Anger. Frustration. Fear. Grief. Hysteria. The list of emotions that the Dark Side gaming can bring is long and rich, but ‘relaxation’ is not often one that springs to mind. However, USC’s Electronic Arts Innovation Lab has produced a new game, Cloud, which is designed to elicit more than the usual gaming reactions.

The game’s premise is fairly simple—fly around, dragging clouds behind you. However, it features a soothing soundtrack and tropical graphics, allowing players to get into the spirit of flying. The mouse control is a little difficult to adjust to but works pretty well, and there’s something satisfying about flying around and seeing a bunch of clouds light up. It may not have much staying power amongst FPS junkies with hair-trigger-reflexes—in fact, it may bore them to tears—but it’s an interesting experiment especially amongst non-gamers.

[Via digg]

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SPONSORED BY: Fable: The Lost Chapters. Now On PC. Enter a world where every choice changes your fate. Enhanced graphics, new journeys, good or evil-how will you choose to play?

Dot On has found a way to demouse home computers. In its place would be a ring that allows computer users to manipulate their cursor with the lift of a finger - and without taking their hands off the keyboard. The technology also makes computer presentati

At the same time as people are diving into game worlds, the games are starting to invade the real world....

did anyone see pacman or the ghosts? EL

This willl help you get around a few problems.

It has been 20 years since the futurist Eric Drexler daringly predicted a new world where miniaturized robots would build things one molecule at a time. The world of nanotechnology that Drexler envisioned is beginning to come to pass, with scientists conj

Quilts, with robots on them! Amazing.

You may have heard about the little book we're working on over here. It's coming along swimmingly, and we're having a great time.

We're hoping you might contribute a suggestion or two for our section on biomorphism. We want to feature some of the greatest examples of design—architecture, textile, art or product—whose form is inspired by nature. Some examples we've mentioned in the past include the Gherkin (Swiss Re building), a chair inspired by a callalily, and a nautilus-shaped fan, but we know there countless others.

Send along whatever comes to mind. We look forward to seeing your ideas!

(Posted by Sarah Rich in Your Turn at 05:33 PM)

an impressive dynamic data visualization showing a large collection of science news stories. the individual beads represent the ever-changing zeitgeist of science news in the world, populated automatically every few hours by a computer program that parses several online news sources & blogs that focus on science. the color makeup of the insignias change, with each dot taking on the average color of its corresponding photograph, & then quivering with Brownian Motion. the user can alter the focus between science & culture with a slider, altering the composition of the visualization between respectively a static square & random movement. its visual structure is derived from the Fibonacci Sequence & closely related to the Golden Ratio, to emphasize a space where science meets culture.
see also ten by ten & wordcount from the same great developer, Jonathan Harris. [phylotaxis.com|via forestandthetrees.com]

Go Mike, EL

easy regex -

got to love lisp - EL

We have seen pedals with LED's built in, but we can't use them because we wear bike shoes that clip on to our pedals. This is the answer: Bike lights that connect to the axle and are charged by magnets connected to the spokes. How elegant and simple.

"The lights flash powerfully with twin LED’s using the power generated by magnets attached to the spokes of your bicycle. Why was it not invented before?

There is no need for batteries or dangling wires – never, ever!

The lights are easily fitted to any bike, and are a great safety device for you or your children. The lights are always on, day or night, constantly flashing.

And just as important, there are no batteries to buy or to throw away when used.

A recent independent study in Denmark showed a 20% reduction in accidents for bicycles fitted with these additional lights."

::Goodbye Batteries via :;Red Ferret

"I've been influenced by Julia Cameron's "Artist's Way" and also Philip Sylvester at the Drawing Studio -- but I feel like I'm really beginning to get a grip of my own on the creative process and wanted to take some quick notes."

