Ciara Taylor was also at Interaction 12 in Dublin and reports on the keynote talk by Anthony Dunne for Core77. “Interaction design and designing interactions… are they the same concept? Anthony Dunne, partner at Dunne and Raby and professor at Royal College of Arts in London, gave a keynote at Interaction12 that began this discussion for the attendees. In Dunne’s talk titled “What if…Crafting Design Speculation,” he asks designers to use imagination to think...

There was magic in the air on the final day of the Interactions 12 conference in Dublin, as a number of speakers drew the connections between magic and design, whether it be electric faeries, having childhood dreams of being a magician, or actually being one in a past professional life. Louise Taylor, Boon Chew and Vicky Teinaki cover the presentations by Fabian Hemmert, Kate Ertmann (Animation Dynamics), Pete Denman (Intel), Dr. Michael Smyth & Ingi Helgason (Centre for Interaction Design,...

It is a constant complaint: We’re choking on information. The flood of data on the Web has reached mind boggling proportions, and it shows no signs of stopping. But wait, says Harvard professor Ann Blair in an NPR radio program — this is not a new condition. It’s been part of the human experience for centuries. Listen to program (or read transcript) (via InfoDesign)

McKinsey’s John DeVine, Shyam Lal, and Michael Zea write that businesses ought to focus on the human side of customer service to make it psychologically savvy, economically sound, and easier to scale. “Some organizations are making strides in the design and delivery of services. By focusing more thoughtfully on the human side of customer service, these companies are lowering costs by 10 percent or more while improving customer satisfaction scores by up to 30 percent. In this article,...

Vicky Teinaki and Louise Taylor continue their coverage of the Interactions conference in Dublin. In this long article, they report on the presentations by Jonas Löwgren (School of Arts & Communication at Malmö University), Scott Nazarian (frog), Ariel Waldman (Spacehack.org), Dustin DiTomasso (Mad*Pow), Julie Baher (Citrix), Jonathan Rez (Seren Partners), Sami Niemalä (Nordkapp), Rachel Bolton-Nasir (MISI Company), Abi Jones (Google), Michael Hawley (Mad*Pow), Katie Koch (Project:...

“I argued in Fast Company last year that Silicon Valley’s engineers aren’t paid nearly enough when you consider the billions in profits they create for their firms. But it’s now clear that the industry’s surprisingly low wages for engineers weren’t just a strange quirk of the labor market. They were by design: For years, the biggest tech companies conspired to drive down salaries by illegally agreeing not to poach one another’s workers. The Department of Justice settled with Adobe,...

Dublin — and even its Lord Mayor — welcomed a record 750 attendees to the opening of Interaction 12. The day would unfold with Hitchcock, healthcare, and hearing the question ‘what if?’. Vicky Teinaki and Louise Taylor report on the presentations by Luke Williams (frog design), August de los Reyes (Samsung UX Centre), Mike Lemmon (Ziba), Kel Smith (Anikto), Giles Colburne (cxpartners), Maggie Breslin (Mayo Clinic), Virgil Wong and Akshay Kapur (Medical Avatar), Katey Deeney (WebMD Health...

Tricia Wang of UCSD’s Department of Sociology and Barry Brown of the Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center Stockholm presented the paper “Ethnography of the telephone: Changing uses of communication technology in village life” at MobileHCI 2011. Abstract While mobile HCI has encompassed a range of devices and systems, telephone calls on cellphones remain the most prevalent contemporary form of mobile technology use. In this paper we document ethnographic work studying a remote...

“Those beautiful houses I live beside. Somebody please tell them give them a clue of you, Zamzam, who shines like the morning light like the scales of a colorful fish, while you were gone on Hajj had many memories. Your friend, Aisha died of love. at long last [I realized] both I and the camels need love.” - What is the english translation to what K’naan says in somali in the song “America” ? - Yahoo! Answers

The Norwegian Design Council has published a new resource site about inclusive design, to inform and communicate how this approach can be used as a strategy for innovation and development of more user-friendly products and services for the mainstream market. Note also that the Council will be organising the European Business Workshops on Inclusive Design 2012 on 7-8 June in Oslo, Norway. The two-day sessions are conceived as inspiring, method-based workshops for business organisations and...

Heather Ford spoke with Stuart Geiger, PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about his emerging ideas about the ethnography of robots. “Not the ethnography of robotics (e.g. examining the humans who design, build, program, and otherwise interact with robots, which I and others have been doing),” wrote Geiger, “but the ways in which bots themselves relate to the world”. Geiger believes that constructing and relating an emic account of the non-human should be the ultimate...

In this first piece, Sam Ladner examines the different temporal conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork in industry and academia: “Academics frequently criticize corporate ethnography simply as “too short.” But this is just as shallow an insight as is the idea that culture=consumerism. Academics, of all people, should know that culture drives practice. The rapid pace of contemporary corporate life clearly and reasonably demands shorter time horizons for any research project. It is more...

In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1–4, Core77 is bringing us a preview of this year’s event, including this guest post by David Malouf, professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department at the Savannah College of Art and Design. “In the last year IxD, as a community of practice, has faced its strongest challenge to date. We have shifted from converging and assimilating to a community that is...

As more and more devices in your home get connected to the Internet, the user experience becomes increasingly important. The people at ReadWriteWeb announce that over the coming months they will be exploring the world of User Experience design, by interviewing UX experts and reviewing products that get it right – and some that get it wrong. They will start by looking at how the user experience of televisions is becoming more interactive and what this will mean to your TV consumption...

On 23 January 2012, Martijn de Waal defended his Ph.D. thesis ‘The city as interface’ at the Philosophy Department of the University of Groningen. Abstract: The main concern of the study ‘The City as Interface’ is the future of the urban public sphere. It investigates various scenarios that describe how the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, such as the mobile phone, GPS-navigation, and the usage of social networks through smartphones, change the way the urban public sphere...

