Drift Deck is up for the IxDA Interaction Awards in the “People’s Choice” category. Which isn’t the “Jury’s Choice” but — whatev. It’s the People, so we’re hustling to make you, the People, aware of this chance for you to choose what is the Choice of the People. For Interaction Design Awards.

Fabien and Nicolas went to Madrid for a workshop at BBVA innovation about Smart Cities. Organized by Urbanscale (and more specifically by Jeff Kirsh, Adam Greenfield and Leah Meisterlin), it focused on opportunities to use networked data for the client. It basically followed up on the previous work we have done with…

I’ve been working on, and testing out, a new thing for the last couple of weeks. It is called privatesquare. It is a pretty simple web application that manages a private database of foursquare check-ins. It uses foursquare itself as a login service and also queries foursquare for nearby locations. The application us…

I spent quite a deal of time in workshops evolving some ideas around location and tracking. We had Marc Tuters come by the studio. Marc’s written and created quite a number of locative media projects over perhaps the last decade. Along with that, he’s written some of the canonical bits of text on the topic, includin…

I think going forward I should do a better job of talking around what we’re working on from a technical point of view, until such time as it’s okay to talk about what we’re doing from a principles, rituals and practices point of view. And, also — sometimes in the thick of a design-making-schematic-and-hot-air-baking…

Yesterday while leaving the LA Photo exhibition in Santa Monica — a kind of catch-all retail event of photography through the commercial curatorial world of private galleries — I happened across a small scrum of people with anodized extruded rectangles holding them close to bush leaves, flowers and tiny bits of dirt…

LOS ANGELES

While we're in the present, dribbling over our shiny new iWhatevers and being amazed that an espresso maker can shit out coffee just from seeing a picture of a bean, Julian Bleecker and his fellow technologists are busy fucking around in the near future. He’s co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. What’s that? Well, it’s a place where provocative concepts and ideas are materialized into non-profit conversation pieces.

Making things to augment or even surpass the discussion of ideas themselves without instantiating the ideas in material — without bringing them into the world of objects — is the way we combine the Engineer and the PhD in History of Consciousness. It’s the way we make things that matter, that have a kind of agency in the world, that can be used to think with and through. It’s the way we make things that are more than just ideas, but ideas that are made manifest in the world.