Read in Freud’s Civilization and its discontents “Now let us make the fantastic supposition that Rome were not a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity with just as long and varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had ...
Read More“Asymmetric gaming” as described here: providing players different control schemes and specialized objectives in the same game scenario. This is a departure from traditional console game mechanics. Most current games involve a discrete set of role...
Read MoreFound in Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press: “If one had to summarize the contribution of the medieval and early modern struggle over the proper...
Read MoreA great quote by Craig Stecyk, 1975: “two hundred years of american technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential. but it was the minds of 11 year olds that could see that potential.”
Read MoreNot exactly your über cool high-flying drone, but I find remote-controlled cars like this fascinating. The real-time perspective, via the goggles, might be weird.
Read More“Biotic video-game” or more thoroughly described in Design, engineering and utility of biotic games by Ingmar H. Riedel-Kruse , Alice M. Chung , Burak Dura , Andrea L. Hamilton and Byung C. Lee (2011): Games are a significant and defining part o...
Read MoreWorking on the “Curious Ritual” book project, I found that interview of Bruce Sterling very much in line with what we are exploring (with field observations as the one represented above): Tish Shute: This year we have seen gestural interfaces go m...
Read MoreThis is the Nissan LEAF Start-Up Sounds, which is an electric car and, as such produce almost no noise when starting.Why do I blog this? Preparing our design fiction video in the Curious Rituals project, Walt showed us this sound as an interesting ex...
Read MoreA curious project by Antonin Fourneau The “Water Light Graffiti” is a surface made of thousands of LED illuminated by the contact of water. You can use a paintbrush, a water atomizer, your fingers or anything damp to sketch a brightness message or...
Read More“Hard time on planet Earth” is an American science fiction series that aired on CBS in 1989 and caught my attention at the time because of the weird floating robot that constantly moved around the main character. According to the Wikipedia: Afte...
Read MoreDespite its flawed title, reading My Life as a Telecommuting Robot was intriguing enough. Some excerpts: During my robot days, I interacted with co-workers I’d never met before, as well as others I hadn’t talked with in years; each of them was com...
Read MoreDephone, by Maria Beltran (Master Media Design, HEAD-Genève): Smartphones have spread into our daily lives. Their multifunctionality monopolizes the attention and contributes to the addiction of users. Everyday behaviors have changed considerably and...
Read MoreMeanwhile in Switzerland: sheep to warn shepherds of wolf attacks by SMS: During the experiment, the change in the flock’s heartbeat was found to be significant enough to imagine a system whereby the sheep could be fitted with a collar that releases...
Read More“Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science:Those seven warning signs are: Discoverers make their claims directly to the popular media, rather than to fellow scientists. Discoverers claim that a conspiracy has tried to suppress the discovery. The claimed ...
Read MoreThe Leaky Future Conjecture: The Leaky Future Conjecture (LFC) asks “What if nature were able to leak information from the future to its own past?” Although human-like time travelers are standard fare in Science Fiction, the conjecture makes no pr...
Read MoreLittletechie That’s London, my five-year-old son. He likes technology and gadgets a whole lot. Seriously. Little Techie is a spot to showcase his “creations” and day-to-day life as a tiny little tech geek. Because sometimes being a geek is maj...
Read More(via) Read in Wired, a sociologist, Esther Kim from Yale University was interested in the tactics employed by people to keep a free seat in the bus: Avoid eye contact Lean against the window and stretch out your legs. Sit on the aisle seat and listen...
Read MoreTurkopticon: Almost half of the Mechanical Turk workers who wrote their Bill of Rights demanded protection from employers who take their work without paying. Turkopticon lets you REPORT and AVOID shady employers. […] Turkopticon adds functionality t...
Read MoreMars Rover “A set of low-resolution gray scale Hazcam images will be acquired within minutes of landing on the surface,” said Justin Maki of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Once all of the critical systems have been check...
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An insightful excerpt from NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America by Constance Penley:
"the original star trek had a curious ambivalent relation to the representation of futuristic technology. Although the producers of the show consulted scientists, engineers, and technicians in their efforts to make the science and technology plausible, they decided finally to give only the barest and sketchiest of outlines to keep, for example the design of the ship and the various scientific, medical, and military instruments extremely basic and simple. Not only was this decision an economical one (for example, some of Dr. McCoy's medical instruments were made from salt-shakers), simplicity helped to ensure that the technology would not quickly look dated. "Phasers," "tricorders," "communicators,", "scanners", "photo torpedoes," and "warp drive" were therefore designed to reveal their functions without divulging anything about how they were actually supposed to work"
Why do I blog this? Currently working on a design fiction project in video format, we had to wonder about similar issues. In our project, the idea is to explore the type of curious gestures that may appear in five years time with the usage of new digital technologies. In the film, the characters will have things such as augmented reality glasses, brain-computer interfaces or "virtual closets"... which of course led us to wonder about the appearance of such devices. What kind of style should it reflect? How to avoid making them too glossy or passé? How can we taken into account vintage trends from 2017?