Posts tagged as:

product design

When "woman" means "short"

by Sam Ladner on September 21, 2009 · 2 comments

in Blog

Sociological Images has a great post about product design gone wrong due to stereotypes. Lisa writes that Moto Guzzi motorcycles have created a “lady seat” (I kid you not; that’s what they call it).
Lisa points out, quite rightly, that the only characteristic that makes this a “lady seat” is its size:
So really, it’s just a [...]

2 comments

Categories: Blog

Design thinking’s big problem

by Sam Ladner on March 4, 2009 · 0 comments

in Blog, Popular

So-called “design thinking” is the new It-Girl of management theory. It purports to provide new ways for managers and companies to provide innovative, creative solutions to old problems. But design thinking alone will not solve these problems because a lack of creativity was never the issue.
The real issue is one of power.
Design is attractive to [...]

0 comments

Categories: Blog · Popular

Context, time and technology

by Sam Ladner on February 24, 2009 · 0 comments

in Blog

Sometime ago I wrote about designing for time use. I’d like to expand on that post and discuss how contextual cues frequently are erased by poor technology design.
Poorly designed technology is like Vegas: you don’t know what time of day it is because it treats every minute exactly the same. Humans don’t experience time this [...]

0 comments

Categories: Blog

The digital availability of social information has lead many to think it’s a crisis of privacy. It is not; it is a crisis of identity management. Designers of online profiles should think about privacy as the management of identity, which can be an easily damaged piece of social information. Users who can control access to [...]

5 comments

Categories: goffman · product design · social media

I’m currently forming research questions for an ethnography of Toronto-based technology and design workers. I am working through this question: is Twitter a “place”?
In her 2000 book Virtual Ethnography, Christine Hine argues that there are two analytic strategies to see “cyberspace.” First, one can view it as a “place,” where social norms emerge. Or second, [...]

0 comments

Categories: design · ethnography · product design · qualitative research · social media · technology design · user experience

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