When it comes to bike rental platforms, I am often intrigued by how digital technologies are employed and for what purposes. A description of how italian biking solution Bicincittà describes it in detail: "Monitoring and organizational systems: Every movement of the bicycles is transmitted to a ser...
"Everyday Engineering": be inquisitive about your environment
"Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See" is a nice little booklet by Andrew Burroughs from IDEO. A bit in the same vein of "Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design" by Jane Fulton Suri, is about all these small things and details that I sometimes blog about: observations about the wor...
A taxonomy of "coded domestic objects":
In Software, Objects and Home Space, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin (Environment and Planning A) examine the relationship between objects and software in detail. They describe how ubiquitous computing - through the embedding of sensors and computation in objects - is transforming daily artifacts, giv...
The design and fading of pinball games
Last week, the NYT had an intriguing story about pinball machines, or - more specifically - the survivor of the pinball industry. Some excerpts I found interesting below: About how it went downhill ("a painful fading") that may be "turned around": "“There are a lot of things I look at and scratch m...
Roads patterns following biological patterns
Belle Dumé in the NewScientist addressed recently the idea that city road networks grow like biological systems. The article is basically a description of the academic work of Marc Barthélemy and Alessandro Flammini who analysed street pattern data from roughly 300 cities, including Brasilia, Cairo...
Waiting and mirrors
Read in The Psychology of Waiting Lines by David Maister (1985): "the example of ‘the well-known hotel group that received complaints from guests about excessive waiting times for elevators. After an analysis of how elevator service might be improved, it was suggested that mirrors be installed near...
User research and informed opinions
An interesting sidebar from an old issue of game developer (november 2007) called "usability research commandment" by Randy Pagulayan (Microsoft Game Studio user reasearch) deal with the relationship between user experience researchers and designers. Some excerpt that I find interesting and relevan...
Text clothes
Back during the first internet bubble, mobile computing was already a hot thing and people start having ideas about how to connect things and people. One of them was Skim which enabled a sort of physical to digital connection through a identification number written a piece of clothes that you can t...
When the affordance is not enough...
The need to put a "bell" arrow sticker to indicate the button position. ...
Elephant path or desire line
Another synonym for elephant path: desire line. According to the Wikipedia: "A desire line is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of...