Seen in Madrid last week. ...
"Walk your movie": An interview with the founder of "Walking the Edit"
Once in a while, I enjoy conducting interviews with the interesting people I encounter in my work. This time, I discussed with Ulrich Fischer, founder of Walking the Edit, a very intriguing locative media application that allows users to “walk a movie” : your recorded walk will be translated into a...
Hidden webcam: the reluctance to be observed
Observed on one of my student's laptop. He told me that he "did not want to be observed" (nor he wanted his laptop to be controlled from elsewhere). Which is why he he put a (French) stamp ("easy to remove", he told me) on the camera. Why do I blog this? This is an interesting example of these lit...
IEEE Pervasive computing issue on "Ubicomp computing at 20"
The engineering journal IEEE Pervasive Computing has a special edition on the twenty years of the Ubiquitous/pervasive computing trope. It's actually a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Mark Weiser’s seminal article, “The Computer for the 21st Century” first published in Scientific American ...
Theoretical bases for Smart Cities
"A theory of smart cities" by Colin Harrison and Ian Abbott Donnelly offers an overview of the different theoretical bases for the "Smart Cities" trope. As the author mentions, "the current ad hoc approaches of Smart Cities to the improvement of cities are reminiscent of pre-scientific medicine. Th...
Baudrillard on the difficulty to grasp people's needs
A good quote by Jean Baudrillard, Selected writings (1988): "...he is forced to represent the individual as a completely passive victim of the system... we are all aware of how consumers resist such a precise injunction, and of how they play with needs, on a keyboard of objects. We know that advert...
New URL for pasta and vinegar!
As my main affiliation is now the Near Future Laboratory, Pasta and Vinegar moved to this new cosy URL. More news later on. ...
Subjective subway map
"Mon plan du métro de Paris" by Pierre Joseph is an interesting representation of the author's memory of Paris: Why do I blog this? Maps based on people's recollection of souvenirs and past experiences are always insightful. They tell stories about the person's subjectivity, what count for certain ...
A study about mobile phone location data and recommendation systems:
People who played with location-based recommendation systems may have been confronted to a common issue: when you start using the application, you do not necessarily have a "location history" (no list of past "check-in" if we translate this in the Foursquare idiom), hence it's difficult to get rele...
PHOTO/NYKTO: a game played by switching on and off the lights
PHOTO/NYKTO is a project designed by my colleague Annelore Schneider & Douglas Edric Stanley at HEAD in Geneva: "« Photo/Nykto » is an experimental game conceived by Annelore Schneider and Douglas Edric Stanley as part of the « Unterplay » project at the Master Media Design —HEAD, Genève. It is a g...