Bloom.io seems to be an interesting platform and their tag-line is just fantastic. "Our mission to bring you a new type of visual discovery experience is already underway. We’re building a series of bite-sized applications that bring the richness of game interactions and the design values of mo...
Urban tragedy: a street sign that lost its performativity
This street sign, which indicates that it's not allowed to park your car along this sidewalk recently went through a very intriguing process: it used to be several inches on the right, next to the curb (a careful observer would see a tiny black dot on the sidewalk). Being there, it was convenientl...
Back Track : mark it, go anywhere, get back
People talk a lot about location-based services these days. GPS car navigation system is quite mainstream for a while, geosocial services such as Foursquare or Facebook places are more and more adopted, and media attention is still focusing on the promises of location-based marketing (even though u...
Reading notes from "Player One" by Douglas Coupland
A few quotes from "Player One" by Douglas Coupland that I enjoyed (combined with an exploration of how I can export note from a Kindle app on an iPad): About artifacts and objects Encountered at "Location 92" (Oh btw, given that I read the Kindle version of the book, I exported the note from kindle...
My flash code has been contaminated by a fat virus
Encountered in Paris yesterday morning. (Intentional) Derelict 2D code in the city with an interesting caption (which perhaps explains the fact that the code is not readable with your usual QR code reader). ...
The diversity of platforms to read digital texts
Why do I blog this? Working on a chapter in my book about recurring failures of technologies, I quickly created this diagram that shows the different iterations of platforms to read digital texts/content. The point was to show the large diversity of systems, as opposed to the unique "e-book reader...
Screen multiplicity in a Swiss train
Sitting on a Swiss train the other day, I became fascinated by this air pilot playing with his laptop PC and his tablet. But it became even more fascinating when the guy fired up his iPhone: Why do I blog this? Fascination towards compulsive usage of technologies. This is definitely an extreme u...
From "Learning from Las Vegas" to design research
During my Christmas vacations, I finally had some time to read "Learning from Las Vegas" by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Working on a course about field research, I was particularly interested by the way the authors framed the importance of observation in design. Two quote...
About the history of the computer mouse
An interesting excerpt from "The best laid plans of mice and men: the computer mouse in the history of computing by Paul Atkinson: "In the case of the adoption of the computer mouse as the preferred selection device, it seems that there are three discrete relevant groups of user that saw the proble...
"Eye am You"
"Eye am You" (IAMAS Gangu Project, 2009) by Jarashi Suki: "You am Eye is a toy that reflects the glasses which are in front of their eyes. Captured from the video camera mounted on the front, and locate the face by face recognition system that has the eyes of his face reflecting the display. This ...