Julian Bleecker
Catalog
✓ Augmenting socio-cognitive interactions
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I’ve found notes I’ve written when attending a talk by my phD director. I put it here since it could be seen as a framework for my phD.
✓ Misc stuff about mobile devices
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I’ve just read an article about the SPV Phone (Orange and Krosoft). It explains why they locked the cell phone so that people cannot run any freeware software, but only software developed by Orange (or under orange license). It’s a shame, and their reasons are quite amazing : they locked it “because they can” and to…
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After an interesting discussion with fabien and dks about weblogs, I’ve read an article concering this trend.
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The book “Social Navigation of Information Space”, outcome of a HCI workshop, gather contributions about the very topic of socialnav. I’ve only read the introduction but it appears to be a relevant reference.
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Gosh ! here’s the first to do list… another use of a blog I should add to the list posted yesterday !
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Yesterday was the inauguration of CRAFT (Centre de Recherche et de d’Appui à la Formation et ses Technologies, Center for Research on Education and its Technologies), the new epfl lab directed by Pierre Dillenbourg, my phD director.
✓ Graffiti of Otaku Generation
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I think the title of this post (directly taken from a GAINAX animated movie released in the 80s) absolutely covers the idea of SocialTexting !!!
✓ Virtual Communities and social network
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I am just entering the field of research concerning virtual communities (gathering of geographically dispersed people with common interests and activities) and other social considerations. My interest towards this area is quite old : from minitel stuff at the end of the 80’s till the discover of the www in 1995. At…
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There is nowadays an interesting debate about this trend of putting WiFi hotspot everywhere to provide users with a permanent connection to the Internet.
✓ The VCR watches TV for you !
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I really like this quote from Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency :
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Social Space is a crux issue. It should be considered as the cornerstone of joint activities and hence to collaborative work/learning. This space is build considering the traces left in the environment (virtual or not) by people. We all send signals into social space that can be decoded by others as trace for a pote…
✓ Cognitive functions tu support Collaborative Work
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I’ve made a brief review of the cognitive functions that should be fullfilled for collaborative work:Group memory/Storing the context/Group mirrors/Conflict/disagreement/Explanation/Internalization/Appropriation/Shared cognitive load/Mutual regulation/Social grounding/Division of labor/Building a shared understandin…
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I was thinking of innovatives ways to use mobile devices for educational purposes. We could propose a kind of game in a city where players have to collaborate (different roles could be assigned), performing a joint acivity where they need to negotiate. Maybe I could use something like that to test the effects of loc…
✓ Submitted Paper for International Conference on Groupware
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I have written a paper for the International Conference on Groupware in Autrans, France (Sunday 28, September – Thursday 2, October 2003). Here is the abstract :
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J’ai lu un texte très intéressant de Gilles Deleuze (dans Pourparlers, 1990) : “Post-Scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle” qui traite du glissement qui s’opère actuellement des sociétés disciplinaires apparues au XVIIIème (famille, école, usine, hopital, prison). Ces institutions sont finies, seule leur agonie est…
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Marketing people try to categorize people by building profile in order to sell them the most appropriate stuff. I’ve listed below few so-called “profiles” : ‘balanced enjoyers’, ‘inside explorers’, ‘cool followers’, ‘status seekers’, ‘asian aspirers’, ‘trendsetters’ (this one is too simple :), ‘fun loving youth’, ‘p…
✓ Discussion with my phD director
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Few notes of a discussion with my phd director (messy and in french sorry) Il faut pour ma thèse quelqeu chose de visionnaire mais pas casse-gueule, il faut une application précise
✓ Weblogs, awareness and transactive memory
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How come weblogs, awareness and transactive memory are related ?
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Defining a method to evaluate collaboration is a hard and challenging issue. Billinghurst, Belchera, Guptaa & Kiyokawaa in their studies about Augmented Reality collaborative interfaces proposes three key points :
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Très proche du courant dark ambient de NYC pour la vibee, de dj spooky et de l’afrofturisme pour les textes et du hop-hop 80s pour le look. East Coast rulez
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Jonah Brucker-Smith, artist/researcher at Media Lab Europe (the MIT Medialab kind-of franchise, worth to check what is happening there 🙂 proposes a collection of background awareness applications based on desktop ubiquity : Desktop Subversibles :
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Eva Saro-Nydegger a présenté lors d’un brown bag seminar a tecfa des outils pour interroger images et valeurs dans un contexte personnel ou professionnel. Venant des beaux arts, son approche différente (moins formalisée que les sémioticiens) est intéressante !
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Je sais pas pourqoi les séminaire (comme celui-la) sont si pompeux, au 21ème siècle, 30 ans après les situs (debord rulez), il serait temps de se rendre compte que la ville, terrain de la collectivité est une aire de spectacle dans laquelle peuvent s’insérer des activités passionantes et inutiles (dans le sens, sans…
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Fab m’a demandé pourquoi je n’aimais pas ce que racontais joël de rosnay (par exemple), je réponds qu’il est trop positiviste, que la technologie c’est tout bo, magnifique pour le futur….
✓ Mobile phones impacts on time/space
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Cell phones do have interesting effects on our representation of time. Three examples :
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Bertrand Merminod a l’epfl travaille sur des projets alliant urbanisme et mobile devices/location-based stuff. Il a notamment concu un device alliant gps et mouvement de la personne.
✓ A new track : augmenting guy debord's derive
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I think I have managed to find a way to gather my research and my passion for psychogeography. Focusing on how information technologies could help us to reappropriate urban’s life is definetely my interest…
✓ RSS
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J’ai approfondi un peu RSS aujourd’hui en installant le plugin pour faire de la syndication avec movable type : cefichier propose d’aggréger les contenus venant d’autres blogs : c’est ce qui s’appele faire de la syndication (on “feed”, on aggrège des data venant d’ailleurs).
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According to usa today, Symbol Technologies last year released a Wi-Fi/cellphone communications system marketed toward truck drivers. Drivers transmit data via cellphone when on the road, such as how many deliveries they’ve made. When they pull into a Wi-Fi-equipped dock, they can upload and download more detailed d…
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Fab send me this interesting news about google. It is clear now google is a social tool used for dating, selection candidates for a position, check my importance (vanity google)…. I like those quotes :
✓ Awareness of Presence on Multi-Player Games
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Yanna Vogiazou at the Knowledge Media University in the UK is foucing on presence-based multiplayer games from a social psychology perspective.
✓ Rummie and his awareness tools
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After a smart discussion yesterday with dks about the fact the US neo-conservatives won their influence war against the establishment (conservatives), I read an interesting article in Wired last issue about how Donald Rumsfeld modified warfare. One of the striking feature here is the fact that innovation and progres…
✓ Does The Bell curve go flat ?
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Daniel Pink in Wired 11.05 claims that the Bell Curve (normal distribution) goes more and more flat : low in the center and high on the side. For instance : there is tremendously large companies (GM, Citigroup…) and small enterprises; high-end luxury hotel and low-end budget (same for airways companies). He also fin…
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J’ai vu entre midi et deux heures une expo des projets de diplòme des étudiants d’architecture de l’EPFL. C’est fascinant : richese des supports (mock-ups, posters, plans, fasciule bien designé…). En plus, ils utilisent une quantité impressionante de visualisations superbes et très riches en information : par exempl…
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Prior imagining interaction scenaios with ultra-hype mobile devices that rocks, I should adress those questions :
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I’ve made a kind of XXth century website to describe my ph project. It’s definitely roughly/sketchy/odd for the moment… on purpose, if you want to understand (because of the public machines’ law), feel free to contact me…
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Psy-Geo-Conflux 2003 held in New York was a psychogeographic event. It seems that other people share my idea of mixing psychogeography with IT !!
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Quand j’étais à tecfa, les étudiants devaient faire des blogs pour commenter leur travaux, notamment pour le cours dont jetais l’assistant.
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Un trip urbain intéressant : le parkour : art du déplacement, intégration urbaine entre danse et évitement d’obstacle. Très bon !!!
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How the POSITION/DIRECTION of the partner influences the GROUNDING process in the context of mediated collaboration ?
✓ Remapping the local with mobile phones
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“Design predictions were that 80 per cent of information would be pan European, 20 per cent local, but it is actually the other way around. Phones are about mobility, but they are also about localness and specific regionality. They are about a configuration of place that is a quite local sense of place.Phones are ab…
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I should write a position paper concerning AWARENESS (awareness and CSCW or awareness and learning).
✓ CASPIAN
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Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) is a NGO that want to be “An information clearinghouse and resource for community and national action”
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Discussion avec Fab 🙂 a propos des gens qui regardent les chantiers dans les villes, et prennent des photos
✓ Meeting with the Megawatch team
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This morning I met Yusuf Leblebici and Pablo Ienne who work at EPFL on wireless mobile devices.
✓ Workshops on The Design of Virtual Space/Place
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Christine A. Halverson (Social Computing Group / IBM. T. J. Watson Research) and Quentin Jones (Information Systems Department / College of Computing Sciences / New Jersey Institute of Technology) seem to organize, each year a workshop on the topic of ppace, space and collaboration
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– Véridique : 4 tomes présentant des strips parues dans les Inrocks – Attation : petit volume concept – Top télé maximum : petit volume concept sur la télévision – Nos meilleurs amis et l’acte interdit : petit volume concept sur les rapports hommes/chiens – Les Mousquetaires de la résurrection : un volume des aventu…
✓ Quote
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“the analysis of the movements will give us an idea of many social patterns : group configuration, group migrations, preferences of sectors in buildings Those aspects are relevant within the learning processes in order to understand how to design the most suitable space for a group to work, which are the tool they…
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1. Marx : impacts socio-économiques du système capitaliste 2. Debord : conséquences sociales du capitalisme : la société du spectacle 3. Houellebecq : conséquenecs sexuelles du capitalisme (les comportements sexuels d’aujourd’hui)
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I am really into Mecha stuff so lego mecha is a new direction I am going to investigate !!!!
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“Toute la vie des sociétés dans lesquelles règnent les conditions modernes de production sannonce comme une immense accumulation de spectacles. Tout ce qui était directement vécu sest éloigné dans une représentation.”
✓ Surveillance is the future !
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Unfortunately, we are close to 1984 : Combat Zones That See, Terrorist/Total Information Awareness, SHopping Card…
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Few days ago, I presented the gragoyle/stringer job, now another trend : journalist in virtual world ! For instance, Wagner James Au is a pro games writer who’s working now as an “embedded reporter”, chronicling the developments in the world of a new massively multiplayer game”.
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Nowaday, attaching information to real worlds stuff and gear is a trend. Projects like Aula or HP Cooltown (everything has a web page!) are a step toward this direction. Applications like tourist navigation, collaborative work or games.
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A mobile phone is a powerful AWARENESS TOOL that can tell you the PRESENCE of somebody. Yesterday, I was wondering whether my friend Elise (who was in Italy for holidays) was back in France or not. I sent her a SMS. My Nokia Phone receives reports to tell me whether the SMS is delivered or just pending.
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About my literature review : I have to make a taxonomy. Three objects : Person/Artefact/Location (a fourth : activity ?). Distance/Spatial relation between those three objects : between persons (proxemics), artefacts/persons, location/artefacts, person/location (absolute or relative distance), between locations. Rel…
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Publish with the e-mail client of your mobile phone or pda: The easiest way to publish is to write an e-mail with your report to [email protected]. You can also include one jpeg-picture if you have a phone with an integrated camera.
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An exploring analysis of students’ SMS content could be of interest in order to categorize how students use SMS in order to regulate their collaboration. We could for instance establish a typology (help, motivation, affective…)
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I’ve read on textually.org Judah Klausner, an inventor in Manhattan, has won a patent for a cellphone that can project Web pages onto a larger surface.
✓ SLOG
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There seems to be a new buzzword in the blogosphere : SLOG. SLOG uses SMS technology to update the log is an SMS-log. This online diary is hence updated by sending in SMS messages.
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L’analyse des usages me semble primordiale (par exemple au lieu de se demander comment concevoir le e-banking, l’ergonome devrait se poser la question de comment les gens gerent leurs comptes bancaires; de meme pour mon sujet au lieu dimaginer comment concevoir des environnemments collaboratifs CSCL mobile, il faut…
✓ Nouvelle forme de tourisme urbain
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Après avoir été par hasard au coeur des manifs en France contre les retraites (entre autre), et contre le G8 en Suisse, il semblerait qu’une nouvelle forme de tourisme apparaisse : des gens en short béat (extension du phénomène type badaud) observent et prennent des photos au beau milieu des manifestants ou des cass…
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J’ai trouvé de quoi illustrer la théorie du gazon avec des photos et pas des dessins moches 🙂
✓ GRAME : music and computer science
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I am not into that field but I mentionit, just to be aware that this kind of institutions exists outside paris (and its ircam) :
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premiers constats en norvege (bergen) : architecture riche, deconcertante, bcp d’elements disparates (vieilles baraques en boite, low rise moderne, art deco…). Les interieurs sont tres riches en elements arts deco, du 50s aussi. Bcp de coiffeurs (frisors) ou alors c moi ki ny fait plus attention en france… ya des me…
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William Gibson’s Count Zero : two worlds/spaces collide : the mystic, organic world of Haitian Voudoun, and the detached, cool, mechanical world of the matrix/infosphere -> two different virtual spaces…
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jesaispluki me faisait remarquer que cetait pas cool (“c ‘est pas humain”) de lire des docs sur mon laptop et que c’etait plus sympa de lire des “vrais livres”, du papier quoi… parce que c moins impersonnel, plus joli et gnagnagna… surement encore un bobo en mal de “wellness” (je hais ce concept). Deja je peux lui o…
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le fait de localiser les gens ou qu’ils soit me parait insupportable; a l’interieur d’un seul batiment ET dans un contexte de travail/apprentissage collaboraitf, cela parait moins violent; J’aimerais arriver a montrer que ce n ‘est pas le fait de savoir OU SONT PRECISEMENT les autres partenaires d’un groupe de trava…
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experimental psychology methods, quantitative/qualitative analysis, social network analysis, literature about space/cognition/collaboration, literature about cognition theories (distributed cognition, activity theory, socio-cultural perspectives…), literature about awareness, programming (C or python script as well…
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this site presents a tremendously wide bunch of stuff concerning place and space from different approaches.
✓ Skateboarding, Architecture and Space
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I am definitely convinced that my early interests (teenagers’ stuff) are still linked to my research. or my passion to urban “dérive/drift”. I found this reference :
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Last week-end, I was really concentrated on reading articles about mobile phones while in the train :
✓ Spatial Grounding and mobile phones
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I have read an interesting paper “Why people say where they are during mobile phone calls” form Eric Laurier (submitted to Environment and Planning D : Society and Space).
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I should choose among this list of processes involvbed in collaborationm the one that I have to study for my phd :
✓ Gosh ! My ventilator killed himself
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In a very sad attempt to liberate himself from ??? (my table ? electrictiy ?), my ventilator managed to killed himself, and fell on the floor…
✓ Meeting with my phd advsisor
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Attention à faire la part des choses entre des objectifs de recherche et ce qui est branché (la technologie quoi) !
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After having read a definition of collaboration on mediaTIC, I would like to give a more general view :
✓ The Feature – Tinseltown 2.0
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In TheFeature.com (RIP..) Douglas Rushkoff interviewed Mimi Ito and myself about the mobile research we are both doing here at USC.
✓ Innovation and military stuff
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“one cannot understand the development of information tech, without understanding the evolution of military strategy”
✓ Censure
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Je lis sur le site de Kitetoa que les salariés de France Telecom R%D ne peuvent naviguer sur ce même site (Kitetoa). Un filtre (webwasher) en interdit l’accès. C’est magnifique de voir qu’une entreprise francaise qui se veut de pointe adopte un comportement dictarorial. La bannière est éloquente : “ce site n’est pas…
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Yep I am just getting back from my holiday in the sun (sex pistols rulez) : Montpellier, Toulouse and Les Pyrenees (south of france)
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Ekahau proposes a smart position engine. This application is a powerful positioning server that provides PC, PDA, and asset TAG location coordinates (x, y, floor) and tracking features to client applications. Ekahau’s patented positioning technology features up to 1 meter (3½ ft) average accuracy, enabling people an…
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®TMark est une société de courtage bénéficiant, comme toute société privée, de la “responsabilité limitée”. Ce principe lui permet de réunir des fonds et d’investir dans le sabotage et l’altération médiatiques de produits commerciaux tels que des poupées, des jeux éducatifs ou encore des vidéos, entre autres. Ce mod…
✓ Card art
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today, I’m into cards : tagging any cards that happen to be on my desk : bus/metro ticket, plane ticket… :
✓ MArketing et technologies mobiles
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Ce site est pas mal foutu, ce ne sont pas des articles scientifiques, plutot du marketing mais ils offrent des pistes intéressantes.
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I had a very refreshing and interesting meeting today with stefano mastrogiacomo about Herbert’s CLark theory, Activity Theory and spatial stuff. I think I am going to use this framework for my phd. Let’s read Clark…
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Découvert aujourd’hui à Genève : des post its “tout ce que je cherchais” et “http://www.sony.ch” collés sur le maximum d’autres affiches de spectacle : un teaser de sony pour des produits de mp3 downloads…
✓ A Design Approach for the Geospatial Web
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In the vibrant realm of the Geospatial Web, where maps intertwine with our daily lives, a new design philosophy emerges. Picture a world where location isn't just a point on a map but a gateway to endless stories waiting to be told. As I penned my thoughts for O'Reilly, I felt the thrill of weaving user interfaces that dance with the pulse of the e..
✓ About
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We focus on creating implications and provocations well beyond the commercial mainstream. There is nothing here for sale and most of these things make little sense in a normal, for-profit context. We are not a corporation, or patent-wielding design studio. We work from our instincts, self-commissioning ourselves wit…
✓ Marco Susani on Mobile Networks
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Marco Susani, Director Advanced Concepts Group at Motorola, had some interesting words on what he calls “Aura Networks” that captures succinctly the nature of networks that are more like social meteorology than the tinkertoy network graphs we're used to. It's not a new conversation on Susani's part. It&#…
✓ An account of location-based games multiple play
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An account of location-based games multiple play – A good read: Barkhuus, L., Chalmers, M., Tennent, P., Hall, M., Bell, M. and Brown, B. Picking Pockets on the Lawn: The Development of Tactics and Strategies in a Mobile Game. Proceedings of UbiComp 2005, Tokyo, Japan. The paper tackles the issue of how the experien…
✓ The Wireless Web – Do Not Call!
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Another meme that is on my do not call list is wireless web. The October 2005 issue of Communications of the ACM, the house organ for the Association for Computing Machinery, as an article titled Wireless Web Adoption Patterns In The U.S.. The substance of the article itself seems interesting insofar as I would be i…
✓ Developing technology interventions to activate community spaces and public life
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Developing technology interventions to activate community spaces and public life:
✓ Frason BlueToools API Kit for .NET
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Blue Tools is a new Franson .NET API kit that allows developing Bluetooth apps for devices easy. And, if his other kits, like the SerialTool and GPSTools APIs are any indication, it’ll be lickity-split development time. Well worth the modest costs of the tools, I can tell you that.
✓ iPeople
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Here’s an article titled "It’s all in your head" from the October 9, 2005 Toronto Star on the topic of communities, public space and personal portable mobile devices. It’s interesting in the way it deliberately swerves the conversation away from the 911 and ID Theft memes of security and privacy toward the social im…
✓ BT Launches a Whole Range of Terribly Boring LBS Services
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I found this through Nicolas Nova's splendidly corn-fed Blog who pointed me to Russell Buckley's posting on BT's pathetic Location Based Services offering.
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The NYT ran a piece in the October 17 2005 issue titled "Now Playing on a Tiny Screen" about the increasing media interest in video-based entertainment designed for mobile phones.
✓ Art Center Nabi Workshop on Urban Play and Locative Media, Day 1
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Day 1 was comprised of a series of speakers discussing their insights and projects relating to locative media and urban play. This was followed by an excellent expert guided tour of Myung-Dong, the region of focus for the workshop. After that was a dinner on the epic 33rd floor of the SK Tower.
✓ Piedimonsterz: Kids, Kinesthetics and The Fitness Diary
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Aram Armstrong mentioned a project he worked on in a Service Design course at Ivrea that involved using a pedometer that would sustain or enliven or otherwise affect an electronic avatar that you could then jack into your computer back at home and it would author a blog entry about how good it was feeling based on m…
✓ Art Center Nabi Workshop on Urban Play and Locative Media, Day 2
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Sell your morning walk http://morningwalk.biz
✓ Drinks Scanning in Airport Security
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Passing through Narita this afternoon on my way back from the Art Center Nabi Workshop on Urban Play and Locative Media, (scan the blog for a few notes from the 3 day workshop) I found a large sign in the transfer zone between international flights indicating that one was to remove any drinks (plastic bottles of wat…
✓ BT on UA
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Had another one of those "the world is the size of a postage stamp" moments (maybe it's also a networked publics moment..) while returning to Los Angeles from Seoul via Tokyo on UA890 when I somewhat randomly decided to listen to the music channels that pipe through the armrests. I normally don't do that, mostly bec…
✓ Royal Grand Prix Derby Racing (On Air)
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Stumbled across one of the most stunning augmented reality environments on a bustling market street in Seoul this evening. It's called Royal Grand Prix Derby Racing (On Air). Inside it's darkened, quiet and smoky room, are row and row of illuminated consoles quietly and occupied by contemplative men huddled…
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I’m almost afraid to enter a new design idiom into my tool chest, but this one came up during Aram Armstrong’s presentation during the Nabi Workshop. It’s probably old hat to many of you out there, and I have to say that I was somewhat hopped up on the Information Design and Experience Design stuff. (One of my mento…
✓ 2005 4S (Society for the Social Studies of Science) Conference – STS Meets New Media
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Mimi Ito organized a series of panels at this year’s 4S conference (Society for the Social Studies of Science), held in Pasadena. I proposed a paper on Locative Media that I had titled Landscape as Interface: How Creative Uses of the Global Positioning System Enable Location Aware Media. I didn’t have much of an ide…
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The New York Times writes another nugget on the increasingly knitted worlds of film (should I say, celluloid film?) and video game creative production. As electronic games become a candidate (of many possibilities) for the future of visual story telling, drawing upon the various models of production becomes a hot to…
✓ Google Mash-Up Meets US Census Data
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Jason Gilmore publishes a developer-oriented article on how to combine geocoded census data with Google’s Map API. It uses Perl and some PHP hooks. Nice “how-to” piece.
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Mapping provides a unique way to create new ways of imagining the world and perhaps new ways of living within it. Such is the power of one of the canonical representational practices.
✓ Candidate ISEA2006 Interactive City Projects
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Marc got me thinking about possibly inserting a project into the ISEA2006 Interactive City event. This came up during responses to the talk I gave at the Art Center Nabi Workshop on Urban Play and Locative Media, which I blogged about herein.
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Holly Willis wrote a piece describing the burgeoning digital art scene in Los Angeles titled LA Digital Universe in which she interviews myself, Perry Hoberman, Michael Naimark, Mark Allen and some others in the local tribe.
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My new blog is trying to catch up with my new life. To that end, let me put up a belated link to my article on WiFi.Bedouin in Issue 2 of the online journal, Vectors., which is chock-full of other fascinating articles. I recommend you toast some marshmallows and settle in for some leisurely browsing.
✓ Response to Michael Liebhold on The Geospatial Web
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The following are my remarks on Michael Liebhold’s talk on The Geospatial Web, capture in my notes.
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I’ve been thinking about using the Ephemera Cache as a framework for some kind of game experience.
✓ What The Experts Fail To Grok About Google Maps
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I wrote a super quick, super short comment to a recent editorial on Directions Magazine’s site:
✓ Biography, Curriculum Vitae, Work Samples, Press, Professional Statement
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Julian Bleecker is a Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication and an Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media Division, part of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
✓ First entry about Pierre la Police !!!
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I finally decide to move from my low-tech html page to a database-linked blog generator (movable type as a matter of fact), blog for real ! I had begun to feel some frustration with html I think… so, let’s use one of those ready-steady tools for making weblogs…
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After having focused on the cognitive impacts of awareness tools in a collaborative video-game, my phD will adress the question of the social and cognitive effects of context-awareness tools in collaborative mobile activities. I have to find a joint activity where users are engaged in joint tasks that require collab…
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Timo just told me he’ll be attending Triggered by RFID a workshop by Mediamatic that sounds like it’s really a workshhop. Like..things will get built using objects. I’m very jealous. I wish I was going there. Things are so painfully quiet here right now. Lots of ideas, lots of motivated colleagues and grad students,…
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On the IDC list, there’s been a thread of comments on the LA Weekly article that’s been a little bit fun to follow. A little bit.
✓ WYS, WIS, What We See Together
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I recently found out that the acronym soup of the Computer Human Interaction ([w:CHI]) cauldron has been stewing the WYSIWIS (‘what you see is what I see’) concept for sometime now. I’ve been doing anonymous reviews of papers for CHI2006 and stumbled across the acronym and it got me to thinking about WYSIWIS for pre…
✓ Bruce Sterling: A Hardy Polemic
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Bruce Sterling is here this evening to talk at our IMD seminar.
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This “Lab Notes” dispatch from the Berkeley College of Engineering resonated because I have been thinking about the military industrial light and magic complex. That is, the knitting together into shared sensibilities a cohesive semantic blob that makes it difficult to distinguish military-entertainment-games-illusi…
✓ Image Theory Objects: Flickr Collaboratory
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I’ve been adding somewhat anonymous Flickr “users” who seem to be using their images as a collaborative research effort. I guess. My favorite currently is FreedomLab.org’s Flickr stream. Shared collaboratory, I guess. Many of there images are these semantic diagrams — showing trends reports, Venn Diagrams of memes…
✓ Institute for Creative Technologies
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I arrived a couple of hours late for a day-long series of presentations on what the ICT is doing these days.
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EDGY PRODUCTS CALL FOR PARTICIPATION [http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/edgyproducts/]
✓ Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson Speaks at Annenberg Center Nov. 9
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Annenberg Center for Communication¹s netPublics Reseach Group and the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication
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Ever since Bruce Sterling’s up-close-and-personal polemic the other day, I’ve been all hopped-up on the [w:spime]. The idea of an object that knows itself — it’s history, where it’s been, where it should be, and can self-describe in a rich way is enthralling for some reason right now.
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My take on the relationship with EA at IMD is that its problematic, in general because it overwhelms the Games track in the division. Many students are here for “games” and see the division as a way to get on the inside track to a job at EA.
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In the realm where strategy meets simulation, the Dupay Institute emerges as a beacon of innovation. Their campaign database, akin to a treasure trove of historical warfare, breathes life into the art of battle. Imagine generals, clad in virtual armor, wielding the power of past conflicts to navigate today's complex landscapes. It’s a fascinating d..
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In a world where games weave the fabric of our interactions, Jane McGonigal stands as a beacon of creativity. Her insights dance through the corridors of game design, illuminating paths we never thought to tread. Collaborating with her has been like finding a hidden treasure chest, filled with ideas that challenge the mundane. With her guidance, I'..
✓ Collectively (Collaboratively?) Defining Context
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I’m engaging in what seems like an unending exercise in shuffling and reorganizing all of the intelligence and insights that live in various PDFs and such all in my electronic and analog libraries. I have no idea what the most effective way to organize the stuff is — I’ve tried knowledge management tools and pract…
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In the vibrant heart of MIT, a project called iSpots dances with data, weaving tales of wireless whispers and digital footprints. It’s a blend of art and tech, where numbers become visuals and the unseen patterns of connection take form. Imagine tracing the paths of knowledge seekers, as their invisible threads create a tapestry of activity across ..
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In a world where maps come alive on our devices, Thomas Landspurg has woven a tapestry of technology, crafting Google Maps for J2ME. With a humble heart, he shares his journey, where innovation meets nostalgia. The thrill of collaborative mapping dances in the air, beckoning developers and dreamers alike. Here lies a glimpse of a future where creat..
✓ Sightseeing Oprah Winfrey Crop Circles with Google Satellite Maps
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Stumbled across this Google Maps..thing. It’s not quite collaborative mapping, but it has a draw.
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In a world where information flows like a river, Google spreads its influence, wrapping itself around our desires like warm jam on fresh bread. The dreamscape of a kingpin decision-maker dances in my mind, where zillions are spent on crafting the ultimate location-based services. With friends gathered, savoring smoked salmon, we envision a realm of..
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In the vibrant world of interactive media, creativity dances hand in hand with technology. Here, students explore the enchanting landscape of mapping, crafting stories that transcend the mere push-pin. With tools like Google Maps API, they weave narratives that breathe life into locations, each pixel a brushstroke on the canvas of imagination. Jour..
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I got a call from a reporter at Forbes.com who wanted my take on “networked art.” So..I gave a take.
✓ Pal Mickey Blogject Wannabe..
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I was talking to Matt Jones and Chris Heathcote this afternoon about this “blogjects” or spime-variant theory object I’ve been hopped up on these last couple of weeks. I was describing the Mad Prophet project students are working on our mobile design seminar this quarter and I wanted some prior art. Who else has don…
✓ Mike Davis in Conversation with Joshua Bearman, Friday, Nov 11, Venice
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The Believer and 826LA present Mike Davis (City of Quartz and The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu) talking to Joshua Bearman (McSweeney’s, L.A. Weekly, The Believer) about Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of New Orleans, avian flu, the war in Iraq, Yetis, and writing non-fiction.
✓ A List of 50 UK Mobile Hotties
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In the ever-evolving world of mobile technology, innovation dances like a flickering flame. O2's Hot 50 list shines a spotlight on enterprises that are not just keeping up, but leading the charge into the digital frontier. Each entry tells a story of creativity and ambition, a symphony of ideas that blend the practical with the poetic. From harness..
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Nicolas Nova recently dropped a nugget on what he calls Art + Science in Collaboratory.
✓ Chris Anderson – Resistance is Fertile
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In the vibrant tapestry of digital discourse, Chris Anderson paints a picture of the Long Tail—a concept as rich as the colors of a sunset. His words dance through the air, weaving together the threads of innovation, culture, and the intricate networks that bind us. As we explore the depths of media and communication, we find ourselves afloat on th..
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In the heart of New Hampshire, a chorus of voices rises against the shadow of technology. The air is electric, filled with chants of freedom and privacy, as protesters unite under the banner of civil liberties. They stand before Wal-Mart, bearing witness to a world where every item whispers secrets, a world encroached upon by the tendrils of RFID. ..
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In the heart of nature, where whispers of the woodlands dance, lies the Periscope, a gateway to the wonders unseen. With RFID tags as magical keys, it unlocks a treasure trove of stories, inviting children to embark on an adventure through the foliage. Each tag is a gem, shimmering with knowledge, guiding curious minds through lifecycles and hidden..
✓ Embrace
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Imagine a world where connections spark like fireflies in the night, where two souls can share moments without uttering a word. The 'Embrace' bracelet, with its delicate dance of light and scent, invites wearers to intertwine their stories, creating a tapestry of shared experiences. This interactive piece is not just jewelry; it's a bridge over dis..
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Bluebox is a unique bluetooth software and hardware application designed and developed by Maria N. Stukoff and Jon Wetherall for the creative use of mobile phones via bluetooth. as part of this development we are invited to trail the first phase of blubox technology – called fotobox an interactive installation with…
✓ Anime Portable Visual Storytelling
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The New York Times has a short quip on anime now produced for delivery and viewing on the Video iPod.
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In a world where the hum of our mobile devices dances with the whispers of our surroundings, location-based services beckon us closer. Picture the joy of discovering hidden gems just around the corner, or the thrill of a game that leads you on a treasure hunt through the streets. Yet, amidst this digital treasure trove, one can't help but wonder if..
✓ Innovation and Competitiveness: Hoping to Mitigate A Gathering Economic Storm
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The New York Times brought to the fore a topic that’s been on the mind of myself and far-flung colleagues — innovation. The article, titled Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge? As the title suggests, the topic is framed as a US national crisis distilled down to two trends:
✓ Fizzees – Kinesthetics Interfaces for Health
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NESTA Futurelab is showcasing their prototype reseach project called Fizzees “..that enables young people to care for a ‘digital pet’ through their own physical actions. In order to nurture their digital pet, keep it healthy and grow, young people must themselves act in physically healthy ways.”
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I may slow down a small bit this next week or so — I’m going to be reblogging over at Eyebeam’s reBlog err..blog.
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In a whimsical journey through the digital landscape, I stumbled upon Pocket Sakura, a delightful intersection of technology and playful exploration. Like petals swirling in a soft breeze, the idea drifts from one intriguing link to another, each connection revealing a new layer of creativity. My curiosity sparked, I found myself wandering through ..
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In the vast expanse of our skies, where metal birds dance gracefully, Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns captures the poetry of flight. Each visualization twirls like a ballet, mapping the rhythms of jet streams and transit routes, telling a story only the heavens can narrate. With data from the FAA, these artistic renderings turn numbers into art, pai..
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In the vast sky where dreams take flight, Flight Aware paints a tapestry of real-time journeys. Each plane, a story waiting to unfold, dances through the heavens, connecting distant lands. The thrill of watching these metal birds traverse the world is like witnessing a symphony of engineering and nature. But amidst the beauty lies a question: How l..
✓ Air Traffic Control, Spimes and Jerry Bruckheimer
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In the vast skies of technology, FlightAware dances like a mystical wand, casting spells over the realm of aviation. It’s not just about flights; it’s about the stories that soar through the air, tethered to the identities of those who navigate them. Each flight tells a tale, each aircraft a chapter in the grand narrative of human adventure. Join m..
✓ Google Is The New Surveillance
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In the vast digital realm, where data dances and ideas swirl, Google emerges as a curious beast. It’s a place of wonder, creativity, and possibility, yet whispers of unease linger in the air. As we marvel at the sleek interface, we must ponder the deeper implications of this technological colossus. Will it become our guide, or will it consume us wh..
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In a serendipitous meeting with Eduardo Sciammarella at Protohaus, we meandered through the realms of creativity and technology. Our conversation danced around various projects, but I found myself reminiscing about an old gem – NetMagnet. This project, a whisper of innovation from years past, beckons me to revisit it. It was a canvas for spontaneou..
✓ MVNOs – Strategy for Innovation?
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I had a completely kooky idea the other day while meeting with Mike Liebhold and Francois Bar to discuss a research project. One of the big challenges for creating innovating services, apps, devices — what have you — within the current mobile ecosystem is that the carriers don’t adopt the same kind of spirit of…
✓ Navtones
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Imagine cruising down the road, the wind in your hair, and Mr. T's booming voice guiding you through the twists and turns of life. It's not just about getting from point A to point B; it's about the journey, the attitude, and the flair that comes with each direction. With Navtones, your GPS can transform into a personal guide, bringing a touch of c..
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In the dance of technology and movement, orientation sensing emerges as a captivating partner. As I weave through the realms of accelerometers, the potential to craft my own pedometer ignites a spark of creativity. Imagine stepping lightly, each stride a note in the symphony of distance traveled, an interface that transcends mere location. The jour..
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In a world where the Internet of Things dances on the edge of our reality, conversations swirl like autumn leaves. The allure of spimes and blogjects beckons, whispering secrets of a connected future. Yet, nestled in the excitement, a pang of frustration echoes through the halls of academia. With research funds as elusive as a wisp of smoke, the qu..
✓ Thinglink? Meet the Blogject, cousin of Spime.
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I like this idea that Ulla-Maaria Mutanen describes in her thinglink post, it resonates with the Spime and the idea of object tagging that Nicolas Nova and I have been discussing.
✓ WiFi.ArtCache? Meet Processing
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One possible idea for the UCI event this summer, and perhaps for ISEA2006, is to develop an ArtCache hybrid where the WiFi.ArtCache API is ported to Processing. It is presently just Flash. Same basic idea — anything written in Processing will work through an ArtCache library that allows for the behaviors of the Pr…
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In a world where our devices dance to the rhythm of our gestures, the idea of mobile orientation weaves a delicate tapestry of interaction. Imagine your phone, not just a gadget, but a compass guiding you through the maze of urban landscapes. With every tilt and turn, it whispers secrets of navigation, promising a future where finding your way feel..
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In a world where health meets whimsy, a friend of mine sticks Dymo reminders on her mirror, a playful nudge towards her fitness dreams. With a sprinkle of humor, she takes it a step further, adorning her mobile with mnemonics that dance across the screen. Enter the realm of fitness-themed wallpapers, a charming blend of motivation and style, courte..
✓ Syllabi
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Here are a few syllabi from recent courses taught at the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media Division.
✓ Understanding Situated Social Interactions in Public Places
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Fabien Girardin caught this one, a paper called Understanding Situated Social Interactions in Public Places, Jeni Paay and Jesper Kjeldskov.
✓ SIGCHI Workshop on Mobile Social Software
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A Call for Position Papers for a workshop on the topic of Mobile Social Software (is that supposed to be in cap-case?) went out a week or so ago, and I’ve been meaning to write a few notes — I’m interested in attending and trying to sort through the various projects that are over low-heat (for lack of USC research…
✓ Marko Ahtisaari? Meet The WiFi Bedouin..
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Here’s an interview with Marko Ahtisaari that Nicolas blogged this morning. When I was at this year’s Ars Electronica, I saw his talk. He was dressed head to toe in white during the talk. When I saw him later during the festival, he was head to toe in black. So, there’s that. I mean, that’s entirely cool — it remi…
✓ Receiver #14 Out —Thanks Vodaphone
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Vodaphone’s excellent series of insightful, culturally-aware essays on the mobile society has just released Issue #14. Pick it up..it’s free!
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Local chum and Protohaus boss Eduardo Sciammarella has a piece in Always On called Cell Death 2010: Good-bye, mobile phones; hello, mobile web! captures the general aspirational tenor as well as the “sigh..groan..” ruefulness of many of we who see a great future for mobile and pervasive media but are genuinely puzzl…
✓ Motility and The Internet of Things
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Read the short essay A Certain Sense of Place: Mobile Communication and Local Orientation by Jochim R. Hoflich.
✓ Sage Publications: New Media and Society
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A new issue of New Media and Society is out, with an essay called Cellphones in public: social interactions in a wireless era.
✓ 2005 Internet Traffic Map — Telegeography
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In a world woven with invisible threads, the internet flows like a river, carrying whispers and dreams across continents. Each pixel dances in a vibrant tapestry, connecting hearts and minds in an endless embrace. As we dive into the digital ocean, we explore the currents of information that shape our lives. Join me in this journey, where every cli..
✓ Alavs Flocking Blimp Whales at Art Center College of Design
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Jed Berk, an MFA student over at Art Center College of Design, graciously offered to show us Alavs (Autonomous Lighter Than Air Vehicles) — the flocking blimp project he and his colleague Nikhil Mitter have been working on. The blimps are kitted out with a small SunSpot — a Sun made sensor platform with some pro…
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In a world where gadgets whisper secrets of their journeys, a little gizmo called Sorell’s NF1 emerges, brimming with potential. It dances between GPS, music, and videos, inviting us to explore the paths less traveled. Imagine each step you take illuminated by the stories that surround you, as devices become aware of their own histories. With a pla..