John T. Unger, an artist and longtime commenter on Collision Detection, recently announced an intriguing art project called "American Guernica: A Call for Guerilla Public Art". He's calling upon artists nationwide to post replicas of Guernica, Picasso's famous antiwar painting, on billboards and the sides of buildings -- as in the Photoshopped example above. Why Guernica? Because Picasso intended it to depict the horrors and insanity of war, particularly the human destruction wreaked by bombings. Guernica caused a stir when it was unveiled back in 1937, and apparently it still does. John says his inspiration for the project came from an Iraq-related incident, as detailed by Wikipedia: A tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room ... On February 5, 2003, a large blue curtain was placed to cover this work, so that it would not be visible in the background when Colin Powell and John Negroponte gave press conferences at the United Nations. On the following day, it was claimed that the curtain was placed there at the request of television news crews, who had complained that the wild lines and screaming figures made for a bad backdrop, and that a horse's hindquarters appeared just above the faces of any speakers. Diplomats, however, told journalists that the Bush Administration leaned on UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other U.S. diplomats argued for war on Iraq. As John writes, "If the painting intimidates warmongers into covering it, then why not make sure that it goes up in as many public spaces as possible?"

I used to shop at the seattle store and its awesome! EL

What?

Tuesdays from 2pm – 4pm the Eyebeam OpenLab holds its public 'office hours.' This is a time that our researchers have pulled themselves away from their work to make themselves available to anyone who wants to know more about what is going on in the lab and why.

During this time the OpenLab is open for tours, demonstrations, and explanations of Eyebeam's R&D program and the projects going on here. It is also a time when people in Eyebeam's ever-growing network of friends, contributors, and collaborators can come to the lab to interact with its directors, fellows, and residents. Tutorials, brainstorming sessions, feedback on ideas and projects, or just stopping by to chat are all good reasons to come and get engaged.

When?

Tuesdays, weekly, from 2pm to 4pm

Where?

The OpenLab at Eyebeam.
540 W 21st St
New York, NY 10011

(Read the whole OpenLab Launch Series)

We always knew there was a good use for that bucket of LEGOs stashed away in the attic. Geordan has used them to design a state-of-the-art cradle for the testy Xbox 360 power supply. So if a string and box don’t satisfy your aesthetic tastes, give the LEGO-cradle (with user-powered fan) a try. You won’t be disappointed.

[How long before we actually see 3rd party cradles hit the market?]

[Thanks, Geordan]

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SPONSORED BY: Fable: The Lost Chapters. Now On PC. Enter a world where every choice changes your fate. Enhanced graphics, new journeys, good or evil-how will you choose to play?

A new project by Evan Roth - a diary of someone famous in blog form.

Julian Bleecker, come back soon.

Starting today is Emma Lloyd, Eyebeam's very own Director of Technology. Emma started at Eyebeam August of 2005, coming from an Operations Manager role at a financial software company on wall street. At Eyebeam she has been opened up a can of operational whoopass on the organization to help keep all our technical needs and resources in order.

Take it away.

There are parts in there made by Eyebeam!!

m3lt writes "Business Wire is reporting that Concurrent announced today that Lockheed Martin Space Systems has selected RedHawk(TM) Linux as the operating system for their United States Army Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program." From the article: "Lockheed Martin selected RedHawk for the THAAD program due to the precision and guaranteed response time of Concurrent's RedHawk Linux real-time operating system. Only RedHawk Linux was able to ensure the high frame rates required in their HIL simulation without frame overruns, thereby ensuring the highest quality of system test."

usually the tech goes the other way, from military to citizen use. [sarcasm] good job, Linus! --MF

Reuters - Fatter rear ends are causing many drug injections to miss their mark, requiring longer needles to reach buttock muscle, researchers said on Monday.

