People interested in retro-computing (i.e. the use of early computer hardware and software today), may want to have a look at 101 Project: an independent creative platform to collect memories and archives in order to develop a documentary film. Selected at SIGGRAPH, it is a kind of collective memo...
Lift Asia is coming
Right after the Lift Marseille edition, we had to get back to our pen and pencils to build up the upcoming edition in Che-Ju (Korea). The event is taking shape with "Serious Fun" as a theme. Make not mistake, the point of the conference is definitely not to address serious games but rather to adop...
Futures, delayed
(alex pang and graphjam): Surely a great graph that connects with my interest in the constant "futures" delay (flying cars, mobile social software, "intelligent fridge", etc.) ...
Upcoming piece about the asynchronous city
Julian Bleecker and myself are putting a final touch to a pamphlet entitled "A synchronicity: design fictions for asynchronous urban computing" in the Situated Technologies series. Here's the blurb: "Over the last five years the urban computing field has increasingly emphasized a so-called “real-t...
Correlation != cause and effect
Definitely an awkward combination of services encountered in Chamonix last week: the weather board has been combined with a condom vending machine and a letter-box. As written on the green thing, the "Meteo" box (which means "weather" in french) is a curious cluster. I take it as an example to ex...
Granularity degrees of "nearby"
Travelling very often in different european cities, I am always curious about Easyjet place recommendation to observe what sort of advices they bring to the table and how they renew their propositions over time. One of the feature that interest me is the "Escape" part, the quick description of ho...
Failure(s)
According to the thesaurus I use: "Failure: Definition: lack of success Synonyms: abortion, bankruptcy, bomb, botch, breakdown, bungle, bust, checkmate, collapse, decay, decline, defeat, deficiency, deficit, deterioration, downfall, failing, false step, faux pas, fiasco, flash in the pan, flop, fr...
Swiss post box: from the material to the physical
Another one about post-related issues: the swiss Post just launched a new service called Swiss Post Box: the "electronic equivalent to your regular physical mail box". It allows subscribers to receive scans of their unopened envelopes by e-mail message and then decide which ones they want opened a...
User participation
A basic occurrence of user participation, taking the form of a rough message that indicates this stamps machine is broken. User-generated content if I may use this term. This sort of activity has been taken as potentially transferable to digital interfaces. Think, for instance, about GPS devices t...
Causes and symptoms of failures
My interest in failures (as attested by my Lift09 speech) led my peruse "Anatomy of a Failure: How We Knew When Our Design Went Wrong, and What We Learned From It" (by William Gaver, John Bowers, Tobie Kerridge, Andy Boucher, Nadine Jarvis) with attention. The article is a case study that examines...