All human societies are alive with the battle for influence. Every single day each of us is subject to innumerable persuasion attempts from corporations, interest groups, political parties and other organisations. Each trying to persuade us that their product, idea or innovation is what we should buy, believe in or vote for. In our personal lives the same struggle is played out for the supremacy of viewpoints, ideals and actions. Whether it’s friends and family, work colleagues, potential...

Two interesting posts by Danish photographer and visual ethnographer Jacob Langvad Nilsson: Business ethnography as a key strategy for international brands When penetrating new markets, two critical mistakes seem to repeat themselves. The first mistake involves thinking that because it is already a big and recognizable brand, its potential consumers will be overwhelmingly impressed when the products becomes available in a new market. The second mistake is for the business to think that solely...

Applying Anthropology in the Global Village Edited by Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler and Jacqueline Copeland-Carson Left Coast Press – November 2011 – 326 pp. Hardback (978-1-61132-085-5) Paperback (978-1-61132-086-2) The realities of the globalized world have revolutionized traditional concepts of culture, community, and identity—so how do applied social scientists use complicated, fluid new ideas such as translocality and ethnoscape to solve pressing human problems? In this...

After dinner with Ghi and Alejandro (Taken with Instagram at Pho Sizzling)

China Real Time Report: ‘Buried Alive’: A Dissident’s Words Become a Catchphrase

Chapter twelve of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It deals with what HCI specialists call ‘affective computing’ and was written by Kristina Höök, professor in Human-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University. As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design moved from designing and evaluating work-oriented applications towards dealing with leisure-oriented applications, such as games, social computing, art, and tools for creativity, we have had...

During the Pop!Tech conference, well known design researcher Jan Chipchase gave a talk about his research work. In the panel session an audience member asked two questions relating to personal motivations of doing this kind of research and whether anyone has the moral right to extract knowledge from a community for corporate gain: - What is it like working for BigCorps pillaging the intellect of people around the world for commercial gain? - How do you sleep at night as the corporations you work...

Elizabeth Churchill, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, was the speaker at the October 2011 Creative Mornings event in San Francisco. In her talk she discussed how we hide, reveal and misinterpret emotion online and off. Watch video (30 min)

Jan Chipchase thinks that 80 to 90% of current recruiting for design research/ethnographic studies (excluding focus groups) that is currently placed through recruiting agencies could from a skill and work-flow perspective, be carried out in-house through a clever use of social networks. “For researchers this means learning new skills: maintaining an online identity that is a suitable interface for potential recruits; knowing how to gauge reach through which social networking sites, running...

SPOEK MATHAMBO - CONTROL (by spoek mathambo) appreciate

Genevieve Bell, interaction and experience research director at Intel Labs, has published a guest post on the BBC website on how artificial intelligence will change our relationship with tech. “I think in 2012 we will start to see signs of change in our relationships with devices. Here I do not just mean more forms of new interfaces and new interactions. This is less about gesture and voice recognition and more about machines that are contextually and situationally aware. And there is lots...

It’s increasingly clear that we live in collaborative times. Many of the most interesting innovations of recent years have at their heart ideas of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging or swapping. These are age-old concepts being reinvented through network technologies and a cultural shift driven by the more civic minded millennial generation. The report, with the subtitle “Platforms for exchange and reciprocity in public services”, was...

Steven Portigal interviews Julian Bleecker about the near future, design fiction and storytelling. Julian Bleecker is a designer, technologist and researcher in the Advanced Projects studio at Nokia Design in Los Angeles and the Near Future Laboratory where he investigates emerging social practices around new networked interaction rituals. His focus is on hands-on design and prototyping as a way to raise questions about commonly held assumptions about digital media and digital devices so as to...

In its new focus on products for girls, Lego is using quite a lot of ethnographic research: “To develop Lego Friends, Knudstorp relaunched the same extensive field research—more cultural anthropology than focus groups—that the company conducted in 2005 and 2006 to restore its brand. It recruited top product designers and sales strategists from within the company, had them join forces with outside consultants, and dispatched them in small teams to shadow girls and interview their...

The idea of sharing things instead of owning them goes against everything we’ve been taught as a consumeristic society. Those who have spent their lives “keeping up with the Jones’” may find it hard to suddenly relinquish their death-grip on idea that owning things is the path toward happiness. But younger generations, poised to inherit the economic turmoil and environmental disaster caused by consumerism, are increasingly embracing the alternatives offered by...

Reboot, a service design firm working in the fields of governance and international development, recently spent time with three marginalized groups in China — the rural poor, ethnic minorities, and migrant workers — to research the impacts of three decades of disruptive change, and to design new services to improve their livelihoods. Their task was to make sure that the coming mobile banking revolution — unlike too many other revolutions — is inclusive and accessible for everyone, and...

Brian Thomas Collins has made a career out of creating brand experiences, “a few of them great”. He writes: “A good brand experience is when a brand does what we expect of it. A great brand experience is something we tell someone else about. In short, a great brand experience is a story, in which the brand user – not the brand – is the hero. A great brand experience is direct and transformative. It’s not a stunt or a fantasy. It’s not a campaign. It’s not the idea of...

Jared Spool explores the key differences between “Normals” (normal mainstream users) and tech early adopters. Instead of thinking about ‘early adopters’ and ‘normals’ as if they are two homogeneous groups, he thinks it’s better to look at the motivations that trigger someone to buy into a new technology or solution at various points in the release timeline. Read article

Frog’s Robert Fabricant breaks down the themes from the 2011 Interaction Design Awards. “Technologies like cheap sensors and cloud computing are increasingly being used to augment our daily lives in both magical and mundane ways. Everything we do is an app in the making (a million and counting). But in this environment we are also developing a new sensitivity to the thin line between enrichment and annoyance. Which is why interaction design continues to gain prominence as the...

