It's been a while I haven't posted about past and current research projects conducted with partners. Last week, I went to DPPI 2011 (Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces) in Milano, a conference that focused on "How Can Design Research serve Industry?". I'll get back to the conference itse...
MP3 players or phones as standardized computing component for upcoming products
Phones and MP3 Players as the Core Component in Future Appliance by Albrecht Schmidt and Dominik Bial (IEEE Pervasive Computing) was a curious morning read. The paper wonders whether mobile devices such as MP3 players or phones can become the standardized computing component for the next decade. Or...
New book about recurring technological failures
A quick egocentric note. My new book about recurring technological failures has been released two weeks ago. It's called "Les flops technologiques: comprendre les échecs pour innover" which obviously means that it's written in French. Based on the analysis of several cases (the intelligent fridge,...
Science-Fiction timeline
Being curious about timelines and graphic visualization of time lately, I quite enjoyed this project called "Wandering through the Future" by Marjolijn Dijkman. It consists of fragments of 70 film productions from all over the world: Apocalyptic landscapes and scenarios leads the spectator through...
Hauntology
Read at bampfa.berkeley.edu: In the fifteen years since Derrida first used this term, hauntology, and the related term, hauntological, have been adopted by the British music critic Simon Reynolds to describe a recurring influence in electronic music created primarily by artists in the United King...
Robot fictions: entertainment cultures and engineering research entanglements
Yesterday in a "secret robot house" in Hatfield, in the suburbs of London, I gave a quick talk about how popular robot fictions influence the design process. The speech was about the propagation of the robot myth in engineering spheres and the influence of certain topics (robot idioms, shapes, beha...
Domestic complexity: home(s)
Reading Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell last week-end, I was interested by several things. Among others, as I was about to prepare a speech about robot interactions, the part concerning home and ubiquitous computing was of par...
Vespa interface simplicity
Interface simplicity at its best. ...
Locative media, lessons learned in the pas few years
Yesterday, I was at ZHDK (design school) in Zürich to give a talk and a workshop about locative media to students from the CAST department. My speech dealt with the lessons learned in the last ten years of locative media design and deployment. See the slides below: [slideshare id=8277975&doc=zhdk20...
Urban dérive on the (urban) information superhighways
This video of two Japanese guys using Google Streetview to visit the USA from their living room is quite fascinating. It's not necessarily the numbers that caught my attention (90 hours, 104,619 clicks, lots of energy drinks). Of course, they're quite extreme but what's curious here is the practic...