"Historical Analysis: Using the Past to Design the Future" by Wyche, Sengers and Grinter is an article about how the discipline of history similarly can contribute to research about human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing. The authors takes the example of a specific context, domestic en...
The slow evolution of AI in video-games
Just read on gameplanet.co.nz: Rather than trying to program enemy AI to think, behave and play like a human, developers simply imbue them with increased hit points, better statistics, or any number of favourable benefits whilst removing the same attributes from the players themselves. Manipulat...
Co-creation workshop with Nokia Research during Lift 11
During Lift 11 in Geneva, researchers from Nokia Research Center Lausanne organized a co-creation workshop with a small group of conference participants.The session focused on understanding how the contextual insights of users could contribute to the evolution of the mobile user experience...
"Journals of Negative Results"
A recent trend in academic sciences consist in the publication of "negative results". This is based on the idea that scientific articles published in traditional journals frequently provide insufficient evidence regarding negative data. More specifically, the point is to give a voice to negative re...
Both French and Swiss systems
There's this part of the airport in Geneva that has this fascinating setting. Several remarks: You have traces of both French and Swiss systems: two separate phone booths (Swisscom and France Telecom), two separate mailboxes (French and Swiss Posts), two different fire extinguishers You have both...
Location-based services updates
Few examples of location-based services that I ran across recently. Bluebrain reactive music based on location As described on The Next Web: "We had this idea of having the music progress and change based on a person’s location. We decided to release an album that’s also an app with whole melodic p...
Teardown culture and companies' reaction
POPSCI has an article about the "history of the teardown" and what happens on websites such as ifixit.com/. (A robot tinkerer's desk at the design museum in Zürich) The article describes the important of this kind of activity to understand how things work, child-like memories of bricolage and to g...
Video games that recently caught my attention
Recently, a journalist asked me what are the console games that I found interesting lately. I froze for a while, told him about 3 games: Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress... and realize none of them were available on consoles... Few notes about these 3 video-games tha...
About gestures and mobile phone conversations
"Not crazy, just talking on the phone: Gestures and mobile phone conversations" by Carolyn Y. Wei is an intriguing paper I ran across recently. It basically focuses on a phenomena you may have certain notice: why and how mobile phone users engage in vivid nonverbal communication behaviors that do n...
Keyboard hack #3
Another interesting keyboard adaptation that I ran across in one my course. This designer is working on a large graphic and needs to drag and drop lots of visual primitives here and there with Illustrator. She found it more convenient to use this quick and dirty solution by using tiny stickers wit...