✓ Blogjects — Perambulation, Locale Harvesting, Presence
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In the gentle dance of our footsteps, we wander, weaving stories into the fabric of the world. The Blogject beckons, a curious companion, eager to share our perambulations with the universe. It captures the whispers of the streets and the echoes of our thoughts, transforming ordinary moments into a tapestry of interconnected experiences. With each ..
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Chris Heathcote just dispatched this tasty nugget — the Aibo’s with the new brain? They blog their day. Here’s Pedro chit-chatting and moblogging about what he’s up to. Mostly what’s captured are the things he’s looking up at along with some lilting, aphoristic musings.
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I started piling up references, links, papers and so forth — my harvest of material on the topic of mobile social software — in a bid to steel myself for the preparation of a short point-of-view document on the topic and to help pour some concrete into the frame I’ve built around this blogjects topic so as to ad…
✓ Co-location and the Familiar Stranger
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Nicolas pointed me to some work that Jamie Lawrence and his colleagues have been doing on the topic of what they refer to as “co-location”. It’s a neologism tied to [w:Stanley Milgram]’s [w:Familiar Stranger], someone who is observed repeatedly over the course of time, but with whom there is no interaction.
✓ Project Toaster – Blogjects and More
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This holiday season, a delightful concoction brews within the project toaster, bubbling with creativity and curiosity. With the ADXL203 evaluation kit nestled snugly in my hands, the dream of a pedometer that blogs begins to take shape, affectionately named flavonoid. As I await a treasure trove of microcontrollers, my mind dances with visions of a..
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Drove up to San Francisco for the weekend, kind of, to see family and stop in at the Stupid Fun Club‘s Christmas party.
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It’s the holiday season, which, since I was about 15, meant it was time to take some time to catch up on the projects I’ve been meaning to do. Terribly alpha-geeky. I’ve been meaning to connect a GPS to Processing (http://www.processing.org) to allow Processing to get some rudimentary context awareness — where it…
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Reading a bit today from Goffman’s “Behavior in Public Places”. It reads a bit like a sociologist’s take on propriety and protocol which it is. That means Goffman is investigating social behaviors in order to develop a framework for understanding such behaviors and, thereby, learn more about how and why people condu…
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This is another Flavonoid variation. I fear there are now becoming more than is reasonable to manage. Each one reflects a different design sensibility and a learn-through-practice approach. I decided to use the I2C protocol for many of the devices, largely to address the challenge of routing too many signals and in…
✓ When 1st Life Meets 2nd Life: The 1685 Pound Avatar and the 99 Ton Acre
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A Second Life avatar produces 1,685 pounds of CO2? And an acre of real estate in Second Life produces 99 tons of CO2? What gives?
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This week I’m at the Lift Conference. I went last year and had an amazing time meeting a really novel cast of participants, and not all of them alpha-geeks by any means. There were people from the UN, doctor’s, bankers, homemakers, senior citizen’s advocates, artists, researchers, university professors, architects a…
✓ Arduino Workshop Two — An Introduction To Device Art With The Arduino
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Yesterday at IMD we had a ball workshopping design and technology for device art using the Arduino. Fun stuff.
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An on-going project that requires the display of alphabetic and numeric characters using a 5×7 LED matrix turned me towards a chip by Maxim IC — the MAX6953. The chip, while expensive (~$8), has lots of built-in features that mitigate the damage to my purse, trading such in kind for time-saved. It will directly driv…
✓ Word Finder, Google Earth Edition
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This is a 1st Life / 2nd Life game that is based on paper-based word-finder games. In this game, you try to identify dictionary words within a grid of letters and circle them. In this variation, the landscape becomes the game grid and you have to walk (or run!) to generate a virtual line that runs through the letter…
✓ Arduino Workshop — An Introduction To Device Art With The Arduino
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Recently at IMD we had a ball workshopping design and technology for device art using the Arduino. Fun stuff.
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Nicolas sent me information about this DS-compatible pedometer toy called Tekuteku Angel Pocket Pedometer, which looks very cool.
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I have been using the Arduino and Atmel microcontroller’s generally using the SPI (serial-peripheral interface), but decided to look at the two-wire (a.k.a. I2C) interface as well. I’m doing this partially because it would be good to know how it works, but also because it’s electrically more compact. It only uses tw…
✓ Spark Fun Cracks Open a Nike+
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I’ve been waiting for someone else to do this. I got one over a month ago, but haven’t taken the time to hammer it open. I’m glad more adept reverse engineer types went ahead and did it.
✓ Printed Circuit Board Fab Houses — A Few Reviews
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So, I’m at the point with the Flavonoid project that I need to start getting printed circuit boards made. (The printed circuit board includes an accelerometer, a real-time clock, touch sensor, and a bit of EEPROM memory, if you want to know.) A fair bit of the break was spent schooling up on Eagle, doing layouts, ma…
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I picked up a nice electric skillet from Target to do some surface-mount technology work. It was on sale — $19 after the mark down! The suggestion for using an electric skillet for a low-cost, perfectly serviceable SMT reflow rig came from the Spark Fun folks.
✓ Research Bulletin Abstract: An API For Durable Affinity
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Title An API for Durable Affinity: Engineering Interfaces That Matter
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Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy by Jonathan Chapman
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For his Ph.D. work, Jean-Baptiste Labrune has captured some cool line-ups of a trio of tinkerers microcontrollers for young and old.
✓ DIY Media? Fan Art in Google Earth
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Fan Art in Google Earth (click for the super high-res, high megabyte version)
✓ World of Warcraft Bullshit Installation
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Second day — after a break yesterday — trying to install World of Warcraft. It’s not fun any more. I mean, I had trouble enough trying to muster the brain waves to say, okay..I’ll give it a shot. But, this installation process is horrendous. After several patch downloads, etc., I finally got to one that said, b…
✓ Bluetooth Arduino Mini Prototype
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Without too much ado, I’ve been seeing how it goes designing in a Bluetooth module with the Arduino Mini. It’s not difficult at all, really. The thing that gives me a belly-ache is how relatively expensive Bluetooth modules are, generally. This one here set me back around $60USD, single units. It doesn’t get much ch…
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A proposal for research seeking support.
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Vis-à-Vis is a series of multi-player games that utilize physical body movements to control the point of view in a first person perspective computer game. The framework uses a TabletPC, held in the player’s outstretched arms, to display the point of view one would normally see while playing a computer game.
✓ Designing Culture: A Work of The Technological Imagination
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Anne Balsamo gave a talk today at the Annenberg Center for Communication on the topic of her forthcoming book: TechnoHumanism: The Study of the Cultural Relationship between the Human and Technological
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These are some images documenting one of the first Flavonoid prototype designs. During this process, I was learning how to turn the schematic design for the project — the “logical” description that shows circuit connections and components — into materialized printed circuit boards. As part of that process, I sent th…
✓ Game Week Musings — Offline Gaming? A Near Future for Electronic Play?
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Trying to come up with some “log line” style idioms to describe the whole vector of near future research I’m doing around game gestures that elongate the scales of motion, time and contact (proximity, touch, etc.) that electronic games have completely shrunk down to nil. There’s definitely a trend towards considerin…
✓ Flavonoid v.03 Notes: Testing the QT113H proximity sensor
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Here’s the v03 Flavonoid prototype pretty much all assembled, except for attaching a battery on back and the DS1340 real-time clock and its crystal — you can see the landing pad there near the center.. I’d be surprised if this all works. I mean..something must be wrong, right?
✓ We Make Money Not Art Interview
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Great questions from Sascha Pohflepp that helped me figure out what the heck I do and why the heck I do it.
✓ Exergaming and Instrumented Measures of Fitness
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The Economist had a short article titled Let’s Get Physical on “exergaming” — gaming that combines play with exercise. At the same time, Fabien wrote a thought-provoking blog post on the Nokia Sports Tracker and Tracing Personal Mobility. This stuff got me thinking about these weak-signals around exercise, play,…
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Ideasonair.net is fantastic. It’s like an idea a day. It’s fantastic to see project ideas shared and documented this way. I wish I found more of this, just little sprinkles from a project notebook, shared and documented electronically.
✓ Statement of Research Motivations
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For the last 10 years, I have been working on ways to represent and visualize physical, geographic space using portable, mobile, networked digital technologies. (Cf. an Extended Research Statement.) This work makes use of the many mechanisms available to describe geographic space — including mobile devices, wirele…
✓ Reboot 9.0 – "New Interaction Rituals: Getting The Playful Interfaces We Deserve"
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Here are the slides from my Reboot presentation where I sketch a speculative pre-history of computer-human interfaces that includes bricklayers, Apollo guidance computers, Herman Miller Eames loungers and Aeron chairs. The trajectory is an argument for investigating how efficiency (time and motion) can be factored o…
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The work in mapping the connection between physical geography and virtual representations of that geography is a component of the work I have done that is relevant to the question as to what the basis of my tenure case is. In retrospect, I realize that I picked up the story in the middle, and that there is a precedi…
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It is designed and manufactured by Leah Buechley in Boulder Colorado. This version is an old one she and Jean-Baptiste LaBrune used for a post-industrial workshop near switzerland.
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When one thinks of “mobile computing” I think the knee-jerk meanings are to consider it to be desktop computing only with a smaller screen and a jammed up smaller keyboard. Suppose though you could start with the mobile part and think first about movement or the kinds of activities that happen when you’re moving, as…
✓ Left To Our Own Devices (Hardware Sketching..What This Means)
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Making our own stuff — what does it mean, how do you do it? There is a sense that the ability to make our own electronic/digital/computational “stuff” is not just fun, but has some larger purpose that’s related to impulses of DIY sensibilities. Making your own devices has a implicit cultural and political message. T…
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The “Blubber Bot” series of DIY blimps has been a great success. Jed ran a workshop the other day at Machine Project. Sold out, in fact. Everyone was overjoyed. Mark broke out the cooler of ice cream and cones. I think they’re scheduling another one for the people who got locked out.
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The 2nd part of Don Norman’s two part essay on “The Next UI Breakthrough” appears in the July/August 2007 edition of ACM Interactions. In it, he describes how physicality is now being re-introduced into the user interface for computers. He describes physicality as more extensive than tangible computing and “embodime…
✓ CfP Special Issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
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So, I’ve been pretty happy sending printed circuit boards off to this Gold Phoenix operation in China. It feels global to do my manufacturing offshore and its certainly a heck of a lot cheaper than doing it onshore. Frankly, my budget is my pocket money and every penny counts. I’ve been even happier that I can do th…
✓ Microsoft Research Faculty Summit & Design Expo
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These are definitely the droids you are looking for..
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I call Time Warner, the provider of my cable modem line, to troubleshoot the cable modem. I call from my cellphone because I have a VOIP phone that, you know — isn’t working because the cable modem is out of commission. My cellphone has a 917 area code, which is an area code for New York City. Time Warner’s computer…
✓ Depth of Field To Add "Depth" To The Interface
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I noticed this while running the little Pownce desktop applet. It moved the window into “the background” by blurring it out a bit as if there were depth to the screen. I’m not 100% sure I like this. I haven’t seen it ever before I don’t think — and it made me wonder if I was getting ready to pass out or something.
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Most of the artifacts from the near future I’ve been designing and making have this peculiar property where there’s no on-off switch. I first started thinking about this peculiar idea when I thought about how basically all of my digital stuff just stays on. My laptop. My normal human phone. My mobile phone. These th…
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A viral campaign based on the premise that computers and other digital kinds of things can exhibit emotions, like jealousy. They certainly exhibit stubborness, insolence, daring-do, morose sorts of apathy moods, memory loss, short-term memory loss, deep depressions leading to suicide, and the occasional carbuncle an…
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So, the evolution of machinery has led to the eponymous “sleep” mode, or “sleep state” for digital devices. Our phones and computers and stuff — they can go to sleep. I think the first time I saw this (and was somewhat fascinated) was when a PC I was using had this BIOS that could put the computer into a hibernate m…
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A bit of overt geekdom here, but we’ve been getting a few requests for designs that relate to time — a peculiar watch design for one, and an even more provocative sort of life time-piece. And time is one of the design idioms we’re interested in anyway, so I went ahead and constructed a break-out board for the DS32C3…
✓ Conclusion: Interdisciplinarity is Dead
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“In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a ‘subject’ (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a new object, which belongs to no one.” Roland Barthes, “Research: The Young” in “The Rustle of Language”
✓ Slow Messenger Prototype (II)
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This is the second prototype hardware for the Slow Messenger project we’ve been working on. It’s slow going, naturally enough, probably the result of too many design projects for peculiar mobile devices going at once.
✓ LIS302DL — Wii Accelerometer
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I’ve been wanting to mess with this thing for a spell, but I couldn’t find a breakout board at the usual places, so I just up and made one. The LIS302DL 3-axis accelerometer is used in the Wii’s controller, as best as I know. Cool little 2D barcode on the chip there, huh?
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Giulia Simi interviewed The Near Future Laboratory over at Digicult Magazine. It’s all in Italian, but I’ve provided the original that was translated for the article.
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Well, this was fun. Right now, I’d rather be making little ironic, provocative things to think about nearly-real near future worlds than just about anything else. This is very satisfying. Way more satisfying than just writing about such things, and much more satisfying than making the same old stuff for some big gig…
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The first time I went to an Art Center College of Design exhibition of their Product Design division, I was stunned. Man. What finishers! Hey, look at that vacuum cleaner looking thing! That could be sitting on the shelves at Target, I swear!
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In a meeting yesterday with a couple of collaborators, I realized (again) that I have been over-iterating these Near Future Laboratory projects. I make small changes given any reasonable or ridiculous excuse to do so. The iterations and re-workings and editions and variations expresses themselves in all kinds of pec…
✓ The Face of the Faceless User Interface
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Ironically, a typing command user interface to do set-up stuff and manage the Flavonoid device itself. There were enough unknown variables in the design of the device and enough of my own obsession with preferences and configurations and such all, that I spent some time creating a configurable device.
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“Sketching”, as I’ve learned from Mike Kuniavsky/ThingM’s Sketching in Hardware workshops and from Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Interfaces is a useful trope to help capture some of the fresh ways that design, physical and functional prototyping can be stitched together. Bringing together user experience, hardware pr…
✓ Insignia
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I needed something to attach to my shop coveralls to sustain the laboratory story. These are pretty sweet. My guy down the street did them..they clean clock. One other narrative arc in the Near Future Laboratory project — fashionable laboratory garments.
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The stack of industrial design related books keeps getting higher. “Design Now!” just came in and, despite it’s size, I really kind of want to bring it everywhere I go. I even seriously contemplated bringing it with me to New York City.
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MacBook Pro display died. Or went all Arora Borealis on me. Turns out, it’s nice to return to paper and pencil every once and again. And the iPhone? I mean, you can surf and read email more-or-less, and the constraints make sure you don’t do too much of it before you get completely carried away and distracted. Plus,…
✓ Ubiquitous computing: visions, failures and new interaction rituals
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For LIFT08 this year I’ll be co-organizing a workshop with Fabien Giardin and Nicolas Nova on the challenges and visions of ubiquitous computing. It’s fairly meta in the sense that we will look sideways at the near-future, forever just-out-of-reach promise of the seamlessly connected, always computing world. Pfft..y…
✓ Digital & Physical Mashup At DLD08
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DLD (Digital, Life, Design) is Europe’s conference for the 21st century, covering digital innovation, science and culture and bringing together thought leaders from Europe, the Middle-East, America and Asia. The three-day event is chaired by publisher Hubert Burda and investor Joseph Vardi and hosted by Stephanie Cz…
✓ Kombolói: An Anti-Anxiety Device
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This is a quick, quick sketch for an idea I had for a intimate personable device that is best described as a digital worry bead or Kombolói — not so much a worry bead as something to capture and diffuse your anxiety. It works by capacitively linking your tension through a unique capacitive touch sensor and then harn…
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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…
✓ Future. Planning. Innovation.
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Nicolas and I gave a talk serendipitously organized at SK Telecom’s Technology Innovation and Planning group. The purpose was introductory. I had met the group’s leader, Jong Chae Oh at a workshop organized by the Institute for the Future’s Mike Liebhold. It was an opportunity for sharing process, methodology and so…
✓ Strategies for Mobile Comfort
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Some scenes of the particular strategies for maintaining a sense of comfort, ownership of space and a spirit of home-is-where-the-shoes-can-be-removed. What are the ways that comfort can be maintained even when in uncomfortable, cramped, public, awkward spaces?
✓ Travel Reading — "The Plenitude"
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I came across Rich Gold‘s name when I decided to take proper stock of this ubiquitous computing thing maybe three or four years ago. Rich Gold, who I never knew personally, relished in being multi-discplinary, it appears. He describes the multiple hats he wore — engineer, (“pseudo”) scientist, artist, designer. It’s…
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I had the great pleasure of participating again at Picnic, this time organizing a panel between Fabien Giardin, Nicolas Nova and Dennis Crowley on the topic “The Near Future of Pervasive Media Experiences.”
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I got an instructive challenge to one of the hand-held forms I’ve been modeling. It’s a bit hard to see in white plastic, but the form is basically smaller, with some simple articulations that in my early days here, have been difficult to execute in software.
✓ Paul Dourish's Lift2008 Talk
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Paul’s talk at Lift2008 is a great encapsulation of many of the most important insights on the imbrication of technology-and-design and some of the difficulties of being a technologist who is challenged by the expectations that social sciences are supposed to provide fuel in the form of “implications” to inform engi…
✓ Your Imagination Leaves Digital Traces (Latour)
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A wonderful little essay Beware, your imagination leaves digital traces by Bruno Latour on the imagination in a digitally networked world. Fabien Giardin blogged this a month or so ago, and I feel the need to echo his insights.
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Nokia Design’s Calabasas Studio has done something fantastic. They’ve taken design thinking and created an impactful concept initiative called "e;Remade". It’s what I would call a Theory Object — it is a provocation for serious conversations at the tippy-top of the Nokia enterprise to seriously consider how upcy…
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Many of you know about a collaborative project I worked on a few years back called PDPal. It’s had many iterations and several commissions and just sort of continues to continue, even to this day. Me and my collaborators — Scott Paterson and Marina Zurkow — were commissioned by Creative Time to produce an editio…
✓ The World's Slowest Instant Messenger, Part II
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Finally, something to show for this “Slow Messenger” project, a playful interface for instant messaging. I’ve gotten all the hardware bits cobbled together and most of the firmware. Now I’m working on learning how to tie in AOL Instant Messenger so that messages can be delivered to the device. Fortunately (I think)…
✓ Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities
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Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities:
✓ MobZombies Sensor Board Assembly
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Wow, what a bit of a learning experience this was. That chip is an Invernsense IDG300 gyroscope. $35 a pop. And its one of these “QFN” (quad, flat, no leads) style packages which basically makes it a pain to work with. I thought I could use this technique of dabbing a bit of solder on each of the pads on the printed…
✓ Drowsy LED for The World's Slowest Instant Messenger
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I dunno, I was staring at the Slow Messenger and the power LED — your typical grasshopper green — was so bright and just staring at me and kind of giving me a headache. And I thought..that’s not about slow. And I thought about the drowsy white “sleep” pulse of my PowerBook and I was, like..I need something like that…
✓ Techne
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From a distance, the craftwork of prototyping speculative devices is really, really exciting to me. Thinking about design, electronics, construction, developing activated objects that actually work? That’s great.
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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…
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Power. Faced with the design challenges of keeping things that don’t sleep awake as long as possible. One of the more intriguing aspects of the Flavonoid project has been to find ways that it can stay active and recording without it requiring a large, heavy battery. This battery here — the “Powerizer” — is about as…
✓ In The Midst Of Design-Technology
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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…
✓ Version Version Version Version Version Version Version
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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…
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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…
✓ Gestures and Interface: Things To Do With Your Finger
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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…
✓ SmartDust — Battlefields and Cornfields
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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…
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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…
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Aram Bartholl’s project “WoW” suddenly popped into my head as I was discussing the good old Mobile Social Software knee-jerk project — proximity-based friend finders. (Here is a decent video of Bartholl’s project in action.)
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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…
✓ Undisciplinary Design / People-Practice
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Crossing into a new practice idiom, especially if it offers the chance to feel the process of learning, is a crucial path toward undisciplinarity. The chance to become part of a practice — with all of its history, ideology, languages, norms and values, personalities, conferences — is an invigorating process. Embodyi…
✓ Scale
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Not knowing a heck of a lot about solenoids in practice — I know what they do, and, as an example of the sometimes impracticality of higher-ed, am fairly fluent in the E&M principles at work here. But, when it comes to the practical matter of finding one with the necessary “umph” to articulate a simple controller’s…
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I’ve been pondering a comment Michal Migurski made on Adam Greenfield’s blog about how hard hardware is (he says how easy software is, but in the context of doing hardware)
✓ Peculiar Dog Driving Practices and Other Mobile Daring-Do
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Definitely not a viable near future human social practice, especially with gas approaching its inevitable $5 USD per gallon prices, here in the US. This non-staged dog driving was seen recently in Lima Peru in the Barranco district, which reminds me of New York City’s Upper East Side (aka “Planet of the Apes” bizzar…
✓ Pre-Columbian Internet Geography
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This photograph is my second “Truman Show” moment, near the end of day four of walking the Inca Trail, with this bit of exposed infrastructure along the seam where mountain meets trail. An abrupt reminder that the trail is maintained in the contemporary sense, pretty much exclusively for visitors using it as I was —…
✓ Functionally Finished Architecture
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Some curious structures and dwellings seen in the very touristy town of Agua Caliente, which serves as the out-and-about place just at the base of the mountain where Machu Picchu rests. The town is under heavy construction for nice, small refined hotel rooms for tourists to stay in comfort. There are many hostels tu…
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A persistent architectural geometry in the Andes, theorized to be resistant to damage from Earthquakes. All evidence indicates it mostly works.
✓ Playstation 2 Logic Analysis
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Back for a bit to the world of prototyping peculiar Near Future kinds of things. I’m still working through this anti-game controller, game controller to do some experiments in alternative sorts of mobile interfaces for traditional game devices.
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A peculiar bit of 1×1 white pixel space seen on the Pacific Coast Highway this morning. I must’ve driven by this sign a hundred times and never noticed.
✓ Security
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Security in Peru is all over the place. I don’t know much about the history of things that may cause security concerns — I can imagine — but it’s like driving through a neighborhood with lots of bars on residence windows and security grates in front of retailers. Here, police and militia toting automatic weapons tel…
✓ Companion Species Study Group
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Another human peculiar but pervasive human social practice. The introductory manual would be this “Poodles for Dummies” book. I would also recommend these two slightly more advanced instruction books, “When Species Meet” and “The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness” both by my old Ph…
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Enterprising vendors in Cusco selling mostly music in bulk. 5 Soles (about $2.50USD) gets you 3 or 4 CDs or DVDs. Vendors have their CD players nearby to confirm the validity of their wares.
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So, just a brief overview here of the Logicport Logic Analyzer and it’s top-line features and set-up. When I set out to figure this thing out, I took a decent “known” set-up that was running a not terribly complicated, but still useful protocol — SPI. As it happens, the Playstation 2 communication between its contro…
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..respectfully. I’m an engineer, too, who is learning Design. But these sorts of things — not done on purpose of course — reveal the seams between purely functional and designed-with-love. This isn’t fun. It works. It gets the job done. But it’s robotron to the point of disrespectfully, especially nowadays. I could…
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I’m generally not a rush-rush guy when it comes to airline travel. If find it useful to take a bit of a time buffer between deplaning and entering the real-world of transfers, taxis, trains, learning to negotiate maps, figuring out where the hotel is, sorting my head out, and to shake off the stiffness of barely hum…
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Found this in Tiger, a designer-y inspired bric-a-brac shop in Copenhagen for 10DKK (about $5USD), a prescient little device that allows you to monitor your UV exposure when outside trying to have fun sailboarding and stuff. What I find curious here is the way the packaging simply avoids the unspoken hazard of this…
✓ Alex Galloway's "Kriegspiel"
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Alex Galloway came by to do a short talk discussing his new game “Kriegspiel” based on Guy Debord’s “The Game of War” This is a curious strategy game that Debord created while in the midst of a bit of a creative flat-spin. It was created in an artisinal mode, with 5 hand crafted editions constructed with a collabora…
✓ Design As Consumption and Cannibalism
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Yesterday François Bar came by the design studio to chat. He offered a perspective on a technology that made it impossible to believe the instrumentalists perspective. What we off-handedly refer to as “technology” is always about social institutions and cultural practices and never any less. It is no more “neutral”…
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How do you find the spirit and play of exploration in an optimized geography?
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John Marshall over at Designed Objects has ben teaching a studio design course he titles “Post-Optimal Objects” with the convenient acronym POO. These are projects that are exploratory and self-critical in a sense. They skirt between what Marshall says is fine art and design so as to address approaches for developin…
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Time for the next chapter. Shortly, I’ll be officially joining a fantastic little studio within Nokia Design called Design Strategic Projects. It’s a studio of very clever, insightful and thoughtful designers and researchers. It’s a playground of big ideas, and plenty of support to work them through. There are some…
✓ Video Game Makers Favor Diversion over Depth
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Ian Bogost is featured in this NPR story on video games — entertaining diversions or substantial implication-rich forms of creativity? There’s no one answer, only conversations around this topic. With the video game industry proclaiming that it is all grown up (110%+ growth in the last year, etc), the “industry” wil…
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A cordon of "road turtes" repositioned to define an area for a vendor’s cart of refreshing fruit cups. The road turtles stake out an informal, semi-permanent "home" for the vendor’s cart, but closer to permanent in that they’re nailed into the softer material between the broad cobblestones that make up the street. I…
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A variety of curious improvisatory object holders found within unexpected and retrofitted interstices.
✓ Re-Write Infrastructure — Diablitos Instantiated
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Seen in San Miguel de Allende, a re-routed, altered infrastructures adapted to more convenient, local activities. They are, according to one commentor here, "Diablitos" — little devils. In portugal they are "gato," according to Younghee. Both are idioms for illegally drawn electric cables. Here an overhead mains lin…
✓ Reverso
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A hand-painted sign marking this restaurant/bar, curious reversed. I puzzled over this — it seemed not particularly in keeping with the generally sensible and utilitarian graphic design of most everything else in San Miguel de Allende. This seemed to have a peculiar sensibility that serves no specific purpose other…
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Advertising services for a handyman, improvising placement and using available/upcycled materials — in this case, a paper sleeve for a compact disc.
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Some saran-wrapped pre-market cars convoy up the PCH. They’re all heavily instrumented — you can see instrument fittings and computers inside. Each has a driver and some kind of tech dude in the passenger seat.
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Found in a university class room is this very peculiar bricolage of interface stylings. I can see this as either four deliberately distinct interfaces — and therefore entirely transparent as to its utility because each separate interface does its own thing. Or completely baffling and, aesthetically, dyspeptic becaus…
✓ [Event] Biggest Visual Power Show — Los Angeles May 17
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The Biggest Visual Power Show is an intellectual spectacle blending a conference and a pop concert. BVPS mixes movies and live performance, morphs physical experiences into virtual imagination.
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Today in London Rhys Newman presented the studio’s "Homegrown" project to an audience of 150 journalists. Rhys is part of the newly minted Design Strategic Projects studio that I will be joining in a few weeks.
✓ PDPal — Mapping Without Terrain
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“To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square meters of it… tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory. And with these, the sense of the worldís c…
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Curious expressions of status through social practices. For those unfamiliar with the kind of bumper sticker — for which this instance is an ironic, long-overdue kick in the ass — they typically will express how well one’s child has performed in school, or sport, or other cultural affair for which parents can be pro…
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Not the most exciting thing, but an interesting challenge here. I’m trying to get a Parallax Propeller chip to behave nicely as an TWI/I2C slave with the idea that I’d like to create a pretty much black-box interface that’ll allow a TWI/I2C master to control it for stuff. Ultimately I’d like to use the Propeller in…
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A couple of curious vanity plates seen in rapid succession. The inconsistency between the sentiment expressed in the vanity plate and the sensibilities, politics and mythology/religion captured in these particular vehicle’s brand culture seems almost diametrically opposed.
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Persistent nagging problem — shifting logic levels between devices that are fabbed with different technologies so their voltages end up being different. Digital circuits “trigger” based on voltage levels — a logic 1 or high signal is relative to the electrical specifications of the device and the fabrication process…
✓ Sketching From Ideas to Material
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Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands is an important piece on the ways that “sketching” in hardware can become a way to invigorate a relationship between creativity and materiality. It features some friends from the Sketching ’08 workshop that I was at a few weeks back at RISD. (Link to some stuff.)
✓ Refining
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I’m getting closer to have a second prototype of the PSX project. Strangely, I seem to be building the breadboard prototype (lower image) simultaneous with the PCB prototype (the thing on top). I think the breadboard prototype is mostly for working on the firmware for the Propeller, which is going better than I had…
✓ History of Consciousness Hiring
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My UCSC Grad Program, History of Consciousness, is hiring, Associate or Full Professor level. It’s the only interdisciplinary program of its kind, with a strong reputation for critical thinking both inside and outside of academia. This is the first hire since I was there from 1993-95, when I served on the graduate s…
✓ Timing
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Next step, testing the PCB edition of the PSX. I’m back to using a slow, low STK500 to do some debugging. Now that the firmware is fairly well squared away, most of the debugging is either a poorly solder-pasted pin (knock-wood).
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Lift Asia will be happening in a couple of weeks and I encourage you to attend if you are at all able to. (I promised myself Ars Electronica this year, which conflicts, unfortunately.) The line-up is a fantastic list of creative all-stars, as well as what sounds like a great queue of “locals” from Korea. This is an…
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This was a peculiar sequence captured while waiting for the uptown N in New York City. This gentleman was enjoying a bit of mobile computing, composing something there while waiting for the train. I thought that in itself was intriguing — I suppose it’s not all that surprising. But, I was quite surprised that, when…
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Very interesting work that Jan Chipchase and Younghee Jung have been involved in that they call “open studio.” The design approach is quite intriguing as it involves participation from on-the-ground “locals” given a particular question and allowed the freedom to explore possibilities — however preposterous it might…
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One often sees improvised power in urban contexts. Whether the “Diablitos” in Mexico or “Gato” in Portugal, tapping into the local power grid, usually from a street lamp, is pretty standard urban improvisation.
✓ One More Thing — Design, Theory, Practice and the Future of Scholarship
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A topic near and dear to my heart, and I’m glad to rattle off some pecha kucha thoughts on this topic.
✓ 21_21 Design Sight Exhibition
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On Paul’s suggestion I went to the “XXI Century man” Exhibition 3 at 21_21 Design Sight in Roppongi. The exhibition theme was about the challenges posed to “man” (us living here in this world) eight years into the millennium. The question posed is where are we headed, now that we live in the century once hailed as t…
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Carriers trail slime. Every bill I get for my iPhone has the evil smell of burnt sulfur. The carriers will die eventually — either that, or they’ll transform themselves or, more than likely, be run out of town by smarter, more people-centric enablers of networked sociality. Until then, though — most of us are stuck…
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Maintenance in an urban setting, scraping the bits of hardened gum and goo that inevitably find their way downward. There was an interesting dance around this worker that isn’t quite captured here, with the transitory swarms of Shibuya. People indirectly registering this diligent and slow worker amongst their own sw…
✓ Playful Water, Hydrophobic Plates
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Kotaro Watanabe is a seriously crafty design engineer at takram. He created this really nice water project that was exhibited at 21_21 Design Sight during their last exhibition titled “Water.” These paper plates have been made super hydrophobic using a compound that completely changes the behavior we normally expect…
✓ Studio Visit at "dividual" and A Slow Conversation
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Spent a very cool conversational show-and-tell-y bit of time with dividual’s Dominick Chen and Takumi Endo at their new cozy studio digs. I guess Paul connected us last minute, which is basically how this whole trip has been, which is fine.
✓ Exit Strategies. UCLA Design Media Arts 2008 MFA Exhibition
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Took a jaunt through the UCLA Design Media Arts MFA 2nd Year MFA Thesis Show this evening, titled “Exit Strategies.” There were a couple of pieces that stood out to me in the exhibition, which ranged from rather cerebral to playful, all with a good scoop of design sensibilities. There was a good range of work here a…
✓ 7.5 Rules for Working Together
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Honm Friebe is an economist and journalist and one of the managing directors of Zentralen Intelligenz Agentur in Berlin.
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It’s curious to think about eateries in time-context rather than categories of food types. In this case late night workers, people out after bar-hopping, people who just don’t cook at home and have midnight cravings. The neighborhood here is somewhat borderline in terms of its geography. It’s several blocks from a u…
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What I’m coming to understand is the relationship between art, technology and design as one in which the different idioms of very distinct and displinary practices can be brought together..or not. My insights are not as thorough as yours and more driven by intuition and insight through process and projects. My own d…
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While in Japan and discussing design and the implications it can create around action and thought. Nothing mystical, but maybe..For example, the Zero Waste charger scooting around the Design Strategic Projects studio. The design of the activation button which starts a charge cycle that is constrained by time, to acc…
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Here in Venice, where there is a tight housing market (but not unaffected by the current deep downturn), if you want to knock down the ugly old and put up your new janga-box architectural, but don’t want to hassle with the permissions to do a new construction, you can leave one wall standing and call the project a r…
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“Fresh” fruit sold in a posh Tokyo Midtown supermarket. Brilliant symmetries and perfections and curious delicate packing. Sorted and curated specimens. At dinner that night, I was told that Japan basically imports all of its fruit, so it becomes rather like something precious. Perhaps the plastic/foam packaging imp…
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A worthwhile challenge for designers — learn how to learn. Self-evident, but I’m just sayin’. Learning the particulars of the mechanics, engineering, materials — what is often waved-off as “technology” — of the objects designed has more value than one might think at first. It’s a bit brutal at times, and daunting, a…
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The Service and UI Design within Nokia Design – is expanding, and they’ve got jobs going in Palo Alto and Helsinki/Espoo for both visual and interaction designers. You’d be working directly with Chris, Adam, Younghee and Raph, and just along the org chart from Jan and myself and the rest of the Design Strategic Proj…
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Nicolas’ post the other day got me thinking. After my first job as an engineer, I wanted to find ways to do work that had more direct implications for people. I found things like Human Factors, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Human Interaction. They had the word “human” in them, so I figured this was the engine…
✓ Theory, Practice — Art Design — Technology
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I did a Pecha Kucha style presentation on some developing thoughts on the relationships between theory and practice, and the role of a hybrid, multiple art-design-technology approach to creating and circulating culture and knowledge. “Making things” can happen in lots of ways. I’ve tried two — engineering and art. A…
✓ Short Keys and Sheep Throwing
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A hardwired, buttoned residue indicating the essentials. Some archaic (I still wince when someone, often a lawyer, asks me to send a Fax), and some now have become so vague as to be nearly meaningless in context — “Internet”?? “Extras”?? And a “Tel” short-key? Still working through interfaces for people. Close, but…
✓ Display
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A variety of metal foil etched displays. These are super thin displays designed to be used in things like smart cards and credit cards, or laminated onto some other small, light weight device. Curious how the 8-segment displays feel a bit ancient, like old calculators.
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A night out at a fancy Brazilian restaurant in Beverly Hills. The main interface instruments here are the card that can be turned to the green side for “bring me meat” or the red side for “pause..” Judicious control keeps a patron from a serious bout of indigestion. It’s very game-like, this experience. As soon as t…
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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.
✓ Salt Air
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One block from the Pacific the salt air takes its toll on a janky table and set of chairs. Venice Beach is very much in transformation, gentrifying even with the housing crisis in full-swing. One finds way over priced homes right next to mid-century cottages with piles of junk in the front yard and newspaper for win…
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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…
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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.
✓ Ambient Power Consumption Monitoring
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
✓ Near Future Laboratory Interns
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Looking to participate in some of the Laboratory projects? We have 2 Internship and 1 Staff Researcher Positions in Los Angeles, or in the Network. Please send inquires (a portfolio as a PDF, preferably and a short statement of your interests and aspirations) to us at hiring at nearfuturelaboratory dot com. We’re sp…
✓ DS1803 Digital Potentiometer
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I’ve been fussing with this digital potentiometer, the DS1803 by Maxim. They’re “digital” because you can control the resistance over its range programmatically, by sending it commands over a 2-Wire (I2C/TWI) serial interface. So, that means that I can hook it up to some microcontroller, like the Arduino, and adjust…
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So, this is my analog version of a playful Playstation 2 controller for the PSX project — the one that slows the analog part of the controller down over time so, you know..when I’m playing Katamari Damacy it’s a bit more realistic that the Prince gets tired or during GTA, my guy actually gets tired from running away…
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At these points, technical and quotidian language practices just crack wide open the smooth pavement of the information superhighway. I personally notice way more bumps than gentle curving highway. It’s either me, or the infrastructure is giving way.
✓ PSX (With Propeller) — Digital Edition
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So, feels just a little bit like converting religions or something, but I’ve started looking into other kinds of microcontrollers for practical reasons as well as to just generally expand what sits in my prototyping sketchpad. I’ve been curious about the Parallax Propeller, which has a multi-processor (they call the…
✓ Einar's "Adventures in Urban Computing"
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Einar Sneve Martinussen reports on the completion of his thesis project "Adventures in Urban Computing" from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. I’ve been peripherally following his work ever since we first met when I was at the AHO for a NordiCHI workshop on near-field communication.
✓ Eliasson
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Further to Chris’ post — I found Hans Ulrich Obrist & Olafur Eliasson: The Conversation Series to be last week’s best quick-read. (Actually, I guess it was last’s weeks only quick-read, if I don’t count reading 1/2 of Austin Grossman’s cleverly sardonic “Soon I Will be Invincible”. Anyway.)
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Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams…The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowledge and a means of action. Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Thei…
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(Some cartogram structures and linkages Pascal created as sensor maps where the geography is an implied and driven — rather than the driving — parameter.)
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Elevator usage norms expressed through ascension and descension protocols. Conservation — of energy and, also, presumably time as there is a single elevator for what is likely a busy, academic building (student’s bustling at peak moments when classes begin/end.)
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Sketching ’08 held at RISD’s Industrial Design facilities. 45 folks who, for all intents and purposes, live in the near future — doing the things that will likely become conventional in a few or five years. We convene annually to share insights, thoughts, projects and approaches to doing design, technology and art a…
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A few interesting contrasts here. This is the sort of expression of familial/local pride that seems particularly New England-y, not to mention the fascinating and huge Safe and Vault store. The contrast of material, rather than digital, protected storage is curious, and the fact that there is a store to sell vaults…
✓ Thoughtless Acts — Improvised Holsters
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Shuttling around San Francisco in a cab, I found this intriguing set of improvised holders for a mobile phone and a bluetooth headset. California just began enforcing a law requiring that drivers use a hands-free device when they take a call while in the car. Anecdotally, we’ve seen many people continue to hold the…
✓ Near Future Laboratory Top 15 Criteria That Define Interactive or New Media Art
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The Julianipedia entry for “New/Interactive Media Art” has been finalized by the guys and gals on the editorial floor here at the Near Future Laboratory officeplex. After several years of review, discussions with leading experts and practitioners we’re finally ready to release our conclusions. And what better place…
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Redundancy norms here for restricted access areas, using variations in human language, which is just good to CYA, plus English twice, just in case.
