Bioscope is a project by intrepid friend Jean-Baptiste Labrune: "a device that materialize the sketches made by gesture while talking to somebody or being in a creative or expressive process. The goal is to be build a creativity research tool that manifest visually the evolution of concepts and ide...
Different levels of interactivity in user-generated content
Working on a presentation about user-generated content and video-games, I found interesting how Jef's talk addressed the different levels of granularity when thinking about "open design". Depending on the interactivity given to the end-user, this white paper from Think Studio discriminates: "- Pass...
Spatial gestures challenges
Some quick elements about the challenges regarding 3D spatial gestures to control digital information are described in "Gameplay issues in the design of spatial 3D gestures for video games" (by Payne et al. 2006): " The seemingly natural and intuitive ease with which gestures could replace command ...
Googie architecture
Googie architecture, according to the Wikipedia: "Googie, also known as populuxe or doo-wop, is a subdivision of expressionist, or futurist architecture influenced by car culture and the Space Age and Atomic Age, originating from southern California in the late 1940s and continuing approximately in...
Empathy and innovation
In a speculative blogpost about what can be recommended to foster innovation, Steve Portigal gave different answers. One of them is a very pragmatic and relevant answer that I I fully agree with: "I would introduce empathy processes into government, especially departments that interact with the pub...
Ironies of automation
Some excerpts I like from Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge: "The classic aim of automation is to replace human manual control, planning and problem solving by automatic devices and computers. However, as Bibby and colleagues (1975) point out : "even highly automated systems. such as elec...
The intricate nature of city components
An excerpt from Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities": "Intricate mingling of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order. (...) Let us first consider that diversity looks ugly. (...) But this be...
Electronic urbanism and open design
Today at the urban sociology department, the "Penser l'espace", Jef Huang (LDM) gave a talk about "Electronic urbanism: future of space and role of authorship". It's very close to his talk at LIFT06. Raw notes below: Even though the title is "electronism urbanism", Jef's work rather focused on smal...
Open plan legibility and infoviz
Revisiting the Open Plan: Ceilings and Furniture as Display Surfaces for Building Information is a paper written by my colleague Mark Meagher, Jeffrey Huang and David Gerber for a conference called BuiltViz. The paper argues that one the flaws of the "open plan" in architecture is the lack of legi...
Seamlessness and duct tape
Read in "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing" (Adam Greenfield): "The infrastructure supporting the user's experience is deeply heterogeneous, and, at least in contemporary, real-world systems, frequently enough held together by the digital equivalent of duct tape and chewing gum. (....