Yesterday, I went to a small village in Savoy, France. This was a good opportunity to take a picture of these two forms of signage that are pervasive in this country. On the one hand, you have the common "Ville fleurie" ('flowered cities') which corresponds to a sort of rating French cities get to...
"we took note of every choice they made in cyberspace"
"Jack: Although everything imaginable was on the web, certain texts had disappeared. Though interactivity and equal access to information were the cornerstone of the revolution's rhetoric, no one seemed to notice, or at least feel, the loss of expression officially deemed malcontent, antisocial, an...
GPS drawings to interpret the urban environment
Drawing with Satellites is a "GPS project" carried out at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture by Chris Speed, Esther Polak, Ross Cruickshanks, Karlyn Sutherland and second year Architecture students. The project led to this intriguing PDF booklet. The brief engaged part...
Design form guide
The "Formfächer" (Formguide) is an instrument I stumble across when visiting the design studio emphase.ch two weeks ago: "The "formguide" explores the potential of language for the description of objects and forms. Using examples, a professional terminology is developed which aids communication ab...
A glimpse at the robolift program
A quick update about the robolift conference program, I've been building over the previous months. The event is in two weeks and I'm looking forward to see the presentations and debates! We finalized the line-up last week and here's the latest version: The Shape of robots to come: What should rob...
Event recap: Lift seminar @ Imaginove about gamification
Last week saw the first of my lift@home series for this year, in partnership with Imaginove, a French cluster made of video-game companies, animated movie studios and web/mobile design firms. As an echo to the debate at the Game Designer's conference in San Francisco, we chose to talk about gamifi...
Forgers versus Honers
An excerpt from Diamond Age Neal Stephenson (1995) "Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less re...
"Field research for design" course 2011
Students are back from vacation and my course about design ethnography at HEAD-Geneva just started. This year the number of students has doubled compared to last year, the diversity is quite good in terms of nationality (Swiss, French, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Brazilian, Dutch) and specialities: I...
Personal object tagging practices
Two remarkable forms of "object tagging" encountered recently at ENSCI two weeks ago: 1. Tagging for temporary storage ENSCI is a design school in Paris. The kind of place where students need stuff for their practices, which means that they have storage facilities (small boxes made of steel). Besid...
Facebook and spatial implications in Menlo Park
I'm generally not that interested in social networking sites per se... but this article in the WSJ sent on the Dr. Fish list caught my attention. It basically addresses the implication of Facebook upcoming move from Palo Alto (University avenue) to Menlo park on a new campus, which it is taking ove...