Found in Insa-dong district of Seoul, in a combination bookshop / cafe / newsstand. Bruce Sterling commented the other day that Seoul was one of the quietest cities he has experienced. I had not “heard” the city that way, but after talking about this point I realized that it was indeed quiet. Not forest and trees qu…

I could say over design, but zealous sounds more purposeful.

Jan Chipchase’s recent image provocation on slowness had me thinking about what sorts of things can be slowed down and why one would want to slow them down. He shows an image of an automated espresso maker delivering a deliciously thick and gooey latte. I’ve noticed that the automatic coffee machine here is paced as…

Struck with a heavy irony last night as I was responding to an inquiry about Blogjects, Smart Dust, Smart Technology as might be realized in the year 2030 that Smart Dust has been variously pitched as a something for the battlefield (remotely track enemy troop movements, etc), on the one hand, and the cornfield (mea…

What are the boundaries of interfaces for our digital lives? Our fingers? How can the gestures we use to interact with our devices extend to create new sorts of interaction rituals and interactive experiences that go beyond the digit interface? From simple switches found in old trucks, to the 19 tactile buttons on t…

Mobile devices suffer from a variety of design requirements that have created some pretty interesting challenges. One is power. How do you get small, portable, powerful technologies to run for a reasonable amount of time without weighting them down with car battery-sized power cells? I’ve hit this problem in all kin…

I’m in a fit of over-design. Here I am on the sixth edition of Flavonoid, which is going rather well. It does pretty much everything I would like it to do, save a proper rest mode, some little bit of recoding to make it more fuel efficient, a pedometer (step-counting) mode per Dennis’ request and, well — mostly comm…

In the midst of trying to finish this first run of Flavonoid boards — getting the firmware right, finding little gotchas in the design, little mistakes in the assembly process — I keep flipping back and forth between thinking about the minutiae of assembly and the craft work, and the 6-mile-up design theme. The minu…

Here’s a revamped Flavonoid configuration console. This allows easy configuration over USB. There’ll be a few more commands in here for other features and crap, especially extracting the recorded data. This harkens back to the old school VT100 style terminal controls. There’s no drag-and-drop here, just words and co…