Far-flung families are increasingly using Skype, Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat to do things together that would otherwise require a plane ticket. “Though Skype is now eight years old, the software — and others like it, including Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat — has become a regular fixture in a growing number of American homes, providing new ways for families to stay connected in an age where generations are less likely to gather around the table on Sunday afternoons to share...

NY Times technology reporter Steve Lohr writes on how consumer-based Internet technologies are morphing into new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care, traffic management and food distribution. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies. [...] “We’re going to put the...

With a harvest of data from a wired planet, computing has evolved from sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, explores what this means. “As Mike Liebhold and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future have discussed, computing will have evolved from merely sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. In this evolution,...

As design becomes more sophisticated in influencing user behavior, it’s important that we start to think critically about the ethical boundary between persuasion and outright manipulation, argues Stephen P. Anderson. “You can’t discuss a topic like seduction or what motivates people without some awareness that, no matter how playful or well-meaning your intentions are, these things will certainly be abused. So I’m often asked this question on the subject of ethics:...

Incorporating wireless technology into its newest cars, Ford prepared to roll out vehicles capable of monitoring everything from pollen counts to glucose levels. “[Ford] started concentrating on the aging population in 1999, and a focus on health and wellness within the car is at the center of their new approach. Unobtrusive ergonomic changes like lowered door frames—much kinder on stiff joints—have already been making a quiet appearance throughout the fleet. Within the next five years...

Sondre Ager-Wick, Nokia’s Head of Design Strategy and Foresight, discusses the evolution and future of mobile design. His new trends: - DIY design - Electronically enhanced senses - The smartification of everything - Less digital bling. More content first. - Getting serious about play Read article

In an article for DMLCentral Nishant Shah, founder and director of research for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, wants to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. “Based on my research on young people in the Global South, I want to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. One of the binaries posited as the Digital ‘Other’ — ie, a non-Digital Native — is that of a Digital Immigrant or Settler. I am not comfortable with these...

In September 2011, researcher Anna Snel defended her Ph.D thesis, entitled “For the love of experience: Changing the experience economy discourse“, at the University of Amsterdam. It is now available for download. The attention for experiences as economic offerings has increased enormously in the last decade. However, the lack of a clear definition of experience and the bias towards the organization’s perspective in the discourse cause much confusion. In this study experience is...

Experience designers investigate the motivations behind users’ behaviors to develop skill in predicting and guiding those behaviors. A short article by designer Sorin Pintilie. “So, yes, experience can be designed— not all experiences, but certainly some experiences. And with time, experience designers will continue to investigate the inherent motivations behind users’ behaviors. They will continue to develop and refine their tools and skills to predict those behaviors with...

Chip maker and technology group Intel says that women are emerging as the dominant users of technology and if it continues to enhance its ease of use, the fairer sex will continue to dominate the adoption of technology. This is the opinion of Genevieve Bell, Intel fellow and director of interaction and experience research, who noted that European women spent more time on social networks than men, sent more text messages and used more location-based services on phones. Read article  

Chapter eleven of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It was written by Dag Svanaes, Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (and former professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea) and deals with the philosophy of interaction and the interactive user experience. “I will approach the question of interactivity from a number of angles, in the belief that a multi-paradigmatic...

Homesense was a research project that looked at how we might design smart homes from the bottom up, in an environment of open innovation. Using open source tools Homesense brings the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home. “The Homesense project was an open research project around the topic of bottom-up smart homes initiated by Tinker London. In mid-2009, founder Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino wrote a blog post highlighting what the...

Since September 2011, Niti Bhan, an emerging markets design strategist, has been wholly immersed in the cyber cafe industry in Sub Saharan Africa, specifically peri urban and rural Kenya in East Africa. She and her colleagues were tasked to assess the market and value the opportunity space for Village Telco, a social enterprise start up whose mission is to enable affordable access to voice and data communications in challenging environments. “Since their intended target audience was to...

Information Marketplaces: The new economics of cities Author: Arup, The Climate Group, Accenture and Horizon, University of Nottingham Publication date: 28 November 2011 The technology-enabled city is an untapped source of sustainable growth. “Written in partnership with The Climate Group, Accenture and Horizon, University of Nottingham, this report investigates how technology can be used in cities to meet the growing challenges of expanding urbanisation. The technology-enabled city is...

Rohan Gunatillake, the lead producer of festivalslab (the Edinburgh Festival Innovations Lab) gives four reasons why new thinking and tools can produce better experiences. “Here at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, we explore how to best use new thinking and new tools to make the experience of the twelve major Edinburgh festivals even better – for audiences, performers and the festivals organisations themselves. As part of this ongoing work, this week saw the launch of Festivals...

Occupying Wall Street and Tahrir Square: Feathers of the Same Bird | Truthout: “The tear gas used on protestors in Tahrir Square was manufactured by Combined Systems Inc., a US based company. The same company provided the pepper spray used in UC Davis demonstrations,” she tells me, adding, “This is a period of global unrest. It cannot be stopped. We will occupy everywhere.”

Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian that the “smart money is moving from online towards ‘live experience’.” “The new magnetism of congregation seems universal. Every online service or forum promotes an event, an invitation, a club night, something for which subscribers will pay, much as online dating points towards a meeting. Demonstrators are never content with online but want to “seize back the streets”. Religious sites plead for church attendance....

“Homage to Catalonia II” is a documentary, a research project, a story of stories about the construction of a sustainable, solidary and decentralized economy. The video, which is a project of Joana Conill, Manuel Castells and Àlex Ruiz of IN 3, the High School Institute of Research of the University Open to Catalonia, investigates new economic cultures, new forms of living and of understanding the economy. For the . In particular, it studies the social impact of the...

Chris Risdon expands on what constitutes a good experience map in a long and highly commendable article on the Adaptive Path blog. “The experience map highlighted [on the left - click to enlarge] was part of an overall initiative for Rail Europe, Inc., a US distributor that offers North American travelers a single place to book rail tickets and passes throughout Europe, instead of going to numerous websites. They already had a good website and an award-winning contact center, but they...

