Exploring Passive Social Wearables with Gossip is a paper written by Eric Gilbert, Matthew Yapchaian and Karrie Karahalios for the CHI2007 workshop "Shared Encounters". The application they describe is a wearable speech interface that take advantage of gossips and display them as a "social awarenes...
Thinking by case
Enjoyed reading the critique of Thinking by cases, or: how to put social sciences back the right way up. by Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel (eds.), Penser par cas, 2005, written by Philippe Lacour. This french book is about "case-thinking"/"case-based reasoning" and sciences, or "the central...
Smart houses that are not so smart and then should be smart in another way
Reconfigurable House is a stimulating project by Adam Somlai-Fischer, Usman Haque et al.: "The Reconfigurable House is an environment constructed from thousands of low tech components that can be "rewired" by visitors. The project is a critique of ubiquitous computing "smart homes", which are base...
Brainwave detection in a Darth Vader outfit
The SFgate gives a quick overview of how Neurosky aims at building brain wave-reading toys and video games (use of EEG). Nothing really new compared to other announcement we read about this company but I was intrigued by the way the interface itself. The journalists describes it as a "crude biofeed...
Hacking the wiimote
The WSJ has an article about how people re-engineer the Nintendo Wii controller to do all sort of things. This is done through downloading free software on the Web and tweak the code to re-assign the control/movements to specific commands. See wiihacks.blogspot.com and WiiLi.org. Some excerpts I fo...
Path to the future
A timely and relevant definition of foresight (by Bill Cockayne): "Foresight is the practice of exploring the long-term future. The goal of foresight is to help individuals and organizations to better prepare for long-term opportunities or problems. Unlike forecasting methods, foresight does not a...
Wireless plush toys
The latest issue of Metropolis has a piece about interactive toys by Ricci Shryock. It presents some innovative examples, based on a context-aware model ("wireless plush toy design"): "My Beating Heart. The plush, $120 toy uses microchip technology to mimic a human heartbeat. Gitman says users feel...
interactive cities
Anomos and Hyx recently edited an interesting book called "interactive cities" about the ways in which the digital domain impacts the contemporary cities. "In the field of urban planning, there has been much debate about the information and intelligence society and its flourishing potential. Discus...
How discourse about cybernetic pervaded other fields
Having just read last night "L'Empire cybernétique : Des machines à penser à la pensée machine" by Céline Lafontaine. In this essay, the author aims at showing how the "cybernetic" paradigm (Wiener) as well as the vision it promoted, has influenced the scientific and intellectual worlds. Startin...
The Economist on ubicomp
"When everything connects" is the latest special edition of The Economist... a survey of the telecom industry that deals with ubiquitous computing and the so-called "wireless revolution". There is a ten or so articles on that topic, which are good read if you're interested in this area. When everyt...