Extracted from "Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research (Ethnographer's Toolkit , Vol 1)" (LeCompte Margaret Diane): "Components of Data Collection Matrix 1. Which research question are to be asked 2. Which data will answer those questions 3. Where, and from whom, those data can be obtained ...
Street furniture hacking
A very rich picture that depicts street signs. The blue one in the foreground has been severely damaged but still holds its primary function: 1) show people to go straight at this intersection 2) serve as a support for stickers with hookers' phone numbers (it's an intersection where people have to...
"Locative Gaming for Team Cognition (LoGTCog)
Rogue Signals by Zachary O. Toups, Andruid Kerne, Daniel Caruso, Erin Devoy, Ross Graeber, Kyle Overby seems to be close to the CatchBob project in the sense that the deployment of a location-based game is used to address psychological questions. Some might refer to this as "serious gaming": "a loc...
Stride over that fence
This might be one of the nastiest device I've seen on the street (apart from barbed wires). I ran across this thing in Paris few weeks ago, not sure about what it's made for but the affordance for me is clear: don't put stuff in that street corner, don't stand there, and inevitably don't pee here....
DIY robotics
Some excerpts from an article in Scientific American on "Open Source Hardware Makes its Debut in "Robot Internet Mashup". It's about the "Telepresence Robot Kit", a sort of DIY robotic platform developed by a group led by Illah Nourbakhsh (professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon, University in Pit...
Pondering user-generated content frenziness
An interesting comment by Pete Mortensen on a post by Bruce Nussbaum about the very low number of participation on user-generated content platforms: "tools that allow people to be designers or broadcasters have been around for years, and they have been niche. What YouTube has done is create a singl...
Mise-en-scène
"The most obvious way to create a mise-en-scène to support communication is to gather objects in a space, such a room, where they are simultaneously visible, and where not only the objects themselves but also the spatial relationships among them can assume significance. (...) It operates at an arc...
Research about "hybrid ecologies"
The Mediamatic workshop about digital/physical hybridization that I attend next week is a great opportunity to start reshuffling my research interests. It's been one month that I started working at the Media and Design Lab at EPFL, starting new projects is a slow process (especially when you don't ...
The Economist on why you don't have a supa interconnected ubiquitous pervasive world right now
Some quotes from this week issue of The Economist, on ubiquitous computing (which I started bloggin here), I took them from various articles in the special issue. I find that they nicely exemplify common problems with ubiquitous computing and its slow user-adoption: "Connecting machines requires gi...
Ultra-fast virtual air hockey
Among all the technologies designed by Spaceman Technologies, the one I found the most curious is this "Ultra-fast virtual air hockey": "In 2001 Spaceman Technologies developed a large table-top virtual air-hockey platform for up to four players. Incorporating a proprietory ultra-fast velocity-sens...