A good excerpt from a text by Neal Stephenson: "Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then s...
Designing a marker system for the next 10,000 years
"Permanent Markers Implementation Plan" is a project initiated in 2004 by the U.S. Department of Energy in order to provide a permanent record which identifies the location of nuclear waste repository and its dangers. The report is quite big and it's perhaps easier to peruse this shorter version, m...
Crosswords - QR - Game of Life
Lighweight QR code (as suggested by Paul Baron)? Game of Life (as suggested by Matt Jones)? or simply a red hand-drawn crosswords structure... as this kind of artifact fascinates me recently. I wonder if some people already thought about crosswords generated by game of life algorithms (beyond this...
Apple first computer cost 666.66$
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"the job of the studio is to bring our own ideas to life..."
The interview about SVK by Berg London is insightful but I was fascinated by this quote: "I think the job of the studio is to bring our own ideas to life – that it’s something inventive, hopefully something that has some cultural importance – but mainly to have fun, make stuff y’know? When you can ...
"Mobile 3D" projects
Currently working on a project about the user experience of 3D on mobile displays, I am fascinated by these two projects that came up in a discussion with Etienne yesterday: Hasbro MY3D Viewer: "Designed specifically for iPhone and iPod touch, the MY3D Viewer lets you experience 3D games and 360-d...
Taxonomy, ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies
"These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into: (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed o...
ENDCOMMERCIAL® / Reading the City
ENDCOMMERCIAL® / Reading the City is a book that Chris Woebken recommended few weeks ago via a quick exchange of 140-character messages. It's a fascinating object that is perhaps 102% in line with my interests (urban artifacts, classification, aesthetics). This book is basically a compilation of p...
Repurposed shutter
Why do I blog this? Giving lectures here and there about user experience, it's good to have such kind of examples to show the tendency people have to repurpose standard artifacts for other needs. ...
User-made "you are here"
... or you can spot where you are based on a location people made clearly visible through touching a paper-based map... seen in Paris last week-end. ...