This week we’ve got a whole bunch of interesting links for you. Ranging from an interview with the creative designer of Motorola Korea to plans of the European Commission.

As part of a new CNN series on internet and the end of privacy, John D. Sutter reflects on the world of public living — where most everything about a person’s habits, location and preferences is just a few clicks away.

Most Americans in fact don’t want to be tracked on the Internet and are unwilling to trade their privacy for web ads that are tailored to their interests. So suggest the results of a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of Internet users conducted over the weekend.

The European Commission meanwhile unveiled an ambitious agenda to bring public services online across Europe so that it could “serve an economy which relies on the networks of the future.”

So, how has the most revolutionary innovation of our time – the internet – transformed our world? What does it mean for the modern family? How has it changed our concepts of privacy? Of celebrity? Of love, sex and hate? These are some of the questions that writer and commentator Aleks Krotoski (who is also the brain behind the digital revolution open source documentary) addresses in a new Observer series entitled “Untangling the web“.

Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences at Edinburgh University, Scotland, wonders whether devices like iPhones and Blackberries are actually becoming extensions of our thinking selves.

UX Magazine has published a rich trove of articles that looks at the internet and interaction design from a broader user experience perspective.

The Joong Ang Daily, the Korean partner newspaper of the International Herald Tribune, published an interview with Hwang Sung-gul, the creative designer of mobile devices at Motorola Korea, about the thinking and work that goes into designing a mobile phone.

Digital marketing expert Dhiren Shingadia interviewed ethnographer and technology researcher Tricia Wang to learn how ethnography can provide new insights for companies seeking to understand communities.

The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) announced the launch of the IxDA Interaction Awards, a first-of-its-kind awards program dedicated to celebrating global excellence in the discipline of Interaction Design.

Automation World reports at length on how human-centered design techniques are gaining attention in the world of industrial controls and automation, as more users struggle with complex user interfaces.

The UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph profiles Cordell Ratzlaff, director of user-centred design at Cisco Systems, and former head of Apple’s Human Interface Group.

Om Malik, founder of GigaOM Network, also focuses on UX issues as he argues in a much commented post that Google has a user experience problem, as it starts to compete with rivals whose entire existence revolves around easy, consumer experiences.

This week we dive into books and research. I read Donald Norman’s newest book, got interested in Bill Moggridge’s Designing Media and read many other interesting things.Designing Media, the new book by Bill Moggridge, director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and founder of IDEO, is now available in hard copy, as a DVD and as a downloadable pdf.

The Megacities on the Move report, compiled by the Forum for the Future, says authorities must start planning their transport infrastructure now for a future when two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. Of particular interest too are the four scenarios for urban mobility in 2040, which paint vivid pictures of four possible worlds in 2040. Scenario animations bring each world to life, as they follow a day in the life of an ordinary woman, examining the mobility challenges and solutions in each world.

The book, This is Service Design Thinking, introduces an inter-disciplinary approach to designing services. A set of 23 international authors and even more online contributors from the global service design community invested their knowledge, experience and passion together to create this book.

I just finished reading Living with Complexity by Donald A. Norman and considers it an important contribution to our field.

Sebastian Greger, social interaction designer, internet sociologist and post-graduate student at the Media Lab of the Aalto University School of Art and Design in Helsinki, has published his Master’s research, entitled The Absent Peer, that aims to provide a framework for the consideration of non-users in the context of social interaction design, in particular for the design of social network sites.

Norden, the Nordic Innovation Center, has published the results of U DriveIT, a research project between Denmark, Norway and Iceland, that explored the increasingly strong connection between ICT and user-driven innovation in those countries, and how this approach could be transferred from the IT sector to traditional businesses.

This week: urban transformations in from Chicago to Cyprus, and storytelling using  science fiction.

A group of young designers are exploring how methods used within user-centered design can improve urban regeneration, and are now making their mark on the urban scene of Nicosia, Cyprus, by creatively redesigning “misused public spaces”.

