A quick definition of "black-boxing" by Bruno Latour (in Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies): a process by which "scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its i...
okay to play here / not okay to play here
Each places have their own rules. It's okay to play on this giant and empty parking lot above (Santa Monica) but this bench below in Venice depicts clear signs of defensible space (to prevent skateboarders to grind the curb). In one case the sign is explicit, in the other, it's rather a deterrent ...
"Paper direct"
Encountered last week-end in Venice, Los Angeles. Still about press, I am fascinated by foreign press available as these A3 sheets of papers sold straight from the printer. Far from the complex e-paper technology, these very low-cost one-sided magazines show an interesting trend about the importan...
Browsing time
Highly intriguing notice in this newsstands visited in Venice Beach yesterday afternoon: the indication of the time customers are allowed to flip through the magazines. Temporary consumption of products indicated in the place where you can access them (see of course "The Age of Access" by Jeremy R...
Success evaluation for radical innovation
Gathering some notes about "successes" and "failures" of innovations to improve my talk about foresight failures, I ran across interesting material in Communicating Technology Visions by Tamara Carleton (Funktioneering Magazine. Vol 1, pp. 13). The paper actually shows how measuring only financial ...
Dead end on the interwebs
There was a time when this sort of message was more common. For the record, an error 404 (or Not Found error message) refers to: "a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was conf...
Physical layers
Seen in Lyon, France last year. Accumulation of information or simply a physical representation of the history of concert posters. The different layers are added on top of each others creating this intriguing shape. This accumulation leads to a curious texture/surface in our environment: there is a...
Technology breakdown and people's reactions
The picture above taken in Marseilles (France) few months ago depicts a human practice that fascinates me: the deliberate destruction of artifacts. There are different reasons for that, ranging from anger towards someone (and throwing the object at hand) to being upset by a certain piece of techno...
Public notepad
This hanging pen/notepad assemblage can be found at a beauty salon in my neighborhood. Interestingly, the notepad is meant to be used by customers to note their contact information so that the owner (when busy) can phone them back. What is important here is that: This notepad features contact inf...
Adaptive street-signage?
An intriguing and purely accidental assemblage observed in Geneva this morning: as if the pedestrian's footsteps were reshaping the yellow band (of course it's not, these curves are caused by cars). An evocative image of the adaptive city. ...