Chapter ten of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview and deals with end-user development. Computer users have rapidly increased in both number and diversity. They include managers, accountants, engineers, home makers, teachers, scientists, health care workers, insurance adjusters, salesmen, and administrative assistants. Many of these people work on tasks that rapidly vary on a yearly, monthly, or even daily basis. Consequently, their software needs are diverse,...

“The Apple of Steve Jobs needed HyperCard-like products like the Monsanto Company needs a $100 home genetic-engineering set.” - Loper OS » Why Hypercard Had to Die HyperCard R.I.P.

“So if your goal is to enrich the Arringtons of the world while maybe, if you win the lottery, scooping some of the groundscore that they overlooked, then by all means, bust your ass while the bankers and speculators cheer you on. Instead of that, I recommend that you do what you love because you love doing it. If that means long hours, fantastic. If that means leaving the office by 6pm every day for your underwater basket-weaving class, also fantastic.” - Watch a VC use my name to sell a...

Aileen Lee, partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, believes that the best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users is harnessing a concept called social proof. “What is social proof? Put simply, it’s the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It’s also known as informational social influence. Wikipedia describes social proof as “a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others reflect...

The concept of of social labelling could lead to a subconscious change in behaviour, Guy Champniss writes in The Guardian. “By social labelling, we’re referring to the tag society gives a particular behaviour in order to make sense of it. In other words, society interprets the action and tags it with a motivation – for all to see – that it considers consistent with the behaviour. This means your individual behaviour can carry a social tag independently of the internal tag you...

(via Daily Kos: Fiscal inequality: Godzilla vs. Ants) As long as corporations are people and money is speech, then democracy is a farce. If you want to live like a person and not an ant, that has to change.

Catvertising (by johnst172)

Kickstarter - Global Village Construction Set: The greatest open source hardware project ever - GVCS gives you the means to manufacture a modern civilization on a DVD!

“Oakland police will no longer indiscriminately use wooden or rubber bullets, Taser stun guns, pepper spray and motorcycles to break up crowds, under an agreement announced Friday.” - OAKLAND / Agreement reached on crowd-control tactics - SFGate November 06, 2004|Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer

RAW VIDEO: Protester who helped rescue injured vet talks about ordeal [warning: strong language] - Video - KTVU San Francisco: Shocking first-person account of what happened in Oakland - an interview with the woman who was standing by Scott Olsen. Very sad. 

“Mary Meeker, an investor and former financial analyst at Morgan Stanley, compiled this imaginative report to inform the discussion of America’s financial situation and outlook. USA Inc. examines the U.S. government’s income statement and balance sheet, interprets the underlying data and facts, and illustrates patterns and trends in easily understandable terms.” - USA Inc. (Video) — Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers

This. Kid. Is. Killing. It. see video: I’m Yours(ukulele) (by uke3453)

No business like goat business. Thx, Lionel. A-R-A-B: The Rap (by GoRemy)

Ned Hepburn: Obama got a Tumblr. : motherjones: cheatsheet: newsweek: nedhepburn: Really? Why? Is he stoned? I give it a week until he drunk-blogs something. Will he add only hot girls, SoCal creativebros, and New York media jagoffs? Because that’s what I did. Will he just use it to reblog pictures of twee landscapes with some shitty quote about first… Is Obama the first “Hipster” president?  Oh god. If he is, I’m voting Huntsman. The last thing I fucking want is a President...

metadata analysis on rap lyrics

I need love and a sweet falsetto.

Breaking Batman (via IamA with user MassiveJoe) - Imgur: i

Wearing a CuteCircuit design, a sexy white catsuit adorned with thousands of interactive LEDs and glimmering Swarovski crystals, Katy Perry illuminated the stage on American Idol last thursday night. She performed her latest chart topping single E.T. in her only live television performance of the hit. Katy Perry shared the stage with surprise guest Kanye West who added his own lyrical performance to the bridge of the song. CuteCircuit designers Francesca and Ryan commented, “The design...

Our goal with Chinagram was to combine the charm of Chinese ideograms with the potential of the iPad platform, creating an app that is not only useful and interesting to use but also beautiful to look at. Here is a “behind the scenes” of how I created Chinagram’s illustration of a peacock, a symbol of beauty in Chinese culture, used in the splash screen of the application. Before going digital, I drew some abstract shapes and strokes with watercolors on paper: once I scanned and edited...

Chinagram for iPad from todo.to.it on Vimeo. Say hello to Chinagram! Our first iPad app, it tells the story of Chinese writing, explaining its logic and showing its beauty, sign after sign. Web: chinagram.info App Store: itunes.apple.com/​app/​id426200988

A couple of renders that illustrate an installation for the Stazione Futuro exhibition. The opening is in a couple of days: March 17th, at Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Torino. See you there. More documentation will follow soon.

  Visit us during Paris Fashion Week from the 4th to the 7th of March! CuteCircuit has launched a secret showroom on the smallest island in the beautiful heart of Paris. Curious? Headed to Paris? Send us an email to confirm your place. And we will send you all the details. Space is limited. You’ll get a sneek-peek at the latest in wearable technology from our Autumn/Winter 2011/12 collection, champagne and gold-coated pop-rock eclairs! À bientôt!

Generative graphics system developed to communicate the contest for the new Expo2015 logo. http://concorsologo.expo2015.org/ In collaboration with FutureBrand Milan. Music: Ryuichi Sakamoto

The K-Dress from CuteCiruit Glows!   For a limited time you can find an exclusive and amazing range of CuteCircuit fashions at Selfridges. In the Womenswear Department on the second floor you will find the fabulous K-Dress. The K-Dress, which made it’s debut earlier this year in Paris for Fashion Week, is made entirely in the UK of 100% luscious silk chiffon and silk taffeta. And it features hundreds of LED lights embedded in the fabric that glow and sparkle in whatever colour or...

