Gave a talk at the European GDC today in Lyon. It was called "5 lessons about tangible user interfaces" and addressed an overview of classic misconceptions concerning tangible user interfaces. It's actually a modified version of an earlier talk I gave last year at Nokia Design in Los Angeles; I add...
The culture of mistake
The NYT has a piece on the "culture of mistake" that I found intriguing "good grades are usually a reward for doing things right, not making errors. Compliments are given for having the correct answer and, in fact, the wrong one may elicit scorn from classmates. We grow up with a mixed message: mak...
Weird personas deck
Some weird cards that I use for [absurd] persona discussion. Each of this very nice portrait has on the other side: its name, job and description. Exercise for today: Try to design for "Teddy" an officer of the US navy (and try to spot him on these cards). ...
Phone directory spot
Spotted last week in Lausanne: Phone directories without any public phone booths. The last remnants of a technological past where phone in public spaces were in booths. The directories there are updated though. It's no longer of a phone booth but a "directory spot". ...
Get "My Location" sans GPS
Wrt my research on location-awareness, My Location is an interesting new google beta application that find people's location of people using its mobile mapping service (even if the phone isn't equipped with a GPS receiver). A feature available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, Bla...
6 months in a design lab
It's been 6 months or so that I am working at the Media and Design Lab, a structure led by Jef Huang that sits both in architecture and computer sciences faculties. My motivation to join this lab, as a researcher, was both to work on architecture/urban projects and to learn more about design thinki...
Mapping the HCI communitiy
In "How do Design and Evaluation Interrelate in HCI Research?", Wania et al. investigates the relationship between two communities in human-computer interaction: those who focus on designing for usability and the ones who evaluate usability. Their goal was to discover how design and evaluation are ...
A user study of Dodgeball
The last issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is devoted to social networks. Among all the papers they have about this topic, there is one that is closer to my own research about location-based applications and services: Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of...
"TGV hitch-hiking"
This morning in the french news, a story of furious commuters, unhappy with the delay of their trains who stopped a high-speed train (TGV) in France. After few weeks of transport strikes and regular delay, the commuters on this line were so edgy that they warn the station manager that they would st...
Steampunk tangible interface for music
Being a great fan of all the electro-dub production of french label Jarring Effect, my interest has been drawn by a device designed for Ez3kiel's last show, created in partnership with Medias-Cités. That blogpost by Clement Thierry has a good write-up (in french though) about it. Called "cycloharp...