"By looking at the satellite image we extract ourselves from our particular point of view, yet without, bouncing up to the bird's eye view; we have no access to the divine view, the view from nowhere. We go from our bounded view to a sliding view that will carry us from a labyrinth of transformati...
Johanna Brewer about ethnography and design
Back to EPFL today for a lecture by Johanna Brewer about "What can ethnography do for technology?". She basically presented how ethnography, as a methodological strategy, is relevant for design in the context of her PhD projects. Johanna did her PhD with Paul Dourish at UCI Irvine and she recently...
Original design thinking approach for researching RFID
Designing with RFID by Einar Sneve Martinussen and Timo Arnall (presented at Tangible & Embedded Interaction 2009) is an highly interesting read if you're into alternative visions to the internet of things. Based on what the authors call "a practice-driven design approach", through sketching, maki...
About why people hate Clippy
Taking some time reading about technological failures, I found this interesting reference by Luke Swartz called Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents. This dissertation deals with Office assistants on computers that seem to be a ...
Map incompleteness
Map incompleteness is something that I am very intrigued about. As shown in the example above taken in Paris, the city itself is well represented but as soon as you leave the "périphérique" (the highway-like infrastructure that surrounds the french capital), it's a blank grey void as if no one lea...
Testing the Nintendo DSi
Recently acquired a Nintendo DSi. Although I have a DS for sometime, I wanted to see how the user experience could be reshuffled through the new features provided by Nintendo. The first interesting change is that you can download games from DSi ware virtual shop. Simply put, there's no game sold w...
The Sci-Fi angle in Love&Rockets
One of my favorite graphic novel series lately is "Love&Rockets" by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. More specifically, it's Jaime's Hoppers 13 which gets me all hopped up. It basically tells the story of a group of chicano girlz in their teenage years (Margarita Luisa "Maggie" Chascarrillo and Espera...
2.0
A reminder that the "2.0" meme has not always referred to "user participation/sharing" (on the World Wide Web in the Web 2.0 trope or in other fields such as in "enterprise 2.0", "city 2.0" or "human 2.0"). And don't get me started on that term... ...
EPFL IC research day about invisible computing
[Local news] The School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL (my alma mater) has a research day on June 4 about Invisible Computing: Novel Interfaces to Digital Environments organized by two ex-bosses (Pierre Dillenbourg and Jeffrey Huang). There's going to be three interesting talks abou...
Pieces of personal informatics left on our office door
At the Lift offices, we now print (yes, on paper) different pieces of personal informatics such as our Dopplr sheets of trips. As we are often in and out our physical offices, collocated colleagues and friends who swing by can access this a sort location-awareness board that is both accessible on ...