Flying saucer in Oslo

In good rezonance with UFO-like architecture in Geneva (see here), here is the Oslo version of the flying saucer: Why do I blog this? left over in a curious part of the city, this rusty unflying saucer is a very nice object from a future yet to come, yet to envision but that some folks there do no...

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NordiCHI Workshop highlights (day 1)

A kind of super-quick synthesis of the main highlights from our workshop at NordiCHI "Near Field Interactions the user-centered internet of things". This is not the final report and it only reflects what I found relevant with regards to my research practices. Timo started by introducing the aim of...

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A blogging purse

Cyril pointed me on this quite unusual blogject (which is wrong since there is no prototypical blogject representation) is this 'blogging purse': " It looks like it just uploads images. The details are a bit on the weak side, but some of the stuff looks neat. The purse contains a camera, basic stam...

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remote control gardening

Via, look at this Aiterrarium: Remote-control gardening: On October 11, Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd. announced plans to begin selling an indoor gardening system whose lighting, temperature and water supply can be remotely monitored and controlled via the Internet. The system, called Aiterrarium,...

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Research as material for design

I was struck this morning by two parts of blogposts written by Anne Galloway. First on the Touch's project blog for which Anne now collaborate: I’m a social researcher working at the intersections of technology, space and culture. (...) When Timo and I first started talking about the project, I was...

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Barcode Jesus

Scott Blake is an artist who plays with barcode; maybe one of his bets piece is this Jesus portrait made out of barcodes. In Scott's words: This is the Bar Code Jesus that I created using my first refined bar code halftone program. The bar code images used look like regular bar codes, but they go b...

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Future literacy at Philips

In this Philips column "new value by One Design" entitled Making sense of the future give some food for thoughts about foresight: Philips Design's foresight research takes into account technological change but understands that this is driven by human interests and their context. This means also tak...

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Shoulder-surfing

The practice of "shoulder-surfing": the use of direct observation techniques, such as looking over someone's shoulder, to get information (e.g. where someone watches numbers typed by an ATM user) ...

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From symbolic analysts to pronoiac meme-broker

Quote from sci-fi novel Accelerando by Charles Stross: Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyran...

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Haptic radar for spatial awareness

Augmenting spatial awareness with Haptic Radar by Alvaro Cassinelli, Carson Reynolds, and Masatoshi Ishikawa; a paper presented at the International Seminar of Wearable Computing in Montreux, Switzerland. This paper is about an "haptic radar": device that would allow its users to perceive and respo...

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