That little guy up above has finally got its own academically written *History. The Arduino is historical! That means something. It means that it is significant enough to warrant a retrospective look back on its when and where and who kinds of questions. I’m glad that’s been done. There are good stories swirling aro…

Last week, or the weekending on August 29 2010, I noticed and took stock of more and more of this kind of behavior. I mean — I really noticed the ways that people get locked into their screens. It’s like “we” (those with jobs and fancy fuck-off phones and stuff) have evolved into a different kind of species.

Coming up is an exciting sounding workshop on the “urban internet of things — programming the real-time city.” Some more opportunities to get this one right..or at least human.

The disadvantage of having so much fun taking photos of skateboarders is that I have less “design research-y” photos to go along with the dispatches here from the Laboratory. So..I’m reusing some and digging deep into the archives.

There was recently a wonderful article on Ars Technica interviewing the production and prop designers for Star Trek. I highly recommend giving it a read, even if you’re not a Trekkie. What I find most curious is the creative constraints that the production design was under and their solution. With a limited budget f…

One of a sample of “Destination Maps” presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 by a team of researchers. It shows a computer-generated emulation of the canonical napkin-style hand-drawn map. The described advantages are that it highlights relevant “neighborhood” streets and diminishes the arterials and highways that are not…

I can sum the last two weeks up briefly and, again — for my own record keeping. Nothing useful here, likely at all.

It’s too bad that the measure of results often must translate to quantities or business-y things, like numbers of meetings obtained or pages of PowerPoint presentations. Decanting often rich, qualitatively substantial ideas into boxes and “slides” and “decks” sloughs off so much richness that all that was learned of…

A familiar challenge is to translate the seemingly unyielding demand to put a specific technology into something because it is expected, or because the name of the technology is the new great thing. It doesn’t matter what it is in particular — I use “doorknob” as a stand-in for whatever the latest “doorknob” of the…