The research [link in Dutch] was conducted by Ipsos I&O on a sample of 2000 people between 16 and 24 year old.

This routine is likely to remain permanent as they become older, explain Authority staff Edmund Lauf and Karin Schut in an interview with Takken. 

They highlight that this age group “no longer encounters or uses the valuable and quality information that news brands have to offer, while unchecked, unedited posts are allowed to circulate freely on social media”, due to the use of algorithms, and explain how this threatens the “vitality of Dutch democracy”. 

Although youngsters knows the basic facts, they have little access to context or analysis, the researchers say, not helped by the fact that paper newspapers are no longer lying around in Dutch homes.

Moreover, media organisations are less present on social media, even though they should – with content tailored to this age group. 

The problem, the researchers argue, is that these media, whom youngsters trust but rarely encounter, are not incentivised to provide news on social media, as the earnings don’t go to the news providers but only to the social media owners. 

In particular they propose that “the [Dutch] government should financially incentivize news companies, and force the big tech companies to pay for the news they use,” similar to the current “must-carry” legislation that obliges cable companies to re-broadcast public TV and radio broadcasts.

“Tighter regulation is very important, especially at the European level. The EU is now looking mainly at monopoly formation and other market distortions of Big Tech, while information provision is also important. By the way, we did not investigate X because it appeared to play a minimal role in young people’s news consumption.”

See also this Google translated article by public news provider NOS.

A riveting story of what it means to be human in a world changed by artificial intelligence, revealing the perils and inequities of our growing reliance on automated decision-making

On the surface, a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, an Indian doctor, and a Chinese activist in exile have nothing in common. But they are in fact linked by a profound common experience—unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence. In Code Dependent, Murgia shows how automated systems are reshaping our lives all over the world, from technology that marks children as future criminals, to an app that is helping to give diagnoses to a remote tribal community.

AI has already infiltrated our day-to-day, through language-generating chatbots like ChatGPT and social media. But it’s also affecting us in more insidious ways. It touches everything from our interpersonal relationships, to our kids’ education, work, finances, public services, and even our human rights.

By highlighting the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from the cozy enclave of Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often-exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Murgia exposes how AI can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency, and shatter our illusion of free will.

The ways in which algorithms and their effects are governed over the coming years will profoundly impact us all. Yet we can’t agree on a common path forward. We cannot decide what preferences and morals we want to encode in these entities—or what controls we may want to impose on them. And thus, we are collectively relinquishing our moral authority to machines.

In Code Dependent, Murgia not only sheds light on this chilling phenomenon, but also charts a path of resistance. AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small, and Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity.

Madhumita Murgia is an award-winning Indian-British journalist and commentator, who writes about the impact of technology and science on society. She is currently AI Editor at the Financial Times in London, where she leads global coverage of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. She has spent the past decade travelling the world from Silicon Valley to Seoul, writing about the people, start-ups and corporations shaping cutting edge technologies, for publications including WIRED, the Washington Post, Newsweek and the Telegraph. She appears frequently on national radio and TV in the UK, including the BBC’s flagship Today program and Sky News. Her TEDx Talk, about her personal data being sold by data brokers has been viewed by nearly 200,000 people online. Madhu lives in London, but her heart remains in her hometown, Mumbai

More:

• Author interviews (text): Times of India (31 March), Esquire (18 June), Tech Policy (18 June)
• Author interviews (video): Oxford Internet Institute (8 March) Pan MacMillan (19 March), Times of India (12 June), Good Morning America/ABC (18 June)
• Book presentations (audio and video): LSE (24 March), Strand Book Store / C-Span (17 July)
• Book reviews: The Guardian (23 March), The Hindu (5 April), LSE (9 May), Boston Globe (13 June), NRC (in Dutch, 5 September)

Launched this month for SmartThings app users on Galaxy smartphones in the US, the tool leverages Samsung’s connected living platform and smart home devices to provide comprehensive support for both caregivers and those they’re looking out for.

Family Care helps monitor comings and goings, sending alerts when someone arrives at or leaves a specific location, helping to ensure their safety. It also offers activity notifications and medication reminders. Using AI, the service determines a person’s regular daily routine and will send a notification if it detects anything unusual. It also keeps tabs on someone’s first activity of the day. Additionally, it allows caregivers to set up automations for energy savings and improved indoor air quality.

While some family members in need of care might — rightly! — balk at their every move being watched, the tools can provide a valuable layer of security and reassurance. The key is to balance monitoring with respect for privacy, ensuring that the technology enhances, rather than infringes upon, the dignity and autonomy of those being cared for.

Their analysis of a million ChatGPT interaction logs, Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons, reveals that the second most popular use of AI is sexual role-playing. 

We’re seeing a giant, real-world experiment unfold, uncertain what impact these AI companions will have either on us individually or on society as a whole. […] AI wields the collective charm of all human history and culture with infinite seductive mimicry. These systems are simultaneously superior and submissive, with a new form of allure that may make consent to these interactions illusory. In the face of this power imbalance, can we meaningfully consent to engaging in an AI relationship, especially when for many the alternative is nothing at all? 

The allure of AI lies in its ability to identify our desires and serve them up to us whenever and however we wish. AI has no preferences or personality of its own, instead reflecting whatever users believe it to be—a phenomenon known by researchers as “sycophancy.” Our research has shown that those who perceive or desire an AI to have caring motives will use language that elicits precisely this behavior. This creates an echo chamber of affection that threatens to be extremely addictive. 

They are concerned:

Repeated interactions with sycophantic companions may ultimately atrophy the part of us capable of engaging fully with other humans who have real desires and dreams of their own, leading to what we might call “digital attachment disorder.”

And argue that this requires policy interventions and regulatory approaches.

Robert Mahari is a joint JD-PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School. His work focuses on computational law—using advanced computational techniques to analyze, improve, and extend the study and practice of law. 

Pat Pataranutaporn is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. His work focuses on cyborg psychology and the art and science of human-AI interaction.

Download

Ted O’Callahan of Yale SOM interviewed her.

When you read about organizations and organizational dynamics in a textbook, it all sounds so rational and orderly. But as everyone who has worked in an organization knows, there are subcultures, politics, and hierarchies. Navigating all that isn’t orderly or completely rational.

I think ethnography is a really important way to keep our theories about organizations grounded in reality. It does that by capturing the full richness and complexity of organizational life.

Love and Technology: An Ethnography of Dating App Users in Berlin explores how dating apps fit into Berlin’s unique dating culture and brand of intimacy and form a tangible nucleus around which users navigate dating rituals, romantic biographies, and digitally mediated intimacies within city space.

Drawing on the field of digital anthropology, this book takes the form of an immersive ethnography, resulting from 13 months of fieldwork with young dating app users, across Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid, in Berlin. It argues that dating apps offer, or impose, depending on their context of use, a series of affordances. These affordances, and the technological devices they rely upon, exist through the relation between users and their environment, both in terms of physical spaces and cultural frameworks. The book posits that dating apps are woven into spatial practices and self-narrativisation, constituting imagined communities for their users, as well as a canvas, alongside the city of Berlin, against which to characterise romantic experiences.

