(via) Oh, and btw, an highly important tool for 2010: a reminding list of important stuff in case of time-travelling: Why do I blog this? It's always curious, as a thought experiment, to think about what one would put in this sort of list. Perhaps asking my students "What pieces of knowledge and a...
Communication infrastructures from 1901 to 2009
Last hours of 2009 devoted to contemplation of the world gets more and more interconnected; as attested by the following maps: A map of Eastern telegraph cables from 1901 (via): Undersea cables in use mapped by TeleGeography Research (2001): Undersea cables in use mapped by TeleGeography Research...
Studies of the impact of the media on people have not produced stable results
Great read tonight: Studying the New Media by Howard Becker (Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 3, 2002). The author focuses here on the studies about the "impact of the media on people", the sort of stuff you see popping up in the press on a regular basis (be it about tv, video-games, comic-books...
About the "long nose of innovation"
Reading the PDFs that accumulate on my computer desktop (see picture above), I ran across two columns by Bill Buxton. Both addresses a constant pattern: the very slow diffusion of technical innovation over time. The first one, from January 2008 is about what he calls the "long nose of innovation",...
Unusual topics for Dec 26
Two unusual topic that attracted my attention on this Dec 26th day: 1. Football/soccer evolution as an interesting model of futures thinking as described by this quite curious article in The Guardian that Scott Smith dispatched on Twitter. Some elements to draw here in terms of culture, foresight a...
Interpreting automatic door movements
Approachability: How People Interpret Automatic Door Movement as Gesture by Ju, Wendy, and Takayama Leila (International Journal of Design, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2009) was a curious read. The authors describes this issue as interesting to exemplify the challenges of designing emotionally welcoming in...
Sit on the snow
A basic trick to sit on the snow, seen in Geneva yesterday. Snow season here, quickly replaced by heavy rain tonight. ...
Platform studies: Atari 2600
As part of our project about gamepad design evolution, we collect plenty of material concerning game interfaces (mostly joypad but still) and historical pointers about these devices. Which is why we've paid close attention to the recent "Platform Studies collection at MIT press, which "investigate...
Naming conventions and usage
Naming digital devices such as music players or car-navigation system is always intriguing and it's often curious to see which terms are employed by people. In a world where artifacts do not necessarily rely on existing technical lineages, companies need to create new terms. Eventually, theses name...
The "0" of Peugeot cars
Mundane things always hide elements that are not obvious when you see them for the first time. Peugeot cars names have always been curious to me with their "x0x" nomenclatural label. A sunday in a small village in France enabled me to document this more thoroughly and wonder about it. There is a i...