Design by Use: The Everyday Metamorphosis of Things by Uta Brandes, Sonja Stich and Miriam Wender is a wonderful book I've read recently about object appropriation or reinvention and the role of design into this. The book basically gives a design perspective to how people redefine objects, which i...
Robot memory in Blade Runner
Roy Batty, in Blade Runner, who tells Deckard about the things he saw in his life and how all those memories would vanish. He is about to die and give this memorable final speech: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched c-beams gl...
"Design Unlikely Futures"
... is a pervasive meme as attested by this tag found on a clothe I bought few days ago: ...
Networked objects 2010
An update for myself. Various networked objects that I've ran across recently and that seems to be curious for my projects: Analogue Tape Glove (Signal to Noise) "This interactive sound installation deals with "exploring the physical connection between people and technology". A tangible user inter...
Joypad memory game
The game controller project moves slowly but we're definitely onto something. We'll release soon an iPad/iPhone application that would correspond to a visual corpus to all the joypads. Each pair of pages will describe one of the 42 official joypads along with various data: date, brand, correspondin...
Maes-Garreau Point/horizon
Read at Kevin Kelly's blog: "The latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it is defined as The Maes-Garreau Point. The period equals to n-1 of the person's life expectancy. This suggests a law: Maes-Garreau Law: Most favorable predictions...
Architecture/Design hints
Some interesting design recommendations, read this morning in "101 Things I Learned in Architecture School" by Matthew Frederick: Why do I blog this? A quick read; it's not a manual or a textbook, it's rather a sober list of principles and hints. Found it curious and replaced the word "archit...
Letter box agency and new metaphors in service design
An interesting new form of signage recently appeared in our cities. See this example in Geneva: few weeks ago, letter boxes in Geneva featured stickers telling people that they will be moved. Interestingly, as shown on the example above, the message was not just a message from the Swiss Post tell...
ATM, vending machines and proxemy
Observing lines of people awaiting their turns to be attended is always curious. See some examples below that shows various distance between the person using the vending machine and the next person in line: Why do I blog this? "Proxemy", a topic I have often addressed here few years ago correspon...
"Challenge design orthodoxy and prevailing technological visions"
From the introductory text by Anthony Dunne for the "Design Interactions show 2010": "Last year, the futurologist Stuart Candy visited the department and showed us a wonderful diagram he used to clarify how we think about futures. Rather than one amorphous space of futureness it was divided into Pr...