2013

A patent document was published by the US Patent and Trademark Office on November 19, describing a system developed at Google that analyses a user’s accounts on social network sites in order to provide half-automated reactions to relevant activity […]

A few days ago, I noticed an interesting item on my LinkedIn feed that serves to illustrate one of the instances how non-use may manifest itself in social web services. A message featured in the news feed encouraged me (and likely a large number of others) to […]

“Leave your phone behind”, a recent writing by a NYC startup CEO on LinkedIn gained quite a bit of traffic and comments when Rafat Ali suggested to create short periods of disconnection from the omnipresent network and its distracting forces. Both […]

A paper titled “Limiting, Leaving, and (re)Lapsing: an Exploration of Facebook Non-Use Practices and Experiences” by Eric P.S. Baumer et al., presented in May at CHI 2013 (slides), sheds some light on the practices of Facebook non-use and […]

@jocxy Thank you for sharing your thoughts! We are not designing interactions but the spaces for them. Interesting conference topic as well!

About 10 years ago, technology researchers started to discuss voluntary non-use in contrast to the prevailing assumption that non-use is an involuntary state. In their 2002 book chapter “They came, they surfed, they went back to the beach: […]

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project published some interesting non-use related numbers related to Facebook, in a report titled “Coming and Going on Facebook”:

61% of current Facebook users say that at […]

Earlier this year, some media outlets pinpointed that the Facebook user statistics published by social media analytics platform Socialbakers would indicate a decrease in the absolute number of “Monthly active Facebook users” over the last six […]

Looking at the trace of “non-users” in the history of technology research, the work of James E. Katz and Ronald E. Rice is not to be missed. In their 2002 book “Social consequences of Internet use: access, involvement, and […]

Public healthcare in Finland is based on the provision of tax-funded services, which, in times of limited public finances and an ageing population, translates into a demand that often exceeds available resources. Since municipalities are legally obliged to provide their services equally within binding time frames and at a predefined level of quality, there is a strong demand for solutions that will help cut costs, optimise the utilisation of available resources and save on expensive treatments through preventive care. The book "Designing for Wellbeing", published by Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, summarizes a broad range of design projects carried out during the World Design Capital year in Helsinki 2012. In the chapter "Reducing social distance through co-design", Zagros Hatami and I share our observations from our involvement in three co-design projects related to the provision of better public health care by means of information technology.

@tsihvola IMHO news biz would need to redefine their value proposition. “Breaking news, haven’t you heard, is broken” http://buzzmachine.com/2013/04/22/and-now-the-news-heres-what-we-dont-know-at-this-hour/

RT @Seersucker_Mag:

Great piece on leaving phones behind. “Dance the Smartphone Tango Without Me” http://nyti.ms/YEUnEG  via @nytimes

Ubicomp vs. “interface culture”: RT @danlockton:

No to NoUI: wise piece on invisibility & its problems by @timoarnall http://bit.ly/WHhoLq

This book – “The Victorian Internet” by Tom Standage – sounds like a great read:

This is the story of the oddballs, eccentrics and visionaries who were the earliest pioneers of the on-line frontier, and the global network they constructed — a network that was, in effect, the Victorian Internet.

Given The Onion is a satirical magazine, this article is so spot-on it could – from my own conversations with “users” – just as well be about factual research:

Tired of being bombarded with constant requests to share content on […]