The NYT has a good piece about cell phones practices: In an age of information oversharing, the mobile-phone number is one of the few pieces of personal information that people still choose to guard. Unwanted incoming calls are intrusive and time-consuming and can suck precious daytime cell-plan mi...
iFind: yet another friendspotting application
iFind is... "MIT's new location-based application for friendspotting", as they describe it (a project coordinated by François Proulx): iFIND, a project developed at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, aims to improve social networking through some kind of digitally augmented serendipity. Using iFIND, you a...
Urban juice: traveling system
It's kind of weird but after blogging about the "urban radar" I now ran across this Urban Juice project by Mine Danisman Tasar done at the Umea Institute of design (and Philips), which expands the notion of travelogue: Prior to a trip, the modern nomad can not afford time to get acquainted with a n...
Urban Radar
I just attended a talk by Alexander Repening about the use of mobile computing and simulation for "social learning". One of the project he mentioned is quite relevant to my research. It's described in his paper Mobility Agents: Guiding and Tracking Public Transportation Users : The Mobility Agents ...
Gilles Paté and defensive space
Gilles Paté's "Le repos du fakir" ("Fakir's rest") is finally available in the DVD format. It's actually a short movie that describe the concept of "defensive space": all the transformation in space that aim at preventing people to have a specific behavior... such as sleeping on a bench, doing skat...
Mapping the world wide web circa 1995
Working lately on visualization of coordinating agents, I ran across old work about cyberspace visualization that struck me as very intriguing. See for instance Cyberspace geography visualization: Mapping the World-Wide Web to help people find their way in cyberspace by Luc Girardin (bro of fabien)...
History of tape
People who are into "duct tape" (like me) must have a look at this history of tape published by Ambidextrous (by Jonathan Edelman). It provides a very curious timeline that starts from "Earthenware pots mended with an adhesive substance made from the sap of trees" to Johnson and Johnson or 3M inven...
Internet of Things talk in Geneva
Today I gave a presentation about the "Internet of Things" at a foresight meeting in Geneva.I spoke after Lara Srivastava from the ITU who described the ITU's vision about that topic. In my talk, I tried to show an alternative vision, as propelled by artists or researchers. My point was to show thr...
Graphical music annotation (2)
yet another example of graphical music annotation: Why do I blog this? as an example of visualization for my dissertation. ...
"So my thesis is finished when it’s completed"
okay time for a quote by Bruno Latour, from his well-known dialogue with a a student: "Student — But that’s exactly my problem: to stop. I have to complete this PhD. I have just eight more months. You always say ‘more descriptions’, but this is like Freud and his cures: indefinite analysis. When do...