Complete Ubicomp fail. I mean..they can’t even get this most simple of scenarios straightened out and they want to put my refrigerator and toaster oven on the network? WTF. Seriously. Anytime I hear the alpha futurist-y featurists get all excited about some kind of idea for how the new ubicomp networked world will b…

Observed on a walk-about San Francisco, curious antique objects and their preservation, or lack of. I stumbled across this diorama-like recreation at an unused entranceway to the San Francisco Chronicle building (at least, I think that’s what this building was.) It was Herb Caen’s office frozen in time, with his old…

Slideshow from The Five Dollar Comparison on Flickr

The Drift Deck (Analog Edition) is an algorithmic puzzle game used to navigate city streets. A deck of cards is used as instructions that guide you as you drift about the city. Each card contains an object or situation, followed by a simple action. For example, a situation might be — you see a fire hydrant, or you c…

While I’m still in Helsinki I’m projecting myself into the near future, thinking about this upcoming seasonal “Fall Technology Horizons Exchange” with the Institute for the Future, November 18 and 19. I’ll be on a small panel with the lovely Kati London of Botanicalls fame and with whom I shared an all-too brief sta…

I found this quite pervasive practice in Helsinki of giving restaurants a big hunk of didactic anchorage through these geographic names of cities or entire geographical regions. No guessing what sort of dish and style of food — even anticipating for you the decor you might find inside or style of service. It’s all i…

Spied about while meeting-and-greeting Helsinki colleagues at Nokia House, some materials that I couldn’t help but recognize in the context of the early morning writing I’ve been trying to do, refining the last three presentations I’ve given last month on “Design Fiction.”

A scale of design models in these check boxes suggests refinement from basic form to mechanical, color, materials and so forth — stopping at full appearance. Appearance absent functionality, which can only be inferred based on what it is a model of. In the world of mobile phones, the functionality is implicit — maki…

I participated with a talk at this conference called Moving Movie Industry for the Sandberg Institute at the lovely new Amsterdam Central Library was a one day series of lectures related to this notion that the movie industry is “moving” onto some new and interesting territory. There were several very intriguing tal…