As a participant in a recent effort to draft a definition of open-source hardware, I've been carefully considering the practices that constitute it: allowing commercial reuse of a design, for example, and publishing the original source files (not some intermediate, read-only format). This aligns with my generally pragmatic attitude towards open-source hardware, which I see as one of many possible approaches, appropriate in some circumstances and not others. What this attitude neglects,...

Preparing for the show! The K-Dress was shown publicly for the fist time today during Paris Fashion week! The K-dress, bearing a genetic similarity with the dress CuteCircuit created for Katy Perry  earlier this year, was unveiled during a special catwalk event at the Cité de la mode et du design. The K-Dress is made entirely in the UK of 100% luscious silk chiffon and silk taffeta. And it features hundreds of LED lights embedded in the fabric that glow and sparkle in whatever colour or...

Our Spamghetto stand at 100% Design London is up and ready for tomorrow opening. If you’re planning a visit, we’d love to see you at stand J10!

Listen to Marketplace on National Public Radio today to hear an interview with CuteCircuit Designers Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz. The interview feature, titled “Fashion may be going high-tech”, covers a wide range of subjects including the place of innovation in the fashion market, the emerging field of Wearable Technology and where this might lead the fashion industry in the future, and some discussion of CuteCircuits own unique designs and products. Listen live on Marketplace...

Make an amazing video or photos of yourself wearing a Twirkle T-Shirt (or Twirkle dress or Twirkle mini-dress) and submit it before the 5th of November. The best photo or video will win a CuteStore Gift Card and be showcased on the CuteCircuit website! Imagine what sparkling videos and photos you can take with light up Twirkle clothing! Submit your photos or videos to the following e-mail address with “Twirkle Competition” in the subject line: cute@cutecircuit.com The body of the...

Hello everybody! The CuteStore is finally live! Visit the store now: http://www.cutecircuit.com/cutestore/ Let us know how you like it! If you are one of our subscribers you are going to receive a little surprise via e-mail in the next 24 hours!

It’s always good to stare at circles once in a while. Here’s a doodle I made in processing… modified from my previous post.. nuninuninu..

Lately we have been working on a redesign of the Arduino identity, including new graphics for the boards, mimimal sustainable packaging, etc… The project will be released in mid September.

THE STROBES — Modular Light Scenography from todo.to.it on Vimeo. client: MTV Italia — MTVDAYS Opening Nightlocation: Environment Park, Torinoyear: 2010

I have a few minutes to sneak this post in. Just to let you know that I have been teaching Information Architecture at the Ateneo, my alma mater, at their Information Design program under the Fine Arts Department. Here’s a shot of what we’ve been up to:

Artificial Dummies — M HKA, Antwerp from todo.to.it on Vimeo. Guerrilla Projections for the opening of the Animism exhibition at M HKA, Antwerp Contemporary Art Museum. Music: Dimitri Brusselmans January 2010

CuteCircuit at The Queen’s Birthday Party in Rome! The Queen’s Birthday Party took place at Villa Wolkonsky, the residence of British Ambassador Edward Chaplin, on June 9th 2010. Rome was hot and sunny! The Queen’s Birthday Party is a traditional diplomatic event equivalent to a national day for the UK. This year’s event presented an exhibition focussed on the themes of innovation and sustainability in fashion to highlight Britain’s important contribution in this...

CuteCircuit catwalk show at Made in Future Event at the House of Lords. The House of Lords was the backdrop for a catwalk show featuring the best of British fashion innovations, from smart materials for raincoats to CuteCircuit’s very own luminous collection of Twirkle tees. The show kicked off with opening remarks by Lord Simon Haskel. The event showcased UK excellence and talent in smart textiles and wearables and has been organised by the Materials KTN in conjunction with the British...

CuteCircuit at La Rinascente in Rome ! If you are in Rome this summer here is your chance to check out some of CuteCircuit’s exclusive summer fashions at La Rinascente. Walking distance from fashionable Via Veneto of La Dolce Vita fame and the beautiful park of Villa Borghese, La Rinascente is located in Piazza Fiume. In the picture: the Eye Twirkle Shirt, the Disc Twirkle mini-dress, the Armour Purple dress and the Disc leggings. Let us know how you like them!

As my final project for Joe Paradiso's sensors class, I created a sensors library for Arduino. It provides abstractions for some of the hardware peripherals on the ATmega328 microcontroller on the Arduino: timer 1, timer 2, and the analog-to-digital convertor (ADC). On top of these, it provides higher-level functionality like a sleep function and a function to sample the ADC at regular intervals. I'd eventually like to add something similar to the low-level hardware abstraction to the Arduino...

“rather cool” ubergizmo “Moject: The mobile projection system we’ve been waiting for” Recombu “As if Sony’s PlayStation Move, Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Project Natal weren’t evidence enough, we’re here to inform you that motion gaming is here to stay… for awhile, anyway. One area where it hasn’t quite taken over in full force is the mobile sector, but Dave & Adie are angling to change that.” -...

moject enabled iphone with laser pico projector motion gaming We are very pleased to reveal the worlds first Moject enhanced iphone in all its prototype glory! We have to give a huge shout out to Matej and Ziga for their huge support! The Moject enhanced iphone features a laser pico projector and custom software and hardware upgrades based around our moject IP of ‘interactive projection’. Our demonstrator game is a 3D geolocated experience that shows how Moject can transform any...

I'm tidying up a few things around my respective websites and wanted to sound a warning in case you read Girlwonder through a feed: it's possible that the URLs for RSS will change. I'm switching blog platforms as well and...

"What, then, is the 'object?'Every object is the nodal point, the boundary point in the relationship between person and person. Whoever really grasps the object and designs, does so [grasps and designs] not only for the individual man and...

A quick post on the interview with Nick Perlas on Rock Ed Radio in NU107. Right click on the link and “save as” to download.Nick Perlas on Rock Ed radio

Our laser modules arrived today, I haven’t seen them yet but early reports are good. This means our next major prototype is tantalisingly close to reality, stay tuned for updates!

