Some snippets from an interview of Mike Kuniavsky (by Tamara Ardlin) on UX Pioneers: "TA: Were there products that came out during that time that you thought were especially cool or especially bad? MK: There were a ton of bad products. There were refrigerators with built in tablet PCs, which are t...
Pet computing review
Working on a paper about new interaction partners, I tried to categorize the work done in what can be called "pet computing", i.e. the idea that "traditional human-machine interfaces and their advantages can be extended to other living beings. In order to provide them comfort and also to enhance hu...
Some perspectives on urban computing
Dourish, P., Anderson, K., & Nafus, D. (2007) Cultural Mobilities: Diversity and Agency in Urban Computing, Proc. IFIP Conf. Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT 2007 (Rio De Janiero, Brazil). This article is a comprehensive critique of mobile computing in the city that has been construed quite narr...
Braille graffiti
Lately, I've been amazed by the street art work of dwaesha, especially these "Braille Graffiti" (2005): Why do I blog this? I already dealt with podotactility here, in this example, things are different (although it looks like vertical podotactiles). What is intriguing is the idea of touching graf...
Software-sorted geographies
Graham, S.D.N (2005). Software-sorted geographies, Progress in Human Geography29, 5 (2005) pp. 1–19. The central claim of the paper is that computerized systems act as "ordinary" mediators through which people encounter the world, hence the term "software sorting": "Software-sorting is the means th...
Numeric identity tagged on walls
Kids compulsively tagging their zip code in other cities. I could have taken other examples but I quite liked that one: 1026 is from a village in the countryside close to Lausanne (which is ranging from 1000-1007, 1010-1012, 1014-1015 & 1017-1018). The use of "zip code" tagged on walls is a recurr...
'User of what?' one tends to wonder
Reading (again) Lefebvre this week-end, I ran across this quote about the notion of "user" that I liked: "Let us now turn our attention to the space of those who are referred to by means of such clumsy and pejorative labels as 'users' and 'inhabitants'. No well-defined terms with clear connotations...
Signs
mmmh? NO... OK... ...
Snippets from The Economist on tech failures
Some of the bits I was interested in, featured in last week edition of The Economist's technology quarterly:Radio silence, about what happened to RIFD, once hailed as a breakthrough that would revolutionise logistics: " it was not surprising that RFID was widely regarded by many in technology as th...
Ambivalence in pop culture’s treatment of technoscience
Reading "Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes" while scouting for LIFT speakers, I was struck by this quote from Eugene Thacker (the interview is available here): "these sciences and technologies are normalized in a way that the general public going to a film will “accept” their inclu...