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Timo et al Mediamatic have created a superb physical instantiation of safety in an era when the network leaks rather perniciously into the physical world. Their RFID safe enclosure protects your near-field communication objects from being scanned by faulty equipment or data muggers discretely consuming the swarms of…
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Okay, an algorithm for creating conceptual train wrecks. Think of something that normal humans do. Add a hyphen and then the word “computing.” Wait for lots of new devices and ideas to appear that require batteries, a USB cable or network jack, a deployed call center in Bangelore and few new entries in Wikipedia. Hi…
✓ Old Mapping Alternatives and New Metaphors, Please
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Some curious alternatives and conscious decisions made around map materials. When do we chose the local tourist map that has down-res’d nonessential features and up-res’d features more on the mind of weekenders, such as the location of airport, town squares, likely museums and sites? How do the fancy digital alterna…
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A curious and relevant overhead slide — lovely for its low-tech — seen at the recent “Everyday Digital Money” symposium at UC Irvine. Absent the usury virus, economics looses lots of fluff and gets back to basic human fundamentals for living in the world. By itself, the graph tells a rather vague story — never got t…
✓ GPS 9000
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Anticipating the less-than-lovely side of ubiquitous computing scenarios, this photo is the end point of a circuitous GPS navigation FAIL on the way to relatives for Thanksgiving dinner last week. Looks like we’re driving into the river there. After what we went through, it wouldn’t surprise me if the GPS lady sent…
✓ Practice Observed: Secure Improvisations
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Improvisation enacted to overcome a secured door that is probably the most often used in the studio, sitting near to the kitchen and coffee machines (and the sadly defunct espresso machine..) A stapler used to keep a door open helps one poor sould evades the secure RFID lock. Likely, their secure card was left on th…
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Tending to the digital garden here, replacing a small-oldish laptop hard drive (90 GB) for a larger one (320 GB). Going through this ritual made me think about what gets old and how things begin to fail, or need to be retired, or stored for the winter, or, like the roses in our backyard, deadheaded.. In this case, I…
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Continuing on my strange pursuit of designing weird interfaces that disrupt conventional game interaction rituals, I put together a bit more of my “PSX” project. You probably don’t recall, but this is the project where I’ve created a little “dongle” that can fool a PS2 (or Playstation 3, as it turns out..) into thin…
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Seen in the "Funplex" — a warning sign that prepares those not used to losing that they may in fact obtain nothing for their time and perhaps even lose something in exchange for the token they use to have a whirl at the crane game (try and hoist out a bundle of tickets which can be used to get things – mostly crap —…
✓ Workshop on Pervasive Advertising
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It amazes me how non-relevant this topic is, particularly nowadays when there can be little reason to entice a consumer to engage in letting loose of whatever cash they may have. By the time we get out of the current morass of mistrust, misspending and misguided expectations of a world where all the growth graphs go…
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I swear to GOD this is a friend’s “sig” line in her emails (she’s the hardest working IT person at a university department with lots of whining, illegal-software-downloading, computer-breaking-and-never-fixing, softdrink-drinking-right-by-fancy-computer-equipment students, so I have complete sympathy.)
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Shorthand code, accepted by convention and practice. Minivan. For sale. Call this number to discuss. Oftentimes a price will appear in grease pencil like this, along with the number. Here, just a dollar sign, as if written in haste and without consideration as to price.
✓ Tipped.
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Photographic recollection of an accident that happened a few minutes before I cleaned it up. In the studio, morning — reaching to my left, I knocked over my coffee which did a fairly good job of soaking a couple of things. No biggie, except that what surprised me most was the failure of my peripheral vision and prop…
✓ Visual Design and Mitigation Strategy
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A variety of rules designed to mitigate accidents and loss of limb at a local bouncy-park, for kids. And people within certain height boundaries. And people above a certain weight. And people inclined to rough play. And people who may end up tumbling or flipping. And..
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For Russell’s speculative modelling provocation, I was sent a Hornby Jubilee Clock Tower. I quote Mr. Davies:
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There are many facets to art-technology and its exhibition. This was seen at the splendid “Future Imaginaries” exhibition at the Ben Maltz gallery at Otis College of Art and Design. I eagerly await Norman Klein (pictured gesturing to Lev Manovich who is assessing an audio focus rig) and Andreas Kratky’s forthcoming…
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There’s something heart-warming about the simplicity of a bundle of fresh bread product and news printed on paper. The whiplash of life, reactions to the times perhaps, moves towards paper, simplicity, tangible trusted objects like a foursome of Pretzel Bread and ink on news paper.
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After passing by this a couple of times walking back from Venice Beach, I can’t help but wonder if this Pepsi advertisement is an allusion to the Obama victory. Without clearly saying so, it may be. I suppose knowing when it went up might help, if I were that interested. in any case, I can’t think of what else in th…
✓ Interactivos – Medialab-Prado
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I’m off to Medialab-Prado where I’ll be participating in the Garage Science, their International Workshop-Seminar that includes an intensive project development workshop (January 28 through February 14, 2009) and a seminar with lectures and public theoretical works presentations (January 28 and 29, 2009). Both the p…
✓ Workflow
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Cross off one goal on the list of things for 2009. I’ve managed to create a rugged imaging work flow which has all the characteristics of an over-wrought, over-the-top Balkan bureaucracy. Nevertheless, it works for me for the time being, although I’m fairly certain there’s a quagmire of snafus and lost data lurking…
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Ian Bogost‘s and his Persuasive Games operation have introduced an iPhone game called JetSet — a curious little gem that situates specific locations as the enforced zone for game play.
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Well, I’ll be sad to miss Lift in Geneva this year. Really sad. But, you shouldn’t be, so I suggest you go if you can, especially if you’re close by anyway, to mitigate large carbon foot stomps. It’ll be a great line up as always, with some great workshops, including this one with Vlad Trifa and Alexandra Alexandra…
✓ Garage Science Conclusions and Implications
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No almost back to the Laboratory after a fantastic week in Madrid at Medialab Prado where I was helping run their annual Interactivos workshop/activityshop. This one happened along with Critical Art Ensemble and, of course, all the fine folks at Medialab Prado.
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This came up in the studio..errr…I think it was a studio BBQ. Mr Newman pondered – what about thoughtful acts?
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Been thinking about the relationship between things over-burdened, trying to do too many things at once, and the elegance and simplicity inherent in doing one thing, and doing it very well. I get a bit miffed and muddled about long lists of features on most any consumer gadget, especially things like telephones and…
✓ Eric Paulos' Open Disruption
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This is the most important thing you will read this year if you have any interest in or passion for ubicomp, design, making-things. I’ll quote a bit, then send you to the source. Eric wrote this on the centenary of The Futurist Manifesto, bringing these sensibilities into the context of ubicomp in particular, but I…
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The Valley and The Sky, Sascha Pohflepp’s RCA dissertation, just now released into the wild’s of the networked jungle. A dissertation about California’s technology culture between idealism, business and futures for design. Submitted to Critical Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art in October 2008.
✓ The Map Is Here For You To Use
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Departing Madrid early on a Sunday morning, I found this paper map of the Metro, tucked neatly within the seams of a pre-fab wall, ready for re-use. I wondered, who was on their way out of Madrid, thinking that they could not in good conscience throw away their worn map, looking about for a way to pass it along to a…
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For anyone who hasn’t watched the amusing trekumentary How William Shatner Changed the World — please, treat yourself. It come back and forth to my mind as I hammer out some of the contours of design fiction thinking and practices.
✓ Convergence CfP — Special Issue on Digital Cultures and California: Extended Submission Deadline
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This call invites submissions for a special issue related to and about digital cultures of California. Internationally, California is a phenomenon in terms of its relationship to creating, consuming and reflecting upon the era of digital technologies. From the legendary garage entrepreneurs, to the multi-billion dol…
✓ Patron Identification Protocols
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In a busy, bustling hipster bar called The Alibi Room in Culver City California, you’ll get a magician-sized playing card to identify you as the party who ordered two flights of spicy pork korean BBQ tacos, fries and a couple of pints of girlie beer. (That’s the same bar that was once much rougher, less hip, where y…
✓ Piemonte Share Festival — "Manufacturing"
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Super excited. Next week on Saturday at 2pm I will be speaking at the Share Festival in Torino.
✓ Urban Computing As Fried Eggs
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Via Fabien on the 7.5th Floor, I came across an illustration by Karen Martin starting to map the field of Urban Computing. It’s not a field, of course — closer to a large set of intersecting practices and broader disciplines swirling about those practices. Two things to be said. First about visualizations and illust…
✓ What Is Manufacturing in the Era of Design-Art-Technology?
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(Essay for Share Festival Catalog 2008)
✓ Crossing all the wires: Cultural Engineering and Electrical Theory?
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In order to do interdiscplinary work, it is not enough to take a ‘subject’ (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a new object, which belongs to no one. Roland Barthes in “The Rustle of Language”(1)
✓ What You Model Is What You Get — Some Design Notes
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"..the next order of business is to define design. The great American modernist Charles Eames offered the following: ‘A plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose’ (Eames, 1972). This definition situates design as a problem-solving discipline, with problems here defined and sol…
✓ Technologies of Kindness and Cruelty
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Ack. This is one that drives me a little batty. Technology — friend or foe? Well, neither, of course. It’s how the technology is used that determines its normative dimensions. Right?
✓ Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction
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This is the essay "Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction," which explores the concept of design fiction, or one of the drafts of it, I’ve lost track. Probably the canonical take on it is much of the substance of the book, “The Manual of Design Fiction,” which you can find in the Near Future Laboratory..
✓ Design Fiction / Science Fiction
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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.”
✓ Stifo@Sandberg Moving Movie Industry
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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…
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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…
✓ Self Explanatory: Street Level User Interface
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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…
✓ Institute for the Future: Blended Realities Fall Technology Exchange
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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…
✓ Drift Deck (Analog Edition) Card Art
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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…
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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…
✓ Ubicomp is like a 5 year old wishing for a pink pony
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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…
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There’s a story here. The bottle smashed on the ground is a lovely blue-green glass with a Sake label of some sort on it, probably from the pocket-sized Sake specialty store 10 meters or so back down the block. I don’t know if the smashed bottle, and the janky protective garbage bag over the driver’s side window her…
✓ Mobile Defense and Chinatown Cobbler
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Curious strategy for preventing bumper dings — a bumper for the bumper, you might say. It’s the Mobile De-fender. (Get it? De Fender?) You will see material like this for preventing a lower category of bump, such as a “light tap” from negotiating a tricky parallel parking job, or even the deliberate tap to inch a ca…
✓ GPX to DXF – Drawing GPS Tracks
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It has not been a quiet couple of days here in the Laboratory. Lots of gear and glassware about. Goggles, bunsen burners and all that sort of thing. And the report draft was just finished with Nicolas Nova, which occupied many early mornings. We almost spilled an organic, but toxic material on the draft which cause…
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I think I figured out why I enjoy this map by Jack Schulze and Matt Webb — it can possibly induce vertigo, which means it’s human, real and embodied. The rolling coasting perspective that deliberately distorts the island of Manhattan shows the city from a fixed point of view, but still showing no horizon. The map is…
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This is probably old hat for current New Yorkers certainly, and something that makes visits home really interesting, these street furnishings and people zones are incredible interventions and nice experiments about alternative urban landscaping. When arriving in Times Square with my brother for a quick screech throu…
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A curious urban mountain or boulder of some sort. I think there’s a story behind this concrete lump, but I’m not 100% sure. It could be some sort of street furniture, or perhaps an accident that occurred while concrete was being poured and no one cleaned it up?
✓ Urban Historical Infrastructure Layers
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Three curious examples of a kind of infrastructural sedimentation, found in New York City and Brooklyn. The first one shows a broken portion of a (ugly) sign that had been placed over the original art deco style lettering on a behemoth post office. The next is a (ugly) fancy condominium module that has been plopped…
✓ Design Leadership — How Design Thinks?
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A short piece by RISD VP of Media + Partners Becky Bermont in the Harvard Business Review Blog describes her experiences learning about the way design can contribute to how business does what it does. Despite the reference to designers as “experience perfectionists” who want to arrange the music in a room to enhance…
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An interesting article in the Harvard Business Review that I came across recently. It is relevant to a long-standing interest in other strategies for “innovation” particularly in commercial enterprises.
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Yes, an old original iPhone car charger and…what’s this? The iPhone 3Gs cannot take the same charging accessories as the iPhone original!? So..basically the introduction of something new forces something old to be tossed out? Maybe there’s something that can be done with the old charger, but, I mean…really? Is this…
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Two curious examples of “everything-ness.” The first is this “Everything Electrical” company which does, well — everything having to do with electrical installations and so forth. They also have these interesting trucks which are made to be easily loaded and off-loaded at work sites or at the warehouse. I like this…
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I’m not an out-and-out anti-surveillance person. I enjoy observations, especially one’s involving image-making. When you can’t have a conversation with the man behind the curtain, or the observations are not easily accessible for review, comment, dispute, etc., something may be quite wrong, then.
✓ Practice Observed: Designed For Rest And Activity
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Where I live there are quite a number of transient mobile home dwellers. I don’t know quite what the history of this is — I’m intrigued and only imagine at this point. It will take a more concerted effort to discover the larger story of why many people come here with their mobile homes and trailers, park them on the…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: The Interlaced Histories of Star Trek & Mobile Phones
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A mobile phone, functional of course, designed by colleague Andrew Gartrell.
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Here are some visuals and notes from the current UCLA DMA MFA Exhibition, 2009.
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Cylon Hybrids "Tweet" Prophecy or Prattle
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BSG Twitter Hybrid from Julian Bleecker on Vimeo.
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Everybody needs Money. That’s why they call it Money. (From “Heist” by David Mamet. Danny DeVito playing Mickey Bergman.)
✓ Design Fiction at Belgrade Design Week 2009
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Our friends from NONOBJECT, the studio in Palo Alto that is working on the NONOBJECT book of designed objects meant to provoke reconsiderations as to what things are, will be participating in the Belgrade Design Week 2009 this next week. Wish we could be there but in any case, if you attend, be sure to look out for…
✓ Laboratories, Accelerometers And Kitchen Crockery
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We’ve been out of the Laboratory proper — the place where things are constructed and soldered and heated up — for a bit now, not because we don’t go in there, or we haven’t been doing things that will go in there. No, rather, or because of a variety of curiosities that have attracted our attention and, in that way,…
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Scales of things and their relationships. A curious moment while out on a weekend’s Urban Scout, with these bicyclists, who could fit into the Smart Car that could fit into the ridiculous, shameless Hummer SUV. This scene reminded me of the image of relatives scales of occupancy between the same number of people, on…
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Used to be that “cash only” was a mark of something “under the table” or “off the books” — a way to pay for a service without raising the attention of the authorities (like the tax accessor). With a “above board” “on the books” transaction, records are kept which can be looked through to determine if one or the othe…
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A typically baroque arrangement of elements, found at a large house on the perimeter of Koreatown in Los Angeles – by the measures I have heard, the largest population of Korean ex-pats/speakers-of-Korean/culturally-identifying-as-Korean/&c. outside of Korea itself. (The variation I have heard, too — “outside of Seo…
✓ Chalkbot Versus GraffitiWriter…Round One! Ready….FIGHT!
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From the Laboratory’s Bureau of Historical Precedence comes this dispatch: A colleague here in the studio, in a thread about Jeremy Wood’s GPS Drawing mentioned this ChalkBot robot that Nike has deployed to help promote, well — cancer awareness with the Lance Armstrong tie-in and itself by extension — at the Tour de…
✓ Conflux Festival 2009 Call Proposals
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Conflux is having their 6th annual Conflux Festival! The deadline for submissions is soon — August 15th. At last year’s Conflux we brought our “Drift Deck” technology and had a swell time! Several years back, we did WiFiKu — we walked the streets of New York City neighborhoods and digitally scanning for the names of…
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Finally, Objectified came to Los Angeles for a night. The Laboratory was a bit eager and a bit fan-boy-y. Some stages of hunger for the stories perspective and objectives of design, broadly. We felt like a small transition was made — there was a joke that the Laboratory “got”; there were personalities we recognized…
✓ Call for Artists — Locative Cinema Commission
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From the Passing Useful Things Through Division, this one came from curatorial chum Steve Dietz:
✓ Companion Species Training Game
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I found out about this Nintendo DS game from Kevin who found out about it from Russell. I literally just got it yesterday, but it’s pretty exciting to see. I can only imagine in my head out the play dynamics unfold, but I’ll be playing with it and have some more thoughts before long.
✓ LIS302DL. A 3 Axis Accelerometer
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Ooooh. Those code jockeys in the Laboratory have been mucking about in the ol’ locker room, giving each other rat-tails, chucking firecrackers in the halls and having a good horsin’ around. Smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap booze. Everything. Stink bombs in the girl’s room. Whatever. It’s a regular Lord of the F…
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This isn’t bad and its not a BSOD rant. Only, well — I guess it is in a matter of speaking. Perhaps not quite an instance of atemporality but there was a bit of a dizzy feeling I got when this crap computer I use every so often told me to call my hardware vendor. Who the heck is that, to start with?
✓ Upcoming essay on the asynchronous city
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Via Nicolas — Upcoming piece about the asynchronous city:
✓ Experiment With A Bird In The Air-Pump
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Last visit to London, I made a quick stop at the National Gallery in London to see this for real, Joseph Wright of Darby’s “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump”, which has relevance for me from my work and interests in the history and social studies of science. This was one of those odd tourist-y moments for me,…
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This weekend, I was at this un-conference, event, workshop called The Overlap in the misty Pacific Grove along the coast of California near Monterey. It’s a mix of designers and self-described business types and some who were both, mixing it up with a variety of loosely structured “technologies” to explore, test, pr…
✓ Digital Blur: Stories from the Edge of Creative Design Practice
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Cribbed from John Marshall’s Designed Objects blog, he and I contributed a short, analytic essay on inter/trans/undisciplinarity as it pertains to design practices for this book — Digital Blur: Stories from the Edge of Creative Design Practice. The book is forthcoming in September-ish I am told and contains a collec…
✓ National Science Foundation Creative "IT" RFP
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Funding Opportunities from the National Science Foundation CreativeIT Program
✓ Drama, Boredom, Simply Infovisualized
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A sketch in 2D of real life as David Sivers reflects on remarks and a drawing done at a talk by Kurt Vonnegut where he is explaining his perspective on why people like drama. The conclusion, summarily: life is boring and without change. Drama brings that rollercoaster ride into our experience. And, if I remember my…
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This is a nice, succinct reflection on the characteristics of cities, and the characteristics personally likable by David Byrne, titled David Byrne’s Perfect City. Worth the quick read. The short essay also serves as a reminder for the new Byrne book, Bicycle Diaries.
✓ Incongruence Between Public & Private
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A private bathroom, introducing an element of the public with this urinal. Quite an incongruity, if you ask me.
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A curious interoperability protocol, wherein the address for some weird place in Seoul has been found on an iPhone and must now be entered into the GPS of the taxi. A simple affair, with minimal bumps often enough, particularly because the map on the iPhone shows the address and streets in Korean, which is great for…
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In the Itaewon neighborhood of Seoul, where every other store-keep on the main drag is trying to measure a tattered, soaked urban scout for a new suit, this garment was spied — a rather natty, silky, shiny shirt with a monogrammed cuff with another man’s name. Not an unusual fashion idiom — wearing someone else’s na…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Duncan Jones' "Moon"
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A short mention of this wonderful film “Moon”, which is presently in the theaters here and there. I quite enjoyed the production design — Tom Carden pointed me to the site of the designer who created the fictional environment, giving the film a particularly lonely and somewhat constrained feeling to it, a fellow cal…
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Found in the Itaewon neighborhood in Seoul — a tangled web of the old carted off to make way for the new. The muck and mess of an old building taken away and hidden off in a landfill or perhaps it will be smashed, melted and repurposed. That tangle could be good steel if redone. I can think of no more appropriate ph…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Modes of Surveillance in "Eagle Eye" and "The Final Cut"
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Design Fiction Chronicles: The Final Cut from Julian Bleecker on Vimeo.
✓ When Characters Cross: Extradiegetic Imbrication
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First off, I’m being tongue-in-cheek with the blog post title, so lower your weapons. And I’ll be brief. There are two things going on here.
✓ William H. Whyte Revisited: An Experiment With An Apparatus for Capturing Other Points of View
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Times Square Urban Living Room from Julian Bleecker. More Apparatus Videos.
✓ Ikky Futures — Back To The Futures on VHS Tape
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This arrived in the mail over a week ago and I just now managed to actually watch the thing, mostly because access to a VHS deck is not super easy. There are a few around the studio. Irony Number One: The first one I tried — which I tried because it appears to be connected via some piping of cables into a wall, prob…
✓ Lift Asia 09 Jeju Korea, Sept 17-18
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Just a short note about the Lift Asia 09 conference in a month, September 17-18 2009. I’ll be speaking on something to do with either minor undesired paternity notoriety or, perhaps more likely — building your own world to get the future you deserve.
✓ Pastiche, Scenarios, Design, Communication
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While rummaging through a stack of things read and to-be re-read, I came back across this curious paper by Mark Blythe and Peter Wright called “Pastiche Scenarios: Fiction as a Resource for Experience Centred Design”. I believe I was referred to while deep into this business of “design fiction.” It describes an appr…
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var so = new SWFObject(“http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser.swf”, “PictoBrowser”, “500”, “430”, “8”, “#E0E0E0”); so.addVariable(“source”, “sets”); so.addVariable(“names”, “LA Generative Procedural Maps”); so.addVariable(“userName”, “nearfuturelab”); so.addVariable(“userId”, “73737423@N00”); so.addVariable(“ids”, “7215…
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Ian Bogost flagged this one from the netherline — a curious visualization engine called “personas Web” used to create these kinds of colored bands that somehow represent and categorize me based on a comb through of the network, I assume. I might be projecting a bit, but it appears that the principle here is this: th…
✓ Pogoplug and The Rise of Network Fog
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Along with Augmented Reality, Cloud Computing seems to be one of the more thorough-going technology memes these days. The concept is consistent with the logic of the network. As bandwidth speeds level-up, and bandwidth costs go down (not free, just less, despite what Chris Anderson hypes) the asymptotic extreme appr…
✓ Eduardo Galeano Contemplates History's Paradoxes
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An intriguing short interview with the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano as he contemplates the various histories of the worlds over the past 5,000 years.
✓ SXSW 2010 Interactive Proposal – Design Fiction
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Fortuitously, the SXSW folks provided a brief window of opportunity for us delinquents to submit a panel proposal in the “Late” category of things. Which I have done on behalf of several of us kindred design fictionists. The panel proposal machine at SXSW is wonderfully constrained – 8 word titles, 50 word descripti…
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A brief post with a couple of pointers, mostly coming from a peculiar serendipity: A stack of The New Yorker often comes with me to be read during long periods where, otherwise, I would be staring at the back of someone else’s seat and head. Often times, when not on a long journey, sadly — these issues just pile up,…
✓ Bad Idea
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Design tactics from Imagination Lancaster at the Design Connexity conference dinner. Relevant to the Near Future Laboratory’s Bureau of Failures and Frack Ups.
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Running the blog-the-dog-eared-pages algorithm on Bruce Sterling‘s fantastic “Distraction“, I’ve selected these gems. They’re all intriguing speculations about a near future world to be, complete with some insights and implications that trace the now to the then if you think about how such moments, conversations, ob…
✓ Gradually Undisciplined. Stories Not Titles.
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Not directly in conversation, but in the topics that happen between people, especially when they share the same studio space (as well as the same city), Mr. Chipchase’s posting about his ACM CHI keynote had me dig this dispatch out of the “pending drafts” depot of the blog (where it’s been sitting since last year, p…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Aram Bartholl's Vision of Augmented Reality
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In discussions these days about Augmented Reality — really vintage high technology if there ever was such — I am reminded of Aram Bartholl‘s workshop and project WoW, which is quite relevant. For some reason — I suspect Freemason conspiracy of the highest order — Augmented Reality is making some sort of bid to regai…
✓ Reality Augmented: Birdsong Identification Tour
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Further to augmented reality and its discontents, I wonder if this sort of augmented experience might not suffice in many situations. Human-to-human interaction of some sort, high-fi, low-tech, or material that makes rough use of digital interfaces and technologies without fetishizing the technology and its inevitab…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Found Futures Image Testaments
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I don’t regularly read Wired, but I will occasionally flip to the “Found” back page which, according to words on the networks, is moving to the inevitable user-supplied content/contest model. In the meantime, our avuncular net BFF bruces found a collation of them, which are actually quite nice to look at all in one…
✓ Contextualising critical design: a classification of critical design practices
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Contexualising critical design was the title of a paper (I only heard the talk) by Matthew Malpass, a Ph.D. student in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University.
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No one should be allowed to do what they’re diploma (or whatever..) says, especially if they have three of those diplomas — e.g. BS, MS, Ph.D. all in Computer Science or whatever. Should be a law. The other law? Switch what you do every 3-5 years..really. Versatility & variety & polymathic approaches to doing things…
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Here a curious corner in a typical urban strip mall. First, the ubiquitous nail salon, this one in a roughly hewn, bumpy corner of Los Angeles. Immediately adjacent, not quite recto & verso, is the Live Scan “salon”, or shop of some sort for obtaining fingerprints. One side, the finger’s nails. The other side, the f…
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..when we are confronted with an apparently clear choice, sometimes the correct thing to do is choose the worst option, so that the thing may redeem itself, shedding its old skin and emerging in a new unexpected shape.
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The Near Future Laboratory’s Overseas Bureau of Avuncular Insights and Apropos Turns of Phrase found this clattering off the network’s teletypes — a wonderful short dispatch from Bruce Sterling referring in high-style to the challenges confronting our forward-facing resources for imagining new, near future worlds. S…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: The Stability of Food Futures
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Three ways observed recently to delivery food, in some sort of service stack hierarchy. Which got me thinking about food futures, generally. First, a sample of present food service and presentation protocols as depicted above.
✓ Follow Curiosity, Not Careers
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I’m feeling somewhat vindicated by the NYT opinion piece “End the University as We Know It” — a call for restructuring the old, creeky ways of the graduate university. The trajectory from graduate school to teaching positions is serpentine, at best. Specialization creates smaller and smaller communities of practice…
✓ Preposterous Scales of Time and Size
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A ridiculously quaint DB9 connector attached on the far end to some peculiar, but not-mini-USB connector. (Best as I can tell, the thing on the other end is a proprietary connector, but I’m prepared to be proved wrong. Every of the variety of old and new *scaled* USB connectors I have lying around would not fit into…
✓ Mobile Media 09 at UCLA D|MA
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Short note to call your attention to an event at UCLA’s Design Media Arts department beginning this Thursday evening, November 12 with a keynote by the barely containable Kevin Slavin (area/code), following on with three panels on Friday November 13th (damnit..) beginning at 10:30a and some workshops (all listed her…
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What was sticking in my mind, and has been recently, and especially after dinner conversation and the lecture which was on Design Fiction with an emphasis on the relationship between props, prototypes, and the normalization/everyday-making of provocative ideas.
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Just a short post to point folks to this succinct description of The Golden Institute by the artist-designer himself. The engaging documusic sort of brings it all together. Great work, Sascha!
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: The Augmented Reality Near Future Imaginary Par Excellance
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Well, the recent round of chit-chat about augmented realities and their current canonical motivations, design prototyping and concepts has leveled-up in my own mind. On the 12th floor of the Laboratory complex, we’ve decided to fill up the vacant cubicles and set up some bits of kit, post-it notes, fiducial-filled s…
✓ Upcoming Talks, Crits, Lectures
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A quick dispatch to mention a few upcoming events at which I will be sharing thoughts, new materials and so forth.
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Urgency and Emergency, Notification and Warning
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Last week, when there was that earthquake in Samoa, we happened to be talking about Tsunamis in the studio — thinking about the ways that the California coast could be gobbled up in an unfortunate, epic disaster. It’s a distinct possibility, and with the Pacific Ocean popping off earthquakes with increasing frequenc…
✓ Textual Landscapes at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery
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Seen at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in Manhattan on way-west 24th Street, a group show consisting of some favorites — Marina Zurkow especially, with whom I have had the great pleasure of collaborating in the past.
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Nokia is a gigantic battleship, and in some of that ship’s little corners, quite intriguing things happen that are quite consistent with the sensibilities of play, exploration and making new meanings, and especially inverting existing assumptions or retracing histories. I think these sorts of things are some of a sm…
✓ Props, Prototypes and Design With No Spec: Notes on Heliotropic Smartsurfaces
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What did I learn from visit to “M” — University of Michigan — and the School of Art & Design, Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning? Two things, mostly.
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I’m reading two books at once, a dangerous thing to do because one is always interpreted alongside the other, changing what it may have been and my perspective, necessarily. But, in hindsight I would say that I am doing this on purpose. One of the books is Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Th…
✓ A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing
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This just in: A Synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing — Nicolas Nova and myself conversing about what we’re calling asynchronous urban computing — has been released by the Architectural League of New York. It’s a dialogue on an inverted urban computation framework, with material embodiments…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Star Trek's Historical Time Line
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An indulgement, visiting the Star Trek Exhibition at Hollywood and Highland the other day to just see what it was all about. Turns out, it was mostly about a few ways to get visitors to say — oh, alright.. — when it came to liberating them from $20 here and $20 there for photos, lenticular gizmos and admission. But,…
✓ SXSW 2010 Design Fiction Panel
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It’s so far away I can barely see to it, but at SXSW 2010, in March a bunch of us will be doing a panel called Design Fiction:Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas. I managed to wrench the longer description I had written into the SXSW panel proposal form with some edits, but I’ll give you the orig…
✓ Design Fiction in the Science Gallery
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From Bruce’s Beyond the Beyond: Design Fiction in the Science Gallery: “
✓ Beyond Public Toilet Maps — Prehistoric Augmented Reality Devices
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A small collection of historic augmented reality devices, found during a rake through a flea market in Paris with fellow Urban Scout Nicolas Nova last Saturday. Mostly bashed up, broken things — but evocative devices that, when run up against all the excitement surrounding “Augmented Reality”, suggest more to me tha…
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I just finished Richard Powers’ intriguing industrial historical novel Gain, which was brought to my attention by a couple of passages in Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, which was brought to my attention by..&c.
✓ The Week Ending Today 111209
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In the spirit of the curious weekly updates I’ve begun paying attention to, and within the practicalities of this laboratory log, I think we’ll give a try to remind myself what the heck has been going on in and around the laboratory nervous center mostly for our own record, and for those who are curious.
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To go along with the previous *blog all dog-eared pages* post, an additional description of *what plastic is* — to include alongside of all the others chemical, political, economical, historical, technical, medical, fictional, &c — done in the story-told style, again from a dog-eared page in Richard Powers’ *Gain* —…
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Curious minor urban disaster. The brace meant to prevent the signal light from being struck by a large truck or something was struck by a large truck or something and, thence, struck the object it was meant to protect.
✓ The Week Ending Today 181209
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Last week was maintenance and tidying-up. Like returning from a long trip and sorting through all the stuff, experiences, dirty laundry and receipts. There was mostly a bit of cataloging and filing of material related to Project Trust (aka *Project Foghorn*, a.k.a. *Project Firefoot*), which has tipped into a nice s…
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The second guy to walk on the moon — Buzz Aldrin — has been doing the rounds, signing his new book Magnificent Desolation talking about how his life was destroyed cause he was famous for being the second guy to walk on the moon. And how we should go back to the moon. And stuff like that.
✓ RIG DataDecs / Data Materialization + Quantified/Historical Self
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var so = new SWFObject(“http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser.swf”, “PictoBrowser”, “500”, “500”, “8”, “#EEEEEE”); so.addVariable(“source”, “sets”); so.addVariable(“names”, “RIG DataDecs”); so.addVariable(“userName”, “julianbleecker”); so.addVariable(“userId”, “66854529@N00”); so.addVariable(“ids”, “72157623057949220”);…
✓ The Week Ending Today 251209
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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…
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A curious instantiation of temperament, attitude and confrontation seen on a Christmas Day stroll along Venice Beach.
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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…
✓ 6th Swiss Design Network Conference – "Negotiating futures. Design fiction."
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negotiating futures. design fiction. 6th Swiss Design Network Conference October 28 – 30 2010 in Basel, Switzerland
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Boy, that’s one ugly, ugly industrial design *refresh. I have no idea what got into the head of whoever is attempting to design these things, but that first one? The small one on the right? Not great, but it’s basically not meant to be a flashy desktop thingie or to sit next to your flower vase. It goes in the wall,…
✓ CfP. Twelve 2 Week Residencies in…Synthetic Biology!
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We seek participants for a research project on synthetic biology, design, and aesthetics. The project will provide funding to bring together scientists and engineers working in synthetic biology with artists, designers, and other creative practitioners. Resources will be made available for ‘embedded residencies’, in…
✓ He said that science fiction wasn't special..
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“…because of its gadgets and its landscapes. It wasn’t special because of its ideas about technology or progress: instead, it was special because of its language, and the assumptions and techniques readers used to interpret that language, and the ways writers’ knowledge of those assumptions and techniques affected t…
✓ Design Fiction Panel at SXSW 2010
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Well, last Saturday the SXSW panel I had proposed on Design Fiction presented our stuff. It was 7 minutes each for myself, Sascha Pohflepp, Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagen with Jennifer Leonard doing an excellent job of wrangling and moderating. We invited Bruce Sterling up for the discussion session and he lofted sev…
✓ The Week Ahead: SxSW 2010 — Design Fiction Panel
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So, early heads-up and there’ll be more — if you’re heading to SxSW this year, I’ve organized a panel under the rubric of *Design Fiction. The full title is Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas, and I feel prescient with that title because it captures much of what’s been going on i…
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Mike Kruzeniski-Poetry & Polemics in Creating Experience from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.
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The variety of permissions and their signals in Austin Texas during SXSW 2010. No firearms, smoking’s okay — and no firearms — licensed or unlicensed — because of this peculiar 51% law in Texas, versus only the forbidding of unlicensed firearms which means, like..there exists unlicensed firearms. Just people buying…
✓ The Week Ending Long Ago…031210
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The week before was mostly reassessing the Trust project communication and making notes on what might need to be redone and what might need to be tossed out. The communication itself has a good rhythm although the last share of it — well, basically it felt like falling while skating, but never quite hitting the grou…
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Man..was *that a week. No one’s counting, or probably even noticing, but I missed my weeknote from the week before — there’s a gap — so this is really a weeks notes. ((Now I’m definitely talking to myself, I know that.)) But it was all a strange, hopped-up, late-night-then-squeeze-of-port sort of blurofatwoweeks. It…
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Well, it was half SXSW 2010 and half back in the studio with some exciting, hungry activities moving things into the happy quadrant. SXSW was a wonderful swirl of head-exploding conversations. Scott Kraft helped me with the material metaphor for the Nokia 1100 — it’s the Mercedes 200 of mobile communications. Like t…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: The Dark Knight's Ubicomp Mobile Phone Sonar
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Here’s that scene from The Dark Knight where Batman has secretly installed a surveillance system that traces the legal, moral and ethical contours iconic to ubiquitous computing networked devices of this sort. What’s going on — as explained in the short bit of dialog — is that all of the mobile phones used by all of…
✓ Design Fiction Panel at SXSW 2010
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An exceptionally short, late Friday dispatch just as a waypoint on the way to *then — the audio *podcast from the Design Fiction panel with Jennifer Leonard, Sascha Pohflepp, Jake Dunagan, Stuart Candy, Bruce Sterling and myself, she’s available now. As Bruce mentioned — it is missing something without the video, wh…
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Well, see there. The trouble with writing weeknotes at the beginning of the week following when I was supposed to write them is that I don’t easily recall what happened in the week in which the week’s notes refer. Damnit.
✓ Design Fiction at 6th Annual Swiss Design Network Conference
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[[This just in. Sounds fun and curious. Almost makes me not loathe the academic conference context if only because the topic seems far enough beyond the typical that it may in fact suggest that there is an active imagination or two left in the tower.]]
✓ Design Fiction @ Design Engaged 2008
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Design Engaged 2008 winds down with a series of quite enjoyable “wrap-up” presentations from some real-world adventures amongst four groups who went out into the field yesterday after the last of the presentations on Saturday. Thanks to everyone and especially Andrew, Boris, Mouna, and Jenn for their hard work and e…
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A peculiar analog ticket dispenser machine found in Montreal. Rather than printing tickets on-demand, a whole bunch of physical, paper tickets are pre-stocked in the machine and, like buying candy bars from a vending machine, you select your route and the machine drops a ticket down for you.
✓ Precious
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Observed: Curious handling of a precious device. Or, maybe less precious. We often see other mobile technologies, like phones handled loosely. What will allow more sophisticated mobile technologies to become less precious, yet still durable?
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Interface fail. Evidently, the ordering of the apartments inside here is different from the screwed-on doorbells so one of the tenants improvised a new user interface. Hysterical.
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An intriguing juxtaposition between machine and this unusually emotional sticker, desolé drew me in. At first, looking at this scene in the Underground City of Montreal network — a hybrid space that occupies many square blocks underneath the city and consisting of mostly retail spaces interconnected with tunnels and…
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A curious touch keyboard interface that was a bit confusing. This was found at a Department of Motor Vehicles location here in California this morning. The keyboard was there in this kiosk so I could type in my car’s license plate and be issued a renewed vehicle registration certificate. The geometry of the keyboard…
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I was awed for some reason today by this power brick for a Lenova ThinkPad thingie. The assemblage of certifications, warrants and authentication badges almost defines how large the brick can be. What this made me think of is the thicket of contested hurdles objects and devices must vault over in order to become cer…
✓ Flat Tires and Thoughtless Acts
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Do flat tires make the unlocked bicycle in the top photo less likely to be stolen? Does the fact that the owner of the bicycle in the bottom photo locked their bike make it more likely to be stripped nearly bare for its handlebars, rear tire and transmission, seat, brake cables, brake clampy-things-that-clamp-the-fr…
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Seen just south of San Jose, California, another curious pragmatic interface that allows me to use my speedy, trusty debit card to complete a transaction without cash, but with a little dose of poor interaction design. After swiping my card, for security purposes (presumably) I must enter my postal zip code. So I ca…
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Look at this thing! Seen at the lobby of the Arts Hotel in Lisbon, this beautiful matrix of familiar and also baffling icons indicating the services or rules or functions of the various parts of the hotel assemblage. There are some I understand — but the one with the svelte Martini glass hovering over a sleeping per…
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More observations of preciousness with our digital devices. This cover came with the laptop and was used during shipping but the owner decided to keep it to prevent the display from becoming damaged or smudged.
