General

Touchpoint Observatory: Armed Ticket Collectors

February 2, 2012

These people – five in total – were ticket inspectors on an early afternoon bus in Luzern, Switzerland, very much a tourist destination. So why are they dressed like armed police (no guns, but with pepper spray and earpieces)? And what is a security firm, Securitas, doing supplying ticket inspectors to a public transport company? [...]

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The Irony of Neuroscience & Behaviour Change

December 7, 2011

I have been enjoying the Brain Culture: Neuroscience & Society series via BBC Radio 4′s podcasts recently. In the series Matthew Taylor looks at how developments in neuroscience are changing the way we think about everything from law and punishment to education and marketing. As a fan of Raymond Tallis’s writing, who is somewhat of [...]

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Pre-digital versus digital services

December 2, 2011

Seth Godin has written an interesting observation about a common experience of hospitals in a piece titled Pre-Digital: A brief visit to the emergency room last month reminded me of what an organization that’s pre-digital is like. Six people doing bureaucratic tasks and screening that are artifacts of a paper universe, all in the service [...]

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End User Development and more from Interaction-Design.org

December 1, 2011

Mads Soegaard and his wife Rikke Friis Dam have been hard at work over at their Interaction-Design.org site, a free and well put together resource of educational materials about interaction design. The whole site is set up as an encyclopedia with tightly focused articles that have expert commentary underneath and often plenty of video interview [...]

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On Insurance Lying

November 15, 2011

(Photo: Steve Rhodes) I have a friend whose father used to be an insurance underwriter and he used to always complain about people lying about their insurance claims. He made the quite reasonable point that false claims put up the price of premiums for everyone. The problem is that insurance is often sold as a [...]

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Nest – Why Product Designers Don’t Design Products Anymore

October 26, 2011

By now most of you will have already seen the learning thermostat, Nest, designed by Tony Fadell, who led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone. The news has been heating up the Web for the last couple of days. For those of [...]

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Onlab’s Animated Infographic for the Audi Urban Future Summit

October 20, 2011

Audi Urban Future Summit from onlab on Vimeo. onlab produced a lovely animation for the Audi Urban Future Summit at the Frankfurt international motor show. It’s often hard to get across abstract concepts of future services and this accomplishes it very well. From Onlab’s site: The animation explains the implications of three types of energies [...]

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Antirom Tops the Digital Archeology Leaderboard

September 1, 2011

I’m totally late blogging about this, but I was very happy and proud to see antirom top the votes of the Digital Archeology project leaderboard while the project ran at Internet Week NYC back in June. So, officially we “won”, but since you can still vote for projects, our old friends from K10k are now [...]

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Matt Polaine & the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Project Re-Design interns

August 16, 2011

Good to see my brother Matt, Sustainable Development Researcher at BT, making an appearance in this video for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Project Re-Design internships. From the Foundation website: Working closely with industry experts within each of our Founding Partners’ specializations the internships are being carefully developed to ensure that each one offers a unique [...]

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Design Research – A Failure of Imagination?

July 7, 2011

Have design education and design research failed to fire up the imagination in public discourse? I believe so and I believe the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) mantra has unbalanced thinking about education curricula in general. John Thackara’s recent Observers Room newsletter notes the same: Last month, as the Dutch government expelled trouble-making artists [...]

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