Social Technologies
Too Much Virtual Friend Making .NL
I’ll be posting at Core77 this year, starting with this observation about some of my favorite people and their addiction AND repulsion to social media: In her annual Christmas Message, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands warned of the dangers of too much virtual friend making. She encouraged people to put down their phones and laptops and re-establish physical connections. “We tend to look the other way and close our eyes and ears Read More
Happiness? There’s an App for That
At Open Forum for Inhabitat: It turns out, money doesn’t buy happiness. In fact, as Daniel Gilbert pointed out in his book Stumbling on Happiness, humans are famously bad at predicting what will make us happy, because of logic-processing errors in our brands. So what does create the conditions for happiness? A new research project by doctoral student Matt Killingsworth out of Professor Gilbert’s Hedonic Psychology Laboratory at Harvard is enrolling anyone with Read More
Tools of Engagement
“If we want to impact these ecosystems on a large scale we must increasingly design for social systems, not individual needs.” – Robert Fabricant has been thinking about how the User Centered Design practice evolves out of the user needs trap and moves on to thinking about groups, communities, and neighborhoods. The New Practice of User Centered Design (thanks again Core77 for serving as a sustainable design think space). — Learning Landscape from Read More
The Downside of Crowdsourcing
The crowd may save us, and the crowd may also pop the balloon of high wages in creative industries, according to John Winsor writing for Business Week online.
Read MoreAre you a designer of the internet of things?
Nice presentation from Webb of Schulze and Webb on the topic – with a few product to service concepts not yet in my collection – like Howies Hand Me Downs. The New Negroponte Switch from schulzeandwebb
Read MoreIf Products Could Speak – Would They Say “SendMeHome”?
Always looking for Spime ideas that do not rely on a mega infrastructure of sensors and data networks – like this simple concept SendMeHome via TechCrunch. It’s a site that let’s you register an object with a unique code, and they sell little stickers you can place on the object. Oooh, a business model that does not rely on advertising, but on sticker micropayment. The service sees two primary applications for these Read More
If Products Could Tweet
For the second year in a row a DIY project wins the Greener Gadgets Competition – this time it’s a crew from Make Magazine who hacked into a Kill-a-Watt in order to give the device a Twitter voice. The Kill-a-Watt power meter will “tweet” the daily kilowatt hours consumed to the user’s Twitter account. Make is releasing this project as an “Open source hardware” project – in other words, any ITP student Read More