Entries from Orange Cone tagged with 'ubicomp'
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...
Read-Write Material Culture (Sketching 09 presentation)
I expanded on my LIFT France presentation at this years' Sketching in Hardware gathering. The two presentations are quite similar. My core point is that the fundamental nature of making things changes as the cost of moving atoms goes up...
When bits meet atoms: Making things in a Read-Write World (LIFT09)
A couple of weeks ago Liz and I had the pleasure of speaking at LIFT+Fing France, a great conference about technology, design, society and the future. The lineup was fantastic and both the in-band and out-of-band conversations were great....
When atoms meet bits (LIFT 09 talk summary)
I'm going to be speaking at LIFT France 09 later this week. The talk is an intro to presentations by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of tinker.it and Michael Shiloh. I'll post the actual talk when it's done. Here's the summary: According to...
Companies that provide information shadow/Internet of Things tracking
In writing my book, I've been trying to keep track of companies that are creating consumer-facing information shadows for various kinds of products (as opposed to the other kind of item-level identification technologies that are primarily for use by businesses...
ETech 2009: The Dotted-Line World
I presented a talk at ETech today. It links the capabilities of ubiquitous computing and intersects it with service design to come up with a justification for creating subscription-based services out of (certain) everyday objects. The original description is...
Finite and Infinite Terms: the trouble with optimistic names
As has been obvious in the recent past, I've been a bit focused on how and why disciplines, especially disciplines relating to ubiquitous computing, are named what they are. I'm not a language precision pedant most of the time--words...
Smart Things: an outline
Several people have asked me to describe the ubicomp UX book I'm writing. As time allows (and it doesn't allow much), I'll try to post some information about it. For now, I'll start with an annotated outline. A big caveat:...
Smart Lights: where ethernet-over-power is useful
This is an outline of a project that I've had on the drawing board for years, and it looks like I'm not going to actually instantiate it, so I decided today (after being prompted by a foo camp mailing list...
Ubicomp UX Design at Dansk-IT
I was one of the international keynote presenters at this year's Dansk IT Usability and Design conference. I would first like to thank them for the invitation: it was a pleasure to spend a couple of days in Copenhagen and...
Materials, cloud computing, ubicomp and service design
I recently lamented in Twitter that my blog posting has become shovelware from my presentations. That mostly shows how busy I am--which is actually good--but it's also a shame, since I like having the time to use this as the...
ThingM launches MaxM!
Woohoo! ThingM's second product, BlinkM MaxM, has hit the store shelves (first at Sparkfun, soon at FunGizmos). It's (to quote myself), "BlinkMs bigger, crazy sibling. It's an intensely-bright smart LED for prototyping that comes as a package of two...
Ubicomp UX Design in ACM's interactions
I wrote an article on ubiquitous computing user experience design for ACM's interactions magazine. The final article is only available to subscribers, but here's a preprint version of it: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design I think 2005 was the year...
How ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things
About six months ago, I was invited by the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) to keynote their annual conference. After admitting that I didn't know what "serials" were (think periodicals, journals and other similar things), I realized that...
Digital rings, Disney and New Urbanism
The title implies more mean than this blog post will have in it, but in my research on digital rings, I discovered an amusing factoid: the first people to have worn digital jewelry on a regular basis are the children...
Magic ring prototypes
Hideaki Matsui's ring-based concept made the blog rounds this week, and it's only the latest of a trend of ring-shaped ubicomp devices (as helpfully cataloged by Yanko Design): Right now they replicate simple functions that may be done better by...
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...
Software capabilities versus user needs
Reading a description of the design of the Appliance Studio's RoomWizard (now a Steelcase product sold by Polyvision) for my book, I came across this description of the tension between the capabilities of software-based devices and users needs. I think...
Magic and ubicomp in the Congo
In the latest Economist Technology Quarterly, there's a story about a SUNY researcher who is creating an RFID and metal detector system for rangers identify potential poachers walking the elephant trails in Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Congo. This in...
How appliances evolve (and how I evolved)
A couple of months back, receiver magazine, Vodaphone's magazine about art, society and technology, asked me to write a short piece for them. I decided to write about the evolution of appliances. As with many of my recent articles, it...
Ubicomp and kitchens: "When a knife talks to a toaster, what do they say?"
I had the great privilege of speaking at the Taste3 conference on wine, food and art in Napa today. This is a terrific conference that's run as a kind of "TED for food" by many of the folks who...
Media vindication (of sorts)
Last Friday there were two surprising (to me, anyway) front page stories about ubicomp. First, the Economist has a special report on "The coming wireless revolution." The end of the first paragraph reads "In coming years wireless will vanish...
