Protected device

Interestingly, this radio has been protected by a ziploc because of its context of use (the bathroom). Sometimes, the context dictates a necessary protection to the owner... who reported me how she ingeniuously had to use it as the room can be highly humid.

Lovegety: proximity-based matchmaking

Doing some research for my book project about locative media, i was curious about early version of proximity-based interactions. The Lovegety was an interesting primer, especially given that it was a real product. They actually shipped more than 350,000 of them in two and half months after the release in 1998.

For those who do not remember it, the Lovegetty was a japanese wireless-based matchmaking device made of three buttons that users could set according to their activity (talk/karaoke/get2, a sort of wildcard). Yukari Iwatani describes the matchmaking system as follows:

"Once the holder selects a mode, the device searches for Lovegety holders of the opposite sex in a five meter radius. If it locates a holder with the same mode, the "get" light flashes and the device beeps, so the pair can find each other. If there is a holder in the vicinity with a different mode, then the "find" light flashes and a different sound goes off, alerting the user of a near get."

Why do I blog this? not sure if the thing is still available but it's interesting to see some primary forms of technology-based matchmaking device (that was followed by the toothing hoax). Of course I am skeptical by the usage as well as the weird matchmaking algorithm, but the device is curious enough to be mentioned.

Wembley moustraps as blogjects

It seems that mousetraps too can become blogjects:

"[Rentokil] added a small sensor and a wireless module to its traps so that they notify the building staff when a rodent is caught. This is a big improvement on traps that need to be regularly inspected. A large building might contain hundreds of them, and a few are bound to be forgotten.

Since June 2006 thousands of digital mousetraps have been put in big buildings and venues such as London's new Wembley Stadium. The traps communicate with central hubs that connect to the internet via the mobile network to alert staff if a creature is caught. The system provides a wealth of information. The data it collects and analyses on when and where rodents are caught enable building managers to place traps more effectively and alert them to a new outbreak. "

Why do I blog this? a basic example of a curious machine-to-machine communication involving animals.

Virtual/Physical touch interface

Same interface for metro tickets vending machine in GTA 4 (above) and in Paris (below).

Why do I blog this? this is an interesting connection between the digital and the physical: this a digital interface found in the physical environment which found its way in a digital environment. Quite recursive right? What's ironic though is that it's not possible to touch the in-game screen.

See also Dan Hill's perspectives on this issue in 2004. He interestingly compared pictures he did in Santa Monica to photos from GTA's fictional LA (in an earlier version of GTA). Dan highlighted the detailed sense of location in video games such as this one.

Urban honey

Certainly one of the most intriguing urban project I've encountered lately: miel béton (which means "concrete honey" in french): the production of honey on urban roofs in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint Denis. According to new paris bohemian:

"A graphic designer and visual artist by trade, Olivier Darné began his investigation of bees in 2000, when he first placed a single beehive on his house in Saint Denis. Following that experiment with the installation of a dozen hives on the roof of city hall, Olivier was fascinated by the idea of sending bees out into the city as "prospectors" of the urban environment. What, exactly, could bees tell us about our city, about the relationships between wild and urban, between humans and their surroundings, between space and time? What Olivier found was more than gratifying: bees reproduce, in liquid form, the density, changes, and social organization of our city. If you consider that 3000 hectares (or 5000 acres) of city are concentrated into a single pot of honey, the resulting flavors are a gauge of how we urbanites live. (...) By consuming honey produced in and from their own city, urbanites connect themselves intimately to their land, even if it happens to be one that’s filled with concrete, high-rise housing blocks, and if they’re lucky, bees."

Why do I blog this? definitely not related to technology, I found this project amazingly curious as it shows how cities can be curious places for new forms of design. The intersection between nature and the urban environment is surely a relevant topic for design.

Rolling interface

Vertical rolling as an interface.

From our desktop to our mobiles

James A. Landay and Todd R. Kaufmann in 1993 ("User Interface Issues in Mobile Computing"):

"A theme common to much of the past work on mobile computing devices is the desire to run similar computing environments on the mobile machines and on the user’s office workstation. Although running many of the same applications may be useful and desirable, running the same environment may be both undesirable and, for many mobile devices, impossible."

Why do I blog this? surely this quote is deja vu here for people who reads this blog, but I wanted to have a reference about this important topic.

Nomads have antennas too

Observed this morning, next to the circus in Geneva. Nomads have their vehicles and movable antennas. What's next?

Interface and process

A superb example of interface that maps the process and the buttons to be employed. Although the affordance is complex (a button used to move parts), the signage is relevant to understand the possibilities.

Stickers

Beaming alien? Wifi and space invaders around? An intriguing combination. Especially this amazing number of barcodes meant to be used by the facility management company in Paris Gare de Lyon.

