Reading this article in The Economist about some problems encountered by scientific research, I stumble across this intriguing paragraph: "There also seems to be a bias towards publishing positive results. For instance, a study earlier this year found that among the studies submitted to America’s F...
Phone affordance
Phone affordance... for a phone and a door handle. Love the way one affordance can be transfered from one usage to another. The phone handle as a door handle and signage is an intriguing example. ...
William Gibson on scifi
New Scientist has a quick piece by William Gibson that is somewhat intriguing if you're interested in building near futures. A sort of extension of "the future is just here, it's not evenly distributed". See for example: "The single most useful thing I've learned from science fiction is that every ...
Portable gaming habits
Some insights from a recent study by NPD about portable gaming (collected from over 3,200 pre-identified sample owners of portable devices from September 16-23): "79 percent [of those polled say] they use their portable device in-home, far more than any other location. (...) Gameplay is the feature...
Future of economic and cultural exchange
Recently been working on the future of economic and cultural exchange with a good bunch of people. The project is called KashKlash and has the following purposes: "KashKlash is a lively platform where you can debate future scenarios for economic and cultural exchange. Beyond today’s financial turm...
Design and the Uncanny
(Spare parts from an old robot encountered last year) In "The Uncanny and The Everyday in the Design of Robots" (a paper submitted as a CHI workshop in 2004), Carl DiSalvo discusses an intriguing topic: how the design should not prevent people loosing sight how unusual certain artifacts are. He app...
Location-based war game
It's been a while that I haven't seen lot of innovation in the field of location-based games. It's as if the game play were always repeated (object collection, finding a human who have to escape...). There were some good projects about this in the past but the field has some trouble going beyond a ...
LBS troubles
Some material about location-based services... and how the user adoption of such artifact has been somewhat delayed (a topic I addressed copiously in my ETech 2008 presentation): First, this IHT article entitled "Still searching for profit in location-based services". It addresses how mobile operat...
Incomplete buildings
Incomplete buildings are something that fascinate me. The raw backbone of the buildings looks as if it had been never finished or strip naked after a momentarily stopped renovation. To me, the city of the near future definitely looks like this sort of architecture. And this fascination is not just...
Ethnography and design
In "Experience Models: Where Ethnography and Design Meet" presented at the EPIC2006 conference, Rachel Jones discusses the roles of ethnography in design. She gives a quick overview of the literature regarding this topic: "Identifying “sensitizing” concepts (the identification of researchable top...