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Dot Everyone & the 2015 Dimbleby Lecture by Martha Lane Fox

In Digital, Digital Culture, Digital Leaders, Disruption by Fredy Ore

Last night’s #DimblebyLecture was from digital pioneer, baroness Martha Lane Fox who proposed creating a new institution to make Britain the most digital nation on the planet.

Her lecture focused on the values that make the internet great and proposed to help balance opportunity for civic, public & non-commercial bodies.

Today, we’re letting big commercial technology platforms shape much of our digital lives, dominating the debate about everything from online privacy to how we build smart cities.Martha Lane Fox

She introduced DOT EVERYONE and highlighted 3 important areas.

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  1. DOT EVERYONE has to help educate all of us, from all walks of life, about the internet.
  2. DOT EVERYONE must put women at the heart of the technology sector. Currently there are fewer women in the digital sector than there are in Parliament.
  3. FINALLY we should aim for a much more ambitious global roles in unpicking the complex moral and ethical issues that the internet presents.

The lecture is available on the BBC iPlayer and a transcript including public comments are available at doteveryone.org.uk.

The Guardian, the BBC and Apple CEO Tim Cook have recently written about issues raised in the lecture and with the Internet today.

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The Design & Redesign Critique in Data Visualisation

In Design, Image, Visualization by Fredy Ore

I came across this brilliant Medium post title Design & Redesign in Data Visualisation which discusses the recent trend of the design critique in dataviz.

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Last year, Alberto Cairo wrote about Visualisation Redesign on The Functional Art, and this essay goes more in-depth on the benefits.

I really love how a critique exposes a forced-push towards better design thinking and design.

Love it! :)

The example above is of the Arab Spring Data Visualisation by Alexander Katin / Kir Khanchaturov and the redesign by Alberto Cairo.

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Enjoying the great talk by Ian Bach at IxD15

In Digital Culture, Digital Experiences, Disciplines, Disruption, Experience Design, Visualization by Fredy Ore

@IanBach – IanBa.ch – #IxD15

We discussed the IxD15 Ian Bach presentation last night (amongst others) at the IxDA London Movie night at the Wellcome Trust.

It is worth watching as he also argues that part of the tools and mindsets we use (in design) are perhaps too focused on the less emotional perspective and are more akin to the more “functional” + “pain-relievers”.

Design-Thinking-Transition

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#DesignInTech report by KPCB

In Digital Leaders, Disciplines, Technology by Fredy Ore

John Maeda’s inaugural #DesignInTech Report has been presented at South by South West 2015. It was great to be part of and contribute to some of the findings.

More about the report can be found below:

Tech-Companies-In-Design

Great-Design-Is-About

Excerpt

Design has become a game changer in Silicon Valley. Last year, John Maeda joined KPCB as the firm’s first Design Partner, joining from his role as the President of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Now, in his inaugural #DesignInTech Report, Maeda highlights the rising importance of design in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Drawing on extensive research and his own conversations with hundreds of designers, Maeda examines the intersection of design and technology.

The report covers trends ranging from the record amounts of funding flowing into design-led startups to M&A activity with major tech corporations. Beyond designers and technologists, the report will appeal to a broad audience. For all of us who use a computer or mobile device, great design is changing how we live and work. This report helps explain why.

Also mentioned:
– Dezeen

Gallup blog series (2014) – The shifting landscapes for financial institutions

In Digital Experiences, Experience Design, Financial Services, Product & Service Design by Fredy Ore

I revisit this 2014 blog post titled Looking Out for Customers’ Financial Well-Being Is Table Stakes for Banks

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and the blog series on the shifting landscapes for financial institutions. from the Gallup Blog

Update (2016): Gallup blog post on Channel Experiences for banking customers

  • Most engagement drivers hinge on channel experiences
  • Channel satisfaction creates brand ambassadors
  • Financial leaders should make channel satisfaction a top priority
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Behavioural Adaptation & The Peltzman Effect on Design

In Business Design, Design, Digital Culture, Disruption, Innovation by Fredy Ore

I came across an interesting discussion today on the Peltzman Effect on the Golden Gate bridge.

The bridge has recently seen an unexpected increase in speeding due to introduced forced safety rules intended to slow cars down.

The Peltzman Effect is a reference to the work of economist Sam Peltzman within the area of Automobile safety, it states that there are often reduced predicted benefits from the increase of regulation intended to increase safety.

Golden Gate

It made me think of Behavioural Adaptation (a field within Psychology) and the unintentional consequences within Design.

