“As designers of interactions broaden their perspective and take a higher level view of the problem, they simultaneously make another transition: they stop solving interaction design problems and begin solving problems with design. And it is in taking this step that designers—of all types—begin to play a more strategic role in the organisations and societies for which they work.

In this capacity designers of interactions bring their design skills to bear on truly complex, systemic problems—broad in scale and scope—and have the opportunity to affect truly profound and lasting change.”

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Participants (including Paolo Antonelli, Andrew Blauvelt, Allan Chochinov and John Thackara) from a spectrum of institutions in 11 countries engaged in a far-ranging and illuminating conversation.

Design Observer’s William Drenttel and Change Observer’s Julie Lasky have written an extensive report on this symposium sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and organized by Winterhouse Institute.

Here are the key conclusions (copied from the abstract):

1. The museum can be a collective commons for learning, reflection and critical action, as well as a platform for delivering information and provocation and a stage for learning, social connectedness and critical action. The museum as commons is not only an exhibition space but also a civic arena where people can reflect on the importance and efficacy of social change.
2. Museums need to move beyond the object so that social design exhibitions are more than concrete displays. In that sense, design should be regarded as a tool for improving life and fostering participatory engagement and social activism.
3. Museums should be a place where “wicked,” or seemingly intractable social problems of global scope, are addressed — a shared space in which diverse stakeholders can participate in solutions.
4. The curator’s role may have to evolve and broaden to include skills germane to the complexity of issues around social change and innovation.
5. Traditional museums can learn from other institutions and organizations that champion design as an agent of social change by stimulating, honoring and publicizing specific achievements on an international platform.

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The blog also supported TakingITMobile, an international study on youth mobile communications that she completed as a part of her Master of Environmental Studies at Canada’s York University. And her key findings are well worth taking a look at:

The fastest spreading communications technology the world has seen yet, mobile phones are rapidly changing the face of youth activism globally. TakingITMobile is a community-based research study conducted in partnership with the social network TakingITGlobal that examines how youth leaders across the globe (Campbell Salazar surveyed twenty countries) use mobile communications to create social change within their local communities and internationally. Survey participants (n = 565) paint a picture of the diversity of mobile youth activism around the world.

It was found that the majority of youth reported using their mobile phones to generate Citizen Media to share their message globally, mobilize protests, fundraise, educate their peers and spread solidarity.

TakingITMobile participants were passionate about a number of global issues, including the Environment (39%), Human Rights (36%), Poverty (28%), Health (24%), Peace (23.8%), HIV/AIDS (22.4%) and Violence (11.6%). While the most common mobile feature was Voice Calls (75%), TakingITMobile participants used a variety of mobile phone features, including Text Messages (46%), Web Browsing (38%), Social Media (27%), News (26%) and Photography (22%).

It was also discovered that youth who own smart phones are more likely to use their phones for activism (81%) than youth who don’t (71%). As well, females are much less likely (70%) to use their phones for activism than males. Youth ages 25-29 show higher levels of activism (84%) than youth in their teens (67%), early 20s (75%) and 30s (75%). GDP per capita was an influencing factor on both monthly costs, monthly average number of minutes used, number of SMS used and internet data used.

Overall it was found that participants from countries with high GDP per capita received cheaper services, with the exception of very high income nations such as Canada and the United States.

A number of barriers were identified for mobile youth activists, including cost of services (32%) cost of mobile phones (10%) as well as network coverage (9%) were the biggest barriers to accessing mobile phones.

“Experts say that the huge growth of the internet has in effect created a “permanent memory” online that can be searched by anyone. Embarrassing statements, and photographs, or angry attacks by spiteful ex-friends once faded away. But no longer. [...]

There are now many firms offering help in keeping people’s online history safe. They include companies and websites like Online Reputation Manager, Reputation Professor, Reputation Defender and Reputation Management Partners.”

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In her assignment, she focused on the ways in which South Australians use new technologies in their everyday lives. Through extensive, often ethnographic, research she helped shed light on new opportunities for broadband and associated communication technologies in the state and beyond, and, equally importantly, how to meaningfully engage all South Australians in these technologies.

A dedicated website, SAstories, provides more background on her work in South Australia.

Bell’s final report “Getting Connected Staying Connected: Exploring South Australia’s Digital Futures” has now been officially released and is available for public comment.

“The recommendations made in the report set out a possible future plan for South Australia so individuals, communities, businesses and government can take full advantage of the opportunities created by information communication and entertainment technologies.

