This huge tube that looks like a medieval bull horn is one of the installation from the Lausanne Jardins project (Lausanne garden), which is a series of devices located here and there in the city that aims at renewing the relationship to nature. The piece above is called "Dentelles" ('lace' in eng...
Nametagged
This name-tagged hooded that I ran across yesterday morning reminded me of Aram Bartholl's WoW project. The fact that this kid walked around with his first name written on his clothe seems to be a curious phenomenon; although, it's perhaps not his name (is there a brand called "Alex"? or is it som...
Count on something else happening
The observation of this sidewalk game (three card monte) the other day in Geneva 5 minutes after starting a book by Howard Becker lead me to acknowledge the full veracity of the following quote: "We can always count on something else happening, another glancing experience, another half-witnessed e...
White Glove Tracking
The never-ending discussions about MJ in various contexts sometimes leads you to talk about pop culture in conjunction with concepts such as "crowd sourcing" and "social web". This is what happened yesterday when I brought back the White Glove Tracking project in a social web meeting. It was a cro...
Energy production feedback - saved CO2
Encountered in Paris yesterday when visiting Aldebaran Robotics. ...
Yet another weird toilet interface
(Out) (In) This toilet door encountered in a french train yesterday struck me as fascinating. On both side of the door (in and out the toilet), you have a remnant of the past (a door handle that has its highly efficient affordance) and a set of button (open/close). As you can imagine, most the pas...
3 pieces about ethnography and design
Some pieces I ran across recently about the role of ethnographically-inspired approaches in design: Fewer Engineers, More Anthropologists (by Navi Radjou) highlights a so-called new R&D model based on interdisciplinarity. The authors describes to what extent "anthropologists" (or people who have s...
Micro/Macro Mobility
Different forms of mobility means, spotted this week-end in Geneva. Both need an energy source (electricity or gas). ...
Library or antilibrary
Going through Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan another time, I stumbled across this inspiring quote at the beginning of the book: The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non dull. He is the owner of a large personal library (contai...
Robust computing
A street interface seen in Marseilles, France the other day. Located in a very crowded and touristic area, and aimed at informing visitors, the specification that lead to this device certainly put a super strong emphasis on the firm and protected quality of the material. What is even more intrigui...