Preparing my talk for the Game Design Conference about tangible/gestural interfaces, I ran across this very interesting Wario Ware Walkthrough guide by G. Louie (not only curious because of its ASCII layout). What struck me as very pertinent here is the nomenclature (the naming) and the description...
Pumping like a shadok
As the Shadok say: "Better to pump even if nothing happens than to risk something worse happening by not pumping". Why do I blog this? The Shadok was a french animated TV series from the late 60s that involved rough and stupid bird-like characters. One of the most curious aspect of this species is...
The Mobile City conference
The Mobile City is a conference on locative and mobile media and the city that seems to be interesting: "Locative and mobile media can be seen as the interface between the digital domain and the city, bringing the digital world into the physical world, and at the same time uploading and sharing rea...
Some urban computing projects
Last week I attended an interesting event organized by the foresight group of the Geneva State. The whole day was about the digital cities of tomorrow with an interesting set of speakers. I've been mostly interested in all the projects that speakers presented to describe either weak signals of urba...
Encouraging uses of location-aware systems
Reading (again and again) articles about location-awareness for a journal paper I am writing, I ran across "The Carrot Approach: Encouraging use of location systems" by Kieran Mansley, Alastair R. Beresford and David Scott which I found quite interesting. The paper addresses the lack of understandi...
Implications for Design: responsibilities and framing
In "Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design continues to elaborate on the use of ethnography in human-computer interaction and the "implications for design" issues he addressed at CHI2006 (see my notes here). In the CHI paper, he argued how the use of ethnograp...
J.G. Ballard and empty swimming pools
Reading Ballard lately, I am always struck by his fascination with empty swimming pools. See for example in "Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown" (1967): "Usually accompanied by Leonora Carrington, he visited the Mullard radio-observatory near Cambridge and the huge complex of early warning radar inst...
Assumptions of future studies
I already mentioned how "Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, Knowledge (Human Science for a New Era, 1)" by Wendell Bell was a relevant reference about future studies/foresight. One of the book chapter deals with the assumptions of future studies: " Time...
Urban decay
The last two days have been very fruitful in terms of urban decay. Yesterday, in Lyon, there were these fantastic two encounters: And this the morning in Lausanne: Why do I blog this? why being passionate about this sort of things? about creeping infrastructures? simply because it reveals intere...
New LIFT visual
The new poster design of LIFT is out: It's actually made of 150 drawings from Gaël Vuillens composing a network of Lift people and moments. ...