Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Putting People First
Language issues. An Interview with Brigitte Jordan
Last September, social anthropologist Nora Schenkel had the opportunity to interview Brigitte Jordan, described by Cat Macaulay as one of the “godmothers” of design...
From Putting People First
John Maeda on our life in 2020
In 2020 we might just regain some of the humanity that was lost in 2010, argues John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design. “The software industry...
From Putting People First
The user research behind HTC One’s Sense 5 interface
Drew Bamford, Director of User Experience at HTC, explains Sense 5.0 and why the company’s Android UX needed redefining. “HTC radically overhauled the look and...
From Putting People First
The Google Glass feature no one is talking about
The Google Glass feature that (almost) no one is talking about is the experience – not of the user, but of everyone other than the user, writes Mark Hurst in a...
From Putting People First
In a world of connected devices, focus on what they do
Stacey Higginbotham reports on a the GigaOM Internet of things meetup in San Francisco a few days ago: “All of the participants agreed that the connected device...
From Putting People First
How teachers are using technology at home and in their classrooms
A survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project of teachers who instruct American middle and secondary school students finds that digital technologies have...
From Putting People First
Future Imperfect: Evgeny Morozov vs. Steven Johnson
A couple of weeks ago Evgeny Morozov and Steven Johnson had a very public spat (writers’ favorite kind), prompted by Evgeny’s review of Johnson’s latest book in...
From Putting People First
On legitimacy, place and the anthropology of the Internet
In this thoughtful piece for Ethnography Matters, Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) discusses the ways in which the internet has transformed the relationship between...
From Putting People First
Computer interfaces: tech’s next great frontier
Since the invention of personal computing three decades ago, how we interact with computers has remained about the same: monitor, keyboard, mouse. Monitors have...
From Putting People First
How ‘Minority Report’ trapped us in a world of bad interfaces
“There are better ways to handle spatial ideas,” writes commercial artist Christian Brown, “ways which are more in line with the way our bodies are built. Human...
From Putting People First
The future of lying
Someone told Intel’s futurist Brian David Johnson that technology could do away with all lying in the future. He was horrified by the idea and wrote this: The Future...
From Putting People First
The problem with our data obsession
To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov Public Affairs Book, 2013 432 pages [Amazon] Abstract In the very near future...
From Putting People First
Isobel Demangeat on the UX of augmented reality
A bit of an older talk, but still quite interesting: Isobel Demangeat, UX researcher at Qualcomm Corporate R&D Cambridge (UK), spoke at MEX in December 2011 on...
From Putting People First
Call for Papers for EPIC 2013 London
Since its inception, the EPIC conference has brought together a dynamic community of practitioners and scholars concerned with how ethnographic thinking and methods...
From Putting People First
Designing empathy into an open Internet of Things
The mobile technology of tomorrow may be real-time, always on and algorithm driven in its characteristics, writes designer Jessi Baker, but there is a real opportunity...
From Putting People First
Cultivating empathic design in an analytical world
There is an empathy gap in technology development, argues April Demosky on the FT’s Tech Blog. “In the analytic, data-driven world of Silicon Valley, emotions often...
From Putting People First
The curious cult of the connected thermostat
Nick Hunn, CTO at Onzo, a “smarter than normal” Smart Energy start-up, criticizes the service model of the Nest thermostat: “A basic programmable thermostat in...
From Putting People First
Lean and user experience, again
When anthropologist Natalie Hanson was asked last year to contribute to a new book called The Handbook of Business Anthropology, edited by Rita Denny and Patty...
From Putting People First
How will big data change design research?
Will design researchers (and our models and explanations) be replaced by data tables and “experience actuaries” that tell us what to build, for whom, and what it...
From Putting People First