What is your food culture?

Learning about the culture of eating without hands.  Its a challenge... but people ARE very creative in finding ways. Finding their own culture and manner. This is where true innovative ideas occur.

But, eating is about aesthetics and pleasure and meetings and cultures and lifestyle....
not just eating.

Its like, why do people take a shower or a bath?
Not necessarily to get clean. Its plesuare, rituals, lifestyle etc

- To wake up.
- To prepare for bed.
- To get warm.
- To feel warm.
- To reflect.
- To meditate.
- To reduce pain.
- To do something.
- To get away.
- To prepare oneself for a meeting.
- To look good in the hair.
- To avoid a burn injury.
- Etc.

Showering can also be approached as a culture. Just like eating is a culture.


http://wikieducator.org/Lesson_19:_Disability_and_Rehabilitation_Part_1

Experience design or service design?

What is service design and what is interaction design or experience design:

- The methods are (almost) the same
- But service design involves a bigger perspective, and requires an understanding of different touchpoints..


http://www.enginegroup.co.uk/service_design/v_page/service_design_and_user_experience_same_or_different

When inventing new services and artefacts it interesting to consider cultural differences affecting values. And values in a society may change...

The psychologist Shalom Schwartz has elaborated a widely accepted value model that consists of 10 human value types. These are ordered along two major dimensions: openness to change vs. conservation and self-enhancement vs. self-transition (see Figure). Extensive research in numerous countries has confirmed the validity of this model across cultures. However, cultures may differ in their value priorities.

http://www.migration.uni-jena.de/project4/values/index.php

Conventional wisdom

The blogger Anders Gustavsson have read Freakonomics and is discussing some interesting thoughts about conventional wisdom, and how people tend to believe things that the (their) majority believe in...

http://andersgustafsson.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/konventionell-visdom/
(in swedish)

Crowdsourcing

This is old, but still interesting: Crowdsourcing. Picture databases such as Istockphoto.com and flickr are good examples of this. Instead of buying a picture from a professional, you now buy your picture (or use it for free if allowed) from anyone sharing their pictures. The special practice has converged into something everyone can be part of making money on... as long as you create pictures that someone else wants.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

Looking beyond the masses...

Ariel Meadow Stallings wrote the book "Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives for Independent Brides". Can potentially inspire people to have a less narrow mindset about the perfect wedding... :-)

Now she is working for Microsoft and writes the blog Microspotting (Like the paparazzi but for geeks) She hunts down smart, interesting and geeky people, and this apparently supports changing peoples views about the typical "Microsoft" person. The atypical people will make the company appear more interesting for talents that previously might not have felt like a typical "Microsoft" person. It also shows that the company has a perspective that goes beyond work...
Smart.

Glowbots

Glowbots are small wheel-based robots, which communicates with each other and visually presents this as animated light patterns. The emerging patterns can be encouraged or discouraged by shaking the robots. The concept of Glowbots was initially inspired by the interests and experiences found among people that has lizards, spiders and snakes as pets. From interviews we found that such pets involve a different experience and relation, than what owning a dog or a cat does. Some expressed their pets as a hobby of breeding lizards with interesting patterns, without being interested in different personalities. Such findings were investigated as inspiration for these robots. The concept has now been technically implemented on a robotic platform called E-puck. Glowbots have been presented at Siggraph'07, Wired Next Fest'07 and will appear as a video at HRI'08. Furthermore, they have appeared in media such as Discovery news, and the New Scientist blog.

Glowbots project website