This account by a brit teenager of how he used a Sony Walkman from back in the days is highly intriguing. The kid tells his story and compare it to the ipod. Some excerpts I enjoyed: "My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day. (...) Throughout my week using the Walkman, I came to realise that ...
ATM interface complexity
These four pictures depict different ATM interfaces from Lyon, Santa Monica, Lisbon and Paris. As usual, there is a lot to draw here: keyboard minimalism versus "a button for each bill needs", presence or absence of jack-entry for headphone, paper annotation, ATM receipts dumped in the cracks, etc...
Urban screens as skeuomorph
(an interactive display at Zürich train station) In his chapter called "Extreme Informatics: Toward the De-saturated City" (taken from "Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City" by Marcus Foth), Mark Shepard offers an insightful critique of urban scr...
City quantification devices
A quantification device encountered on a bike path in Marseille last sunday when riding "le vélo" (that's how they call the bike rental system down there). Two intriguing pieces of strings connected to a metal box. As an aside, the warning sign on top of it could even be re-used by angry punk-rock...
Location-based audio file in Marseille
A subtle cue on the pavement that indicate that you should press "2" on the audio-guide. An interesting location-based service which do not necessitate a GPS or any other positioning technology. In this case, it relies on people's curiosity and will to spot this sort of red dot on the pavement. Wh...
Collecting street stuff
Sunday morning in Marseilles, France. This folk is collecting material and old devices in the city. I don't really know what he's going to make out of it but he seems to be fully equipped. Perhaps some tinkering and device repurposing, the fan may surely prove handy with Marseilles' hot temperatur...
Soft infrastructure interruption
Somehow, this soft infrastructure, a zebra crossing in Marseilles, is quite intriguing: (1) it's yellow (which reveals that it's a temporary signage), (2) it's interrupted by a layer of concrete that has been added there. Why do I blog this? observing the decay of soft infrastructure and how diffe...
In Marseilles for Lift France 09
"in the land of the mute - the blind are deaf", the local version of "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king". This is Marseilles, France and today is Workshop-day, lots of things going on. ...
Omnipresent internet through chaotic arrows
A recent telco ad campaign aimed at showing the pervasivenness of the Internet in the physical environment... through a chaotic set of arrows that indicate the omnipresence of network access in the environment. 10'000 arrows have been deployed last saturday in certain swiss cities. From another...
Self-fulfilling prophecy
As shown in his book "Social Theory and Social Structure", Robert Merton coined the expression "self-fulfilling prophecy": "a situation where "a false definition in the beginning... evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception comes true (...) this specious validity of the self-f...