In the various interviews for my book about location-based services, privacy is often brought to the table, especially with french journalists who really want to deal with this angle. What happens is that most of the discussion revolves around the potential fear caused by Google Latitude, Aka-aki ...
Workshop in Torino
Last tuesday I was in Torino, Italy for the "I Realize" conference organized by TOPIX (Torino Piemontre Internet eXchange). Participating as a workshop facilitator, I was told to focus on how people will move and interact in the city of tomorrow. We worked on identifying unsolved problems, suggesti...
Hidden protection
An interesting example of a car carpet repurposed to hide a locker at the door of an urban garden in Torino. ...
City quantification devices
The presence of scales in public space has always intrigued me. Such a quantification device is generally private but there are different occurrences of public appearances. The picture above in Torino depict street scales that people can use (and pay for) to know their weight, which is definitely ...
Reading "The Caryatids" by Bruce Sterling
Just finished reading "The Caryatids" by Bruce Sterling. This inspiring book is built around the history of the four Mihajlovic sisters, who are surviving clones of a biopiracy lab. Spread in different countries (Balkans, California and the Gobi desert in China), each of them represent a different...
Living in the future
In Receiver #14, James Katz wrote an interesting article entitled "The future of a futuristic device" where he describes why lots of people perceive the mobile phone to be a futurist tool, and what they might want in their phones. An interesting part of the paper deals with how early adopters say t...
Subtle signage in different context
In a subway station in Paris (each colors and number correspond to a metro line), in the countryside in South-Burgundy below: Why do I blog this? it's always intriguing to compare the various ways signage can be subtly integrated in the environment. ...
EPFL IC research day
At the Information and Communication faculty research day at EPFL which is about "Invisible Computing: Novel Interfaces to Digital Environments". Two bits from the presentations caught my eyes. In her presentation entitled "The myth of touch", Chia Shen from Harvard University dealt with 3 wrong id...
Ceiling signage
In general, ceilings are not so common place to put signage on. Which is why I found interesting to encounter this sign "L'Europe" (the name of this plazza in Lausanne) placed on the surface that is under the bridge where people walk to the subway station. ...
French book about locative media and LBS
My french book about locative media and location-based services (FYP Editions) has just been released. It's an overview of the field, that starts from the technical standpoint and go through various questions: what are they for, why the common scenarios (buddy-finder, spatial annotation, location-...