An intriguing example of location-based annotation. This red brick inserted in the pavement on Rue de la République in Lyon (France) indicates that former french president Sadi Carnot had been assassinated here on June 25th, 1894. The sort of things that people want to replicate online, but it gen...
What, How, Why automation
In What Should be Automated?, Matti Tedre discusses the fundamental flaw in the debate around automation. The question should not be "what should be automated?" but instead "How can one automate things efficiently and reliably?", which then shifted to "why things should be automated?": "since the 1...
Some design choices for touch interfaces
vertical or horizontal swipe? avoid too much effort, unlike: and, in the end, your aim should be that you reach what Adam calls "information processing dissolving in behavior": (observed in Paris last week) ...
The city, being measured
Some measurement devices, capturing and collecting data about the urban environment (paris above, geneva below). The sort of stuff which allows some people to design mash-ups, chronotopic representations and visualizations. ...
Tesla on wireless electricity
Being involved in a project about the Internet of Things and electricity consumption led me back to some stunning texts by Nikola Tesla, written back at the end of the 19th century. For instance, in "On Electricity", "I wish much to tell you on this occasion—I may say I actually burn for desire o...
Locative versus non locative social practices
In her short paper entitled Understanding Socio-locative Practices", Ingrid Erickson describes her research project, which aims at understanding the motivations behind and impacts of what she calls "new socio-locative practices: geotagging online photographs or microblogging using location-based pr...
Wii-like consoles
Digging some material for a project about gestural interfaces in France lately, I stumbled across this sudden (and curious) surge of Wii-like platform, see for example these 3 devices: First, the technigame, a very rouge game console which allows to play bowling/soccer/tennis with a stick that has...
Overmodern in the present
Marc Augé on space and place issues regarding subway practices in this interview: "JPC: The subtitle of Non-lieux is "An introduction to an anthropology of the overmodern." What can you say about this phrase? MA: The word "overmodern" is an attempt to suggest the logic of excess at work in our pres...
Remediating both gramophone and photography with a tape recorder
There is this moment in time when companies (after accounting computations and equation solving) release this sort of things and wonder about what sorts of added value it will have for people. The tape recorder was not primarily marketed as a music-playing device. It was meant to store memorable m...
"i work in ubiquitous computing"
Often bemused by the "on the internet" versus "in the internet" debate, it's intriguing that the only person we can find who refers to "i work in ubiquitous computing" was late Mark Weiser (see on his website). A google query on "i work in ubiquitous computing" seems to confirm it. ...