(clean San Diego, a vision form the future) As stated by Mike Crang: ""as robins (1999) has pointed out, too often futuristic accounts of the electronic city are driven by a resurrected modernism that, like the Saint Simonian's of the 19th century, looks to offer transparency, efficiency, and thus ...
Feel the city differently
A different way to experience the city (seen in Paris last monday). A non-frequent posture. ...
Manufacturing matters in the 21st century
Near-Future Laboratory colleague Julian Bleecker wrote an important piece about manufacturing (as part of the Share Festival Catalog 2008): "First, we’re not talking about manufacturing (...) Manufacturing evokes cavernous, cold, awesomely huge assembly lines with scales all out of proportion to th...
User Experience of TomTom
Jan Borcher's "ode to TomTom" in the last issue of ACM interactions addresses issues that are relevant to my interest in the user experience of location-based applications. First about usability issues of TomTom: "City or street names are listed so close below each other that you keep selecting wro...
Fake power outlet on the street
Although it's a fake power plug (for an ad), it's often desperately needed for certain people on the street. Seen in Paris yesterday. Another sign of the need for certain (outdoor) infratructure ...
Design process at Apple
An interesting write-up of the contribution by Michael Lopp (senior engineering manager at Apple) at SXSW2008 describes some aspects of Apple design process (by Helen Walters): "Pixel Perfect Mockups: “it removes all ambiguity.” That might add time up front, but it removes the need to correct mista...
Dirtiness of touch interface
How touch interface can age... and get dirty over time. Seen in Paris yesterday, it's actually an old video rental booth down the street of the 11th arrondissement. Why do I blog this? just find intriguing the role of aging (and dust!) in the design of interfaces (and then: interactions). Sometim...
Tools for writers, design considerations
Funny piece in the NYT by Rachel Donadio about recent tools used by novel writers: "Powers wrote in an e-mail message — or rather, dictated, since he uses the voice recognition software built into the Tablet PC operating system to compose everything, including his novels. (...) Powers has turned to...
Stir the pot
According to the Phrase finder: "What does the phrase "to stir the pot" generally mean? Deliberately provocative, yes, but not necessarily maliciously. Picture a pot of soup. A lot of ingredients have settled to the bottom, out of sight, until stirred. Metaphorically, a lot of issues/resentments/ob...
Laundry list for ubicomp
In the last issue of ACM interactions, there is an interesting paper called "When users "do" the Ubicomp" by Antti Oulasvirta. The paper starts off by discussing the 2 perspectives of ubiquitous computing: on the one hand, the sort of research/outcomes you see in conferences and on the other hand, ...