The panel about New Aesthetic at SXSW last month left me with the impression that NA is all about visual representations:

Working on the book about game controllers, I did some research about the first game peripherals. This is actually chapter 1… and one of the most intriguing example is certainly the existence of rotary dials. Potentiometers and knobs were of course the first lineages in terms of game controllers; think about Tennis…

It’s very gratifying to see how the #newaesthetic discussions are popping and percolating across the networks. There’s something to it, I think. Specifically the observations that something here under the New Aesthetic rubric is worth considering, thinking-through, working-towards.

Pfft. Turns out Nicolas is on some island in the Mediterranean “writing” the game controller book.

Upstairs in the electronics bay, where I’ve been happily spending more and more time, I decided that the thing to do to make it more studio-like, rather than submerged rabbit warren-like, was to put fun things in there, like music and a hidden bag of reward chips. Make it easy to plop down in a chair without fussing…

A curious addendum to account for a UI/UX muck up at a nearby gasoline station. These moments reveal these hybrid displays — both purposeful, and one made to accomodate for failures in the machine. And this second one — how peculiar. My new laser printer to replace the 10 year old one what that I printed my disserta…

For Nicolas, it was a week devoted to teaching with different lectures and workshops in Geneva (digital failures, Monday), Lausanne (creative approaches in design, Wednesday), Paris (open innovation and design ethnography, Thursday) and Annecy (Innovation and foresight, Friday)… and writing for the game controller p…

Yesterday, in a very small village in the French Alps, I ran across this fascinating bread vending machine. It made me think about other encounters with not-so-common machines such as a book delivery system in Seoul:

Nicolas was, once again, in the train for two workshops about design ethnography and object repurposing: one in Paris at ENSAD, and another one at the HKB in Bern. The idea was to show students the value of this kind of field investigation by asking them to go observe how people repurpose objects in physical space.…