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Private lives Our personal details are used everywhere. And it’s more easy to share, mine and exploit them than ever before.

This new report by the UK think tank Demos is an up-close and personal investigation into how people feel about the use of their personal information. The British public might not be as reserved as we like to think.

The database society is not inherently good or bad. The best we can hope for is that it is as democratic as any of the institutions, markets, and regulatory and legal systems that exert power over our lives. The rules governing information use will determine our power as individuals in the database society and the powers that the state, businesses and other people have over us. As the infrastructure of the database society passes through a formative stage, it is important to understand more about the use of personal information is understood by the people it affects.

Democratising personal information does not only mean giving people a voice in the debate. It means finding better ways of listening to what they say. This pamphlet is about what people think about the use of their personal information. It sets out the findings of Demos’ ‘People’s Inquiry into Personal Information’, revealing the opinions and ideas expressed over 13 hours of deliberation. The inquiry demonstrates how to engage in the conversations that bring personal information decision-making closer to the people it affects.

Download pamphlet

Mystery David Sherwin argues in his blog that there are a few eerie similarities between the plotting of mystery novels and how designers should document design research findings.

“So how is the design research process anything like the plotting of a mystery novel? Let’s talk about the “B Story.” If you read a lot of mysteries or watch any kind of thrillers on TV or in the movie theater, then you’ve experienced this storytelling tactic. “

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Mystery David Sherwin argues in his blog that there are a few eerie similarities between the plotting of mystery novels and how designers should document design research findings.

“So how is the design research process anything like the plotting of a mystery novel? Let’s talk about the “B Story.” If you read a lot of mysteries or watch any kind of thrillers on TV or in the movie theater, then you’ve experienced this storytelling tactic. “

Read article

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Playfulness In his blog, Dan Lockton, a Ph.D. researcher at Brunel University (UK), describes eleven behavioural change patterns “drawn from games or modelled on more playful forms of influencing behaviour.”

“My main interest here is to extract the design techniques as very simple design patterns or ‘gambits’* that can be applied in other design situations outside games themselves, where designers would like to influence user behaviour (along with the other Design with Intent techniques). So these are (at least at present) presented simply as provocations: a “What if…?” question plus an example. The intention is that the card deck version will simply have what you see here, while the online version will have much more detail, references, links and reader/user-contributed examples and comments.”

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Augmented reality Charles Arthur investigates in The Observer [Sunday edition of The Guardian] how the ways in which we watch sport, read magazines and do business with each other could change for ever.

“Augmented reality – AR, as it has quickly become known – has only recently become a phrase that trips easily off technologists’ lips; yet we’ve been seeing versions of it for quite some time. The idea is straightforward enough: take a real-life scene, or (better) a video of a scene, and add some sort of explanatory data to it so that you can better understand what’s going on, or who the people in the scene are, or how to get to where you want to go.”

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