Enough with the snow. I'm in Los Angeles, or more precisely, Venice (and I missed the third snowstorm in 10 days in New Jersey). I will be shifting my time to be here more than not in the next several...

It's the second snowstorm in a week and right now, it's the strange moment where I can feel the pressure change and sense the rest of the front that's about to hit. They've closed Princeton today--in fact, they've closed most...

I'm finding that as I sit down to do my weeknotes, it's as much about what's coming up as it is about what I've just done. That's probably to be expected, even though last week was exciting and relaxing and...

There are a lot of sites that cover web design. Some good ones that cover interaction design. There are also a few good ones that cover that cover local design scene. One blog that I subscribe to, and I suggest you do too, is Plus63.net. They post pretty regular articles on Filipino visual designers. Another design blog that seems to beat me in announcing new logo redesigns in the Philippines is One Design PH. So this makes me think of how to position my blog to serve you guys better. I...

Greetings from Mexico City! I'm on vacation, a tagalong for a commercial that Motion Theory is shooting. I keep having dreams about editing and rewriting, but I have nothing to do until February 3, when I have my oral defense....

Been curious about this Weeknotes habit that various people are doing on their sites. Given that it's the start of a year, I figure it's time to write about what I've been up to. I wrote this blog post on Saturday...

Hi, we are Dave&Adie, in 2007 we developed the first prototype of Moject | Motion Projection, that you can see in this video but we decided it wasn’t ready for the prime time until we had perfected the experience but after seeing the simple demo by Microvision and Intel we thought why not share our work with you. We are really excited about the possibilities of mobile motion projection and the next evolution of Moject is in our labs and will be coming very soon, if you want to be the...

I did some tweaks on the previous sketches I made before. I was trying to make a “bokeh” effect by blurring the circles a bit. But the filter blur in Processing was a bit too strong and I still don’t know how to control it yet, the result was something far from the original one and still way off from what I want. Sketch 2-1, added some random blur effect. Sketch 2-2, changed colors a bit, still using the follow mouse effect. Sketch 2-3, automated the movement and size of...

I bought the compilation of The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite a couple of days ago because my wife had a subscription of Archie comics which she had to pick up. I was very happy that I did. I rarely read comics so I may not be the best critic for these things. But a couple of months back, I also bought the first of the series of Blackest Night, so I can make that as my comparison. I finished The Umbrella Academy in one sitting, versus Blackest Night which I just got in the middle of. ...

I find myself going back to learning Processing when I feel the need for fresh air or escape. Someone told me that I was too technical to be creative. Working with highly technical people, this was something new to me. I always am thought of as creative than technical. I guess I am absorbing some new skills by working closely with technical people. But I digress. So I open up processing to see how technical I am or maybe exercise and learn to be more technical and creative at the same...

My submission to the TEI conference was rejected, but I wanted to share the paper anyway. Here's an excerpt: Working prototypes have many disadvantages and difficulties. Foremost among these is the time they take to build. In the course, most of the student groups spent fully two weeks (half of the time) constructing their final prototype. Compared to the hours or days taken on most of their earlier prototypes, this was a large commitment. It can also be difficult to estimate the time...

For a project in my group, we needed to talk to multiple XBee radios from a computer. I adapted the XBee API library for Processing by Rob Faludi and Daniel Shiffman, adding methods for sending and receiving serial data (Series 1 radios only). To send data to a specific radio (identified by its 16-bit address), you use the xbee.sendDataString16(int addr, int[] bytes) function. There's a new constant, xbee.SERIES1_RX16PACKET, that's returned by XBeeDataFrame.getApiID() for incoming data from a...

Wanna speak at a conference? What if it's about cities and architecture? Not your subject? No problem. It can be with the handy Urban Computing Conference Title Generator.(Brought to you by a brief bout of procrastination as I revise a...

Congratulations to the Winners of last night’s awarding ceremony, Luzon leg. No, unfortunately I didn’t win. But I’m still happy to be a finalist among the hundreds of other blogs. :) Here’s the list: SPECIAL AWARDS Best Blog Design – The Site Guy Best Filipino Blog Abroad – The Warped Zone Best Foreign Blog – My Sari Sari Store Blogger’s Choice – Micamyx Best Filipiniana Blog – Pilipino Komiks TEN BEST POSTS OF THE YEAR Karnabal by...

I rarely come across a website that captures my imagination… and Spectra did it for me. I just saw this site by accident while browsing through another site. Spectra is msnbc’s visual newsreader. So instead of showing text and images, spectra presents this differently, via spiral and colored boxes (according to the category of the news item). But this wasn’t the one that got me hooked. If you go in deeper and look at the other ways they present information, you’ll...

Please, if you can, try to help out people who were affected by the floods and typhoon. Toni has a very comprehensive list of places that are offering assistance.

In July, out of the blue, a friend's cat attacked my leg, biting and scratching it until my friend pulled it off, without provocation. Later in the month, my bizarre allergy to Princeton's mosquitos returned, causing a full-on systemic allergic...

Most open-source hardware projects (including Arduino) seem not to have taken advantage of the distributed manufacturing models enabled by the open nature of their designs. Instead, we mostly see two conventional distribution models: centralized manufacturing and artisanal production. The centralized manufacturing model The centralized manufacturing model is a simplified form of the process followed by most corporations. Here a manufacturer (the small red dot) produces the product and...

View more documents from David Mellis.

There are a lot of people creating value around Arduino: e.g. this experimentation kit from oomlout, tons of videos from Make Magazine, various books, etc. When I see all this activity, two questions come to mind, one selfish and one altruistic. The selfish question is: how can I capture more of this value? The altruistic question is: how can I make these things more accessible and useful to the Arduino community? To rephrase the first question, should I (or others on the Arduino team) be...

