"Interactionist AI and the promise of ubicomp, or, how to put your box in the world without putting the world in your box" by Lehau, Sengers and Matcas makes an interesting analogy between Ubiquitous Computing and the situation encountered by Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s. They state how the...
Pre-computing dashboard
A fascinating stack of notes with numbers, additions and corrections encountered recently in a very old-school french grocery store. This awfully nice pile of duct-taped paper looks very pre-computing and surely plays more role than calculations: it's clearly as dashboard for the salesman as he to...
About near-future SF
Back in the days, Regine's blog "We Make Money Not Art" was still called "near near future", a name I was really fascinated of, as it implied how the short term is on the verge of going something different, more curious with intriguing alternatives. The near future laboratory's rationale of course ...
Proxemics in service design
The importance of proxemics in service design. Two examples of signage that warn people to keep a certain distance with each others in a (1) booth context (Switzerland), (2) vending machine context (France). These signs are interesting cultural cues showing the value of space between people and ...
Bringing the "real" to design through user experience research
The link between user research and design is a topic I focus on even more closely than in the past, perhaps because of my involvement in different design courses. More specifically, I am interested in how user research can be relevant for design purposes and what are the underlying process one can ...
Felix Petersen on the geoweb (web2 expo berlin)
Super quick notes from Felix Petersen's talk last week at Web2.0 Expo in Berlin. Felix founded Plazes, a web-supported location-based service in 2006. He basically built upon his experience to describe the state of the geoweb in 2008 (excuse the rawness of my notes): "founded in 2006 / one of the f...
air interaction
Browsing through weird interfaces, I ran across this air-augmented display. It's called BYU-BYU-View and it basically adds air to the interaction between a user and a virtual environment, and communication through a network, by integrating the graphics presentation with wind inputs and outputs on ...
Design approach and capturing the "needs"
In the latest issue of ACM interactions, Steve Portigal's column is a categorization of different "approaches to making stuff" that I found both insightful and ironically intriguing: "Be a Genius and Get It Right (James Dyson): Be a Genius and Get It Wrong (Dean Kamen) Don't Ask Customers If This I...
Vocabulary of touch
Quick wordle after a discussion I had about touch with Timo last week. Each of these words can lead to ask interesting questions regarding interface affordance, vocabulary of interactions as well as how create human-legible touch interactions. Exercise: take each of these terms and a technological...
Lift09: where did the future go?
As I already discussed here, the topic of Lift09 (25,26,27 Feb. 2009) will be "Where did the future go?": "After three successful editions in Geneva, two events in South Korea, we are preparing for the 4th edition of Lift in Switzerland (February 25-26-27, 2009). This year, the topic will be "Where...