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Augmented sensing through smartphones
So how are we doing to augment our senses through digital technologies? Here are some of the products currently on the market that allow people to augment their sensing (and sense-making) through...
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Context is key to making computers better conversationalists
When communicating, context is king. A breakthrough in modelling context in human communication could make computers better conversationalists, according to cognitive scientists at Stanford University....
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Intel social research team experiments with mood-altering technology
A team of engineers, anthropologists and psychologists at Intel’s Oregon lab is busy developing ways of integrating human emotion and technology in ways that will, it hopes, lead the two to positively...
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Field notes from global tech ethnographer Tricia Wang
A sociologist, ethnographer, and corporate consultant who studies global technology use among migrants, low-income people, youth, and others on society’s fringes, Wang has worked for the past several...
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Silicon Valley worries about addiction to devices
Computers, smartphones and other gadgets have made life easier, but now tech firms are worried that they may be harming people. Huh? Tech firms worried about addiction to devices? As also the author of...
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Social media’s neoliberal world view (and how it affects us all)
Recently I have embarked on trying to understand better the underlying ideology and world view of the Silicon Valley tech scene, and how this is impacting our daily lives through the products and...
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Touch in cars is still too complicated
It is not a secret that touch is not as easy as it seems and very difficult to get right, writes Wolfgang Gruener on Conceivable Tech. Cadillac is the first company that is trying to translate touch in...
View ArticleThe bling approach to the school of the future
Recently I have been exploring developments on the impact of new technologies on the future of education, particularly in high schools. The latest trend in education is all about tablets, of course. My...
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Intel conversations about the future
Intel dabbles in science fiction, titles ReadWriteWeb. On Monday, they write, Intel debuted a book of science fiction stories. Dubbed Imaging the Future And Building It, the book includes a number of...
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How to create a cutting edge Smart City visitor experience
A four step guide from the Milan Expo 2015: Step 1 Ask your main sponsors (in this case Cisco, Enel and Telecom Italia) to indicate the relevant “Smart City” technologies that they already have, are...
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An enchanted Odyssey on your iPad
Article by Francesca Salvadori, Scuolalvento blog Translation from the Italian Technology is probably the last thing that comes to mind when you think about poetry and how it can be captured and...
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Understanding the sensing city
Consultant Roger Dennis, who identifies himself as “serendipity architect”, has been writing a series of posts on meetings he had related to the sensing city. Together they give a good overview of some...
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Wearable tech pioneers aim to track and augment our lives
Wearable technology is still in its infancy but as it increasingly taps into a desire to have the functionality of technology without the intrusiveness. A BBC article covers some of the recent products...
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Core77 report on the Design Research Conference
A few days before the EPIC conference in Savannah, Chicago’s IIT Institute of Design organised and hosted its yearly Design Research conference. Although no videos seem to be available yet, Ciara...
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A tablet still is not a book … not yet
Dan Turner discusses why the experience of reading a book on tablets (iPads in particular) is a chore rather than a delight. In a long article for UX Magazine, he discusses a number of reasons, often...
View ArticleFinally a serious research study on tablet use in schools
Although there are many tablet deployments in schools worldwide, there is a glaring lack of serious research on what actually happens in the classrooms with these devices. In fact, there is so far no...
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Scotland study: Tablet devices in schools beneficial to children
School children who use a tablet computer benefit the most when allowed to take it home, rather than just using it in school, reveals research from the University of Hull, reports Engineering &...
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UK study: tech in schools requires a rethink of how learning is organised
In the last five years UK schools have spent more than £1 billion on digital technology. From interactive whiteboards to tablets, there is more digital technology in schools than ever before. But so...
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Research on Android tablet use in 5th grade classrooms
The series of research projects on tablet use in schools (see here, here and here) now also has an Android study. A small research project by Marie Bjerede and Tzaddi Bondi, equipped a 5th grade class...
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Intel’s UX research on touch interface usage and Ultrabooks
One of the more innovative studies to come along at Intel in regards to user experience and the Ultrabook is Daria Loi’s global survey of touch interface usage. Dario Loi, who is UX Innovation Manager...
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No one likes a city that’s too smart
This week London hosts a jamboree of computer geeks, politicians, and urban planners from around the world. At the Urban Age conference, they will discuss the latest whizz idea in high tech, the “smart...
View ArticleWelcome to 2020 and 2030
Business Technology 2020 Human-like technology. The potential downfall of the data center. Hyper-personalization of data. These are some of the responses IT leaders gave to us when we asked, “What will...
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Intel’s ‘Women and the Web’ report
From the press release: Intel Corporation released a groundbreaking report on “Women and the Web,” unveiling concrete data on the enormous Internet gender gap in the developing world and the social and...
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Dan Hill’s critique of the smart cities movement
Dan Hill (of CityofSound, ARUP, Sitra and now Fabrica fame) is not only extremely prolific, but his writing is also very much to the point. His latest Smart City (or better “Smart Citizen”) manifesto...
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How will big data change design research?
Will design researchers (and our models and explanations) be replaced by data tables and “experience actuaries” that tell us what to build, for whom, and what it should be like? Artefact’s Dave Mc...
