Paul Saffo's talk at the Long Now Foundation (MP3 here) is a very good overview of foresight research heuristics/rules of thumbs/methods. Some notes: "Hunt of Bin Laden, experts agree, Al Qaeda leader is dead or alive" is a great forecast because it accurately captures the uncertainty of the momen...
The Wire about design issues
Watching "The Wire - The Complete Second Season" (Ernest Dickerson), there is this interesting moment in Episode 5 (around minutes 47:00 to 47.56) where the dockers are explaining how technologies often fail. It deals with both radio-wave signals and handheld computers: "That's cans, containers, co...
Victor Scardigli: the meaning/direction of technique
It's often when reading obscure and never translated european writers that I find the most intriguing ideas, especially when it comes to foresight and innovation. The book "Les sens de la Technique" by Victor Scardigli is no exception to this; the title is a sort of pun since "sens" in french means...
Reasons for some failed futures
Being interested in technological failures, I read "Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived" by Daniel H. Wilson. Some excerpts that I found interesting, related to causes of failures: "Jetpack: "the development of the jetpack effectively ceased the day...
Tech Report about designing multi-user location-aware applications
A recent EPFL Technical report I wrote with Fabien Girardin and Pierre Dillenbourg: A Descriptive Framework to Design for Mutual Location-Awareness in Ubiquitous Computing. "The following paper provides developers, designers and researchers of location-aware applications with a descriptive framewor...
Different layers of information
Seen in Verona, Italy last week-end. Different layers of information, some official (regular signage), some more informal (badly written with Tipp-Ex, to state that drugs can be find on the right). Another way to communicate that information is to use shoes hung onto a telephone wire as seen on th...
Henry Petroski about design, failures and compromises
Among my readings during Easter was this "Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design" by Henry Petroski. The whole book is about design as a compromise in response to constraints, illustrated by stories concerning automobile cup holders, duct tape, WD-40, paper cups/bags and the device...
Old technologies which are still around
Reading this piece on ZDnet that I flagged few months ago, I stumbled across interesting figures: In 2007, Minitel traffic and services generated 100 Millions Euros (shared between the french provider France Telecom and third parties) through to 4000 "services" (sort of the equivalent of websites...
Location-based annotation
A location-based annotation that indicates when water overflowed that street in paris. Interesting marker of the past (from 1910) that aims at reminding a different state of the environment. That's the sort of Holy Grail for mobile phone service developers... who try to promote a digital equivalen...
Intelligent use of space
How to use spare/interstitial spaces (seen in paris last monday in the RER) ...