Urban sensing: out of the woods is a paper by Dana Cuff, Mark Hansen, Jerry Kang that deals with embedded networked sensing that successfully shifted from the lab to the environment. Some excerpts I found interesting: "urban sensing shifts focus and control away from the scientist at the center. We...
Etech 2008: Tom Coates about Fireeagle
Tom Coates announced the launching of a geo-service called Fire eagle. 3 ideas behind the scene that informed this project: - we should build services that cam manifest everywhere the network touches - the back-end of ubicomp. - in this new world we're creating, the service should stay in a silo bu...
Design as choice
Encountered yesterday in Venice Beach: Why do I blog this? design is about choice, why have some letters been chosen on that keypad? why others have been discarded? perhaps there aren't anything that starts with "I" or "Y" in the choices proposed. Another example about design choices: why there are...
Etech 2008: Fictional futures
"Fictional futures" by Matt Webb. Matt discussed his favorite concepts from science fiction because he likes to take the ideas in the science fiction and take them back to the everyday, inspire product design. To him, scifi is good to identify things that falls into the same metaphor species as des...
Notes from the Mobile City conference
Some notes of things that I found relevant to me at the Mobile City conference. Malcolm McCullough Malcom gave an insightful talk about the history of "urban inscriptions" and how the City has been the place of "marking" for a long time. First, "the city itself is an inscription" and there lots of ...
SHARE (Turin) about manufacturing
Next week's must see event in Turin, Italy: SHARE, a conference curated by Bruce Sterling: "The theme for the 2008 edition, which will dominate the contents of the conferences, round tables, workshops and performances, is the new materiality of digital arts. In the 90s the net art phenomenon addres...
Near future of pervasive games at USC
This afternoon, I was invited by Julian to give an informal talk at USC in his "experimental game topics" course. I showed a bunch of projects from others that I find interesting and it triggers a discussion about the near future of mobile/pervasive games, what are the main factors, the limits, the...
AK-47: criteria of good design?
Read in Good "The problem is that “good design” didn’t look much beyond the object itself. An AK-47 rifle, for example, makes use of sound and appropriate materials and it demonstrates other criteria of good design, such as solid workmanship, efficiency, and suitability of purpose—the gun was desig...
The mechanical and electronic processes of Rotterdam
Having spend few days in Rotterdam makes me realize how this European city was a very interesting example of how the spatial environment can show heavily-visible signs of mechanical and electronic processes. And this, with different levels of interaction with regards to whom (or what) can influence...
In a panel at the Mobile City conference
Participated in a panel yesterday as the Mobile City conference in Rotterdam. The event was great and fully packed with a nice program and audience. The conference was a multidisciplinary even about locative media/mobile technologies and their relation to the City. The panel was about “Designing fo...