Scholars interested in digital anthropology, ethnography, dating, and regional Berlin will find that Love and Technology offers a vibrant springboard for thinking through both theoretical and methodological concerns.

Fabian Broeker is a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in the Department of Media and Communications. His research interests encompass digital anthropology, intimacy, and new media.

> Review by Jiangyi Hong on the LSE Review of Books blog

Marta Granda Nistal, Associate at ARUP, the global engineering firm, argues that human-centred design (HCD) has a useful role to play this context. Climate change, she says, provides countless contexts where behaviour change will need to be central to the solution, and where designs need to address a complex range of human needs, behaviours and preferences.

A big part of HCD’s strength is in what it reveals at the individual and community level, enabling the development of new solutions from previously underserved needs. Given that achieving net zero goals inherently requires major changes in behaviour at the level of whole populations, understanding barriers of adoption and what people really care for is undeniably part of the challenge.  

Rather than imposing a new technology, service or piece of infrastructure on people, human-centred design first tries to understand them and their needs through in-depth primary research and design solutions based on real evidence. 

On the whole, the User Interviews report is much more detailed, insightful, and realistic in its balanced assessments, although some of the insights are not jumping at you in the summary. 

Maze: The Future of User Research (March 2024)

Between December 20, 2023 and January 16, 2024, Maze surveyed over 1,200 product professionals using their own Maze platform [which obviously creates a selection bias] to “uncover how product teams conduct research to inform decision-making and build successful products”. 

Their key insights from the report [more of a trend report than a research report]:

• The demand for user research is growing. 62% of respondents say the demand for user research has increased in the past 12 months.
• Research democratization empowers stronger decision-making: organizations are scaling research by empowering different teams to engage in research
• New technology allows product teams to significantly scale research

Survey respondents were located in multiple regions around the world, including 40% in Europe, 32% in North America, 9% in Asia, and 8% in Latin America. 

User Interviews – The State of User Research (June 2024)

Between April 4 to April 17, 2024, User Interviews collected 759 qualified responses via social media, their weekly newsletter (Fresh Views), and an in-product slideout; they also posted the survey in research-related groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Slack, and on their professional networks.

There are many takeaways in the report, and we at Experientia have selected some that we think are most telling:

• Research specialists are becoming rarer: a fifth (22%) of the people surveyed said that their company laid off dedicated researchers in the last 12 months. 
• Researchers are uncertain about the future: when asked how they’re feeling about job opportunities and room for growth within User Research, most dedicated Researchers and ReOps specialists responded pessimistically. 
• 56% of researchers use AI to support their work

The report has also a lot of detail on what roles researchers have in the organisation, and what department they fit into.

It brought up more questions than answers.

They all offer similar services (rapid discovery and analysis of your interviews, as long as you upload your data “somewhere”).

Marvin, Lookback, Outset, and Voicepanel are based in California (although location is always hidden somewhere in their privacy policies, at best). AddMaple and Reveal do not disclose their location, yet we found out that AddMaple is actually based in the UK and Reveal in Virginia, at least according to the phone number they listed on LinkedIn).

Most do not disclose what AI systems they use to provide their services. And if they do, they use OpenAI. 

Many have privacy policies that are about the data they collect about your company, not about the data provided by your company. Some claim to be GDPR compliant. Most don’t bother. 

Most do not disclose what service providers they share your data with. If they do, there are many (up to 30).

Some privacy policies are extremely short (AddMaple and Voicepanel), or very wordy and “legalese” but not providing much insight on what actually happens to your clients’ data.

None explicitly position themselves as privacy-first.

In short, it is more than obvious that serious UX research agencies can’t use them, as doing so would immediately imply that you are in breach of NDA’s and client confidentiality contracts. 

|s there some serious analysis of AI-based service platforms targeted at hosting and analysing UX research? 

UX matters: the critical role of UX in responsible AI
Authors: Vera Liao (Microsoft Research), Mihaela Vorvoreanu (Microsoft), Hari Subramonyam (Stanford University), Lauren Wilcox (eBay and Georgia Institute of Technology)
To mitigate harms of AI to people—individuals, communities, and society—RAI uses a set of principles and best practices to guide the development and deployment of AI systems: fairness and nondiscrimination, transparency and explainability, accountability, privacy, safety and security, human control, professional responsibility, and promotion of human values. To understand and positively augment this interplay requires the combined expertise of people who specialize in technology and people who specialize in understanding people, such as those working in UX.

Designing for data sensemaking practices: a complex challenge
Authors: Arma?an Karahano?lu (Twente University), Aykut Co?kun (Koç University)
While the initial wave of health trackers focused on quantifying bodily metrics, the tide is turning toward more qualitative, subjective, and social-oriented tracking practices that capture lived experiences. But are we truly harnessing the power of this data or merely drowning in an ocean of numbers? This article explores this question from the data sensemaking perspective.

Inclusive computational thinking in public schools: a case study from Lisbon
Authors: Ana Cristina Pires, Filipa Rocha, Tiago Guerreiro, Hugo Nicolau (Lisbon University)
Integrating inclusive computational thinking (CT) education into children’s school curricula is essential for developing problem-solving, logical reasoning, and creativity skills. Implementing inclusive, multisensory robotic environments in schools can enhance learning, engagement, and collaboration between children with diverse abilities, promoting educational equity and reducing the risk of social exclusion.

Unmasking AI: informing authenticity decisions by labeling AI-generated content
Authors: Olivia Burrus (Adobe), Amanda Curtis (Adobe and Oxford University), Laura Herman (Adobe and Oxford University)
Providing transparency means presenting viewers with clear and understandable information about how content was created, and disclosing the role of AI in that process, if any. Transparency is essential for fostering viewer trust and understanding, as well as for ensuring accountability and support for responsible AI development and deployment.

Large Language Objects: the design of physical AI and generative experiences
Marcelo Coelho (MIT and Formlabs), Jean-Baptiste Labrune (MIT)
Large language objects (LLOs) are physical interfaces that extend the capabilities of large language models into the physical world. Due to their generative nature, LLOs present more fluid and adaptable functionalities; their behavior can be created and tailored for individual people and use cases; and interactions can progressively develop from simple to complex, better supporting both beginners and advanced users.

(Weber Shandwick is a global communications and PR agency.)

The socially conscious individual has given way to a “me over we” consumer who favors brands that deliver personal value over societal value, according to new research from the Weber Shandwick Collective (TWSC).

The report, “What We Value: The Primacy of Personal,” used quantitative and qualitative research to understand what people around the world want from brands, products, and companies. Three out of four respondents say what they value most has changed in the past five years, with the shock and aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic being the No. 1 reason for the shift. After practical considerations, such as utility and value for their money, consumers ranked “personal emotional value” as two times more important to them than societal or social value.

The research, which TWSC shared exclusively with Modern CEO, suggests a retreat from the conscious consumerism movement, in which social, ethical, and environmental considerations guide buying decisions. 