Genevieve Bell was South Australia’s 15th Thinker in Residence and her brief was to identify a set of strategies, directions and opportunities for all South Australians with regard to the future of new information, communication and entertainment technologies.

During her time here she traveled over 14,000 kilometres and visited 45 very different communities, from Adelaide to Amata and talked with hundreds of South Australians.

Genevieve discovered South Australians using technology in a huge range of creative and innovative ways to benefits themselves and their communities.”

Download report (alternate link)

See also this Fast Company article on the report release.

Individuals and institutions are slower to adopt e-government services due to a lack of user centricity in design and development. Work with PortNL, an integrated e-government service for expatriates in the Netherlands, suggests the core of governments’ difficulty in creating user-centered services lies in a fundamental tension between the needs of users and those of governments. In this talk, Nalini Kotamraju — an Assistant Professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands — explains how the purposes of e-government services can be met through a user-centered design approach, and how site builders can put the needs of users ahead of the ideas of governmental clients.

Watch video

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“The only real reason to adopt coercive curation is to attain a monopoly over a platform – to be able to shut out competitors, extract high rents on publishers whose materials are sold in your store, and sell a pipe dream of safety and beauty that you can’t deliver, at the cost of homely, handmade, personal media that define us and fill us with delight.”

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Ethan Zuckerman argues in this Guardian video that cultural and linguistic barriers stand in the way of our using the internet to tackle global issues.

These include, they argue, a tendency to disempower people who are supposed to benefit from services, to create waste by failing to recognise service users’ own strengths and assets, and to engender a culture of dependency that stimulates demand.

People’s needs are better met when they are involved in an equal and reciprocal relationship with professionals and others, working together to get things done. This is the underlying principle of co-production – a transformational approach to delivering services – whose time has now come.

Co-production has the potential to transform public services so that they are better positioned to address these problems and to meet urgent challenges such as public spending cuts, an ageing society, the increasing numbers of those with long-term health conditions and rising public expectations for personalised high quality services.

For over a year, nef and NESTA have been working together to grow a network of co-production practitioners. They have built a substantial body of knowledge about co-production that offers a powerful critique of the current model of public service delivery and a key to transforming it.

The discussion paper Right here, right now – Taking co-production into the mainstream (pdf) is the last of three reports ow is the right time to move co-production out of the margins and into the mainstream. The report provides the basis for a better understanding of how to make this happen.

The first report, The Challenge of Co-production, published in December 2009, explained what co-production is and why it offers the possibility of more effective and efficient public services.

The second report, Public Services Inside Out, published in April, described a co-production framework.

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In an interview with Arlene Chang of the India Real Time blog of the Wall Street Journal, Medhi talks about her passion for socio-economic development through technology, how it can improve the quality of life in rural India even for illiterate people, and “why she loves her job”.

“Through an ethnographic design process that comprised interviewing 400 research subjects from low-income, low-literate communities across India, the Philippines and South Africa and more than 450 hours spent in the field observing subjects in the natural contexts in which they live and work, I discovered that there were a number of usability challenges which people experienced while interacting with traditional text-based UIs, on both mobile phones and PCs.

Based on the broad lessons learned through this ethnography, design recommendations were developed for non-textual user interfaces for low-literate users that use combinations of voice, video and graphics. These principles have been applied to designing four applications – job-search for the informal labor market, health-information dissemination, a mobile money-transfer system and an electronic map.”

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“We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.”

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Many of the problems that are identified with Facebook are symptomatic of a company which only has a couple of thousand employees to serve half a billion users.

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“Is it not possible that some people simply don’t want to participate in this brave new digital world? After all, wouldn’t it be absurd to coerce people into using mobile phones, TVs or cars – these technologies, too, are beneficial, increasing mobility and interaction with the world. Why all this guilt-tripping about the internet in specific?”

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We’ve extended our expertise areas this year, with major new projects on sustainable development, e-learning, public transportation, business software visualisation tools, and mobility solutions for people with disabilities. Check out the description of our Low2No Living project on the Experientia website: we’re very excited to be working on this great sustainable development project in Helsinki, with a fantastic international team.

We love to spot new talent, and this year, we’re happy to welcome five new full-time staff members, who bring their in-depth knowledge and high quality work to our projects. We’re joined by Mariateresa Dell’Aquila as Project Manager, Gabriele Santinelli as Web Prototyper and Josef Bercovich as Senior Interaction Designer. In addition, two previous short-term collaborators, Adriana Rivas and Jennifer Murphy are back as full-time designers, bringing us to around 30 people in the office.