More urban transformation in Chicago where citizens harness technology to offer up solutions to problems in their communities, with the support of the Give a Minute! initiative, created by Jake Barton’s media design firm Local Projects.

Also in Northern Europe they are experimenting urban transformations, as Living Labs have become an established part of local and regional innovation systems. So it became necessary to start benchmarking and harmonizing best practices for setting up and conducting individual Living Lab research.

Storytelling is another big theme this week.

Intel’s Chief Futurist, Brian David Johnson, is a big advocate of using science fiction narratives as a jumping off point for a discussion between management and engineering about the future of Intel’s business, and has commissioned four writers — Douglas Rushkoff, Ray Hammond, Scarlett Thomas and Markus Heitz — to produce science fictional pieces on the future that the company can use in its own planning.

Finally, Digital U is the first television/web series to examine how the internet and social media are changing the way we live, work, play, consume and communicate.

Yesterday marks the one-year anniversary of Apple’s iPhone debut in Korea. The iPhone’s impact was bigger than most market observers ever expected. In fact, according to this Korean newspaper’s article, it changed how people live, work, socialize and entertain.

The autumn issue of Koreana, the quarterly devoted to Korean art and culture, contains a special feature on Korea’s smartphone era.The first article in particular – Mobile phones in Korea: between dynamism and anxiety – is worth a thorough read, as it explores the zealous passion for mobile phones in Korea.

I recently became one of Canvas8’s newest Thought Leaders, lending my insights and knowledge to the site’s growing archives of articles and interviews on cultural global trends. My first contribution, co-written with Erin O’Loughlin, was a reflection on designing for sustainability-focused behavioral change. The article outlines Experientia’s behavioral change framework, which has been developed over the course of our work in Helsinki’s Jätkäsaari area, as part of a team constructing a low-to-no carbon emissions building block called Low2No.

Experientia president Michele Visciola meanwhile was invited to send a video message to the World Usability Day 2010 event in Tokyo, Japan. Michele, who is also European Regional Coordinator for the Usability Professional’s Association, spoke on the event’s theme of communication, and the relationship between communication and usability in research and design activities.

This week Mark was in South Korea, where he made two presentations at the International Design Congress organised by the Busan Design Center and also met a lot of designers, which led him to a series of reflections on Korean design.

Meanwhile Bo Begole from PARC’s (formerly Xerox PARC) Ubiquitous Computing Area, has been developing an app that brings the concept of ‘ubicomp’ to a commercial reality, while James Glasnapp of PARC provided a helpful overview of data collection methods (and methodologies) that ethnographers use to understand a particular population or situation of interest.

Data use and smart human-centric data visualisations are becoming the “next big thing” in UX design. A number of posts this week delve into the matter.

The latest issue of Interactions Magazine is the last issue of editors Jon Kolko and Richard Anderson. Many articles reflect on the results achieved and the changes  that occurred over the last three years.

Finally, Matt Richtel reflects in the New York Times on the impact of growing up digital. The constant stream of stimuli offered by new technology, he says, poses a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

The week of inspirations continued: after the Venice Architecture Biennale, it was my own city – Turin – that was full of artists, clubbers and hipsters of all sorts. Régine Debatty wrote extensively about the art fair Artissima on her blog we make money not art, while Bruce Sterling was a steady presence at the Share Festival (although I missed his talk there – sorry, Bruce). And then there was the discovery of RENA , a new political group led by some very bright, young people who strive for a new climate of excellence in Italy, and collaborate intensively with no other than Bill Emmott (former editor of The Economist).

Within that context of fresh and inspiring thinking, I was delighted to find the free publication entitled The Enabling City: Place-Based Creative Problem-Solving and the Power of the Everyday (pdf). It is really an innovative toolkit – also featured on a website – where Italian researcher Chiara Camponeschi showcases pioneering initiatives in urban sustainability and open governance. Take a look and you will notice that her thinking is very close to the co-creation and service design themes that are currently all the rap in the UX community. It therefore comes as no surprise that she is inspired by creative communities guru Ezio Manzini.