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In a world of connected devices, focus on what they do
Stacey Higginbotham reports on a the GigaOM Internet of things meetup in San Francisco a few days ago: “All of the participants agreed that the connected device wasn’t the product; the service was....
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Big Data and personal data for behavioral analysis and behavioral change
In a broader article on Big Data and privacy, the New York Times writes about the work of Alex Pentland, a computational social scientist, director of the Human Dynamics Lab at the M.I.T., and academic...
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Low2No smart services workbook by Experientia
As part of Experientia’s involvement in the award winning Low2No project in Helsinki and in particular its strategy towards demand management and behavioral change, we are proud to announce that Dan...
View Article‘Open Data’ brings potential and perils for governments
Governments and public officials are rushing to embrace the concept of Open Data, throwing open the vast panoply of publicly collected information for the digitally savvy to mine and exploit, writes...
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Death, life and place in great digital cities
At the heart of the Smarter Cities movement is the belief that the use of engineering and IT technologies, including social media and information marketplaces, can create more efficient and resilient...
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What’s lost when everything is recorded
Who wouldn’t delight in hearing Lincoln at Gettysburg in the same way we can go back and witness President Obama on the campaign trail? But with so much data capture and storage, which is preferable...
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Does big data have us ‘fooled by randomness’?
Being surrounded by data makes it easy to see the noise rather than the signal, and the trees rather than the forest, writes Andre Mouton in USA Today. “Nassim Nicholas Taleb achieved notoriety with...
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Exploring the use of tablets in educational settings
MindShift, a service by KQED and NPR, has published a four-part series to explore the four dimensions of using tablets in educational settings, examining how teachers can take students on a journey...
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Selected videos from “The Conference” in Sweden
Media Evolution The Conference is an international conference organized annually in Malmö, Sweden. The event focuses on factors that are affecting our society, with a media industry angle to it,...
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Can Smarter Cities improve our quality of life?
Can information and technology improve the quality of life in cities? That seems a pretty fundamental question for the Smarter Cities movement to address. There is little point in us expending time and...
View ArticleThe problem with big data correlations
“The people using big data don’t presume to peer deeply into people’s souls,” argues David Brooks in the New York Times (in an April 2013 column). “They don’t try to explain why people are doing...
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How technology changes storytelling
Long New York Times piece where writers in a variety of genres tell us what new technologies mean for storytelling. Contributions by Margaret Atwood, Charles Yu, Marisha Pessl, Tom McCarthy, Rainbow...
View ArticleTwo new reports by ARUP
Designing with Data The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and ARUP have released Designing with Data: Shaping Our Future Cities, a new report that explores the massive potential role that...
View ArticleTeens in the digital age
Two talks on teens in the digital age: The App Generation: identity, intimacy and imagination in the digital era (video – 21:18) Talk at The RSA, London, UK – October 2, 2013 Today’s young people have...
View ArticleHow do e-books change the reading experience?
Mohsin Hamid and Anna Holmes discuss in the New York Times Book Review how technology affects our reading habits. Mohsin Hamid argues that in a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind...
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The UX of commercial drones
In order for commercial drones like Amazon’s or Australian startup Flirtey’s to become a reality, the drone (or any future-world technology, really) can’t merely do its job—meaning, it can’t randomly...
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De l’importance de l’ethnographie appliquée aux technologies
For once a post in French! Hubert Guillaud of InternetActu describes some examples – mostly from the recent EPIC conference – of the great contribution of ethnography in focusing our gaze on real life...
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Observing the technologists
Nick Seaver, a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at UC Irvine, makes the case for the importance of “studying up“: doing ethnographies not only of disempowered groups, but of groups who wield...
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A UX view of the future of mobile networks and systems
The latest post of the User Experience Lab at Ericsson Research presents a UX view of the future of mobile networks and systems. “The “Remote Control over Mobile Networks” concept is one of several...
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11 reasons computers can’t understand or solve our problems without human...
It is true that our ability to collect, analyse and interpret data about the world has advanced to an astonishing degree in recent years, writes Rick Robinson, Executive Architect at IBM specialising...
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Graphic novel explains our role in the world of Big Data
Big Data powers the modern world. What do we gain from Big Data? What do we lose? Al Jazeera America examines the role of technology and the implications of sharing personal information in the...
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MIT Technology Review special report on persuasive technology
The MIT Technology Review has just published a special business report on persuasive technology, i.e. how technologies from smartphones to social media are used to influence our tastes, behavior, and...
View ArticleWe are citizens, not mere physical masses of data for harvesting
The deal we have struck with the information society over the extent to which our lives are shaped and our privacy invaded requires urgent renegotiation, argues law professor Julie E Cohen at the...
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The driverless car push ignores challenges of people and context
Autonomous or driverless cars are based on a technology push strategy. Beyond statements like “freeing up time”, “reducing accidents” and some simple scenarios on “remote parking” or “vehicle sharing”,...
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Exploring the ‘next nature’ that people and technology are creating
The Next Nature website sets out to radically shift our notion of nature: Our image of nature as static, balanced and harmonic is naive and up for reconsideration. Where technology and nature are...
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