It is designed and manufactured by Leah Buechley in Boulder Colorado. This version is an old one she and Jean-Baptiste LaBrune used for a post-industrial workshop near switzerland.

Here are the slides from my Reboot presentation where I sketch a speculative pre-history of computer-human interfaces that includes bricklayers, Apollo guidance computers, Herman Miller Eames loungers and Aeron chairs. The trajectory is an argument for investigating how efficiency (time and motion) can be factored o…

I dunno, I was staring at the Slow Messenger and the power LED — your typical grasshopper green — was so bright and just staring at me and kind of giving me a headache. And I thought..that’s not about slow. And I thought about the drowsy white “sleep” pulse of my PowerBook and I was, like..I need something like that…

Wow, what a bit of a learning experience this was. That chip is an Invernsense IDG300 gyroscope. $35 a pop. And its one of these “QFN” (quad, flat, no leads) style packages which basically makes it a pain to work with. I thought I could use this technique of dabbing a bit of solder on each of the pads on the printed…

Finally, something to show for this “Slow Messenger” project, a playful interface for instant messaging. I’ve gotten all the hardware bits cobbled together and most of the firmware. Now I’m working on learning how to tie in AOL Instant Messenger so that messages can be delivered to the device. Fortunately (I think)…

Many of you know about a collaborative project I worked on a few years back called PDPal. It’s had many iterations and several commissions and just sort of continues to continue, even to this day. Me and my collaborators — Scott Paterson and Marina Zurkow — were commissioned by Creative Time to produce an editio…

Aaron Meyers deployed this turn of phrase “human joystick” during his final presentation for the course I taught this semester — “Design and Technology for Mobile Experiences.” He’s been working hard mostly on his thesis project, Torrent Raiders, but for my class he worked on programming a J2ME version of the MobZom…

I’ve been playing with a gyroscope lately as a game input control element for MobZombies. The challenge is to come up with a less cumbersome sensor rig, and less expensive. The sensor will need to communicate with a mobile phone because no one’s going to buy a $2000 tablet pc to play a game. The sensor should also b…

No, that isn’t an historical photo of children playing MobZombies..but it may as well be. MobZombies is being featured on the Processing.org web site..that’s pretty cool. I’ve started helping out on the project’s evolution, mostly in the area of lowering the cost of the device. This is important. I think it’s a very…