Yesterday in Lyon, Emmanuel Rondeau and myself organized a Lift@Home about gestural interfaces. We (Lift) indeed partnered with Imaginove, a French cluster of companies, research institutions and universities focused on video games, audio-visual, cinema, animation and multimedia. Several other Lif...
Locative media projects that caught my attention
Interesting locative media project that I've found relevant lately: Address necklace by Mouna Andraos and Sonali Sridhar: "Address is a handmade electronic jewelry piece. When you first acquire the pendant, you select a place that you consider to be your anchor – where you were born, your home, or...
Petroski's "The Evolution of Useful Things"
Reading about technical objects evolution for the game controller project led me to The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are by Henry Petroski. Focused on forks, paper clips or spoons, the book asks this basic-but-...
Delicate protection
An interesting assemblage observed recently, certainly influenced by the length of the iPhone charger cable. ...
Superimpose various urban realities
Received today my copy of You Are the City: Observation, Organization and Transformation of Urban Settings by Petra Kempf, definitely a gem in my collection of books and artifacts about urbanism. Made of 22 transparent slides in a folder, and a 16 page brochure, as described by the author: "this p...
Matt Jones on mujicomp and mujicompfrastructures at Technoark
Two week ago at the the "New Digital Spaces conference at Technoark in Sierre, Switzerland, Matt Jones gave a talk called "people are walking architecture". You can see the video here. (Fabien's picture of Matt Jones at Technoark) In his presentation, he introduced the notion of "Mujicomp", a port...
Famous user figures in the history of HCI
Marketing people, engineers and designers often rely on persona, i.e. fictional characters created to represent the different user types within targeted characteristics that might use a service or a product. In the history of human-computer interaction, some user figures have been so prominent that...
Object evolution
A recurring topic on this weblog is the evolution of technical objects. The game controller project is of course one of the reason for this interest but it goes beyond this category of artifacts. Some examples of genealogy trees we are inspired of in the project below. They come from a book by Yves...
mapenvelop: post it from the exact place
mapenvelop is a project by beste miray dogan that I like a lot: the inner walls of the envelope are blanketed by a Google map that indicates where the sender's address is. As described by the designer "post it from the exact place". Why do I blog this an interesting low-tech approach to adding loc...
There are unused icons on your desktop
Seen the other day at the airport in Newark, USA. When the reality of Windows OS is brought to the foreground for non-obvious reasons. Why would we care, as users of this display, to see this message? ...