Jenn Webb
Jenn Webb is a veteran of the newspaper industry turned freelance scribe, editor, and researcher. She is a nerd with a passion for technology and cultural disruption. She currently serves as O'Reilly Radar's managing editor and helps to investigate topics in the Design, IoT+, Data, and Emerging Tech spaces.
The 3 best experience design things we saw this week – March 20, 2015
UX evolution, tooting horns, and a rambunctious rant.
Our design editors curate the most notable, interesting, and important material they come across. Below you’ll find their recent selections.
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The evolution of UX
From da Vinci to Dreyfuss to Disney to Donald Norman, interactions between humans and technology have marked each key milestone in the longer-than-you-think history of user experience design. Here’s how UX design’s past sheds light on its future.
Source: Image by U.S. Army on Flickr
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Design’s return to artisan, at scale
The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Matt Nish-Lapidus on design's circular evolution, and designing in the post-Industrial era.
In this week’s Radar Podcast episode, Jon Follett, editor of Designing for Emerging Technologies, chats with Matt Nish-Lapidus, partner and design director at Normative. Their discussion circles around the evolution of design, characteristics of post-Industrial design, and aesthetic intricacies of designing in networked systems. Also note, Nish-Lapidus will present a free webcast on these topics March 24, 2015.
Post-Industrial design relationships
Nish-Lapidus shares an interesting take on design evolution, from pre-Industrial to post-Industrial times, through the lens of eyeglasses. He uses eyeglasses as a case study, he says, because they’re a piece of technology that’s been used through a broad span of history, longer than many of the things we still use today. Nish-Lapidus walks us through the pre-Industrial era — so, Medieval times through about the 1800s — where a single craftsperson designed one product for a single individual; through the Industrial era, where mass-production took the main stage; to our modern post-Industrial era, where embedded personalization capabilities are bringing design almost full circle, back to a focus on the individual user:
“Once we move into this post-Industrial era, which we’re kind of entering now, the relationship’s starting to shift again, and glasses are a really interesting example. We go from having a single pair of glasses made for a single person, hand-made usually, to a pair of glasses designed and then mass-manufactured for a countless number of people, to having a pair of glasses that expresses a lot of different things. On one hand, you have something like Google Glass, which is still mass-produced, but the glasses actually contain embedded functionality. Then we also have, with the emergence of 3D printing and small-scale manufacturing, a return to a little bit of that artisan, one-to-one relationship, where you could get something that someone’s made just for you.
“These post-Industrial objects are more of an expression of the networked world in which we now live. We [again] have a way of building relationships with individual crafts-people. We also have objects that exist in the network themselves, as a physical instantiation of the networked environment that we live in.”
Big data’s impact on global agriculture
The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Stewart Collis talks about making precision farming accessible and affordable for all farmers.
Stewart Collis, CTO and co-founder of AWhere, recently tweeted a link to a video by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, Big Question: Feast or Famine? The video highlights the increasing complexity of feeding our rapidly growing population, and Collis noted its relation to his work at AWhere. I recently caught up with Collis to talk about our current global agriculture situation, the impact of big data on agriculture, and the work his company is doing to help address global agriculture problems.
The challenge, explained Collis, is two-fold: our growing population — expected to increase by another 2.4 billion people by 2050, and the increasing weather variability affecting our growing seasons and farmers’ abilities to produce and scale to accommodate that population. “In the face of weather variability, climate change, and increasing temperatures … farmers no longer know when it’s going to rain,” he said, and then noted: “There’s only 34 growing seasons between now and [2050], so this is a problem we need to solve now.”
Experience Design Links and Fodder: March 13, 2015
10 thoughts for all designers, wise words from Gemma Curtain, and open source surgery.
Each week our design editors curate the most notable, interesting, and important material they come across. Below you’ll find their recent selections. You can get these and more in our weekly design newsletter.
Top ten
“Like” is not a design word. Choose your battles. There is no perfect design. A pragmatic designer shares his memo to self with 10 thoughts that all designers should consider.
Source: Image by woodleywonderworks on Flickr
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Experience Design Links and Fodder: March 6, 2015
Design and business, wise words, and software beyond a single device.
Each week our design editors curate the most notable, interesting, and important material they come across. Below you’ll find their recent selections. You can get these and more in our weekly design newsletter.
It’s business time
Design does not exist in a bubble. Just as business people can benefit from design thinking, designers need to think about business, especially if they plan to launch products. Here’s how business and design come together.
Source: Cropped image by SAM Nasim on Flickr
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Bridging the gap in big data silos
The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: John Carnahan on holistic data analysis, engagement channels, and data science as an art form.