The minimal b&w sticker is quite well integrated with the seriousness of the barcodes.

Lift 09 poster

Snowed under work lately (foresight project about the future of the web, gestural controllers research, lift, writing a book about locative media), I have less time to blog but it's worth having a look at the new Lift poster:

Explained by Bread and Butter themselves:

A city by night, an impressive landscape of anonymous buildings. Could be anywhere. A luminous meteor carves the darkness, rustling the anarchy of the city, of our memories. LIFT 09 emerging with new energy, lights and colors.

A feeling of perspective, of vertigo. An image inspired by the covers of sci-fi novels of the 70-80's. This is a typical LIFT poster, 1:1 hand-made, with enough feather strokes to confuse the pixels, impactful.

Carving into the past, LIFT lights up the future that never was. The journey starts now…

You can see the archive of Lift posters here, and download highres versions for printing if you wish.

Technonomadic work

Necessary tool for two-user audioconference using an iphone. Basic artifact for 21st century work process.

Pavement life

Seen in Paris (I spent half of my time in this city lately)

Signage on the sidewalk, dead birds and homeless people living in tents. Or, on other words: designed artifacts for city-dwellers, animal partners which accidently did not manage to live in good terms with (driving) humans, and people left-aside from society.

The urban environment per se, a certainly gloomy winter.

Design-Science relationships

In Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline versus Design Science, Nigel Cross interestingly discusses the epistemological concerns of design research. Using his own typology he tries to differentiate the design-science relationships: (a) scientific design, (b) design science, and (c) a science of design. Some excerpts I found relevant:

"Scientific design refers to modern, industrialized design—as distinct from pre-industrial, craft-oriented design-based on scientific knowledge but utilizing a mix of both intuitive and nonintuitive design methods. (...) a desire to produce works of art and design based on objectivity and rationality, that is, on the values of science. (...) Design science addresses the problem of determining and categorizing all regular phenomena of the systems to be designed, and of the design process. Design science also is concerned with deriving from the applied knowledge of the natural sciences appropriate information in a form suitable for the designer’s use.” This definition extends beyond “scientific design,” in including systematic knowledge of design process and methodology, as well as the scientific/technological underpinnings of the design of artifacts. (...) the science of design refers to that body of work which attempts to improve our understanding of design through “scientific” (i.e., systematic, reliable) methods of investigation. And let us be clear that a “science of design” is not the same as a “design science.” "

Another interesting topic addressed in this paper is the critique of the positivist doctrine implied by the scientific design vector, referring to the following claim by Donald Schön:

" He criticized Simon’s view of a “science of design” for being based on approaches to solving well-formed problems, whereas professional practice throughout design and technology and elsewhere has to face and deal with “messy, problematic situations.” Schön proposed, instead, to search for “an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict,” and which he characterized as “reflective practice."

Why do I blog this? exploring the design field, I find it relevant to look at this sort of discussion as it clarifies lots of ambiguities. Working with people having both a "scientific approach" an designers, it's easy to see the gaps and the underlying elements described above. Beyond the "design thinking" meme, it's also good to see some academic references tackling the problem of design epistemology.

Real-Life treasure hunt on the Nintendo DS

An intriguing use of the positioning system of Nintendo DS wifi is described on Gamasutra. Creative director and lead designer Justin Leingang (at Aspyr) is working on an original Nintendo DS title that uses each player's DS to create "a real-life treasure hunt,":

"The project, which bears the working title Treasure Troves, (...) One of Treasure Troves' main input mechanics operates by scanning for nearby wi-fi networks and generating items based on each network's unique frequency. (The game continues to uncover items and and optionally emit aural feedback even when the DS is closed, allowing players to "play" in public without needing to actively monitor the system.) These items can then be managed and traded with other players to create special item sets, and can be used for a variety of player-customized in-game functions. (...) For example, each item emits a distinct sound, which include musical notes and phonetic noises; the items can then be replicated and arranged on a Mario Paint-like musical grid. Like items and other custom creations, these resultant compositions can be traded with other players."

Why do I blog this? what an awesome game idea and of course the point here is not to position the Nintendo DS in an accurate way. Instead, it's simply about using existing Wifi networks to create specific items. Surely an intriguing way to tie in the physical and the digital.

Another interesting element here is that it's highly uncommon to see this sort of development on a platform such as the Nintendo DS. Although it's doable to hack the thing for this sort of purpose, it's generally more difficult for game studio to make it acceptable for Nintendo. Perhaps I should re-read the TRC:

lottery game interface

For lots of people, this is a very common game interface. The picture shows a device usually employed in France to verify whether your lottery ticket is a winning one. You have to swipe the ticket below this light and the results are then displayed on a tiny screen above. Minimal game interface!