Abstract

How society can shape individual actions in times of uncertainty

When we make decisions, our thinking is informed by societal norms, “guardrails” that guide our decisions, like the laws and rules that govern us. But what are good guardrails in today’s world of overwhelming information flows and increasingly powerful technologies, such as artificial intelligence? Based on the latest insights from the cognitive sciences, economics, and public policy, Guardrails offers a novel approach to shaping decisions by embracing human agency in its social context.

In this visionary book, Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger show how the quick embrace of technological solutions can lead to results we don’t always want, and they explain how society itself can provide guardrails more suited to the digital age, ones that empower individual choice while accounting for the social good, encourage flexibility in the face of changing circumstances, and ultimately help us to make better decisions as we tackle the most daunting problems of our times, such as global injustice and climate change.

Whether we change jobs, buy a house, or quit smoking, thousands of decisions large and small shape our daily lives. Decisions drive our economies, seal the fate of democracies, create war or peace, and affect the well-being of our planet. Guardrails challenges the notion that technology should step in where our own decision making fails, laying out a surprisingly human-centered set of principles that can create new spaces for better decisions and a more equitable and prosperous society.

Authors

Urs Gasser is professor of public policy, governance, and innovative technology and dean of the School of Social Sciences and Technology at the Technical University of Munich. His books include (with John Palfrey) Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford. His books include Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton).

Human-centered research and design consultancies are increasingly asked by clients to do their work much faster, using AI tools (e.g. these ones) as shortcuts.

Does this approach make sense at all? Let’s zoom in on UX research.

Survey of UX researchers shows efficiency gains and low trust

The US-based company User Interviews conducted in August 2023 an online survey of 1,093 UX researchers (mainly of the US we presume, although this is not clarified) on how they use AI in their work. The survey explored which AI tools researchers are using, what aspects of the research process they are automating, as well ethical concerns, benefits and shortcomings.

77.1% of the researchers queried are using AI in at least some of their work, but nearly all of it is for process activities: scheduling, screening, recruiting, transcriptions, translations, editorial support.

Efficiency gains (and time savings) are considerable. The fact that they use AI and told their clients so, also improved – somewhat bizarrely – their professional credibility.

But few UX researchers use AI for insight gathering and analysis itself, and were struck, when trying, by “the low-quality, inaccurate, surface-level, or incomplete outputs”. Even qualitative coding provided poor results, the survey showed.

“Many people also said that AI needs so much human review (described by one respondent as “hand holding”) to catch errors that its limitations undermine any efficiency gains.”

Ethical concerns such as biased outputs and negative socioeconomic outcomes (e.g. discrimination and unemployment) were also a recurring theme in the responses.

In general the researchers in the User Interviews survey audience seemed to have very low trust in AI, and many wished AI solution providers were more transparent about their data protection policies (or lack thereof).

What do industry experts say?

First a caveat: there are a lot of marketing pieces and practical guidance articles. They explain what AI-powered tools might or could do for your company, and usually end with some considerations and concerns to take into account. We will not dwell on them, as they are easy to find and not so insightful.

In a well written and in-depth piece of April 2023, UX strategist Greg Nudelman analyses the value of AI for UX research and sees four dimensions in how UX techniques will be affected by AI: (1) those that will likely see full automation, (2) those that will be radically augmented, and (3) those that will become increasingly valuable. He also devotes an entire section to “AI bullsh*t”.

He argues that there are certain UX skills that AI will have a hard time understanding and simulating and that these will actually increase in value, such as core skills (aka dealing with humans); workshop facilitation; formative Research, field studies, ethnography, and direct observation; vision prototyping; and augmenting the executive strategy.

The bullshit section zeroes in on “AI applications to UX research that are far-fetched, oversold, and over-complicated, or just fail to grasp the rudimentary principles of UX Design” such as AI strategic analysis tools that claim to replace humans in coming up with novel ideas and business use cases, AI heuristics analysis replacing user research and design, AI acting as users for the purposes of usability research, and tools that claim to build your Persona using AI.

Feifei Liu and Kate Moran of the Nielsen Norman Group focus on issues and limitations when using AI-powered tools for UX research, stressing the importance of a skeptical approach in their July 2023 article. In particular, they presented the results of their evaluation of four new AI-powered UX-research tools: three AI insight generators that summarize user-research sessions based solely on the transcripts of those sessions, and suffer from the fact that they cannot take in context, and one collaborator tool, which acts like an insight generators, except that it can accept some contextual information from the researcher, but still has similar limitations according to Liu and Moran.

The limitations were many, including the fact that these tools can’t process visual input, often gave extremely vague summaries and recommendations, have a very limited understanding of context, lack of citation and validation, unstable performance and usability issues, and bias.

If you like something more polemic, consider this savory and very recent UX Collective piece by Pavel Samsonov entitled No, AI user research is not “better than nothing”—it’s much worse (of which we copied the image, above), who argues that algorithm-driven design will lose companies a lot of money.

A small but growing number of people in many countries consistently avoid the news. They feel they do not have time for it, believe it is not worth the effort, find it irrelevant or emotionally draining, or do not trust the media, among other reasons. Why and how do people circumvent news? Which groups are more and less reluctant to follow the news? In what ways is news avoidance a problem—for individuals, for the news industry, for society—and how can it be addressed?

This groundbreaking book explains why and how so many people consume little or no news despite unprecedented abundance and ease of access. Drawing on interviews in Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as extensive survey data, Avoiding the News examines how people who tune out traditional media get information and explores their “folk theories” about how news organizations work. The authors argue that news avoidance is about not only content but also identity, ideologies, and infrastructures: who people are, what they believe, and how news does or does not fit into their everyday lives. Because news avoidance is most common among disadvantaged groups, it threatens to exacerbate existing inequalities by tilting mainstream journalism even further toward privileged audiences. Ultimately, this book shows, persuading news-averse audiences of the value of journalism is not simply a matter of adjusting coverage but requires a deeper, more empathetic understanding of people’s relationships with news across social, political, and technological boundaries.

Benjamin Toff is assistant professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota.

Ruth Palmer is associate professor of communication and digital media at IE University in Madrid and Segovia, Spain.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and professor of political communication at the University of Oxford.

Some have even claimed that the premise on which human-centered research and design is based is all but dead. The double diamond can be retired, some argue. Others write that the entire human-centered approach can be replaced by AI-generated tools or by double jeopardy  “System 1” approaches. 

While these tools – old and new – have been very successful, they increasingly run into limits, particularly with the current situation of economic and political volatility. 

Companies and organizations that want to protect themselves feel increasingly the need to explore developments beyond the short time horizon that their existing methods offer. Some have come to us. 

Human-centered design, as offered by strategic agencies like Experientia, helps companies and organizations understand what customer behavior changes may be on the cup of emerging – already present but still marginal – and guides them in foreseeing and preparing alternative approaches taking these potential changes into account. 

Opportunities with limits

Automobile OEMs have invested billions in heavy vehicles like SUVs and pickup trucks, based on surveys that this is “what our customers want”. It has been a very profitable strategy. Now there is a public and legal backlash, based on road accidents, pollution data, and impacts on parking and traffic in cities, and we ended up – unexpectedly according to some commentators – with a Paris referendum that other cities now consider copying.

