When Fabien and I had to find a title for our photo booklet "Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities", the notion of "friction" came up very easily in the conversation. Having read few books by Lefebvre in the last few years, it was certainly one of the reason for picking up ...
Technical issues regarding location-based services
In an IEEE article called "Location-Based Services: Back to the Future", Paolo Bellavista, Axel Küpper, and Sumi Helal gives an interesting overview of the technical issues regarding location-based services. They take an intriguing viewpoint: projecting themselves in 2012 and backasting to discuss ...
How homeless people perceive urban and mobile technologies
If there's a population that is often overlooked (or dismissed) by urban designers or urban technology engineers, it's definitely the homeless. A CHI 2008 paper by Le Dantec and Edwards entitled "Designs on Dignity: Perceptions of Technology Among the Homeless" deals with this topic, trying to unde...
The complexity of urban signs
Lots of signs on that picture taken in Geneva. Different meanings, some are official (street number), some aren't (graffitis); some are about navigation (street number), some about making explicit invisible phenomenon (the purple rainbow shows the availability of the wifi signal), some are easy-to...
Mapping The Emerging Urban Landscape
"Trace: Mapping The Emerging Urban Landscape" by Alison Sant is an interesting article if you're interested in the whole debate about digital traces and how wireless networks and mobile devices are "reforming our contemporary notions of urban place". It deals with a topic I am interested in, which ...
Shopping carts culture
Beyond molested bicycles, street cleaning vehicles and bad wiring, shopping carts are highly ranked in my list of intriguing city devices. One of the reason is because there is always a small proportion of carts that are stolen, abandoned or used or other purposes. Some examples easily comes to min...
Vocabulary of public transport ticket validation
The vocabulary of interaction in this sequence of devices aimed at validating public transport cards in France: "validate here", "punch your ticket", "leave your card here". It's interesting to nice that only the "touch interface" explicitly tell people where to touch the card ("here"), whereas th...
Map obstacles for disabled people with GPS phones
GENEVE*accessible by Antoni Abad is an intriguing project launched by the city of Geneva in partnership with the Handicap Architecture Urbanisme (HAU) association, with the purpose of making travelling easier for the disabled. The project is simple: disabled phone are handed out GPS-enabled mobile...
Assumption of seamlessness and cellphone boosters
Cell phone booster/repeater solution seems to be a trendy path lately, as shown by this NYT article which presents devices such as femtocell to extend mobile phone service coverage indoors, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable. What I find interesting here is less the t...
Sensors in condoms
Found here, a new vector in ubiquitous computing: "A musical condom designed to play louder and faster as lovers reach a climax is to go on sale in Ukraine. Grigoriy Chausovsky, from Zaporozhye, said his condoms came fitted with a special sensor that registers when the condom is put on. It transmit...