Encountered this morning in France, at the train station in Lyon: It' been a while that the tap was not delivering water. Instead of putting a warning sign about this, some folks preferred to add a piece of steel to cover the sink... What a great affordance. ...
Food artifacts form the 21st century
Curious objects from today (tomorrow?) that I ran across lately: Candyfab (via, which is a home-built 3D sugar fabricator. It basically allows to 3D print objects out of pure sugar. Gastrobots (robots with a stomach) like Chew Chew (a food-powered robot in the form of a little train). The idea her...
The mystery of the daytime idle
The San Francisco Gate has an intriguing article by Chris Colin about "the mystery of the daytime idle", i.e. "how come there are so many people out on the street all day, seemingly not working?". A sort of quick survey on these people showed a typology of tourists, retired people, street workers, ...
Marginal practices and design
Finally got some time to read what inspired the Glowbot project blogged about recently: Ljungblad, S. and Holmquist, L.E. (2007). Transfer Scenarios: Grounded Innovation with Marginal Practices. In Proceedings of CHI 2007, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 28 April - 3 May, 2007...
Accuracy versus Deployment of location-sensing technologies
A very relevant map that shows the diversity of location-sensing technologies. "Each box’s horizontal span shows the range of accuracies the technology covers; the bottom boundary represents current deployment, while the top boundary shows predicted deployment over the next several years" Taken fr...
Troubles ahead for the game industry
Gamasutra features a very interesting interview of game designer Raph Koster about various trends regarding innovation and the video game industry (at the GDC07 his talk was interestingly entitled "Where game meets the web"). His claim is that the video game industry is "doomed because the web is s...
Walled-up doorway
This doorway, spotted this morning in Saint Jean de Luz (France) is kind of special. When Louis XIV of France got married to the Infanta Marie-Thérèse, the doorway through which the royal couple passed has been walled up aftwerwards so that no one can use it anymore. Why do I blog this? an interes...
LEGO evolution
In the last issue of Escapist, there is a good piece about LEGO and games. It basically describes the different evolution and extension to the LEGO bricks. That part is interesting if you don't know what's up there but more relevant is the conclusion: "To an extent, LEGO has always mirrored society...
The production of space
"Every social space is the outcome of a process with many aspects and many contributing currents, signifying and non-signifying, perceived and directly experienced, practical and theoretical. In short, every social space has a history. (...) history must account for both representational spaces an...
About second skins for game controllers
Some random skins for game controllers taken from Google Image: Why do I blog this? beyond the personalization trick, I'm sure there are some opportunities to create new gameplay based on game controller skins. How certain color/material/settings would afford specific interactions? ...