Week-ending 105

[I started making weeknotes too, This is week 105 because I started working at Liftlab 105 weeks ago] Last week-end was a sort of retreat/holiday to recover from Lift10... and work on the "Lift insight" report, which will summarize the various topics that has been addressed at the Lift 10 confere...

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More and more complex pedometer games

Pedometers connected to video-games are more and more complex, as attested by this Pokéwalker, a Poké Ball-shaped pedometer which can connect to Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver game cards via infrared signals. See the possibilities: "It uses a currency known as "watts", which are obtained as the ...

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Verbs and design and verbs

Looking at interaction design metaphors lately, I've been reading Chris Crawford's "The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software". As mentioned in this other blogpost, I like his approach that uses verbs: Using linguistics as a metaphor for HCI/...

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Last week, recent encounters

[Short note: blogging is more and more difficult with travels, consulting gigs and the need to spend some time offline, i will try to post some form of weeknotes with a visual and short text twist. It's not very fancy, only curious stuff I've stumbled across and collected last week. Of course I'll ...

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Actor-Network Theory and design

The paper "Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network Theory of Design" by Albena Yaneva is an interesting contribution to the role of Actor-Network Theory in design. It basically shows how various ANT concepts can be relevant and insightful in the context of designing artifacts. Relying on...

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Pianococktail and the convergence of artifacts

An intriguing encounter this afternoon with a pianococktail, i.e. a piano that mixes drinks based on the combination of keys played. Being a reader of Boris Vian, running across this crazy object he described in his novel “L’ecume des Jours” ("Froth on the Daydream") is always a pleasure. The one ...

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Phone surface

Give people a surface next to a phone... and it's going to be used for annotations and crazy scribblings. Seen at CERN last week. ...

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"Research" in Design

Lift10 is over and I finally found some time to work on my stack of books. Which lead me to this book that Lysianne gave me during the conference: Recherche-création en design. Modèles pour une pratique expérimentale. This book (only in French) is the final milestone in a swiss research project c...

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A definition of transduction

An interesting quote that will certainly frame our current work on the gamepad project: "the term [transduction] denotes a process – be it physical, biological, mental or social – in which an activity gradually sets itself in motion, propagating within a given area, by basing this propagation on a ...

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