I've been pointed on this incredible football tape (presented in Saint-Etienne Biennale 2000): Spanish designer Martí Guixé is known for his anarchic sense of humor, and his Football Tape (2005) is both unruly and witty. Designed to wrap around old newspaper or other scrap material, the Football T...
Bob the blimp
No it's not Sponge Bob, nor CatchBob! but Bob the blimp, a project by Karl Forsberg from the Umeå Institute of Design, : This product is a robot that can serve as a friend for children and that can help them learn new things by answering their questions. Furthermore, it can act as an assistant in p...
On-going Research goals
"On-going goals" at the lab: finish the PhD in one year then I need to refine my model of location-awareness and coordination + a second experiment with the structured tool usage to validate the model current papers to write: one for COOP 2006 about the drawback of automatic location-awareness fo...
Thoughtful critique of so-called ethnography usage in design
A very relevant and thoughtful critique of so-called ethnography usage in 'designing user experience' can be found on Rashmi Sinha's blog (about the DUX conference):Many speakers told us about the "ethnographic research" they conducted. Sometimes they shared some video of their observations - of ch...
A mega helmet
In the Instructables, there is this amazing Pimped Out Megaphone Helmet: how you can very simply modify a megaphone to accept 1/8" line input from an iPod, and mount the megaphone on top of a motorcycle helmet. Â The resulting "Mega Helmet" delivers the maximal aural stupidity allowed by law. Usel...
Awareness must be matched to appropriate tasks
Coming to the wrong decision quickly:Â why awareness tools must be matched with appropriate tasks by A. Espinosa and J. Cadiz and L. Rico-Gutierrez and R. Kraut and W. Scherlis and G. Lautenbacher, CHI 2000. The paper underlines the importance of matching the features of an awareness tool with a wo...
Walking Cities by Ron Herron
While wandering around on the Web tonight, I ran across this Walking Cities project by Ron Herron (a member of the Archigram avantgarde group). In this concept, the city is a giant, reptilian structures which glided across the globe until its inhabitants found a place where they wanted to settle. ...
Remote-contolled turtles
After the remote-controlled humans, Ananova has this good headline: A Russian scientist claims to have created remote controlled turtles for spying missions: Alexei Burikov, head of the biology department at Rostov-on-Don State Pedagogical University, said a human controller could direct the turles...
Find web pages of nearby places based on GPS coordinates
Web-Enhanced GPS by Ramaswamy Hariharan , John Krumm and Eric Horvitz, a paper presented at Location- and Context-Awareness: First International Workshop, LoCA 2005. Location-based services like reminders, electronic graffiti, and tourist guides normally require a custom, location-sensitive da...
Think tank in Lausanne
Thanks to Morten, I've recently been aware of this interesting think tank in Lausanne: Imagination Lab. The Imagination Lab Foundation is an independent, non-profit research institute founded in 2000 and based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its raison d'être is to develop and spread actionable ideas abo...