Was in Grenoble yesterday, attending an event called "Design Matters organized by the big nanotechnology operation they have there as well as several other partners. The gig was about design in the context of industrial innovation: "Is it possible to see designs as fundamental processes developed b...
No WiFi!
Seen in Grenoble today: "no wifi"... as if it was important to indicate that this area is not covered? It's not the case here, if you read the lines under that sign. Sometimes, 802.11b cannot be employed... some context prevent people from making it available and sometimes it's even worse: you're ...
Increasing pace of interactions in our cities
In Life in the Real-time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism, Anthony Townsend deals with the implications of new mobile communication on contemporary urbanization. Unlike preceding technologies such as automobiles or telephones, Townser argues that mobile phones may not results in "enormo...
Eyes upon the street
"there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The building on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn they backs or blank sid...
Bottom-up innovation and velo'v
In this post, I mentioned this bike rental service called velo'v in Lyon (Paris has velib, Brussels has cyclocity, etc.). They're managed by JCDecaux and you can read Re*Move for an analysis of this. What is interesting is to observe the side practices around these bikes. Two examples: Look how her...
A framework of "place" for LBS design
Morning read in the train this morning was "A Framework of Place as a Tool for Designing Location-Based Applications" by Anna Vallgarda. The paper is about a "framework of place" defined through interviews with architects, that aims at informing the development of location-based applications. The a...
Atom style - Atoomstijl
Perhaps one of the most important building I wanted to see in Brussels this week was the Atomium. Built for the Expo'58 (1958 Brussels World's Fair) and designed by André Waterkeyn, this building is a 103-mettre connection of 9 steel sphere so that the whole forms the shape of a unit cell of an iro...
Talk at Google about location-awareness
Been at Google Office in Zürich this afternoon for a Tech Talk about "location awareness and mobile social computing". Google's R&D office in Zürich is actually very well into maps and spatial applications, which is why I wanted to confront my ideas to them. Although this is my usual talk about bar...
Greenfield and Shepard on Urban computing
Reading "Urban Computing and Its Discontents" by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard was a good move, as I am currently cobbling some notes about locative media and urban implications. This book is part of as a series called "Architecture and Situated Technologies Pamphlet" which addresses the implica...
Family names on door walls
Door entry seen in Brussels: As the communication system is destroyed, people write their name directly on the wall... and one can see how names are updated over time. It's then possible to read the "history" of the building by looking at who lived there (and make assumptions based on the ethnicit...