“How can you rob a bank in a world without money?” wonders science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, one of the collaborators of the new foresight project KashKlash.  KashKlash is a lively platform where you can debate future scenarios for economic and cultural exchange. Beyond today’s financial turmoil, what new systems might appear? Global/local, tangible/intangible, digital/physical? On the KashKlash site, you can explore potential worlds where traditional financial transactions have...

ILoveSketch Very nice (proto-demo ?) 3D sketching software modeled on hand-drawing techniques and their relative affordances. Scientific American: Why Do We Forget Things?

Experientia is often involved in supporting and promoting the Piedmont, Italy territory where it is located. Our latest initiative is Diana, a machine designed to satisfy existing and future needs of the beauty industry, based on an analysis of current trends, which was a winning entry at the Canavese Connexion a project to promote design by regenerating the Piedmont Canavese industrial area. Experientia partner Jan-Cristoph Zoels worked as Design Director on Diana, with TECNO SYSTEM S.p.A,...

Last August, I participated in a contest and submitted a design to a local government agency called the MMDA.  The task was to design a landmark that would be built in front of the newly opened airport, Terminal 3.   My concept was simple but I thought was solid: There were 2 landmark spots and I thought that they should work to support one another.  My concept was to make icons out of the Philippine flag.  The result was the 3 stars of the flag will be on the smaller landmark, while the Sun...

I’ve written about “why I write about design” on this blog before. And it has been quite some time since I have written anything, more than a month. Like Micheal Beirut said in his Design Observer blog, “I write to slow things down again, to question my own premises, to force myself to pay attention…”   I guess this past month has been too fast.  Sometimes too fast to pay attention. I often get stunned by the amount of work that I need to do and I have...

The Washington Post published a long article on how, for every move, mood and bodily function, there’s a website to help you keep track. “Self-disclosure has been redefined online. In Web 2.0, it’s led to blogs and Tweets, Facebook and instant messenger, each developed to help users share the inane minutiae of their lives with others. But another kind of site has evolved — a type meant not to broadcast your life to others but to chart it for yourself, on...

Designing Gestural Interfaces by Dan Saffer O’Reilly Media, Inc. Paperback, 268 pages December 3, 2008 ISBN: 0596518390 Promo text: If you want to get started in new era of interaction design, this is the reference you need. Packed with informative illustrations and photos, Designing Gestural Interfaces provides you with essential information about kinesiology, sensors, ergonomics, physical computing, touchscreen technology, and new interface patterns — information you need to...

Last week, Nokia launched its Nokia Life Tools (backgrounder), a range of innovative agriculture information and education services designed especially for rural and small town communities in emerging markets. From the press release: “Nokia Life Tools helps overcome information constraints and provides farmers and students with timely and relevant information. These services use an icon-based, graphically rich user interface that comes complete with tables and which can even display...

Hilary Cottam is the 2005 UK Designer of the Year and former director of RED [archive site], the meanwhile closed innovation unit of the UK Design Council. I interviewed her last year for Torino World Design Capital site. And she is suddenly hot. She made it last week into the International Herald Tribune, and now you can read another story about her company Participle in Fast Company magazine. Both stories are written by the same author Alice Rawsthorn, but have a somewhat different...

The Nokia Conversations blog reports that one big shift at Nokia is going beyond maps and thinking more about places (locations full of information). Nokia is also going beyond the simple contact card to a more dynamic representation of who people are (people connected to information). “The word we use to describe this is “Context”, and we feel strongly that mobile devices will play a central role in establishing a context to the places and people in our lives.” Read...

MobileActive.org has just released its newest resource, A Mobile Voice: The Use of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media. “In this report we explore the dynamics of the role of mobile phones in enhancing access to and creating information and citizen-produced media. We explore trends in the use of mobile telephony with a focus on software and platforms that make content creation and broadcasting easier. We also present an inventory of current and potential uses of mobile phones to promote...

Smashing Magazine: 10 Futuristic User Interfaces

The Caryatids (hardcover) by Bruce Sterling Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Del Rey (February 24, 2009) During a speech at Mobile Monday Amsterdam, Bruce Sterling announced his next book “The Caryatids”. According to Sterling, the book which will be published in February, is an “internet of things” book, set in the 2060’s, that “tries to describe what life is like in a working internet of things”. Promo copy In the vein of William Gibson’s...

