Near Future Laboratory Blog
Near Future Laboratory Blog
Thoughts, Reflections, Updates & Week Notes
May 26, 2008 – Jun 4, 2008
w22/w23/
Coffee Interfaces
Jun 04, 2008
Bizarre interface syntax here. On the bottom left it’s Large, Small, Medium. That’s sort of peculiar — I’m never entirely sure what button to press. The Small and Medium seem almost identical when you’re feeling in need of a cup of coffee. Once, I pressed Large and it overflowed the cup. What are the contexts here f…
DesignInterfaceKeyboarduser interface
May 31, 2008
High Chair is a tall chair placed on or near the sidewalk allowing sitters a chance to see the city from nearly above. It’s a middle vantage point, above the street, below the skyscraper, with a full view that balconies seldom offer, and still amongst the pedestrian fray. The chair is evocative of that used by a lin…
DesignDesign Art TechnologyDesign for ImplicationsDisruptionPeculiarPlayPost-Optimal DesignProjectsPsychogeographySocial PracticeUrban
May 31, 2008
404 resonances. Cars and pages, not found. Not quite plate-of-shrimp; a different category of meaning-making. The above graph is from Golan Levin’s curious “The Secret Lives of Numbers” project, the image below a nicely composed hood shot of a Peugeot 404, the other 404 resonance object, captured by Adam Greenfield…
GeneralSocial Practice
20080513_17-59-37
May 31, 2008
Privacy, modesty or cocooning?
GeneralSocial PracticePrivacySocial Practices
20080528_12-15-34
May 29, 2008
Picked a couple of these “Ecowatt” devices up while in Tokyo, from Bic Camera. They monitor power consumption of whatever you’ve plugged into it. Here I had my MacBook Pro plugged in and running (no sleep) for about 24 hours. The device simply runs through four measurements — two I have no idea about because the sym…
Design for ImplicationsDisplayInterfaceNew Interaction RitualsAmbientMonitorPervasivePervasive MediaPower
20080527_17-42-21
May 29, 2008
I’ve been doing a bit of business trying to clean up my sometimes wonky skills with I2C communication. It took a bit to figure it out, but I managed to get a few different kinds of devices to the Atmel microcontrollers I usually use — things like a real-time clock, an LIS3LV02DQ accelerometer, these EEPROM devices.…
ArduinoDesign TechnologyGeneralHardwareHow ToI2C Electronics DIYLogicport
20080512_15-29-36
May 28, 2008
From my paranoia-fueled American mind, this is a curious context for small public storage lockers, immediately outside of the bustling entrance to the Shibuya train station in Tokyo. Whenever my cultural relativity hits a speed bump like this, I know I’m elsewhere.
Social PracticeUrbanStorage LockersTokyo
20080526_18-52-40
May 27, 2008
The project here is to find ways to create a simple interface display element, as an experiment in subtractive features — removing things to create less bloat, less confusion. A return to fundamentals rather than feature creep. Not that a 4×5 matrix LED display would necessarily be an end-goal. Rather, what are the…
DesignDesign Art TechnologyDesign TechnologyDisplayHardwareInterfacePost-GUISlow Messenger
20080523_11-11-25
May 26, 2008
Summing up all the projects that seem to be perpetually in process, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m learning more about process, that is more enthralled with the doing rather than what specifically gets done, especially with the new techniques of design, tools, machines languages.
DesignDesign for Implications