Yesterday I visited one of the European Tech Center of Cisco to give a presentation about location-awareness and mobile social computing. Slides from my presentations can be found here (pdf, 10.5Mb). It's actually a reshuffled version of my Geoware deck. Thanks Jérome for this opportunity! Althoug...
Digital space behavior close to physical world proxemics
The ACM technews recently reported on a study about an intriguing experiment in Second Life (presented at the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents): "University College London researchers are using an automated avatar in Second Life to study the psychology of Second Life users...
From Locative Information to Urban Knowledge
(via) In, "From Locative Information to Urban Knowledge" (see in the the conference pre-proceedings), Viktor Bedö addresses a question very close to my research interests: How does information generated and shared through locative media and mobile communication technologies turn into knowledge?. Th...
Switch conventions
In Switzerland, the large majority of switches fall into 2 categories: As if there was some sort of CH's designer-in-chief who ruled the existence of switches. It eventually leads to a great homogeneity in their design (compared to the very broad diversity in France for example). Find it intrigui...
About Metcalfe's law
I sometimes use the Metcalfe Law in my work to describe how communication systems (mobile phones application, location-based services, etc.) have a value only if there is a critical mass of users. Being the only local boob with a fax machine does not allow you to go beyond showing off, it's actuall...
Industrial design and ubiquitous computing
Are designers ready for ubiquitous computing?: a formative study is a very interesting short paper by Sara Ljungblad, Tobias Skog and Lalya Gaye that deals with the challenges industrial designers will face with ubiquitous technologies. The paper report a workshop they ran with designers, in which ...
A list of intriguing digital cameras
A follow-up to this blogpost, I started making a short list of "curious digital cameras" Microsoft's Sensecam, a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn. The Wingscapes BirdCam which uses an infrared sensor to detect ...
Near Future Laboratory interview
Julian posted on the near future laboratory website the translation from an interview we gave to Digicult, an italian magazine about digital culture. The interview deals with the near future laboratory's existence (" an opportunity in a design and research practice that operates between traditional...
"The Jetsons" as a touchstone for the future
In a WSJ article, Jason Fry how he feels like George Jetson with all the technologies that we have around (cell phone, TiVo, etc). He interestingly describes what was interesting in that TV series: "Then there was another influence, one that makes space opera sound like real opera. That, of course,...
Geographies of science-fiction
Lost in Space : Geographies of Science Fiction edited by Rob Kitchin and James Kneale is a collection of essay on the geography of sci-fi novels and films. Contributors are coming mainly from the field of human geography and literary critic. As described by Kitchin and Kneale: "the starting point f...