An interesting article in Scientific American discusses a new insight about forgetting: although the brain contains detailed representations of lots of different events and objects, we can’t always find that information when we want it. “As this study reveals, if we’re shown an object, we can often be very accurate and precise at being able to say whether we’ve seen it before. If we’re in a toy store and trying to remember what it was that our son wanted for his birthday,...

The Wall Street Journal reports on how businesses are tapping designers for innovative ideas on management. “When New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center wanted to make the chemotherapy process easier on patients three years ago, it sought help from an unusual place: the design firm IDEO Inc. The IDEO consultants approached the problem the way they design eggbeaters or CD players: by closely watching patients and testing little changes. The process delivered surprises....

Last week frog design and IxDA NY organised Tiger.Blam, a public conversation with Nokia’s Jan Chipchase on effective design research in cross-cultural mobile markets, or in other words, how he ‘designs’ his research expeditions. No video or presentation download is as yet available, but several bloggers have it summarised. Robert Fabricant of frog design focuses on his personal favourites and is an especially interesting read. Christine Huang of PSFK found especially...

Wallpaper: RCA Vehicle Design 2008 Wild car concepts from RCA graduates, including Jon Radbrink's Nuaero. Elemente Magazine: Alberto del Biondi's concept bike Radical spokeless design.

In this nearly 27 minute video Bruce Sterling, a leading futurist, speaker, columnist and science fiction writer, shares his vision on where mobile is heading. Preaching his story from a somewhat unconventional place, the pulpit instead of the stage, he managed to silence the audience. Check the video to see what he had to say to the Mobile sinners. (via InfoDesign)

Two user experience magazines landed on my desk this week. They are available only to subscribers, both in print and online. But subscriptions are relatively cheap. User Experience is the quarterly magazine of the Usability Professionals’ Association (membership is a modest 100 USD) and its latest issue is devoted to usability in transportation. Here are the titles of the feature articles and you can find the abstracts online: Taxi: Service Design for New York’s yellow cabs By...

With the prevalence of digital cameras, Photoshop and cheap printing services, it's no surprise that flipbooks have been making a comeback. (Which is not to say they're all good--as with any artistic medium, just having the tools is not enough, as a recent rash of lame corporate "viral" flipbooks proves.) This music video for Kraak & Smaak, directed by Andre Maat & Superelectric, is uneven but definitely has some killer moments: via like cool (more...)

Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM wrote an article on ubiquitous computing user experience design for ACM’s interactions magazine. The user experience design of most everyday ubiquitous computing devices—things you see in gadget blogs—is typically terrible. That’s because we do not address ubicomp user experience design as a distinct branch of interaction design, much as we did not treat interaction design as separate from visual design in the early days of the Web. In the last couple of...

Josh Keyes | Paintings and Drawings

Belgian esigner Ellen Ectors' SwiTCh is a space-saving furniture set that doesn't, for once, fold up into a neat little box. Well, not really; the leather ball seat can be combined with the structure to form a sort of easy chair, or you can tip the structure into a desk. Originally conceived as one of Ectors' school projects at the Hogeschool Sint-Lukas in Brussels, the design landed her a job at Ellesco, the company now manufacturing the SwiTCh. via crooked brains(more...)

Probably acting as the Ueber online widget collection of all widgets (or a ironic view of the iGoogle portal concept), Sprint introduces a huge widget mosaic dashboard [sprint.com] that attempts to document the "now". The statistical data shown through slick designed bar charts, counters and various iconography ranges from the "World Energy Used Now" over a "Live White House Cam" to amount of "People Stuck in Elevators". I normally do show people some screenshots of a Apple Dashboard or a...

Web Without Words Reverse-wireframing websites.

활인공(活人功) -qikorea.com & hwalin.com   Jung-Seop Lee

활인공(活人功) -qikorea.com & hwalin.com

"Gum Election is a guerilla art project which started in New York City in October 2008. It should encourage people to vote on November 04th and also not to spit out their chewing gums carelessly on New York Cities already dirty streets. If you want to bring the Gum Election to your city or your office, print out the poster, put it up and send me pictures of it." More here.

Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies (via Nicolas Nova) Exactitudes "By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people's attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity." RjDj "RjDj is a music application that uses sensory input to generate and control the music you are listening...