What could help people share the models they use for generating data so that others can investigate alternative scenarios or presentations of the model (and not just the resulting data)? For example, in the The Economics of Structured Finance [pdf], Joshua D. Coval, Jakub Jurek, and Erik Stafford discuss the impact on the value of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and CDOs-squared of changes in the default correlation and probability of their underlying assets. They present one graph...

/* * Blink - the basic Arduino example. */ int ledPin = 13; // LED connected to pin 13 void setup() // run once { pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); // sets the pin as output } void loop() // run over and over again { digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); // sets the LED on delay(1000); // waits for a second digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); // sets the LED off delay(1000); // waits for a second }

This is something that Simona asked me recently. To be honest, I'm not sure what the answer is. I don't expect that a large portion of the population will ever design a circuit or even assemble a kit. But perhaps it can provide for the creation of many products that would not otherwise have existed, and which have the potential of mass consumer appeal. The possibilities for industry are also fascinating, but something I know very little about. I hope that in a few years I'll have a better...

Recently, I've started running. I've never thought of myself as an athletic person at all -- my parents tell stories about me, age 3 and 4, hiding behind the gymnastic mats in the gym of my nursery school, reading books....

Just call me Fallopia. In early March, I gave an Ignite talk at eTech about pneumatic tubes-- a five-minute talk where the slides advance every 15 seconds. It's shot its way around the Internet, but I haven't yet posted it...

Open-source hardware raises a number of economic questions. Primarily: how do unaffiliated individuals collect and spend money? Presumably, this applies to other endeavors, but what are they and how does the answer differ?

My dear friend Spiro Pina passed away on Tuesday, March 17, after fighting a Type IV glioma, a very aggressive form of brain tumor. He leaves behind many people who love him, not the least of which include his...

Just wanted to note that I've not forgotten to post a recap of the Tangible Interactions in Urban Spaces panel we put together at SXSW. A few life things (see next post) have happened. I'll post this week....

I'd been chugging along, updating Girlwonder frequently and then school started up again. Somehow, I'm now midway through my final semester of coursework at Princeton. This month is the month of conferences... today at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference, I present...

Some general principles for the development of open-source hardware that I hope to elaborate on in the future: Use common components Use standard layouts and connectors Provide clear instructions Distribute widely (especially internationally) Introduce in person (workshops are good) Grow your community Meet a real need Help others make money Build a brand Keep innovating

....and she's off. My best friend, Jennifer Bove, is moving across the country. She's joined Kicker Studio, a design consultancy that says, "We do interaction-infused product design for: consumer electronics / appliances / mobile devices /kiosks and touchscreens / interactive...

"I posit that the usability and elegance of any product, software or hardware, tends to reach and seldom surpasses the level that satisfies the taste of whoever is in charge of the product. This applies universally, not just to free and open source software. For example, it explains why Microsoft produces such crummy software even though the company employees thousands of talented programmers and even designers — Microsoft’s decision makers have no taste. But the problem is endemic...

Open-source hardware requires money. This fundamentally distinguishes the nature of its participants from those of open-source software. In open-source software, the fundamental contributor is the developer, many of whom collaborate in order to create a single software application. In open-source hardware, the fundamental contributor is the entrepreneur, who builds on the work of others in order to offer his or her own products. Open-source software is collaborative; open-source hardware is...

On Wednesday, May 21, I'm going to be the Design Remixed speaker with the AIGA New York chapter. It's from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Apple Store in Soho. I'm going to be talking about my life as a...

Years ago (maybe 1999?), Maggie sent me this poem, "Errata" by Charles Simic, who is the current American Poet Laureate. I believe it was published in his first poetry collection, What the Grass Says. ErrataWhere it says snowread teeth-marks of...

Found via Engadget Mobile: "Enkin" introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices. This project is a submission for the first round of the Google Android Developer Challenge and should not be...

Malcolm McCullough once said that he liked to recreationally reprogram his thermostat. I wonder whether he knows that he has this in common with the Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, who told an audience at Princeton last week, "When you create...

Based on this talk, THAT would be a company I'd love to work for: Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo

A heated post-pub debate last night on the potential of mass customization and the echo-chamberness of these little micro-communities on the web took an interesting turn when the good Mr. Sparks and I found ourselves veering into the land of television. So for the last 50 years or so, we've seen the rise of weekly media moments. Those water-cooler, event television moments, where instead of gathering around a warm fire, we all huddled round the blue glow of our TVs. But now that broadcast is...

Via DefenseTech.org One might think that the United States' nuclear weapons — the cornerstone deterrent in the country's arsenal — would be treated with the utmost precision. This comfortable illusion was shaken on Aug. 31, 2007, when crews loaded six live nuclear warheads onto a B-52 bomber and flew from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, cruising over the nation's heartland. Each warhead was 10 times more powerful than the atomic...

Yesterday, I was at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington DC (both the lovely, huge Dulles hangar and the nostalgically tatty one on the Mall), where the second Apollo Lunar Module is displayed. ... which brings us to...

Ralph Rapson passed away this weekend at the age of 93. He left a 70 year legacy as an architect. Rapson studied at Michigan and Cranbrook (under Eliel Saarinen), went on to teach at the New Bauhaus at the Institute...

It struck me I've not posted the talk I gave at IxDA's Interaction 08 conference, titled Strategic Boredom. Some of what I had to say I'd published in an earlier blog post. Here, you can see the video....

Today's delight is musical. This is my muxtape...Archers of Loaf, "Web in Front." Circa late 1994, Spiro and I drove around listening to this, and I've always loved the lines "There's a chance that things could get weird/Yeah it's a...

Greetings from Austin! I've just arrived for South by Southwest Interactive. This marks #11 for me and the 10th year I've attended (as well as my 10th on the advisory board). It is my favorite time of year -- I'm...

