Another category of service you find on the street in Peru (as well as other countries) is the public scribe (in Ayaviri above and Arequipa below). Generally sat somewhere at a desk or on stairs, aided by a typewriter, he/she serve the needy illiterate to writer different things, especially admini...
Hands on
The NYT had a good piece about how digital designers rediscover hands-on activities. With examples from Adobe and Mike Kuniavsky's Sketching in Hardware gatherings, the article describes the renewed interest in manual tinkering "or innovating with the aid of human hands". Some of the reasons for th...
Ambivalence towards future and design
"The best way to invent the future is to predict it"John Perry Barlow - The Future of Prediction (2004), In Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, Sandra Ball-Rokeach (Eds). Technological Visions, p. 177. "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" Alan Kay - Early meeting in 1971 of PARC, Palo A...
GPS-related accidents
Not the best technical source but some intriguing GPS-related accidents are described in the Mirror: "SCOTLAND: In May, Scottish ambulance drivers were told to ignore their new £5m satnav system and use maps instead after drivers complained they were not being directed by the quickest route to 999 ...
Bricks from the ground
Turning raw material into "concrete" and actionable items for building constructions. Or, how to create bricks from the ground and then sell them to others. Can only be done in the dry season using a wooden mold. Seen in Canyon de Colca, Peru. What is interesting here is the proximity between the ...
Llamadas: mobile+human pay phone
One of the most interesting service you find on the street in Peru (and I am sure you can also get it in other countries) is the "llamadas". It's generally women or teenagers with a bundle of mobile phones and a stop-watch who act as pay phones. They wear colorful clothes with mobile carriers bran...
Phone affordance on manhole cover
A remnant from a past affordance found in a city environment. Seen in Lima, Peru. When manhole cover allowing the access to phone lines take the shape of rotary telephones (for post-80 reader people had to "rotary dial" a phone number). ...
Taleb's "fooled by randomness"
Reading "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets" (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) in the midst of Peru was a pleasant thing. Basically, Taleb, a "post-trader" gives an interesting account of how human judgement is fallible, especially because we tend to fall in the apophe...
Back here
Back from Peru Where magic is also used as a teaser to make you employ technological artifacts (such as Internet/TV cable in this case). ...
on vacation
back in 2 weeks, ta ...