What's up here!?

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Sorry for the silence here but the last few weeks have been super hectic because of various projects. So, as a quick summary of what I'm up to:

  • I just finished writing the French manuscript of a book about the history of game controllers. It's called "Joypads! Le design des manettes" and it's going to be published in January 2013 by Les Moutons Electriques (The Electric Sheeps), a Lyon-based editor. The book is a joint project with Laurent Bolli from Bread and Butter/OZWE in Lausanne.
  • With the laboratory, we organized a workshop in Detroit called "To Be Designed" that focused on " the hands-on, pragmatic ways in which one can imagine and then create things from and for the near future." It was a great event and I still have to publish my notes.
  • The Print-On-Demand version of the "Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday" book is almost ready. We had to spent some time fine-tuning the last bits.
  • The school year resumed and I'm currently preparing different courses at the Geneva University of Arts and Design. There's going to be a workshop at the end of the month about design and ethnography, in which we'll focus on urban animals. There's another class at EPFL about design process, and a seminar class about the history of interaction design. On top of that, I have 6 masters students for whom I'm a masters thesis tutor.
  • At the design school here in Geneva (where I work part-time), I just received a research grant for a study about the relationship between ethnography and interaction design. More about this later.
  • Raphael Grignani and I are working on a week-long workshop at ENSCI-Les Ateliers in Paris.
  • For a client, as a follow-up to last summer's field study about car-sharing in the US, I'm going to do a series of interviews and observations in Switzerland. For another client in Madrid, there's also going to be a workshop about digital data in November.
  • There are several talks lined up in the near future (UX Paris, a game-related conference in Hamburg, a design lecture in Edinburgh, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston) but I'm accepting less and less of these. Mostly because my schedule is a mess and also because it's hard to be productive (or relaxed) when always on the road.
  • After organizing half of the program at Lift France, I'm taking care of three sessions at Lift 13 and will do a workshop there about urban bricolage.

Phew... and that's why there's less time to blog.

Outcomes of Curious Ritual project

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Time for presenting summer project outcomes! In July and August, I spent two months in the Media Design Program department at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. As I mentioned few weeks ago, the project was called CURIOUS RITUALS: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday and focused on the postures, gestures and habits related to digital devices such as laptops, cell phones, remote-controls, sensors or robots.

Along with Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu, we produced two things: (1) A book (.PDF, 3.1Mb) documenting current digital gestures (based on a preleminary field study in European cities and in Southern California, with essays from Dan Hill and Julian Bleecker), (2) A design fiction film that speculate about their evolution in the near future.

I'll post more material about the project in the next few weeks (approach, rationale, findings).