It's friday afternoon and the week-end is almost there so it's a good time to read few things about Buckminster Fuller, isn't it? First in Metropolis, there's an interesting overview of his "legacy" by colleagues and admirers. And second, Popular Mechanics have a sort of retrospective called "10 Go...
Ubiquitous computing vision flaws
Thinking about ubiquitous computing and the so-called "internet of things" lately, I have started to recognize the underlying process and how it is engineered. It's as if the starting point was the "social" which is then cut in different chunks and "places": home, work, etc... and then a second dif...
"Design in the age of intelligent maps"
(Maps of optic fiber routes in an urban environment taken from Jef Huang's talk at the world congress of architecture) Meanwhile, on the urban computing front, Adobe Think Tank featured an insightful article by Karzys Varnelis and Leah Meisterlin entitled "The invisible city: Design in the age of ...
Real-time information about electricity production
A basic instance of revealing the invisible through technology (urban computing!?). These simple electronic displays give some information about the production of electricity by solar panels located on this parking lot rooftop. Seen in Lyon, France yesterday, it actually represents the real-time p...
Superposition of urban layers
Some cities are amazingly good at keeping the different layers which constitute the "urban envelope". In this example taken from Zürich last week, remnants from an old building have been kept to create a colorful playground. Where other cultures/regulation would tear it down, the city of Zürich am...
Different sorts of touch-screen technologies
An interesting short description of common touch-screen technologies on by AP described by Peter Svensson: " Resistive (Palm Treos, HTC phones and the Samsung Instinct.): Two layers of clear conductive material lie on top of the display. Pressing them together makes current flow between them. Res...
The nature of prototypes in design
In the last TOCHI issue, there is this paper called The anatomy of prototypes: Prototypes as filters, prototypes as manifestations of design ideas by Lim, Stolterman and Josh Tenenberg which deals with prototypes in HCI and design. They state how the role of prototype is well known but there's a la...
Hacking and pervasive computing
This summer issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing is especially focused on hacking and its role in the field of pervasive/ubiquitous computing. As Roy Want, puts it into his editorial introduction, hacking can play a powerful role in pervasive computing as it can inspire "thought processes and reduce t...
While visiting a glass dump
... made me thing of Person, M. & Shanks, M. Theatre/Archaeology, London: Routledge (2001): "The archaeological experience of ruin, decay and site formation processes reveals something vital about social reality, but something which is usually disavowed. Decay and ruin reveal the symmetry of peopl...
"A Social Dimension for Digital Architectural Practice" by Chris Speed
Chris Speed's PhD thesis seems very relevant for people interested in architecture and digital technologies, and more specifically the notion of "social navigation": "Through a literature review of the introduction and development of digital technologies to architectural practice, the thesis identi...