all I've been waiting for -- mainlining right through my glutes --MF

page of links

New Orleans is set to run America's first free-to-access municipal Wi-Fi network as the city looks at ways of speeding up the rebuilding process in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

show me your t--s, with wifi! --MF

Having just spent Thanksgiving making a meal that took about ten hours to prepare, ten minutes to wolfishly devour, and then two hours to clean up after, all I want is something easy and lazy. Enter toastabags, bags made of woven fiberglass, that let you put messy, drippy fillings right into your toaster for an instant grilled panini. I don't know if they're still being made, but some years ago I picked up some frozen toaster pizza- flat cardboard-like dough around some fake cheese and sauce. I remember thinking it was a genius idea, other than the fact that the resulting "pizza toast" was virtually inedible. If this works, then making things like tuna melts would be far easier and quicker than oven grilling or using a sandwich press. You'd need a wide-slot toaster, one that can accomodate gigantic bagel halves, but then sky's the limit- my next holiday meal is going to be toaster croque monsieur followed by pumpkin pie pop-tarts.

Toastabags are $5.99 for a set of two, and can be re-used up to 300 times.

From Conspicuous Consumption.

i love grilled cheese! --MF

Experts at Cardiff University have developed machinery so sophisticated that they can drill a hole narrower than a human hair. Such precision has potentially major benefits in medical and electronic engineering. The experts at the University's multi-award-winning Manufacturing Engineering Centre, are drilling holes as small as 22 microns (0.022 mm) in stainless steel and other materials. The human hair varies between 80 microns (0.08 mm) down to 50 microns (0.05 mm) in thickness.

The recent post on ifbyphone discussed the technique of making interactive text available as interactive audio. How does this media-shifting affect the experience?

There is a long-standing connection between the IF community and blind/visually impared gaming or audiogaming. While not all IF is accessible, the vast majority can be used by a visually impared gamer simply by reading the text-only content using normal screen-reading software. Special IF-text-to-speech interfaces are also in development which streamline the text-to-speech process (say, to prevent rereading of the status bar when it has not changed). In this context, it makes sense to ask to what extent experiences interactive audio experiences are accessible. Are they similar to the screen experience of the work? What changes? “Photopia” and “Fail-Safe” provide good case studies:
<!-- technorati tags start -->Tags: audio, games, IF<!-- technorati tags end -->

The color of sound

ifbyphone features a nicely chosen selection of games for the new player. “Adventure” and “Zork I” are traditional, while “Dreamhold,” “Theatre,” and “Ediface” are well written and provide a wide range of genre and tone. “Photopia” is an acclaimed work, and a particularly interesting choice in that, like some editions novels such as of Michael Ende’s novel “The Neverending Story” or Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves,” it uses color printing to influence the mood and indicate story progression. This color effects are primarily ornamental, as “Photopia” is fully playable without color. However it is interesting to see how quickly media translation issues appear even when dealing with collections of apparently minimalist work. To adapt the color edition of “Photopia,” should a different text-to-speech (TTS) voice read each color? Should it be the same voice, but pitch-shifted?

Even without color, auditory adaptation of interactive fiction immediately raises some interesting aesthetic questions - many of which are common to the production of TTS audio books, but some of which are unique to IF. This becomes most apparent in considering the choice of Jon Ingold’s “Fail-Safe” to be experienced as TTS audio.

The sound of sound

Jon Ingold’s “Fail-Safe” is perhaps a perfect choice for “by phone” transmission, as the game already claims to be occuring entirely via radio transmission. Just as you the player cannot see anything beyond text, the operator whose role you play in “Fail-Safe” relies entirely on audio from the other end of the line to find out what is going on from the very introduction:

Bzzt. Crackle. *Static*

“…hello? Hello? Can… me? .. Anyone! Hel…. Need.. hello?”

Bleep - PLEASE WAIT - Locating/Tuning signal…

..

“.. help. Repeat, can anybody hear me? Can you hear me? Hello..”

>> hello

“Hello? Hello! The .. pretty bad. Are you receiving this? Over.”