Also supermarkets (and the large scale retail distribution system they are part of) have followed a similar approach. They invested aggressively in cheap food, often with distant and poorly monitored supply chains, again with lots of positive economic impact (more profits for them, more savings for their customers). This model is now increasingly under pressure from inflation, globalization/ relocalisation, climate change, consumer demand and farmer protests. Consumers are clamoring for more sustainable alternatives and can’t find them, except in local shops or street markets which have often been competed out of existence.

Tech providers have been algorithmically milking people’s data now for years – with occasional “apologies” – and nearly the entire tech ecosystem is now based on data-based advertising models. Their “users” are now realizing the effects these “feeds” have on their democracies or on their children. In Italy (link) 70% of children face cyberbullying, 37% to a high degree. Nine out of ten 18 to 24 y.o. Italian girls that use Instagram and TikTok consider themselves dissatisfied with their bodies, and 70% of those go so far as considering surgery.

Even in politics we have seen an increasing use of opinion poll based approaches where the majority of people often define legislation for all. After all, this is what our citizens “want”. Then some minorities rebel (like recently the farmers) and their actions are described in the media as a big surprise, and sometimes dogmatically condemned.

Beyond the wants and the needs 

Yet, all the above developments are of course not surprising at all. 

They were and are foreseeable if these companies had considered more in-depth consumer research, based on longer interactions with a limited group of carefully chosen people, that doesn’t just look at what consumers “want”, but within what mental, cultural and social frames they make such choices. Such research often also considers non-consumers, e.g. by exploring how consumer choices impact those who don’t make those choices, thus opening opportunities to understand what might need to be done to convert non-consumers into consumers. 

Based on such insights, companies and organizations can create alternative scenarios, and potentially start exploring product lines or service options that cater to these alternatives.

In a context of economic and geopolitical flux and volatility, a more in-depth human-centered design approach is now more necessary than ever, as it helps forward-looking companies to anticipate and be prepared for rapidly changing futures beyond the next six months.

From trendy restaurants to city grids, to TikTok and Netflix feeds the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences and choices. The algorithm is present in the familiar neon signs and exposed brick of Internet cafes, be it in Nairobi or Portland, and the skeletal, modern furniture of Airbnbs in cities big and small. Over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined decisions has taken over, almost unnoticed—informing the songs we listen to, the friends with whom we stay in touch—as we’ve grown increasingly accustomed to our insipid new normal.

This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called “Filterworld.” Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit. But to have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, while convenient, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question.

In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions arise: What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet?

To the last question, Filterworld argues yes—but to escape Filterworld, and even transcend it, we must first understand it.

Reviews: New Scientist (Alex Wilkins), NPR (Clare Lombardo), NPR/Fresh Air (Tonya Mosley), The Atlantic (Megan Garber), The Globe and Mail (Josh Greenblatt), The New York Times (Alexandra Jacobs), The Washington Post (Rachelle Hampton), Undark (Elizabeth Svoboda), WNYC (interview by Micah Loewinger)

Despite technical and non-technical countermeasures, humans continue to be tricked by phishing emails. How users make email response decisions is a missing piece in the puzzle to identifying why people still fall for phishing emails.
We conducted an empirical study using a think-aloud method to investigate how people make ‘response decisions’ while reading emails. The grounded theory analysis of the in-depth qualitative
data has enabled us to identify different elements of email users’ decision-making that influence their email response decisions.
Furthermore, we developed a theoretical model that explains how people could be driven to respond to emails based on the identified elements of users’ email decision-making processes and the relationships uncovered from the data. The findings provide deeper insights into phishing email susceptibility due to people’s email response decision-making behavior.
We also discuss the implications of our findings for designers and researchers working in anti-phishing training, education, and awareness interventions.

The paper ends with five concrete enhancements to state-of-the-art anti-phishing education, training, and awareness tools to support users in making safe email responses. Among others, we suggest that the goal of anti-phishing education, training, and awareness tools should shift from accurate email legitimacy judgments to secure email responses.

Experimentation is an essential part of innovation. It is the link between generating new ideas and putting them into practice. We are constantly experimenting in our daily lives, and organizations place great value on testing new products, services, and strategies. Yet there is a shortage of actionable guidance on how to design and execute high-quality experiments for practical purposes.

This book is a hands-on manual for crafting and conducting useful experiments in real-life settings. It guides readers from any background or discipline through the fundamentals of identifying testable ideas, selecting an evidence base, prototyping, and testing, building users’ skill sets and channeling their creativity through an interactive, exercise-oriented format. The book details a step-by-step framework, with user-friendly instructions and a case study illustrating the process at work at each step, as well as templates for readers to customize in their own projects. It draws on design thinking as well as other practical business approaches. From the classroom to the practice world, The Experimentation Field Book is a vital tool kit for all problem solvers and innovators seeking to address today’s pressing challenges.

Experimentation is an essential part of innovation. It is the link between generating new ideas and putting them into practice. We are constantly experimenting in our daily lives, and organizations place great value on testing new products, services, and strategies. Yet there is a shortage of actionable guidance on how to design and execute high-quality experiments for practical purposes.

This book is a hands-on manual for crafting and conducting useful experiments in real-life settings. It guides readers from any background or discipline through the fundamentals of identifying testable ideas, selecting an evidence base, prototyping, and testing, building users’ skill sets and channeling their creativity through an interactive, exercise-oriented format. The book details a step-by-step framework, with user-friendly instructions and a case study illustrating the process at work at each step, as well as templates for readers to customize in their own projects. It draws on design thinking as well as other practical business approaches. From the classroom to the practice world, The Experimentation Field Book is a vital tool kit for all problem solvers and innovators seeking to address today’s pressing challenges.

The authors

Jeanne Liedtka is the United Technologies Corporation Professor of Business Administration at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia and a leading expert and author on design thinking.

Elizabeth Chen is the design thinking lead at Innovate Carolina, the unit for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Natalie Foley is the director of advisory services for Opportunity@Work, a startup social enterprise, where she uses experimentation to launch new products and services. Previously, she was the CEO of Peer Insight, a venture studio and innovation consulting firm.

David Kester is the managing director and founder of the strategic design consultancy DK&A and the executive training school Design Thinkers Academy London. He is a former CEO of the UK Design Council and honorary professor at Warwick Business School.

Cameron Hanson, Strategy Director at Smart Design, gave a presentation at the Service Design Network (SDN) New York Chapter – actually, an encore presentation from the SDN Global Conference in Berlin – on practical ways to integrate GenAI into the design research process.

In this video, she shared what she learned by conducting three experiments using GenAI for synthetic users, research synthesis, and in-person ideation. 

The first is that people trust people, not things. 

Second, public trust is earned rather than built.

Third, more trust is not necessarily better.

The fourth point demands deeper exploration: trust depends on perceptions of whether sociotechnical systems are seen as beneficial and well-governed as well as whether they work as their designers expect.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, one of many legacy broadcasters besieged by social media, recently began a new advertising campaign with the strapline, “If you know how it’s made, you can trust what it says. Trust is earned.” Transparency does not necessarily lead to trustworthiness, but whether in news, policy-making, or technology, some people will have a legitimate interest in matters of process. For opaque technologies like artificial intelligence, this presents a particular problem.

