Last week I attended the Learning And Technology World Forum – LATWF, a major world Education Ministers conference hosted by the UK government in London. Throughout the week I was part of the Learner’s Voice team composed of 7 students from all over the world. Our duty in this forum was to attend conferences and workshops, maintain a blog about the event and, on the last day, present a plenary in front of 400 delegates including 60+ Ministers of Education.

The most important part of the forum was the closed conference that brought together 60+ Ministers of Education representing countries from all around the world. This conference was about the next steps that countries need to take in order to include technology in their education systems. This was a disappointing session, as we witnessed ministers playing a game of ‘Show and Tell’ instead of trying to figure out answers to their problems. We have heard a lot of aims and ambitions and everybody was talking about ‘what we should do’, but no strategies or promises have been made.

The main issues on everyone’s agenda was changing the curriculum in order to fit the student’s needs and training teachers in order to understand technology better and adapt easier to the student’s needs. My question here was: have anyone asked the students what their needs are?

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Michael Grossman of the User Experience Arts blog recounts the presentation by Alex Lee, CEO of OXO at this year’s GEL Conference. (A personal favourite of mine from the States.) In order for a idea to become commercialised at OXO, it must be intuitive to use, obvious in function, provoke thought and inspire re-use. OXO also discounts the value of verbatim customer feedback. We’ve also found that people are often bad at articulating needs and frequently do things they would never tell you. I can only assume the insight to develop the Angled Measuring Cup came from watching people bend over to get level with traditional measuring cups.

When we begin our workshops on user-centred design, we have participants peel an apple with several different peelers (including an OXO peeler). The participants, regardless of design experience, are quickly able to list all the positive and negative attributes of each peeler, and through a few minutes of experience, have done some great design thinking around creating the perfect peeler.

What’s wrong with a little deception in design if it is for the better? This Good Experience post is worth the read just for the nursing home that installed a fake bus stop outside their Alzheimer ward to stop patients from wandering away. Brilliant.

The Adaptive Path blog recently highlighted an Adobe employee that was using the comic book format to communicate research findings. Not only is the presentation more compelling than your standard presentation or report; comics place characters (people) into the context of a story. The dialogue is their own (user-centred) and communicates emotion (empathy). This method certainly isn’t for everyone, but if you are intrigued, read an interview about the work that inspired her.

Shaul Schwarz/Reportage, for The New York Times

In an article nothing short of fascinating, The New York Times follows Nokia’s user anthropologist Jan Chipcase on his design research visits to the developing world. The mobile phone, one of many objects of convenience to most of us, is transformed within a new context.

Something that’s mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal — land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars — can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information. A “just in time” moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town.

Simple user insights lead directly to new design features.

Influenced by Chipchase’s study on the practice of sharing cellphones inside of families or neighborhoods, Nokia has started producing phones with multiple address books for as many as seven users per phone.

However, more than just an expose on user-centred design in practice, the article explores issues of identity, the role of technology in the lives of others and design for self-actualisation.

Of additional interest is Future Perfect, the personal blog of Jan Chipcase and a collection of “thoughtless acts” images and descriptions.

Pushing technologies on society without thinking through their consequences is at least naive, at worst dangerous, though typically it, and IMHO the people that do it are just boring. Future perfect is a pause for reflection in our planet’s seemingly headlong rush to churn out more, faster, smaller and cheaper. Somewhere along the way we get to shape what the future looks like.

I don’t believe this is the first time we have referenced the excellent blog, Designing Better Libraries. In this article (PDF, 1.13MB), Steven J. Bell pulls together a nice primer on the design thinking process and explores how it can be applied to designing better libraries. How do libraries help users accomplish their work? How do we understand the problem before jumping to solutions? Design thinking helps librarians focus on facilitating research and creating passionate users instead of concentrating on the commodity of information.

At the Carnegie Public Library, “librarians and library staff devote more of their time to more high-value, high-reward efforts. Changed perceptions have attracted new customers who would have otherwise avoided the library. Existing customers find it easier to accomplish their goals and, along the way, discover new things that they might have otherwise missed.”

Additional reading and watching:

MAYA Design: Carnegie Public Library
TED Talk: Joshua Prince-Ramus: Designing the Seattle Central Library

via Aesthetics of Life, Tastes Fine

The user-centred approach Sohrab Vossoughi of Ziba speaks about in this post could apply to all health care systems. The fact remains that a healthy workforce is a more profitable one. Vossoughi dubs the new era the Age of Empowerment and groups health care experience innovation into three groups: self-care, service innovation and Internet-enabled.

User-centric experience innovations need not be relegated to businesses using design to establish a loyal bond with their customers. Applying time-tested design methods to a national institution like health care can help ensure that our citizens not only have affordable care, but that the quality of the care actually empowers them to live the lives they desire.

We’ve posted on a number of occasions regarding design thinking in education. I see via the d.school news blog that they have developed a new course on the use of design thinking for K-12 education. Bravo. The last time I checked we all have two hemispheres in our brains and appreciate the “whole-brain” approach to education.

Photo credit: Amy Tiemann and The Laptop Club

Not only are they paper-thin, but infinitely customisable by the user and recyclable to boot. You can even make one yourself. Alright, they may not be commercially available (yet) but clearly are some of the most innovative computers around.

Amy Tiemann, creator of MojoMom.com and c|net contributor blogged about The Laptop Club, where 7-9 year-olds at a local school were creating paper laptops for play. From a research perspective, this is serious stuff and reminiscent of one of my favourite research exercises, Draw The Experience. Looking for insights, particularly from young children? Crack open a box of Crayola crayons and have them draw what they are thinking. We recently used this approach with children travelling through Ireland West Airport to understand what they liked, disliked and wished for in the perfect airport.

Be sure to check out this interview with Amy Tiemann, which includes a gallery of the laptop designs.

Not getting your daily fill of user-centred insights? TMTBOX Media have pulled together a list of their Top 100 User-Centred Blogs. Though very heavy on the interface side of user-centred, you may find a few feeds to add to your own list of favourites.