Last saturday, I made a quick trip to the Swiss Museum of Science Fiction for the opening of an highly intriguing exhibition called "Do Robots Dream of Spring?". It features the work of Ken Rinaldo, an american new media artist who specializes in exploring the confluence and coevolution of organic...
Skateboards, golf clubs and other bodily engaging artifacts
This quick varial observed in Geneva few years ago is one of these pictures that I keep using to show how skateboard practice is interesting in the context of tangible artifacts. As a matter of fact, my argumentation about it is more based on personal intuition (and gut feelings) than serious obse...
Evolution in rapid prototyping/3D printing
A common remark I've heard at Lift France 11 about the session focused on fab labs and rapid prototyping dealt with the lack of business opportunities in these fields. Interestingly, the NYT had an overview of the current possibilities in this article. Various companies ranging from HP to Boeing ar...
Recent "you are here" encounters
London, UK: the delicate use of a pointing finger. Istanbul, Turkey: the finger is now turned into an arrow, that indicate the location. Faial, Portugal: a common "you are here" symbol with a bullseye signage that replaces the finger/arrow metaphor. Lyon, France: an interesting example of a semi...
Article about relying on failures in design (ACM interactions)
My article about technological failures has been published in the last issue of ACM interactions. It addresses the possibility to use failure as design tactic: "failures and mistakes are important too because they are implicit signs of a need or problem that requires a solution. The examination of...
Attaching stories to objects: the return of the blogject meme
This article in the NYT made me think that there seems to be a new bubble in platforms that allows attaching stories to physical objects. The article mentions Tales of things (" Slap on a sticker with a newfangled bar code, and anybody with a properly equipped smartphone can scan the object and lea...
Lift seminar@imaginove about robots/networked objects
A quick update on the Lift@home front, we're going to have a Lift seminar with Imaginove on September 29th in Lyon. We'll talk about how networked objects and robotics can offer an interesting playground for digital entertainment. The event will be in French and we'll have two speakers. Etienne Min...
Designing alternative presents and speculative future
Last week I attended the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology conference in Trento, Italy. I went there presenting my work about game controllers and user appropriation of these devices. One of the most interesting session I attended was part of a track called "Speculation, ...
Foursquare data analysis about users activities
Bitsybot has an interesting set of visualizations about Foursquare usage. Called Foursquare Trends, it shows users' behavior over time by visualizing a week’s worth of Foursquare checkins. Bitsybot is interested in using this to "develop a suite of similar tools to help small brick and mortar busin...
Motivations for "off the grid check-in" on Foursquare
TechCrunch is generally not a website I follow that much, but there's an interesting article by a Guest Author about "Off the Grid" check-ins on Foursquare. Following up on the blogpost about automatic location capture I wrote last week, I think it's worth having a look at this survey mentioned in ...