These are some of the main findings of the first Allianz Foundation “Civic Engagement Study” entitled “The Movers of Tomorrow?”.

The study is based on a representative survey that the Allianz Foundation conducted, together with the SINUS Institute, among 10,000 young adults aged 18 to 39 in Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom.

The results show: Young Europeans find today’s structures of political participation outdated and do not feel addressed by them. Conventional offers such as party membership are only attractive to very few of them. They want to provide direct input and desire flexible and personal forms of engagement. This is a huge task for politics, civil society and philanthropy: to rebuild trust and create pathways into getting engaged.

Sinus Institute writes that the study, entitled “The Movers of Tomorrow? How Young Adults in Europe Imagine and Shape the Future” (pdf) was conducted in two phases. First, to ensure that the research addresses the real concerns of real people, young adults in the five countries were directly involved in focus group discussions. Documenting their future outlook and their experiences of civic engagement paved the way for the second phase: A representative survey, which was administered between September and November of 2022. The survey questionnaire was designed using young adults’ true-to-life input from the focus groups, along with state-of the-art research in the domains of civic engagement, social psychology and youth studies.

To learn more about what exactly is needed to unleash the civic potential of young adults, the Allianz Foundation invited 78 leading voices from civil society, the arts and journalism to seven interactive Future Labs in seven European cities — Athens, Berlin, Istanbul, London, Palermo, Warsaw and Prizren in Kosovo. Valuable lessons emerged from them, including the need to craft more compelling change narratives, address burnout, create and defend safe spaces and foster dialogue among young adults, civil society and its public and private funders, which have been synthesized in Future Labs Report 2023 (pdf), a workshop report with recommendations for action for civil society and its supporters.

> Excellent analysis of the Italian results in article by Sofia Li Crasti in La Stampa newspaper.

How we became so burdened by red tape and unnecessary paperwork, and why we must do better.

We’ve all had to fight our way through administrative sludge—filling out complicated online forms, mailing in paperwork, standing in line at the motor vehicle registry. This kind of red tape is a nuisance, but, as Cass Sunstein shows in Sludge, it can also impair health, reduce growth, entrench poverty, and exacerbate inequality. Confronted by sludge, people just give up—and lose a promised outcome: a visa, a job, a permit, an educational opportunity, necessary medical help. In this lively and entertaining look at the terribleness of sludge, Sunstein explains what we can do to reduce it.

Because of sludge, Sunstein explains, too many people don’t receive benefits to which they are entitled. Sludge even prevents many people from exercising their constitutional rights—when, for example, barriers to voting in an election are too high. (A Sludge Reduction Act would be a Voting Rights Act.) Sunstein takes readers on a tour of the not-so-wonderful world of sludge, describes justifications for certain kinds of sludge, and proposes “Sludge Audits” as a way to measure the effects of sludge. On balance, Sunstein argues, sludge infringes on human dignity, making people feel that their time and even their lives don’t matter. We must do better.

Cass R. Sunstein is Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and Chair of the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences at the World Health Organization. He is the author of The Cost-Benefit Revolution, How Change Happens, Too Much Information, Sludge (all published by the MIT Press), Nudge (with Richard H. Thaler), and other books.

The OECD is currently exploring the contribution that behavioural science can make to service design by partnering with the Government of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia on an ‘International Sludge Academy’. 

Chiara Varazzani et al. write about it here and redefine sludge in this context as “unjustified frictions in citizens’ interactions with government”.

The concept of ‘sludge’ puts a behavioural lens on a conversation that has previously been focused on administrative burdens, on the one hand, or on user experience, on the other. Grounding our analysis in specific human behaviours helps to bring those perspectives together, by identifying problems, quantifying them, and suggesting solutions.

Since the internet’s earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists’ plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism.
 
Big Tech has authority not only over people’s lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies’ policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes readers on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?

Tamara Kneese is a visiting scholar at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, CA.

> Interview with Tamara Kneese published in The Observer on 30 September 2023.

A new cyberpsychology research program, Reimagining Security with Cyberpsychology-Informed Network Defenses (ReSCIND) from the U.S. Defense Department’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects activity (IARPA, https://bit.ly/3V39fk8), focuses on how cybercriminals act and think.

According to IARPA program manager Kimberly Ferguson-Walter, the ReSCIND program aims to study the cyberpsychology of cybercriminals in order to isolate the weaknesses in how they think to improve cybersecurity. […]

Ferguson-Walter has hypothesized several cognitive biases that could apply to influencing attacker behavior. New defender solutions could use these biases to get an attacker to believe they had achieved a lot of obfuscation inside the network so they will take more chances. That could make it easier for defenders to catch them.

The bottled water industry has both subtly and overtly spread doubt about the safety of public tap water, positioning its product as the safer alternative.

Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice
by Daniel Jaffee (Author)
University of California Press
September 2023, 384 pages

Abstract

In just four decades, bottled water has transformed from a luxury niche item into a ubiquitous consumer product, representing a $300 billion market dominated by global corporations. It sits at the convergence of a mounting ecological crisis of single-use plastic waste and climate change, a social crisis of affordable access to safe drinking water, and a struggle over the fate of public water systems. Unbottled examines the vibrant movements that have emerged to question the need for bottled water and challenge its growth in North America and worldwide.

Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, residents, public officials, and other participants in controversies ranging from bottled water’s role in unsafe tap water crises to groundwater extraction for bottling in rural communities, Daniel Jaffee asks what this commodity’s meteoric growth means for social inequality, sustainability, and the human right to water. Unbottled profiles campaigns to reclaim the tap and addresses the challenges of ending dependence on packaged water in places where safe water is not widely accessible. Clear and compelling, it assesses the prospects for the movements fighting plastic water and working to ensure water justice for all.

Author

Daniel Jaffee is Associate Professor of Sociology at Portland State University. His previous book, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival, received the C. Wright Mills Book Award.

The conference theme is “Crossing HCI and AI”. Indeed, Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
(HCAI) has gained popularity for bringing humans into the center of AI design. HCAI has the
potential to create systems that provide intelligent computations beneficial to humans, thus
supporting them in achieving their objectives. In addition, HCAI systems focus on enhancing
human performance, increasing their reliability, safety, and trustworthiness. This may also involve
designing an interface that effectively leverages human skills and capabilities to improve human
performance with an application. Together with vital aspects like transparency, explainability, and
fairness, the conference aims to consolidate the efforts made by the local and global community to
spur further reflections and activities.
CHItaly 2023 aims at debating the intersection of HCI and AI as an emerging field of research,
devoted mostly to Intelligent User Interfaces, i.e., interfaces developed using the approaches from
HCI and the tools from AI.

In an era where digital technologies are increasingly integrated into migration processes, these technologies are reshaping border governance in a manner that impacts the human rights of people on the move and communities worldwide. As we navigate these evolving dynamics, it becomes paramount to address the potential harms the use of digital technologies poses to human rights, while also harnessing the opportunities they offer to facilitate safe and dignified migration. This collaborative study, conducted by the UN Human Rights Office and the University of Essex, analyses the human rights implications of specific border technologies. It provides recommendations for States and stakeholders on how to take a human rights-based approach in ensuring the use of digital technologies at borders aligns with international human rights law and standards. The study draws from a collective body of expertise, research, and evidence, as well as extensive interviews and collaborative meetings with experts.