(Korean) Picture Diary Stumbled onto these wonderfully detailed small drawings while in Seoul. Even tried to buy (some of) them, but got lost in translation along the way. Too bad.

Microsoft is extending the concept of the touchscreen beyond the edges of the phone itself, reports New Scientist. The company's researchers have developed a system called SideSight, which allows you to control a phone placed on a table by wiggling your fingers in the space around it. Infrared sensors pick up the movement of fingers up to 10 centimetres away. This technology would be useful for very small phones, where it would be cumbersome to use fingers on the touch screen. The...

Lamborghini donates the new ?Gallardo LP560-4 Polizia? to the Italian State Police.

Service: Online Only: The New Yorker

Hardball: Michelle Bachman Calls Liberals Un-American (via heathr456)

ActBlue — Elwyn Tinklenberg, MN-06: 5K Supporters, $237k raised on behalf of Michele Bachmann’s opponent.  I hope MN kicks her out.

Obama Knew It Was Coming All Along (via jedreport) “Nostrobamus”

Back in college I had a professor that taught us the difference between “questioning the faith” and “doubting your faith.”  I’m not going to speak religion here, but more on looking back at my design career.  I will be using the same words but swapping the word “faith” with “design career.” The past month was very busy indeed and one of the events that passed was my birthday.  This in turn leads me to question my career choices.  I ask...

“Top gun or spoiled brat? Contributing editor (and this blog’s author) Tim Dickinson separates the facts from the fiction on the Republican presidential candidate.” - Five Myths About John McCain : Rolling Stone : National Affairs Daily

Hulu - The Colbert Report: Formidable Opponent - Business Syphilis Hot!

tikitag "tikitag is a service that links real-life objects to the online world."

Youtube Beatbox Collaboration (via nsgmusic)  kids can collaborate

Incredible Documentary Footage of Mass Arrest in St. Paul | PEEK | AlterNet

The Philippine Blog Awards is set for this sunday… and hooray! Perlas Design Studio is a finalist for the Culture and Arts category.  I going against a varied list of blogs:Dalityapi UnpoemedGIBBS CADIZ pamatay homesickPerlas Design StudioPinoy PowerIt’s going to be tough winning against these gems.  I’ve been to their sites and they all write well and have different styles.  Which actually makes my nomination feel special, it goes to show how much time and effort the...

via img90.imageshack.us

“” - http://www.spore.com/view/profile/omagom

SNL - 9/13/08 - Palin and Clinton (via MotorWave) …or I will lend you mine.

Biden: The silence is Deafening (via Director4u2c) Tell ‘em the truth.

Rumor: New iTunes Visualizer will be the Stunning Magnetosphere We Are Going On A Fantastic Voyage

Barack Obama: They Don’t Have An Agenda To Run On (via jedreport) Can I get a “Amen!”

Jon Stewart Annihilates Sarah Palin’s Media Surrogates | Comedy Central Insider - The Comedy Blog for Comedy Fans

Bruno 9li - The Spirit of Brazil (via SagatibaUS)

ImageShack - Hosting :: 1220053980983qk3.jpg wow

If you’re a fan of Slow Food, or just interested in checking out the scene, then consider Slow Food Nation ‘08. It’s going to be held in San Francisco over Labor Day, and visitors will get to enjoy live music, taste testing, a lecture and teaching series, and live music, among other things. What’s more, if you’re willing to pony up $2,500 and become a Patron, you not only help underwrite the event but also receive a special package as a thank-you. This package...

A very cool cooking video, though not at all what you might be expecting to see:

"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 to open...

 I say mysterious because only one computer in the office has seen it.  I tried viewing yahoo.com on my mac, a newer PC and an older PC simultaneously but only the old one, using firefox, saw it.  Weird.  It seems like an easter egg prank is being played by yahoo.  TechCrunch also documented seeing this phenomenon.  But since we’re here, let me just quickly say I perfer the old logo, but using the purple color.  Purple being more “branded” for me as the yahoo color,...

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...

"Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which they were ignorant. Men who knew nothing whatever – who had never run a steam engine, the simplest of forces – who had never put their hands on a lever – had never touched an electric battery – never talked through a telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt or an ampère or an erg, or any other...

