Why do I blog this? This “Genesis Lego by Jomind” is a weird and curious hybridization of a standard controller (a Sega Genesis pad) and a combination of Lego bricks. I take it as an interesting example in the process of creolization, corresponding to the first steps.

Why do I blog this? Simply because I love this visualization as a way to show path-dependence.

Legacy post from Near Future Laboratory.

Establishing Criteria of Rigor and Relevance in Interaction Design Research by Daniel Fallman and Erik Stolterman is a paper about the epistemological underpinnings of interaction design. It addresses the problem of ‘disciplinary anxiety’ that is often felt by people in this field and the inherent discussion about w…

Stuck at the airport in Austin the other day, I couldn’t help being fascinated by the three TVs in a café. Each of them was on a different program (news + sport 1 + sport 2) and the sounds of each channel was mixed with the background noise of the place (+ music). The different device sit there all day and broadcast…

In Geneva, Nicolas returned from SXSW 2012 to give an afternoon workshop with students at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne (part of their semester project)… and work on the game controller project with Laurent Bolli. There’s indeed a new opportunity to show some joypads in a design exhibit. Since the of…

Socialbots: voices from the fronts, in the last issue of ACM interactions, is an interesting multi-author piece about how socialbots, programs that operate autonomously on social networking sites recombine relationships within those sites and how their use may influence relationships among people. The different stor…

Why do I blog this? The first time I encountered this weird signage taken in London (Shoreditch area), it struck me as a good example of cultural hybridization, certainly one of the first step of the creolization process I blogged about yesterday. Overall, it also reveals a sort of weird “new aesthetic”.

The terms ‘Creole’ and ‘creolization’ are used in many different contexts and generally in an inconsistent way. It is instructive to start with the origins of the root word. It was probably derived from the Latin creara (‘created originally’)… The French transformed the word to ‘créole’… ‘Creole’ referred to somethi…