Another discovery was the IDEA 2010 conference, held last month by the Information Architecture Institute. It is a yearly gathering  where UX professionals exchange insights and share perspectives for designing better experiences across physical and virtual information spaces. Videos of the first day are now available (check those by Josh Clark and Peter Morville) and you can also read recaps of Day One and Day Two on this very site.

Last weekend I went to the Architecture Biennale in Venice, which was themed “People Meet in Architecture”. The focus in other words was on people (how they live, feel and behave in built environments) and how they interact with each other. These Monocle videos (part one and part two) provide a good impression. It’s great to see that people-centred thinking is now the vogue in the architecture world. Rethinking Happiness by the Italian architect/designer Aldo Cibic and his team is one of the projects that was exemplary of this exciting approach, and I encourage the readers to explore the website. The biennale closes on 21 November.

Lots of clippings this week.

Usability was a major theme and people reflected extensively on the usability of the iPad and the form factor usability of mobile phones.

Mobile devices are now, it seems, THE topic in the user experience discourse: their impact on emerging markets, the implications for online news, how they affect retail and local sales, and what apps could mean for tv viewing.

Two must read books got featured this week: Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks were interviewed about their new book Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design, and Jon Kolko published a sample chapter of his forthcoming book, Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis.

Because of a trip to Seoul, South Korea my UX clippings are a few days later. But that doesn’t make them less interesting.

• With fast developments in the mobile world, there were again quite some reflections this week on the role of mobile devices in our lives. Smartphones are the new drug of choice, writes CNN. They actually tap into one of the same pathways in the brain that make slot machines so addictive.
• Wired instead looks at the future of smartphones. They are particularly interested in what is happening in interface innovation at Nokia Research, as this reveals some intriguing possibilities on how we will interact with our devices in the future. Nokia as we know has problems. Smartphone problems. Software problems. American problems.
• Gizmodo is convinced that to fully understand what’s wrong [with Nokia], we’ve got to understand what’s been right, or to put in another way, what’s distracted Nokia. Meet the most popular phone in the world.
• Finally Intel is exploring what future everyday use could arise from their recently launched context-aware computing concept.

Broader reflections this week were on the pitfalls of socially responsible design (in Metropolis Magazine), the psychology of complexity (in Rotman Magazine), and the upcoming design power of South Korea (by myself, Mark Vanderbeeken).

Each week Mark brings us the latest UX news from around the world wide web. This week his focus was on cultural contexts and the Internet of Things.

Culture and context

We at Experientia often argue that UX design goes far beyond the interaction between people and a device or service, and that  user-centred design cannot do without an understanding of culture and context. This week’s updates delve into the matter more:

• In response to questions from Amy Knox on the difference between US and European user experience, Søren Muus (creative director at FatDUX and co-initiator of the European Centre for User Experience) recently posted on the mail list of the Information Architecture Institute some interesting ideas on the matter.
• A contingent of Stanford University d.school students recently returned from Kenya, where they spent two weeks working with Nokia Research Africa, and the University of Nairobi, developing health-related mobile applications.
• “Creativity, Cost-Cutting & Keeping it Simple: what the Developing World can teach us about Technology” is the long title of a short feature story by Anna Leach on Shiny Shiny, a gadget blog.
• The French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have jointly published the report entitled “Innovative ways of appropriating mobile telephony in Africa“, describing how development is happening “from the bottom up” and an entire economy, both formal and informal in nature, has come into being to meet people’s needs.

Internet of Things

The other main topic coming up this week was the Internet of Things, where the issues of debate now increasingly centre on mobile integration, human involvement and buy-in, and information visualisation:

• Hunter Whitney concentrated on the importance of information visualisation in his article on public health for UX Magazine;
• Boston University‘s participation in the $2 million Smart Neighborhood project to make a Boston neighborhood more energy efficient focuses on ways to get people on board and participate in what they hope will be a “living laboratory”; and
• The Internet of Things was also a hot topic during the Device Design Day that Kicker Studio organised on 20 August in San Francisco. Make sure to check out the videos of the talks by Mike Kuniavsky (“Information as a material”) and Julian Bleecker (“Design fiction goes from props to prototypes”).

