Yes, phones are mobile and everywhere now. But before that, public phone used to sit inside a booth... and before that they were also out of the booth. People would take the phone and put your head inside this kind of device encountered at CERN the other day (te gent on the picture is Mr. Woebken)...
Location-awareness sharing and affordances in the subway
Two recent articles about location-based platforms caught my eyes Seeburger, J., & Schroeter, R. (2009, Nov 23-27). Disposable Maps: Ad hoc Location Sharing. In J. Kjeldskov, J. Paay & S. Viller (Eds.), Proceedings OZCHI 2009 (pp. 377-380). Melbourne, VIC: The University of Melbourne. "The gatherin...
Cern input interfaces
A bunch of curious input interfaces I encountered at CERN today. Interesting diversity: lots of specific affordances, several distinct constraints that lead to a wide variety of possibilities. They control information and fluid through mechanical, electric, electromechanical and electronic mec...
Wifi sharing request
An interesting encounter last week in Lyon: a message stuck on a door from a person who want to share a wifi connection. The translation in English goes like: "Hello, I would like to share a Wi-Fi connection with someone. I need the internet for my studies (till June) but I do not want a subscript...
Recap of Lift seminar @ Imaginove
Yesterday evening, I co-organized a Lift seminar in Lyon, in partnership with Imaginove, a cluster of digital content companies. Located in a an old flour mill, the seminar was about new forms of video game play with a specific focus on Transmedia and Location-Based Games. To deal with this, I inv...
Gestural interaction when reading
Observing how people read on displays is a fascinating endeavor. One of the interesting interaction mode with on-line media I noticed recently concern the gestures people make when reading. Lots of folks have focused on how people would touch or gesture to interact with information as an INPUT. But...
Tangible interaction frameworks
Two interesting frameworks I often use in design research about tangible/gestural interfaces: The first by Benford et al. (2003) is focused on three components: "Movements of interfaces can be analysed in terms of whether they are sensible, sensable and desirable. Sensible movements are those that...
The complex relationship between people and domestic appliances
Reading the last issue of "Design and Culture that Basile pointed to me few weeks ago, I ran across this paper yesterday that deals with "homemaking". Working on a small projects about networked objects in the home context, it's quite relevant: Crewe, L. (2009). The Screen and the Drum: on Form, F...
Digital plumbing and the deployment of Ubicomp at home
(A broken interface that would certainly need a digital plumber, seen in Amsterdam) An interesting article about the deployment of ubicomp at home: Tolmie, P., Crabtree, A., Egglestone, S., Humble, J, Greenhalgh, C. and Rodden, T. (2009) Digital Plumbing: The Mundane Work of Deploying UbiComp in th...
Crowd dynamics determined by more than physical constraints
A long time ago, while still doing a bachelor degree in biology, animal cognition was a pet project of mine. Ants and bees or ethology methods were highly intriguing and paved my way towards more technology-oriented studies of behavior. I still keep an eye on this field and the following paper from...