In this Radar Podcast episode, I sit down with John Carnahan, executive vice president of data science at Ticketmaster. At our recent Strata + Hadoop World Conference in San Jose, CA, Carnahan presented a session on using data science and machine learning to improve ticket sales and marketing at Ticketmaster.
I took the opportunity to chat with Carnahan about Ticketmaster’s evolving approach to data analysis, the avenues of user engagement they’re investigating, and how his genetics background is informing his work in the big data space.
When Carnahan took the job at Ticketmaster about three years ago, his strategy focused on small, concrete tasks aimed at solving distinct nagging problems: how do you address large numbers of tickets not sold at an event, how do you engage and market those undersold events to fans, and how do you stem abuse of ticket sales. This strategy has evolved, Carnahan explained, to a more holistic approach aimed at bridging the data silos within the company:
“We still want those concrete things, but we want to build a bed of data science assets that’s built on top of a company that’s been around almost 40 years and has a lot of data assets. How do we build the platform that will leverage those things into the future, beyond just those small niche products that we really want to build. We’re trying to bridge the gap between a lot of those products, too. Rather than think of each of those things as a vertical or a silo that’s trying to accomplish something, it’s how do you use something that you’ve built over here, over there to make that better?”
Experience Design Links and Fodder: February 27, 2015
UX in ops, designing car-free cities, and an MVP checklist.
Each week our design editors curate the most notable, interesting, and important material they come across. Below you’ll find their recent selections. You can get these and more in our weekly design newsletter.
Tweet of the week
Dear #UX designers of earth, We need help in ops. #kthxbai
— Jeff Sussna (@jeffsussna) February 10, 2015
Design to reflect human values
The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Martin Charlier on industrial and interaction design, reflecting societal values, and unified visions.
Designing for the Internet of Things is requiring designers and engineers to expand the boundaries of their traditionally defined roles. In this Radar Podcast episode, O’Reilly’s Mary Treseler sat down with Martin Charlier, an independent design consultant and co-founder at raincloud.eu, to discuss the future of interfaces and the increasing need to merge industrial and interaction design in era of the Internet of Things.
Charlier stressed the importance of embracing the symbiotic nature of interaction design and service design:
“How I got into Internet of Things is interesting. My degree from Ravensbourne was in a very progressive design course that looked at product interaction and service design as one course. For us, it was pretty natural to think of product or services in a very open way. Whether they are connected or not connected didn’t really matter too much because it was basically understanding that technology is there to build almost anything. It’s really about how you design with that mind.
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“When I was working in industrial design, it became really clear for me how important that is. Specifically, I remember one project working on a built-in oven … In this project, we specifically couldn’t change how you would interact with it. The user interface was already defined, and our task was to define how it looked. It became clear to me that I don’t want to exclude any one area, and it feels really unnatural to design a product but only worry about what it looks like and let somebody else worry about how it’s operated, or vice versa. Products in today’s world, especially, need to be thought about from all of these angles. You can’t really design a coffee maker anymore without thinking about the service that it might plug into or the systems that it connects to. You have to think about all of these things at the same time.”
An alternate perspective on data-driven decision making
The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Tricia Wang on "thick data," purpose-driven problem solving, and building the ideal team.
In this week’s Radar Podcast episode, O’Reilly’s Roger Magoulas chatted with Tricia Wang, a global tech ethnographer and co-founder of PL Data, about how qualitative and quantitative data need to work together, reframing “data-driven decision making,” and building the ideal team.
Purpose-driven problem solving
Wang stressed that quantitative and qualitative need to work together. Rather than focusing on data-driven decision making, we need to focus on the best way to identify and solve the problem at hand: the data alone won’t provide the answers:
“It’s been kind of a detriment to our field that there’s this phrase ‘data-driven decision making.’ I think oftentimes people expect that the data’s going to give you answers. Data does not give you answers; it gives you inputs. You still have to figure out how to do the translation work and figure out what the data is trying to explain, right? I think data-driven decision making does not accurately describe what data can do. Really what we should be talking about is purpose-driven problem solving with data. Read more…
Signals from Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose, CA, 2015
From data-driven government to our age of intelligence, here are key insights from Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose, CA, 2015.
Experts from across the big data world came together for Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose, CA, 2015. We’ve gathered insights from the event below.
U.S. chief data scientist
With a special recorded introduction from President Barack Obama, DJ Patil talks about his new role as the U.S. government’s first ever chief data scientist, the nature of the U.S.’s emerging data-driven government, and defines his mission in leading the data-driven initiative:
“Responsibly unleash the power of data for the benefit of the American public and maximize the nation’s return on its investment in data.”