Household choices – such as what to eat, how to get to work and how to heat our homes – have significant implications for the environment. With the urgency of environmental action and the need to shift to more sustainable consumption patterns, making more sustainable choices holds great potential to reduce environmental impacts. Yet in the context of interlocking crises, governments face challenges in supporting households with policies that realise this potential. How Green is Household Behaviour? presents an overview of results from the 2022 OECD Survey on Environmental Policies and Individual Behaviour Change. The survey investigates household attitudes and behaviour with respect to energy, transport, waste and food systems. It was carried out across more than 17 000 households in 9 countries, including Belgium, Canada, Israel, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. The data collected also include information on self-reported motivations and barriers to change, providing a unique source of empirical evidence to inform policy efforts to shift to more sustainable consumption patterns.

[Check out our refreshed Experientia site]

“UX folks are trapped in complacency while the AI techquake radically shakes up the computing landscape. We witnessed similar complacency during the dot-com revolution. It is high time we shake off inertia, embrace AI design, and prevent engineers from monopolizing the new UI paradigm.” […]

‘The lessons from the dot-com saga signal that engineering-biased and marketing-fueled designs yield subpar user experiences. Businesses might see some productivity gains, but these fall far short of the potential benefits from a user-centric design approach for the slew of industry-specific AI tools to be rolled out in the next 2–3 years. Meanwhile, users will be the victims of shoddy design.”

The post dates from mid-June, but Nielsen comes back to the topic in his post UX Angst of 2023 of just a few days ago:

“We also need more UX work to improve enterprise AI and domain-specific AI implementations. It’ll be a year or two before the need for this UX effort dawns on most business executives, but the light will come.”

This book puts forward a new paradigm to understand and implement Sustainable Innovation (SI). Innovation without sustainability leaves out large swathes of the population or generates maladaptive or misappropriate behaviors. Innovative solutions will be sustainable if they can retain individual and group differences while offering greater benefits for the common good. When working together, designers, life, human and social behavioral scientists can add value, which promotes behavioral changes to the advantage of sustainable models in all fields. This volume presents a guide on how to set up sustainable innovation programs, as well as ideas on how to integrate multidisciplinary teams into innovation projects. Moreover, this book offers students a synthesis of non-academic thinking on the relationship between design and behavioral science.

Table of Contents

Part I: A Common Ground for Sustainable and Responsible Innovation
Front Matter (pdf)
Understanding Behavior for Sustainable Innovations (link)
The Determinants of Behaviors (link)
The Fragility of Cooperation (link)

Part II: Disclosing Value through Behavioral Design
Front Matter (pdf)
Design Paths (link)
Intentional Behavioral Design (link)

Part III: Shaping Change
Front Matter (pdf)
Change and Innovation (link)
Change, Perspective, and Proximity (link)
Behavioral Change and Heterogeneity (link)

Part IV: Accelerating Sustainable Innovation
Front Matter (pdf)
Behavioral Change Design (link)
Energy Consumption and Sustainable Innovation (link)
Health Services Transformation and Behavior (link)
Thinking as Behavior Scientists, Acting as Designers (link)

Author

Michele Visciola is president and co-founder of Experientia. Over the course of his career he has directed project teams on prominent topics, anticipating trends and developing new research languages, in numerous sectors such as, for example: Economics of services for small landowners (Kenya, 2013); Services for the elderly masterplan (Singapore, 2013-2014); Personal Finance Management and design of digital aids to facilitate savings (Europe, 2015); Behavioral economics for investments and savings in the retail bank (Italy, 2016); Fossil energy footprint reduction to zero (Europe 2013-ongoing); Patient-centered service models to facilitate behavior change and lifestyles improvement (Switzerland and Europe 2017-ongoing). Michele has more than 10 years of teaching experience divided between Politecnico di Milano (“Digital culture for designers”) and Bicocca University Milan (“Evolution of user research methods”). He has written several scientific publications, articles and books; was part of the core team that founded World Usability Day. He is Master and Professor of the DeTao Academy in behavioral design and modeling.

Think Like a UX Researcher will challenge your preconceptions about user experience (UX) research and encourage you to think beyond the obvious. You’ll discover how to plan and conduct UX research, analyze data, persuade teams to take action on the results and build a career in UX. The book will help you take a more strategic view of product design so you can focus on optimizing the user’s experience. UX Researchers, Designers, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts and Marketing Managers will find tools, inspiration and ideas to rejuvenate their thinking, inspire their team and improve their craft.

In this newly revised Second Edition, the authors have added six new essays that look at how UX research methods have changed in the last few years, why remote methods should not be the only tools you use, what to do about difficult test participants, how to improve your survey questions, how to identify user goals when you can’t directly observe users and now understanding your own epistemological bias will help you become a more persuasive UX researcher.

Authors

David Travis has been carrying out ethnographic field research and running product usability tests since 1989. He has published three books on UX, and over 30,000 students have taken his face-to-face and online training courses. He has a PhD in Experimental Psychology.

Philip Hodgson has been a UX researcher for over 25years. His UX work has influenced design for the US, European and Asian markets for products ranging from banking software to medical devices, store displays to product packaging and police radios to baby diapers. He has a PhD in Experimental Psychology.

Videos

In this collection of 6 videos (from the 2019 edition), David Travis reviews the ways that UX researchers think differently.

According to JD Power’s Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout (APEAL) Study, overall satisfaction among car owners is 845 (on a 1,000-point scale), a decrease of two points from a year ago and three points lower than in 2021. That’s the first time in the 28-year history of the study that the consumer research firm registered a consecutive year-over-year decline in owner satisfaction.

Unsurprisingly, more people are choosing not to use their car’s native infotainment controls. Only 56 percent of owners prefer to use their vehicle’s built-in system to play audio, down from 70 percent in 2020, JD Power found. Less than half of owners said they like using their car’s native controls for navigation, voice recognition, or to make phone calls.

Naturally, it seems like most people are preferring to use smartphone-mirroring systems like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which have proven to be incredibly popular over the years.

“Our current recommendation is that we should be extremely careful about and maybe try to avoid using these detectors as much as possible,” said senior author James Zou, from Stanford University.

We all know people who talk with their hands—but do they know what they’re saying with them? Our gestures can reveal and contradict us, and express thoughts we may not even know we’re thinking.  

In Thinking with Your Hands, esteemed cognitive psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow argues that gesture is vital to how we think, learn, and communicate. She shows us, for instance, how the height of our gestures can reveal unconscious bias, or how the shape of a student’s gestures can track their mastery of a new concept—even when they’re still giving wrong answers. She compels us to rethink everything from how we set child development milestones, to what’s admissible in a court of law, to whether Zoom is an adequate substitute for in-person conversation.?  

Sweeping and ambitious, Thinking with Your Hands promises to transform the way we think about language and communication.

