A curious inscription left by someone to clarify which button expedites which crosswalk signal. Someone has written with an indelible marker “B” and “W” on each button (for Broad Street and Watchung Avenue respectively), as well as writing an abbreviation on the pole (“WAT”, for example.) What is interesting here is…

Whilst technically still on holiday, there were some things done as usual and *holiday* is never entirely just not doing nuthin’.

Apropos of the new decade, I hunkered down to half watch the 2001: A Space Odyssey sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact — a middling accomplishment in the shadow of 2001, but more of a movie than the cinephile’s 2001, at least insofar as one might measure the distinction using the vulgar calculus of *words-of-dialo…

Some quick notes on what we did last year.

A few notes for the notebook on this essay Visualisation and Cognition by Bruno Latour. In it I found a few points relevant to this idea of *design fiction* — the imbrication of design, science fact and fiction to help imagine and materialize new kinds of near future worlds. The essay certainly isn’t about this dire…

negotiating futures. design fiction. 6th Swiss Design Network Conference October 28 – 30 2010 in Basel, Switzerland

A curious instantiation of temperament, attitude and confrontation seen on a Christmas Day stroll along Venice Beach.

Strangely — because I trained to be a cynic-critic — I actually enjoyed Avatar. I don’t know if I expected much more of a nuanced story from James Cameron, so I didn’t go in there looking for insight and reflection on the complexities of sci-tech versus anti-tech (delivered, ironically, by a super high tech producti…

Naturally, it was a holiday week so not all that much was going on, except that there was of course plenty going on. As pertains the Laboratory, we’ve been fussing around with various tool chains for doing matchmoving animations, perhaps something useful for performing designed fictions to explore and experiment wit…