It's always refreshing to leave a city with a mechanical face like this staring at you, anthropmorphism at its best (surely unintentional though). ...
Selective disConnectvity
Mindful Disconnection: Counterpowering the Panopticon from the Inside by Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluitenberg in Skor.nl challenges the "unquestioned connectivity" of the Internets and propose a possible alternative they call ‘mindful disconnection’, or rather the ‘art of selective disconnectivity...
Notes from Frontiers in Interaction
My notes from Frontiers in Interaction in Milano, an italian event about user experience/interaction design that focused on the Internet of Things as well as Virtual Environments. Thanks Leandro Agro and Matteo Penzo for the invitation! Fabio Sergio: "designing for the segment of one" Fabio describ...
Shared map anotations
Seen in Milano this morning, some annotations shared on the metro map. ...
Frontiers in interaction talk
Currently at Frontiers in Interaction in Milano where I gave a talk entitled "PeopleSpaceThings: hybridization over the internets" (Slide can be found here). The talk was basically a critique of assumptions in ubiquitous computing, relying on current literature (Bell and Dourish, Graham, etc.) and...
Cooperation between designers, engineers and scientists in HCI
Bartneck, C. & Rauterberg, M. (2007). HCI reality—an ‘Unreal Tournament’?, Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 65 (2007) 737–743. This article addresses the cooperation between designers, engineers and scientists in the HCI community. It reports the results from an empirical study about the barriers bet...
The materiality of networked cities
Stephen Graham, in his essay entitled "Strategies for Networked Cities" has some very convincing arguments against supporters of "ICT-based end of city visions" who ignore the very material realities that make the supposedly “virtual” realms of “cyberspace” possible: "in their obsession with the et...
Twitter-like device from 1930?
Location-based microblogging in the 30s: this "robotic" messenger display aims at "TO AID persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabout": Why do I blog this? definitely not twitter but somewhat related to the same practice of sharing micro-content. It did no...
Intel Ubifit Garden
Eric Savitz, in an article about Intel in Barrons describe the Intel Ubifit Garden: "Intel built a device roughly the size of a pager that contains a variety of digital sensors, including a thermometer, a barometer, a 3-axis accelerometer, a microphone, a digital compass and sensors for humidity an...
Protected source of electricity
Had to deal with that yesterday in a french train: A protected source of electricity... that prevented me to use an electrically-powered of some sort that I often employ in train for my work. Is it because they do not want to provide electricity for commuters/travellers? In this case no, because t...