A computer system is much more than just code: it consists of technology, its users and the processes that they follow. User experience (UX) covers all aspects of users’ interaction with products and services and how they are perceived, learnt and used. UX design prioritizes human values and relationships in the development of technology, to derive maximum value from our interactions with it. It...
The digital revolution of the first decade of this new century has brought many wonders, yet it has also has ushered in a bewildering array of unanticipated consequences. We now find ourselves in a volatile and hyperconnected world where risk has been globalized. Our tightly-coupled systems have become interdependent, creating feedback loops so complex that predictive analysis is of...
Global Pulse is predicated on the understanding that today “new data” is being generated as a by-product of people’s activities at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. That deluge of passively produced data may hold insights about how, for better or worse, people’s lives are impacted by shocks like volatility in food and fuel prices.
Part of Global Pulse’s approach is learning how to...
Last year, we launched a large-scale mobile phone based survey to ask people from five countries in different regions of the world how they are dealing with the effects of the global economic crisis. In June of this year we partnered with Visualizing.org to host “Giving Voice to the Vulnerable through Data and Design”: a challenge to visualize the voices of vulnerable populations in times of...
On July 14th and 15th, Global Pulse hosted “Towards a Real-Time Understanding of Emerging Vulnerability,“ a conference for UN partners from 9 agencies and 8 countries to share research findings on how the world’s most vulnerable populations were affected by the economic crises in different sectors, and to explore whether (and how) we can do crisis impact assessments more rapidly in the future.
As...
The submission deadline is quickly approaching (July 25) for a data visualization challenge we are hosting with Visualizing.org, “Giving Voice to the Vulnerable through Data and Design,” and we are particularly excited to review the submissions. Everyone who submits a visualization that helps shed new light on the dataset will be making a huge contribution to the Global Pulse initiative, and here...
Our international development colleagues sometimes describe the Global Pulse tech work as “that weird stuff over there.” I suspect we do a little more than that, and that it’s worth explaining the tech every so often.
With that, these are the five big things going on with Global Pulse technology at the moment, and how to get involved in them:
Hunchworks
This is one of the most exciting projects...
We are very excited to announce "Giving Voice to the Vulnerable Through Data and Design," a 6-week challenge with Visualizing.org, to visualize results from an SMS survey on how people are coping with the economic downturn in 5 countries.
Last year we worked with MobileActive.org to implement a mobile phone based survey gathering bottom-up information from everyday citizens in order to gain a...
The use of mobile phones for quick-time data collection is proliferating around the world. To get a better understanding of the scale and scope of these new data collection efforts, the Global Pulse initiative partnered with MobileActive.org, a global network of people using mobile technology for social change, to conduct a survey of present and planned mobile data collection efforts. The survey...