Iunctura Daily — Center for Strategic Relations
Individual behavior can influence your economy
Dubner, Stephen J. Calculating The Irrational In Economics. (New York Times, Arts & Ideas/Cultural Desk, 28 June 2003)
Behavioral economics — which blends psychology, economics and, increasingly, neuroscience to argue that emotion plays a huge role in how people make economic decisions. [News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences, Issue 101]
Other resources on this topic include: The Society for the Advancement of Behaviorial Economics (includes a list of relevant journals), Russell Sage Foundation Summer Institute on Behavioral Economics (includes agenda of last program and participant list), and should I miss anything MIT presents a Behavioral Economics Bibliography.
Relationships strengthen emotions and establish expectations for individuals. I’ve pulled heavily from some of the surface discussions in this community. It is key to remember that people are not cogs in a bigger business machine, they are people and will always be people.
When the individuals working for you, or with you, or even served by your product feel you have grouped, categorized, or labeled them, and they will discount your value to them. While these customer segmentation strategies help you select more profitable customers, they should be conducted in a manner that increases the feeling of individualindividualism.
Behavioral sciences can help you understand people in such a way to help you reach them more effectively. The way they respond to what you have to offer will significantly influence your companies economy (flow of goods and services.) Take emotional states into consideration in your marketing communications, customer interactions, and how you treat your employees– these strategies powerfully build your bottomline.
Fascinating stuff - need to spend time reading this. Really interesting and very valid point above about treating people as individuals.
Onlineblog.com - Guardian Online’s weblog
BusinessWeek Online has a special report on Digital Homes – what we used to call “home automation”.
Great article from Business Week:
What distinguishes today’s digital homes from “smart homes” of the past is the modular nature of the technology. Because so many products are designed with Internet standards in mind, consumers can start out with just a few devices and build up slowly. It helps that PCs such as Dell Computer (DELL ) Corp.’s XPS gaming machine and Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Media Center PC are becoming entertainment-oriented, while consumer electronics are becoming more PC-like — with hard drives, screen-based menus, and built-in Net access. Piece by piece, the technology also is getting more user-friendly. That goes a long way toward explaining the explosive popularity of Wi-Fi networks, now in 11 million U.S. households.
Absolutely. I cannot afford to get everything I want either but the modular nature of the equipment is a superb factor in allowing consumers to go for it. more importantly is the understanding that these items really have to be plug and play. Carrying out some extensive configuration in techie level language just won’t cut the mustard. Remember most people can’t even programme a VCR.
Continue reading ‘Home of the Future, or is that today?’
Matt.Blogs.It
Deploying Google Viewer. Greg reports that some of his search results contain a “View results as slide show” link, presumably using Google viewer. Have you seen this?… [Google Weblog]
The interface has an interesting CD player like styling to it. But in IE6 I got a script error that prevented it from doing anything more than look interesting. Bummer.
Google Viewer worked fine for me (also in IE 6) - I searched on Broadband and Me (vain I know) and got a great taster. I actually thought ‘Wow!, that’s a great idea!’…(that’s 3 times this week…)
Via elearningpost
AIGA: DUX2003 Conference Sessions
The DUX 2003 program featured accepted submissions of real-world design practices, research, and cases from around the globe, creatively combined in sessions moderated by leading design practitioners and theorists. Here are a diverse collection of stories about the experience of designing for user experiences.
The Aiga site has some excellent case studies, which I am not even going to begin to blog. Another action to me, read them! (Agggh! They’re PDFs!)
This one particularly caught my eye: Silvia Gabrielli & Jan-Christoph Zoels, Design Strategy as a Way of Creating Imaginable Futures
The Register tells about Dell’s involvement with a great cause to help develop birght children in the US.
…which focuses on “realizing the potential of bright children who learn differently through individualized learning.”
“The Dell-Winston Solar Car Challenge is an example of how companies can do their part to provide students with 21st century skills that are now required in the 21st century workforce,” said John Bailey, director of technology, U.S. Department of Education, in a statement.
It then goes onto criticise Dell for its own lack of R&D. While I am not always a great fan of American sentimentality, I also think the cynical English attitude is over done.
Well done to Dell. When I go to upgrade PC, they are top of the list.
BBC NEWS | UK | Boost for off-shore wind power
Excellent to this this type of investment in renewal energy sources. Its a shame and I suppose ironic that an evironmentally friendly form of energy could have an adverse impact on the environment.
Can Machines Reproduce?
what would be the use of such self-replicating machines?
Nanometer-scale robots running the JohnnyVon program might be “the key to low-cost manufacturing,” environmental cleanup, or any application requiring large quantities of robotic helping hands, Turney told NewsFactor. “Self-replication can make such large quantities economically feasible,” he added.
Self-replication “is essential to nano-technology,” Ben Gurion University computer science professor Moshe Sipper agreed. “We want to build one tiny machine that will go forth and replicate — but not multiply ad infinitum.”
Nano-technology feels like science fiction made fact. There seem to be astonishing possibilities from all of this, not least the idea of machines self-replicating. It provokes two responses from me - one of fascination and the desire to understand those possibilities and one of apprehension, not over hte technology per se but of what humans will build the technology for…
f r e e g o r i f e r o | weblog
Tools for Tales.
Personas and scenarios can be very powerful design tools, both internally (within a team) and externally (with a client).
The simple reason being, in my humble opinion, that we can all easily relate to a well-written narrative: scenarios allow anyone in product development to use a shared vocabulary, the one we learned hearing our mother’s bedside tales, reading comics and books, watching movies.
Great post from Fabio Sergio on use of narrative in design. I’ve attended a seminar where David Snowden went through this from his perspective but I haven’t seen anything else in this area. We currently work from abstracts (well actually the Product Manager and I will susually huddle in a corner and put somethign on a white board) which usually are as simple as flow diagrams or when we want detail we produce UML but this is more at the translating for techies level than actually communicating real world requirements.
Must take time to go through this article and look at all the links.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Pupils learn in wi-fi wood
Wi-fi wood
For the project, a wireless network has been set up in a wood in Sussex on the south coast of England.
Back at base they can compare notes
Schoolchildren with PDAs and walkie talkies are encouraged to explore the wood, reporting back about wildlife or plants they see along the way.
In the latest trial in late June, pupils from the Varndean school in Brighton spend three days exploring the worlds in pairs.
“When they found something, they described it to someone back at the den, which means they had to verbally describe very carefully what they found,” explained superviser Rowanne Fleck.
“They then got a little message on their screens which gave them a little more information and acted as a record of what they found in the wood,” she told the BBC programme, Go Digital.
The feedback from the children has been overwhelming positive, with the students embracing this new way of learning about the environment.
“It is a brilliant way of linking technology with the ecology,” said technology analyst Bill Thompson.
“It gets away from the idea that using technology in education is about sitting students in front of a computer and getting them typing on keyboards.”
This is superb. I want to go and play! Perhaps they could add a Wifi connected camera? I wonder if there is a webcam?
No there isn’t! But there are some good pics here, which is the Ambient Wood website at Sussex University COGS department.
They are undertaking the following project called Equator
The central goal of the Equator IRC is to promote the integration of the physical with the digital. In particular we are concerned with uncovering and supporting the variety of possible relationships between physical and digital worlds. In doing this our objective is to improve the quality of everyday life by building and adapting technologies for a range of user groups and application domains.
Perhaps I should do this sort of stuff for a living?
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