John Maeda’s book Simplicity arrived the other day. It’s small, so I sat down to read it over breakfast. I hit a brick wall here, on page i (not page one, page eye, in the preface, I guess):

A few notes on Vernor Vinge Paints the Future at Austin Game Conference as they pertain to some topics near and dear. I found the comments as transcribed to be interesting enough to frame a few thoughts around.

Should new modes of Leisure & Entertainment be created (or anticipated) that do not vector in on “industrial” entertainment models of production, distribution — even genre? That is, why would we expect that the forms of media apparati that are dominantly understood as “entertainment” or as “leisure” be able to acc…

I just read through a short, incisive little essay by Machiko Kushahara called Device Art: A New Form of Media Art from a Japanese Perspective in the v6, n2 issue of intelligent agent.

I was deliriously fortunate to have been invited to spend the weekend at Foo Camp a weekend ago and equally fortunate to have met a number of hardware makers and hackers including Nathan Siedel from Spark Fun and Colin Cross, engineer by day and open cell phone developer by night.

Perry and Andreas came up with this list in our new Collaborative Design Lab. Let’s just call it a to-do list.

We’ve just posted the 15 accepted papers for the Nordichi workshop on Near Field Interactions. More details at the workshop web page.

I spent a week or so wrangling some variations on the immersive viewer apparatus for the little research group at USC working on this project. Some of the “early” prototyping of the concept I had done last winter, described in this blog post.

Timo Arnall, Arie Altena and I will be participating in the Mediamatic workshop on RFID & The Internet of Things, September 11-13. It’ll be a mix of discussion, lectures and hands-on prototyping. Should be lots of fun!