Last week in Torino, Italy, I spent some time in the Lingotto building which was a huge FIAT car factory built from 1916 and opened in 1923. A place Le Corbusier called it "one of the most impressive sights in industry", and "a guideline for town planning". It's now a complex, with concert halls, ...
Bruce Sterling about failed futures
In his talk at Frontiers of Interaction in Torino, Italy last week, Bruce Sterling dealt with the failure of technology and why we don't have jetpacks or flying cars: "to say a word is not the same as engineer a thing (...) we/people think it's a smooth and practical process but it's not (...) they...
Delineating the future of making
The IFTF recently released an interesting "future map" called "Future of Making Map: "Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the...
21st Century Digital Boy
"I cant believe it, the way you look sometimes,Like a trampled flag on a city street, oh yeah, And I dont want it, the things youre offering me, Symbolized bar code, quick id, oh yeah, cause Im a 21st century digital boy, I dont know how to live but Ive got a lot of toys, My daddys a lazy middle cl...
Map for blind
How to represent a map for blind people. Seen this week in Torino. ...
Overtrusting technology?
Some device usages sometimes rely on a great confidence of certain technologies. ...
Change in urban environments in the past centuries
In their introduction to the great "Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilites and the Urban Condition" book, Graham and Marvin describes the 5 most important changes cities and urban infrastructures have experienced in the past century: "the intensity, power and rea...
From Ubiquitous Technologies to Human Context (World Congress of Architecture)
Yesterday in Turin, Italy for the World Congress of Architecture (UIA) where I've been asked by the organizers to put together a session about ubiquitous computing and human needs/desires. It was called “From Ubiquitous Technologies to Human Context" and three great speakers joined me on stage: Ada...
Digital Yet Invisible: Making Ambient Informatics More Explicit to People
In Torino today for the Frontiers of Interaction conference where I've just given a talk entitled "Digital Yet Invisible: Making Ambient Informatics More Explicit to People". Slides can be found here. The talk was about the paradoxical relationship between visibility and ubiquitous computing, a to...
Visualizing the information distance between cities
(via), City Distance is a neat project by bestirario that aims at measuring informational distance between cities. What this means is simple: it creates a visual representation of the the world comparing real geographical distances with informational distances as defined by Google: "This tridimens...