Islington council has introduced 20 mph on its main road network in order to reduce casualties through reducing speeds to a more appropriate level on streets where people live, work and shop.
Islington was the first council in the country to bring in a 20 mph limit on side roads, and is now introducing a 20 mph speed limit on all its main roads.
– Living Streets UK, Sept 29 2014

I live in the borough and very much welcomed the news that 20 mph speed limit will bring safer roads for our kids and family. But can increases in road/pedestrian accidents, fire response times, rent prices and immunisations since be also attributed to the 20 mph road limits?

As designers, we often aim to solve a design problem with good intentions, but sometimes inadvertently cause unintended effects (to customers, products or services).

We almost always nudge towards a direction that includes other hidden impacts our crafted, designed products/services have in our world.

Fly-In-Urinal-Schiphol Airport

Image Sources
1. Blake Evans-Pritchard – Aiming To Reduce Cleaning Costs
2. Kieron Rowe on Twitter
3. SFGate – Golden Gate Bridge barrier leads to rampant speeding, new rules

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Thomas Heatherwick on Ingenuity, Transformation & Surprise

In Architecture, Digital Leaders by Fredy Ore

Thomas Heatherwick is giving a talk at the Emmanuel Centre in London with Intelligence ² on February 26th, 2015.

Heatherwick-Intelligence-Squared-Talk
Heatherwick is one of Britain’s most original creative talents bringing together design, architecture, engineering, sculpture and urban planning as a single practice.

He is most notably recognised for the design of the London 2012 Olympics Cauldron and the updated London Routemaster bus.

Looking forward to it, should be a great talk.

Photo credits: Tom Thorpe and Intelligence ²

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Adding further meaning into the new Products we Design

In Digital Culture, Digital Experiences, Disruption, Experience Design, Experience Strategy by Fredy Ore

Happy New Year everyone & Hello 2015.

After a beautiful Xmas with family in the Lake District and a few weeks away. I start the new year catching up on a tonne of reading, teaching our little one Spanish, completing the books I never finished in 2014 and learning a few bits of Processing for the 2015 launch of Sediment.

xmas-2014-lake-district
The year is starting at a fast pace and so far I have come across some great stories, articles and talks. If this is a reflection of the year to come, it will be an exciting year indeed.

I start the year reading the latest issue of ACM Interactions and an article by Elisa Giaccardi, titled Designing the Connected Everyday.

Elisa Giaccardi is a professor at Delft University of Technology whose research focuses on heritage as a lens to understand participatory values and practices.

“In order to design digital networks that integrate meaningfully into our everyday lives, we need to learn how to design for commensurability. That is, we need to make our ability to connect to people and things across networks commensurate with our practices in the physical world.”
Elisa Giacardi, ACM Interactions Jan-Feb 2015 Issue

ACM-Interactions-Designing-the-connected-everyday
No doubt this article will bring up a lot of discussion in the next issues of Interactions as well as within IOT circles, as it affirms a discussion that products should also be arranged around practices in the real world, not just layered on top.

This point becomes more meaningful as I’m currently reading an early chapter from the forthcoming O’Reilly book Designing Connected Products by Claire Rowland, Elizabeth Goodman, Martin Charlier, Alfred Lui and Ann Light.

Experience-Design-eBookIn contrast, it is worthwhile also reading this post on Design Thinking and Disruption by Mary Tresseler. It contains a link to a free Experience Design ebook from curated chapters on Process (Lean UX), Strategy, Data Informed Design, Designing for IoT, Branding, Behavioural Economics and Designing Across Devices.

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Christmas Music season

In Audio, Metrics by Fredy Ore

A post on the planning, data analysis and market research leading into the Christmas period for radio and online streaming services.

Mariah Carey, Bing Crosby and Jose Feliciano have seen an increase in play streams as early as November 1st!

Streaming services need to keep subscribers happy, and doing so requires sophisticated algorithms to keep Christmas … cranked up.
For radio, the stakes are even higher. A station that flips its format can see its ratings triple in an especially good December.Five Thirty Eight

Below is Spotify’s 2014 Christmas playlist :)

From our family to yours, Merry Xmas everyone!

Photo Source: Flickr

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How the new Skype Universal Translator works

In Audio, Engineering, Experience Design, Future, Innovation by Fredy Ore

Skype have written a blog post explaining how their Skype Translator works which is currently available as a preview-release for the Spanish language.

The blog includes a short Behind the scenes video of the team working on the Translator.

Related
– Deep Neural Networks for Speech from Microsoft Research
– The Guardian report of the Skype Spanish to English Translator

Image source: The official Skype logo pack