At the moment the UX Lab is quite busy with a number of activities that are difficult to share any specific information about – mainly because we are in the middle of getting our heads around things. So instead of writing about what we haven’t done yet, I reckon it might be of interest to point at some of the topics we have been thinking about lately [ Read more ]

The post Coming to terms with complexity – Issues and questions at the top of our minds appeared first on UX Blog.

As a part of exploring how our research-platform for interconnected objects (see “the Social Web of Things“) could enable new user experience concepts, we looked into what we could do with the log of data generated by the connected gadgets, sensors and services. This data is both used to maintain an updated snapshot of the current state of everything, and also for detecting historical [ Read more ]

The post Journalist-bots, data and connected everything. appeared first on UX Blog.

In a recent attempt to explain, in a non-technical way, how the network and the integration with web-based services is changing the properties of our products and devices, I told someone that “the network is a habitat”. The network is a fundamental condition for many connected products to function well, so connectivity is almost like a natural resource which a population of products are dependent [ Read more ]

The post The hippos and camels of connected products appeared first on UX Blog.

Sometimes I get to lecture a crowd or two about the near future of smart networked products and services. This is an image I have used to describe where product design is heading. It is originally borrowed from robot research, showing what they call the “uncanny valley“; the steep drop just before the curve reaches the upper right corner of the chart. It shows how people [ Read more ]

The post Products as pets appeared first on UX Blog.

I was invited to say something at a conference in Stockholm the other week and I gave a talk that I half-dorkishly titled “The Internetworkeffects of Things”. I tried to say something about that the default strategy for products and services in an increasingly networked society must include good and open APIs that enable interplay with other products and services across industries. Otherwise [ Read more ]

The post Silos, Stovepipes and Siri appeared first on UX Blog.

The London-based design consultancy BERG have produced some very interesting work. Something we found especially intriguing was that they have this idea that Products are People Too. We had been tinkering with the concept of a Social Web of Things when we stumbled over BERG’s brilliant work, and it struck us that many of their ideas [ Read more ]

The post UX Lab & BERG explores the Internetworks of Things appeared first on UX Blog.

At this year’s Mobile World Congress, one of the major fairs for the telecom industry, Ericsson’s User Experience Lab teamed up with LEGO Mindstorms to show connected Lego-robots hooked up to the Social Web of Things prototype.

The demo included four robots, each with a specific task. A laundry-robot that sorted socks by colour and placed them in different baskets while it chatted with the washing machine. A [ Read more ]

The post Ericsson and LEGO at MWC 2012 appeared first on UX Blog.

Back in 2008 we started working with some projects involving interaction design for large networks of connected products and services. Not Internet of Things-ish stuff, but in that direction. The challenge was to come up with a graphical user interface which was both scalable and very easy to understand. Or that was what we thought the challenge was to begin with.

The scaling-part was difficult. A relatively small number of things, say ten fifteen or [ Read more ]

The post A Social Web of Things appeared first on UX Blog.

As we steer toward a future in which all our objects and environments are connected, we will eventually find ourselves living a technologist’s dream, with everything being part of the network. But how will people experience and interact with this? Will users see it as a logical step in the evolution of the World Wide Web, or is it going to be understood [ Read more ]

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