>> _

Considering this text, we can see immediately that a lot of audio information has been textually encoded. “Bzzt. Crackle. *Static*” is not supposed to sound like those onomotopeaic words, pronounced outloud - it indicates that we should imagine actual line noise, with the bold emphasis and the asterisks indicating high volume, and the ellipses indicating not just lapses of time between sounds, but shifts in relative volume when the static drowns out the signal, or the signal volume fades.

“Fail-Safe” is most appropriate for ifbyphone because it is most particular to an auditory experience - but ironically the visual encoding of auditory information is also what makes much of the content totally inappropriate for being processed by text-to-speech (TTS). Similarly, what makes “Fail-Safe” so perfect for its interaction loop is that its parser error messages refer to not hearing what was said - which in my experience was frequently the actual problem. Given that we can expect to be yelling “OPEN DOOR!” into the phone in a low-reception area while the computer replyies “That isn’t something you can throw”, wouldn’t it be interesting to process error messages based on the real audio input? Pattern matching failures might generate error messages like “you’re speaking too quickly” “you’re breaking up” “there’s too much static” “could you please speak a little louder?” based on the actual quality of the audio received, rather than at random (as “Fail-Safe currently does). Importantly, the difficulty in speaking over the crackly channel is part of the suspense of the story - it is an obstacle of the medium (the limits of cell-phone networks and TTS technology) that is already subsumed into the dramatic situation.

Of course, these kinds of interactive audio designs go far beyond the ifbyphone concept, which appears to be a comparatively simple, efficient and reliable text-to-speech / speech-to-text loop. Still, this shouldn’t prevent us from asking how the experience might be improved. How could we make a better ”Fail-Safe“ audiogame? One approach might be to pre-record each of the text outputs from the game, creating a kind of IF audio-book in which the parser strings together mp3s for playing rather than printing text strings - these audio clips could be performed, with appropriate background noise. A more complex way of doing it would be to introduce an audio mixing layer, where TTS strings from the parser could be combined with radio-play-esque sound effects strings as well as background sound - in this case, a volume controllable wall of static. A parser that produced its audio rather than presenting it would maintain many of the advantages of the text-based system - for example, the possibility of inline translation, of substituting voices with different accents, or of fine-tuning the audio effects.

If we did create such an audiogame, however, it would be asymmetrically text/audio based even when interacting with it by keyboard - much like Subservient Chicken was an asymmetrical text/video chatbot. This suggests that our model for looking at text-based systems in general could use some refining - what separates IF and chatbots from many related works is not that they are text-based, but that they are text/text as opposed to say text/image or image/text.

Is an experience that is both heard and voice-controlled really ”text art,“ even if the background processing occurs entirely within a text engine? Recently, WRT has covered a lot of image-based ”text art,“ involving words embedded in cartoon images, words formed in water, words made of light, or words that otherwise depart from the traditional understanding of digital characters computationally encoded symbols (ASCII, Unicode, etc.) rather letterforms whose creation was enabled by some digitally-assisted process (digitally controlled spigots, digitally controlled LED-boards, etc., etc., etc.)

The example of ifbyphone represents yet another limit on the concept of ”digital text.“ ifbyphone and IF/TTS rely on symbolic manipulation of encoded symbols (rather than say audio transformations) in determining their output. Yet, in order to argue that they are digital text art, we must concede that neither the reception (heard audio) nor the interaction (spoken audio) need be textual.

This concession would seems to throw any definition of ”digital character art“ wide open, and leave us with only ”character manipulation processes“ - which sounds like a Turing Machine to me….

—

Related: ”You’re Kidding Me“ simulated phone conversation, based on an earlier work by the same designer

The Red Ferret has picked up on Call Recorder, a new remote service lets you record your cellphone or landline telephone calls without having to invest in any hardware.

Just as it pioneered the use of MP3s, Public Enemy is now an early adopter of the wireless phone network as a distribution system for music. This is the best revenue-generating market that exists today. It's like the Internet in '98, but with a business plan," says Walter Leaphart, who manages Public Enemy leader Chuck D.

