Some excerpts of the Data.gov.uk Newspaper that Russell Davies gave me last week. As described by the people who designed it, the purposes were the following: "We’ve been thinking about the beta Data.gov.uk repository, and wanted to explore putting some of the information contained within into peo...
Natural beings evolution versus object evolution
An interesting figure that I've found in a book by Bruno Jacomy, which depicts two drawings by A.L. Kroeber. They represent the evolution of beings on the left, and man-made artifacts on the right. Why do I blog this? Working on my notes about the gamepads genealogy projects. More to follow about...
Common artifacts from the future
Source: played a little bit with Graphjam to describe some artifacts generally viewed as de rigueur in *teh future* Of course, this is definitely not based on existing data (someone could actually select a big corpus of sources such as movies and ads and count the occurrences). ...
Material Beliefs: scientific research+design combinations
Readers interested in reseachers-designers collaboration may be interested in the Material Beliefs project: "Rather than focusing on the outcomes of science and technology, Material Beliefs approaches research as an unfinished and ongoing set of practices, happening in laboratories and separate fr...
Nintendo processes
Reading the video-game press is a rare occasion for me but this interview of Shigeru Miyamoto a funny piece during breakfast. Why? simply because it's interesting to hear about the design process (and HR) at Nintendo. Of course there are some elements that can be perceived as a bit cliché but I fi...
Tablet PCs strike back
The return of the Tablet craziness echoed with the perusal of "A bitter pill to swallow: the rise and fall of the tablet computer yesterday during my flight. The article analyzes Tablet PCs as a "product failure". Given that it was written in 2008, it states that it "no longer represented the futu...
Sharks tagged by scientists
A curious example of an heterogenous network of animals, technologies and people is described in Telegraph: "More than 70 white pointers have been tagged by scientists is Western Australia in a world first trial that will send beach lifesavers a text message when one of the predators swims close to...
Kitchen hack
Interesting kitchen hack noticed last week in France. A stopper duct-taped to a pan lid to prevent people from burning themselves. Note the interesting use of grey duct-tape to make it more coherent color-wise. Quite elegant. ...
Urban Computing in a design studio context
(The city being measured, encountered in Annecy, France few weeks ago) The short article "Research through Design in the Context of Teaching Urban Computing" by Andrew Vande Moere and Dan Hill (Street Computing Workshop co-located with OZCHI'09, Melbourne, Australia) is an interesting read for peop...
'Nothing is original'
An interesting quote by Jim Jarmusch (taken from The Golden Rules of Filming) that I ran across yesterday after seeing The Limits of Control: "Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, ph...