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the department of psychology and comparative human development, and the committee on education, at the University of Chicago. Winner of the 2021 Rumelhart Prize in cognitive science, she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in Chicago, Illinois. 

Review in The Economist

To answer these questions (and many others !) the Paris-based think tank Urban AI – in collaboration with Cornell Tech – interviewed and exchanged with global pioneers in the emerging field of Urban Artificial Intelligence (Urban AI).

The experts from Berlin, Amsterdam or New York. They are architects, CEOs or researchers. But they all have in common that they imagine, design and develop the Urban AI of tomorrow.

The results of the project, with interviews realized in late 2022 and the report published in May 2023, are available in video recordings and a report.

Previous books are available here.

AI is now a global phenomenon. Yet Hollywood narratives dominate perceptions of AI in the English-speaking West and beyond, and much of the technology itself is shaped by a disproportionately white, male, US-based elite. However, different cultures have been imagining intelligent machines since long before we could build them, in visions that vary greatly across religious, philosophical, literary and cinematic traditions. This book aims to spotlight these alternative visions.

Imagining AI draws attention to the range and variety of visions of a future with intelligent machines and their potential significance for the research, regulation, and implementation of AI. The book is structured geographically, with each chapter presenting insights into how a specific region or culture imagines intelligent machines. The contributors, leading experts from academia and the arts, explore how the encounters between local narratives, digital technologies, and mainstream Western narratives create new imaginaries and insights in different contexts across the globe. The narratives they analyse range from ancient philosophy to contemporary science fiction, and visual art to policy discourse.

The book sheds new light on some of the most important themes in AI ethics, from the differences between Chinese and American visions of AI, to digital neo-colonialism. It is an essential work for anyone wishing to understand how different cultural contexts interplay with the most significant technology of our time.

Edited by Stephen Cave, Director, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, and Kanta Dihal, Senior Research Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge

The aim of this collaborative five-year project has been to conduct comparative analysis of the impact of the smartphone on the experience of mid-life around the world and consider the implications for mobile health.

Meanwhile a number of publications have come out that are available as free Open Access downloads.

• The Global Smartphone (May 2021) and translations of this book in Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese
• Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland (May 2021)
• Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy (May 2021)
• Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil (April 2022)
• Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile (March 2023)
• Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China (September 2023)
• Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda (September 2023)

We spend an average of just 47 seconds on any screen before shifting our attention. It takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to a task after an interruption. And we interrupt ourselves more than we’re interrupted by others.

In Attention Span, psychologist Gloria Mark reveals these and more surprising results from her decades of research into how technology affects our attention. She shows how much of what we think we know is wrong, including insights such as:

• Why multitasking hurts rather than helps productivity
• How social media and modern entertainment amplify our short attention spans
• What drains our mental resources and how to refuel them
• The four types of attention that we experience every day and how to recognize them

While the concept of “flow” has previously been considered the ideal state of focus, Dr. Mark offers a new framework to help explain how our brains function in the digital world: kinetic attention. This book reveals how we can take control, not only to find more success in our careers, but also to find health and wellness in our everyday lives.

Dr. Gloria Mark is Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012. She is a two-time recipient of the Google Research Award and has received a prestigious NSF CAREER award. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology.

The book has been extensively covered. Here some reviews and interviews in alphabetical order; CNBC, CNN, Columbia Magazine, El Pais, Forbes, New Scientist, Newsweek, Psychology Today, Salon, The Guardian, The New York Times, Time.

We’re all familiar with smart TVs making suggestions on our future watching, real-world exercise data being transferred into stats and infographics on our workout apps and turning up our home heating before we start our commute – but how does this world of technological interfaces affect our actions and perceptions of self? When society relies on computer models and their interfaces to explain and predict everything from love to geopolitical conflicts, our own behaviour and choices are artificially changed. Zachary Kaiser explores the harmful social consequences of this idea – balanced against speed and ease for the user – and how design practice and education can respond positively.

Zachary Kaiser is Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Experience Architecture at Michigan State University, USA. His research and creative practice examine the politics of technology and the role of design in shaping the parameters of individual, social, and political possibility. His work has been featured in national and international exhibitions, and his writing, on topics ranging from the future of the arts in higher education to dream-reading technologies, appears in both scholarly and popular publications.

This is what Tristan Dissaux, researcher in socioeconomics (CERMi) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), emphasises in his article for The Conversation (seemingly promoted by the Axa Research Fund).

Certain types of means of payment now seem indispensable for full participation in socioeconomic activity, yet they’re not necessarily available to everyone. Digitalisation thus increases the number of people in a situation of “monetary exclusion” – they may have money, but not in the right form.

Interestingly, he points out the cultural and social value of cash:

Something deeper is at stake that cannot be summed up in simple considerations of practicality. Money is not just a simple technical tool that makes our economic transactions more fluid, but a social institution: our collective use of money helps shape our society.

The report uses data from 41 focus groups convened in the four countries at the centre of this project – Brazil, India, the UK, and the US – strategically selecting participants from disadvantaged communities whose perspectives and experiences may plausibly differ from majority or dominant groups in important ways. 

Key takeaways (also in this Twitter thread):

• Audiences are frustrated over media coverage
  Participants expressed similar frustrations about not being represented in the news, with common critiques of coverage ranging from relentless negativity and unfair treatment to harmful stereotyping and inadequate attention
• The media is often perceived as an instrument of power
  The news media as an institution was often viewed by focus groups participants as an extension of systems aligned to serve those in power rather than the entire public #BLM
• Not everyone wants newsrooms to be more diverse
  Focus group participants differed on the degree to which they valued the importance of journalists themselves coming from diverse backgrounds, with some seeing it as critically important, and others warier of performative efforts
• Audiences value alternative news sources
  Many spoke of the importance of niche news sources that they felt more fairly and fully represented people like themselves and their interests, such as local news, individual influencers or podcasters, and ethnic and community media

The report suggests four possible strategies to build trust amongst these audiences:
– focusing on reducing biases
– writing more complete stories
– improving training
– making an effort to understand different needs

“Anthropocene is still positing this idea that there is a nature and then there is a technology; that human beings are outside of nature,” but the term smartness resolves this conflict, she says. Not only does the concept exist in both domains, but ubiquitous computation is one of the best tools we have to combat current ecological crises, while big data and AI are vitally changing how we understand nature. In any case, computer chips are ‘natural’ because “everything follows the laws of physics”.

“What exactly is “smartness,” and how and why has it come to be not only a desirable goal, but something that must be implemented everywhere,” asks co-author Professor Robert Mitchell in a book interview with Elizabeth Thompson.

The Smartness Mandate
By Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell
MIT Press
January 2023, 325 pages

Over the last half century, “smartness”—the drive for ubiquitous computing—has become a mandate: a new mode of managing and governing politics, economics, and the environment.

Smart phones. Smart cars. Smart homes. Smart cities. The imperative to make our world ever smarter in the face of increasingly complex challenges raises several questions: What is this “smartness mandate”? How has it emerged, and what does it say about our evolving way of understanding—and managing—reality? How have we come to see the planet and its denizens first and foremost as data-collecting instruments?

