Media fabrics for media makers

Glorianna Davenport is currently giving a fabulous talk at Media Lab on her interactive media, story networks and media fabrics research! She is bringing along researchers who share the passion of realizing an expressive landscape for digital dialogues. I worked with Glorianna from 2002-2004 and her vision shaped my research since then ...

Live webcast of the talk->here<-

Glorianna Davenport is a filmmaker and technology innovator who has spent three decades at MIT, exploring the fundamental issues of digital media experiences, collaborative co-construction, and the role of the machine for documentary and entertainment forms.

One of her guest speaker, Nicholas Negroponte updated us with the status of the one laptop per child initiative. I must admit: I love the new laptop design: for its fantastic idea of prioritizing the laptop as a book, then a laptop as a shared device in a co-located space, then a laptop as a laptop. Offering this double metaphor is extremely powerful, unique and also daring. Most probably children will not use the laptop as a book, but the fact that the laptop can be handled as such is very sweet. It offers flexibility and connects with a culture, for instance in Brazil, where there is a govermental budget for books.



The laptop can also be handled as a shared device. This resonates particularly well with my own research on the sharing of media and the creating of ideas in co-located space.



The laptop that becomes a platform for co-located collaboration

More soon ...

A European MIT for 2008?

The European MIT known as the EIT (European Institute of Technology) with R&D should become operational in 2008, dixit the European parlement. It will be based on a principle of knowledge and innovation communities, relationships with companies and universities.

Article online (in French). Thank you Olivier for sending me the link! Another article in English

Kyoto City University of Arts

Serendipity books made by Asako Matsumoto is an attractive concept interface to enjoy books.


Found on Blankism blog, the blog also links to the annual exhibition 2006 web site for Kyoto City University of Arts, in which a selection of gradute school prizes are presented.

Letter by Domae Hitomi

John F. Kennedy grant

I have just been notified of my award in the form of a John F. Kennedy Irish grant 2005-2006 for my studies in architecture and product design at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design.

A little history on my three years of research in Ireland ...
From 2002-2004 I worked at the Media Lab Europe, the European Research Partner of the MIT Media Lab . In 2005, I joined Crite a research group from the department of computer science at Trinity College University in Ireland. I was also technology director for a robot exhibition at the Ark, a cultural center for children.

In news

The Ulm School of Design

I am particularly fascinated by the Ulm School fo Design as it integrates political, social and scientific approach to design.

The Ulm school (in 1949) has integrated the Bauhaus into German design. Some might confuse the Ulm school to the Bauhaus. However, the Ulm school differs from the Bauhaus in the sense that the Ulm School wanted to enable a better democracy while the Bauhaus wanted to change immediately Germany. The Ulm school focused more on art theory while the Bauhaus more on applied design. The idea of the Ulm School was to have a strictly scientific approach, a pure science linked to design and not craft. The school also has positioned itself politically and raised social questions as part of its curriculum. It also researched on cognitive science to understand the perspective of space, e.g. Josef Albers' book 'interaction of colors' would consider colors as meaningless out of their context.

The brochure to apply to the Hochschule fur Gestaltung. Ulm (Ulm School of Design) starts its introduction with the spirit of resistance introducing Hans and Sophie School, shot for high treason to the Nazi regime on February 22, 1943.

On February 22, 1943, two young students of the University of Munich were shot for high treason to the Hitler regime. Hans Scholl, age 25, and his sister Sophie Scholl, 23, were put to death for having distributed pamphlets advocating resistance to the Nazi government.” Indeed it is introduced as an example of courageous persons who have risked their lives in resistance to a way of life they knew was fundamentally incompatible with their own values...

The spirit of the school was then to contribute to the spiritual regeneration of a destroyed and confused post-war Germany and attack the problem of educating young people toward social and cultural responsibility... In 1955, according to Walter Gropius, the architect and founder of the Bauhaus, the goal of the Ulm School of Design is to convince the world of the vital necessity of the creative man for the proper of a true, progressive democracy.