Entries from Orange Cone tagged with 'social effects'
Peak MHz
In preparation for my upcoming Dorkbot talk, I put together this chart of CPU speeds from 1980 until today: This chart demonstrates that we hit the era of what I'm calling Peak MHz in about 2004. That's the point when...
Ubiquitous Computing Bridges Devices and Services
I was honored to have been invited to present at XD Forum, Intuit's internal user experience design conference, last week. My half-hour talk focused on the relationship between ubicomp devices and services, a topic I've been evolving for much of...
Fast processors, open standards, social research and Sketching in Hardware
A journalist acquaintance asked me about the relationship between journalism and product development in the context of Sketching in Hardware. I wrote him an email that (somewhat densely) summarized much of my current thinking about the relationship between cheap hardware,...
Animism and Italian Design
When I was in Milan for the Furniture Fair/Design Week I took a break from all the current design talk and looking and went to the Triennale for the inaugural show of the new design Italian museum hosted there,...
2008 Milan Furniture Fair/Design Week interactive art review
Since launching BlinkM in February, I've been focused on the potential design uses of LED lighting. This years' Milan Furniture Fair (aka Milan Design Week, since it's branched out significantly beyond furniture to design of all kinds of consumer products...
Information Shadows of people
Over the years there have been many projects that use mobile phones to associate physical objects with their information shadows (YellowArrow, QR Code, ScanLife, etc.). There have also been many projects that use phones in social setting as a way...
Sketching Smart Things 3, borrowed purses and smart hammers
I spoke last night at Berkeley's School of Information Future of Interaction Design lecture series, presenting the "Sketching Smart Things" talk I gave at BayCHI last month and at CHIFOO the month before. I'm evolving this talk, rather than doing...
Tom beat me to it
This is what I get for writing a blog, but not reading any. I've been talking about merging the physical and digital worlds and I knew I wasn't the only one doing it, but it's kind of embarrassing when I...
Whirlpool centralpark, Cozi and "domestic groupware"
Here here's your latest computer fridge news: Whirlpool has partnered with a domestic groupware software company called Cozi. Right now, it's just a branding partnership with Cozi's calendar/to-do list/grocery list etc. software for families, but it's clear where this is...
Artifacts wear their own history
About a year ago I bought several books in an old set of Dickens' collected works from a book store that was going out of business. I bought them initially because of the nice texture that 19th century books have,...
Sketching Smart Things, a presentation for CHIFOO
(photo from Flickr, (cc) dailydog) CHIFOO, the CHI forum of Oregon, invited me to speak at their January gathering, and it was an honor and a pleasure to accept their invitation. Their lecture theme this year is "From Ideation...
Sung, et al's Roomba intimacy paper
After several months heads-down on several projects (more news about that soon), I decided to go back and see what I had missed by skipping Ubicomp 2007. So far, the most interesting paper, from my perspective is Sung, Guo, Grinter...
The Fantasy Economy
I'm reading The Design of Things to Come a book that advocates design as a competitive differentiator for companies. It came out in 2005 and the authors are from a (slightly) different world, the world of industrial design and business,...
Technology brings context, a presentation for history museums
This week was a two conference presentation week for me. The second was the keynote for Etech, but the first was for the Outdoor Historical Museum Forum. The Forum, which our friends at The Henry Ford asked me to...
How objects become gadgets
Tod, my partner in ThingM has written a great analysis on his blog of how ubicomp will permeate everyday technology in the near term, and how adding technology changes how we relate to, and how we buy, everyday objects. As...
LED Graffiti Causes panic
The Graffiti Research Lab pointed out that electronics are nearly as cheap as paint these days, but it took a panic in Boston (and maybe some reckless PR, but who knows) to give it widespread recognition: More than 10 blinking...
Origin of Magical thinking
Cassidy and several others pointed me to a NY Times article about magical thinking. [...] magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day. The appetite for such...
Magic watch
(from Engadget) Not quite using magic as a metaphor, but more traditional stage magic (i.e. a technological assist for what's a sleight of hand deception), Casio's magic watch assists in doing five different magic tricks. Stage magic and technology...
The Magic Smoke in Electronics
While writing the last entry, I remembered a tongue-in-cheek myth from electrical engineering, documented in Wikipedia, which says that there is a little bit of magic blue smoke in every integrated circuit, resistor, transistor, and all other electronic components and...
Roomba hacks and attitudes toward ubicomp
My business partner in ThingM Tod continues to reach new heights in hacking Roombas. A couple of weeks ago, he built a custom circuit to give Roombas a Battlestar Galactica cylon eye...but just having moving LEDs wasn't enough, and...
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