More and more anthropologists are doing research on new media technologies like mobile phones and social networking sites. Some of them are even being hired by companies to do ethnographic studies to gather the sort of “actionable insight” that can help a better understanding of how these technologies are used, and help inform how new [...]
The Story of Stuff is a very clever and well-executed film about our relationship with our planet. You should go watch it now. Come back afterwards and read the rest of this post. It’ll take 20 minutes, but it’ll be worth it. It may come across as a bit preachy at times, but the points [...]
I found Dan Saffer’s presentation on “How to lie with design research” on Nicolas Nova’s blog today. A User Experience researcher, Nova posts a lot of blog posts of varying insights on interaction design and user experience and such buzzwords. The talk is a tongue-in cheek discussion of ethnographic design research, which appears to annoy [...]
One of the entries for the Index design award was the Dropping Knowledge website. It’s a fun, if somewhat difficult concept which lets anybody ask a question, and gives anybody else the opportunity to offer their answers. It is an attempt to use the new sort of participatory culture to find or reach contemplative answers [...]
Following the INDEX conference, I got to thinking a bit more about how the designers posited design as an unquestionable good to be used to solve the many problems of the 21st century. But what is good design? How do you know when you’ve found it? Well, this summer I read Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and [...]
2 weeks ago, I went to the INDEX design conference, which is a prelude to the Aspen Design Summit – a design meeting which takes place in June, and is considered something akin to a design world summit ever since its first instance in 1951. The conference was part of the INDEX design awards, the [...]
Listening to the radio this morning before biking into town to work sitting at my newly-acquired thesis writing spot at the Royal Library in the centre of Copenhagen (nice), I heard a segment from Danish IT-news source, Harddisken, on Pervasive Computing and the hospital which sounded oddly familiar. The segment was called “Et hospital i [...]
Some time ago, Anne Galloway posted an excerpt from a talk by designer and HCI theorist Brenda Laurel on her concept of culture work which caught my interest. Laurel’s main concern is design which focuses on the bottomline, the way that most of the products we buy are designing with buying and consumption in mind, [...]
So with the release of the new version of Ubuntu, 6.10 (6 for 2006, 10 for October) I decided that rather than merely upgrading my system from 6.06 to 6.10, I would wipe clean my hard disk, wipe all my desktop settings and try to start afresh to see how long it would take me [...]