When we contemplate the effects of technology on urban life, our thoughts first turn to its visible manifestations: the commuter with his headphones, the pedestrian on her mobile phone, the café dweller and his laptop. But these are only surface traces: the stuff of the times, as the newspapers or briefcases of yesterday. The primary impact of today's technologies of instant communication and digital creation comes instead from the changes they effect on the nature of business and work (among...

The idea of open and open-source hardware has been growing in popularity and practice, but it's not always clear what is meant by the terms. Make laid out something of a choose-your-own-definition, but it's difficult to use a term which can simultaneously refer to a multitude of possibly incompatible meanings. To me, the definition of "open-source hardware" is straightforward, and analogous to that of open-source or free software. It is, simply, the provision of the digital artifacts...

In an interview with Charlie Rose, Paola Antonelli suggests an interesting criteria for distinguishing between design and art: design is done for someone else (she says around minute 30) and art is done for oneself (my addition).

RTVE (a spainish media conglomerate) did a rebranding and presented it magnificently. Watch this video. Read more about the rebrand from BrandNew price viagra pharmacy online phentermine online description price best price 100mg viagra and overnight price of generic meridia effexor and topamax interactions aqnd anxiety buy sildenafil citrate lithium order the drug zyban cheap phentermine no rxx buy xanax prescription consultation overnight delivery buy flomax cheap phentermine online visa...

We’ve written about Rouxbe before (Rouxbe), and it looks like they are set to unveil a new cooking school for members in June. Using a curriculum developed in partnership with the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver, the Rouxbe cooking school begins with foundational lessons on kitchen equipment, knives, and techniques and terminology. Having completed those courses, a wide range of courses will cover everything from sauces to legumes, eggs to pork, and custards to cakes. There are...

Salon.com has a review of the book Bottlemania and an interview with the author, Elizabeth Royte. I’d always taken to heart the X glasses of water a day rule (even if I didn’t follow it) and I suppose it comes as no surprise that, having never investigated the origin of the rule, there’s more to the story than a simple equation. Why do you think that water in single-serving sizes became so popular? Marketers hammered home this idea that we need to stay hydrated, and...

A NYTimes article highlights a growing rift between the traditional chefs in Spain and the more avant-garde among them: Santi Santamaría, one of the country’s most prominent chefs, has directed bruising public attacks at his avant-garde counterparts, accusing them of producing pretentious food they would not eat themselves — and potentially poisoning diners with chemicals that he says have no place in the kitchen.

About a week or two after I posted my thoughts on the redesign of SMART Communications’ logo, I saw this huge billboard in EDSA corner Pioneer St. promoting the new SMART Buddy campaign, this after their SMART Bro promotion. They have also come out with other campaigns for their other brands: The logos to the right of the poster show the brand architecture that was implemented across their ads and materials. I have gotten a hold of their brand manual, which I cannot share since it is...

An article on the New York Times website (Finding the Best Way to Cook All Those Vegetables) suggests that it’s not only what kinds of vegetables you eat, but how you prepare them, which influences their nutritional benefits. In some cases it’s better to cook fruits to release additional nutrients than to eat them raw. In other cases, raw is the better way to go. The confusing bit is that there are no hard and fast rules. Generally, we’ve seen a shift over the years from the...

That was a mouthful.. and so is what it represents.  One of the difficulties I encountered working with Novare is trying to explain what Novare does in one sentence, or in this case, one glance.  The graph below will never see the light of day, but I still think it is worth showing.  The graph represents what Novare Technologies do, or rather what services they offer to their customers and partners. Here is the circle in more detail.  Why a circle? I think it is appropriate since it also...

It is the Year of Dangerous Minds at the Gravity Free Design and Innovation conference! Gravity Free started today in Chicago and CuteCircuit founders Francesca and Ryan spoke in the first session kicking off the Conference with a dose of Fashionable and Wearable Technology. The talk was followed by an Open Forum discussion about design innovation with other speakers in the session Charles White (master illustrator and imaginator) and Jamie Drake (bold and intense interior design). Each session...

SMART Communications Inc. is, arguably, the top mobile network operator in the Philippines boasting of over 25 million subscribers.  I have written about the recent rebranding of their competitor Globe. Could this be their answer back?  I didn’t hear of any launch party like what Globe did, probably because it didn’t merit one.  It seemed like they just slipped this one passed us.  I only noticed the change when they had their new campaign for the launch of their SmartBro...