Emerging markets have higher numbers of textually non-literate people than more developed markets. Effective use of mobile phone features requires an understanding of textual prompts. Solutions can be categorized as improvements to the phone, the ecosyste

Why do I reBlog this? Jan Chipchase has one of the more enviable jobs, at least in my mind. Nokia Research Center is also one of the more prescient R&D operations in the mobile communications business ecology. Rather than exclusively "instrumentalized" research (how do we get the phone smaller? how do we cram more features into that smaller phone?) they seek a richer, culture-specific explication of usage, users, social "factors", implications of locale-specific practices, etc. Jan captures some of this in his wonderfully illustrated dispatches from the field. His "Future Perfect" blog is part travelogue, part ethnography, part database of insights. Future Perfect. --JB

Mocoblog has picked up on Flycell's self help wallpaper collection for cell phones, designed to promote weight loss. "Flycell’s launches the mobile wallpaper collection in partnership with mypetfat.com, a site whose “pet fat” (like pet rock) products serve as a visual approach to weight loss."

... The service locates the sender's phone to within 500 yards in built-up areas and sends the message to the parent's phone within 60 seconds.

NTT DoCoMo's FOMA SA800i is designed to keep kids in elementary school safe.

The new service will be called Imadoco, which is Japanese for “where are you now?” It gives parents the ability to track the location of a child’s phone, and even receive periodical email updates with its current location.

Welcome to this week’s Thanksgiving edition of Carnival of the Mobilists.

If you’re new to the Carnival, the idea is to collect the best writing about mobile in one place at a different website every week. This week, it’s Smart Mobs’ turn and I’m doing the editing – so I’m the guy to complain about if you don’t like what I’ve written!

You can find out more information about the Carnival here. If you’re a blogger, you might want to enter in the future – or even offer to host it one week soon.

So let’s get on with it.

First up, we have an amusing little ditty to get us in the Thanksgiving mood, from the “Queen of the Blogs”, Emily from Textually and who’ll be familiar to Smart Mobs’ readers too from her moonlighting here too. Emily recounts a great story about how to really annoy an actor and how his ire won him a standing ovation from the rest of the audience.

I dubbed Troy Norcross as "the man who really hates spam" in the first Carnival and the sobriquet seems to have stuck. Troy's blog covers Mobile Marketing and Spam, which is also its name, in case you're easily confused. This week Troy's been looking billions of "Welcome to our Network" messages the networks send every year to the 210 million of us who roam annually - set to rise to 850 million within 5 years. Could these messages be made more useful for the recipients and be a valuable marketing opportunity to boot? Troy has some interesting ideas - check them out here.

If you've ever found a mobile application difficult to use or been bewildered by a menu system, that's because it's missing the mUXP ingredient. No, it's not a piece of code or arcane techie protocol, but design following the principles of Mobile User Experience. In other words, seeing how mobile owners actually use their phones and designing your applications and experiences accordingly. This sounds bleeding obvious, but it's a principle frequently overlooked by the best of us. Head over to Rudy De Waele's M-Trends to read all about this vital and much neglected area.

Another familiar name to Smart Mobs' readers is The Pondering Primate, himself - Vanilla Gorilla. We both share a passion and fascination for the mobile in its role as connecting the digital and real worlds. I sometimes refer to the mobile in this context as a virtual mouse. The PP this week considers two such possibilities - sampling trailers for a hot, new film release via Bluetooth and a price comparison service by phone. One service is found wanting - any guesses which?

Judy Breck, (yet another Smart Mobian) has a passion to put mobile at the centre of our education system - kids love mobiles and and find them fun and intuitive to use. This means that suddenly our kids of the future won't be able to wait to get stuck into their homework! Judy looks at a recent Nokia announcement that suddenly means that the vision is becoming reality much quicker than you might think.

