A very interesting blogpost about the fall and rise of location-based services on Mobile Radicals: During the early days of WAP capable mobile phones, BT Cellnet in conjunction with the then un-deregulated 192 service and Yellow Pages would allow you to find such useful things as a curry house when...
The Economist on Makers/Tinkerers
A very relevant article in The Economist about the DIY/hack trend of the amateur revolution: "Technological tinkering, or hacking, is not limited to computers. Cars, cameras and vacuum-cleaners can be hacked too". Some excerpts I found interesting: Today's technological tinkerers, however, have a f...
Using video-game controllers/devices for other purposes
I recently came across this DTEC-BC-PRO (550$!): The DTEC-BC-PRO is quite simply THE BEST boost controller ever made. It turns your Gameboy Advance SP into a powerful Electronic Boost Controller cabable of controlling boost pressures in excess of 60psi. The DTEC-BC-PRO allows everything from simpl...
Nice laptop carrier
Netto is a curious laptop carrier by german designer Tonia Welter: The standard plastic bag in a new sense: on journeys and trips, inventive laptop owners wrap their best piece just into a plastic bag or nap film to create a kind of trash-look as an effective protection against thieves. NETTO picks...
Some thoughts about technology forecast
Q. Some technologies, like the Internet, seem to have changed almost everything.A. We were told in the 1960s that space travel changes everything. In the 1970s, we were told that nuclear power changes everything. Now, we are told that the Internet changes everything. If you look at the most importa...
Since people like THINGS, the repository becomes a social tool
I've been working lately on the social and cultural consequences of digitalization (for a client, not for my research). One of the side effect in the video game market is that boxed PC games decline as digital downloads rise according to marketing firm GfK: But the way in which people get their gam...
Location-based games overview
Rashid O., Mullins I., Coulton P., and Edwards R. “Extending Cyberspace: Location Based Games Using Cellular Phones,” ACM Computers in Entertainment, Vol 4, Issue 1, January, 2006 This article is a comprehensive overview of location-based games, describing enabling technologies as well as examples ...
Prototyping in video games
There is a great account of Maxis Senior Development Director Eric Todd's talk at the GDC on Gamasutra about pre-production through prototyping, which is a very important question in game design: what can game designers learn from prototypes? how early in the development of a game could they use th...
Strata by Jody Elff
Doing a presentation in Lyon (France) today, I encountered this interesting sound installation in a parking garage (the policy here is to put art installation in every underground parking garage, which is nice): Strata by Jody Elff Commissioned by Lyon Parc Auto, Strata is a reactive sonic sculptur...
Ethnography of Petrol Station Stay
TENDING TO MOBILITY: INTENSITIES OF STAYING AT THE PETROL STATION by Daniel Normark (Environment & Planning A. Pion, vol. 38, no 2, pp 241-252.) is an ethnographic study of ongoing social activities at a petrol station. Petrol stations constitute a nexus for mobility. Through ethnographic observati...