Just ran across that quote by Nigel Thrift (in this paper "I have what I think is a pretty good test of whether a person is a social scientist or not: do they eavesdrop on a fairly regular basis on other people’s conversations on trains and planes, on buses, in the street, and so on? If they don’t,...
Current stuff
(maybe a personal blogpost to keep track of current things I'm involved in) Writing (and meeting people from a telco or) a research project in 2008 about the user experience of mobile gaming. Meetings with lots of people in Paris: j*b to chat about our current projects (bravo pour la thèse), Bruno...
Watch+RFID keyring
An RFID keyring attached to a watch. Usually serves to open doors. The owner told me that recently his watch ran out of energy, he kept wearing it because it was convenient to keep thr RFID keyring there. The importance of the bracelet to hold other things than time. Appropriation and personaliza...
Why video telephones never...
Forbes had a good bunch of articles about the future lately. Among them, the on about why video telephones never took off (even though they have been pushed on the public for more than 40 years) is quite interesting. The author, Neil Steinberg describes some reasons ranging from bad phone service, ...
Social value of location-based content collection
In "Social Practices in Location-Based Collecting", O'Hara et al. describes an alternative approach for location-based technologies "by focussing on the collecting and keeping of location-based content as opposed to simply the in situ consumption of content". Their point is that collecting and keep...
Design for the Location Revolution?
Reading Where Are You Now? Design for the Location Revolution on UX Matter this morning makes me wondering about the advancements in the location-based services area. Although I agree on the premise ("The true power of the mobile Web lies not merely in providing remote access to data, but in lettin...
Podotactile affordances
Two other uses of podotactiles encountered recently, two possible affordances: Cuieng thanks to podotactiles experienced this morning in Paris, France: These thin podotactiles literally pave the way to a shop when exiting from the subway at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie. Another affordan...
Break pressure measurement
Break pressure measurement, as seen in the subway in Paris. Designed or not designed for the subway users? ...
Experiencing NFC in mobile gaming
"Experiencing ‘Touch’ in Mobile Mixed Reality Games" by Paul Coulton, Omer Rashid and Will Bamford is one of these papers which stand on my desktop for ages, waiting to be parsed and analyze (among lots of others). Found time to read it today in the train (heading back to Geneva from a three-day me...
User experience of automation on context-aware applications
Is Context-Aware Computing Taking Control Away from the User? Three Levels of Interactivity Examined by Barkhuus & Dey is an interesting paper about the users' experience of different degrees of automation in ubicomp. They investigated this through a user study of a context-aware application in whi...