Ambiguating the terminology: Web 4.0
I just got a pamphlet inviting me to the 2007 Semantic Technology conference, which has a curious illustration on page 3. The illustration shows the "evolution" of the Internet, really the Web, since what its creators do is show how...
Coming Age of Magic (Etech Edition)
This morning I gave a keynote at O'Reilly's Etech. It was an elaboration on the theme of magic in the design of ubiquitous computing user experience that I've been developing for a while now. The core of the piece...
Me on magic and ubicomp in Ambidextrous Magazine
The nice folks at Ambidextrous Magazine asked me to contribute an essay on magic as a metaphor for ubiquitous computing user experience design to Issue 6, which launches this week. This essay fleshes out my October dorkbot presentation. Here's the...
New data for old senses
(photos (cc) by eecue and decade_null, found on Flickr) A couple of years ago I wrote about an idea I had for visualizing the implicit heat maps in Wifi signal strength using actual heat. I never made the device,...
A terminology experiment
After all of the observation- and analysis-based discussions of terminology on this blog, I decided to do a little experiment to see if there was any data that could be collected. To get an idea of how much people used...
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...
A mobile-phone/lamp for personal surveillance
I don't advocate the implicit weirdness of such a device, since I can't think of any case where using it doesn't imply some seriously screwed-up priorities, but this lamp that hides a secret GSM camera is an interesting example...
Philips Drag & Draw magic markers
Although the event at which the technology is described appears to be have happened some months ago, I just saw this video on YouTube about a Philips project called "Drag & Draw." It appears to be a projector and...
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...
Smart Furniture + IKEA
A group in Switzerland has been doing some interesting experiments with technology embedded in everyday objects that helps people use those objects. Two of their papers were mentioned on Engadget and I enjoyed what they had to say. One paper,...
REXplorer: Magic as historical explanation metaphor
Researchers and designers at Aachen University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have a magical user experience design project called REXplorer. As described in their paper entitled REXplorer: A Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists as Social Software, REXplorer...
National's Smart Bed
It looks like National (aka Matsushita/Panasonic) is launching a smart bed. It's a combination of a bed with a pressure-sensitive pad (roughly serving a similar duty to the sensors in Stanford's Sleepsmart project [120K PDF]) and an ambient environment that's...
Smart Furniture in Fiction
A short story about the animist perils of ubicomp.
Smart Furniture Manifesto v2
Version 2 of the Smart Furniture Manifesto, as published in the June 2004 issue of Metropolis Magazine
"Remote Furniture" at SIGGRAPH
Noriyuki Fujimura's "Remote Furniture" piece is a nice smart furniture piece with two rocking chairs that create a conversation.
Adam on Smart Furniture
Adam Greenfield challenges my Smart Furniture Manifesto.
Smart Furniture Side Show, Part 3
I conclude my 2ad Smart Furniture Side Show talk by talking about cars and concluding by noting that all of these are just examples of the kinds of questions that we can start asking about how technology can be included into every objects.
Smart Furniture Side Show, Part 2
I continue my 2ad talk transcript by talking about beds and office cubicles.
Smart Furniture Side Show, Part 1
I argue that smart furniture is the augmentation of a class of everyday objects so that people have to learn less and yet whole new classes of questions can be asked of the objects in our environment.
Money for Smart Objects
Two companies, MagInk and Symphonix, who are interested in creating smart everyday objects, get money (one as venture, one as a buyout).
Two Furniture Fairs (part 3)
I look back at the smart objects I saw at the Milan and New York furniture fairs. I only find one thing that really seems like genuinely useful smart furniture, but finding one thing is still incredibly exciting.
Smart Furniture Side Show
I'm at the the Appliance Design Conference in Bristol, doing the Smart Furniture Side Show.
Drift Table and Critical Design
I find the Drift Table, which is cool, but reminds me of the fact that I don't think that RCA's Critical Design philosophy should be called design. It's confusing how something is made and what it's made of with its meaning.
Smart Furniture: Beds
I started thinking of smart beds. Beds seem like a pretty logical platform for incorporating intelligence into furniture. Beds are large, stationary, near electrical outlets and used every day, pretty much at the same time. So I brainstormed on what kinds of smart bed technologies there could be.
Smart Furniture: what's been done?
I look for extant smart furniture and only find two things: Maribeth Back and Jonathan Cohen's Listen Reader and Trinity College's Smart Couch.
Smart Furniture Manifesto Comments
I answer people's responses to my Smart Furniture Manifesto.
The Smart Furniture Manifesto
Furniture will be smart!
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