Catching up with tons of papers, feeds, emails and crap after one week away, I was struck by a talk by Danah Boyd about MySpace called "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace". Apart from the identity production topic as well as the social analysis of this platform, I w...
Dark side of computing
As we were discussing with fabien, the dark side of computing may lead to new fossils in the future. See this atrocious dump in Lagos, Nigeria. (Picture © Basel Action Network 2006) It's from the Basel Action Network, a very important NGO "focused on confronting the excesses of unbridled free trad...
Visual Patterns and Communication for Robots
The Future Applications Lab in Gotenborg, Sweden is involved in a very interesting project (from my point of view) called ECagents (meaning Embodied and Communicating Agents). The project will investigate basic properties of different communication systems, from simple communication systems in anim...
Kafka Index
Last week, during an offline week in greece, I ran across this very curious new concept: the Kafka Index, created in France. It is basically and index that measures the complexity of a project/law and its impact. Referring to Franz Kafka's great novel "The Trial" in which a man tries to struggle ag...
Sterling on Independent Research
Bruce Sterling's "Visionary in Residence : Stories" include an intriguing novel called Ivory Tower, which has already been published in Nature in April 2005 for a special issue about "What does the next half-century have in store?". It addresses a topic I am very interested in: independent re...
Constraints-Based Architecture
Design is bound by constraints as we can see on this picture (seen in Greece where I've been last week): The tree was there and then "they" built the wall (and the street consequently) ...
Tangible Flags: collaborative field trip for kids
A case study of Tangible Flags: A collaborative technology to enhance field trips by Gene Chipman, Allison Druin, Dianne Beer, Jerry Alan Fails, Mona Leigh Guha, Sante Simms, Paper that will be presented at IDC 2006. The paper describes the participatory design of a "Tangible Flags technology" to s...
Street Interconnectivity
Google Cartography: Street Art in Your Neighborhood is a curious google hack by Richard Jones: Google Cartography uses Google via the Google Search API [] to build a visual representation of the interconnectivity of streets in an area. This application takes a starting street and finds streets tha...
Meaningful whereabouts/locative information while googleing your shoes
Reading Everyware and thinking about Bruce Sterling's talk at LIFT06 and ETECH, I was mumbling about the idea of googling objects to know where they are. What Bruce was saying: “I have an Internet-of-Things with a search engine of things. So I no longer hunt anxiously for my missing shoes in the mo...
A telepresence garment
Skimming through Eduardo Kac's "Telepresence and Bio Art : Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots (Studies in Literature and Science)", I ran across his 10-years old project called The Telepresence Garment and found it of particular interest nowadays: I first conceived the Telepresence Garment in 19...