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A functionally-decorative manhole cover that emulates the features of a compass rose for those who care not to navigate by dead-reckoning, rather feature or landmark-reckoning. I know these are all over the place, the image of it summoned up a recent conversation about how much built-in navigation cities should prov…
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Okay, I know I’m probably the last one on the planet to spot a bottle of barcoded wine, but, like..I spotted whole cases. Indulge me and pretend this is, whatever..years ago when this first started happening. Maybe I need to get my wine-on more often or something. I was overjoyed with the observation. (Everyone arou…
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36 hours in Berlin right SHiFT 2008 and there’s only time for one or two things to do, really. Despite geek sensibilities, it turns out a paper map serves better than a digital one. This janky one from the hotel, flimsy and easily smudged and tattered, was actually spot-on perfect. Every street we needed to find, an…
✓ Books for the Épistémè of Fail
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What do you read when reality turns itself on its head? The financial seers in the form of the genius ex-mathematics and high-energy physics Ph.D.s — the “Quants” as they’re known on The Street — failed at their assigned task of turning the many-body problem and squirrely statistics into a clear course into the up-a…
✓ A New Logic Analyzer and the HMC6352 I2C Compass
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Two things that’ve been sitting on my bench for a good spell — this HMC6352 magnetic compass with an I2C interface, and the Saleae “Logic” logic analyzer. I figured I could combine the two together, showing how I used the Logic to check out the operation of the HMC6352.
✓ Showing And Telling: Some Notes On Visualisation and Cognition
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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…
✓ 2010 — A Time Magazine Cover From The Future Past
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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…
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Whilst technically still on holiday, there were some things done as usual and *holiday* is never entirely just not doing nuthin’.
✓ A Curious Crosswalk Clarification
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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…
✓ Once Upon A Place.. Architecture + Fiction Event
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Matthew Malpass turned me onto this curious sounding and intriguing event Once Upon A Place (haunted houses & imaginary cities) — the 1st International Conference on Architecture and Fiction, which might count as a “that’s weird” / “plate of shrimp” moment because I was just describing to Jeffrey Paffendorf, who I j…
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A short note to draw the attention of the two of you to this event that pal Ian Bogost and related/sundry other chums are putting on: Art History of Games to be held February 4th, 5th and 6th right there in Atlanta. Sounds delightful — wish I could make such things as this. I’m fond of these sorts of thoughtful cons…
✓ Microsoft Social Computing Symposium 2010 – Notes
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var so = new SWFObject(“http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser.swf”, “PictoBrowser”, “500”, “500”, “8”, “#EEEEEE”); so.addVariable(“source”, “sets”); so.addVariable(“names”, “SCS2010”); so.addVariable(“userName”, “julianbleecker”); so.addVariable(“userId”, “66854529@N00”); so.addVariable(“ids”, “72157623066738659”); so.a…
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You’d think that scheduling would be one of the easier problems to work out, but clearly there are these simple little constant fails. Here’s a scheduling event for a conference call I will have in a couple of weeks. The call will likely happen when I’m in Helsinki, but the invite is for some other time zone. But, I…
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It’s not often we’re found in print, but this happened when the magazine Good did its “Slow Issue”. Jennifer Leonard chatted with us one morning about our perspectives on the slow movement because of our work on the Slow Messenger device and on-going collaborations with slowLab and Carolyn Strauss. There’s mention o…
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The week began with the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, 2010 edition. I’ve put my notes from the event here in the immediately preceding blog post.
✓ Undisciplinarity (essay in book)
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The book that resulted from the ‘inter_multi_trans_actions: emerging trends in post-disciplinary creative practice’ symposium at Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland on Thursday 26 June, 2008 is nearing publication.
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Diligent weeknotes are already eluding me. Perhaps because it was a short week last week and I wasn’t in the studio until Thursday. Nevertheless — mostly a couple of days of dusting off the desk and considering what remained to finish from the previous year and continue on into the new one.
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It now occurs to me that I should probably just end the week on Sunday, or Monday morning, seeing as that appears to be when I consistently write weeknotes. And the writing of them? That’s just more intrepid pushing-through more than anything else.
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A short-hand expression used in and around the studio to describe that one, usually small, unexpected and deceptively obvious designed feature that makes an artifact suddenly transformatively useful/helpful/up-graded. The kind of transformation that makes you look back and wonder how the heck you ever schlepped that…
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Last weekend was a trip to Santa Cruz for the retirement jubilation of a professor and mentor from grad school, Jim Clifford. He reminded me that retirement isn’t quite the right word. I believe him when he says he’s looking forward to doing more of the fun intellectual work rather than the prickly hassles of univer…
✓ Gibson And The New *Quotidian. A Quote.
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From William Gibson’s recent Book Expo American luncheon talk?
✓ Is There Such A Thing As An Invisible Metaphors
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This is a curious project from some students at MIT. They’ve used a laser beam and a camera sensitive to the light reflected from that beam to track the motion and articulations of one’s hand as it moves and makes mouse-like gestures. So, effectively they’ve gotten rid of the mouse. Which is why they call their proj…
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Well, without making a big thing out of it, I thought I’d just share a few of the installation photos from the Apparatus for Capturing Other Points of View, which is at the HABITAR exhibition at LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre. ((It’s always fun to see the preposterous things you get excited about install…
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A curious bit of making science fiction fact which is one of the themes and motivations and conventions of design fiction is the Sci-Fi Airshow, a tour of the various air/spacecraft from your favorite science fiction shows. It’s all done in the stylings of the airshow, as the name suggests, where pilots and fans gat…
✓ Partial Truths: To Do Something Interdisciplinary
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“Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a “subject” (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity cons…
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“One might almost say that truth itself depends on the tempo, the patience and perseverance of lingering with the particular.”
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Well, well, well..no more phoning-it-in, as they say out here in Hollywood. If you’re doing it, do it til someone gets hurt. So, bulls taken by horns and all that with some promising conversations around the start of things for what will likely result in some defining design executions and implementations. It will b…
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An intriguing short article in the Economist from weeks ago, that I just read in what will surely be a failed attempt to *catch-up on back issues. In this one the article looks briefly at some of the things that Pixar does to maintain its 11-0 record of producing top-notch creative entertainment. A few points are wo…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Apollo 11 Owner's Manual
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Found another design fiction in the form of an Apollo 11 Owners’ Workshop Manual, published by the folks at Haynes. I remember having Haynes service manuals for the two service-it-yourself buckets I had — a 1980 VW Rabbit and that 1972 Toyota Landcruiser which probably spent more time being made drivable than drivin…
✓ And the time it takes to make them is the time taken to mean it.
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A quote from “From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual” by David Levi Strauss.
✓ Design Fiction Studio for Young Minds
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The Innovation Center for Young Minds as an enviable-sounding studio for Fall 2010:
✓ Interactive Architecture Crits
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So, I just have to say — academic architects? Wow..what a surly bunch. Neil Leach had his hands full fending off the fond-of-their-voices contingent of guests he invited to weigh in on his Interactive Architecture Studio end-of-term presentations. It’s like no one thought for a moment that these are students and it…
✓ Five Advantages of The Concept of "Design"
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The Unhappy Hipster site has the tag line “It’s Lonely In The Modern World” dryly shifting design toward self-mocking irony. Perhaps a kind of denaturing of the sublime intoxication home/interior/architectural design was once able to effect. Seasoning this with Latour, we might wonder if there ever was a modern worl…
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Well, the house is proving a persistent but not at all unwelcome distraction from blogging stuff, but that’s okay. Managing to set up even a M*A*S*H*-like *Man Lodge was mitigated by, like..unpacking scores of boxes containing mostly books, old disk drives or bits and bobs from the old Laboratory workbench. But, ala…
✓ Design Fiction Principles: Notes from Design for Screen
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A relevant short essay by Piers D. Britton in theThe Routledge Companion to Science Fiction underscores some of the loose principles (loose, because they aren’t quite principles — more a swirl of useful insights) the Laboratory has been gathering around the concepts of Design Fiction. ((Why gather principles? Well,…
✓ Wandering through the future
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@chriswoebken spied this one — an art film by Marjolijn Dijkman (NL, if you couldn’t guess) called Wandering Through the Future in which the artist takes 70 science fiction films and uses them to explore how they imagine the future. In an interview, there are some curious and relevant sentiments surrounding the prod…
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Good to my habits, I’m nearly a week behind weeknotes. No matter — they are more notes-to-self than anything else.
✓ Design Fiction Pictures Presents: Earth to Luna
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A suggestive and left-to-the-readers scrap of net-archeology found at http://desi-fi.posterous.com/earth-to-luna — a title card for a design fiction film? By Design Fiction Pictures? Lovely.
✓ More Peculiar Design Fiction Film
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A recent post by @bruces sent me into a squirrel hole this morning, smoking out this NANOYOU project and its various techniques for helping people —particularly young people it seems, which is to say..the future — what the heck nanotech is. The one above is described thus:
✓ Apparatus at The HABITAR Exhibition
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As Fabien has mentioned and due to his participation in curating the event, the laboratory’s Apparatus for Capturing Other Points of View will be exhibited at HABITAR. It’ snice to have this project reconsidered in an art & technology context. The exhibition catalog is available as a PDF here.
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…well, it was a short week in the studio and more time spent pondering how to build out the new Laboratory / Man Lodge. Plans and actions. There was good conversations around the main project in the Studio — which basically translates to excelling at communicating what are already good ideas. In this particular sort…
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Well, maybe weeknotes are from the *week ending* but posted at the *week commencing*. One advantage of being one’s own blog boss, I suppose.
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For no particular reason — perhaps a salute to Nicolas who will be presenting his work on design for failure at IxDA this week — I bring you this image taken during DE2008 in which Aaron Straup Cope discusses designing engineering systems with failure contingency as the critical path.
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Looking back on the calendar to see what notes I have from the week ending last week and poking through the notesbook, the thing that stands out is an engaging discussion with Kurt that, as it turns out, was about communicating ideas. You know *how do you enroll someone into your conversation and evolve intellect in…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Robocop + Pre-Augmented Reality Augmented Reality
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An update to the Design Fiction Chronicles. This one will be familiar to most science-fiction film fans out there — RoboCop being assembled and tested in the lab. The curious point-of-view shot — allowing us to see the various moments in which RoboCop is coming into being — sets up the anticipation about what RoboCo…
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles – Demo and Die: RoboCop's Ed 209
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Continuing the RoboCop theme — truly a prescient gem, this one. It’s got two things going on. One: a failure of technological hubris. Two: demo…and die, a quiet nod to the insane inane practice spawned by the Media Lab to be always demoing..demo..or die. Such a stupid proposition, whether it *works or not. Just do g…
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Well, this is getting preposterous, but I’ll keep plugging on in the hope that my weeknotes will be done, at the least, during the week they purport to cover.
✓ Really the Fake: Derived, Diacritic'd, Differenced Things
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A trio of things found over time that came together in their pattern of derived associations. I’m sure these were done in a pragmatic fit of trying to get some uptake by resonating with existing things/objects/markets and so on. Pretty standard stuff, with the Wii and the Call of Duty thing being the more dodgy inst…
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Well, another week, another set of tardy week notes..it only seems like sheer anxiety about not being diligent propels me and that only when the subsequent week begins.
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Brainstorm
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Well, this is one popped into my head the other day, but not for the reasons I’ll mention in this post — I’ll save the initial motivation for a post in the near future. In the meantime, while I was watching this again I found deep enjoyment in the first few minutes of the film when the viewer basically has to learn…
✓ Predictably Not Quite Failing
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Since the *winter holidays here in Los Angeles, which is a strange thing for an East Coast boy, especially as I hear reports of epic dumps of man-killing snow in New York City, my favorite photography spot has been the recently opened Venice Beach Skate Park and the equally awesome Venice Skatepark. I’m not a skater…
✓ Sticks, Stones and The Material Effects of Appearances
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Further to the point of how stories, ideas and language can shape the world in material ways, this came out of the blue on the thread of something or another, the family motto of Phil’s clan, of Australia:
✓ Award Category: Design Fiction
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There are a variety of ways to measure the degrees to which an *out there idea becomes somehow normalized and convention: (in no particular order) (1) It becomes bandied about at conferences and lectures and so forth; (2) Someone writes a book about it; (3) It is a canonical hashtag; (4) It is a canonical normal, ol…
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It was an insane week on the side of things happening between homes..a move. Number 3 on the list of the most traumatic things that can happen in life, I’ve been told. ((I may’ve misheard, but it made sense at the time, so I’ve assimilated that as a part of the life’s-trauma-list.))
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A curious book won the Pulitzer Prize, I just heard. It’s called Tinkers What I found most intriguing about the news story is that the book was published by a small specialty publisher — Bellevue Literary Press, which is associated with the Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Probably one of the scrariest hospitals…
✓ Digital Blur Book Launch At Architectural Association April 27
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This book Digital Blur — in which John Marshall and I have a sort of drunken, double-bandolier-wearing bandito-style essay on *undisciplinarity — will launch on April 27th in London at The Architectural Association Bookshop, which is a fantastic bookshop anyway so you basically can’t loose.
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Well, I missed the Week Ending last week so I’ll capture a couple of the things that happened then, now.
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…and apparently available only in the UK presently. John Marshall and I have a manifesto-y essay towards the end of this.
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A few assorted bits I found related to Design Fiction whilst following a link somewhere, to somewhere else.
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Well, probably the most intriguing thing that happened last week was the unexpected conversations that started up around the graphs of the future presentation I gave (all of 15 minutes) at the University of Michigan last Saturday the 2nd. It wasn’t unexpected in the sense that it was an award-winning 15 minutes of f…
✓ The Faint Scent of Brimstone with Notes of Sulfur
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If I followed this to its logical yet design fiction-y conclusion, I’m sure I’d find the devil himself.
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Well, got about half way through the new Steven Johnson book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation and still going. He tells a good story and I believe much of it. There’s something funny going on in there, though. I’ll sort it out. Seems maybe a bit simple in its argument — things alongside…
✓ Action Sharing 2 Creative Competition
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The fine folks at Piemonte Share in Torino are doing a creative competition called Action Sharing 2!
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Just a quick note to remind myself that I’m in the northern Nordic for the week, translating and workshopping and clarifying much of the work that has gone on in the studio over the last many months. It’s quite interesting to see how important the communication work is in the design process. Not so much showing as a…
✓ The Wall
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This is an interesting paper called The WALL: participatory design workspace in support of creativity, collaboration, and socialization written about workspaces using various techniques to support creativity, collaboration and “socialization.” The paper describes and advanced design studio for a “Nordic EU” country…
✓ Weekending 12122010: Clarity via Complexity
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A week spent last in the Nordic EU discovering the knots and twists and snarls and kinks of the imbroglio that goes along with executing on damn good design. On the one hand there was the work of workshops meant to work *upon the work; on the other hand, there are the traces that appear as — if illuminated by forens…
✓ A Wry Look At Wheels On Luggage
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Why do I blog this? The idiom “wheels on luggage” has been one we’ve been exploring here, not so much to get the precise history of it (although that is interesting), but because of what it stands for. Change from one set of circumstances to another from which you look back and wonder — how could things have ever be…
✓ Designing Fiction in Volume Q.
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For my record, below is the essay that appeared in Volume Quarterly, Issue 25.
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Or…in this case, cinematic architecture. Jonathan Rennie presented a project yesterday that I found most fitting in the vein of design fiction / architecture fiction. For the studio class run by Geoff Manaugh (@bldgblog) called Cinema City, a graduate studio that starts with this brief and asks the students to consi…
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Just a super short set of notes from Steven Johnson’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. I don’t have anything too much in-depth mostly because it’s a fast read, when I found time to read it, and it made me squirm uncomfortably. There was not much that made me stop and smile althoug…
✓ How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
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From the Laboratory’s Blog All Kindle ‘Dog-Earred’ Pages Desk, I bring you a few call-outs, quotes and passages from the brilliant bit of chronodiegetic gooeyness called “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” by Charles Yu. Great good barely science-fictional novel here. Really a story about loss and o…
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Or…in this case, cinematic architecture. Jonathan Rennie presented a project yesterday that I found most fitting in the vein of design fiction / architecture fiction. For the studio class run by Geoff Manaugh (@bldgblog) called Cinema City, a graduate studio that starts with this brief and asks the students to consi…
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Yesterday while leaving the LA Photo exhibition in Santa Monica — a kind of catch-all retail event of photography through the commercial curatorial world of private galleries — I happened across a small scrum of people with anodized extruded rectangles holding them close to bush leaves, flowers and tiny bits of dirt…
✓ Sound Should Just Come Out Of It
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I think going forward I should do a better job of talking around what we’re working on from a technical point of view, until such time as it’s okay to talk about what we’re doing from a principles, rituals and practices point of view. And, also — sometimes in the thick of a design-making-schematic-and-hot-air-baking…
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I spent quite a deal of time in workshops evolving some ideas around location and tracking. We had Marc Tuters come by the studio. Marc’s written and created quite a number of locative media projects over perhaps the last decade. Along with that, he’s written some of the canonical bits of text on the topic, includin…
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Fabien and Nicolas went to Madrid for a workshop at BBVA innovation about Smart Cities. Organized by Urbanscale (and more specifically by Jeff Kirsh, Adam Greenfield and Leah Meisterlin), it focused on opportunities to use networked data for the client. It basically followed up on the previous work we have done with…
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I’ve been working on, and testing out, a new thing for the last couple of weeks. It is called privatesquare. It is a pretty simple web application that manages a private database of foursquare check-ins. It uses foursquare itself as a login service and also queries foursquare for nearby locations. The application us…
✓ Interaction Awards 2012: Drift Deck for People's Choice
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Drift Deck is up for the IxDA Interaction Awards in the “People’s Choice” category. Which isn’t the “Jury’s Choice” but — whatev. It’s the People, so we’re hustling to make you, the People, aware of this chance for you to choose what is the Choice of the People. For Interaction Design Awards.
✓ Pretty Maps – 20×200 Editions
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Some of you may have noticed, mostly probably not — but the Laboratory has expanded its ranks. It’s starting to feel like a proper design collective in here. One of the lovely attributes of the people in the Lab are the broad sectors of activity they cover that doesn’t make it seem like they do a zillion different t…
✓ This Is What I Sent — The Ear Freshener PCB Design
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Here’s the current PCB CAD for the Ear Freshener. It’s sorta got two sides, but on the top I basically have a carrier for another board that contains the audio codec device. The components around it are all the brains that control track selection from the potentiometer/knob — that people will think, hopefully, is th…
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Here in Barcelona, we continue fine tuning Quadrigram, with now a meticulous work on the coherence of pre-programmed modules the tool will provide to access, manipulate and visualize data flows. It also means some backstage cleaning and improvements of the engine that supports the visual programming language.
✓ Features Aren't A Measure Of Innovation
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It’s too bad that the measure of results often must translate to quantities or business-y things, like numbers of meetings obtained or pages of PowerPoint presentations. Decanting often rich, qualitatively substantial ideas into boxes and “slides” and “decks” sloughs off so much richness that all that was learned of…
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A familiar challenge is to translate the seemingly unyielding demand to put a specific technology into something because it is expected, or because the name of the technology is the new great thing. It doesn’t matter what it is in particular — I use “doorknob” as a stand-in for whatever the latest “doorknob” of the…
✓ Weeksendings 07302010 and 08062010
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I can sum the last two weeks up briefly and, again — for my own record keeping. Nothing useful here, likely at all.
✓ Design Fiction Chronicles: Before the iPad There Was the PADD
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There was recently a wonderful article on Ars Technica interviewing the production and prop designers for Star Trek. I highly recommend giving it a read, even if you’re not a Trekkie. What I find most curious is the creative constraints that the production design was under and their solution. With a limited budget f…
✓ Hand Drawn Maps..Drawn By Computer
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One of a sample of “Destination Maps” presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 by a team of researchers. It shows a computer-generated emulation of the canonical napkin-style hand-drawn map. The described advantages are that it highlights relevant “neighborhood” streets and diminishes the arterials and highways that are not…
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The disadvantage of having so much fun taking photos of skateboarders is that I have less “design research-y” photos to go along with the dispatches here from the Laboratory. So..I’m reusing some and digging deep into the archives.
✓ The Urban Internet of Things 2010. An International Workshop
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Coming up is an exciting sounding workshop on the “urban internet of things — programming the real-time city.” Some more opportunities to get this one right..or at least human.
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We made a newspaper through our friends at RIG‘s lovely Newspaper Club service. We — myself, Nick Foster, Nicolas Nova and Rhys Newman — collaborated on this. (Rhys did the lovely drawings, by the way.)
✓ At O’Reilly Strata Conference
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Last week I participated to the O’Reilly Strata Conference with a 40-minutes talk in the session on ‘visualization & interfaces’. My contribution suggested the necessity to quickly answer and produce questions at different stages of the innovation process with data. I extended the material presented at Smart City Wo…
✓ Corner Convenience // The Near Future // Design Fiction
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We did a Design Fiction workshop as a kind of follow on to the Convenience newspaper. Our idea was to take the observation that the trajectory of all great innovations is to asymptotically trend towards the counter of your corner convenience store, grocer, 7-11, gas station, etc. Discerning the details as to why thi…
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In Switzerland, after an hectic week with Lift12, Nicolas went back to design workshops with students. Last Monday and Tuesday, he gave a course in interaction design at the Geneva University of Arts and Design and supervised the last details of the Urban Games project with Etienne Mineur and Daniel Sciboz. The work…
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All Nicolas has time to say is, “A quick trip to Montpellier for a workshop about locative media.” Well..maybe he’ll add more when he lands in Geneva, immediately goes to teach a class and then (tries) to get on our monthly Design Fiction teleco.
✓ SXSW2012 talk about mind and consciousness as an interface
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Yesterday at SXSW Interactive 2012, Julian and myself participated in a panel about “mind and consciousness as an interface”. We basically covered the whole spectrum from the cultural backdrop (science-fiction movies, reiki approaches) to current technologies involved in this. We also concluded about the interaction…
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Over the last year we have been collaborating with the mobile phone operator Swisscom and the City of Geneva to materialize insights on urban centralities and the connectivity of central neighborhoods with peripheral towns. The fundamentals of this project rely on measures, maps and visualizations of the pulse of th…
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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…
✓ Cultural hybrid: chinese kebab
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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”.
✓ How socialbots could influence changes in the social graph
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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…
✓ Multitasking TVs at the airport
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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…
✓ Rigor and relevance in interaction design research
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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…
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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…
✓ A Screen-y FutureScape-y 2025
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[pullquote author=”FutureScapes”]FutureScapes is all about imagining what the world of 2025 will look like and the role technology could play in our lives.[/pullquote]
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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.
✓ Awkward strokes minimized with Dvorak keyboard
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Why do I blog this? Simply because I love this visualization as a way to show path-dependence.
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Nicolas was, once again, in the train for two workshops about design ethnography and object repurposing: one in Paris at ENSAD, and another one at the HKB in Bern. The idea was to show students the value of this kind of field investigation by asking them to go observe how people repurpose objects in physical space.…
✓ Vending machines and their cultural implications
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Yesterday, in a very small village in the French Alps, I ran across this fascinating bread vending machine. It made me think about other encounters with not-so-common machines such as a book delivery system in Seoul:
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A curious addendum to account for a UI/UX muck up at a nearby gasoline station. These moments reveal these hybrid displays — both purposeful, and one made to accomodate for failures in the machine. And this second one — how peculiar. My new laser printer to replace the 10 year old one what that I printed my disserta…
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For Nicolas, it was a week devoted to teaching with different lectures and workshops in Geneva (digital failures, Monday), Lausanne (creative approaches in design, Wednesday), Paris (open innovation and design ethnography, Thursday) and Annecy (Innovation and foresight, Friday)… and writing for the game controller p…
✓ Incongruous Connector // Audio Electronics
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Upstairs in the electronics bay, where I’ve been happily spending more and more time, I decided that the thing to do to make it more studio-like, rather than submerged rabbit warren-like, was to put fun things in there, like music and a hidden bag of reward chips. Make it easy to plop down in a chair without fussing…
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Pfft. Turns out Nicolas is on some island in the Mediterranean “writing” the game controller book.
✓ New Aesthetic // OOO // Future of Things
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It’s very gratifying to see how the #newaesthetic discussions are popping and percolating across the networks. There’s something to it, I think. Specifically the observations that something here under the New Aesthetic rubric is worth considering, thinking-through, working-towards.
✓ Rotary dials as game controllers
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Working on the book about game controllers, I did some research about the first game peripherals. This is actually chapter 1… and one of the most intriguing example is certainly the existence of rotary dials. Potentiometers and knobs were of course the first lineages in terms of game controllers; think about Tennis…
✓ Is the New Aesthetic only about visual stuff?
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The panel about New Aesthetic at SXSW last month left me with the impression that NA is all about visual representations:
✓ Bot activity on Wikipedia entries about Global Warming
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Looking for material for an upcoming speech, I ran across this research project (by digital methods initiative) that inquires into the composition of issues on Wikipedia by contributors, and consequences for the (possibility) of carrying out public debate and controversy on articles surrounding Global Warming.
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For me in Los Angeles, I spent the week debugging the Ear Freshener project and designing a new circuit board. More about that in a subsequent post. There was general following-alongs on the #NewAesthetic developments — mostly to say that it’d be nice to not over-theorize a thing that is basically a result of living…
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Of course, because we’re doing audio design and audio projects around here, I’m excited about most any audio thing that’s a new thing. I mean..I bought a whole iPod Shuffle just so I could try out (and try to make) Music for Shuffle sorts of things. That seems to be a wonderful design brief. (I’m not at all sure wha…
✓ Representing the city as it’s lived: livelihoods
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It’s been few days that I’m following the the livehoods.org/ and it’s quite interesting.
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Read in SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums by Steward brand (1972):
✓ Robot-produced languages as part of #newaesthetic?
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As a follow up to my blogpost the other day about New Aesthetic as not-only-visual-but-also-something-else, I kept wondering about other possibilities. Overall, what I find interesting in NA is that algorithms produce new cultural forms… and that it’s not just about visual representations.
✓ “you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of “their” works”
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Read in Wired 3.05, May 1995 (via):
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Reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, I ran across this notion of “recombinant food” (pp. 219-220):
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Nicolas: the week was packed with different meetings and discussions about a trip this summer to Los Angeles… two months to be spent on a *secret for now* laboratory project in a design school in the area. I also made a quick hop to Lyon in France for the WWW 2012 conference where I gave a speech about how the web i…
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(Nick wrote this over on his blog. It deserves more blogginess, so I’m re-blogging it here as well. – Julian)
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Julian: Literally? I spent the week in the model shop doing three things, sometimes at the same time. First, getting ahead of myself and making a third edition of Ear Freshener. That’s right. A third edition. I think I’m deferring/procrastinating doing the sound design until I can find a proper sound designer to hel…
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Via Daniel Rehn:
✓ Robot Mori: a curious assemblage from the Uncanny Valley
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Perhaps the weirdest piece of technology I’ve seen recently is this curious assemblage exhibited at Lift in Seoul: it’s called “Robot Mori” and, as described by Advanced Technology Korea:
✓ Virilio on “statistical image” and perception #newaesthetic
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Read in Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine:
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Nicolas: last week was quiet because of May 1st but I spent few days on different things. First, I worked on preparing a wall of game controllers with Laurent Bolli for a summer exhibit at mudac in Lausanne. Since the collection of official gamepads are already in Yverdon, we’re going to show the ones that reveal va…
✓ betaknowledge.tumblr.com as a compilation of weak signals about the future
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Btw, I started a tumblr few days ago to accumulate insights, data points and “weak signals” in a very basic/raw way… I use to put that material into delicious but I’m not satisfied with the service anymore.
✓ Monster sticky note on cell-phone screen
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Last month, when involved in a teaching seminar in France, I ran across this utterly curious scene. It’s basically a cell-phone with a piece of paper that shows a drawing, stuck on the device’s display. The drawing features a sort of animal quickly scribbled.
✓ Lessons from teaching design approaches to engineering students
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This year, I had the chance to teach a year-long course at EPFL about design and creative approaches with my colleague Daniel Sciboz. This class is part of the social science/art/design program which corresponds to a set of courses engineering students have to take as part of their general curriculum. Since EPFL doe…
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Nicolas: A quite academic week with two days as an expert in a design school in Switzerland (Neuchatel) and polishing a research project submitted to a funding body. Being external jury judging student’s work is always intriguing, especially when projects are very diverse. In this case, it ranged from a new generati…
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Um. Well, here in Los Angeles it’s been lots of fun/frustrating days getting back into programming the computer. I’ve been getting a bit overwhelmed by the growing list of “ideas” that I thought would be good ways to get back into it. They’re mostly exercises that I thought would be better than following on in the u…
✓ These new aestheticians were a bit too literal, weren’t they?
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Why do I blog this? Probably because this encounter with a weird table, whose shape has been generated by a computer program, seem to exemplify the excess or the mere simplicity of adopting this approach in design/art. We’ll probably see more and more things like that.
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So I have just returned from a multipurpose trip, one of whose purposes was to see the Tom Sachs exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. This is the Tom Sachs show done in collaboration with NASA (and a crop of creative partners, like Creative Time, but that’s less typical than collaborating with NASA…
✓ “I’ve been playing the same game of Civilization II for 10 years”
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The other day, in a conference about video-games I co-organized in Lausanne, I instagramed this presentation by Brice Roy in which the game designer mentioned a game that can only be completed in 250 years. One of my contact (@carinaow) wondered about the very fact that “it’s longer than a lifetime” and that “nobody…
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Here in Los Angeles it’s mostly been programming and book editing and talking to humans. Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley stopped by to do an interview for their curious cross-country mobile blog/interview platform/landscape exploration vehicle called Venue. That was good fun to discuss the various ways landscape, u…
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Just saw this intriguing link called “5 Digital Trends Shaping the Consumer Experience” sent by @iamdanw and I found it fascinating.
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Recently the independent culture research lab ZZZINC interviewed me for the Mosaic online magazine. It was a pleasure to answer Paco González‘ questions on our practice at Near Future Laboratory and our work on urban data. The result is now online: Entrevista a Fabien Girardin (English version).
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… oh and btw, I’ve been quiet here because I’ve been busy on different fronts: - relocating to California for the summer, doing a “visiting researcher” residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, working on a project about gesture (that I’ll blog about as soon as there is something to show) - writing the…
✓ Summer project: Curious Gestures
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So, as I mentioned the other day, I’m in Los Angeles this summer, being a visiting researcher at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The project I’m working on there is called “CURIOUS RITUALS: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday” and we’ve just set up a blog about it.
✓ Interesting projects at Art Center
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Two interesting project I saw yesterday at the Pecha Kucha organized at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena:
✓ Object performativity, or to delegate self-defense to a…
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Object performativity, or to delegate self-defense to a non-human
✓ Two fascinating projects by Joe Malia and aimed at exploring…
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Two fascinating projects by Joe Malia and aimed at exploring design for the “computer obsessive”: a “computer hood” and a “scarf/Playstation tunnel”, to “facilitate an amplified engagement between user and the computer, secluding them in a digital enclosure where the outside world is a memory and attention undivided”.
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Just a short note to draw your attention to this cool quarterly journal called Volume which you may already know about but which I only heard about when they asked if I would contribute a short piece on Design Fiction. Basically it is a condensation of the longer essay from last winter which is presently offline due…
✓ Networks, Sensor Networks, Human Sensors
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While I was in Barcelona to attend the Barcelona Design Week, Josep Blat presented at the Foro de Movilidad de RedIRIS in Madrid the research themes and works developed with him as my PhD supervisor. RedIRIS provides highspeed Internet connectivity and other network facilities for the academia in Spain. On their inv…
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These past weeks I had to chance to work with the alpha version of Impure, a new visual programming environment developed by my good friends at Bestiario. Impure offers a full visual language to retrieve, manipulate, process and visualize information:
✓ Hint Fiction — Short Evocations of Larger Stories
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I found this story on NPR that I heard this morning on this topic of “Hint Fiction” — fictional stories done in 25 words or less — to be quite intriguing. It’s less because it seems like the evolution of story telling in the era of 140 character Tweets and all that. That angle is quite boring, but it seems that this…
✓ Design Fiction Workshop: Failures
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I’ve been away for awhile so obviously I’m just now catching up with some notes for the events and activities of the last few weeks. One thing I want to make a note about is the fun workshop that Nicolas and I facilitated at the Swiss Design Network conference in Basel Switzerland late last month. The workshop was l…
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While in Basel a few weeks ago, Nicolas and Cris and I stole off for a few moments to check out this typically expensive art and technology exhibition in the docks region of the city. I forget the name of it, and also did not have any paper money so I didn’t get an exhibition catalog. Nicolas has a more complete des…
✓ The Paradox of Intellectual Property
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This might be an old one, but I just recently heard about it while catching up on my favorite economy and finance Podcast — the brilliantly home-spun Planet Money. In it they are talking about their project to tell the story of how a t-shirt is being made..by making a t-shirt, from buying the bales of cotton to gett…
✓ Swiss Design Network Conference – Design Fiction Keynote
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This is a notecard when I sort of figured out what I wanted to talk about at the Swiss Design Network conference held a few or four weeks ago.
✓ The Interaction & Interface Design Car Wreck
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For designers, clearly, surfacing, paint colors, materials and interior fabric choices rule out over interface design, which is just plain forgotten about here . Unless it can be justified as, like…Formula 1 inspired, it just doesn’t seem to get any priority as an area of innovation. Look — hybrids barely get any co…
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Well, I haven’t done a weekending in awhile, partially because I was away in Switzerland (for the Swiss Design Network Conference) and then Italy and Spain on vacation and I almost didn’t take any kind of computer, but I did take an iPad partially as an experiment. In any case, I mostly read and photographed and wal…
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This looks like a fantastic book that will look great next to my Norman Mailer: MoonFire: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11 (GO)
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It would be generous to say that privatesquare was ever released. Instead, the source code was made public with a long and twisty blog post and a flurry of screenshots. I’ve told a few people about my installation of privatesquare but since I haven’t had the stamina to run a service for strangers (and a free one, at…
✓ From a paper being presented at the SecureComm conference in…
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From a paper being presented at the SecureComm conference in Italy by Tom Chothia and colleagues at the University of Birmingham, which investigate how users who participate in BitTorrent swarms for popular files are likely to have their IP addresses logged by monitoring companies within three hours.
✓ “Zombie Media”, as defined by Jussi Parikka: Zombie…
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“Zombie Media”, as defined by Jussi Parikka:
✓ Outcomes of Curious Ritual project
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Time for presenting summer project outcomes! In July and August, I spent two months in the Media Design Program department at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. As I mentioned few weeks ago, the project was called CURIOUS RITUALS: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday and focused on the pos…
✓ To Be Designed // Detroit // October 1-3
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In a week’s time the gang will convene in Detroit to create a product catalog of things from the future. We’re putting our Design Fiction insights, experience, skills and moxie to the task of imagining — what are the things one might see in some future fictional catalog of stuff.
✓ To Be Designed // Detroit // October 1-3
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As the name of our Laboratory implies, we’re very interested in the hands-on, pragmatic ways in which one can imagine and then create things from and for the near future. In that sense, we design products and the like. Stuff. We make stuff. They are just things from and for the near future. Which shouldn’t be a prob…
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Sorry for the silence here but the last few weeks have been super hectic because of various projects. So, as a quick summary of what I’m up to:
✓ Contradictions like these abound in many retail establishments…
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Contradictions like these abound in many retail establishments that prohibit cameras while they also use 2-d barcodes that require people to use cameras to read them
✓ "I’ve seen other designer’s sketchbooks and I’m always impressed by how much…"
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Legacy post from Near Future Laboratory.
✓ An ostrich escaped from the Ostriches Farm (Yasusuke Ota: The…
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An ostrich escaped from the Ostriches Farm (Yasusuke Ota: The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima)
✓ Corrupted C#n#m# by Angelo Vermeulen: Corrupted C#n#m# is an…
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Corrupted C#n#m# by Angelo Vermeulen:
✓ "drones are used to do what most in the industry call the three Ds: dull, dirty and dangerous.The…"
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Legacy post from Near Future Laboratory.
✓ "Game On: What sets Proteus apart from other games? And is there anything you wish you could have…"
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Game On: What sets Proteus apart from other games? And is there anything you wish you could have done differently?
✓ Walker Art Center Innovation Working Group
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Walker Art Center had an innovation working group to help ponder how the Walker approaches and thinks about the interdisciplinary in its curatorial, public, and exhibition work.
✓ "When any CPU includes hardware that decides to redirect the CPU’s attention to a new program…"
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Legacy post from Near Future Laboratory.
✓ “Pixeliose” a disease resulting in partial pixelation of the field of vision
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An interesting Swiss film displayed at “Cinéma tous écran” (a local festival in Geneva): Pixeliose by Romain Graf.
✓ “Hommage à New-York” by Florent Deloison: a game in…
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“Hommage à New-York” by Florent Deloison: a game in which the player has to destroy the computer code creating the game:
✓ Fantasy video gaming?: kids playing with game controllers and no…
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Fantasy video gaming?: kids playing with game controllers and no games
✓ After the Flood has this highly intriguing…
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After the Flood has this highly intriguing “Playbook”:
✓ Prototyping session with post-its and cardboard at EPFL
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It’s the second year I am teaching the HUM-401 class at EPFL with Daniel Sciboz. The course is about creative processes and tricks employed by designers in their work. Our aim is to show engineers from various areas (IT, biology, chemistry, material sciences, architecture) a different approach than the one they have…
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Last week, or the weekending on August 29 2010, I noticed and took stock of more and more of this kind of behavior. I mean — I really noticed the ways that people get locked into their screens. It’s like “we” (those with jobs and fancy fuck-off phones and stuff) have evolved into a different kind of species.
✓ Made Up Panel Discussion September 17 at Art Center College of Design
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One week from today I’ll have the pleasure of sharing a panel discussion with my old chum Sascha Pohflepp and the eminent Norman Klien as Art Center rounds out its summer “Made Up” residency studio program. Fun. Come out and check it out!
✓ The Design, Art, Technology & History of Arduino
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That little guy up above has finally got its own academically written *History. The Arduino is historical! That means something. It means that it is significant enough to warrant a retrospective look back on its when and where and who kinds of questions. I’m glad that’s been done. There are good stories swirling aro…
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Last week was mostly spent in a here-and-there state in the studio. Cleaning things up from a busy prior week in which a very exciting, thoughtful bit of work — about three or four months — went out to be shared. It’s got a good story, a good set of principles behind it and I just love it to death.
✓ Stuart's *Fragments of Possible Worlds* / Reperceiving The Future
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Just a fragment of a post — something that’s been sitting in drafts for a few months now for some reason. I guess I was trying to find something to put alongside of it, but it sits well by itself.
✓ Future of Technology Conference University of Michigan September 24-25
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I’ll be speaking at the Future of Technology conference at the Taubman College of Architecture, Planning and Urban Design on September 25th — the conference is on the 24th and the 25th. This courtesy of my chum John Marshall, who I visited last year to be a guest in his fantastic Heliotropic Smart Surfaces design st…
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✓ Design Fiction: From Props to Prototypes (2010 01SJ Biennial Catalog Essay)
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Here’s my short catalog essay that appeared in the 2010 01SJ Biennial Catalog. It’s just a little thing, but I want to mark it here for my own records for when something gets lost.
✓ James Dyson on Engineering Designers
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An interesting article by John Seabrook in the occasional “Annals of Invention” column of The New Yorker just now with James Dyson — the guy who made vacuum cleaners suck better.
