Some ads of "Haptics UI" for mobile in full spin in South Korea (Gimpo airport above and COEX center in Seoul below). The semantic of that word may be mysterious; from a Greek word which means “contact” or “touch” but it's definitely interesting to see it applied here. In the 90s, it was often em...
Anti-bump device for cars
Seen this afternoon in Jeju city in South Korea, this curious anti-bump device allows to less worry when you open up doors when parked too closely to others. I personally love how it clearly does not fit with the door material. ...
Latour on Anthropomorphism
Read in "Aramis, or the Love of Technology" by Bruno Latour: ""Anthropomorphism purports to establish a list of the capabilities that define humans and that it can then project through metaphors onto other beings - whales, gorillas, robots, a Macintosh, an Aramis, chips or bugs. The word anthropomo...
City board
Seen in Marseille last week, someone put these blank sheets of paper and ask people to "express themselves". Lowtech and not meant to resist to time but funny. Still bank 2 hours after. ...
Tune it yourself
In some situation, you really need to tune your interface yourself, write down which buttons will do what. Seen the other day in a pottery factory in the south of France. ...
Envisioning the world through the oligopticon
Re-reading "Paris: ville invisible" by Bruno Latour, I re-encountered the notion of "oligopticon" that he also defined in his "Thought Experiments in Social Science: from the Social Contract to Virtual Society" (on the 1st of April 1998): "That is not what sees everything, but what sees a little b...
Classy graphic equalizer
This classy HiFi equipment that I encountered yesterday on the street made me think about the importance, at a certain point in time, of revealing certain technical characteristic. The presence of the graphic equalizer displayed on the device definitely gives some cachet and might have created som...
Theories of embodiment
(A gestural interface tested in South Korea last year) How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design by Scott Klemmer, Björn Hartmann and Leila Takayama (DIS 2006) gives a relevant overview of different themes of interest for interaction designers focused on tangible/gestural interactions. ...
Pigeon and urban computing
A long time before Beatriz Da Costa's blogging pigeon, Dr. Julius Neubronner patented, in 1903 a miniature pigeon camera activated by a timing mechanism. Equipped with the cameras, the pigeons photographed a castle in Kronberg, Germany, around 1908. (Photographs courtesy of Deutsches Museum, Mun...
Locative media classification
Just found this interesting classification of locative media on Brian Degger's weblog. It's part of a talk he gave at ISEA2008: Why do I blog this? currently writing a book (in french though) about locative media, I am gathering some updates about locative media classification. Some interesting el...