In The Smartness Mandate, Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell radically suggest that “smartness” is not primarily a technology, but rather an epistemology. Through this lens, they offer a critical exploration of the practices, technologies, and subjects that such an understanding relies upon—above all, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The authors approach these not simply as techniques for solving problems of calculations, but rather as modes of managing life (human and other) in terms of neo-Darwinian evolution, distributed intelligences, and “resilience,” all of which have serious implications for society, politics, and the environment.

The smartness mandate constitutes a new form of planetary governance, and Halpern and Mitchell aim to map the logic of this seemingly inexorable and now naturalized demand to compute, illuminate the genealogy of how we arrived here, and point to alternative imaginaries of the possibilities and potentials of smart technologies and infrastructures.

Orit Halpern is Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden and the author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945.

Robert Mitchell is Chair and Professor of English, as well as Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory, at Duke University. His books include, most recently, Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism.

Meet the people who design the algorithms that capture our musical tastes.
 
The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners’ horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. But for their critics, recommender systems seem to embody all the potential harms of algorithms: they flatten culture into numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and they profile their users for commercial ends. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologist Nick Seaver describes how the makers of music recommendation navigate these tensions: how product managers understand their relationship with the users they want to help and to capture; how scientists conceive of listening itself as a kind of data processing; and how engineers imagine the geography of the world of music as a space they care for and control.
 
Computing Taste rehumanizes the algorithmic systems that shape our world, drawing attention to the people who build and maintain them. In this vividly theorized book, Seaver brings the thinking of programmers into conversation with the discipline of anthropology, opening up the cultural world of computation in a wide-ranging exploration that travels from cosmology to calculation, myth to machine learning, and captivation to care.

Nick Seaver is an anthropologist who, as he puts it, studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. He teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he also directs the program of Science, Technology, and Society. His first book is Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music Recommendation. Nick has published several articles in academic journals on topics related to critical algorithm studies, as well as ethnographic stories and anthropological research methods. He is coeditor of Towards an Anthropology of Data.

> Audio interview (47:57) of Nick Seaver by Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes (PhD student in anthropology at Oregon State University)

This study has collated evidence which on balance indicates a strong case to reform digital advertising. It indicates that the status quo is unsustainable for individuals, publishers and advertisers. Digital advertising that relies on the collection of personal data, tracking and massive-scale profiling can have unintended consequences on data protection rights, security, democracy and the environment. But there is little independent evidence to support claims that the use of extensive tracking and profiling yields a significant advantage compared to digital advertising models which don’t do this. This strengthens the position of players who have the most control over and insight into people’s behaviour online and weakens the ability of others, especially advertisers and publishers, to communicate directly to their customers. It has also created an accountability crisis, where individuals are expected to navigate a complex web of companies in order to control the types of ads they see online. This study points to gaps in the regulatory framework which could enable many of the issues highlighted to persist. There is a need to improve transparency and accountability, increase individuals’ control over how their personal data is used for digital advertising and address a number of obstacles that make it harder for advertisers and publishers to “know their audience”.

> Short article by the European Publishers Council

Why Do Businesses Reject User Experience?
In this article, Irwin Hau explores the five primary reasons that cause businesses to shy away from adopting UX strategies, as well as how individuals can help spark change by exploring User Experience.

1. A lack of understanding of the differences between user-interface (UI) design and UX design
2. Acknowledgment of the brand experience gap
3. The differentiated expertise that great UX design requires
4. The careful orchestration that successful UX design requires
5. Ever-evolving UX design trends that are difficult to keep up with

Maximizing Impact: Business Benefits of UX Consulting
UX consulting can help businesses in several ways. First, UX consultants help businesses to create more user-friendly, accessible products and services, which can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Second, UX consultants can help businesses reduce development costs and time to market by identifying and addressing usability issues early in the design process. Third, UX consultants can help improve business outcomes by increasing user engagement, conversion rates, and revenues.

Over the recent decades, the possibilities to surveil people have increased and been refined with the ongoing digital transformation of society. Surveillance can now go in any direction, and various forms of online surveillance saturate most people’s lives, which are increasingly lived in digital environments.

To understand this situation and nuance the contemporary discussions about surveillance – not least in the highly digitalised context of the Nordic countries – we must adopt cultural and ethical perspectives in studying people’s attitudes, motives, and behaviours. The “culture of surveillance”, to borrow David Lyon’s term, is a culture where questions about privacy and publicness, and rights and benefits, are once again brought to the fore.

This anthology takes up this challenge, with contributions from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical frameworks that discuss and shed light on the complexity of contemporary surveillance and thus problematise power relations between the many actors involved in the development and performance of surveillance culture. The contributions highlight how more and more actors and practices play a part in our increasingly digitalised society.

The book is an outcome of the research project “iAccept: Soft surveillance – between acceptance and resistance”, financed by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation. The anthology’s editors are project members, all based at Umeå University, Sweden: Lars Samuelsson, associate professor of philosophy; Coppélie Cocq, professor of Sámi studies and digital humanities; Stefan Gelfgren, associate professor of sociology of religion; and Jesper Enbom, associate professor of media studies.

Since 2020, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in collaboration with Agirre Lehendakaria Center (ALC), has been supporting Social Innovation Platform (SIP) to strengthen governance, inclusive participation and foster socio-economic development at the subnational level. At the heart of SIP lies a people-centered approach that utilizes ‘Deep Listening’ to give voice to local communities and unravel insights into the state of things, and glimpses of what might be to come for more inclusive, participatory, and integrated development planning.

This guide provides step-by-step guidance, practical tools, and hands-on experiences on the process of Deep Listening, including systems mapping, rapid ethnographic research, sensemaking and analysis. It aims to help development practitioners to add a community listening perspective to their programming, which can lay the groundwork for further portfolio design.

Robots Won’t Save Japan addresses the Japanese government’s efforts to develop care robots in response to the challenges of an aging population, rising demand for eldercare, and a critical shortage of care workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at key sites of Japanese robot development and implementation, James Wright reveals how such devices are likely to transform the practices, organization, meanings, and ethics of caregiving if implemented at scale.

This new form of techno-welfare state that Japan is prototyping involves a reconfiguration of care that deskills and devalues care work and reduces opportunities for human social interaction and relationship building. Moreover, contrary to expectations that care robots will save labor and reduce health care expenditures, robots cost more money and require additional human labor to tend to the machines. As Wright shows, robots alone will not rescue Japan from its care crisis. The attempts to implement robot care instead point to the importance of looking beyond such techno-fixes to consider how to support rather than undermine the human times, spaces, and relationships necessary for sustainably cultivating good care.

James Wright is a Research Associate at the Alan Turing Institute.

However, there are no unifying guidelines on what “human-centered” means, nor how HCML research and practice should be conducted. People have worked to articulate a nascent set of values for HCML, but the concept is not clear and definitions come from many sides.

This article by Stevie Chancellor in Communications of the ACM draws on the interdisciplinary history of human-centered thinking, HCI, AI, and science and technology studies to propose best practices for HCML. 

Stevie Chancellor is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University Of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN, USA.