Some notes taken after viewing the LIFT07 talk of Sampo Karjalainen (Sulake Corporation): "Open-ended play in Habbo" (video). Sampo described how Habbo is a virtual hang out for teenagers, an open environment in which you can do things, no clearly explicit goal. A bit like Second Life but browser-b...
code/space by Rob Kitchin
My notes from a talk I attend at the "Digitality and space" seminar CHOROS lab: "code/space" by Rob Kitchin (National University of Ireland, Maynooth). The presenter started by this quote from Thrift and French: "[M]ore and more ... the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software" (2002, p...
Space and coordination of actions
Some elements to be added to my blogpost serie about space and cognitive interactions (which startd here and end there): The term “space” does not only refer to the topological and geometrical constraints of the environment, nor to the elements that constitute a place. Spatial features like distanc...
No perfect i-roid
"Dreaming of a perfect i-roid, screaming cerebrum steroidFaking-jack decoys got beef with Ox You can get caught in my Real Earth chatterbox That's virtual (virtual), if you drunk a V8 You couldn't be parallel, because hell is vertical Aha, fooled ya, thought it was beneath you Got propelled in the ...
About delegation and design
A recent post by Mr. Chipchase addresses the issue of "delegation". Jan proposed that "from a design perspective a potential solution to pretty much every design problem is delegation - getting other people or technology to complete those parts of a task or activity that the user is unable to compl...
Inappropriate responses by robots
Read in the last "technology quarterly" of "the E", this article about chatbot technology and call centres. It describes some potential problems of hooking speech analytics software to a call center: "it will be also necessary to program chatbots to deal with verbal abuse. In some cases, (...), com...
A kirkyan
When talking about connections between the material world and digital environments, terminologies are still fuzzy, a kirkyan is a new word coined by csven: "A kirkyan is similar to a spime or blogject, but different in that a kirkyan is actually a Thing comprised of a combination of reality instanc...
New rules of solving problems
(Via Dr Fish), An article from mechanical engineering magazine (by Kathryn Jablokow) addresses the new rules for solving problems nowadays. Although it's written for engineers, there are some pertinent elements for other domains. Some excerpts: "The number of problems we each can solve alone is get...
A safe maze
Looking on the internets for an image that would represent an environment that would be both playful and secure for kids, I stumbled across this maze by Peter Randall (photo credit: Martyn Barratt): Why do I blog this? this is tight to my interest in spatial environment and their legibility. This ...
Habits of thoughts
The last chapter of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs offers a very thorough and pertinent description of what the author calls "habits of thoughts" for complex problem solving. In the context of this book about urban environment, Jacobs starts by describing "the kind of ...