Some quick items of interest: FoodCamp: The description’s in Italian, and the event itself is in Italy, but it looks like there’s a BarCamp for food, wine, the internet, and big and small distribution of food. A New York Times article (Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World) describes how the transportation of food has traditionally not been taxed. Now, the European Union has announced it will begin to taxed under an emissions trading program by 2012. The goal...

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...

The Small Planet Institute recently launched a new project called Take a Bite Out of Climate Change, which connects food with climate change and presents a way to take action: Take a Bite plunges into the heart of the [climate change] debate with a powerful message: If we are serious about the crisis, we’ve got to talk about food. With nearly one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions coming from the food and agriculture sector, we at Take a Bite are here to help you learn about the...

Here’s a font game for you!  I got 27 out of 34.  Damn serifs.. Blecchh! Thanks to Cargo for the link.  

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...

On the heels of the iPhone SDK announcement, growing interest in Google’s Android and a whole host of other recent developments, Dan Appelquist of Mobile Monday London and Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage have been organizing a new hybrid conference/hackday for the mobile set here in London. Like Mobile Camp London, this event will be entirely free to attendees. We’ve got a great venue over at Imperial College London, and room for 400+ participants. For those of you who wanted to...

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...

“A list was made of 250 food products each with their major flavour components. By comparing the flavour of each food product eg strawberry with the rest of the food and their flavours, new combinations like strawberry with peas can be made. The way to use is, is just to select a food product like strawberries. You will get a plot where you have strawberry in the middle surrounded by other food products. Take one of those other food products and try to make a new recipe by combining...

I’m sure you’ve now seen the video circulating on the internet of the slaughterhouse in California that was shut down after the Humane Society smuggled a video camera into the plant. While the specifics of the situation may not come as a surprise to many who have read books like Fast Food Nation or The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I think it’s still shocking to see things in such a visceral way that sharply resolves the abstract notions we develop from reading about them. I also...

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.

In a refreshing inversion of more recent writings of the effects of technology on the culture of cities (e.g. this piece in which Adam Greenfield contemplates the deleterious effects of laptops on the conviviality of coffeehouses), Lewis Mumford offers the following illustration of the effect of urban form (here, suburbia) on the nature of technology: With direct contact and face-to-face association inhibited as far as possible, all knowledge and direction can be monopolized by central...

At last year's CHI, there were many questions raised in the alt.chi sessions about the proper method of evaluation for interactive technologies. The answer, it seemed to me, was obvious: criticism, of the sort applied to art, architecture, literature and other creative endeavors. "Interface Culture" attempts exactly that, covering topics like links or the desktop with the same mix of history, judgement, and speculation that one might find in a book review or a column on an art exhibition. If...

Who in their right mind would want an enchanted object? Think of the havoc they cause in stories and films. The ring Bilbo finds in the Hobbit contains so much evil that it takes three books, hundreds of pages, and an epic battle involving multiple races to dispose of it. The classic genie in a bottle grants three wishes, but does everything in its power to twist the to the detriment of their recipient. The enchanted broomstick in Fantasia threatens to drown its creator. Countless examples hint...

In a recent blog post, Michael Arrington claims that the lack of a marginal cost for a digital copy of a song implies that the cost of music will inevitably fall to nothing. (He has a longer discussion here.) This flies in the face of our years of experience with software, which can also be copied without marginal cost but has not become free. Not only has software produced one of the world's largest companies, but there are countless people who pay the $25 or so for the programs that keep...

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:

“Up to the industrial revolution, as in Greece and Rome, however servile the condition of the labourer, he was at any rate a human being. “And in the absence of miles of cheap drawing paper, architects, much against their wills no doubt, had to rely on the workmen as being possessed of a considerable deal of knowledge, initiative, sensibility, and responsibility. “You had to leave a certain amount of responsibility to the workman simply because you couldn't draw everything...

The current age of calm technology. Originally uploaded by dam.

The original GUIs were based on metaphors of architecture and interior design: windows, icons, folders, the desktop, even a trash can. To conceal the virtual nature of the computer, interface designers constructed a physical world inside the screen. This world, exemplified by the original Macintosh, behaves fundamentally like the real one. Files and folders have a location and size that exists independently of our attention. We can manipulate them with the mouse pointer - a proxy for our...

