Why not?

Shay Alkalay revisited bears as tools: as bin bags and as vacum cleaner bags.


Bin Bag Bear

A simple employee at the council rubbish disposal services had a peculiar imagination: he could see teddy bears in every object he observed. As a child he would stare at the clouds imagining that he could see teddy bears in the sky… and today...everywhere, even the black bin bags looked like teddy bears to him.
No one at work could stand his excited cries every time he shouted 'look at that bear...look at that one...don't throw it into the garbage crusher… nooooo!..'
Of course he was fired from his job, lost his family and friends and became homeless. Yet even though many people thought he was strange, none of them would admit that they too saw the teddy bear bin bags dumped around the streets of London.

Hoover Bag Bears

More on the Hoover Bears by Regine on wmmna.

Duct tape wallet

A wallet that I saw in many hands. Now there is even a kit to make it. The duct tape wallet kit by db clay. Via ohgizmo

The neo-nomads made it to the BBC!

A great article on BBC news In search of the neo-nomad. So if you think you are becoming a laptop warrior or wirelress dependant, maybe you belong to this new class of persons, the Neo-Nomads. This term was invented by Dr Yasmine Abbas and illustrated by her PhD thesis.

Abbas is especially interested in how people who work on the move retain a sense of belonging to places and organisations, and at the way new technologies open up new ways of belonging to groups and even companies.

A lot can be designed for people on the move. Technology can really serve everyday needs of us, post-cyborgs ;) Yasmine and I started with the Touch Sensitive apparel conceived in the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Laboratory and we are developping a new trend of haptic apparel to serve "digitally geared people on the move". Keep tuned!

Also I just found that the PhD thesis of Jeff Axup on Methods of Understanding and Designing For Mobile Communities was completed.

Abstract Society is increasingly on the move, mobile devices are commonly being used to coordinate group actions, and group communication features are rapidly being added to existing technologies. Despite this, little is known about how mobile groups act, or how communications technologies should be designed to augment existing behaviour. This is partially due to minimal research being done on the topic, but also to the lack of research methods available to study the topic with. Mobile groups are challenging to study because of frequent and long-duration movement, frequent distribution, and the rapidly changing environments they operate within. To address these issues, this research focuses on methodological issues surrounding the development of mobile devices for mobile groups and communities. More specifically it addresses backpackers, who are a relevant example of this type of community. The research primarily explores the convergence of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and the field of mobile device development. This enables the combination of emphasis on designing technologies for groups, social implications, mobile device design, and mobile settings.

Major research outcomes presented in this thesis lie in three areas: 1) methods, 2) technology designs, and 3) backpacker culture. Five studies of backpacker behaviour and requirements form the core of the research. The methods used are in-situ and exploratory, and apply both novel and existing techniques to the domain of backpackers and mobile groups.

Methods demonstrated in this research include: field trips for exploring mobile group behaviour and device usage, a social pairing exercise to explore social networks, contextual postcards to gain distributed feedback, and blog analysis which provides post-hoc diary data. Theoretical contributions include: observations on method triangulation, a taxonomy of mobility research, method templates to assist method usage, and identification of key categories leading to mobile group requirements. Design related outcomes include: 57 mobile tourism product ideas, a format for conveying product concepts, and a design for a wearable device to assist mobile researchers.

Our understanding of backpacker culture has also improved as a consequence of the research. It has also generated user requirements to aid mobile development, methods of visualising mobile groups and communities, and a listing of relevant design tensions. Additionally, the research has added to our understanding of how new technologies such as blogs, SMS and iPods are being used by backpackers and how mobile groups naturally communicate.

You can download the .pdf of the thesis.

An history on interactive design

Etienne Mineur was my graphic design professor at Paris VIII, now he is swimming in praise!

He just finished the interactive graphic piece for Issey Miyake and now he is about to travel around the world with his family to document on graphic designers, game designers, fashion designers. His focus will be Asia, so if you are extremely talented in design, live in Asia, and willing to spend some time with French people, you should contact him.



He regularly presents an history on interactive design. The last one was for les arts deco de Paris, l'ENSAD. I think he should be in this presentation, but in any case it is a very interesting document that he shares online.
Pdf of the presentation

Upgrade! Boston - Turbulence talk

Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director of Turbulence invited me to give a talk. So April 12th at Art Interactive I will present some of my work. There is a rumor that Dr Yasmine Abbas might also be available to share her latest findings on the neo-nomads.

See you there!

What's next with the web?

It seems that Google is eating itself through some kind of cannibalism

We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the end "we" own it!

Google will maybe soon advertise for a Saving Google competition, stay tuned!



It seems that consumers can finally have their revenge towards the banking system. Now it is a deal between consumers. Prosper is a US online marketplace that allows consumers to lend and borrow money from others. Rewarding for everyone, the one who needs money requests it, the one who can lend, lends it! As easy as that, based on eBay, I wander how this will work as a standard - for US residents, only.

Anano

Just a post for the beauty of the eyes.
I followed the work of Anano since 2001. She designed my favorite bear characters. You can discover more pictures of her creations on her web site.












Later on she created a variety of objects and photographs, elegant, delicate, small and antique.










Two of her books on amazon

Petit a petit


Recevoir chez Anano

Digital marks

A little bit on digital marks, I selected a variety of them.

