Excerpts from an interview of Yves Guillemot, UbiSoft CEO: "We are moving towards launching books, games and movies at the same time," he said. "The movie industry creates more ideas than us at the moment, but the more they work, the more they are coming up with the same ideas. We are working more ...
Live the future yesterday to invent it
Reading "Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design" by Bill Buxton, I ran across this part that I found relevant: "in order to design a tool, we must make our best efforts to understand the larger social and physical context within which it is intended to function. H...
Pedestrian rebellion
Seen in Geneva yesterday: "Pedestrians, take the sidewalk on the other side of the street" - No I don't want that! ...
Affective body memorabilia
Via Frédéric: Affective Diary is a project conducted by SICS and Microsoft Research by Kristina Höök, Martin Svensson, Anna Ståhl, Petra Sundström and Jarmo Laaksolathi, SICS, Marco Combetto, Alex Taylor and Richard Harper, Microsoft Research. This diary is based on a “affective body memorabilia” c...
Roles of architecture in video games
The role of architecture in video games by Ernest Adams is a Gamasutra column that is very relevant to my research interests. Prior jumping into his explanation about this topic, the author compares the reasons of constructing buildings in the real world and in a video game. If protection or person...
Street pi
A very unprecise Pi annotation (it does not give more than 2 digits) found on the streets of Lyon. Very concise anyway. The presence of a mathematical constant. What is interesting is that the name "pi" (well, "π") is the first letter of the Greek words περιφέρεια which means "periphery". Perhaps...
Enhancing MMORPG experience through mobile features
Enhancing player experience in MMORPGs with mobile features by Elina M.I. Koivisto and Christian Wenninger is a paper presented at DIGRA 2005 that addresses how the massive multiplayer game experience could be augmented through mobile services. Although written in 2005, not much has really change c...
Social relations included in design
Some quotes from Latour, B. Pragmatogonies: A Mythical Account of How Humans and Nonhumans Swap Properties. American Behavioural Scientist 37(6), 1994, 791-808 to keep up my sleeve: "According to my origin myth, it is impossible even to conceive of an artifact that does not incorporate social relat...
Workshop about toilet space design
A Public Inconvenience (The 3rd workshop in the in-between-ness series) is a workshop about public toilets in urban environment that I surely want to attend. Organized by Arianna Bassoli, Johanna Brewer, Karen Martin, Valentina Nisi and Martine Posthuma de Boer, the focus will be on the design of t...
Ambivalence towards automation
A good quote I've read in a french book about foresight ("Fabriquer le futur 2 : L'imaginaire au service de l'innovation" (Pierre Musso, Laurent Ponthou, Éric Seulliet)), translated by myself: "One can systematically notice a paradox in the public attitude - namely consumers that area comfortable w...