Two big themes in the past few months have been VoIP and pay-per-call advertising, rumoured to be the next big thing in online advertising. Goobile has been looking at one of the key players who have just landed a big round of funding. What do you think - is this the new, new thing, or another noble but doomed initiative?

Many of us think that radio is a much better marriage with mobile than its sexier cousins, Video or TV. Typically, you're doing other things when you're mobile and radio is a great accompaniment to this. But try watching TV when you're walking down a busy street or crossing the road. Motorola have understood this opportunity with the launch of iRadio - or have they? In which case, why would they be talking about iVideo, which is the current rumour discussed at iRadio Waves.

The old days of "Wap is crap" are long dead (oh ye of little faith) with the UK alone enjoying 1.82 billion page impressions a month. It's still early days for surfing the web on your phone, but it's already better than that say, using a computer to surf back in 1996 and look what's happened since then. A site dedicated to finding the best Wap sites is Wap Review. This week, they've been looking at a top Sports Wap site, rating it highly for both content and usability. So if you're a sports fan or want to see what the future might look like, head on over and find out more.

Oliver Starr of The Mobile Technology Weblog was called to greatness this week and invited to write for the venerable Financial Times, no less. In a wide-ranging article, Oliver asks are we entering the Golden Age of Wireless and looks at the evidence to support the case. Head on over there are have a read.

My Post of the Week this week goes to Stuart Mudie of Blethers, mainly because unlike may of us bloggers who just write about it, Stuart actually did something with his mobile:

Those of us who "get" the mobile future realise that the mobile will replace the computer as the single most important device we'll be using to access the web. Shame no one's told Microsoft yet! To get us into the spirit of this, Stuart Mudie has hacked together an online - well, go find out for yourself here. Suffice to say, this kind of tool is the shape of things to come.

Finally, it's a long tradition for the Carnival of the Mobilists (well, 7 weeks old anyway) that the host/editor choses something from their own site that they'd like to draw readers' attention to. This week is unusual in that I'm editor here, but blog at MobHappy usually. So I get to choose two.

First, Smart Mobs. Tons of good stuff as usual, so I let personal bias get in the way here, as I know both the journo, Mike Butcher, and the interviewee, Steve Flaherty, in the original story in the FT. Plus it's a damn fine idea. Check out Judy's post on StarSight - a truly breathtaking idea in its potential to change the world. And like all great ideas, so obvious in hindsight!

For my own post this week, I've selected one I wrote about the much misunderstood area of Mobile Search, trying to probe the potential and explode a few myths. Judging by the comments and referring links around the place, it must be saying something interesting.

Next week, the Carnival is at Wap Review. Don't forget to surf on over and check it out - why not try it on your phone? Thanks to Howard and the Smart Mobs crew for hosting.

If you have any feedback about any of the posts, the idea behind the Carnival, or its format or style, please leave a comment as we'd love to hear from you.

And Happy Thanksgiving to Everyone.

Following up on Jamais' June 2004 post about the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica, or EPICA, new results published this week verify that "the relationship between climate and CO₂ that had been deduced from the Vostok core appears remarkably robust," according to RealClimate.

Secondly, these results will allow paleoclimatologists to really look in detail at the differences between the different interglacials in the past. The previous 3 before our current era look quite similar to each other and were quite short (around 10,000 years). The one 400,000 years ago (Marine Isotope Stage 11, for those who count that way) was hypotheisied to look more like the Holocene and appears to be significantly longer (around 30,000 years). Many of the details though weren't completely clear in the Vostok data, but should now be much better resolved. This may help address some of the ideas put forward by Ruddiman (2003, 2005), and also help assess how long our current warm period is likely to last.

The study shows that carbon dioxide levels have increased significantly over the last two centuries, from 280 to 380 parts per million. According to Edward Brooks, a geosciences specialist at Oregon State University, quoted in an Associated Press article, "There's no natural condition that we know about in a really long time where the greenhouse gas levels were anywhere near what they are now. And these studies tell us that there's a strong relationship between temperature and greenhouse gases. Which logically leads you to the conclusion that maybe we should worry about temperature change in the future."