Our international vibe is stronger than ever at the moment, giving us the diversity we value, as well as fresh ideas and new perspectives. Right now, we have people from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Panama, Portugal, and the USA.

Experientia has a philosophy of investing in internships, and we’ve traditionally always hired interns from acclaimed design schools to spend time with us over the summer. This year we’re joined by people from Domus Academy, Milan; Aalto University, Helsinki; Strate Collège, Paris; IUAV, Venice; University of Madeiras, Funchal; and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI.

Five years in business is a milestone by any standard, and we’re proud that for Experientia, they’ve been five years of success. We’ve got lots of plans for the next five years, and we look forward to continued growth and many more anniversaries.

In it, he argues that in the past, UK politics [and not just UK, I'd say] were dominated by two competing visions of the role of the state:

“One, on the left, saw state provision as the best way to ensure fairness and protect people form the vagaries of the market, and argued for increasing spending on public services. The other, on the right, saw state intervention as contrary to the liberty of its citizens and a poor substitute for market or community provision of services, arguing for a reduction in public spending and a rolling back of the state.”

“We badly need new ideas and new approaches,” he says, “especially since the gulf between rising demands on public services and available funding to meet them is growing ever wider.”

“More than anything, we need approaches that go with the grain of human behaviour and motivation, and which understand that society is comprised of inter-related complex systems, rather than reductionist management control methods.”

He then continues an in-depth discussion about the value of co-design and participation (supported by the PwC / IPPR paper ‘Capable Communities‘), social networks as tools, social networks as contexts, and the future new, socially-networked public services.

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“These intranets need to provide flexible access to both information and people by employing pull models for serving as many knowledge worker information needs as possible, including unanticipated information needs. Information supply needs to be maximized by supporting the creation and access to user-generated content as well as by allowing for easy integration of external information sources. The intranet needs to be turned into an “information broker platform” where information is freely and easily created, aggregated, shared, found and discovered at minimal effort. Such an intranet gives everybody access to all information which is available and make room for virtually infinite amounts of information.

However, most of today’s intranets primarily consist of pre-produced information resources which are intended to serve information needs which can be anticipated in advance. They aim to serve people who perform predefined and repeatable tasks. These intranets are push platforms. As such they might work well for repeatable routine work where the information needs can be defined in advanced, but they are quite dysfunctional for knowledge work. It’s not a coincidence that many knowledge workers find it much easier to find information on the web than in their internal systems and that the intranet plays a marginal role in their daily work.”

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(via InfoDesign)

Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology
By Pabini Gabriel-Petit
In this installment of On Good Behavior, I’ll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this column focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of interaction designers, this discussion of the product design process applies to all aspects of UX design.

Achieving and Balancing Consistency in User Interface Design
By Michael Zuschlag
It is not necessary for a product to be perfectly consistent. Indeed, considering all of the possible references users bring to a product, perfect external consistency is probably impossible. However, we owe it to our users to both eliminate any unwarranted inconsistency and ensure any deliberate inconsistency offers some net benefit to users. That’s the least users should expect from us.

Supporting User Experience Throughout the Product Development Process
By Peter Hornsby
This month, let’s look at how we might design a tool that could help us in overcoming obstacles by supporting user-centered design (UCD)—a tool that’s not just for UX professionals, but supports multiple project stakeholders in various roles throughout the entire product lifecycle. This UCD tool would support stakeholders by making requirements more clearly visible and enabling team members to work effectively across far-flung geographical boundaries.

“In future, your Google account may be allowed, under some as-yet-unidentified privacy policy, to know a whole lot about your life and the lives of those close to you. It will know birthdays and anniversaries, consumer gadget preferences, preferred hobbies and pastimes, even favourite foods. It will also know where you are, and be able to get in touch with your local stores via their websites.”

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Last year, Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic published the book Content Strategy. In her own words, it “offers a pretty straightforward approach to planning for content in your web initiatives.”

“Content Strategy for the Web explains how to create and deliver useful, usable content for your online audiences, when and where they need it most. It also shares content best practices so you can get your next website redesign right, on time and on budget.”

Now some people who have read the book are launching the idea of a joined question time, the UIE Book Club, starting with this book on 17 August. All can join in.

Nick Finck of Blue Flavor recently gave a talk to the Content Strategy Seattle group on how content strategy fits into the user experience. He has posted the slides and a videocast for the talk.

(via InfoDesign)