As soon as you see this kind of gas counter in Spain, you start noticing that its design is pretty similar to a face: A face likes this: And then you see a similar device with 3 counters, which you recognize as a "3-eyed face" (see also the native american version): Later on, you encounter one-e...
Smart Cities: how to move from here to there? | Lift11 workshop
Workshop theme: Ubiquitous computing: Augmented Reality, location-based services, internet of things, urban screens, networked objects and robots Over the past few years, "Smart Cities" have become a prominent topic in tech conferences and press. Apart from the use of this term for ma...
Temporary mailbox in a phone booth
A curious cardboard mailbox inserted in a phone booth in Lyon, France. It seemed to be an for a foundation that helps homeless people (it subsequently plays on the idea that phone booth can become communication nodes for them). ...
What happens in an interaction design studio
There's an interesting short article by Bill Gaver in the latest issue of ACM interactions. Beyond the focus of the research, I was interested by the description of the approach and the vocabulary employed. Very relevant to see how they define what "design research" can be. He starts off by statin...
What robots are
As a researcher interested in human-technology interface, I have always been intrigued by robotics. My work in the field has been limited to several projects here and there: seminars/workshops organization about it, the writing of a research grant about human-robot interaction for game design (a pr...
Steel and discarded electronics collection
As usual, observing people who collect steel pieces, metal parts and discarded electronics will never cease to interest me. This picture depicts a guy I spotted last week in Sevilla, Spain. As the quantity of manufactured artifacts made is increasing, the fact that some folks toss them on the stre...
User's involvement in location obfuscation with LBS
Exploring End User Preferences for Location Obfuscation, Location-Based Services, and the Value of Location is an interesting paper written by Bernheim Brush, John Krumm, and James Scott from Microsoft Research. The paper presents the result from a field study about people’s concerns about the coll...
Primer's explanatory diagram and timelines as a design tool
The blogpost Julian wrote yesterday about Primer reminded of this curious diagram that David Calvo sent me few weeks ago. The diagram is a tentative description of what happens in the movie. Since the movie is about two engineers who accidentally created a weird apparatus that allows an object or ...
Human reality resides in machines
(Traces of human activity revealed on a building encountered in Malaga, Spain) An interesting excerpt from Gilbert Simondon's On The Mode Of Existence of Technical Objects: "He is among the machines that work with him. The presence of man in regard to machines is a perpetual invention. Human realit...
Few days in Spain + Augmented Reality and best wishes for 2011
Currently in Spain, spending few days of vacations till next week-end. A good opportunity to work on a book project (in French, about recurring failures of technologies), read books, take some pictures and test applications such as World lense. In general, I am quite critical with Augmented Realit...