Here are the slides of my talk, which concluded the Junior Research Day at the Swiss Design Network 2010 in Basel. It was about the relationships between Sci-Fi and Design... which allowed me to introduce some of the concept that Julian Bleecker or James Auger would address later on in the conferen...
About African science-fiction
An interesting text by Jonathan Dotse about African science-fiction: "There are also artistic reasons to look forward to an African science fiction renaissance. African storytelling tradition contains the very sort of metaphysical themes that science fiction is best equipped to address: themes of i...
Density of information
The density of information on the back of a Polaroid camera, observed at the flea market in Geneva. ...
Components of Science Fiction #scifi
As claimed by Fredrik Pohl "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam". Just thought it would be good to play with a LOLtechnology such as graphjam to exemplify this quote. ...
Problems about car automation #techusage
Wandering around the Internet, I stumbled across this website about a car technology, which has an interesting flow of comments about how people feel towards it. It's about the “ECO pedal”, i.e a pedal system that uses onboard electronics to determine when the driver is excessively accelerating (an...
Accidents, mistakes, failures and malfunctions, a talk at Share Festival (Torino)
Last Wednesday I went to Torino. I was part of a "Warm-up event" for the Share Festival, which focuses this year on a topic called "Smart Mistakes". The talk was called "Accidents and failures as creative material for the near future" and slides can be found on Slideshare. It was actually an update...
Bruce Sterling on robots in acm interaction
Some excerpts from an interesting interview with Bruce Sterling about robots from acm interactions in 2005: "AM: What do you think of as the most successful or surprising innovation in robotics in the past? BS: Well, robots are always meant to be “surprising,” because they are basically theater or ...
About a voting device
A voting interface encountered last week in Lyon at the local city council. It's interesting to note: The possibility to interact with the room using the micro feature (which stands to "microphone"), The arrow on the right indicate a LED that is switched on when the person enter a identification ...
Reverse-engineer science-fiction from the past / imagine sci-fi of the past
An interesting quote from William Gibson in this interview in Wired UK: "When I was a kid in the late fifties and the late sixties reading a lot of science fiction from the 1940s, I used to simultaneously reverse-engineer the history of the world from whatever version of it that science fiction wri...
Human-cell-phone proximity on the beach
Seen in Marseille, France last week-end. An interesting occurrence of very close proximity between a human being and his cell-phone. Various remarks here: The user seems to have a certain level of trust in leaving his phone like this, while being asleep. Thieves can take it readily (I've often se...