People interested in tangible/gestural interfaces and mobile devices may be intrigued by this patent filed by Apple. Called "Techniques for interactive input to portable electronic devices", the patent is about: "A game input area (surface or plane) receives input for multiple applications includin...
mundane creativity
Mundane creativity is always fascinating. Even when standing at a tram stop, you encounter these little details which make you wondering about the wisdom of people. The guy's shoes protection made out of plastic bag is a tangible representation of this (certainly of interest with an unexpected rai...
Product ecology as a design framework
Recently, in my daily data farming, I ran across several sources mentioning the notion of "product ecology". It generally refers to how (interaction) design broaden its focus from systems targeted on one person to more socially or culturally situated products. Among the sources about this, Jodi For...
Royal McBee interface
Another week-end encounter. A Royal McBee computer/typewriter, heir to one of the non-human participant of the "The Sory of Mel". Why do I blog this? documenting different sorts of interface. There was a time when human-machine interfaces were not so homogeneous and you had both keypads, switches,...
design+future+optimism
In the last issue of ACM interactions, Richard Seymour has this good piece entitled "Optimistic futurism" in which he articulates an interesting vision of design+foresight. After discussing how a wave of relevant innovation stopped around the 70s ("what the hell happened to the future") people real...
don't touch my touch screen
Taken today while visiting a big industrial factory. The left sticker says: "touch screen: no BEWARE: don't touch the screen... except me: I am the operator" and the right one says "Don't touch my screen". It reads like a Kraftwerk song. I found interesting the existence of these stickers which gi...
How to refer to people
As discussed by David R. Millen in Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research "Even the terminology used to describe the research sample belies different research perspectives. For example, psychologists refer to subjects, HCI researchers talk about users, market researcher...
Geography of cloud computing
The ever-growing need of relying on server infrastructure caused by cloud computing is an interesting recombination of space and technology. The Economist has a good piece about "where the cloud touches down", i.e. where to locate data centres and server farms. The fact that these facilities spring...
Miyamoto on alternative controllers
A recent interview of Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto by Chris Kohler (Wired) deals with alternative game controllers employed with casual/sport applications: "I'd always wanted to try to find a way to make a game out of that, and I felt that with the Wii, that's something that I would normally do in ...
Status of objects
Encountered in a french hotel lately. With the flat affordance of screens, TVs can get a status update through this sort of frame. Supposed to be classier? or to fade in the background. On a more ironic glance, it can look as the deification of TV. ...