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Okay. There was some more fussing about to pull together a reading list / viewing list for a new project I’ve been thinking about that is in and around augmented reality. The viewing list includes the usual suspects — Terminator 2, They Live (which I showed in the studio — and only three or four people showed up to,…
✓ Representations of the Future with Graphs
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I collected some graphs that attempt to represent how the future comes to be while I was preparing for a talk at the University of Michigan’s “Future of Technology” conference, from which I’ve just returned. The graphs are simple ways to represent the path from now into the future and what makes “then” the future an…
✓ Vol. 7 of the Design Fiction Chronicles
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These are some of the examples of Design Fiction as used in some Science Fiction film. I presented these at the University of Michigan’s “Future of Technology” symposium.
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Well..Most of the week was spent working on the work, enjoying the change that comes from change and new personalities and wondering excitedly about where things are going. I spent a bit of time relearning video editing and compilation tools because I still thing the visual story is a wonderful way to do design. ((W…
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At the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2010, it was a pleasure to hear Steven Johnson drop a few tidbits on his soon-to-be-released book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation he described an interesting perspective on the history of ideas — or in a more marketable, business-type…
✓ The iPod Time Capsule – Notes on Listening + Time + Design of Things That Make Sound
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Over the week’s end I was in the back studio tearing down and rebuilding the wall of photos for the Hello, Skater Girl “side” book project. I was tasked with this particular endeavor by the guy I hired to do the book design. I knew I’d have to do it all along which is why I had put up sound board many, many months ago.
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In Geneva, where the cold winter is striking back, the week had been, for once!, very quiet with data analysis (head-mounted display project) and book writing (game controllers!). We’re also preparing two workshops for the upcoming Lift12 conference. The first one is about location-based games organized with Mathieu…
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A new feature. I’m going to share the week’s quotes heard around the Advanced Design team studio here in Los Angeles. These come via the man with the ears for quotes, Luke Johnson who publishes them internally — or has been for the last few weeks now. They’re telling things, without telling things like — wooooo — se…
✓ Just A Note: Design Fiction Is Not Design You'd Do Anyway + Motion Graphics
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Just a thought and a note which is not an edict — just to say that Design Fiction can work as a way to have a thorough, sensible story that represents what could be. Yes, certainly it can. I’d argue that the work represented above called The Golden Institute and this other work called Super California: Forever Futur…
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This week in Barcelona started with the pleasure of having Quadrigram making the cut of the finalist of the Strata 2012 Startup Showcase. The tool is a couple of weeks away from seeing the light and the teaser video is now online. At Strata, I will present the tool with my friends at Bestiario right after my session…
✓ Some interfaces encountered in Los Angeles this week
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Few examples of technology/software-enabled spatiality encountered in Los Angeles last week:
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This week was quite active with Nicolas visiting the laboratory in Los Angeles. The main reason for this was a workshop about locative media for Nokia Advanced Design team in Calabasas. Two days there with good discussions about current projects related to this field of application. This visit was also the occasion…
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* The Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence.
✓ Mysteries and Curiosities map of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Two weeks ago, when in California, Luke Johnson gave me this fantastic (and sort-of psychogeographic) map of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The project is called “Mysteries and Curiosities Map of JPL: How can design influence an established culture?” and it has been conducted by Luke and a bunch of other people.
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Over here in Geneva, the Laboratory was involved in the Lift 12 conference with various activities. Fabien attended the event and Nicolas is part of the editorial team and, as such, he took care of one third of the keynotes presentations with sessions about games, stories, mobile and near futures. He also organized…
✓ Probably the most interesting use case for Augmented Reality:…
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Legacy post from Near Future Laboratory.
✓ A patent for an “Internet refrigerator and operating…
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A patent for an “Internet refrigerator and operating method thereof” by peeps at LG Electronics:
✓ 新しい言葉 (New Words) by Alex Dodge: A method for generating…
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新しい言葉 (New Words) by Alex Dodge: A method for generating phonetically unique words from a corpus of existing words in the Japanese language. —resulting in words that are statistically similar to Japanese.
✓ From James Auger’s PhD defense. This quote also sums up…
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From James Auger’s PhD defense. This quote also sums up his perspective:
✓ Brain-Computer Interface (Muse): “head-bands are cool…
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Brain-Computer Interface (Muse): “head-bands are cool again”
✓ “Double Tap – Sam Driver – 48 Hour Compo Entry”:
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“Double Tap - Sam Driver - 48 Hour Compo Entry”:
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As the year ends, tradition calls for a review of the several initiatives I engaged in during 2012. The exercise entails looking back in time with the support social network activities and more personal logs (e.g. ical, emails) to keep track of gratifying rencontres and significant milestones at the Near Future Labo…
✓ The OpenPositioningSystem project by Philipp Ronnenberg (Design…
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The OpenPositioningSystem project by Philipp Ronnenberg (Design Interaction, RCA):
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Curious Rituals is a project about gestures, postures and rituals people adopt when using digital technologies. It’s both a book documenting gestures we observed, and a design fiction film that speculates about their evolution
✓ News from the Executive Suite, Los Angeles Bureau
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Amongst the projects we publicly declare here on the Laboratory blog, there are probably x2 others that we don’t. We plan to change that ratio henceforth.
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Legacy post from Near Future Laboratory.
✓ Július Koller, Post-Komunikacia (U.F.O.), 1977 Collage et…
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Legacy post from Near Future Laboratory.
✓ A Few Things The Laboratory Did In 2012
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As the year ends, tradition calls for a review of the several initiatives we engaged in during 2012. The exercise entails looking back in time with the support social network activities and more personal logs to keep track of gratifying rencontres and significant milestones at the Near Future Laboratory.
✓ Subway usage in Paris, a data visualization made by…
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Subway usage in Paris, a data visualization made by Data-Publica with the following data.
✓ “The heterogeneous home” by Ben Hooker, Ryan…
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“The heterogeneous home” by Ben Hooker, Ryan Aipperspach and Allison Woodruff:
✓ The Bubble Bonnet, aka the Space Bubble Helmet: In 1964,…
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The Bubble Bonnet, aka the Space Bubble Helmet:
✓ (via Stefano Mirti), as reported by Dezeen Royal College of Art…
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(via Stefano Mirti), as reported by Dezeen
✓ Knight Rider’s red light interface. According to the…
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Knight Rider’s red light interface. According to the Wikipedia:
✓ “Hugo Gernsback wearing his TV Glasses in 1963 Life…
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“Hugo Gernsback wearing his TV Glasses in 1963 Life magazine shoot.”
✓ From Regine Debatty’s review of Bad Graffiti by Scott…
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From Regine Debatty’s review of Bad Graffiti by Scott Hocking.
✓ “Did Google Kill this Donkey?” asks Jalopnik. The…
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“Did Google Kill this Donkey?” asks Jalopnik. The answer is no: “Because of the way our 360-degree imagery is put together, it looked to some that our car had been involved in an unseemly hit and run, leaving the humble beast stranded in the road. As our imagery below shows, the donkey was lying in the path - perhap…
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Legacy post from Near Future Laboratory.
✓ ‘Curious Rituals’ in Milan for the Design Week 2013
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Quick update: “Curious Rituals: gestural interactions in the digital everyday”, the book and our short film, was shown few weeks ago in the Logotel’s (In)visible Design – 100 Stories from the Future and Beyond, an exhibition for Milano Design Week 2013. Thanks again Stefano Mattei and Francesca Rizzo!
✓ Contribution to Ethnography Matters
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I have recently contributed to the April edition of Ethnography Matters on Ethnomining and the combination of qualitative & quantitative data. My story describes the overall process of our work with sensor data at the Louvre Museum in Paris. I particularly focus on the importance of mixed-methods when its comes to g…
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After answering the questions of architects in Mosaic, I have recently responded to an interview for the monthly periodical of the Spanish geographer association. The result of the discussion is now online: La leyenda del mapa mudo – Abril 2013
✓ "One thing you seem to have got scarily accurate is the way advertising is weaved into the world…"
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One thing you seem to have got scarily accurate is the way advertising is weaved into the world around. Is that something that you foresaw coming, or just a good, estimated guess?
✓ In a conversation this afternoon with Ben Fullerton, the…
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In a conversation this afternoon with Ben Fullerton, the “trip computer” from the Talbot Alpine showed up. An awesome device from the past, one of those artifacts that was supposed to be “futuristic” at the time
✓ Is that you, or am I experiencing Artificial Reality? – The New…
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Is that you, or am I experiencing Artificial Reality? - The New Yorker
✓ The representation of futuristic technology
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An insightful excerpt from NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America by Constance Penley:
✓ (via) Read in Wired, a sociologist, Esther Kim from Yale…
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(via) Read in Wired, a sociologist, Esther Kim from Yale University was interested in the tactics employed by people to keep a free seat in the bus:
✓ Meanwhile in Switzerland: sheep to warn shepherds of wolf…
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Meanwhile in Switzerland: sheep to warn shepherds of wolf attacks by SMS:
✓ Dephone, by Maria Beltran (Master Media Design,…
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Dephone, by Maria Beltran (Master Media Design, HEAD-Genève):
✓ "Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science:Those seven warning signs are:Discoverers make their claims…"
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Legacy post from Near Future Laboratory.
✓ Despite its flawed title, reading My Life as a Telecommuting…
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Despite its flawed title, reading My Life as a Telecommuting Robot was intriguing enough. Some excerpts:
✓ “Hard time on planet Earth” is an American science…
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“Hard time on planet Earth” is an American science fiction series that aired on CBS in 1989 and caught my attention at the time because of the weird floating robot that constantly moved around the main character. According to the Wikipedia:
✓ This is the Nissan LEAF Start-Up Sounds, which is an electric…
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This is the Nissan LEAF Start-Up Sounds, which is an electric car and, as such produce almost no noise when starting.
✓ Working on the “Curious Ritual” book project, I…
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Working on the “Curious Ritual” book project, I found that interview of Bruce Sterling very much in line with what we are exploring (with field observations as the one represented above):
✓ “Biotic video-game” or more thoroughly described in…
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“Biotic video-game” or more thoroughly described in Design, engineering and utility of biotic games by Ingmar H. Riedel-Kruse , Alice M. Chung , Burak Dura , Andrea L. Hamilton and Byung C. Lee (2011):
✓ Not exactly your über cool high-flying drone, but I find…
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Not exactly your über cool high-flying drone, but I find remote-controlled cars like this fascinating. The real-time perspective, via the goggles, might be weird.
✓ Found in Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of…
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Found in Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press:
✓ Two weird examples of photo manipulation that aims at converting…
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Two weird examples of photo manipulation that aims at converting an “innocent” image into something erotic or pornographic in nature: (1) The now old “mormon porn” strategy, which consists in adding circular bubbles on an image in order to make people focus on certain aspects, (2) The pixellation technique, that the…
✓ “What? They’re Only Mechanical Men!” says…
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“What? They’re Only Mechanical Men!” says Spock, in this old Star Trek coloring book shown on io9
✓ Digital Creativity on design fictions
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For people interested in design fictions, the latest issue of Digital Creativity is a special issue about design fiction. It features papers by people like James Auger or Andrew Morrison, Ragnhild Tronstad and Einar Sneve Martinussen. As proposed by the editor of this issue, Derek Hales, in his introduction entitled…
✓ D&F: A Design & Fiction Evening
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Join us on October 24th for an evening of Design & Fiction with the Near Future Laboratory and special guest James Bridle. Explore how design and storytelling can shape our understanding of the present and future. Enjoy free regional beers and engaging discussions in a limited space setting. RSVP on Eventbrite to secure your spot!
✓ A Delightful Design Fiction Evening in San Francisco
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Last October we gathered for a Laboratory day retreat and decided — so long as we’re all together — why don’t we make a thing of it. So, we arranged to do an evening’s gathering with our friends at IDEO. Scott Paterson from IDEO facilitated our way into IDEO’s splendid waterfront facility. We brought beer, IDEO brou…
✓ Missed Opportunity – A Crank on a Camera
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An idiomatic miss here with this little, darling, silly little camera. First read says to me that crank+camera equals either, like..advance-the-image or, like..crank-the-moving-film through.
✓ Why Silicon Valley Hates TBD Catalog
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TBD Catalog. It started as a workshop-based collaboration with 19 humans and a few algorithms who willingly allowed me to shepherd them through the thoughts in my head and help show what the world may be like in some odd but likely near future — represented as a product catalog rather than some old-fashioned output…
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Nick and I came back again to the Emerge 2013 event at Arizona State University to workshop an issue of “Green Pages”, the Laboratory’s ‘Quarterly Design & Technology Fiction Almanac.’
✓ Thoughts about brain-machine interaction
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Brain-computer interactions is a pet topic I investigate on the side for quite some time; actually since I was an undegrad in Cognitive Sciences back fifteen years ago. In the last ten years, we saw an interesting evolution in terms of hardware possibilities with the advent of headcaps… this led to a novel situation…
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I just realized this the tenth year of Pasta and Vinegar! What started as a PhD student notepad is still around. There’s less blogging than it used to be but I still intend to keep this blog running. Weak signals and links are generally posted on beta knowledge, but P&V will still feature longer posts, slide decks a…
✓ The Future Silicon Valley’s Billionaires Don’t Want You To See
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I want to share with you the latest book project from the Near Future Laboratory. It’s called TBD Catalog — the Design Fiction product catalog for the normal ordinary everyday near future.
✓ A fictional newspaper from 2018 that imagines possible futures of data and football
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How will the so-called beautiful game of global football be different in a world where sport itself, and the culture of the fans who love it, is altered by the rush of data, quantification, analytics and digital delivery? What might a high-stakes match of the near future be like when every move is measured, and ever…
✓ Documenting the State of Contemporary Technology
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Or how the observations of mundane technological glitches and frictions offer a complementary form of inspiration to the multitude of glamorous utopian design visions.
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Reading some background material for a point of view I’m writing on mobile social software for a workshop on the topic lead me to Hidenori Tomita’s essay “Keitai and the Intimate Stranger.” I turned to it because I was trying to put some intellectual meat on the topic of the inextricable collusion between devices an…
✓ Near Future Laboratory Seldom Dispatch
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Enough curious things and publications and prototypes and robot news and VLOGS are currently happening in our different bureaux that we need to issue a dispatch with a note from each of us.
✓ Ubimate
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Stumbled across another mobile stuff blog: http://mobile.kaywa.com/ where I found a dispatch about (another) LBS application. This one is intriguing in that it tries to find things that you might be interested in based on things that other people have done nearby.
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Bones In Motion another, another LBS application, this one falls into the health/fitness/nutrition idiom, similar to motionbased (recently purchased by Garmin). There’s scant info on their webpage — probably still in beta? – but the idea is to accumulate your track logs using a GPS-enabled mobile handset (there’s…
✓ AJAX on Mobiles — MobileWeb2.0?
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Sometimes the “convergence” of technical idioms becomes comic in a kind of ironic way. Like, you can see a few wonks noodling about Web2.0 and then they’re, like..trying to predict a trend and, Hollywood-style, say, “Wait just a minute! Web2.0 meets Mobile! MobileWeb2.0 — get it? It’s like Web2.0, only it’s Mobile…
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Never too early to plan on waiting until the last minute to submit something for Ubicomp 2006! The general announcement just went out. I’ll be serving as co-chair for Demonstrations this year, and it will be fairly “local”, down in Irvine, California.
✓ Tis The Season for Conferences
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This just in, for Pervasive 2006 – 4th International Conference on Pervasive Computing May 07-10, 2006 The Burlington Hotel, Dublin, Ireland.
✓ Lift
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So, next month I’ll be attending Lift — check it out! If you can, I’d recommend attending. The list of attendees insures that this’ll be a great one. It’s cheap, compared to other conferences that can run $1000US+, easily.
✓ Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks And Territories
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In a world where lines blur and boundaries fade, 'Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories' invites you on a journey through the vibrant landscape of modern mapping. Edited by the insightful Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, this book is a treasure trove of creative exploration. With 40 diverse projects from talented artists acr..
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There was an interesting Charlie Rose on Friday January 6, 2006. I used to think that if I had 15 minutes of fame, I’d like to enjoy about 5 of those minutes sharing my expertise, experiences and intellect on the Charlie Rose show. Now I’m not so sure.
✓ Call for Entries: Turbulence New England Initiative II
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Turbulence recently announced a Call for Entries for its “New England Initiative II,” a juried, networked art competition.
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This Friday I will be visiting UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics and giving a talk on Mobile Social Software — some material I’ve been working on through the Netpublics Research Seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication.
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In the heart of the UK, where creativity dances with innovation, NESTA Futurelab breathes life into the world of learning. This vibrant research facility embraces the wild spirit of risk-taking, crafting a tapestry of ideas that inspire and ignite. With each newsletter, a treasure trove of projects unfolds, revealing the magic of technology intertw..
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In the whimsical world of creativity, where imagination knows no bounds, a project emerges that captures the essence of joy and play. Picture a tiny rolling prince from the beloved Katamari Damacy, bringing elements of the digital realm into our tangible lives. It's a delightful dance of technology and artistry, reminding us of the magic that happe..
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Here’s one project that slipped into the back of my memory until very recently for two unrelated reasons. The first is that I received an email from the Walter Philips Gallery this morning, which commissioned the MobileScout for its Database Imaginary show up at the Banff Center for the Arts, talking about the trave…
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I started experimenting this summer with using orientation sensing as part of the interaction syntax for some kind of near-future cinematic interface. The idea is that your mobile device like a window into a panoramic visual story world. This is a prototype of Naimark’s Viewmaster of the future idea, in many ways. I…
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Pack the pack for Bar Camp. Is this the alt-dot for the Alpha Class Foo Camp — Foo a playful and somewhat self-aggrandizing meme translating to Friends of [Tim] O’Reilly.
✓ UC Humanities Research Institute Sympoium — Technofutures
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UCHRI Summer Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory August 14-25, 2006; UC Irvine Campus
✓ GAM3R 7H30RY — And Near-Future Books
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In collaboration with The Institute for the Future of the Book, McKenzie Wark, professor of cultural and media studies at the New School is book-blogging his new book GAM3R 7H30RY, an examination of single-player video games that comes out of the analytic tradition of the Frankfurt School (not surprising..) Here’s a…
✓ EKO's and Theory Objects, or — Why Do I Blog This?
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I have always enjoyed Nicolas Nova‘s way of appending his posts with a framing statement describing why he blogged what he blogged, so I took up this Talmudic Why do I blog this? practice, but this post is about a higher order question: Why do I blog? or, more to the point, Why should design agents blog?
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Most connected humans suffer from poor ‘data hygiene’. For instance, we are plainly grotesquely overfed on social media with its ‘anytime’ ‘anywhere’ experience and there is no rational end in sight. In this article, I introduce the reasons why I developed Humans, an app that offers a way to rationally manage too ma…
✓ Licoppe on a Geolocated Game – The "Mobility Turn"
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I just finally got to Liccope’s paper (ICTs and the Engineering of Encounters: A case study of the development of a mobile game based on the geolocation of terminals) on the design, development and deployment of a geolocated mobile game in Japan — Jindo, which became Nido. (I’m pretty sure this is about Mogi Mogi,…
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In a lively dance of ideas, the Blogjects Workshop emerged, weaving connections between objects and the digital realm. A tapestry of thoughts, where tangible things became storytellers, sharing their musings in the form of blogs. Each presentation unfolded like a petal, revealing the beauty of pervasive media and the networks that bind us. As we ga..
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Has anyone discussed the submissions process for professional conferences — the important, if infamously flawed, social mixer for the knowledge production class? No? I think it would be worth taking the time to do start a short introduction to the topic. Let’s give it a shot.
✓ Lift06 — Why It Is Important
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What’s Lift06? Lift06 (Life Ideas Futures Together) is a conference in Geneva organized by Laurent Haug in collaboration with Nicolas Nova, Steven Ritchey and John Staehli. It brought together a nice diversity of participants ranging from Microsoft geeks to NGO like Amnesty International, to open society pundits lik…
✓ Anatomy of an NSF Proposal Unable To Be Funded
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Here’s another rejected proposal. It was a long shot, even as I wrote it last summer. (The summary of the proposal is available here.)
✓ Why Pigeons that Blog Matter, or: The Internet of Things is not an Internet of Arphids
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Ever since this “blogjects” topic has started circulating, I’ve been asked lots of things, but two questions have come to the fore. First, why would objects want to just blog? Second, why would I care if objects “blog”?
✓ Space, Place and Things — New Rules of Tenancy Within the Internet of Things
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(cross-posted in part from the netpublics blog)
✓ Super Heros become Super Common – From Web 2.0 to World 2.0
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I found myself in the advantageous position of having both Yochai Benkler and Mimi Ito at the same supper table. I puzzled over what was the one question I would want them both to answer — something that went beyond framing particular practices of cultural production and its meaning. So, I asked them both — what…
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One of my pieces of “output” from the workshop on Blogjects/Networked Things that Nicolas and I put together is the document contained herein. (BTW, we’re very close to having our more formal workshop “write-up” completed.) It started out as some scribblings on what I learned from the workshop, seeing the groups’ pr…
✓ Postdocs at the Annenberg Center
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The Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) at the University of Southern California invites applications for up to eight postdoctoral positions and one visiting scholar position. These Visiting Research fellows will take part in a major multi-disciplinary research initiative to explore the “The Meaning of the Ne…
✓ Mobile Phone Usage Idiom — No. 1
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Francois is just freshly back from a trip to India to kick it with that sub-continents introduction of the Aspen Institute — I guess they’re franchising or something.
✓ Mobile Phone Usage Idiom — No. 2
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I didn’t think I could get two of these in under 24 hours — and lead to them from the same colleague, but Francois diligently commented on the Flickr page from one of the images for Idiom No. 1 with another design challenge.
✓ Objects That Blog Usage Scenario — No. 1 (Making Things Legible)
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I have been pondering with Nicolas and others a series of usage scenarios for Things (networked objects) that could make the aggregate effects of themselves legible through the great disseminator — the Internet. That is, turning things that are invisible and perhaps incomprehensible into the visible and semantical…
✓ Internet of Sticks — Now There's No Excuse Not To Get Your Spime On!
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Fabien just IM’d in this bit of codeable candy — the TrackStick. What is it? It’s a stick that knows where it is. It has some Spimey characteristics — it tracks where it goes, and it remembers where it’s been. That’s pretty much it. The Track Stick records its own location, time, date, speed, heading and altitude…
✓ Armitage On Controllers — Are These Controllers What We Want To Inform Game Design? Huh?
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Tom Armitage gave a great talk this morning at Etech titled “Is Controller Design Killing Creativity.”
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So, when I first tapped this into Ecto a few days ago, I had just given my talk at O’Reilly Etech on Pervasive Electronic Games. I was burning a few minutes before the EFF presentation and jammed it in, went to upload a PDF of my slides and I couldn’t create a new directory on my server. I tailed /var/log/messages a…
✓ Society of the Spectacle (2.0): Surveillance in the Internet of Things
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I was recently asked to consider how the new surveillance is (or might) operate in the era of networked Things. It’s not a hard one to think through, but I reflected upon the role that visual surveillance has played in reshaping and refashioning physical space and thought — maybe visual surveillance doesn’t mat…
✓ The divide that separates people from their online lives
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The divide that separates people from their online lives:
✓ Report from the Blogject Workshop at LIFT06
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Nicolas and I have finished our Next Iteration on the Blogject project — our workshop report from Lift06..Read, Ponder, Complain and Disseminate.
✓ San Jose / Palo Alto / Berkeley
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I did a bit at the Institute for the Future Monday at lunchtime, and then I have a Nokia thing down to San Jose Monday evening and then Tuesday I’m going to meet Rob Tow up to Sun Labs to talk about what he’s doing, what I’m doing. The usual drill.
✓ Theory Objects & Design Patterns
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This “Theory Object” business — I’m trying to work out what it might mean through practice, through the activity of making things. As Bruce Sterling said in his wonderfully rabinical talk at SXSW just the other day, “A Theory Object is a kind of Theory Object.” It’s got that geeky recursion, like GNU — GNU is Not Unix.
✓ South Bay Round-up: IFTF, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, GDC
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I am just coming back from a round-up quick tour around the South Bay over the last two days. I came up here to San Jose at the invitation of Jyri Salomaa from Nokia, Beijing, who is the Research Manager for Asian Mobile Gaming at Nokia. Jyri invited a few of us out to dinner to discuss the mobile projects going on…
✓ Notes on Saskia Sassen – 3G mobiles 'change social habits' + Creative Destruction
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This article was lurking in a Smart Filter in NetNewsWire.
✓ Clusters that Circulate Culture — Filling Out the Ecosystem Metaphors?
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In a world swirling with cultural currents, the talk by Yochai Benkler at the Annenberg Center for Communication has set my thoughts adrift. It invites us to envision a landscape where culture flows freely, unbound by the rigid hierarchies that dictate our collective narratives. Here, we can gather our tools and craft our own stories, celebrating t..
✓ Theory Objects, Pedagodgy and Practice-based Design
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I’m liking this Theory Object business more and more.
✓ networked publics conference
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In the vibrant tapestry of academia, a new thread is woven with each passing year. This time, it’s the buzz of the Networked Publics conference, shimmering with ideas and creativity. Scholars and dreamers alike will converge, each bringing their unique spark to ignite conversations that matter. Join us in this dance of minds, where the digital age ..
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reboot 8 is awfully fun, insightful, brilliant and engaging. There’s so much here that is being discussed that I’m rationing pages in my little portable notebook. Notebook? Yeah, because some of th emost exciting conversations happen f2f out on the front lawn of this amazing space where the weather has been accommod…
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TripSense. I first wrote a little bit about this about six months ago. My car insurer asked if I would plug this data recording module into the special data port on my car — that port that the mechanic plugs into when your Check Engine light comes on.
✓ Blogject Presentation at Reboot
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Nicolas and I gave our presentation yesterday at Reboot on Blogjects. It was a lot of fun to think about how to deliver our early thinking and insights and capture the substance of the concept, and deliver some of the design thoughts developed at the workshops, and think of the ways these things tie into the many ot…
✓ Ubicomp 2006 — Call for Demos — June 16, 2006
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The Ubicomp conference’s Demonstrations Program offers an excellent way to showcase tangible results of ubiquitous computing research and development to over 500 attendees from academia and industry. A successful demo communicates ideas and concepts in a powerful way that a regular presentation cannot. We invite y…
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In the vast tapestry of the skies, flight tracking emerges as a delicate art, weaving together the movements of metal birds soaring through the clouds. With fboweb.com, the magic unfolds as you enter a flight number, and watch as the journey unfurls in real- time, a dance of logistics and time. The new KML files invite you to take a closer look, me..
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In a world where every click brims with potential, Will Carter and I have been weaving a digital tapestry called geotagthings. This project unfurls a simple path to blend the virtual with the tangible, where URLs find their place on the map. With a single click of a bookmarklet, you can anchor a website to a specific latitude and longitude, breathi..
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In a world where technology dances with our daily lives, the Nokia 5500 emerges like a songbird, chirping melodies of innovation. This 'Sport Phone'—a title that feels a bit off—embraces the art of motion with its built-in 3D sensor. Imagine the thrill of tracking your steps like counting stars, or measuring your run as if each stride were a brushs..
✓ Nordichi Workshop Call: Near Field Interactions
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Workshop: Near field interactions This is a call for proposals for a workshop on user-centred interactions with the internet of things at Nordichi 2006, October 14 and 15, 2006 in Oslo, Norway. http://nordichi.net.dynamicweb.dk/
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This is perhaps the most disturbing spam I’ve ever received. It purports to be from a soldier in Iraq who is part of an underground syndicate stealing booty (“consignments”) and selling it on the open market. Maybe they think I’d stow it in the back shed until such time as the killings and day-to-day unrest settles…
✓ SLOWmail
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A project that Carolyn Strauss and I proposed, to do in collaboration with graphic designer and artist Zipora Fried received a Rhizome Commission! We’re pretty excited. We’ve been chatting around the project topic basically since we first met a couple of years ago now.
✓ Blogjects: Small Clarification
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Once, my mentor and dissertation advisor Donna Haraway mentioned in a conversation that she wished she could better police the way her writings were taken up. I only vaguely understood what she meant at the time.
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Some remarks on Friday and Saturday’s “Networked Publics” conference.
✓ Why Games Matter?: Susana's Thesis Project
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Susana Ruiz’s MFA thesis project – one of the projects from the 2nd class of thesis graduates to complete their MFA’s from the interactive media division’s, is an embodied explication of the intractable, miserable, life diminishing products of what happens when difference – political, ethnic, religious, skin color –…
✓ MSR Social Computing Symposium
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I’m at the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium today and tomorrow. A live video feed is here:
✓ Ubicomp 2006 — Call for Demos
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The Ubicomp conference’s Demonstrations Program offers an excellent way to showcase tangible results of ubiquitous computing research and development to over 500 attendees from academia and industry. A successful demo communicates ideas and concepts in a powerful way that a regular presentation cannot. We invite y…
✓ Augmented Objects Workshop: Ubicomp 2006 CfP
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This Ubicomp 2006 workshop looks to be asking questions related to networked objects and the digital environments that would obtain when you have physical space inhabited by informatically chatty Things. It would be fun to attend this one!
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In the heart of Edinburgh, where history whispers through cobblestone streets, the Poker Club awakens anew. Imagine a gathering where minds spark like fireflies, illuminating the night with ideas of the ‘internet of things’ and ‘open source architecture’. Here, artists, architects, and technologists collide, stirring the pot of innovation over a fi..
✓ Winning (and Losing) the First Wired War
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In the theater of war, where chaos dances with strategy, a digital divide emerges like a chasm between worlds. Commanders, anchored by their screens, send forth orders, but the soldiers in the field remain untethered, battling in a silence of incompatible signals. It's a tale of missed connections and fragmented communications, where the promise of..
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I was poking around the RES website last night and stumbled on a short interview with Keita Takahashi, designer of the iconoclastic Katamari Damacy duet of video games, perhaps my favorite, you know — modern video game.
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I went to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to see the exhibition on digital games & art. The Stedelijk Museum is set in a kind of dockyard floating barge tie-up area near the Centraal Station. My negative sense of direction ultimately delivered me near enough where I saw the preposterously funny mix-and-match of a…
✓ reboot 8
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reboot8 is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us… 2 days. 400 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, conn…
✓ DIY at Foo Camp, and Why Chumby Matters
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I was deliriously fortunate to have been invited to spend the weekend at Foo Camp a weekend ago and equally fortunate to have met a number of hardware makers and hackers including Nathan Siedel from Spark Fun and Colin Cross, engineer by day and open cell phone developer by night.
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I just read through a short, incisive little essay by Machiko Kushahara called Device Art: A New Form of Media Art from a Japanese Perspective in the v6, n2 issue of intelligent agent.
✓ What is Leisure & Entertainment 2.0?
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Should new modes of Leisure & Entertainment be created (or anticipated) that do not vector in on “industrial” entertainment models of production, distribution — even genre? That is, why would we expect that the forms of media apparati that are dominantly understood as “entertainment” or as “leisure” be able to acc…
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John Maeda’s book Simplicity arrived the other day. It’s small, so I sat down to read it over breakfast. I hit a brick wall here, on page i (not page one, page eye, in the preface, I guess):
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A few notes on Vernor Vinge Paints the Future at Austin Game Conference as they pertain to some topics near and dear. I found the comments as transcribed to be interesting enough to frame a few thoughts around.
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So, anyway. I heard about this gadget a few years ago, but it kind of rolled off my brain. I saw some documentation about it again for this summer’s SIGGRAPH, and then I saw the Device Art article in Intelligent Agent a week or so ago and I decided I should get one — it was resonating with a bunch of stuff. I figure…
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Ah, the season of innovation and creativity is upon us once more! As the world awakens to the possibilities of gaming beyond the screen, ideas dance like leaves in the wind. This year, I'm excited to share my vision on pervasive electronic games—a blend of reality and play that beckons us outside. Imagine a world where our everyday surroundings bec..
✓ Arduino and the LIS3LV02DQ Triple Axis Accelerometer
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A mouthful otherwise known as a nice little 3-axis accelerometer from STMicroelectronics with a SPI bus, which makes it handy for interfacing in microcontroller style applications. I picked up one of these in breakout board style from the DIY heros at Sparkfun Electronics to see about its suitability for a DIY pedom…
✓ Between Experts and Amateurs as Original Equipment Manufacturers
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In the world of DIY device crafting, a beautiful dance unfolds between experts and amateurs. It’s a symphony of creativity where backyard workshops hum with the buzz of innovation. With every circuit soldered and every code written, the lines between professional and hobbyist blur, giving rise to a vibrant community of makers. What if, instead of w..
✓ Picnic
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I’m heading to Amsterdam for Picnic ’06 to give a talk on, er.. the Internet of Things, a topic near and dear and, despite the somewhat pedestrian sound of the topic (what else would the internet be except an assemblage of “things”), it is a subject that flags some weak signals as to what it will be like in the near…
✓ The Blind Camera – Sascha Pohflepp's "Buttons" Series
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Ever sense Sascha started talking, quite animatedly, about this project — ” The Blind Camera — I became almost as excited as he. A camera..that takes someone else’s photo. The semantics are tricky — it doesn’t take a photograph of someone else, but take’s (as in, borrows or copies or “snags”) a photograph that someo…
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I’ve only started doing this blogging bit for a short while, after a few fitful starts. It’s hear because I need a research notebook, and I’m feeling good about making my inscriptions public (if you count the handful of people who skim this a public, why not?).
✓ Youtube and the Flash-Bang Grenade Theory of Evolution
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Nicolas Nova, who will be joining us at the Networked Publics Conference, points to a International Herald Tribute article on user generated content. (Recently, there was an article in the NYT on a similar topic.)
✓ Hey, I got it! Let's make the band pay..
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Amidst the whirl of conferences and ideas, a tale of fiscal woes unfolds. The SIGCHI 2006 beckons, yet the cost leaves a bitter taste. Like a poet lamenting for the lost chance to dance in the spotlight, our writer feels the weight of missed connections and unfulfilled dreams. In a world where passion meets the harsh realities of funding, we ponder..
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In the vibrant world of interactive media, students weave their dreams into reality. Last night, amidst the buzz of excitement, the 3rd year students shared their thesis masterpieces, each a glimpse into the future. Among these sparks of creativity, Erin Dinehart presented her enchanting mobile game, 'Journey of Jin.' It’s not just a game; it's an ..
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In a world where our inboxes overflow like a wild garden, the quest for calm amidst chaos takes center stage. What if our digital dialogues could unfold like a gentle breeze, inviting us to savor each word rather than rush through? Imagine a communication channel that dances between the fast and the deliberate, a space where anticipation blooms as ..
✓ How Blogjects Can Become Taxonomic Glue
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I’m really hopped up on the idea of the ubicamera that takes ubipictures. There are already hints of ubiquitous visual coverage with this “mutually assured flickering” whackiness of getting coverage of the same moment from a variety of perspectives. It happens, of course, with tagging concensus for events and so for…
✓ Making A Geospatial Web: Collaborative Cartography, Part I
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Imagine a world where the physical and digital realms dance together, where each web page has a heartbeat tied to its location. The geospatial web beckons, promising a symphony of information that flows seamlessly through our everyday lives. It's a bit chaotic, a touch whimsical, yet filled with the potential for connection and creativity. In this ..
✓ MASSIVE Event at UCI — Why Games Matter
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Yesterday's MASSIVE event was a journey worth every mile down the 405, filled with vibrant discussions and the sweet taste of thoughtfully crafted presentations. The air buzzed with ideas, and Celia, along with the rest of the organizers, created a tapestry of experience that was both enlightening and delicious—no bland bake sale treats here! I too..
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Las Vegas, a dazzling realm where dreams collide with the glitz of neon lights, beckoned me this weekend. Amidst the chaos, I sought wisdom at the Digital Cinema Summit, a vibrant symphony of creativity and technology. Here, industry titans like James Cameron painted visions of 3D magic, reminding us that stories, not just the tech, breathe life in..
✓ Interactive Media Division Thesis Show 2006: "dimension 9"
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May 6-12, 2006 Opening Reception: May 6, 2006, 4-8p Location: Robert Zemeckis Center for the Digital Arts, 3131 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA 90089
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Else/Where Mapping edited by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall is one of the most loruvilous books I’ve wrapped my paws around in a long time. I just lurve books that are full of gorvilous rich color illustrations and photos and with enough writing around them that I can dip in and dip out without feeling I have to go fro…
✓ NeutralNet, TCNOtopia, Automata — Video Remix for Netpublics Symposium
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Great post-ironic documentary from the future on The Network as it may be.
✓ The World Of Self-Driving Cars
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It’s easy to get all..Silicon Valley when drooling over the possibility of a world chock-full of self-driving cars.
✓ Design Fiction and the Optimistic Contrarian
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[The Fosbury Flop](http://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/sports/year_in_sports/10.20.html) and the power of unanticipated, optimistically contrarian perspectives to make creative work "creative" in...
✓ Unintended Use Cases - The Unknown Knowns In Design
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A blind spot in modern user-centered design is the difficulty in handling the 'unintended use case'.
✓ Creating Fictional Data Products and Their Implications
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When conceptualizing a service or product based on data, I first transform visions into a tangible visualization or prototype that anyone in a multi-disciplinary team can feel and understand. Additionally, I generally create Design Fictions that explore possible appropriations of the envisioned data product along it…
✓ Some Critical Thoughts to Inspire People Active in the Internet of Things
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It has never been so easy to build things and throw them into people’s pockets, bags, phones, homes, cars. Almost inevitably — with this abundance of ‘solutions’ — it has never been so easy to get caught in the hyperbolic discourses of perpetual technological disruptions with their visions of flawless connectivity a…
✓ The Global Village and its Discomforts
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Or why designers and data scientists should learn from the anxieties, obsessions, phobias, stress and other mental burdens of the connected humans.
✓ Hello World. This is Próximo.
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Ever since the slow death of Dopplr after its acquisition by Nokia a decade ago, the internet has lacked a dedicated space for people to casually share their travel intentions. Back in those days, it was also a feature of trip planning services like TripIt which since then pivoted to booking management for frequent…
✓ Battleship:GoogleEarth (a 1st Life/2nd Life mashup)
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I’ve started working on a bit of summer laboratory experiment to see how Google Earth could become a platform for realtime mobile gaming. (Follow the link on the Flickr photo page to the URL you can load in your Google Earth client to see the game board in its current state.)
✓ Jaiku! Presence Awareness for Breakfast
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Just saw on Nicolas’ place that an early beta (what’s the difference between any beta anymore..) Jyri Engestrom and his posse’s Jaiku rich presence application for Series 60 2nd edition devices has been released..very nice. I just downloaded the client to this N70 + T-Mobile I’ve been poking around with and it makes…
✓ The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex: Avoiding Ender's Folly
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ACE2006 Keynote: The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex
✓ RES Magazine — Short Profile
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Holly Willis wrote a short profile on me in the July/August 2006 issue of RES Magazine.
✓ Hello from the Design Museum
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The Design Museum (London) has just opened their Home Futures exhibition. Our Ikea Catalog From The Near Future (2015) is on exhibition, with physical copies for museum visitors to peruse and take home.
✓ Design Fiction at the Design Museum
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This week we have taken over The Design Museum of London’s Instagram feed. We did this in coordination with the publication of our Ikea Catalog (of the Near Future) for The Design Museum’s current exhibition, “Home Futures” — running until March 2019.