The semacode, a two dimensional code that encodes a URL. The picture below is the semacode of architectradure. Thank you Michael Surtees for the link! This tag embed the URL address of my blog, that can be read by your cell phone and send you to its page. I guess it avoids typing in the URL and you can rapidly go through a series of web sites using the respective tags.


semacode of architectradure

It is especially useful for combining physical space to digital content. The Semacode's Software Development Kit has is developed for ubiquitous computing by creating visual tags for objects and contexts, and read them using a mobile camera phone. The physical Wikipedia called Semapedia , created by Alexis Rondeau and Stan Wiechers, allows you to add place tags on places and things to link them to the relevant Wikipedia articles.


trash can with a wikipedia tag

Semacode technical paper

Urban tapestries allows public mapping and sharing by combining mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems. This system was linked to Natalie Jeremijenko's famous feral robots -open source robots for investigating contaminated urban sites- and called Robotic Feral Public Authoring: "Adding the sensor readings to online mapping tools, such as Urban Tapestries, suddenly brings the relationships between environment and home vividly to life. It enables people to feel they can learn about their environment and have the evidence to do something about it"

Yellow Arrow allows a community to tag places using arrows. You can post a message using the arrow and anyone could retrieve it using their cell phone. Another method to link digital content to a physical place. The community of yellow arrow is quite big. Their blog.



Elens allows anyone to create talking landmarks. Developed by the MIT Media Lab it allows anyone to tag a place by adding a sticker on a physical location, sticker that can later be scanned by a cell phone, in this case the Motorola A1000.

M-views developed at the MIT media lab in the interactive cinema group -media fabrics- with Glorianna Davenport, explores the "ideas, methods, and culture of mobile cinema, which is experienced in temporal and spatial narrative segments that can be delivered on context-aware mobile devices."

In 2002, I researched with Glorianna Davenport on technologies to allow digital information to communicate with the physical space. I worked on Passing Glances a system that enables users to create ambient urban interludes through the use of SMS text messages. Associated graphics and storytelling were projected in the urban space.
CHI'04 paper
Enarrative5 2003 paper

With these tags, the physical space is tagged to the digital space. One can think the other way around and tag the virtual space with physical content. That is what Josh Lifton told me he was working on the other day. Josh created a plug sensor/actuator network, called the dual reality lab, that links the MIT Media Laboratory space to a virtual lab space in the Second Life online virtual world.


Location of the MIT Media Laboratory in Second Life

More info technical about the plug

Design and Intuition

Designing interactions book

Few weeks ago, I asked my advisor Hiroshi Ishii to lend me the Designing interactions book from 2007 in which he presents multisensory interaction design. I particularly liked the organization of the book in a form of a small encyclopedia of interviews illustrated by successful examples from the first PC prototypes to the existential design of the RCA interaction design department.
The book can be discovered online with streamed interviews and samples of work.

Video interviews

Video interview of Hiroshi Ishii

Video interview of John Maeda

Today, Hiroshi invited Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, to talk about "Design and Intuition" at the MIT Media Lab and to introduce his book.

abstract of the talk
Interactive technology is everywhere, seeping into every crack and cranny of our lives. It's not just the mouse that we use for pointing and clicking, plus the desktop and windows on our screens. It's the TV we watch, the iPods that help us enjoy music, video games, digital cameras, phone services, Palmtops, plus the aesthetic, social and cultural interventions that we experience. Bill Moggridge will describe a design process that is common to these examples. He will show how design opportunities can be identified by discovering people's latent needs, behaviors, and desires, and by creating new ways to serve and support them. He will demonstrate how designers can visualize new products, services, spaces, media and software-based interactions, and bring them to life by prototyping. He will discuss the values inherent to Design Thinking and the processes that can help to harness the power of intuition in designing interactions.

bio of Bill Moggridge
Bill Moggridge is cofounder of IDEO, independently ranked by business leaders as one of the most innovative companies in the world. A Royal Designer for Industry, Bill designed the world's first laptop computer. He pioneered interaction design and is one of the first people to integrate human factors into the design of software and hardware. He has been a visiting professor in interaction design at the Royal College of Art in London, lecturer in design at the London Business School and a member of the steering committee for the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. He is currently consulting associate professor in the joint program in design at Stanford University. His book Designing Interactions is available from The MIT Press.

Jean Baudrillard

One of my favorite thinker, Jean Baudrillard, passed away yesterday.

The last book of his I read is l'échange impossible. In the book, Baudrillard confronts our relationship with our contemporary world to its ongoing hyperreality.

My friend Oliver Vaubourg posted a summary of one of Baudrillard's master piece: l'Ecran total. The main point of the book is to consider the repercussions of substituting formerly symbolic oppositions for a generalized culture with a passive consensus.

I just found out that on Turbulence that Ars Virtua will be holding a public tribute to honor the late social and political theorist Jean Baudrillard. Jean Baudrillard's criticisms and view on Simulation are influential to our discussions of the MMO. This short program will be held on the WoW Kilrogg server, 4-5pm PDT, March 17, 2007 near Orgrimmar. Please send tell to Zuluu upon arrival in-world for the location. Too bad my level 62 character is on another server, I will have to go visit with a level 1 ...