Tapestry made out of old motherboards, encountered in Lisbon, Portugal. Ubicomp/urban computing to the letter. ...
Confusion in user research
In "Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?" (ACM interactions, May/june 2009), Steve Portigal addresses the role of user research in design. He points this interesting example of people/companies who mistook how to to carry out research, see this quote from a book he mentioned: "[T]h...
Design as part of R&D?
[A perhaps very high level and political post... emerging from recent thoughts about how to frame my work in the R&D public policy in Europe] Can design be perceived as a component of Research & Development? Or is it mostly about "production" and commercialization of products? What are the design p...
Windows, shutter and privacy
Windows and their relative transparency are an architectural element that I tend to always observe when traveling. Indeed, the presence of shutter and curtain is an interesting material indicator of how people deal with privacy. Some cultures are more likely to leave things open/transparent (as i...
What happens when you criticize a holy grail
(Picture taken from Azuma's "Tracking Requirements for Augmented Reality", 1993) The other day, Julian wrote an insightful critique of Augmented Reality, as a one of those glorious holy grails I referred to in my Lift09 presentation. Julian argued about how he wasn't convinced by the current iterat...
people and electricity
Last semester, I've given a series of lectures at ENSCI (a Paris-based design school) for design students about people's experience of electricity. Just had some time to trim the slides and edit then in english. It's a short version of the presentation I've made about people's representations of el...
Integration of the natural and computational worlds
Freshly updated signage in the woods above Sintra, Portugal. As if the green mousse has just been removed to paint these basic-but-elegant trekking signs. These inspiring pictures echoes a lot with a research paper I recently read about how human computer interaction (HCI) had little explored eve...
Prevalent indoor environment in computer games
"most virtual environments still rely on the cinematic idea that the virtual space extends off-screen even though it can neither be seen or accessed. Hence the popularity of games settings such as labyrinths, prisons, caves and interior chambers of pyramids and the like. The spatial frameworks eff...
Speech idioms
Idioms going from the interwebs to the physical, seen on ads in Berlin last october. Thought about it the other day when I overheard a goof on the streets screaming "lol" (in a french conversation), found it funny to think about the transfer of idioms. Plus, I am always intrigued by speech bubble...
Bus GPS
The GPS navigation system in the bus that goes from Lisbon airport to the city center is an interesting device. Located in the front and at the middle of the bus, it allows customers to see where they are on a very basic map of the surroundings (a classical GPS map actually) along with a list of ...