(Cross-posted at Terra Nova) Science Mag has an article entitled "The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds" by William Sims Bainbridge which gives a pretty good overview of how games such as MMO have a "great potential as sites for research in the social, behavioral, and economic science...
Street crochet
Knitting as a the 21st way to hack the city. A phenomenon I documented here (see also Metropolis here and there). Gentle and sweet. Seen last week-end in Paris near Gare du Nord. ...
Networking knowledge, net IQ and whuffies
Reading "Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present" by Bob Johansen, I find intriguing the connection between the following excerpt and some stuff I read the other day in "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" by Cory Doctorow. It's mostly about the future of "networking knowledge"...
Mike Davis about the desire of huge and obsolete machinery
Just found this great interview of Mike Davis by Mark Dery. It's mostly about this great chapter of "Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster" entitled "Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control". Excerpts that I found curious to me: "What we need right now is the rigor of a hard, rele...
Mobile self-contained video game system
A very curious patent from 1985 for a mobile self-contained video game system with instantaneously selectable game (by Robert J. Nikora). "The system internally stores a plurality of standard video game cartridges simultaneously and provides instantaneous external user selection of any game cartrid...
Multiplicity of signs
Multiplicity of signs on a subway platform (in Paris). Podotactility to cue about platform edges and arrows to show the circulation flows. It's interesting how these signs added up over time. What's next? Another modality? ...
Habbo Hotel as a boundary object
(Cross-posted at Terra Nova) There is an insightful interview of Sulka Haro, the lead designer of Habbo Hotel by Brandon Sheffield on Gamasutra. The interview covers a broad range of issues and may be of interest for who-ever is intrigued by "gameless games" or the "social web" or the evolution of ...
"Data is geology"
Artifacts of the Presence Era is a project form 2003 by Fernanda Viégas, Ethan Perry and Ethan Howe that proposed to visualize accumulated layers of data in an intriguing way. A camera and a microphone captured the myriad of images and sounds produced during an exhibition in the ICA gallery. The sy...
From observation to design insights
Having a glance at this Thoughtless Acts book that was standing on a shelf in my apartment, I ran across the last part about why documenting such practices is relevant. The book is a collection of different snapshots which captures the ordinary actions people unconsciously perform every day, avoidi...
Analysing the remediation of urban life
In his paper "Beyond the ‘dazzling light’: from dreams of transcendence to the ‘remediation’ of urban life", Stephen Graham interestingly proposes six starting points in analyzing the remediation of urban life, aimed at new media research: " Stress continuities with discontinuities: new media main...