A simple agenda

A picture I took from a colleague's office. The guy has a simple todo list: "Fix mem bugs": sometimes, people's agenda are clear enough that it can be written in few words. The simplicity of his agenda is very evocative. ...

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User dashboard in railway station

In swiss railway stations, some TVs like this allow to check the state of the traffic. The map can indicate the portion of the network that have troubles. An interesting example of giving feedback to users, a bit basic but there might be some interesting information to depict. I haven't seen yet an...

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RFID gaming: La Fuga

La Fuga (by Négone) is a intriguing pervasive game in which players has to escape from Mazzinia, a futuristic high-security jail. "Named La Fuga (The Breakout), the game opened this month at a former bank not far from the Real Madrid Stadium in northern Madrid. The facility can host up to 300 playe...

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Trendwatching

An article in the WSJ about cool-hunting that express how things works in "fashion" industry. Some excerpts: "The role of trend spotters -- sometimes also called cool hunters -- has grown in importance as the fashion cycle has speeded up. (...) Trend spotters can help mass merchandisers figure out ...

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Awareness of the future and some thoughts about classification

Reading Mr. Heathcote's post about serendipity, it struck me as interesting that more and more awareness systems are directed towards the future. As Chris puts it "it’s exciting that there’s services looking at the future – much effort has gone into recording, collecting and remembering". For examp...

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Rebecca Allen's talk at LDM

Rebecca Allen's talk at LDM. Raw and messy back in the days "computers are too important to be left to engineers" so use of computer graphics, take human forms into the computer, in a natural way examples: the catherine wheel (1982) with choreographer Twyla Tharp, musique non stop with Kraftwerk (1...

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Online play to tackle tough computational problems

There's an intriguing piece in Science news about using the power of online gaming to address big computational challenges such as language translation, refining online search, locating objects in images, etc. The point is to use the time, the energy and the mass of players to solve problems and co...

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Usage of data generated by tech in urban environments

Trying to expand on what fabien blogged (weblog as a way to elaborate our thoughts), I am digging the internets to find how digital information/traces/logs can be mined and of interest. The massive number of traces generated automatically (cell phone, wifi laptops) or by the user (synchronously or ...

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"Offline gaming" opportunities in mobile gaming

Musing in the train this morning with Frederic, we discussed a near-future laboratory topic: offline-gaming that Julian describes more thoroughly here. This is also helpful for the presentation for Mobile Monday I am working on. Let's start with Julian's notes (the near future laboratory method is ...

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Topology of dining

Yet another tableware project today (it's funny that this week has been filled by discussion about tables here at the lab): Topoware by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino and Karola Torkos. The point of the project is to "questions the landscape of dining": is territory an adequate notion during a meal? c...

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