This week CuteCircuit presented a 2 day event at the University of Ulster in Belfast. The talk, the first in the Kinetic Spaces Lecture Series, highlighted the work of CuteCircuit and discussed the future of interactive fashion, wearable technology and textile innovation. The first day, Monday the 13th, an evening event was held where Francesca and Ryan talked with designers and researchers of University of Ulster. The following day, was dedicated to an intense creative workshop with the...

I’ve now uploaded the slides I recently received from Peter Bond to go with his presentation on Otodio, and updated my post containing the videos of his talk and live Otodio demo to embed the slides. You can alternatively view the slides direct.

I’ve processed and put up all the videos I recorded now - sorry I didn’t manage to record more! Some were on Blip.tv and some on YouTube, so the full list of the lot is here (my post on the weekend from a girl geek perspective!). Or you can see just the blip.tv videos. And I’ve also taken the liberty of making up my own laws of mobileCamp! Many thanks to everyone involved. Imp.

Dale Lane walked away with our final prize for the Hack Challenge: an OpenMoko Neo 1973 handset. How did he achieve such a feat? Oddly enough, by developing a series of plugins for Windows Mobile that allow him to search Google, create TinyURLs and post to Del.icio.us: The aim was to find some more small ways to improve usability in Pocket Internet Explorer - the web browser on Windows Mobile. Anything that we can do to cut out a step, or save the user having to input something, all helps with...

In addition to the Orange Code Camp happening November 6th and 7th and the Future of Mobile occurring the following week here in London, October and November will be busy months for mobile events. Just a quick scan of Barcamp.org’s homepage reveals several mobile camps happening around the globe: Oct. 13th - MobileWebCampParis Oct. 28th - MobileCampLA Nov. 3rd - MobileCampSF Nov. 10th - MobileCampNYC2 If anybody is going to any of the above and blogging, please let me know, it would...

Sam Machin walked away from Mobile Camp London with a shiny new Nokia N95 thanks to his weekend effort - creating an app that pushes notes he writes on his phone, out to his Tumblr blog: I use tumblr for noting down ideas / urls etc when at conferencing events and some one says check out this site… The app was designed so that I could note it down quickly on my phone and then when I`m sat at my PC later I can look at my tumblr feed and find all the links & notes I made during the...

Simon Maddox - our first place winner in the Hack Challenge, and soon to be proud owner of an iPhone, created an amazing way to find television content and then get it streamed to your phone: My hack: TV Shows is an easy way to watch TV shows (such as Heroes, Prison Break etc.) on your mobile. Show details are pulled from TV.com and displayed on the mobile. When you choose a show / season / episode, the system will go off to a video sharing website and pull the content to the server. Once the...

On Saturday, Jure Sustersic gave a talk on Nokia’s LBS services and how developers can access them:

As part of Mobile Camp London 2007, we offered a little design/hack challenge to create a mobile mashup in a weekend. Five teams took the challenge to heart and built some interesting apps, ranging from a way to pull tv-shows from the web to using Tumblr and an N95 to take notes. We taped the presentation for your viewing pleasure:

Two OpenMoko Neos calling each other at mobileCampLondon.

CuteCircuit will be presenting new concepts of mobile technology at MobileCampLondon on September 29th and 30th, 2007. True to the slogan, “Hack, Design, Debate” we hope to take an in depth look at the opportunities provided by mobile tech and how this is going to change the fashion world forever. We will be highlighting and discussing the latest prototypes that were unveiled at Wired NextFEST in Los Angeles, such as the Hug Shirt, the M-Dress (mobile phone dress) the SkateHoodie,...

CuteCircuit presented a whole series of new prototypes at Wired NextFEST 2007 in Los Angeles. These included a new version of the Hug Shirt and the new never-before-seen prototypes of the M-Dress and SkateHoodie. The reaction from visitors was enthusiastic and very exciting. Visitors to the exhibition got to try on Hug Shirts and each received a variety of hugs from soft subtle hugs to intense all-around hugs! To see how people reacted when they tried on the Hug Shirt check out this gallery of...

I've launched a new project. Conceptual Device is where I am writing these days about architecture, design, technology, culture, and the panoply of interests I've been following academically and professionally the last several years. Right now, there are posts about...

