[ljudstråk] seems to be a nice urban-related project (carried out by studio 12-21): [ljudstråk] is a library of audio walks, available to the public. These audio walks consist of young people's dull, mysterious, exciting and horrifying stories in the public space. They can be borrowed and bought a...
Enhanced Social Interaction in Traffic, Ph.D thesis
Enhanced Social Interaction in Traffic, a PhD Thesis, by Mattias Esbjörnsson. We investigate social and interactional aspects of driving among groups of road users, where the roads and road use have the double qualities of means as well as ends, in order to generate meaningful and interesting mobil...
Album of the year 2005
Fantomas' last album is great, 30 tracks (one for each day in the month of April), 43 minutes! illustrated with a lovely calendar by japanese artist Yoshimoto Nara. "Suspended Animation" (Fantômas) According to the label (Ipecac): Patton describes the new album as ânursery rhymes, cartoon sou...
HR Giger urban stuff in Switzerland
Today I was in gruyère, a not-so remote part of Switzerland but definitely not a city nor an international capital, and I stumbled across very interesting pieces of urban furnitures, obviously designed by HR Giger (the creator of 'Alien', who happens to be Swiss). It's actually the entrance of the ...
Research practices changed by free access to scientific results
Another good effect of free access is that scientific research is reshuffling its publishing model (or at least starting to) as attested by this article in The Economist: IT USED to be so straightforward. A team of researchers working together in the laboratory would submit the results of their res...
Norman on Tufte on Powerpoint
A column by Donald Norman about defending powerpoint against Tufte; some excerpts I found relevant in this informative rant: It has become commonplace to rail against the evils of PowerPoint talks; (...) PowerPoint should be banned, cries the crowd. Edward Tufte, the imperious critic of graphic dis...
SCORPIODROME: Mixed Reality Social Gaming for Children
SCORPIODROME : An exploration in Mixed Reality Social Gaming for Children (.pdf) by G. Metaxas, B. Metin, J. Schneider, G. Shapiro, W. Zhou and P. Markopoulos (User System Interaction Programme / Eindhoven University of Technology) This paper describes the design of SCORPIODROME a mixed reality gam...
Phillip Jeffrey visit
Today, Phillip Jeffrey visited our lab in Lausanne. The point was to discuss potential avenues of collaboration with him and his group at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. One of the issue we raised is their future use of CatchBob! (yep they will re-use our CatchBob game their!). Som...
Sharing a sense of balance with people
A curious way to feel copresence is described in Networked Equilibrium Sharing System "Balance Seat" by Nobuya Suzuki, Takahiro Kobayashi and Hiroshi Yasuda. This paper presents a networked system connecting real space, which is shared and operated by three people. We made three pneumatic triple-ax...
FT on open-source and innovation
An interesting account in the FT of how the 'open-source' movement is now nurturing the innovation processes. It's called 'How open source gave power to the people': In the internet age, it seems, the next big idea to change your industry may come from an unexpected direction. (...) Sophisticated t...