Bandai poking box

One of the weirdest electronic toy I've played with so far is certainly this "tuttuki bako" (tuttuki box) poking box by BANDAI. It consists in a basic box with a LCD screen, a cute yellow button and a hole on one side of the box. To play the games, you simply have to insert your finger in this hole, and see it appear on the LCD screen.

Apart from being a basic clock, you have different games as represented on the photo below: poking a panda, removing boogers from someone's face, touching slime or ticking a stick figure character. I actually played with it for sometimes yesterday afternoon at the game studio and it sparked a good discussion about this type of gesture-based interactions.

Why do I blog this? this object is the typical geek magnet as you can see from its presence on tons of blogs about gadgets. Oftentimes, they miss the point and only see the odd character as well as the proximity to old-school tamagotchis. Being interested in electronic toys and their user experience (in a video game project), I try to nail down the interesting aspects of this device.

What's intriguing here is the mode of interaction proposed. Clearly, sticking one's finger in a hole to interact with an object is highly uncommon and almost taboo. Furthermore, it's really about being "engaged" in the interaction physically since you feel that a body part is can be both an input and a somewhat output through the LCD screen.

Second, the vocabulary of interaction of highly interesting. On the physical side: insert, touch, twiddle around inside, stick in, etc. And on the digital side: pushing around a stick figure, ticking someone’s nose, petting a tiny panda bear, etc.

Internet of Things day

The Lift team is helping other conferences with their program, advising on speakers and format. For instance we are organizing a whole day in Sierre, Switzerland about the Internet of Things on January 30th. With speeches from Daniel Kaplan (from the french think tank FING, who brilliantly wrapped up Lift07), David Orban (of the Open Spime project) and Jean-Louis Fréchin (NoDesign and ENSCI). There will also be different workshops.

Apart from David's talk, the event is going to be in french.

Switzerland sci-fi museum

Last week, I visited the Maison d'Ailleurs in Switzerland, which is a museum of science-fiction and utopia. The only public institution of its kind in the world, it's a non-profit foundation functioning both as a public museum and a specialized research center.

They have temporary exhibition (with people such as H.R. Giger, John Howe or Alejandro Jodorowski) and have a tremendous "Espace Jules Verne" with tons of documents (books, pictures, objects) related with this author. They also have a library with a huge collective of pulps and sci-fi documents that can be interesting for researchers.

The most intriguing activities are certainly the research aspects. For example, they have done a project with the European Space Agency called Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications (ITSF). The Maison d'Ailleurs was commissioned by ESA to organise and lead a study of technologies found in science fiction literature in 2000-2001:

"The study supervisors - along with SF writers, engineers, experts and anyone seriously interested in the project - are identifying whether any of these technologies might hold potential for further analysis leading to feasibility studies. The technologies listed are being examined to see what might be possible with today's knowledge, technologies and materials, or what new technologies and knowledge might be required to make any of the identified SF concepts work.

Following this, an in-depth technological study will then be carried out in order to make a more extensive evaluation of the major technologies deemed to be of sufficient interest by a panel of experts. The objective will be to ascertain whether any of these are worthy of eventual consideration for ESA's long-term space programme"

Why do I blog this? beyond my fascination towards sci-fi, this place seems to be a highly relevant institution. The material they have can be very interesting for researchers and as a material to work on design related issues. Besides, the museum director will give a speech at Lift 09.

Historical analysis as a design tool

In "Historical Analysis: Using the Past to Design the Future", Wyche and her colleagues shows how history can be valuable for ubiquitous computing research; namely, that it can employed to provided insight and methodologies in the same vein as anthropology or philosophy. They point out in what respect historical analysis is relevant:

• sheds new light on recurring cultural themes embedded in domestic technology, and by extension, ‘smart homes.’ Questioning these themes has the potential to lead designers to rethink assumptions about domestic technology use. For example, rather than using “ease of use” as a guiding principle, elders described difficult, yet enjoyable aspects of housework that technology removed
• exploring the past helps us understand who we are today and where we are going. For ubiquitous computing, historical awareness can deepen designers’ understanding of the context they are designing for.
• history can spur designers’ imaginations by revealing the contingency of the present situation, rendering it less obvious and inevitable
• using history to defamiliarize the present supports designers in envisioning future domestic life less constrained by present-day cultural assumptions embedded in technology
• Like ethnography, history forces designers to become more aware of their preconceptions about a topic. Because of its ability to defamiliarize the present, history can be a powerful recourse for inspiring innovative computational devices and systems."

They apply this approach to domestic technology use with some interesting techniques such as scrapbooking or the the use of personal histories of technology use (asking people to remember the first time they use a certain technology).