Each week Mark will bring us the latest UX news from around the world wide web. This week he reflects on data visualization.

Data visualization as an actionable tool in our lives

This week I watched the excellent online documentary “Journalism in the Age of Data“, which is a video report on data visualisation as a storytelling medium that Geoff McGhee created during a 2009-2010 Knight Journalism fellowship. I first didn’t write on it in my blog Putting People First, as I considered it a media story. But I changed my mind.

Apart from the fact that this video provides great inspiration for interaction designers and interface designers of all sorts, and not just those working in journalism, it also inspires a wider reflection.

With people rapidly moving to a world inundated with data capturing devices and the resulting data streams, our challenge as UX designers is to create tools that make sense of these data, and transform this data flood into useful and actionable informational experiences that help us better conduct our lives.

Smartphone applications seem to me an intermediate step. Yes, indeed, one can find apps for almost any need and they are sometimes quite useful. But we cannot conduct our lives with hundreds of apps: one for parking, one for driving, one for shopping, one for dining, etcetera.

What could be the future of actionable data visualisations in a multi-sensorial world?

Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

Other interesting news

Ford’s design principles for automotive interfaces
Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/automobiles/10FACE.html

The New York Times reports on how car designers have recognised the challenge of keeping vehicles’ controls up to date in an era when technology evolves far more quickly than automakers can move.

“Ford’s goal in establishing a set of design principles for automotive interfaces that would be consistently applied to all models was to improve what it called the cabin experience. The program was given the internal code name HAL. [...]      The guidelines that resulted from the program, a sort of universal logic for all the cars’ switches and systems, helped shape the dashboard controls in the redesigned Ford Edge and Explorer. The standards will apply to future Ford models around the world.”

Donald Norman on design without designers
Article: www.core77.com/blog/columns/design_without_designers_17587.asp

In his latest Core77 contribution, the acclaimed Donald Norman reflects on the role of testing versus creativity in design and innovation.

“There is a trend to eliminate designers. Who needs them when we can simply test our way to success? The excitement of powerful, captivating design is defined as irrelevant. Worse, the nature of design is in danger.” [...]      “Design without designers? Those who dislike the ambiguity and uncertainty of human judgments, with its uncertain track record and contradictory statements will try to abolish the human element in favor of the certainty that numbers and data appear to offer. But those who want the big gains that creative judgment can produce will follow their own judgment. The first case will bring about the small, continual improvements that have contributed greatly to the increased productivity and lowering of costs of our technologies. The second case will be rewarded with great failures and occasional great success. But those great successes will transform the world.”

Depth of field: Film in design research
Article: www.formakademisk.org/index.php/formaka…

Timo Arnall and Einar Sneve Martinussen have published the article “Depth of field: discursive design research through film,” which discusses the role of film in interaction and product design research, and the use of film in exploring and explaining emerging technologies.

“This article is about the role of film in interaction and product design research with technology, and the use of film in exploring and explaining emerging technologies in multiple contexts. We have engaged in a reflective design research process that uses graphical, audiovisual, and time-based media as a tool, a material and a communicative artefact that enables us to approach complex, obscure and often invisible emerging technologies. We give a discursive account of how film has played an intricate role in our design research practice, from revealing the materiality of invisible wireless technology, to explaining complex technical prototypes, to communicating to a public audience through online films that may fold broader social and cultural discourses back into our design research process. We conclude by elaborating on discursive design approaches to research that use film as a reflective and communicative medium that allows for design research to operate within a social and cultural frame.”

Is social media catalyzing an offline sharing economy?
Article: shareable.net/blog/is-social-media-catalyzing-new-sharing-economy

The results of Latitude Research and Shareable Magazine‘s The New Sharing Economy study released today indicate that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources such as cars and bikes, largely because they are learning to trust each other online. And they’re not just sharing to save money – an equal number of people say they share to make the world a better place.  The research was prompted by a recent surge in sharing startups driven by social technology, a generational shift, and new consumption patterns brought on by economic and environmental crisis.