Where the first picture only requires to gently caress the button, the second is strikingly more aggressive and requires the presence of an RFID tag to open up the access. In the first case, the symbol depicted is the hand, the situation is more complex in the second one with this non-universal p...
Folded map on the bike
A nicely folded map for a careful bike-rider? At first glance, its looks as if the owner folded a map intelligently to find his/her way in the city. But the same map is on every bike around and if you read it you notice that it's a warning about the upcoming removal of the bike. An interesting sig...
Expliciting the invisible: magnetic movie and pollstream
Two interesting projects that I ran across recently and which aims at making invisible phenomena more explicit: Magnetic movie b Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) shot at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, California, USA.: "In Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have taken the m...
Bottom-up urban practice: tune your city
Just saw that in a the newspaper this morning, there seems to be a guy in town who's attaching those little ashtray in various places because he's fed up of people throwing paper and cigarettes on the ground. A bottom-up urban fux of some sort if you want. ...
Public telephones and public space culture
URBAN TRACES - TELEPHONE is a project I recently stumbled acrosss, which examines public phones in different countries. Alina Tudor & Răzvan Neagoe sees public phones as a interesting sign of daily urban life that reveal the relationship between certain cultures and public space: "We start up from ...
Urban computing (behind the scene)
A recurring topic here, as seen in Zürich yesterday: what it takes to support urban computing: infrastructures and configuration issues. ...
Towards LIFT Asia
SO... LIFT is going to South Korea for LIFT Asia 08, a three-day event taking place on Che-Ju island on September 4, 5 and 6. As in Geneva, the conference theme revolves around social change in information society. What we mean by that is that we will focus on the influence of technologies such as ...
Renamed bus stops
Seen in Torino, last week. The practice of changing names (and also to put a random "grazie"). ...
Hertzian space and architecture
Obviously related to my talk about the invisiblity of ubicomp, Kazys Varnelis wrote an intersting A+U paper that you can find on his blog about how we live in "Hertzian space" the cloud of electromagnetic radiation that surrounds us and wonder how architecture that actively engage Hertzian space wo...
Salient design factors for kinetic user interfaces
In a recent issue of Communications of the ACM, Designing kinetic interactions for organic user interfaces, Parkes, Poupyrev and Ishii reflects on the notion of "kinetic user interface": "Kinetic interaction design forms part of the larger framework of Organic User Interfaces (OUI) discussed in the...