One of the amazing things about being in Bangalore, is that you are always surrounded by some amazing people, who are so passionate about what they do. It is no wonder that it is the Startup city in India and you get to meet amazing entrepreneurs. Dhiraj and Peeyush from Canvera are two such folks!
I have been a loyal Canvera customer since quite some time now, and was recently at a Tweetup organized by Dhiraj and team. It was something that I could not miss, especially when the a thing on the agenda was to show around the Canvera’s production facility. As a photographer, it is very simple to just see the final output in the form of a photo book. But it has always fascinated me to know the level of complexity that one goes through to get a book that is more like a piece of art in itself. The awesome books that come out are a treasure of memories and a testimony to that is that all my clients who have received the Canvera photobooks have loved it!
Needless to say, all were amazed at the amazing facility in terms of the equipments that are being at par with the best in the world, the quality of paper and the processes in place.
What impressed me most was the attention to detail that is paid at every step. Whether its in the consistency across printers or the lamination of the pages or the cutting of paper or the multi level quality assurance checks or to ensuring privacy of the customers and the photographers.
It may sound easy, but when you get to know that all these have to be done in a maximum turnaround time of 48 hours, you are left amazed! Moreover the challenges that . . . → Read More: Why I love Canvera – notes from a Tweetup.
My recent talk at STC UX conference aimed to throw light on why everyone is a designer and is contributing to the co-creation of UX.
We user experience designers, live in exciting yet challenging times. From the rise of social networks, to the evolution of different devices and platforms, to our design decisions being governed by someone else, the excitement for the field is unbounded. However the excitement also comes with its set of challenges. Design being discussed in the board rooms, poses a lot more challenges. While its an indicator that it is being given its long due value, it also leads to a lot of expectations.
This also allows that a lot of people start pitching into the design process. The rise of the adoption of Agile framework at work places, the decision making in design is starting to get faster and often without much thought about ideas.
Another phenomenon that is gaining momentum, is that with design gaining more prominence across projects, often we end up having many more people who need not be from a design background, to contribute to the designs. These come mainly from the Business teams, the technology teams or even the marketing teams. This is also corroborated by the fact that there is a rise of a lot of crowd sourcing platforms. Design faces a lot of challenges when going via a crowd sourcing platform. As a result of all the above, the UX field is undergoing a paradigm shift.
In a follow-up to my earlier article on Co-creating the User experience, I recently gave a talk on the same topic at the STC UX conference, held on 27th August at Bangalore. Here is the presentation that I used in the talk:
Co-creating the User Experience View more presentations from Kshitiz Anand . . . → Read More: The rise of SoLoMoN
I recently attended a talk by Elizabeth Churchill, Principle Research Scientist at Yahoo Inc, California. She was presenting her ideas from a HCI perspective and as a part of the Big Thinkers Series, organized by Yahoo Research and Development, Bangalore.
The talk focused around the idea of SocioTechnical Design and Engineering. The context was primarily in understandings for the Internet Experience Domain. It was a great talk! I enjoyed every moment of it. It is especially important in the context in which we have opened up Deskala. At Deskala, we are exploring the reach of technology in emerging markets and coming up with design solutions, services and innovations.
With the context of communities changing everyday (Sherry Turkle et al. ), the way we conduct research on users is also changing. What was the notion of a community a few years ago is not the same today. Cyber-ethnography has become the most appropriate tool in reaching a definition of the virtual community.
In the context of an emerging market like India, the need for defining newer methods of user research is important. The penetration of technology is limited to the mobile experiences amongst the emerging markets population. But with the ever changing technological scenario, the technological intervention will expand to other forms of technology.
One of the key propositions going on in the design research field is to bridge the gap between the offline and the online. In India at-least, inspite of having a good reach of technology, there are only 32.1% of the population who are online and are accessing internet from devices.
The notion of cyber space, is therefore not limited only to the online world. One has to expand the understanding of the cyber space. So in the ideal case of cyber-ethnography, one would spend hours in this . . . → Read More: Cyber Ethnography and its challenges in Emerging Markets
Here’s an update of the remaining things I noted at CHI Boston 2009 conference. I think it was a truly enriching experience.
I attended a few sessions on Mobile applications, on User Experience and on Application of Design in the Developing World.
There was a consensus on the call for HCI and User Experience to expand itself and reach out to communities where it had not been so successful. From what I felt, people are ready and willing to (budget permitting) to collaborate with researchers and local people who have a strong understanding of the locality and at the same time be an expert in HCI / UI / UXd/r. As I previously mentioned India did feature a lot during the presentations along with Africa. In fact in one session all the presentations were done in India. In Karnataka to be precise! Groups from universities in UK, Microsoft Research, and Nokia presented their works done in India on user research. There was a call for the expansion of the applications made for the mobiles for varying purposes. The UK group called for the role of Participatory Media in Community Development and its approach.
There were again some studies on voice based UIs, Text based UIs, and Rich Multimedia UIs. However one interesting thing was the focus on Semi-literate users. This was interesting as it allowed for the expansion of the UIs from the text only to graphics included. Rich multimedia UI was tried out, and there was a few projects done by people on iPhones (which I was not too impressed by). A person from UNICEF’s Innovation Division, in a panel discussion asked the HCI community for a 5$ mobile phone with easy interface to reach out to the millions in developing nations. I think that’s an interesting challenge.
There . . . → Read More: CHI 09 Updates
My short talk titled, “Research Strategies for Designing for Social Impact” was selected to be presented at Ignite Bloomington event.
Ignite is a night of presentations on a variety of topics, with a twist. Each presentation has 20 slides, that automatically advance after 15 seconds. It is a worldwide movement, and Bloomington is hosting its first on April 16th at 6pm.
This inaugural edition has some amazing speakers and it should be fun.
I am excited to be sharing my pictures and talking more about my project. It was a challenge to put together the presentation, but at the end of it, I think people will like it.
I am recently attending the CHI conference at Boston.
I strted my day of multiple interesting sessions with the there is this bunch of people at Stanford’s Computing Science Department (the guy who presented was Neel Patel) who are collaborating with college students in India (Dhirubai Ambani Institute) to come up with voice based user interfaces. Their paper won an honorable paper mention (one amongst the 32 that were given this honor, out of the 694 that were accepted). They have implemented the system in Gujarat and working with farmers and testing the usefulness of touchtone based interactions versus speech based interactions. I thought it was pretty interesting stuff.
The prime focus as we know at CHI is Methodologies. I noticed that there was lot of focus on the presentations on NUMBERS. Almost all presentations (except the Nokia one) was full of data. Perhaps this was a way to stress on the process. However something that was missing was the Human element in the presentations. I definitely would have loved to see more papers with actual users talking or actual users feedback than just numbers. Also although I did not come across any interesting new methods so far, people were interested in exploring (and are infact exploring) in research and application of the existing methodolies to new domains.
So, some of the papers also are exploring for children as a potential user group. So there were issues of education being discussed and also panel discussions on children. How could one design digital games as an educational tool for rural children, based on analysis of 28 rural children outdoor games, was another interesting paper. (This is being centered at U C Berkley) Though was a little dissappointed at the presentation. Perhaps will understand better when I read the paper. This . . . → Read More: CHI 2009 Day 1
NGO 2.0 Poster
I think this proposed symposium looks to address some really challenging questions that designers who are interested in Designing for Social Impact is concerned. For more discussions please join the googlegroup.
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