Letting the data do the work for you. Image models:: James Hayes and Alexi Efros: Scene Completion, here, they created a 10k library of images, and used that to mask and replace parts of images. This didn't work so well till they had Millions of pictures. Finding Canonical Images: Jing, Baluja, Rowley @ Google: Most image searches use key words from meta data. In this case the algorithem looks for like features in images over thousands of images, and asks which features are most like the...

Live, Vast & Deep: Visualization on the Web, Not from the Web Going over Repeatable Actions, Patterns & Processes Show everything Collecting until there is a pattern: - In the News: Grabbed news from google 4 times an hour, and show changes over time - Oakland Crimespotting: Oakland's GIS only stored info for 30 days, so Stamen started caching it for longer periods to get better understanding - Dig Ark, keeps the center clear for the subject, the information flows around, to...

I'm in San Diego for ETech this week and have been hanging out with Michael Shilo from OpenMoko. Those of you who came to MobileCampLondon will remember Michael as the man who took a 30 minute presentation and sparked debate over the possibilities of Opensource mobile tech that raged for two days. Over our pre-session caffine boost, Michael let me know of a new development in the progress of OpenMoko that was announced at 6 am today. OpenMoko has just released the CAD files for the physical...

Appearing to have something one doesn't, or to not have something one does: this is the art of the bluff. The bluff is the bigness of an argument, backed up by a certain fear on the side of the adversary....

Barack Obama's just resonating with me lately, and having the attention span of a gnat, I'm loving the video feeds on Mr. Obama's web-2.0-tastic site.

Via Digg, and served up by YouTube, this BBC story on a car that runs on nothing but compressed air with a 200km range. I don't even drive and I want one:

What space does drawing occupy within architecture? Does it exist to support the eventual building of an idea? Or is it something more? Basic architectural education places a heavy emphasis on drawing, on translating an idea out of the...

Not much has been published about Cedric Price's Generator project. In fact, not much at all has been published about (or by) Price (1934-2003), an architect who understood architecture as that which set the conditions for interaction, as opposed to...

Boredom is a provocation. But what kind of provocation is it? It is not the existential state of eternal ennui or depression-- if it were, it would act like the dejected robot Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy....

It is 11:56 p.m. and Haruki Murakami begins his novel, After Dark, as follows.Eyes mark the shape of the city. Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep,...

I just started working at the Mobile Experience Lab at MIT. It’s been a while since I’ve had to fill in governmental-type forms, and it was slightly shocking to see my options as listed in one of their forms: I live a multi-ethnic life every day, so why do I have to choose a single ethnicity for the convenience of this form’s creator? And it’s not about how I self-identify versus how others see me: even if I see myself as multi-ethnic, this form dictates that I can be...

Last night I had a conversation with some friends about the iPhone and whether it will have as big an effect on the cell phone market as everyone else seems to think. Sure, it’s got a cool UI and the touch screen doesn’t hurt either, but I wasn’t so sure there was really that much more to make it stand out from the competition. The ability to play music has made its way into a number of other phones, so that’s not a differentiator. And the Prada phone shows that others...

Following up on an earlier post about the Wii and energy consumption, I ran across the concept of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR or “Producer Takeback”) on the SVTC site: In May of 2001, the European Union (EU) Parliament adopted a directive that requires producers of electronics to take responsibility – financial and otherwise – for the recovery and recycling of E-waste. Right now, EPR is aimed at E-waste, but one could imagine this extended to include all...

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Last week I was in San Francisco for CookCamp and Calls For Change at ETel. Now I’m just getting back from a two-day, last-minute trip to Switzerland. I’ve written about my experiences at CookCamp over at Tasty Thinking, but in brief: we pulled it off without a hitch, and more importantly there’s interest in taking CookCamp forward in a variety of directions. One possibility is a larger event in a few months. Another possibility is a...

I’ve had the chance recently to see a lot of live music (or at least what constituted “a lot” for me) and on each occasion I’ve found myself really thinking hard about the experience. As the Music and Memory project demonstrated, music is more than just a sequence of noise. It can conjure emotions and memories and literally transport you to another place and time. Most of my experience with music has been through records, tapes, CDs, and digital files (MP3, AAC, etc.)....

I always forget this, so I’m recording it here for future reference and for the benefit of any other lost souls who are looking for this particular key combination. It’s too late for me, but hopefully it will save someone else from wasting several minutes of their life looking for this information…. To get a line break within a cell in Excel X for the Mac, use the following key combination: Apple-Option-Enter You’re welcome….

Straight from Wired (IPod [sic] Will Be the New CD – the “I” in iPod should never be capitalized, since it’s a trademark, but what do I know): Well, the iPod could become the new CD, especially if Apple starts offering cheap shuffle iPods pre-loaded with hot new albums or artists’ catalogs. Imagine a whole range of inexpensive, special-edition iPods branded with popular bands containing a new album, or their whole catalogs. Flash-memory drives are now so cheap,...

I just ran across a company called Recordant. They use microphones to capture conversations between salespeople and customers. Those conversations can later be analyzed to determine which specific words used at specific times in the course of a conversation led to a sale. From their FAQ: 2. Do you have to tell your customers they are being recorded? Recordant™ is a competitive advantage for your business. It tells customers that you are serious about giving them the best possible shopping...

A flurry of comments attached to this image posted on Flickr caught my eye (via Macrumors). The subject involves a forged Apple event invitation, and I found the depth of analysis contained within the comments to be fascinating, if slightly…well, let’s just leave it at fascinating. Put it this way: when people start talking about the invitation’s kerning, or how the stars in the background are “ugly”, or even how the choice of words is “NOT...

That would be billions of dollars. One amount is how much the United States of America has annually spent on programs or initiatives which address global warming (to be fair, they qualify the amount with “almost”). One amount is this year’s annual budget request from the Pentagon. Or maybe it does. Not that a couple of misplaced billions here or there makes that much of a difference I suppose1. Guess which story was on Page A1 of the New York Times today? Guess which story...