Lucie Giard describes how Michel de Certeau sees people's link with artifact in the following terms: Certeau’s originality lay in his refusal to endorse the old opposition of high culture versus popular culture, translated into the dichotomy of creative art versus mass production. On the contrary, ...
Encouraging basic social interaction of children with autism skills using robots
Aude Billard, a researcher at our school, worked with others on a neat project that aims at encouraging basic social interaction of children with autism skills using a humanoid robot. One of the experiment she ran is well described in this paper. our current approach of repeated trails over a lo...
LBS, flexibility of information, semantics and transparency
Matching User's Semantics with Data Semantics in Location-Based Services by Shijun Yu, Lina Al-Jadir, Stefano Spaccapietra, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Semantics in mobile Environments (SME 2005), Ayia Napa, 9 May 2005. One of the major issues for flexible information services is how to be ...
Location awareness and World of Warcraft
While walking is swiss snowy mountains, Mirweis pointed me on this World of Warcraft add-on called The Gatherer: Gatherer is a WoW addon for herbalists, miners and treasure hunters. It's main purpose is to track the closest plants, deposits and treasure locations on you minimap. The addon does not...
Confluence of street art and knitting
Via AEIOU I ran across an impressive article about a new and hilarious trend: the confluence of two rising cultural tides: crafting/knitting and street art in Houston Press: "We're taking graffiti and making it warm, fuzzy and more acceptable," says AKrylik. "I like the duality there. Also, I reall...
MEART portrait series
MEART and the portrait series conducted by art-group Fish and Ships. A web cam captures portraits of viewers within the gallery space. These images are then converted into a stimulation map and used to stimulate the neurons (this is the beginning of a drawing process). A multi channel electrophysio...
Leapfrogging: rapid system adoption without intermediary steps
I like this concept very much: Leapfrogging and Worldchanging has a good definition of it:: "Leapfrogging" is the notion that areas which have poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern systems without going through intermediary ...
Use plants to do photography
Via Wilfried Houjebek's delicious, an intriguing project he calls "geranium as camera" many natural things are sensitive to light. Long ago people noticed the effect of light on green plants, or how it made coloured fabrics fade. It is the effect of light on plants that makes Roman Photography poss...
Research discussion at the lab
This afternoon, at the lab, we had a discussion about methodologies. The goal was not to agree on a common methology for all our projects, but rather to have a discussion of what we can use and in which context. One of the issue that lead to this was the fact that we know what we're not using (pure...
Garment-Augmented Technology: Cell phones and Shoulder Pad
A Shoulder Pad Insert Vibrotactile Display by Aaron Toney, Lucy Dunne, Bruce H. Thomas, Susan P. Ashdown describes a project that aims at integrate a vibrotatcitle display and support electronics into a standard clothing insert, the shoulder pad. The shoulder pad in particular was chosen as a high...