As an avid city explorer, I am always amazed at the items people trash; loitering and trashing practices is of tremendous interest to me. I am impressed by trash bags, dirty piles of garbages, plastic bags with shredded paper... there's a lot to learn from a culture based on that (I won't enter too...
wii play history
In this interview of Nintendo execs, there is this interesting mention about the "interaction storing" capabilities of the wii (Timo described this to us during the last NFC workshop but I wanted to go deeper into this issue): Kuroume: Sure, it's really quite simple. Wii automatically records detai...
Touch or don't touch?
While doing a very quick search over touch interfaces, I though back of this very curious Nintendo U-Force controller for the NES: According to Wikipedia: The U-Force is an accessory for the Nintendo Entertainment System made by Brøderbund. It employed 2 large infrared sensors and a series of switc...
Chumby
The Chumby seems to be an intriguing artifact expected to be released in 2007: a compact device that can act like a clock radio, but is way more flexible and fun. It uses the wireless internet connection you already have to fetch cool stuff from the web: music, the latest news, box scores, animatio...
Pseudowords and nonwords
People interested in buying weird domain name for website might be interested in list of pseudowords and nonwords. For the record, a pseudoword is "a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language (at least superficially), while in fact it is not part of the lexicon....
CHI 2007 workshop about "Imaging the City"
Imaging the City: Exploring the Practices & Technologies of Representing the Urban Environment in Human-Computer Interaction is a CHI 2007 workshop that quite fits with my research interests. The aim of the workshop is compelling: This one-day workshop will explore the practices and technologies o...
Joke Analysis and Production Engines
I recently stumbled across this Adding Humor to Text-Based Applications paper (by Rada Mihalcea and Carlo Strapparava). What attracted me was this articulating humor and software engineering. This is the starting point: given the importance of humor in our daily lives and computers in our work and ...
Geo-awareness as a hot 2006 trend
In the Innovation Lab hottest tendencies and trends of 2006, there is this: GEO-AWARENESS: The filling station knows you're on your way, and – via the navigating system in your car or your mobile – it will send you an offer on the petrol, and at the same time it will advertise the dish of the day i...
Design for a fax and Alexander's tree
H. W. Thimbleby, 1997, "Design for a Fax," Personal Technologies, 1(2), pp101--117. This article is a very compelling discussion about the usability of button-controlled devices. It exemplifies this question through examining the design of a 1993/4 domestic phone/fax/answerphone machine (DF200). So...
Flocked Green Jesus Astronaut
There seems to be a new version of the Astronaut Jesus: the Flocked Green Jesus Astronaut is an intriguing add-on: Argentinian design group Doma has partnered with Hong Kong toy geniuses AdFunture Workshop to put out this otherworldly limited edition of 200 figures. Removable helmet. Let the passio...