It's been several weeks that I am hooked on using Onlife, a very simple application that tracks and help you to visualizes traces of your interaction with Mac applications. Onlife is an application f or the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with apps such as Safari, Mail and iChat and t...
Criteria to classify location-awareness
After reviewing lots of interfaces that enable location-awareness in both physical and virtual world, I discriminated criteria to describe them. There is no real formal classification of the MLA tools diversity. Nevertheless, according to Jones et al. (2004) in their conceptual framework of locatio...
Criticisms towards electronic toys
This week, the WSJ has a critical paper about electronic toys that I found interesting. It starts by reporting the enthusiasm geared towards those devices: the "fusion of technology and personality" of robots, the "Vtech V. Smile Baby Infant Development System claims to go beyond passive developmen...
Websearching as a gratification cycle
Some new elaboration on the concept of passively multiplayer game has led Justin Hall to sketch this interesting cycle: As a reminder, he now defines passively multiplayer game as: Passively Multiplayer is a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillan...
Catachresis and détournement
Catachresis is a very interesting notion that has been transferred from its linguistic sense to the ergonomics field by some french researchers. According to the Wikipedia: Catachresis, which literally means the incorrect or improper use of a word -- such as using the word decimate (e.g., "they wer...
WYSIWIS and relaxed-WYSIWIS
Notes from Gareth Smith's Cooperative Virtual Environments: lessons from 2D multi user interfaces: Early 2D multi user interface systems supported shared interfaces by presenting exactly the same image of the application to all users. This simple replication of the system’s image secured a founding...
Unreliable map in Lausanne
Sometimes even low-tech technologies are unreliable... ...but the flaws might be due to third parties. ...
web/internet
I am often mesmerized by how people use the terms "Internet" and "Web" interchangeably, as if they were synonymous. Sometimes even in meetings at work, the discuss ends with the differentiation pointed by a person fed up with this (taken from weboepedia): The Internet is a massive network of networ...
Mobile phones and locality
Sorting out some old quotes for my dissertation, I found that one by Andrew Curry (The Henley Centre) in my notes: « Design predictions were that 80 per cent of information would be pan European, 20 per cent local, but it is actually the other way around. Phones are about mobility, but they are a...
About "technosocial situations"
Japanese academics (Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe) defines the concept of ‘technosocial situations’ to refer to technologically-mediated social orders (= Erving Goffmans’ theory of social situation : isomorphism between physical space and social situation). This term is explained in Technosocial Sit...