official abstract:

The most enduring change wrought by the digital revolution is neither the new business models nor the new search algorithms, but rather the massive generation gap between those who were born digital and those who were not. The first generation of “digital natives”-children who were born into and raised in the digital world-is now coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our cultural life, even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed. But who are these digital natives? How are they different from older generations, and what is the world they’re creating going to look like?

In Born Digital, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a sociological portrait of this exotic tribe of young people who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow. Based on original research and advancing new theories, Born Digital explores a broad range of issues, from the highly philosophical to the purely practical: What does identity mean for young people who have dozens of online profiles and avatars? Should we worry about privacy issues? Or is privacy even a relevant value for digital natives? How does the concept of safety translate into an increasingly virtual world? Is “stranger-danger” a real problem, or a red herring?

John Palfrey is Clinical Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. He is a regular commentator on network news programs, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News, NPR and BBC. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Urs Gasser is an associate professor of law at the University of St. Gallen, where he serves as the director of the Research Center for Information Law, as well as a faculty fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. He has published and edited, respectively, six books and has written over fifty articles in books, law reviews, and professional journals. He lives in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

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What can designers learn from anthropologists?

Our guest today believes they can learn a great deal. In fact, she has married the two disciplines and is a leading exponent of what has come to be known as design anthropology.

She believes successful design begins with carefully observing human nature, whether it be how high-heeled shoes affect natural ways of walking or how participation in the design process empowers marginalised communities.

Listen to interview (starts at 39:52)

(via Culture Matters)

“But it [the positivist tradition] stands in stark contrast to the phenomenological take on things, which is premised on the instability and subjectivity of the things we perceive, and on the irreducible importance of these perceptions as they register on the lived body, i.e. you, now, here, in your own skin, heir to your own history of experience. On the phenomenological side of the house, all of the grandeur resides in the act of interpretation - which is always somebody’s interpretation, crucially inflected by their situation. [...]

The phenomenological approach - and this is the worldview that stands, either explicitly or otherwise, behind the entire field subsuming design and user research and ethnography, at least as those things are practiced by the people I know - insists that the world in its richness cannot be reduced to datasets. Or not, anyway, without doing fatal damage to everything that truly matters.

But Dourish ["What We Talk About When We Talk About Context?", Paul Dourish, 2004] argues (persuasively, I think) that this is the wrong question. For him, this mysterious thing context is something that only be arrived at through interaction - “an achievement, rather than an observation; an outcome, rather than a premise.” It’s relational in the deepest sense of the word, a state of being that arises out of the shared performance and understanding of two or more parties (actors, agents, what have you).

And why do we want to characterize this state of being in the first place? “[T]o be able to use the context in order to discriminate or elaborate the meaning of the user’s activity.” That’s it.”

This is highly recommended reading. Thank you, Adam.

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“Submitting to chemotherapy, radiation treatments, MRIs, CT scans and the like can be bad enough. But often, dreary, windowless rooms and corridors only worsen the experience.

Now, some institutions hope that by making these areas more appealing, they can ease patients’ stress, fear and feelings of helplessness, and perhaps influence a patient’s outcome for the better. [...]

Many of the innovations stem from the nascent field of “evidence-based design,” which ties design decisions to research on how the physical environment can influence well-being and promote healing. That includes practical design elements meant to improve safety, as well as the use of purely aesthetic features such as waterfalls, gardens and artwork.”

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via Mark Hurst

“Technologists are busying themselves turning buildings into displays, or at least draping them with informatics (whether physically or via various forms of augmented reality.) It’s all really exciting, thoughtful, stuff with tons of thrilling prototypes and sketches, it reminds me of early webiness. Because, unless I’m missing something, there’s not a lot of sophisticated thinking about how this intersects with commerce, marketing and advertising. (And I’m very willing to believe I’m missing something, this is why this is a bit of a voyage of discovery. And I just noticed today that Adam Greenfield’s talking about it here.) The city is already festooned with persuasion, screens are already talking to phones and animating transport systems but it’s not being done by thoughtful UI experts it’s being done by poster contractors at the behest of advertising agencies.” [...]

“Is there some connection to the (admittedly unformed) notion of pre-experience design? How cool would it be if the data that’s draped around the city leaks back into communications, and if those communications helped to explain and contextualise that data.”

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(via AHOi)

Access is empowering
16 August
A reflection on the GSM Association’s research report on the economic and social impact of mobile communications in developing countries, as reported also by Business Week, particularly on the subject matter of mobile phones and women.

Women and mobile phones
18 August
A further reflection on the topic, in part based on the research by Kutoma Wakumuna of Zambia.

The Indian BoP market experience: fact or fantasy?
20 August
So is it true or not that there is a profitable market at the Bottom of the Pyramid?

The essence of poverty is the asymmetry of information
20 August
Why is Nokia opening up a research unit in Nairobi?

But what about the people?
21 August
The new web, the one on the mobile, must be human centered from the start. This is one revolution - the Information Revolution - that cannot be driven by technology, but must be guided by the human beings who need it the most.

For consumers, the development of wireless home networks will require a shift in thinking, as the lines between computing, home entertainment and communications continue to blur.

“The main challenge in our business is consumer awareness,” said Hans van’t Riet, a senior director for Philips’s Streamium line of wireless audio components, which transmit music over home WLAN networks. “Research shows this is a great idea. We just have a marketing challenge.”

Well, that’s a dubious comment: people don’t buy it so it is a marketing challenge. Curious what research he is referring to.

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