✓ End of the Year Swimsuit Spectacular Booklet
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Do these selfies taken by two people who don’t know each other give us a glimpse of the future? Will the ever-increasing use of technological devices reconfigure our bodies? Will it affect our posture even in the most banal situations?
✓ A Deep Dive Into A Design Fiction Archetype
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What do I mean when I say 'Design Fiction Archetype'?
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The Future Mundane concept is a valuable transformation as to how we think about possiblity and possible futures by emphasizing the normal, ordinary, everyday aspects of life that are often overlooked in traditional grand-scale future visions. Unlike these glossy utopian projections, the Future Mundane has us imagine into a future that is relatable..
✓ The Futurists Podcast with Julian Bleecker
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In this episode of 'The Futurists,' co-hosts Brett King and Rob Tercik discuss with Julian Bleecker, co-founder of Near Future Laboratory, his unique approach called 'Design Fiction.' They explore the imaginative process of depicting future scenarios through objects, advertisements, and everyday experiences, akin to archeological finds from the fut..
✓ Our Approach of Design Fiction
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One of our objectives at Near Future Laboratory is to help carry Design Fiction to maturity and any interrogation or critique from the public is a source of reflection and an opportunity for describing our understanding as to what Design Fiction is, how it’s best practiced, and in what ways it can evolve.
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The business of dishonest automation and how the engineers, data scientists and designers behind it can fix it
✓ A Design Fiction Map of Geneva for Autonomous Vehicles
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When discussing and writing about the future of cities with autonomous vehicles, it is easy to skip over complex details in favor of the “big headlines”.
✓ On Design Fiction: Close, But No Cigar
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We are super excited and thrilled that the term “Design Fiction” is being heard beyond the relatively small community of designers who have been practicing it over the last decade or so. More organizations and teams are now coming to us looking for a fresh and different approach to addressing their needs, concerns,…
✓ A Little Design Fiction on Brexit
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“The contents of your shopping basket may change. Almost 30% of our food currently comes from the EU, and it is likely that some foods, such as fresh vegetables and fruit, will become more scarce and more expensive in the event of no deal.”
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Vince’s post pointed out that Digital Photography Review has release notes on this Sony dangly thing that uses GPS to record your location and precise time at that location. When you get home and want to correlate location with your photos, it’s a simple matter of time-synchronizing with the time stamp embedded in t…
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Will just created a Geotagthings feed for ISEA 2006, thank goodness. This’ll definitely help with figuring out what’s where..
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In the general category of breeching the berm between 1st Life & 2nd Life — you know, finding ways in which activities in the normal geophysical world can be linked to those in the digitally networked world, I’ve pulled together some thinking into a project that I’m calling Flavonoid. The general idea is to creat…
✓ Summer Laboratory Experiment: Producing Stereo QuicktimeVR
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The back story of the project tracks back to a conversation with Naimark. Working on the (wrong) impression that a stereo panorama could be created trivially, using two cameras on a rotating, panoramic rig, I was all set to make stereo QuicktimeVRs. Naimark pointed me to a research paper that indicated that such a c…
✓ Mediamatic Workshop — RFID & The Internet of Things
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Timo Arnall, Arie Altena and I will be participating in the Mediamatic workshop on RFID & The Internet of Things, September 11-13. It’ll be a mix of discussion, lectures and hands-on prototyping. Should be lots of fun!
✓ Summer Backyard Laboratory Experiment: Immersive Viewer Apparatus, Configuration B
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I spent a week or so wrangling some variations on the immersive viewer apparatus for the little research group at USC working on this project. Some of the “early” prototyping of the concept I had done last winter, described in this blog post.
✓ Touch: Nordichi RFID Workshop Papers
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We’ve just posted the 15 accepted papers for the Nordichi workshop on Near Field Interactions. More details at the workshop web page.
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Perry and Andreas came up with this list in our new Collaborative Design Lab. Let’s just call it a to-do list.
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I’ll keep things brief this week as my brain is all filled up with reading our manuscript and I already begged our lovely whip-cracker crackerjack editorial shepherds with a three day extension to final-final stuff and...
✓ Design Fiction or Science Fiction
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In most instances I can think of, science fiction is more than simple dramatic storytelling about the future. It is often allegory through which the present state is refracted back to us — an assessment of who we are as...
✓ The Generative Function of Design Fiction
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But before that, I want to mention that Nick presented [the closing keynote at the IKEA Digital Days](https://tinyurl.com/ikea-talk) conference last week from his studio in Oakland. He spoke about setting the right...
✓ The Manual of Design Fiction
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This week was a bit of a highly generative and exciting few or four days here at the Near Future Laboratory's Distributed Global Headquarters. You see, there were some diverts and distractions, the most exciting of...
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A description of this post would start by noting that it discusses "In The Matter of Everalbum and Paravision" and explores the implications of algorithmic regulation through a Design Fiction lens. It highlights the need for thoughtful engineering and design to address the challenges posed by algorithms in society. The post also presents a fictiona..
✓ Marketing Fiction vs. Design Fiction
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Fiction effervesces gamely, shaping our imagination, consciousness, our habits, our aspirations, the things we wear, the words we speak, the tears we shed and laughs we laugh, and the various and sometimes deadly...
✓ The Algorithm's Bird Box Moment
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In the film ‘Bird Box’, based on the book of the same name, humans are driven to such a degree of despair that they take their own lives when they see the shadow of their consciousness — the thing they most fear. They...
✓ Process Outcomes and Prediction Outcomes
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The process of doing Design Fiction is one and the same as the outcomes. The Process becomes the work product, which is then preserved by itself — your finished ‘Design Fiction’.
✓ When and Where Are The Future?
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As I see it, there are two unspoken principles undergirding work to create better, more habitable near future worlds.
✓ In Clear Focus Podcast Part One S13E10
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A podcast episode where I discuss the concept of Design Fiction and how it can aid brands in strategic planning. Design Fiction offers a unique approach to envisioning the future, emphasizing the creation of tangible, thought-provoking scenarios over traditional analytical methods.
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`For the past years, the outsized narrative of DAO [Decentralized Autonomous Organization] as an alternative to venture capital dims the light of its much more profound, and much more interesting potential — a fluid,...
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1. I’ve been told that the reason someone will do something without being paid with, you know — dollars and stuff, or some other sanctioned fiat currency — is because they themselves receive some kind of ‘psychic...
✓ Design Fiction as the Epistemological Monkey Wrench (Nothing about NFTs)
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1. The whole NFT thing? It’s like standing between different worlds. 1. What do I mean by that? 1. What I mean is this: the idea of an NFT doesn’t make sense to enough people, and does make sense to enough people, that...
✓ The Geometry of Design Fiction
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It’s helpful to consider that much (all?) of what we know about the world comes from observation. It’s been said that we are sense-making critters. Our brains are able to take inputs, make meaning, and take action with...
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James Bridle wrote a remarkable essay some years back called [“The New Aesthetic.”](https://jamesbridle.com/works/the-new-aesthetic)
✓ What's Next? The Discovery Mindset
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**1**. Somewhere in Holland in the mid-17th century, a time machine was invented. Or it may have been a teleportation device. This is how it happened.
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1. I told this story a couple weeks ago to a guy who was interested in buying a majority interest in a company I started. For some reason, likely my very theatrical imagination, I thought I should have some...
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1. I heard the most simple and resonant description of integrity the other day. 2. It was so resonant, at least to the matrix of my own consciousness at that moment, that I played it over probably a dozen times over the...
✓ How to Rebuild an Imaginary Future (2025) - Bruce Sterling
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Bruce just sent this ‘print edition’ of the talk he just gave at the 2025 SxSW. It refers to the panel I organized at SxSW in 2010 (as opposed to the ..
✓ Phil Balagtas is Making Futures Work
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Listen to the latest episode of the Near Future Laboratory Podcast where Phil Balagtas and I discuss the challenges and triumphs of writing an all-encompassing book on futures practice, exploring the evolution of speculative d..
✓ Workshop on Reimagining Work at USC
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I gave a talk at USC in the context of a Future of Work workshop that was organized through the USC Iovine and Young Academy for their Master of Science in Integrated Design, Business and Technology program. After a brief brief from Yihun, I knew exactly what to share with them — my OMATA case study. That's the one where I created an Annu..
✓ Scratching the Surface Podcast
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Join Jarrett Fuller in this episode of Scratching the Surface, as he sits down with Julian Bleecker to explore the realm of design fiction. Julian, a pioneer in this field, discusses his journey from teaching at USC to writing influential essays, and how his work seamlessly combines engineering with imaginative storytelling. Discover how tangible a..
✓ Tobias Revell Stories To Imagine Alternate Futures
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Listen to the episode on Spotify, Pocketcasts and/or ..
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1. Entrepreneurs write science fiction now. 2. Not the entertainment kind. 3. Not to dream. 4. But to strategize. 5. I mean — what is that even? 6. And I don't even know if they real..
✓ Digital Twins Are The Future of Work
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What if your career had a shadow version of you — always learning, always optimizing, always on? Welcome to a world where Digital Twins aren’t just for jet engines and hospitals. They’re becoming the proxy professionals of the AI era — a second self trained on your ..
✓ Imagination in the Era of AI
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Next week I'll be giving a talk to students and faculty at Princeton University's Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. The talk is titled “Imagination in the era of AI” in which I will be talking about the relationship of Imagination and Innovation, and how the two are always productively entangled in the work I do at Near Future ..
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1\. I once heard — so it’s hearsay and anecdotal, but maybe useful as a provocation — that one of the unique qualities of human consciousness is an ability to imagine as if things were otherwise, or other than things...
✓ Artificial Intelligence Designed Fictions Research Studio
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The language, ideas, concepts — entire epistemologies — we have today are too small for the territory we are entering. AI stands not as a tool, but as the entry point to a new territory. We are at a vanguard, and we need to explore, experiment and prototype our way in order to make it make sense. The Artificial Intelligence Designed Fictions Resear..
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The LA Design Festival is a global platform for creative exploration, cultural exchange, and design as a tool for transformation. Join me for a hands-on workshop on Design Fiction, where we prototype possible futures using artifacts rather than predictions.
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In my book ‘It's time to imagine harder’, my hypothesis was that bringing the creative consciousness back to work is a clear path to unlocking the unexpected and unanticipated, the unseen. The creative consciousness - which has a proclivity or impulse to operate co..
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Ghostwriter is a speculative functional prototype that is meant to explore the possibilities of a more collaborative and conversational interaction with AI. It is not a product, but rather a design fiction that imagines how we might work — or in this case, write — with AI in the near future. This is a kind of UX mode that I'm calling Stream..
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A quick prototype to just see the feel of a collaborative writing experience using the Ghostwriter idea in a TUI interface. Basically a terminal-based interface that allows you to write, and at certain points the Ghostwriter will suggest a next sentence or paragraph, and you can accept it, or not. Or also scroll through suggestions/compl..
✓ Office Hours Side Projects Edition
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In this edition of Office Hours Side Projects Edition, we explore the intersection of AI, speculative storytelling, and embodied design. Sandro presents his work on composable documents that regenerate based on user interaction, while Rodney shares a poetic series of “911 call transcripts” from decommissioned cyborgs. Both talks invite us to rethin..
✓ Office Hours Side Projects N°265
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Another episode of Office Hours Side Projects N°265, where we get together to share our interests, passions, current or past or even future side projects. In this episode had sharings from three participants, Jordan, Guiliana, and Isabella. 👇🏽 Jordan discusses his vision for a speculative design studio aimed at aiding small ..
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The problem with optimization? It can become an obsession. We can easily optimize to the point of failure — and not even realize it. We want things to be faster, smoother, more efficient. But in all that streamlining, we risk losing something essential — a very particular kind of Creativity.
✓ Thinking Forward Podcast Ep.135
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What happens when you hold an artifact from a future that doesn't exist yet? A newspaper headline from 2045, a product manual for technology not yet invented, or a social media post from an entirely different world? These aren't just creative exercises—they're powerful tools for making abstract futures tangible. Julian Bleecker, one of the pioneer..
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Vibewriter is a functional software prototype that anticipates new modes of interaction, interface, and engagement with AI. Vibewriter mode is just the beginning. In its standard Ghostwriter mode, it's able to help complete your thoughts. It will never write for you; i..
✓ Strategy as Disciplined Imagination
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Strategy isn’t a plan. It’s a provocation. A story about a future you’re willing to bet on. It’s not prediction. It’s preparation. Slide decks don’t move people. Artifacts do. Prototypes do. Narratives that you can see, touch, and test do.
✓ In Response to Silvo Lorusso's “Late Futurism”
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TL;DR: Less yammering. More hammering. If there’s one thing getting in the way of Imagining better futures, it’s not capitalism or collapse — it’s us. The self-proclaimed futurists. The critics of self-proclaimed futurists. The endless theorizing, posturing, and purity tests. Let’s collaborate more. Make more. Imagine harder.
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Notes from Office Hours Side Projects Edition N°262, where we discuss the intersection of AI, art, and technology. This session features a presentation by Andrew Cor on horizon scanning and early warning systems, followed by Kirby Ferguson's 'Dream Logic' project. The conversation gets into into the challenges and aesthetics of AI-generated content..
✓ Prototypes are like thinking plus making..
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1. Prototypes are like thinking plus making.. you can't have one without the other. 2. I think of prototypes as a way to make sense of an idea. They are a way to think through a problem, to explore possibilities, and to communicate ideas. They are a bridge between the abstract and the concrete, between thought and action. 3. P..
✓ Futures of Aging Workshop at SF Design Week 2025
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We are in the midst of a longevity revolution. This isn’t just about longer lifespans; it’s about living those years more fully. The number of people over 80 globally is projected to triple between 2020 and 2050. As this population expands, so does the diversity of their preferences, interests, passions, and ambitions. They are not a monolithic gro..
✓ Sideshow
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Futurespaces and Near Future Laboratory bring you SideShow on June 12th, 2025 at 6:00 PM at the Proper Hotel in Santa Monica, CA. One night. A room full of artists, designers, filmmakers, and creative people sharing the work they’re making outside the brief. Sound experiments. Illegible interfaces. Broken narratives. Too..
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The ‘magazine from the future’ isn't simply a collection of predictions; it’s a diegetic prototype, an element of Design Fiction that are the thing you hold and wonder/wander into. The diegetic prototype diverts the expectation of a prediction; that’s a fundamentally limited e..
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We often think of strategy as something cold, analytical, spreadsheet-driven. But more and more, I’m convinced that strategy is fundamentally a form of fiction—a way of telling a story about the future, then organizing people and resources to make that story real.
✓ Zero Cool and the Oraculator
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Creative thinking can be ignited by tools like Ghostwriter, even if they don't yet deliver fully realized narratives. An experiment using Ghostwriter’s Vibewriter mode to generate a cyberpunk story with the Llama 3.2-3b-instruct model running locally in LM Studio.
✓ The trouble with staying with the trouble when the future is in trouble
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The trouble with staying with the trouble when the future is in trouble is that those responsible or who can possibly take responsibility for imagining a more habitable future are doing less of it or, even worse, are imagining a future that is antagonistic to the very forces that are at work to make the world a less habitable place. It is like taki..
✓ A Fictional Conceit from an AI Future
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How we lost — and rediscovered — the craft of writing. A fictional conceit from an AI future. Imagining a possible future or even an adjacent present in which writing is a lost art, and a new generation rediscovers it through mechanical contrivances and the exercise of their paralimbicis gyrus. A piece of short speculative fiction th..
✓ A Short Response to “Can AI Be More Than a Writing Gimmick”
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When considering the role of A.I. in writing, I began to wander into a near future where A.I. is more like a mellow muse than a tool meant to deprive me or those inclined to translate thoughts into prose. To take that away feels like a rush to a future where the craft of writing is misunderstood as drudgery. Now, in some cases it may be. I use it q..
✓ The End of the English Paper?
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A response and some reflections on the article in The New Yorker by Hua Hsu, "What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?" and how it relates to the design fiction project Vibewriter.
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A repost of John Seely Brown and Mark Weiser's seminal paper on calm technology, exploring the design principles that enable technology to enhance human experience without overwhelming it. This paper discusses the importance of peripheral awareness, the balance between center and periphery in design, and the role of calm technology in creating a mo..
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A conversation with Outgoing — Dell and Brett, the duo behind the studio called Outgoing, situated somewhere in Gowanus, Brooklyn. They are a design studio that creates objects and spaces that are both functional and beautiful, with a focus on sustainability and craftsmanship and the opinions of a particular ..
✓ Experiencing the future mundane
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This paper introduces a novel methodological approach for surfacing theacceptability and adoption challenges that confront future and emergingtechnologies from the perspective of mundane action, in which they willultimately be embedded and used. This novel approach configures Design Fiction as a breaching experiment to surface taken for granted bac..
✓ Office Hours Side Projects Edition N°266
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In this edition of Office Hours Side Projects, we explore innovative projects from our community members. From 3D printing advancements to AI-driven tools, the discussions are rich with insights and creativity. Presentations of Side Projects by Ben, Eduardo, and Sabrina spark engaging conversations about the future of design, technology,..
✓ Office Hours Side Projects N°267
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Office Hours Side Projects Edition is an evolution of the Open Office Hours series. In this variation, projects are shared in short, sharp 10 minute presentations, followed by a 20 minute discussion. The goal is to share ideas, get feedback, and explore the potential of these projects in a collaborative environment. In this episode side projec..
✓ Office Hours Side Projects N°268
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Office Hours Side Projects Edition is an evolution of the Open Office Hours series. In this variation, projects are shared in short, sharp 10 minute presentations, followed by a 20 minute discussion. The goal is to share ideas, get feedback, and explore the potential of these projects in a collaborative environment. In the Office Hours Side Pr..
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Over 10 years ago I did what everyone said I shouldn't. I created a hardware startup. “Dude. Don't do it. Hardware is hard!” But, I did it. Maybe it's because I went to Montessori School and was instilled with a different set of decision making muscles. It was hard, no doubt. They were not wrong about that. But I got it done. Built a product — some..
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Sublimated AI interfaces are a possible near future of human-computer interaction, focusing on subtle, ambient collaboration rather than direct commands. This approach preserves human agency and enhances creative flow, making AI a seamless extension of the user’s creative process.
✓ The Other Approach to Writing with AI
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How can we write with AI in a way that is more than just a tool? It seems the tech guys rushed to this vision of a future where the AI is the sole author, rather than a collaborator in the writing process. Things like ChatGPT will very willingly hand over a completed essay — one that recent writing (cf. Hsu) on the topic of AI and the future of (co..
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A reflection on the things that become obvious in hindsight but are not recognized in the present.
✓ Fewer Frameworks, More Fragments
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This post is a reflection on the role of material speculation in design and strategy workshops, emphasizing the use of tangible artifacts to provoke conversation and exploration of possible futures. It advocates for a shift from traditional frameworks and consensus-building towards curating encounters with fragments that represent potential worlds,..
✓ Operationalizing Imagination
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Imagination is evolutionary advantage. It is the core of what Strategy is meant to be. It is at the root of Design. Without it, one will always find oneself left behind, unable to make sense of, or catch-up to the evolutionary cycles of change. Imagination is what allows us to see and make sense of the unknown, and to navigate the vast new terrains..
✓ Sascha Pohflepp’s “Blind Camera”
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This post reminds us of Sascha Pohflepp's "Blind Camera" project from 2006, a visionary work that challenged us to imagine new possibilities in photography and authorship through a wonderful speculative prototype. The project, which captures images taken by others at the same moment, resonates deeply in today's AI-driven world, where image generati..
✓ Shipping Futures As Features
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What is the role of imagination inside organizations? After a decade of turning speculative ideas into tangible products like OMATA, I’m passionate about embedding this practice within organizations. By building small, hands-on teams that focus on Cultural R&D, we can navigate uncertainty and make imagination a core competency. Most companies have ..
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Part Two of a series on embedding speculative design functions inside your team — to prototype future products, anticipate emerging markets, and navigate uncertainty with conviction.
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As generative AI continues to evolve, new camera technologies are emerging that allow users to capture images from anywhere in the world. Couple that with most everyone's experiences of disruption during the pandemic, the shit-show that airline travel has become, economic and social upheavals..
✓ What is it about poetry and AI anyway
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AI and Poetry and Design and Product Design and Cultural R&D and Expeditionary Teams are on my mind as I write this..trying to make sense of it all. What are the modes and modalities of sense-making that are appropriate for this new terrain of AI and what does a team that does this kind of work look like, feel like, and act like? That is, who..
✓ Rebroadcast: Episode 102 with Dave Gray
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This is a rebroadcast of Episode 054 of the podcast, which got a copyright strike for some music (I think?). That's fine. My fault, I suppose. I'm not even sure what the music was because the original master mix moved around so much that the links to the source files are all busted up. But, when I got notice of that Spotify was going to take it dow..
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The internet once came in a box. It was a tangible artifact that made a possible future something you could see, touch, and use. There was also a time when jogging itself — yeah, I know! jogging! — did not exist. So Bill Bowerman — co-founder of Nike and legendary track coach — wrote a book called "Jogging" in 1967 to make that future tangible.
✓ When the Usual Playbook Runs Out
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Part One of a series on embedding speculative design functions inside your team — to prototype future products, anticipate emerging markets, and navigate uncertainty with conviction.
✓ A holiday tale about audacity and worldbuilding
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a holiday tale about audacity and worldbuilding
✓ Episode 103: The Meaning of Branded Objects
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Please support the podcast on Patreon! Thank you to all of my paid subscribers! My friend Tom Guarriello joins me to unpack a deceptively simple question—why do some things matter more than others? How is it that “brands” are rarely just products. Tom describes how they’re meaning-machines: coffee cups, clothes, grocery aisles, and the everyday ..
✓ Responses to the Future is Not So Specialized
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A follow-up to last week's newsletter essay which was mostly about the misalignment as to what they are preparing themselves for and how this obtains in various organizations. This post elaborates on the existential value of collaboration between specialists and generalists in organizations, addressing the two main themes in reader questions: the d..
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The Future of Being Human: An HCI Symposium at MBZUAI was a gathering of researchers, artists, designers, and academics exploring the intersection of technology and humanity. Wondering and wandering into futures together in order to actively build a more human future, considering themes of AI and agency, embodiment and identity, ethics and values, ..
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Curious Rituals and the Digital Tomorrow Film were part of a research project conducted at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) in July-August 2012 by Nicolas Nova (The Near Future Laboratory / HEAD-Genève), Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu from ..
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There are curious opportunities for using Design Fiction in branding and marketing contexts to help companies explore possible futures through speculative storytelling and prototype-driven narratives. Unlike traditional advertising, which focuses on present-day products, Design Fiction immerses audiences in “what if” scenarios that engage, challeng..
✓ Future Feelings with Radha Mistry
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I recently had the pleasure of joining Radha Mistry on the Future Feelings podcast to discuss Imagination, world-building and designing more habitable futures. We explored the tensions between creativity and structure, and shared inspiring examples of imagination in action. A great discussion with Radha that I hope you'll enjoy.
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A rememberance of Nicolas Nova, whose bewilderingly untimely passing has left a hole in the fabric of the internet-era collaborators who knew him.
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This prototype is an exploration of what an “index” page is as a series of “cards” that represent different content pieces. Each card can be visually rich, with images, text snippets, and other design elements that convey the essence of the content it represents. The layout can be dynamic, allowing users to sroll around an infinite canvas, select u..
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This project was one of my early explorations into the technology and design of interactive experiences, and I was fortunate to collaborate with the talented artist Marina Zurkow on this piece. It was exhibited at Bitforms Gallery in New York City from May 15 to June 19, 2003, as part of the "Braingirl E. Pussy Weevil" exhibition. The in..
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A review I wrote of Incorporations (Zone Books, 1992) back while in the masters program in the Engineering School at the University of Washington, Seattle and figuring out my voice in the whole..postmodern aesthetics + critical theory (or whatever..) idiom. The volume is a pretty awesome multidisciplinary anthology exploring the intersections of te..
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Revisiting the Slow Messenger project by the Near Future Laboratory, which started as a kind of ironic joke — rather than Instant Messenger..at a time when that was not taken for granted for any kind of messaging. What was this all about? Well, the concept is that of a communication device that delivers messages at a deliberately slow pa..
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General Seminar is Back! Check this out: That AI Futures Model from the AI 2027 project? Well..yeah..it’s back too! And it’s got predictions..and it’s got some issues. In this episode of General Seminar, we dig into the assumptions behind the model — but we're not going to pontificate about AI timelines. Instead, we’ll explo..
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In this episode of General Seminar, we explore the intersection of strategy and science fiction. Strategy is often seen as a data-driven discipline, but at its core, it is about envisioning and acting upon imagined futures. Design Fiction serves as a powerful tool to make these futures tangible, allowing organizations to "feel into" possibilities l..
✓ Afterword to the Field Guide to Design Futures
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John Carpenter's "They Live" and children at play illustrate the afterword I wrote for Giovanni Caruso and Silvio Cioni's compilation of futures writings “The Field Guide to Design Futures.” I argue that futures work shouldn’t be over‑disciplined, advocating for imagination and the courage to see differently over rigid methods. The book serves as a..
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Highlights from Office Hours N°291 (Dec 26, 2025): on media containers, blind-box “Super Drops,” shipping as design constraint, ethical scaling, breadcrumb publishing, and a graph mindset for curating culture.
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1/ The core move was Brandon Harwood’s building of an “AI Interaction Atlas”: a shared taxonomy of capabilities (seeded from Hugging Face Tasks—a browsable list of model task types) that then gets refined into patterns tied to real product touchpoints. 2/ Diagram..
✓ To be..or not to be.. a futurist
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Wondering about the what it is to be a futurist and recounting my own varied reluctance to claim the term over the years, I decided that being tough on the term itself was missing the point. Instead, I suggest that we look to people who embody the essence of futurism through their work and impact rather than their credentials or self-presentation...
✓ We have never needed science fiction more (reblogged)
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Tokyo’s neon nights feel like stepping into a science fiction dream, but look closer and it’s a tangle of the old and the new, an accretive space piled with layers of the contingent realities of life across time. This is just like our ideas of the future. Tech leaders may love the look. And we have fetishized the aesthetic of wet, cold, purple-hued..
✓ Why a newspaper from the future
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The newspaper from the future is a way to create a tangible vision of a world as a kind of preparation for navigating multiple simultaneous ontologies that orbit around one's own world. As anachronistic as newspapers may seem, they provide a familiar container for the cacophony of perspectives and points-of-view that make up our daily experience.
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The post introduces Design Fiction through reflections on jogging’s origins, highlighting Bill Bowerman’s 1967 manual as an imaginative artifact that rehearsed a future where people embraced running for health. It contrasts the mundane acceptance of jogging today with the bold mindset needed to envision change, emphasizing curiosity about ordinary ..
✓ 5 Simple Complicated Things To Be Considered
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Some months back I was asked to consider a handful of ways of being that help me do what I do as a futures-facing designer, product innovator, and creative technologist. Here is what I offered in reponse.
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The post introduces a proposal inspired by Richard Powers’ novel "Bewilderment" and his conversation with Ezra Klein. It emphasizes the importance of nurturing expansive imagination, especially in youth, to envision hopeful climate futures. The proposal suggests engaging children in imaginative exercises to foster a richer understanding of possible..
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A short sketch of an essay that came out of some workshops and discussion about the role of generative AI in image production, trying to collapse the theoretical into and onto the practice of making images today.
✓ Chapman University Student Workshop
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I find myself giving a few to several talks and lectures at universities and design programs each year. This is my second annual visit to Chapman University for Jillian Warren's course in Chapman's graphic design program. This year, I gave a talk on speculative design and design fiction and we had a fun workshop with Q&A discussing the role of spec..
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Foresight done well isn’t prediction; it’s the discipline of noticing what others overlook, venturing into plausible futures, and returning with tangible proof such as artifacts, images, products, stories that teams can act on before momentum calcifies.
✓ AI Panel
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Last week I was invited to sit on a panel about AI — surprise — at of all places, a local high school here in Los Angeles called Harvard-Westlake. It was part of an event they called NextGen where they bring in people from various fields to talk about what the future might hold.
✓ Promotional Principles for Creative People
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A practical guide to promoting creative work without losing your soul—twelve principles on doing it for yourself, embracing small audiences, release windowing, and staying devoted to your practice instead of chasing likes.
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Annual studio reviews with several students from Liam Young's Entertainment & Media studio at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. I had a great time sitting with students, discussing their work, and providing feedback on their projects. The creativity and innovation displayed by the students were such that it kinda made me want to join in — and reminded me of ..
✓ An Email With Three Design Fiction Questions Answered
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2. I receive emails from earnest folks really wanting to understand design fiction and that's awesome and amazing. I like that people feel they can reach out this way. I want to help, truly.
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--- 1. Most times when we hear about something that has no solid meaning, that has no firm arrangements of connected neurons within our brains, or particularly something we have never ‘seen’ or ‘heard’ or have...
✓ W5 2024
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It was Week 5 of 2024 and we were still talking about a Magazine from a Possible AI Future, wondering what the Imagination does, Radha Mistry has a podcast, as does Theo Priestley and so does Nora Young and Julian was on all of them which means that Julian is way behind on his own podcast.
✓ W6 2024
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It was Week 6 of 2024 here Last Week at Near Future Laboratory Global HQ and this week is all about Collaboration, Coordination, and Amplification.
✓ Chapman University Bensussen Lecture in the Arts
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A visit on February 28th 2024 to deliver the annual Bensussen LEcture in the Arts Series at Chapman University
✓ Enhancing Your Product Decision Making Abilities
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Chris Butler talking about the future of decision-making in an era of AI.
✓ How to set our imagination free to build the technological futures we want
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This podcast episode, hosted by Nora Young, explores the vast potential of human imagination in shaping technological futures It features insights from Ruha Benjamin, Julian Bleecker, and Jennifer Gossetti Ferenczi on harnessing creativity to address societal challenges, the role of imagination in innovation, and practical ways to cultivate imagina..
✓ NFL Podcast Episode 084: Thrilling Wonder Stories
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NFL Podcast Episode 084 - 'Thrilling Wonder Stories' - a tape recording found from the year 2011, when the Internet was weird, friendly, and a wandering/wondering place.
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Imagination Lancaster explores The Future Mundane, a design philosophy focusing on the practical, everyday aspects of future technologies rather than speculative, heroic, or overly idealized visions.
✓ The Thing Got a Human to Build a Thing
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"What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles." -James Somers
✓ W7 2024
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Week Notes! Just a few picks of bleeding-edge content posted to the NFL Discord during Week 7 of 2024
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Design Fiction is a method that combines elements of science fiction and design to create tangible prototypes that envision possible futures, helping to illustrate the consequences of today's decisions. Originated by Bruce Sterling and Julian Bleecker, this approach uses fictional artifacts to challenge and expand our understanding of future techno..
✓ Episode 101: Infinite Remix with Kirby Ferguson
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Welcome to a special blog edition of Office Hours, highlighting the 273rd gathering, where we took a deep dive into the latest in creative innovation with the formidable Kirby Ferguson. Kirby is best known for his insightful series, "Everything Is A Remix," and during this Office Hours, he presented his latest video project — "Infinite Remix." ..
✓ Hyper Island Vision Week 2025
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For the second year in a row, I had the privilege of speaking at Hyper Island’s Vision Week. This year, my focus was on the intersection of AI, creativity, and the human experience.
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A post-keynote conversation with a curious 15-year-old at the LA Design Festival reminded me why I do what I do. It’s about empowering the next generation to actively imagine and shape the future, not just passively accept it. Vikram’s enthusiasm and questions were a testament to the power of youthful curiosity and the importance of giving young vo..
✓ LA Design Festival 2025 Recap
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I facilitated a workshop and gave the closing Keynote at the 2025 edition of the annual LA Design Week. This year the focus of the LA Design Week was ‘Futurism’ — and I wanted to bring some of the more creative and ludic approaches to futuring and introduce it to a wider audience. ..
✓ N O R M A L S Futures Are Boring
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In this episode, I hang out with the gang at N O R M A L S and we get into it: the limitations of traditional futurism tropes like cyberpunk and the need for new archetypes that foster innovation and public engagement. How do we do this? How can we foster the integration of foresight, design, and collective creativity to build evolving scenarios th..
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Most commercial projects today barrel toward the same goals: scalability, virality, ROI. So what do we get? A flattening of imagination. Algorithms optimize for sameness. Brand voices blur into one. That’s why I created Office Hours, The Side Projects Edition. Because imagination isn't a luxury. It's existentially vital. Side projects are whe..
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Mercedes Barrera and Catalina Dib presented their strategic intelligence platform Katari Andes that gathers signals of change from Latin America with a focus on collective wellbeing.
✓ Part Two Anatomy of a Scene That Explicates the Predicament of the Creative Consciousness
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A continuation of the exploration of the relationship between Imagination and Structure, using a scene from John Carpenter's "They Live" to illustrate the struggle of the artist to get others to see the world as they do. We see the dynamics of creative consciousness and rational consciousness and the passionate desire of the Creative Consciousness ..
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I created an absurdly comprehensive field of fragments representing the process of OMATA. I have lots to say about this, and the process, and the company I founded for which this process was performed. What I want to say here is more a reflection on the importance of process documentation in the creative journey. Emphasizing the value of capturing ..
✓ Creative Vitality Summit 2024
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Discussing the futures of creative arts practices, innovation, policy, and the creative economy
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A short essay on the ontologies of Art and Money, Creativity and Rationality, and Imagination and Structure
✓ Design Meets Design Fiction: Exploring the Intersection of Science Fiction & Design
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Design Meets is a Toronto-based and online event about people getting together and sharing their ideas. This presentation by Julian Bleecker will present Design Fiction, a design-led approach to augmenting analytic research by grounding the implications of research into tangible, relatable artifacts.
✓ Episode 088 - School of the Possible with Dave Gray
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..There's no question in my mind that you could create a whole community just around collecting rocks that look like shoes. If you start putting your passion onto the Internet, you're going to attract other people who have similar interests. It's a wonderful machine for that. Or it's a ecology for collecting affinities or attracting affinities. I t..
✓ Tech Concept Lab, Ericsson Consumer Lab, Hyper Island Design Fiction Sprint
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A 24 hour Design Fiction Sprint to Imagine Possible AI Futures Artifacts
✓ Creative Talks Podcast Episode 272
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The podcast that talks about creativity, art, digital culture, music, new media, technology, business, but above all about the future. Creative Talks because we believe that creativity is the most important skill.
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Episode 089 of the Near Future Laboratory Podcast is an in-depth conversation with guest Silvio Lorusso, a designer, artist, and writer based in Lisbon. Our discussion centers around the complex relationship between design, disillusionment, and the evolving role of design in society, as Silvio has articulated in his recent book 'What Design Can't D..
✓ The Work Kit of Design Fiction Show
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Dré Labre and I used the Work Kit of Design Fiction in a pilot episode of a show. I don't think we ever expected that the show would have multiple episodes, but it's fun to think that it could. P.S. There's an online edition now!
✓ If You're Proud of Your Work, Promote TF Out of Your Work
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A post by Yancey Strickler on the Metalabel Substack stopped me in my tracks. Why can it be so difficult to stand proudly by one's own creative work? Promoting one's work non-stop is part of doing the work, despite the discomfort it may cause.
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Proposals for AI Futures and Tourism Futures, plus Workshopping Metaverse Futures, Slow Messagers, and Inlining CSS
✓ W4 2024
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Week 4 of 2024 and we're talking about Chris' podcast with Kevin Kelly, A Magazine from A Possible AI Future, and And Generally Unhelpful Imaginaries of AI Futures
✓ In Clear Focus Podcast Part Two S13E11
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The second part of a two part podcast where design fiction meets innovation. I discuss the process of transforming strategic concepts into tangible experiences, working with major brands to envision future scenarios. My conversation with Adrian Tennant covers the impact of design fiction on strategic planning and the creation of futures-oriented ar..
✓ The Assignment by Taryn O'Neill
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'The Assignment' is a production of Sciren directed by Taryn O'Neill and produced in association with the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. This film is a trailer for The Climate Action Almanac. To read the book, visit https://www.climatealmanac.org.
✓ This Is Design Fiction. But This Is Not.
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Design Fiction is not 'storyboards'. Nor is it science-fiction. Science-fiction is science-fiction. It's also not scenarios, because scenarios are scenarios, just like a table cloth is a table cloth, not a plate or coffee mug. This fact as to what Design Fiction is is stated quite clearly in all of the primary material on Design Fiction — Design Fi..
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Hyper Island Vision Week at Hyper Island is a dedicated period where students are encouraged to stretch their imagination as if it were a muscle, pushing beyond the boundaries of the everyday to envision new possibilities for themselves and society. This experience is designed not only to inspire but to challenge students to actively shape their fu..
✓ Fiction+Facts ≈ Futures
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Design Fiction is an approach and methodology we use in order to reveal and represent possibilities in the form of material artifacts. It does this so as to exercise the imagination, which is the source of all new opportunities and areas of inspired innovation.
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What can we learn about the ways that science-fiction and science fact circulate within the worlds of entertainment? Are there ways that the value creation mechanisms of entertainment can be deliberately intergrated into the value creation mechanisms of capitalism whereby 'innovation' actively engages the storytelling approaches, methodologies and ..
✓ Tom Sachs McDonald's Worldbuilding
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What's Tom Sachs' worldbuilding got to do with Design Fiction? What can be learned from his studio's work as regards the intersection of speculation, art, design in the service of imaginatively creating playful, approachable, legible, non-confrontational spaces for entering into alternative, other, adjacent possible worlds?
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The Distant Early Warning card deck allows players to embark on a “cool trip into exotic regions”, blending conventional games with media elements that are both verbal and pictorial. It's a conversational card game where the importance lies not just in the identity of the cards, but in the varied relationships and juxtapositions be..
✓ Episode 092: The Future of Work Is Not ‘Work From Home’
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Episode 092 of the Near Future Laboratory Podcast anticipates our 2024 Imagine Harder Summit & Workshop on The Future of Work.
✓ NFL x Tech Concept Lab: AI Summit
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A Design Fiction Workshop to Invigorate Our Ability To Imagine Plausible & Habitable Futures In Which GenAI Is Part of the Material Cultural Fabric Of Everyday Life
✓ Design is a Method of Action
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In October of 2012, a multidisciplinary group of artists, engineers, designers, and speculators spent three days in Detroit to “do” science fiction: tangle up in fact and fiction and engage in curious crosstalk about the things that could be. The goal, then, was to Design Fiction and turn talk into deliberate actions and artifacts; to swerve the pr..
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An Inside Look at Creativity and Innovation with Julian Bleecker and Kyle Ng
✓ Episode 091 - Tobias Revell and The Product Imagination of Philip K. Dick
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A discussion with Tobias Revell and his contribution to this new book, Towards the Realm of Materiality.
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In this episode of the Gartner Futures Lab Podcast, host Marty Resnick sits down with Julian Bleecker, founder of Near Future Laboratory, to discuss the use of design fiction in communication and designing plausible future scenarios.Design Fiction is a powerful tool for exploring ..
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Emmet Byrne and Susannah Schouweiler wrote this tidy essay that was one of those essays that, quite very awkwardly for me, is subtitled 'On Julian Bleecker'.Despite this awkward subt..
