Week-ending 106

The previous week was slightly less packed with travels and meetings so I finally had some time to work on parallel projects and be inspired with discussions here and there. A project I really want to push forward is certainly the one about game controller. It's been a while that we have accumulated the material, but we have trouble doing the analysis because of business matters. Laurent and I finally completed a big spreadsheet (see picture above). It's basically a table with the 42 gamepads we consider as being "official" along with a description of their characteristics: number of buttons, surface, button surface, shape type, d-pad type, connector type, etc. Given our slow rhythm to work on the project, we decided that we will release an intermediary step: a booklet to describe our "visual corpus", i.e. the structured set of artifacts we are analyzing in our project. This booklet will be both available physically (printed) and as an ipad/iPhone app. It will show a sort of series of identity cards describing the joypads.

Vaguely related with this project: I was interviewed for a french exhibit called "Museogames about the history of video-games. The interview was about the evolution of computer and console game interfaces, the agent of change and the role of cultural difference in this.

As mentioned in my blogpost earlier, I worked on the Lift France 10 program and we are currently tuning the last details, discussing with speakers about their talks.

Besides, I went to Lausanne last Friday to spend the day at the Panoramic Lab. it's basically the studio occupied by Bread and Butter and Ozwe. A good place to spend some time on Friday, to work/discuss/chat with like-minded people, play and observe robots and get some inspiration out of my daily office. I think I will try to keep doing this. Spending a day a week in another office is also healthy in terms of social activities, work on side-projects (such as the game controller thing) and change from daily routines.

Finally, the week-end was sunny but I managed to find some time to start writing a research proposal about personal data. A potential partnership with local universities and the design school as well as a partner in Asia. We'll see how things goes.

And yes, I read this novel called "Omega Minor" by Paul Verhaegen. Very curious, all over the place (a la Pynchon) and stunning with regards to the topics he deals with. It's not just a book about nazism as the largest European catastrophe, it's also a novel about memory crossed with nuclear physics, wizardry, Berlin, lies, the resurgence of ideas over time and the Holocaust. The author is a researcher in cognitive psychology and given my background in this discipline, I read the book with the information in mind. It lead me to appreciate quotes such as the following: It reminds of me of how I perceived cognitive psychology with regards to much broader perspective about the world. This quote may come handy in presentation about reductionism. Besides, readers interested in his view of memory can also look at the 52 occurrences of the term "memory" to dig more how this topic is addressed in the novel.

Week-ending 105

[I started making weeknotes too, This is week 105 because I started working at Liftlab 105 weeks ago] Last week-end was a sort of retreat/holiday to recover from Lift10... and work on the "Lift insight" report, which will summarize the various topics that has been addressed at the Lift 10 conference two weeks ago. It was good have already existing material such as the drawings you see above (made by Integral Development) or the notes by Hubert Guillaud on InternetActu. The event was good and dense, as usual, and it's important to highlight what has been uncovered. I'll post the report on-line when ready.

Spent one day in London for a project with a mobile phone carrier and a design agency. The project consisted in both a presentation and a workshop to make clients appropriate the insights I brought (through a set of exercises/break-out groups). It was kind of painful to each LHR because my Easyjet flight has been cancelled and I had to take BA, which was on strike.

In parallel, Fabien, Laurent and I completed another project about networked objects and home appliances for a client with the help of Etienne from XPteam. I still have to finalize the exec summary of the report and send it tomorrow to the client.

Finally, it was my last week of teaching for the semester at HEAD-Geneva. These two sessions about evaluating design products were the conclusion of my "Field research and interaction design" course. Students now have to work on their assignments: a field study that will lead to the description of design implications (storyboards, scenarios, paper prototypes, specifications, etc.) I am definitely curious about the results and now need to write a review of the year course to see what we can change or improve for next year. And yes the picture above shows the place where courses are given, an old and curious building in Geneva.

Besides, I received my (physical) copy of Laurence Dupuis' dissertation (under my supervision, at ENSCI in Paris) about Imagination, design and digital technologies. It's full of interesting insights and discussion with people such as Jean-Louis Fréchin, Frederic Kaplan or Bruce Sterling. Only in French though.

Last week, recent encounters

[Short note: blogging is more and more difficult with travels, consulting gigs and the need to spend some time offline, i will try to post some form of weeknotes with a visual and short text twist. It's not very fancy, only curious stuff I've stumbled across and collected last week. Of course I'll post more meat if I have time.] An intriguing speech by Golan Levin at HEAD-Geneva (Geneva University of Art and Design) about interactive art and speculative HCI. Levin described some of his projects and framed them as "creating new forms of interactive experiences... some are very useful (immediate applications), some are absolutely useless and project possible futures that may or may not come into existence... propositions of how we might interact with objects and people". I liked the idea of "infoviz as self-examination for society" and his thoughts about the computer mouse: "a mouse is pathological, as one of my teacher told me: to interact with a computer is to have a computer that has a model of you as one finger", "a urinal knows more about me than a computer mouse"

Some visual research about the gamepad project, like this beautiful representation of what was needed in 1958 to play "Tennis for Two" on an oscilloscope [via].

Preparing a speech about Science-Fiction and urban environments, I've been drawn to various representations of cities in the context of speculative movies. This picture of "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" (1972) was of interest... as it shows how an existing US university (UC Irvine) was used as a scene for this movie.

WiFi Camera is a curious project that " takes "pictures" of spaces illuminated by wifi in much the same way that a traditional camera takes pictures of spaces illuminated by visible light".

Two visualizations by Barbara Hahn and Christine Zimmermann that caught my attention. It's a project called "Visual Atlas of Everyday Life at the Hospital" that represents selected organizational and communicative sub-processes within the patient process at Berne University Hospital. Some of the them are related with waiting times, others are about patient recovery and leaving the hospital. The fact that an hospital could used these data in this form is interesting. I've put this in perspective with Fabien's recent work about representing Geneva based on people's usage of Flickr and Foursquare:

This 8-digit calculator watch by Casio triggered some inspiring discussion about object convergence, an interesting follow-up to my post about the pianococktail. It left me wondering about a watch connected to the Internets. For some reasons, I haven't seen groundbreaking project along these lines. It's not that I want to connect anything to the réseau des réseaux but I am curious about interconnected time machines.

A trip to the funfair is always inspiring for informal observations of various forms of play. More specifically, bumper cars ("dodgems" in the UK, "auto-tamponneuses in France) were very interesting to observe driving behavior of people ready to bump into each other. What happens here? Why do people seem so happy doing this? Could it be an interesting metaphor for new car interfaces? I don't have the answer but I definitely have a gut feeling that bumper cars are an interesting answer to some problems (which remains to be found). Next step is to dig the scientific literature about this funfair device.