Is the Internet best represented by the "e", the "a" or the "i"? Quick review of internet signage in Seoul/Incheon. What letter suits best for what culture? If "A" is pretty common, the others are also employed. ...
What it takes to have all have these swimming pools
The sort of machinery you have underneath hostels here in Jeju island, to make swimming pool working. The incredible size of infrastructure, always hidden from the "users" (no to mention the waste generated by this kind of device). ...
Take-aways from LIFT Asia
Some notes Laurent and myself prepared for the wrap up, insisting on the following take-home issues, the image that takes shape after the conference is done: experience of space: physical space change, the way we perceive and interact in space is modified. Christian Lindholm talked about wifi plac...
Robot session @ LIFT Asia
Saturday morning at LIFT Asia 2008, quick notes. Frederic Kaplan began his talk by stating that the number of object we have at home is huge (nearly 3500), all of them have different "value profile". he showed curves that capture the evolution of the experienced value of an object). See the curve b...
Jan Chipchase @ LIFT Asia 2008
In this session, focused on mobile technologies, the first speaker was Jan Chipchase. His "Future Social" presentation relied on examples of technology use behaviors to show trends that both disrupt these behaviours and generate new social practices. He basically used cases from his field study and...
"Networked cities" session at LIFT Asia 2008
(Special fav session at LIFT Asia 2008 this morning since this topic is linked to my own research, my quick notes) Adam Greenfield's talk "The Long Here, the Big Now... and other tales of the networked city" was the follow-up of his "The City is Here for You to Use". Adam's approach here was "not t...
What is beauty?
Great quote discussed by Christian Lindholm in his LIFT Asia talk:"Beauty: the adjustement of all parts proportionally so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole" Leon Battista Alberti, 1435 ...
Eric Rodenbeck at LIFT Asia 2008
Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen, design studio in SF) just gave a nice presentation in the "Beyond the Web we know" session. He indeed showed a less known part of Web, in the shadow of social media frenziness: rich data visualization. At his studio, Eric and his team work with flows of data (from the intern...
Intentionally slow
An interesting encounter yesterday at the conference center in Jeju is this sign, which reveal to the user why the elevator is so slow: it has been design for that purpose. Sort of the equivalent of "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_foodslow food" for micro-mobility transportation system. Why do ...
Diagrams and visuals in anthropology
("Tuamotuan Conception of the Cosmos", by Paiore, 1820) Recently looking at how to shape ethnographic results in an adequate form for designers, reading Dori Tunstall's post about how "anthropology has always been visual" is very relevant. She points to this Flickr pool entitled "Great Diagrams in ...