✓ Shaun Au Takes Notes In The Manual of Design Fiction
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Shaun Au sent these extensive visual notes he took while reading The Manual of Design Fiction
✓ Imagine Worlds Like Philip K. Dick
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Just as science strives for poetic elegance, artists might assume a quest for truth. All information is grounds for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, no matter its truth-value. We should embrace the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivety of a magical realism. Error breeds sense.
✓ Cyberpunk Cottagecore Future Mundane
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Cyberpunk vibes blends awkwardly to my eye — but perhaps unknowingly — with the aesthetics of cottagecore in this snapshot of someone sharing their latest PC build. It is a moment in a world where the sharp edge of high-tech merges with these textures of a more pastoral, craft-oriented, porcelain miniature vibe. This future is only ever slick, blue..
✓ Future Feelings with Radha Mistry + Anab Jain
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The study, the science, and the art of predicting and preparing for the future has long been a preoccupation of humankind, and is of particular concern to designers. The stakes of our global present are especially high. We’re facing the compounding repercussions of climate change and rapidly transforming technologies alongside the catastrophic fall..
✓ Geneva Map for an Autonomous Vehicle Future
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The automation of various vehicle functions, whether individual or collective, has been a reality for a number of years. Autonomous vehicles are a recent manifestation of such technical evolution, often portrayed in the media as both promising and inevitable. While the existence of this technology is not in question—as evidenced by projects involvi..
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A Plenary Address at the IEEE MetroCon 2024 for the nations' largest IEEE regional conference covering nine parallel technical tracks covering emerging developments in engineering disciplines including: Autonomous and Vehicle Systems, Internet of Things, Computational Intelligence, Photonics and more.
✓ RGD Design Thinkers Conference
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The Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) is Canada’s largest professional Association for graphic design professionals, with 4,400 Members including firm owners, freelancers, managers, in-house designers, educators and students. Through the RGD, Canadian designers exchange ideas, educate and inspire, set professional standards, a..
✓ Design Fiction & The Torment Nexus
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The torment nexus is a critique of the relationship between Silicon Valley and Science Fiction, where tech entrepreneurs often turn speculative fiction into blueprints for real-world innovation. Design Fiction emerges as an alternative, offering a structured way to imagine potential futures without locking into one path.
✓ Design Fiction 101 Workshop at Chapman University
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I went back to Chapman University to give a Design Fiction 101 talk with a wonderful group of students in Jillian Warren's course. We followed that with an interactive discussion and questions, and then the fun part — a practical component, hands-on, where we went into a possible future and imagined that future through artifacts that the students ‘..
✓ IDSA Innovation: Supernatural
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Tucker sent a message asking if I wanted to do some Design Fiction for this issue of the IDSA Quarterly. I said ‘yes’. He wanted something that went along with the issue topic ‘supernatural’ — so I had this Bionomics idea/ad sitting around which...is some kind of contrivance that taps into the various plant-based intelligence processing ne..
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Check this off the list: I was on Kevin Kelly's ‘Cool Tools Show and Tell’! Kevin and I first met a zillion years ago at FOO Camp, for those who remember that and have been in touch over the years. This was a fun chat even as I had to limit myself to just four or five 'cool tools' — but I found some curious things that I've been making great use of..
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If ‘The Manual of Design Fiction’ is the How, the book ‘It's Time To Imagine Harder’ is the book that answers Why Design Fiction is of value. A kind of supplement to ‘The Manual of Design Fiction’ that emphasizes that it is not just a set of techniques and approaches, but that it has a purpose, and a ..
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The presentation traverses the intricate relationship between engineering, imagination, and the speculative visions inspired by science fiction. It delves into the transformative journey from traditional engineering roles to exploring virtual reality and speculative futures. Highlighting how prolific science fiction authors influence societal norms..
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In a world where creative professionals are constantly navigating shifting landscapes, how do we stay ahead of the curve? How do we not only imagine but also shape the future of design, business, and innovation? Innovation as a strategic practiceHow to push beyond traditional frameworks to create designs that trul..
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Episode N°093 of the Near Future Laboratory Podcast with filmmaker, director Gary Hustwit, the creative punk mind behind documentaries Rams, Helvetica and Objectified. We dive into his journey in independent filmmaking, his DIY ethos, and his bold ideas about storytelling in a digital world. Gary shares his approach to creating generative cinema..
✓ Episode 094 with Troy Campbell
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A conversation with Troy Campbell who describes his journey from graduate school to becoming a professor and the Chief Scientist at On Your Feet, where he became passionate about the power of behavioral science. We talk about concepts like identity, memory, and mindset activation, and how they can be utilized across consumer, organizational, and..
✓ FUTURES. Material and Design of Tomorrow
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The Grassi Museum of Applied Arts commissioned the Near Future Laboratory to develop an installation for their exhibition "FUTURES. Material and Design of Tomorrow". Based on our Wo..
✓ Imagination Is Like A Muscle
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A podcast conversation recorded while I was at Innovation Land Summit in Colombia. We look at the intersection of research, creativity, and practical implementation in driving innovation within organizations. There is a necessity to be explicit about the role of imagination, which I see as a kind of muscle that requires regular exercise to stay str..
✓ Shaping Viable Futures: Human Agency and Artificial Intelligence
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An Expert Panel at The British Academy on December 18, 2024. The evolving relationship between human agency and technology requires careful balancing of how AI systems may augment our capabilities with preserving transparency, accountability, and meaningful human agency guided by our values and social norms. ..
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Design Fiction creates material artifacts that serve as evidence of possible futures, originating from science fiction's concept of diegetic prototypes. Like Star Trek's Tricorder, these objects tell stories about future worlds and their values. Design Fiction finds practical applications in product design, policy development, and strategic plannin..
✓ Digests of General Seminar S05/E01
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Looking for work in an AI Future? Pass the classifieds section..
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North of Patient aims to paint an inspired landscape of healthcare's future through dialogues with creative and unconventional thinkers globally.
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Reflections on a Poem Operating System and the relationship between art and technology, I consider the Poem vibe through a short study in the Studio I did last week with OpenAI, Python, Warwalking, Psychogeography, and a Past Project
✓ Poem OS
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PoemOS is a playful exploration of the intersection of poetry and technology, where AI-generated poems come to life through Eleven Labs' voice synthesis. This was a bit of a journey of creating a Python program that could build daily poems, generate the audio, create a little animation and then drop off the whole package to be shared. Par..
✓ (Street) Signs of Change - A Design Fiction Workshop at SxSW 2024
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Imagining possible futures through street signs! The street sign is a fantastic Design Fiction archetype. It's an artifact that is quite legible and recognizable as an indicator of social norms, rules, policy and thereby a small signal of a culture.
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Awhile back I heard Neal Stephenson on a podcast talking about how people are notoriously bad with statistics. It got me thinking about how futures that boil down statistical likelihoods with a number between 0.0 and 1.0 lack any kind of rich, fulsome, evocative acuity. Stats don't communicate experience quite as well as all the other mechanisms by..
✓ The Wheels on Luggage Phenomenon
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1. For the longest time ever, the wheel has been rolling ‘round. 2. Perhaps for longer than the wheel has been around, humans have lugged around their stuff. 3. Going from one dwelling to another, whether to set out...
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Our devices are evolving into persistent companions, more like pets or friends than tools. Explore how perpetual presence shapes our relationship with technology
✓ World's Slowest Instant Messenger
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I’ve been fixated on a story my wandering mind told me many months ago about a little theory object that forced me to think about how the connected things in the era of IP networks always do their thing as fast as possible, approaching speeds that are imperceptible to normal humans. Almost without question, this is…
✓ MobZombies on Processing.org and New Kinds of Physical Electronic Play
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No, that isn’t an historical photo of children playing MobZombies..but it may as well be. MobZombies is being featured on the Processing.org web site..that’s pretty cool. I’ve started helping out on the project’s evolution, mostly in the area of lowering the cost of the device. This is important. I think it’s a very…
✓ A Gyroscope Game Input Control
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I’ve been playing with a gyroscope lately as a game input control element for MobZombies. The challenge is to come up with a less cumbersome sensor rig, and less expensive. The sensor will need to communicate with a mobile phone because no one’s going to buy a $2000 tablet pc to play a game. The sensor should also b…
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Aaron Meyers deployed this turn of phrase “human joystick” during his final presentation for the course I taught this semester — “Design and Technology for Mobile Experiences.” He’s been working hard mostly on his thesis project, Torrent Raiders, but for my class he worked on programming a J2ME version of the MobZom…
✓ MobZombies and new kinds of physical electronic play
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MobZombies, a project blending playground-style physical play with digital gaming, is now featured on Processing.org. The author is helping make the game’s hardware cheaper and sees it as a step toward games that mix real-world activity with screen-based fun. Citing voices like David Elkind on childhood development and reports on physical fitness, ..
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The Overlap 09 was a weekend workshop in Pacific Grove, California where designers and business people came together to explore new ways of thinking and collaborating. The event featured storytelling, body storming, and prototype cards to inspire creativity and innovation. Participants engaged in activities that challenged traditional design approa..
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An experiment with an apparatus to capture the momentum and pace of urban flows, inspired by William H. Whyte's "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces." 7.5 metre pole with 2 wide field of view cameras, post-processing software using Max/ MSP+Jitter, Processing and Adobe After Effects The apparatus consists of a very tall pole which is used to gain..
✓ Less Yammering. More Hammering.
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You’d be right to wonder why there has not been much here for a couple-few weeks. Contrary to a vicious rumor, we neither adopted a needy office pet nor did we father-seed a dead pop star’s child. The title says it all. There will be less just, like..talk and more making things. Less yammering, more hammering. It’s a theme that will be with us for ..
✓ Stanford University CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar Series
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I gave a lecture at Stanford's CS547 course on HCI, and of course it was on'Design Fiction.' This is interesting to listen back on as I forgot about the examples I used 'early on' that came specifically from film. This was during the 'diegetic prototype' emphasis of things. Drawing on examples from films like 'Jurassic Park' and '2001: A Space Odys..
✓ Sascha Pohflepp Blind Camera
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Sascha Pohflepp's project, "Blind Camera," is an innovative exploration of photography and sharing. It challenges traditional notions of authorship and ownership in the digital age by allowing users to capture and share images taken by others in real-time. This concept not only fosters a sense of community and collaboration but also raises importan..
✓ A Little Film about the Design Fiction Product Design Work Kit
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A little instructional film about the 2nd edition of The Design Fiction Product Design Work Kit, which is the second in a series of educational games from the Near Future Laboratory. The Design Fiction Product Design Work Kit is a “construction kit for imagining material cultural artifacts representing the symptoms and implications of all kind..
✓ Dad Band Futures Fest: Broadcast from Later
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Broadcast from Later 46: Dad Band Futures, exploring ways by which creativity can be reinvigorated as we work to ignite a creative renaissance. The creation of a scene, pre-festival, when things unexpectedly start to happen.
✓ Normal, Ordinary, Everyday Futures
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Normal, ordinary, everyday futures — a futures sensibility and approach to futuring that emphasizes realistic and grounded visions of the future, focusing on ordinary, everyday experiences rather than fantastical, science fiction-inspired depictions. It highlights how future societies will be shaped by the accumulation of past and present elements,..
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This is Monday Meeting Podcast, an episode titled 'A Journey Into Design Fiction' where I introduce the concept of Design Fiction to an adjacent creative community of motion graphics professionals. We talk and Q&A about how visual creativity is used to in the practice of futures design and Design Fiction, and the possibilities implications of Desig..
✓ IKEA Catalog from a Near Future
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We were commissioned to workshop and introduce Design Fiction as a research methodology by IKEA and Stockholm University's Mobile Life Centre. We worked with researchers in a practical hands-on workshop to make sense of the trends of the day (2015), their research areas, and possible evolutions of home life, consumer trends and needs, and related t..
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Through essays, interviews, and narratives by Bruce Sterling, Fiona Raby, Sam Jacob and other significant voices in the field, this volume questions the initial discourses around “design fiction”―a broad category of critical design that includes overlapping interests in science fiction, world building, speculation, and futuring. Made Up: D..
✓ Clog 16
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Artificial Intelligence—in particular the so-called "narrow" form of AI that has already surpassed human capabilities when it comes to specific tasks—is a ubiquitous, trusted part of our lives. But at the same time, AI is a topic that often elicits more questions than answers. Even defining "Artificial Intelligence" is no simple matter. In practice..
✓ OMATA 2024 Annual Report from the Future
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An Annual Report..from the future? This was my way of making a more vivid, engaging, strategic representation of the future of OMATA to help communicate my vision. Way better than a pitch deck — an artifact from a future for the company built off of the financial model, so grounded in the anticipation represented by old-fashioned kinds of future fi..
✓ The Manual of Design Fiction (Hardcover)
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"The Manual of Design Fiction" is the canonical reference manual and resource that clarifies and explains the practice of Design Fiction. Authored by Julian Bleecker, Nicolas Nova, Fabien Girardin, and Nick Foster, this book explores how futures-oriented practices like Strategic Foresight can benefit from augmenting their outcomes through the creat..
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Shifting between fact and fiction, between the experience of the real and our projections, fantasies, and desires, Janet Cardiff's audio-video and multimedia installations explore the complexity and vertiginous nature of subjectivity in a highly technological world. They are interactive pieces where visitors are asked to touch, listen, smell, and o..
✓ Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
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The Psychological Manual everyone has been clamoring for — finally available in paperback along with Action Pack Foil Pak Flash Card Set of Electronic Sheep! This is the definitive guide to understanding the psychic and existential challenges facing the Andr..
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If ‘The Manual of Design Fiction’ is the How, this book is the Why. A kind of supplement to ‘The Manual’ that emphasizes that it is not just a set of techniques and approaches, but that it has a purpose, and a purpose beyond the instrumental character of any kind of process or procedure. This book is ..
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What is 'the future', when 'the future' arrives as a printed junk mail catalog of yesterday's vision of the future? TBD Catalog is the first and canonical Design Fiction artifact ever produced. It was the artifact 'found' through a futures workshop in October 2012 with a group of engaged participants fro..
✓ The Manual of Design Fiction (Softcover)
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“The Manual of Design Fiction” is the canonical reference manual and resource that clarifies and explains the practice of Design Fiction. Authored by Julian Bleecker, Nicolas Nova, Fabien Girardin, and Nick Foster, this book explores how futures-oriented practices like Strategic Foresight can benefit from augmenting their ..
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Flowcharting From Abstractionism to Algorithmics in Art and Architecture is a 140-page book by Matthew Allen published by gta Verlag in January 2023. The book is based on Allen's Harvard University Graduate School of Design dissertation research. The book discusses how the modernist program of rationalizing creative practice between the 1930s and 1..
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Things To Come is a working document of our continuing study of the future, reflecting partial and tentative conclusions.
✓ Kiosk
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Mass-produced from the 1970s to the 1990s, modular kiosks like the seminal K67, designed by the Slovenian architect Saša J. Mächtig, and similar systems – including the Polish Kami, the Macedonian KC190, and the Soviet ‘Bathyscaphe’ – could be found anywhere throughout the former Eastern Bloc and ex-Yugoslav countries, from bustling city squares to..
✓ Towards the Realm of Materiality
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Philip K. Dick, one of the most prolific and visionary authors of the 20th century, crafted compelling visions of possible futures and dystopian realities teeming with humans, artificial intelligences, and more. Yet, the Dickian universe is more than just its characters—it’s a realm intricately built with technological devices, machines, and object..
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In 2018, the National Museum of Modern Contemporary Art, Korea presented the exhibition "E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology): Open-ended" in Seoul. The exhibition introduces the works of E.A.T., a non-profit organization founded in 1966 for the establishment of better collaborative relationships among artists, engineers, and industries.
✓ Machine Learning and the City
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Machine Learning and the City: Applications in Architecture and Urban Design delivers a robust exploration of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the built environment. Relevant contributions from leading scholars in their respective fields describe the ideas and techniques that underpin ML and AI, how to begin ..
✓ Reality Was Whatever Happened
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Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy is a compelling meditation on the existential human fear of depending on other species to survive; Beth Coleman’s Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds relays questions of kinship, community, survival, and transformation through generative processes of image production, seria..
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Design offers so much more than an aesthetically pleasing logo or banner, a beautification add-on after the heavy lifting. In Reimagining Design, Kevin Bethune shows how design provides a unique angle on problem-solving —how it can be leveraged strategically to cultivate innovation and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork. As he does so, he descri..
✓ The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age
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This book is an exploration of the intersection between technology and art in the Western world, with a focus on how artists have engaged with and responded to machines throughout history. Rather than offering a comprehensive historical account, it presents a collection of artist-based reflections on technological advancements, particularly noting ..
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Design is broken. Young and not-so-young designers are becoming increasingly aware of this. Many feel impotent: they were told they had the tools to make the world a better place, but instead the world takes its toll on them. Beyond a haze of hype and bold claims lies a barren land of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. Although these feels might be ..
✓ Some Ways of Thinking About the Future
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Abstract Future Studies set the broad conceptual framework within which planning can take place. They ask the question, "Where as a society, are we going?" In discussing such a complex question, a distinction made between "well-structured" problems which concentrate on perfection of means (the "how..
✓ Social Dreaming Through Design
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Facing the reality of a mountain of complex problems, we will work together to create the ideal future for organizations and society. This book explores a framework for envisioning long-term future “worldviews” and methods for implementing actions within an organization to achieve these visions. It incorporates emerging design theories like Specula..
✓ Tom Sachs: McDonald's Catalogue Raisonné
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This is a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known McDonald’s-related artworks created by Tom Sachs Studio over the last 30 years (1994 – 2024).I wrote some more reflection on Tom Sachs' work here: Tom Sachs Worldbuilding
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Dedicated to the question of how tacit ideas about the future can be externalized and shared with others, “Practices of Future Casting: Ways of Sharing Imagined Tomorrows,” edited edited by Michael Shamiyeh, explores diverse approaches to futurecasting through data, fiction, and matter. The book features Contributors from experts discussing t..
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A curious compendium of golden and alchemical elements of insight discovery and craftsmanship, including a forecast of the future of insight.
✓ Applied Intelligence Issue 001
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A newspaper from an AI future — a Design Fiction artifact that imagines a world where artificial intelligence is mundane, woven seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life. We used this as one of the prompts/provocations leading into a two-day workshop on AI policy and strategy. Through the newspaper we explored the implications of AI futures th..
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Beatriz da Costa: Undisciplinary Tactics offers a comprehensive overview of da Costa's work, from her early robotic installations to her later projects in tactical media, environmental monitoring, and public health. The book features contributions from scholars, artists, and activists who reflect on da Costa's legacy and its relevance to contempora..
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"Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts" stands as a pivotal moment in the intersection of technology and creativity. The catalog — representing the exhibition — stands as a prescient, groundbreaking collection of art + technology. It captures an extraordinary moment when artists, musicians, poets, and engineers were first ..
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The DEW-Line deck of cards takes as its point of departure that artists (the creative consciousness) are a sort of cultural DEW-Line that warns of changes to arrive shortly. They can do so because they keep their senses (their radar, to ride the metaphor to staggers) well-tuned: that is the main business of any serious artist.
✓ IDSA Innovation: Supernatural
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What is our relationship with nature? Is it humanity versus nature, nature teaching humanity, or nature and humanity existing as separate entities? Let's explore humanity's relationship with nature through the lens of design.
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The comprehensive how-to, why-to guide to running international field research projects. The Handbook is for anyone that needs to understand users, customers, people across markets, geographies and cultures. The Handbook reveals how to: Build and lead trusted multicultural teams, anywhere in the world; run a field study from pitch to deliverable, i..
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A curious exploration of the role of design in the interplay of speculative thought, the notion of impossibility, and the design imagination, where ‘design’ isn't about solving design problems – it’s about expanding what design can be, and what can become from a reinvigorated design imagination. It is classic D&R to ask one to consider th..
✓ PDPal
PROJECT
PDPal is a series of public art projects for the Palm™ PDA, mobile phone and the web. It has pushed at the notion of mapping, attempting to transform your everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that you write. PDPal engages the user through a visual transformation that is meant to highlight the way technologies that locate an..
PROJECT
This project was a kind of extension of PDPal, focusing on collecting audio narratives via mobile phones about local surroundings, personal rituals, and public sightings. It invited participants to leave voice messages describing the flora, fauna, or behaviors they observed in their environment. It was an experiment in using mobile phones as ..
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This project was one of my early explorations into the technology and design of interactive experiences, and I was fortunate to collaborate with the talented artist Marina Zurkow on this piece. It was exhibited at Bitforms Gallery in New York City from May 15 to June 19, 2003, as part of the "Braingirl E. Pussy Weevil" exhibition. The in..
PROJECT
Telephone “hotline” that captures opinions about President Bush on the eve of his second inauguration and then emails the President an audio file containing the spoken opinion, as well as providing an online repository of those spoken opinions. Public exhibition online.
PROJECT
MobZombies is a zombie-fleeing game where a player's movement controls an avatar in the game space. Players run away from virtual zombies by actually running. The objective of the game is simple: stay alive as a horde of the undead slowly moves towards you. The longer you stay alive, the more zombies appear and the better they get at following you...
PROJECT
An experiment with an apparatus to capture the momentum and pace of urban flows, inspired by William H. Whyte's "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces." 7.5 metre pole with 2 wide field of view cameras, post-processing software using Max/ MSP+Jitter, Processing and Adobe After Effects The apparatus consists of a very tall pole which is used to gain..
✓ Geneva Map for an Autonomous Vehicle Future
PROJECT
The automation of various vehicle functions, whether individual or collective, has been a reality for a number of years. Autonomous vehicles are a recent manifestation of such technical evolution, often portrayed in the media as both promising and inevitable. While the existence of this technology is not in question—as evidenced by projects involvi..
PROJECT
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 come across a pigeon lady. The act..
✓ PSX
PROJECT
This project is a concept for a controllable Playstation controller. The project was developed as a speculative design concept to explore the possibilities of a game controller that could be controlled algorithmically providing inputs to the game from a non-human intelligence. The project was developed in 2008 and was part of a series of projects t..
✓ Artificial Intelligence Designed Fictions Research Studio
PROJECT
Artificial Intelligence Designed Fictions Research Studio is a prototyping-based research program that explores the potential of artificial intelligence in the context of everyday life. The focus is on rapid ideation and prototyping, creating small, functional artifacts that help ground possibilities in materiality and interaction.
PROJECT
The Cluster Sequence Cataloger is a software tool I designed quickly to handle a problem: OMATA, the computer company I created and then sold, has a very large collection of images mostly renders created with a toolchain with Cinema4D at its core. There are over 80,000 images, many of them sequences used to create animations. The problem is that I ..
✓ PoemOS
PROJECT
PoemOS is a playful exploration of the intersection of poetry and technology, where AI-generated poems come to life through Eleven Labs' voice synthesis. This was a bit of a journey of creating a Python program that could build daily poems, generate the audio, create a little animation and then drop off the whole package to be shared. Par..
PROJECT
Early days of the Omata One project I couldn't help but to work through some of the ideas in hardware. I had a fairly clear idea of the functional requirements, but needed to work through them in a grounded way rather than just drawing boxes and arrow on sheets of paper. It's an odd sense of sense-making, knowing fairly well the overall engineering..
✓ A Newspaper from an Artificially Intelligent (Near) Future
PROJECT
A newspaper from an AI future — a Design Fiction artifact that imagines a world where artificial intelligence is mundane, woven seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life. We used this as one of the prompts/provocations leading into a two-day workshop on AI policy, governance, an..
✓ Imagine Harder 2024 — What Are Possible Futures of Work
PROJECT
Detroit Imagines Harder was my 2024 edition of the ‘Imagine Harder’ series of workshops in which attendees collaborate to workshop around a hot topic using Design Fiction, and begin to construct an artifact that represents the implications of change endemic to that topic. For this edition, held October 16-18 2024 at The Jam Handy venue in Det..
✓ Work Kit of Design Fiction Online Edition!
PROJECT
The Work Kit of Design Fiction sold out but there were still requests for it. I have always thought about doing an online/digital version but resisted that because I think the thing in the hand, and cards scattered on a table was so much more appealing. Alas, my curiosity as to how I might build this overcame my reluctance, plus I wanted to learn h..
PROJECT
ADM's Marketing & Communications team commissioned Near Future Laboratory to conduct a series of interviews with their Chief Scientists and their temas of food science experts to represent their work on future food processes and primary ingredients and the implications of global needs and constraints using Design Fiction. The overall objective..
✓ AIGA Design Fiction Keynote 2022
PROJECT
I was asked to deliver a Keynote presentation at the 2022 AIGA National Conference. The presentation was a discussion of Design Fiction and it's 'Why?'.
✓ ANDI Innovation Land Summit 2024
PROJECT
Colombia. Keynote. Imagine Harder. Encourage creative entrepreneurship. Meet with business leaders and executives of established and start-up companies. 2 lunch presentation. Podcast. Interviews.
✓ Apple Design Design Fiction 101 Workshop
PROJECT
Apple, a pioneer in the personal computer industry, defined the vale of what Design could bring to an organization that intended to shape not just the utility of technology, but its meaning. Near Future Laboratory and Julian Bleecker were brought in to brief Apple's internal user-experience and interaction design team about Design Fiction in a '101..
✓ Bloomberg Hyundai Art Technology Lab
PROJECT
Bloomberg & Hyundai's Art+Technology: Emerging Dialogues show asked if I would participate in the artist + technologists dialogues, a 5 Season show they curated to bring a diverse lineup of artists, technologists and futurists to share ideas and engage in conversation. I invited my friend Liam Young as the 'artist/technologist' interlocutor for thi..
✓ Near Future Laboratory x Brain Dead x Gary Hustwit “Eno”
PROJECT
A collaboration NFL x Brain Dead x Gary Hustwit screening Hustwit's groundbreaking generative documentary about visionary musician and artist Brian Eno at Brain Dead Studios, Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles.
PROJECT
The C-Suite of the third largest autonomous vehicle company commissioned Near Future Laboratory to help them make sense of the full-spectrum of a possible autonomous vehicle future. The result was a rich, vibrant, experiential and immersive artifact in the form of a 72 page full-color Design Fiction magazine from a possible autonomous vehicle futur..
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This talk, The Future of Computing is Fiction, presents a brief overview of Design Fiction and reveals how Design Fiction can serve as an approach for envisioning possible futures of computing. Through the creation of tangible artifacts that imply adjacent possible trajectories for computing's futures, Design Fiction allows us to materialize the in..
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A 2-day Design Fiction workshop at Arizona State University's Emerge Festival that explored the "future of convenience" through the lens of corner stores, bodegas, and convenience shops as cultural containers of everyday aspirations and anxieties. Approach: Rather than creating polished, high-tech futures dominated ..
PROJECT
Curious Rituals is a research project conducted at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) in July-August 2012 by Nicolas Nova (The Near Future Laboratory / HEAD-Genève), Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu from the media design program. The curious habits described in this book can be seen as ingredients with which technological objects a..
✓ Failures and Design Fictions Workshop
PROJECT
I facilitated a Design Fiction workshop at the Swiss Design Network conference in Basel Switzerland in October 2010. The workshop was largely Nicolas’ organization and we took advantage of the conference theme of 'Design Fiction' to consider the topic of failure in design — failure as a guide and approach and provocation together with the considera..
✓ TV + GenAI Design Fiction Sprint
PROJECT
Confidential workshop with key stakeholders to ideate possible futures in a world where Generative AI is integral to the experience of TV. The objective was to inspire design, R&D and engineering/implementation teams. The brief was to use Design Fiction as an approach to ideate and conceive of a trove of possible future concepts related to GenAI i..
PROJECT
General Seminar is a platform for sense-making through discussion. I started hosting these during the dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic. I wanted to find ways to develop a sense of community through discussions on topics that were relevant to the creative community that seemed to be drawn to the Near Future Laborato..
✓ Google Creativity Lab Design Fiction
PROJECT
I gave a keynote presentation to the main audience of leadership and Google clients and partners during a summit in support of Google's offerings in Argentina. I also gave a hands-on workshop for the Google office's creative practitioners. Additionally, I accompanied Google's local leadership as they visited the offices of some of their key partner..
✓ Hyper Island x Near Future Laboratory
PROJECT
Hyper Island Vision Week at Hyper Island is a dedicated period where students are encouraged to stretch their imagination as if it were a muscle, pushing beyond the boundaries of the everyday to envision new possibilities for themselves and society.
PROJECT
We were commissioned to workshop and introduce Design Fiction as a research methodology by IKEA and Stockholm University's Mobile Life Centre. We worked with researchers in a practical hands-on workshop to make sense of the trends of the day (2015), their research areas, and possible evolutions of home life, consumer trends and needs, and related t..
PROJECT
We were commissioned by IKEA to synthesize data from their annual Life at Home Report and represent the implications, insights, and conclusions of this data as might appear in a future home.
PROJECT
The 2023 Imagine Harder Summit was organized by Julian Bleecker of Near Future Laboratory September 21-22nd 2023 to bring together 2 individuals to collaborate and coordinate to find paths to elevate and amplify the value of creativity, innovation, and futures-oriented thinking. Held at the Frank Lloyd Wright "Affleck House" outside of Detroit, Mic..
✓ LACMA Solarpunk Worldbuilding
PROJECT
A proposal put together for LACMA Hyundai Artlab to worldbuild a solarpunk + crypto possible future written at a time when Solarpunk and Crypto were in a confused state of ascendency within the cultural imaginary.
PROJECT
1. Based on a set of future scenarios, develop concepts within each scenarios of how Facebook actually shows up in the world/in people’s lives in 10 years. 2. Develop sketches for each concept to help bring the future to life. Bring to life a set of futures for how Facebook may show up in the world and in people’s lives in 10 years time. Inspire le..
✓ Near Future Laboratory Podcast
PROJECT
Near Future Laboratory Podcast brings you conversations at the vanguard of design, technology, futures, and culture, hosted by Julian Bleecker, founder of the Near Future Laboratory.
✓ Netflix Atlas Film Technical Consultant
PROJECT
A friend asked if I'd be interested in reading a script and being a kind of futurist technical consultant on this action sci-fi thriller film directed by Brad Peyton. Basically he was looking to have someone help the art department conjure elements for the film based on the script, a sense of futures trends and so forth. Basically — Peyton and the ..
PROJECT
Netflix Future Of is a fun, light, entertaining show asking about the future of everything from gaming and dating, to life after death. I participated as a talking head futures expert. They did spring the dating topic on me though, for which I cannot claim much notable expertise. Pure entertainment. Fun to talk and chat and see what comes out in t..
✓ OMATA Annual Report From The Future
PROJECT
Create a representation of a company using the Design Fiction archetype of an Annual Report as seen from its anticipated, speculated future based in the analytics and rational representations of the company's Financial Model.
✓ Primer Speculative Design 2018
PROJECT
Primer is (was?) the organization developed to establish Speculative Design as a formal practice. Their annual conference and community has been (was?) a thriving locus of conversation and discussion. I help organize and run the Los Angeles chapter until the pandemic approached (and I was also asked to pay a fee to use the brand.)
✓ Quick Start Guide for a Self Driving Car
PROJECT
The Interaction Design Association invited Near Future Laboratory to introduce Design Fiction to the interaction design community by facilitating a Design Fiction workshop. In this case, we decided to imagine the self-driving future from a design and interaction design perspective by creating a Design Fiction quick-start guide for a fictional self-..
✓ Roblox Design Fiction 101 Workshop
PROJECT
The Near Future Laboratory contributed to an off site for the Roblox design team, with a 3 hour short-format presentation followed by a hands-on workshop. The workshop run-of-show consisted of: 1) An approximately one hour “Design Fiction 101” presentation covering the origins, evolution and current state of Design Fiction, incl..
PROJECT
Slow Messenger is a product from an adjacent now in which there is a mode of communication in which speed is not prized, but rather the semantic weight of time, patience, thoughtfulness has to be accounted for. The product is the product of, the result of, research into the implications of Instant Messenger® and instant communication. It is a wa..
PROJECT
SuperSeminar is the platform for Learning & Development I piloted in 2023 to expand and expose the Near Future Laboratory community of followers to Foresight, Futures, and Design Futures practices. We bring in professionals from our expansive network to present short, evocative, activating experiences and perspectives in a salon-like contex..
✓ SxSW 2010 The Design Fiction Panel
PROJECT
A panel for SxSW to introduce the concept of Design Fiction. This was about a year or two after I wrote the original essay Design Science Fact and Fiction
✓ SxSW 2024 Imagine Harder: Prototyping Impossible Futures
PROJECT
A panel organized for South By Southwest 2024 with Avi Bar-Zeev (XR Guild and Reality Prime), and Andreea Ion Cojocaru. Our intent was to share our experiences, practices, and ways of working when developing and prototyping new ideas. We also intended to share one particular approach — the Work Kit of Design Fiction / Mad Libs — ideation mechanic t..
PROJECT
What are the ways we can augment research data, analytics, trend data by representing the implications of that data in a vivid, compelling, tangible way? What we did was take the trends of the day and extrapolate them, translating the 'trend itself' and representing it as a tangible artifact that implies the future of the trend in a tangi..
PROJECT
We helped organize and facilitate a 24 hour Design Fiction Sprint on the topic of Possible AI Futures in collaboration with Ericsson Consumer Lab, Hyper Island, and Blekinge Institute of Technology. The purpose of the event was to introduce students from BIT (oh..that's cool, actually..) to a fresh approach to ideation and concept development.
PROJECT
In his 1964 book 'Understanding Media', Marshall McLuhan invokes the image of a Bedouin wandering the remotest deserts by camel, dazzling the natives with media broadcasts from a battery-powered radio. McLuhan compares the wonderment of the native with the occultation of everyday technologies among urban dwellers who, despite being immersed in a me..
PROJECT
A Newspaper created for The Museum of Football in Manchester, UK to celebrate the museum's opening and to represent the way Big Data, Algorithms, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Betting might shape a possible future of sports.
✓ The Work Kit of Design Fiction
PROJECT
100 Algorithmically Augmented and Illuminated Prompt Cards, each one an evocative representation of a parameter of a possible future product, service, user-experience scenario, artifact from the most curious, righteous, meaningful, and seriously hilarious, and well-intentioned possible/probable futures.
✓ The Work Kit of Design Fiction
PROJECT
The Work Kit of Design Fiction is a physical toolkit that contains 100 Algorithmically Augmented and Illuminated Prompt Cards, each one an evocative representation of a parameter of a possible future product, service, user-experience scenario, artifact from the most curious, righteous, meaningful, and seriously hilarious, and well-intentioned possi..
PROJECT
Ghostwriter is a speculative redesign of how we interact with intelligent systems, a functional study of an alternative to the ubiquitous chat-based interfaces. Ghostwriter repositions AI as a silent collaborator. A muse. An augment to your voice, not a surrogate. This shift counters the growing tendency to replace human interaction wit..
PROJECT
Vibewriter is a speculative functional design fiction artifact developed within the AI and Designed Fictions Research Studio. It explores new paradigms of human-AI collaboration in creative writing by foregrounding interaction as a dynamic, improvisational dialogue rather than AI-driven content automation. Drawing inspiration from jazz improvisatio..
PROJECT
A New UX Vision for AI-Enhanced Writing What would a writing instrument look like in the imminent future—a world where companion intelligence (ranging from basic to premium) becomes as commonplac..
Podcast
Episode 103 - N°103 - Tom Guarriello The Meaning of Branded Objects
Episode 102 - N°102 - The Art of Possible with Dave Gray
Episode 101 - N°101 - Kirby Ferguson Infinite Remix
Episode 100 - N°100 - N O R M A L S Futures Are Boring
Episode 99 - N°099 - Outgoing
Episode 98 - N°098 - NORMALS
Episode 97 - N°097 - Jarrett Fuller Going Home
Episode 96 - N°096 - Tobias Revell Stories To Imagine Alternate Futures
Episode 95 - N°095 - Phil Balagtas Is Making Futures Work
Episode 94 - N°094 - Troy Campbell Scientific Mind, Artistic Heart
Episode 12 - N°093 - Gary Hustwit Why Does A Film Have To Be The Same Everytime
Episode 93 - N°093 - Gary Hustwit Why Does A Film Have To Be The Same Everytime
Episode 92 - N°092 - The Future of Work Is Not ‘Work from Home’
Episode 91 - N°091 - Imagine As Hard As Philip K. Dick with Tobias Revell
Episode 90 - N°090 - Kyle Ng / Brain Dead / Fashion For Futuring
Episode 89 - N°089 - Silvio Lorusso Design & Disillusion
Episode 88 - N°088 - Dave Gray School of the Possible
Episode 87 - N°087 - Taryn O\'Neil & Tamara Krinsky
Episode 86 - N°086 - What\'s for Breakfast In An AI Future Part 2
Episode 85 - N°085 - What\'s for Breakfast In An AI Future Part 1
Episode 84 - N°084 - EMERGENCY BROADCAST! THRILLING WONDER STORIES
Episode 83 - N°083 - Ruth Guerra\'s Got Social Media Game
Episode 82 - Last Week from the Near Future N°009 - Weeks 51-52/2023
Episode 1 - Last Week from the Near Future N°009 - Weeks 51-52/2023
Episode 9 - Last Week from the Near Future N°009 - Weeks 51-52/2023
Episode 12 - Last Week from the Near Future N°008 - Week 50/2023
Episode 8 - Last Week from the Near Future N°008 - Week 50/2023
Episode 81 - N°081 - Randy Plemel is Expedition Works
Episode 12 - Last Week from the Near Future N°007 - Week 49/2023
Episode 7 - Last Week from the Near Future N°007 - Week 49/2023
Episode 12 - Last Week from the Near Future N°006 - Week 48/2023
Episode 6 - Last Week from the Near Future N°006 - Week 48/2023
Episode 12 - MINISODE: SuperSeminar 005 Sneak Peek with Hassan Ragab
Episode 12 - MINISODE: SuperSeminar 005 Sneak Peek with Hassan Ragab
Episode 11 - Last Week from the Near Future N°005
Episode 5 - Last Week from the Near Future N°005
Episode 11 - MINISODE - SuperSeminar 004 Sneak Peek with Drew Wiberg
Episode 80 - N°080 - Soil Futures & Tarot Decks with Gabby Morris
Episode 79 - N°079 - The Future Will Happen To You with Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith
Episode 78 - N°078 - Circular Economy Futures, a Digest of General Seminar S04E04
Episode 77 - N°077 - Gemma Jones & School of Critical Design
Episode 10 - Last Week from the Near Future E002
Episode 76 - N°076 - Food (In)Security Design Fiction Futures
Episode 10 - Last Week from the Near Future Minisode E001
Episode 75 - N°075 - Artificially Artfifully Enhanced Rebroadcast
Episode 74 - N°074 - Sascha Pohflepp
Episode 73 - N°073 - Lila Feldman Emerging Creative Consciousness
Episode 72 - N°072 - Che-Wei Wang CW&T
Episode 71 - N°071 - Geoff Manaugh (CGI Ghosts and Defensive Grappling In Zero G)
Episode 70 - N°070 - Juliana Schneider — More.Than.Human-Centered Design
Episode 69 - N°069 - Dr. Delfina Fantini van Ditmar — A Not Too Comfortable Future
Episode 68 - N°068 - Futures of Fashion, a Digest of General Seminar S04E01 (29)
Episode 67 - N°067 - Tucker Viemeister (The Last Industrial Designer)
Episode 66 - N°066 - Your Daily Design Fiction Exercise Regimen
Episode 65 - N°065 - A Magazine from the Autonomous Future, A Design Fiction Project Debrief
Episode 64 - N°064 - From Collectors to Creators: A Design Fiction Debrief with Thomas Euyang
Episode 63 - N°063 - Imagining the Future of the Imagination Academy with Will Richardson
Episode 61 - N°061 - The Machines Make The Spoons with Simone & Matteo
Episode 60 - N°060 - ChatGPT Futures, a Digest of General Seminar S03 E26
Episode 59 - N°059 - The Year In The Rear View
Episode 58 - N°058 - We Are Hypercollaborative with Toby Barnes
Episode 57 - N°057 - Design Fiction with Domus Academy & Speculative Futures Milan
Episode 56 - N°056 - The Manual of Design Fiction with Patrick Pittman and Chris Frey
Episode 55 - N°055 - The Manual of Design Fiction with Nicolas Nova
Episode 53 - N°053 - Design Fiction for the Master of Business Administration with Mathieu Aguesse
Episode 52 - N°052 - Speculative Futures as a Design Approach with Johanna Hoffman
Episode 51 - N°051 - After Action Report / ASU\'s Design Fiction as Science Fiction Panel
Episode 50 - N°050 - A 21st Century Enlightenment with Joe Lindley Windermere Tapes Box 050 Tape 05
Episode 49 - N°049 - Windermere Tapes Box 050 Tape 04 with Paulina Yurman: The Design Innovators\' Design Dilemma
Episode 48 - N°048 - Windermere Tapes Box 050 Tape 03 with Alan Hook: Designing Augmented Alternate Reality When Every Community Is Its Own Private QAnon
Episode 47 - N°47 — The \'Third Space Conversation\' Windermere Tapes Box 050 Tape 02 with Futures Designer Laura Dudek
Episode 46 - N°46 — 1.5° Futures, Windermere Tapes Box 050, Tape 01 with Tobias Revell
Episode 45 - N°45 — Design Fiction and The Generalist with Joe Lindley & Paul Coulton
Episode 44 - N°44 — Meow Wolf, Public Policy, and Design Fiction with SRG Bennett
Episode 43 - N°43 — Computer Art Pioneer Herbert W. Franke & Susanne Paech
Episode 42 - N°42 — Sci-Fi, Museum of the Future, & Blade Runner with Fred Scharmen
Episode 41 - N°41 — Design Fiction with Elliott P. Montgomery
Episode 40 - N°40 — Speculative Design with Kontrapunkt
Episode 39 - N°39 — Simone Rebaudengo Futures Designer
Episode 38 - N°38 — Julian Montague
Episode 37 - N°37 — Life On Mars with Camille MacRae
Episode 36 - N°36 — Andrew Dana Hudson Post Normal Fiction
Episode 35 - N°35 — General Seminar 20 \"METALABELS WTF!?\"
Episode 34 - N°34 — Genevieve Bell from Cybernetics to Meta(verse)
Episode 33 - N°33 - Special Bulletin on the NFT Marketplace with Michelle Kasprzak
Episode 32 - N°32 — Yancey Strickler & METALABEL
Episode 31 - N°31 — J. Paul Neeley (Futurists Talking To Futurists)
Episode 30 - N°30 — Dunne & Raby
Episode 29 - N°29 — General Seminar 17 \"Solarpunk\"
Episode 28 - N°28 — Radha Mistry (Futurists Talking To Futurists)
Episode 27 - N°27 — General Seminar 16 \"The Generalist\"
Episode 26 - N°26 — Ed Finn, Solarpunk, Design Fiction & ASU Center for Science and the Imagination
Episode 25 - N°25 — Katie McCrory
Episode 24 - N°24 — 0xDEAFBEEF
Episode 23 - N°23 — General Seminar N°14 WEB3WTF!?
