Laurent and I have been interviewed by Fabio Sergio for the Convivio website (a European network for human-centred design of interactive technologies). What is interesting is that Fabio highlighted an aspect that we haven't really though about when organizing LIFT last year: Fabio: I am not sure th...
Chance meetings at the RAND
(Via Dr.Fish) Archrecord has an interesting article about the design of RAND Corporation Headquarters (the nonprofit policy research institution in Santa Monica, California). It describes these curious figure-8-shaped headquarters: DMJM Design took a page from RAND’s own playbook. It organized the ...
What's this "user" term anyway?
Yesterday I had a meeting with Dominique Foray, a professor at EPFL who will participate in one of the LIFT07 panel about the "user-centered economy". His perspective is about innovation management and the economics of creation. At a certain point, I realized that the term "user" he was employing w...
Deltron 3030's virus
"Deltron 3030" (Deltron 3030) Was just listening to Deltron 3030 Virus... and I ran across those lyrics: a virus To bring dire straits to your environment Crush your corporations with a mild touch Trash your whole computer system and revert you to papyrus (...) Society thinks thier safe when Bing...
Location-based wristwatch in Second Life
I'm slightly underwater lately and I missed this news about location-tracker in Second Life: SLStats comes in the form of a wristwatch, available in Hill Valley Square [in SL] in the Huin sim. Once you register with the service in-world, the watch "watches" where you go, tracking your location as y...
Mechanisms for gathering a team in multi-user games.
In this old paper by Ben Calica found on Gamasutra, there is a good description of the existing ideas for gathering teams in a multi-player game. Calica describes three ways to gather a team: Next on the Bus -This strategy is basically first come, next served. Games are filled by people in order ...
Technology and shabbat
Technology and jewish life by Manfred Gerstenfeld and Avraham Wyler interestingly describes how the development of new technologies has brought with it many challenges and decisions on several aspects of jewish life such as Shabbat observance. I have always been intrigued by how technologies or sys...
Lessons from a google Earth game
This Gamasutra article written by a team from Intel entitled "Mars Sucks - Can Games Fly on Google Earth? " explores whether Google* Earth could be used as the foundation of a video game (and beyond current applications such as “Find Skull Island” and "EarthContest"). Their prototype is simple: Mar...
Qualitative video game studies: categorization and questions
In Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games (a paper published in Game Studies, 6(1) december 2006), Mia Consalvo and Nathan Dutton describe a method for the critical analysis of video games as "texts". Their point is to go beyond "simply playing a game,...
Wardriving with cabs
According to O'reilly radar, there's a plan from Ericsson to find cellphone coverage holes in the New York City area by deploying modem-sized sensors in cabs that will report back signal strength and clarity. I liked this part of the interview: Ericsson chose cabs because they are always on the roa...