We arrived at Campus-Party in Valencia, Spain to show Hug Shirts in a performance/demo in the afternoon but we soon learned that we were also scheduled for a big press conference starting almost immediately! The mannequins were already in place and quickly we put the Hug Shirts on them. With only a few minutes to go until the press arrived, we realized that mannequins wearing only shirts look a little… well, naked! We needed to find a way to clothe them and of course no one had extra...

Last week, we were in Düsseldorf and visited my favorite bookstore, Müller and Böhm in the Heinrich Heine Haus. I'm chuffed that Enrique and I are featured on the front page of the website. Last year, I wrote about the...

Please to cross your fingers for me, to send good thoughts, to wish me well. At 1:30, I give my final semester presentation. It's been an exhausting week, between long papers and my first Ph.D. application (and more than...

"NB* The socially delightful usefulness of responsive architecture has only recently gathered an establishment smart gloss and in so doing has cheapened the tight nice original usage of the very word—responsive." --Cedric Price, "AN HISTORY OF WRONG FOOTING—THE IMMEDIATE...

On November 1, the Worldchanging book hit the shelves. I wrote a few pieces for it in the "Retrofitting Suburbia" section about ways to retool suburbia to fight sprawl. The book is chock full of information about sustainable approaches...

If the spectacle is crucial in the constructing our reality, what does it mean when its messenger dies? RIP, Jean Baudrillard....

... while Dems in the Senate rock it. Today, I sent this note to Harvey Jacobs, the urban planning professor I had in 1994. He taught Green Politics. Dear Professor Jacobs, In 1994, I took your Green Politics class...

Two years ago, I came across this set of questions via Alex's blog. My archives are still not up past a year ago so I can't tell you how I got to it-- just that it was through his...

When I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, I gave a talk at Giant Ant and at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. I presented about my research on urban mobile phone sharing, conducted while at Microsoft Research India in...

Almost 35 Originally uploaded by maximolly. It's my birthday! I am now 35 years old. This is freaking me out because I've forever left the 18-34 demographic. And when many of the people I celebrated with turn 35, I...

November is almost done. I'm almost 35. Ugh. Here are a few posts about what's been up. First, on November 4, 2006, my brother Andy married his longtime girlfriend Carrie. Andy and Carrie are the parents of Jack (almost...

Use time well. Use time creatively. Don't trap time. Don't let time slip away. Don't be scared. Be brave. This quote from Cedric Price Opera is in the Jude Kelly section on page 87. I'm not sure whether she...

For a year, I've had this on an electronic sticky on my Mac desktop: With the trace <Spur>, a new dimension accrues to "immediate experience." It is no longer tied to the expectation of "adventure"; the one who undergoes...

I'm taking Girlwonder over to Vox for the personal life stuff for a while. Find me here: girlwonder.vox.com....

In lieu of giving you something to read that I'm working on, I'll show you what I'm reading... the list now includes Alice in Wonderland, Nietzsche's Gay Science, Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens, Karl Popper's Open Society and its Enemies,...

The exhibit titled Our Cyborg Future at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle (UK) opens today! Exhibits include the Hug Shirt by CuteCircuit and while at the exhibit you can even try one on and even get a hug from someone far away! Also we are introducing a brand new prototype from CuteCircuit called the SkateHoodie that you can try out in the museum! Other cutting-edge technology you will see in the exhibition include prosthetic limbs, robots that are used to perform medical surgery, and a...

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...

São Paulo, Brazil- CuteCircuit is showing the latest Hug Shirt at the Robótica Expo in São Paulo, Brazil. The exhibition is showing now until Sunday, the 15th of April at the Centro de Exposições Imigrantes, São Paulo. On the opening day of the exhibition the Hug Shirt was featured in interviews and live demonstrations for more than 10 Brazilian television shows reaching an estimated 18 million viewers across Brazil! Visitors to Robótica are trying on the latest in Hug Shirt technology...

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...

Wow. Someone went ahead and made a graphical programming language for Arduino. From the blog entry: Finally I can release an Alpha Version of ArduinoBlocks. Only the Windows Version ist availible for download as you have to compile it for the different OSs and also for the different Mac processors. The idea is to have a visual blocks language for children that is translated into Arduino code. I managed to get it running on my Mac by copying the .jars into a copy of my Arduino 0007...