Episode 22 - N°22 — Jaymo
Episode 21 - N°21 — Mieke Marple & Medusa Collection
Episode 20 - N°20 — Nick Foster
Episode 19 - N°19 — Parsons and Charlesworth
Episode 18 - N°18 — General Seminar N°10 CRYPTO GAMING (Something unsettling happened.)
Episode 17 - N°17 — Blockchain Artist Sarah Friend
Episode 16 - N°16 — General Seminar N°9 — Synthetic Brands / Synthetic Media
Episode 15 - N°15 — What is it to be a Generalist? with Patrick Tanguay
Episode 14 - N°14 - Speculative Design, IOT & Cultures of Innovation with Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
Episode 13 - N°13 - Tina He on DAOs, Calvino and Blockchain Social Mechanics
Episode 11 - N°11 - PizzaDAO with Daniel van de Ghinste & Jed Berk
Episode 4 - N°04 - Professor David Kirby
Episode 3 - N°03 - Architect & Filmmaker Liam Young
Episode 2 - N°02 - Scott Smith
Episode 1 - N°01 - Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova
Projects
2023 Imagine Harder Summit - 2023
HELLOThe 2023 Imagine Harder Summit was organized by Julian Bleecker of Near Future Laboratory September 21-22nd 2023 to bring together 2 individuals to collaborate and coordinate to find paths to elevate and amplify the value of creativity, innovation, and futures-oriented thinking. Held at the Frank Lloyd Wright "Affleck House" outside of Detroit, Mic..
A Newspaper from an Artificially Intelligent (Near) Future - 2024
HELLOA newspaper from an AI future — a Design Fiction artifact that imagines a world where artificial intelligence is mundane, woven seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life. We used this as one of the prompts/provocations leading into a two-day workshop on AI policy, governance, an..
ADM Futures of Food - 2022
HELLOADM's Marketing & Communications team commissioned Near Future Laboratory to conduct a series of interviews with their Chief Scientists and their temas of food science experts to represent their work on future food processes and primary ingredients and the implications of global needs and constraints using Design Fiction. The overall objective..
AIGA Design Fiction Keynote 2022 - 2022
HELLOI was asked to deliver a Keynote presentation at the 2022 AIGA National Conference. The presentation was a discussion of Design Fiction and it's 'Why?'.
ANDI Innovation Land Summit 2024 - 2024
HELLOColombia. Keynote. Imagine Harder. Encourage creative entrepreneurship. Meet with business leaders and executives of established and start-up companies. 2 lunch presentation. Podcast. Interviews.
Apple Design Design Fiction 101 Workshop - 2021
HELLOApple, a pioneer in the personal computer industry, defined the vale of what Design could bring to an organization that intended to shape not just the utility of technology, but its meaning. Near Future Laboratory and Julian Bleecker were brought in to brief Apple's internal user-experience and interaction design team about Design Fiction in a '101..
Artificial Intelligence Designed Fictions Research Studio - 2025
HELLOArtificial Intelligence Designed Fictions Research Studio is a prototyping-based research program that explores the potential of artificial intelligence in the context of everyday life. The focus is on rapid ideation and prototyping, creating small, functional artifacts that help ground possibilities in materiality and interaction.
Bloomberg Hyundai Art Technology Lab - 2022
HELLOBloomberg & Hyundai's Art+Technology: Emerging Dialogues show asked if I would participate in the artist + technologists dialogues, a 5 Season show they curated to bring a diverse lineup of artists, technologists and futurists to share ideas and engage in conversation. I invited my friend Liam Young as the 'artist/technologist' interlocutor for thi..
Car and Driverless - 2022
HELLOThe C-Suite of the third largest autonomous vehicle company commissioned Near Future Laboratory to help them make sense of the full-spectrum of a possible autonomous vehicle future. The result was a rich, vibrant, experiential and immersive artifact in the form of a 72 page full-color Design Fiction magazine from a possible autonomous vehicle futur..
Causal Islands Unconference - 2024
HELLOThis talk, The Future of Computing is Fiction, presents a brief overview of Design Fiction and reveals how Design Fiction can serve as an approach for envisioning possible futures of computing. Through the creation of tangible artifacts that imply adjacent possible trajectories for computing's futures, Design Fiction allows us to materialize the in..
Cluster Sequence Cataloger - 2025
HELLOThe Cluster Sequence Cataloger is a software tool I designed quickly to handle a problem: OMATA, the computer company I created and then sold, has a very large collection of images mostly renders created with a toolchain with Cinema4D at its core. There are over 80,000 images, many of them sequences used to create animations. The problem is that I ..
Corner Convenience - 2012
HELLOA 2-day Design Fiction workshop at Arizona State University's Emerge Festival that explored the "future of convenience" through the lens of corner stores, bodegas, and convenience shops as cultural containers of everyday aspirations and anxieties. Approach: Rather than creating polished, high-tech futures dominated ..
Curious Rituals - 2012
HELLOCurious Rituals is a research project conducted at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) in July-August 2012 by Nicolas Nova (The Near Future Laboratory / HEAD-Genève), Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu from the media design program. The curious habits described in this book can be seen as ingredients with which technological objects a..
Drift Deck - 2008
HELLOThe 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 come across a pigeon lady. The act..
Facebook Social Futures - 2019
HELLO1. Based on a set of future scenarios, develop concepts within each scenarios of how Facebook actually shows up in the world/in people’s lives in 10 years. 2. Develop sketches for each concept to help bring the future to life. Bring to life a set of futures for how Facebook may show up in the world and in people’s lives in 10 years time. Inspire le..
Failures and Design Fictions Workshop - 2010
HELLOI facilitated a Design Fiction workshop at the Swiss Design Network conference in Basel Switzerland in October 2010. The workshop was largely Nicolas’ organization and we took advantage of the conference theme of 'Design Fiction' to consider the topic of failure in design — failure as a guide and approach and provocation together with the considera..
General Seminar - 2021
HELLOGeneral Seminar is a platform for sense-making through discussion. I started hosting these during the dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic. I wanted to find ways to develop a sense of community through discussions on topics that were relevant to the creative community that seemed to be drawn to the Near Future Laborato..
Geneva Map for an Autonomous Vehicle Future - 2019
HELLOThe automation of various vehicle functions, whether individual or collective, has been a reality for a number of years. Autonomous vehicles are a recent manifestation of such technical evolution, often portrayed in the media as both promising and inevitable. While the existence of this technology is not in question—as evidenced by projects involvi..
Ghostwriter Selectric - 2024
HELLOGhostwriter is a speculative redesign of how we interact with intelligent systems, a functional study of an alternative to the ubiquitous chat-based interfaces. Ghostwriter repositions AI as a silent collaborator. A muse. An augment to your voice, not a surrogate. This shift counters the growing tendency to replace human interaction wit..
Google Creativity Lab Design Fiction - 2015
HELLOI gave a keynote presentation to the main audience of leadership and Google clients and partners during a summit in support of Google's offerings in Argentina. I also gave a hands-on workshop for the Google office's creative practitioners. Additionally, I accompanied Google's local leadership as they visited the offices of some of their key partner..
Hyper Island x Near Future Laboratory - 2024
HELLOHyper Island Vision Week at Hyper Island is a dedicated period where students are encouraged to stretch their imagination as if it were a muscle, pushing beyond the boundaries of the everyday to envision new possibilities for themselves and society.
IKEA Catalog - 2015
HELLOWe were commissioned to workshop and introduce Design Fiction as a research methodology by IKEA and Stockholm University's Mobile Life Centre. We worked with researchers in a practical hands-on workshop to make sense of the trends of the day (2015), their research areas, and possible evolutions of home life, consumer trends and needs, and related t..
IKEA Life at Home - 2021
HELLOWe were commissioned by IKEA to synthesize data from their annual Life at Home Report and represent the implications, insights, and conclusions of this data as might appear in a future home.
Imagine Harder 2024 — What Are Possible Futures of Work - 2024
HELLODetroit Imagines Harder was my 2024 edition of the ‘Imagine Harder’ series of workshops in which attendees collaborate to workshop around a hot topic using Design Fiction, and begin to construct an artifact that represents the implications of change endemic to that topic. For this edition, held October 16-18 2024 at The Jam Handy venue in Det..
LACMA Solarpunk Worldbuilding - 2022
HELLOA proposal put together for LACMA Hyundai Artlab to worldbuild a solarpunk + crypto possible future written at a time when Solarpunk and Crypto were in a confused state of ascendency within the cultural imaginary.
MobileSCOUT - 2004
HELLOThis project was a kind of extension of PDPal, focusing on collecting audio narratives via mobile phones about local surroundings, personal rituals, and public sightings. It invited participants to leave voice messages describing the flora, fauna, or behaviors they observed in their environment. It was an experiment in using mobile phones as ..
Mobzombies - 2007
HELLOMobZombies is a zombie-fleeing game where a player's movement controls an avatar in the game space. Players run away from virtual zombies by actually running. The objective of the game is simple: stay alive as a horde of the undead slowly moves towards you. The longer you stay alive, the more zombies appear and the better they get at following you...
Near Future Laboratory Podcast - 2020
HELLONear Future Laboratory Podcast brings you conversations at the vanguard of design, technology, futures, and culture, hosted by Julian Bleecker, founder of the Near Future Laboratory.
Near Future Laboratory x Brain Dead x Gary Hustwit “Eno” - 2024
HELLOA collaboration NFL x Brain Dead x Gary Hustwit screening Hustwit's groundbreaking generative documentary about visionary musician and artist Brian Eno at Brain Dead Studios, Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles.
Netflix Atlas Film Technical Consultant - 2022
HELLOA friend asked if I'd be interested in reading a script and being a kind of futurist technical consultant on this action sci-fi thriller film directed by Brad Peyton. Basically he was looking to have someone help the art department conjure elements for the film based on the script, a sense of futures trends and so forth. Basically — Peyton and the ..
Netflix The Future Of.. - 2022
HELLONetflix Future Of is a fun, light, entertaining show asking about the future of everything from gaming and dating, to life after death. I participated as a talking head futures expert. They did spring the dating topic on me though, for which I cannot claim much notable expertise. Pure entertainment. Fun to talk and chat and see what comes out in t..
OMATA Annual Report From The Future - 2020
HELLOCreate a representation of a company using the Design Fiction archetype of an Annual Report as seen from its anticipated, speculated future based in the analytics and rational representations of the company's Financial Model.
PDPal - 2003
HELLOPDPal is a series of public art projects for the Palm™ PDA, mobile phone and the web. It has pushed at the notion of mapping, attempting to transform your everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that you write. PDPal engages the user through a visual transformation that is meant to highlight the way technologies that locate an..
PoemOS - 2024
HELLOPoemOS is a playful exploration of the intersection of poetry and technology, where AI-generated poems come to life through Eleven Labs' voice synthesis. This was a bit of a journey of creating a Python program that could build daily poems, generate the audio, create a little animation and then drop off the whole package to be shared. Par..
Primer Speculative Design 2018 - 2018
HELLOPrimer is (was?) the organization developed to establish Speculative Design as a formal practice. Their annual conference and community has been (was?) a thriving locus of conversation and discussion. I help organize and run the Los Angeles chapter until the pandemic approached (and I was also asked to pay a fee to use the brand.)
Prototyping the OMATA One - 2014
HELLOEarly days of the Omata One project I couldn't help but to work through some of the ideas in hardware. I had a fairly clear idea of the functional requirements, but needed to work through them in a grounded way rather than just drawing boxes and arrow on sheets of paper. It's an odd sense of sense-making, knowing fairly well the overall engineering..
PSX - 2007
HELLOThis project is a concept for a controllable Playstation controller. The project was developed as a speculative design concept to explore the possibilities of a game controller that could be controlled algorithmically providing inputs to the game from a non-human intelligence. The project was developed in 2008 and was part of a series of projects t..
Pussy Weevil - 2004
HELLOThis project was one of my early explorations into the technology and design of interactive experiences, and I was fortunate to collaborate with the talented artist Marina Zurkow on this piece. It was exhibited at Bitforms Gallery in New York City from May 15 to June 19, 2003, as part of the "Braingirl E. Pussy Weevil" exhibition. The in..
Quick Start Guide for a Self Driving Car - 2015
HELLOThe Interaction Design Association invited Near Future Laboratory to introduce Design Fiction to the interaction design community by facilitating a Design Fiction workshop. In this case, we decided to imagine the self-driving future from a design and interaction design perspective by creating a Design Fiction quick-start guide for a fictional self-..
Roblox Design Fiction 101 Workshop - 2019
HELLOThe Near Future Laboratory contributed to an off site for the Roblox design team, with a 3 hour short-format presentation followed by a hands-on workshop. The workshop run-of-show consisted of: 1) An approximately one hour “Design Fiction 101” presentation covering the origins, evolution and current state of Design Fiction, incl..
Slow Messenger - 2007
HELLOSlow Messenger is a product from an adjacent now in which there is a mode of communication in which speed is not prized, but rather the semantic weight of time, patience, thoughtfulness has to be accounted for. The product is the product of, the result of, research into the implications of Instant Messenger® and instant communication. It is a wa..
SuperSeminar - 2023
HELLOSuperSeminar is the platform for Learning & Development I piloted in 2023 to expand and expose the Near Future Laboratory community of followers to Foresight, Futures, and Design Futures practices. We bring in professionals from our expansive network to present short, evocative, activating experiences and perspectives in a salon-like contex..
SxSW 2010 The Design Fiction Panel - 2010
HELLOA panel for SxSW to introduce the concept of Design Fiction. This was about a year or two after I wrote the original essay Design Science Fact and Fiction
SxSW 2024 Imagine Harder: Prototyping Impossible Futures - 2024
HELLOA panel organized for South By Southwest 2024 with Avi Bar-Zeev (XR Guild and Reality Prime), and Andreea Ion Cojocaru. Our intent was to share our experiences, practices, and ways of working when developing and prototyping new ideas. We also intended to share one particular approach — the Work Kit of Design Fiction / Mad Libs — ideation mechanic t..
TBD Catalog - 2012
HELLOWhat are the ways we can augment research data, analytics, trend data by representing the implications of that data in a vivid, compelling, tangible way? What we did was take the trends of the day and extrapolate them, translating the 'trend itself' and representing it as a tangible artifact that implies the future of the trend in a tangi..
Tech Concept Lab AI Futures - 2024
HELLOWe helped organize and facilitate a 24 hour Design Fiction Sprint on the topic of Possible AI Futures in collaboration with Ericsson Consumer Lab, Hyper Island, and Blekinge Institute of Technology. The purpose of the event was to introduce students from BIT (oh..that's cool, actually..) to a fresh approach to ideation and concept development.
Tellbush.org - 2005
HELLOTelephone “hotline” that captures opinions about President Bush on the eve of his second inauguration and then emails the President an audio file containing the spoken opinion, as well as providing an online repository of those spoken opinions. Public exhibition online.
The Work Kit of Design Fiction - 2023
HELLO100 Algorithmically Augmented and Illuminated Prompt Cards, each one an evocative representation of a parameter of a possible future product, service, user-experience scenario, artifact from the most curious, righteous, meaningful, and seriously hilarious, and well-intentioned possible/probable futures.
The Work Kit of Design Fiction - 2024
HELLOThe Work Kit of Design Fiction is a physical toolkit that contains 100 Algorithmically Augmented and Illuminated Prompt Cards, each one an evocative representation of a parameter of a possible future product, service, user-experience scenario, artifact from the most curious, righteous, meaningful, and seriously hilarious, and well-intentioned possi..
TV + GenAI Design Fiction Sprint - 2023
HELLOConfidential workshop with key stakeholders to ideate possible futures in a world where Generative AI is integral to the experience of TV. The objective was to inspire design, R&D and engineering/implementation teams. The brief was to use Design Fiction as an approach to ideate and conceive of a trove of possible future concepts related to GenAI i..
VibeWriter - 2025
HELLOA New UX Vision for AI-Enhanced Writing What would a writing instrument look like in the imminent future—a world where companion intelligence (ranging from basic to premium) becomes as commonplac..
Vibewriter Web Edition - 2025
HELLOVibewriter is a speculative functional design fiction artifact developed within the AI and Designed Fictions Research Studio. It explores new paradigms of human-AI collaboration in creative writing by foregrounding interaction as a dynamic, improvisational dialogue rather than AI-driven content automation. Drawing inspiration from jazz improvisatio..
WiFi.Bedouin - 2004
HELLOIn his 1964 book 'Understanding Media', Marshall McLuhan invokes the image of a Bedouin wandering the remotest deserts by camel, dazzling the natives with media broadcasts from a battery-powered radio. McLuhan compares the wonderment of the native with the occultation of everyday technologies among urban dwellers who, despite being immersed in a me..
William H. Whyte Revisited - 2009
HELLOAn experiment with an apparatus to capture the momentum and pace of urban flows, inspired by William H. Whyte's "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces." 7.5 metre pole with 2 wide field of view cameras, post-processing software using Max/ MSP+Jitter, Processing and Adobe After Effects The apparatus consists of a very tall pole which is used to gain..
Winning Formula - 2014
HELLOA Newspaper created for The Museum of Football in Manchester, UK to celebrate the museum's opening and to represent the way Big Data, Algorithms, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Betting might shape a possible future of sports.
Work Kit of Design Fiction Online Edition! - 2024
HELLOThe Work Kit of Design Fiction sold out but there were still requests for it. I have always thought about doing an online/digital version but resisted that because I think the thing in the hand, and cards scattered on a table was so much more appealing. Alas, my curiosity as to how I might build this overcame my reluctance, plus I wanted to learn h..
Library
(un)disciplinary tactics - 2024
Beatriz da Costa: Undisciplinary Tactics offers a comprehensive overview of da Costa's work, from her early robotic installations to her later projects in tactical media, environmental monitoring, and public health. The book features contributions from scholars, artists, and activists who reflect on da Costa's legacy and its relevance to contemporary discussions about art, technology, and social change. With its rich visual documentation and critical analysis, this volume provides a valuable resource for anyone interested in the intersections of art, science, and activism.
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - 2024
The Psychological Manual everyone has been clamoring for — finally available in paperback along with Action Pack Foil Pak Flash Card Set of Electronic Sheep! This is the definitive guide to understanding the psychic and existential challenges facing the Androids we've come to count on, depend upon — and love.
Applied Intelligence Issue 001 - 2025
A newspaper from an AI future — a Design Fiction artifact that imagines a world where artificial intelligence is mundane, woven seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life. We used this as one of the prompts/provocations leading into a two-day workshop on AI policy and strategy. Through the newspaper we explored the implications of AI futures through speculative narratives and future artifacts. Each piece of content in the newspaper represents a material cultural component of the world, based on current trends as well as speculations about the multiple directionalities and implications of AI futures. Topics covered include ..
Clog 16 - 2018
Artificial Intelligence—in particular the so-called "narrow" form of AI that has already surpassed human capabilities when it comes to specific tasks—is a ubiquitous, trusted part of our lives. But at the same time, AI is a topic that often elicits more questions than answers. Even defining "Artificial Intelligence" is no simple matter. In practice, AI today takes many forms, ranging from consumer-oriented primary points of interaction (AlphaGo, Alexa, Siri, etc.) to high-profile super-machines (DeepMind and Watson), to unseen scripts and bots operating behind the scenes. Few topics have both piqued such curiosity and instilled so m..
Cybernetic Serendipity - 1968
"Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts" stands as a pivotal moment in the intersection of technology and creativity. The catalog — representing the exhibition — stands as a prescient, groundbreaking collection of art + technology. It captures an extraordinary moment when artists, musicians, poets, and engineers were first exploring the creative potential of computers and cybernetic systems. The publication, edited by Jasia Reichardt, emerged from an exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts that sought to demonstrate how humans could use computers and new technology to extend their creativity and in..
Distant Early Warning - 1969
The DEW-Line deck of cards takes as its point of departure that artists (the creative consciousness) are a sort of cultural DEW-Line that warns of changes to arrive shortly. They can do so because they keep their senses (their radar, to ride the metaphor to staggers) well-tuned: that is the main business of any serious artist.
E.A.T. Works: Open-ended - 2018
In 2018, the National Museum of Modern Contemporary Art, Korea presented the exhibition "E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology): Open-ended" in Seoul. The exhibition introduces the works of E.A.T., a non-profit organization founded in 1966 for the establishment of better collaborative relationships among artists, engineers, and industries.
Flowcharting - 2023
Flowcharting From Abstractionism to Algorithmics in Art and Architecture is a 140-page book by Matthew Allen published by gta Verlag in January 2023. The book is based on Allen's Harvard University Graduate School of Design dissertation research. The book discusses how the modernist program of rationalizing creative practice between the 1930s and 1960s took a bureaucratic turn, and how decades of avant-gardist experimentation prepared the way for the computer's entry into the architectural scene. It also discusses how abstract flowcharts can be translated into concrete instructions, where things that were only hinted at in the flowchart must ..
IDSA Innovation: Supernatural - 2024
What is our relationship with nature? Is it humanity versus nature, nature teaching humanity, or nature and humanity existing as separate entities? Let's explore humanity's relationship with nature through the lens of design.
IKEA Catalog from a Near Future - 2015
We were commissioned to workshop and introduce Design Fiction as a research methodology by IKEA and Stockholm University's Mobile Life Centre. We worked with researchers in a practical hands-on workshop to make sense of the trends of the day (2015), their research areas, and possible evolutions of home life, consumer trends and needs, and related topics in the categories of domestic life, food, urban life, travel, leisure, and entertainment. We developed and refined concepts through a focussed two-day workshop. We took these concepts, continued to evolve them and finally represent them in the form of a product catalog we 'brought back' from I..
Insight Alchemy - 2024
A curious compendium of golden and alchemical elements of insight discovery and craftsmanship, including a forecast of the future of insight.
It's Time To Imagine Harder - 2023
If ‘The Manual of Design Fiction’ is the How, this book is the Why. A kind of supplement to ‘The Manual’ that emphasizes that it is not just a set of techniques and approaches, but that it has a purpose, and a purpose beyond the instrumental character of any kind of process or procedure. This book is about the concept of Design Fiction and its interconnectedness to the existential capacity we have to imagine, dream, feel, and actualize possibility. It reminds us that our capacity to Imagine is our evolutionary advantage. Imagination is the way we work our way through and around the existential c..
Janet Cardiff - 2002
Shifting between fact and fiction, between the experience of the real and our projections, fantasies, and desires, Janet Cardiff's audio-video and multimedia installations explore the complexity and vertiginous nature of subjectivity in a highly technological world. They are interactive pieces where visitors are asked to touch, listen, smell, and often move through an environment shaped both by our perceptions and by the artist's alteration of them. With references to film noir, science fiction, cyber-punk and various other filmic genres, her works, often created in collaboration with husband George Bures Miller, address the constant need to ..
Kiosk - 2024
Mass-produced from the 1970s to the 1990s, modular kiosks like the seminal K67, designed by the Slovenian architect Saša J. Mächtig, and similar systems – including the Polish Kami, the Macedonian KC190, and the Soviet ‘Bathyscaphe’ – could be found anywhere throughout the former Eastern Bloc and ex-Yugoslav countries, from bustling city squares to socialist-era housing estates. They served as hot dog and Polish zapiekanka joints, farm egg and rotisserie chicken vendors, funeral flower shops, newsstands, car park booths, currency exchange offices, and more. Featuring over 150 kiosks – from Ljubljana to Warsaw, and from Belgrade to Ber..
Machine Learning and the City - 2022
Machine Learning and the City: Applications in Architecture and Urban Design delivers a robust exploration of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the built environment. Relevant contributions from leading scholars in their respective fields describe the ideas and techniques that underpin ML and AI, how to begin using ML and AI in urban design, and the likely impact of ML and AI on the future of city design and planning. Each section couples theoretical and technical chapters, authoritative references, and concrete examples and projects that illustrate the efficacy and power of machine learning in urban des..
Made Up: Design's Fiction - 2018
Through essays, interviews, and narratives by Bruce Sterling, Fiona Raby, Sam Jacob and other significant voices in the field, this volume questions the initial discourses around “design fiction”―a broad category of critical design that includes overlapping interests in science fiction, world building, speculation, and futuring. Made Up: Design’s Fiction advances contemporary analysis and enactment of narrative and speculation as an important part of practice today. Essays, interviews, and narratives by: Julian Bleecker, Benjamin H. Bratton, Anne Burdick, Emmet Byrne, Stuart Candy, Fiona Raby, Tim Durfee, Sam Jacob, Norman M. Kl..
Not Here, Not Now - 2025
A curious exploration of the role of design in the interplay of speculative thought, the notion of impossibility, and the design imagination, where ‘design’ isn't about solving design problems – it’s about expanding what design can be, and what can become from a reinvigorated design imagination. It is classic D&R to ask one to consider the “design proposal” as prompt, not prescription, and to embrace deliberately unrealizable concepts as a way to fuel imagination. When the present moment has many feeling asthough reality itself is fractured, Not Here, Not Now makes the case for loosening the bonds of trad notions of reality..
OMATA 2024 Annual Report from the Future - 2020
An Annual Report..from the future? This was my way of making a more vivid, engaging, strategic representation of the future of OMATA to help communicate my vision. Way better than a pitch deck — an artifact from a future for the company built off of the financial model, so grounded in the anticipation represented by old-fashioned kinds of future fictions: the financial projection.
Practices of Futurecasting - 2025
Dedicated to the question of how tacit ideas about the future can be externalized and shared with others, “Practices of Future Casting: Ways of Sharing Imagined Tomorrows,” edited edited by Michael Shamiyeh, explores diverse approaches to futurecasting through data, fiction, and matter. The book features Contributors from experts discussing the importance of imagination, collaboration, and ethical considerations in shaping desirable futures. It highlights key projects and methodologies, such as participatory design initiatives, embodied learning, and the use of games for futurecasting. This comprehensive volume emphasizes collaborat..
Reality Was Whatever Happened - 2023
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy is a compelling meditation on the existential human fear of depending on other species to survive; Beth Coleman’s Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds relays questions of kinship, community, survival, and transformation through generative processes of image production, serialization, and fabrication. Operating as an interspecies vehicle with which OBAI prompts us to reconsider race, cognition, and computability, Reality Was Whatever Happened attends to the wild edges of computational culture and politics. Contributors engage with questions of black computing, indigenou..
Reimagining Design - 2024
Design offers so much more than an aesthetically pleasing logo or banner, a beautification add-on after the heavy lifting. In Reimagining Design, Kevin Bethune shows how design provides a unique angle on problem-solving —how it can be leveraged strategically to cultivate innovation and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork. As he does so, he describes his journey as a Black professional through corporate America, revealing the power of transformative design, multidisciplinary leaps, and diversity.Bethune, who began as an engineer at Westinghouse, moved on to Nike (where he designed Air Jordans), and now works as a sought-after consultant ..
Social Dreaming Through Design - 2024
Facing the reality of a mountain of complex problems, we will work together to create the ideal future for organizations and society. This book explores a framework for envisioning long-term future “worldviews” and methods for implementing actions within an organization to achieve these visions. It incorporates emerging design theories like Speculative Design, Designed Realities, Transition Design, Futures Literacy, and Defuturing, based on Masaki's professional experience in Japan and the US. Envisioning a bright future is increasingly challenging with current worldviews focused on speed, quality, and cost. To address complex 21st..
Some Ways of Thinking About the Future - 1975
Abstract Future Studies set the broad conceptual framework within which planning can take place. They ask the question, "Where as a society, are we going?" In discussing such a complex question, a distinction made between "well-structured" problems which concentrate on perfection of means (the "how-to-do-it" questions) and "ill-structured" problems which address the question of ends ("What ought we to do?") some methods such as model-building, trend extrapolation, technology assessment, etc. are well suited to exploring essentially simple problems where the goal is already evident (putting a ..
TBD Catalog - 2023
What is 'the future', when 'the future' arrives as a printed junk mail catalog of yesterday's vision of the future? TBD Catalog is the first and canonical Design Fiction artifact ever produced. It was the artifact 'found' through a futures workshop in October 2012 with a group of engaged participants from across a wide variety of practices and disciplines to infer the implications of trends at a point in time and make sense of these trends as if they achieved their likely/probable/possible outcome in a likely/probable/possible future, but as artifacts from the future.
The Field Study Handbook - 2017
The comprehensive how-to, why-to guide to running international field research projects. The Handbook is for anyone that needs to understand users, customers, people across markets, geographies and cultures. The Handbook reveals how to: Build and lead trusted multicultural teams, anywhere in the world; run a field study from pitch to deliverable, initial hypothesis to becoming organisational wisdom; learn how to read contexts, identify patterns of behaviour, decode cultures, and generate insights that inform and inspire product, brand, strategy, policy, and communications; pinpoint the difference between local, regional, and globally relevant..
The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age - 1968
This book is an exploration of the intersection between technology and art in the Western world, with a focus on how artists have engaged with and responded to machines throughout history. Rather than offering a comprehensive historical account, it presents a collection of artist-based reflections on technological advancements, particularly noting the significant increase in such art+technology work during the 20th century. The text emphasizes the transition from mechanical to electronic and chemical technologies and includes artworks that highlight various aspects of machines. The exhibition and its representation in the catalog and catalog ..
The Manual of Design Fiction (Hardcover) - 2022
"The Manual of Design Fiction" is the canonical reference manual and resource that clarifies and explains the practice of Design Fiction. Authored by Julian Bleecker, Nicolas Nova, Fabien Girardin, and Nick Foster, this book explores how futures-oriented practices like Strategic Foresight can benefit from augmenting their outcomes through the creation of artifacts that represent the consequences of strategic decision making. Published independently by Near Future Laboratory, it provides a rich framework for designers, strategists, decision makers, and more to envision and shape the way we make sense of, imagine into, and create possible f..
The Manual of Design Fiction (Softcover) - 2023
“The Manual of Design Fiction” is the canonical reference manual and resource that clarifies and explains the practice of Design Fiction. Authored by Julian Bleecker, Nicolas Nova, Fabien Girardin, and Nick Foster, this book explores how futures-oriented practices like Strategic Foresight can benefit from augmenting their outcomes through the creation of artifacts that represent the consequences of strategic decision making. Published independently by Near Future Laboratory, it provides a rich framework for designers, strategists, decision makers, and more to envision and shape the way we make sense of, imagine i..
The Tomorrow Times - 2024
A newspaper from June 27, 2030! Only $3.25! Cheap!
Things to Come - 1972
Things To Come is a working document of our continuing study of the future, reflecting partial and tentative conclusions.
Tom Sachs: McDonald's Catalogue Raisonné - 2024
This is a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known McDonald’s-related artworks created by Tom Sachs Studio over the last 30 years (1994 – 2024).I wrote some more reflection on Tom Sachs' work here: Tom Sachs Worldbuilding
Towards the Realm of Materiality - 2024
Philip K. Dick, one of the most prolific and visionary authors of the 20th century, crafted compelling visions of possible futures and dystopian realities teeming with humans, artificial intelligences, and more. Yet, the Dickian universe is more than just its characters—it’s a realm intricately built with technological devices, machines, and objects entirely conceived by this brilliant mind. How did Philip K. Dick envision these technologies, and through them, the future? And now, decades after his time, how should we perceive and interpret these tools? More intriguingly, how can we decode and reconstruct the creative process that led to the ..
What Design Can’t Do - 2024
Design is broken. Young and not-so-young designers are becoming increasingly aware of this. Many feel impotent: they were told they had the tools to make the world a better place, but instead the world takes its toll on them. Beyond a haze of hype and bold claims lies a barren land of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. Although these feels might be the Millennial norm, design culture reinforces them. In conferences we learn that "with great power comes great responsibility" but, when it comes to real-life clients, all they ask is to "make the logo bigger." This book probes the disillusionment that permeates design. It tackles the deskill..
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See here for a professional curriculum vitae
Julian Bleecker is a researcher, designer, engineer, and entrepreneur. He is synonymous with Near Future Laboratory, the platform he founded originally as a blog in 2005, which has since become his company through which he does commercial work. It serves as a home for projects, writing, his podcast conversations with some very curious and intriguing people, his Learning & Development platforms SuperSeminar and General Seminar
He is also most often associated with the product company OMATA, which he founded in 2014 and sold in a successful exit in 2022.
In addition to making other significant contributions to the fields of design, technology, art+technology, and commercial innovation practices, he originated the concept of 'Design Fiction' in collaboration with the science-fiction author Bruce Sterling.
Julian is the author of Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction, 'It's Time To Imagine Harder', and an author of 'The Manual of Design Fiction', the canonical reference for the eponymous practice that has evolved creative practices globally.
At OMATA Julian developed the unique OMATA One cycling computer, connected App, and defined the engineering architecture for a truly unique hybrid of analog + digital technology that combined GPS, Bluetooth, mechanics, and connetivity. He successfully developed the product, brand, and activated the marketplace for this unique sports computer that combines the capabilities of modern sensor technology with the elegance and beauty of an analog timepiece. He continues to work with the new owners to assist with production, brand, and engineering needs.
In addition to his work as an entrepreneur, Julian is an active researcher with strong ties and stakes to academics, pedagogy, learning & professional development.
He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California's famed School of Cinematic Arts — the USC Film School — where he taught graduate film students interactive, location-based, and connected technologies and ways of integrating such in place-based storytelling. He worked for 8 years in a key role at Nokia's Advanced Design Studio in Los Angeles where he evolved a futures-oriented approach to design activities in a commercial context.
The lessons from that experience became a baseline for subsequent commercial futures work. This came from a recognition that it was not enough to have clever ideas, nor show them on a PowerPoint slide. Rather, one must augment and sense-into possibility through tangible, experienced representations — partial worlds as one might experience, not just physical prototypes of this-or-that geegaw, nor stock 'user-experience scenarios'. This experience led indirectly to Design Fiction.
Julian has exhibited art+technology work through many venues, platforms, festivals, and galleries including Ars Electronica (2005), Bitform Gallery (2003), Art Interactive, Times Square (Creative Time's 59th Minute), the Walker Art Center's Sculpture Garden, Whitney Museum's Art Port, the Design Museum (London), MoMA, Rhizome, and more.
Along with Scott Paterson and Marina Zurkow, he was a Creative Capital grant recipient and has been an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam Atelier and Banff Center for the Arts. He has published numerous articles and papers on design, technology, and innovation, and holds several patents, including one he wrote himself for his invention of the OMATA One.
Near Future Laboratory is the hub of his practice. You can find most of his work within the Projects index at Near Future Laboratory. You can also find the best ways of engaging him within Services.
He is an avid photographer who has published several photo books, including 'Hello, Skater Girl' (2011), the first book to exclusively highlight women's skateboarding at a time when the male-dominated sport had yet to take notice. 10 years after its publication, two of the women he were worked (one just finishing high school, the other a junior at USC) were sponsored pros, and appeared in the 2023 Tokyo Olympics, the first Olympic Games to feature skateboarding.
Julian has a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz where he studied and taught with Professors Donna Haraway, and Angela Y. Davis. His dissertation, 'The Reality Effect of Technoscience' investigates the ways technologies of representation from the telescope, special effects (film), simulation video games (SimCity), and virtual reality have shaped the ways we understand veridical truth, or the common idiom, 'reality'.
He holds 11 patents, including two he wrote using a great 'patent it yourself' book for his first commercial product, the OMATA One.
He has an MS in HCI Engineering from University of Washington where he worked as a researcher at the Human Interface Technology Lab. He received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.