A good read in the ACM Ubiquity: What if the experts are wrong by Denise Caruso. It's about how societies prepare themselves to be wrong when creating innovations that can have have important consequences on the world. Some excerpts: "long-term stewardship" of man-made hazards; that is, how a socie...
Music production through haptic interface
Amebeats is a project by Melissa Quintanilha that allows "people to mix sounds by manipulating physical objects instead of twisting knobs or clicking on a music production software". As the Melissa states it: The amoeba shaped board has little boxes in its center that when moved to the arms, activ...
Trashed mailboxes, direct digital equivalent
We certainly have no problem to find the digital equivalent for this. That's usually how digital mailboxes look like nowadays, less colorful though. If you look carefully (and if you speak french), behind the added mailbox on top of the others, there is a written message that says "No Pub!" (= "No...
Kevin Slavin on big games and location-based applications
(Via Fab), this Where2.0 2005 talk by Kevin Slavin (Area Code) is full of great insights about urban gaming ("big games"), and the user's apprehension of location-based technologies. There actually three aspects that I've found relevant to my research (excerpts are very basic transcriptions of t...
The user experience of elevators
It seems that the elevator hacking trick could have been a rumor. Looking for articles about the user experience of lifts/elevators, I ran across this piece in the new yorker: Richard Gladitz, a service manager at Century Elevator, an elevator-maintenance company in Long Island City, concurred. “It...
Code and architecture
"When code matters" by Ingeborg M Rocker is an article in Architectural Design that deals with the role of computation in the discourse and praxis of architecture. It gives a well summarized overview of historical computational models and concepts and then interestingly discuss their role in archit...
Infrastructure for calm computing?
Simply, this is the sort of infrastructure that gives birth to ubiquitous computing; at some point people have to give some power to the devices that allow them to access the information superhigways or activate their second lives. And the power is brought to networked cities of the globe through ...
LIFT07 workshop "Re-designing the city of the future"
Some notes about the foresight methodologies discussed at the LIFT07 workshop "Re-designing the city of the future" that I co-organized with Bill Cockayne last week. The purpose of the workshop was to a gather an heterogeneous crowd of people to discuss topics regarding the city of the future. The ...
Yet another kosher phone
Steve Portigal pointed me on this jpost article about a kosher telephone "that minimizes Shabbat desecration" for military soldiers in the israelian army.So first, look at the problem from the user point of view: "Until now, every telephone call [on Shabbat] that was not a matter of life and death ...
Balls, Gauss curve and psychogegography
Taken from "Les situationistes et l'automation" by Asger Jorn. As the caption says in the document, this device allows to automatically trace a Gauss curve (end position of the balls that fall down). To Jorn, it can be used as a metaphor of moving in cities: the dérive [the situationiste practice...