Reading this report on "the impacts of CCTV in the UK, I was struck by some points in the conclusion: "crime rates appeared to the authors to be a poor measure of the effectiveness of CCTV. The problem about measuring outcomes in terms of overall crime rates was that they disguised some important s...
User acceptance of the smart fridge
The Internet of things field has given, for quite a long time, a prime position to the fridge as the sort of stereotypical device one could "augment". The ubiquity of this artifact, as well as its size and position, made it a good candidate to become the target of ubiquitous computing researchers. ...
Spacewar
Steve russell, quoted by Steward Brand, in the legendary Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums published in Rolling Stones in 1972: "We had this brand new PDP-l, it was the first minicomputer, ridiculously inexpensive for its time. And it was just sitting there. It had a...
Exquisite mobile
An intriguing design process discussed this afternoon at the MobiKUI workshop: Paul Coulton introduced this basic way to think about mobile sensor-based applications based on the exquisite corpse model: you take 3 dices, throw them and it gives you the design brief: design an application that use t...
How design adds to foresight
The relationship between design and foresight has been a recurring interest in the last few years. It interestingly draws some questions such as "can design help futures research?", "can we define foresight as long-range design?", etc. This is why I found interesting the interview of Nathan Shedrof...
Nomadic posture
Nomadic posture seen at Boston Airport, and few minutes after, as it is not very easy to stay in that position, there's a new posture: Difficult to find comfort close to the electric plug. Laptops and contortions, a long history. ...
Design Engaged 2008
Very good week-end in Montreal at Design Engaged few days ago. Took time to cobble my notes form the whole thing. DE is a designers get-together with a good mixture of practitioners and theorists. The events itself is not a conference nor a workshop but a sort of informal gathering of people who t...
Uncanny valley variability
Which part of this bear encountered yesterday at MIT Medialab is close to the Uncanny Valley? The bear-head-shaped face? The way it looks down? the fur-like body parts? or the explosive body wiring? Is the furry part more uncanny than the head? ...
Household cable wiring
Some other intriguing examples of apparent infrastructures in Cambridge (USA): the different sorts of cable wiring. Different boxes, different providers. Sometimes even boxes are removed, leaving only the wiring. ...
tangible@home
Quick talk at MIT Medialab this afternoon, during the "tangible interfaces" course of Hiroshi Ishii. It's called "Tangible@home". The presentation is a very brief overview of the work I am pursuing in terms of UX research. After a quick description of the devices I am interested in and methods I us...