An article in the UK Guardian, linked from a comment on the RealClimate post, refers to analysis of cores drilled along the eastern seaboard, suggesting that "oceans will rise nearly half a metre by the end of the century, forcing coastlines back by hundreds of metres." Professor Kenneth Miller is quoted as saying there's little we can do at this point to stop the sea level from rising, prompting a clarification from Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate: "Miller's point is that sea level will continue to rise under any conceivable scenario (as seen in the 'committed climate change' papers by Meehl et al and Wigley earlier this year....while cuts in emissions will not prevent sea level rise, they may prevent the worst case scenarios in the medium to long term."

MSNBC also published an article, "Tiny bubbles, rising seas point to warming."

Mitigation/Adaptation: Jamais' post, What's the Best Path to CO₂ Reduction, has good information on potential mitigation strategies, as well as the WikiPedia entry on Mitigation of global warming. The leading global effort at mitigation, of course, is the Kyoto Protocol. As Jamais posted when the Kyoto Treaty became active, "Kyoto is a reframing exercise, a memetic engineering project. It forces us to respond and, by being transparent in its failings, forces us in turn to come up with something better."

(Posted by Jon Lebkowsky in To Know It for the First Time – Place, Environment and Ecology at 03:55 PM)

Why do I reBlog this? As long as I'm in an existential tailspin.. -JB

Last week was the first Ethnographic Practice in Industry Conference. I had posted the cfp and was just waiting to see what came of it. Well, all the abstracts are online and the draft (i.e. incomplete) conference proceedings are now available online for a limited time - get the pdf version here.

Of particular interest are the following papers:

WHO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT USERS by KRIS R. COHEN (pp.16-36)
Abstract. I begin with some questions: how have the theories and methods which subtend design research been changed by their migration from academy to industry? How have they adapted to their new commercial culture? What languages and customs have they had to acquire to fit in? To address these questions, I consider a facet of design research which I think most problematically bears the marks of this passage: how we choose who we will study. I go on to think about both the causes and implications of exclusions so often resident in this choice. The ideal that drives my analysis forward is that design researchers are in the business of designing not products for "users," but landscapes of possibility for public life. A final suggestion, inspired by my recent work on Internet-based personal photography and here briefly sketched, is that design researchers take the publicness of our work more seriously-that we design for it.

ETHNOGRAPHY, OPERATIONS, AND OBJECTUAL PRACTICE by TIM PLOWMAN (pp. 38-51)
Abstract. This paper raises issues around commercial ethnographic praxis and its relationship to social and cultural theory. Michel de Certeau’s theories around everyday life practices and Karin Knorr Cetina’s concept of postsocial objectual practice are juxtaposed in order to explore how commercial ethnographic practice might seriously engage with theory and transcend some of the assumptions that currently constrain its application within industry.

TO THE END OF THEORY-PRACTICE ‘APARTHEID’: ENCOUNTERING THE WORLD by MARIETTA BABA (pp. 175-186)
Abstract. A historical and comparative examination of ethnographic practice in sixteen nations around the globe reveals that theory-practice relations in anthropology and ethnography (A/E) have been shaped and re-shaped over time and space by complex contextual influences. This paper explores the evolution of theory-practice relationships in A/E over various regions of the world, tracing the beginning of a theory-practice ‘split’ from its origin under British colonialism, to its reappearance and institutionalization in post-World War II America, and explaining its absence in the ‘Second and Third Worlds’. Global practice in ethnography now appears to be converging toward a re-integration of theory and application across multiple disciplines and professions (a ‘hybrid’ approach), as ethnographers work to address urgent and poorly understood problems that are not
well theorized.

Unfortunately missing are workshop results and these papers:

THE COMING OF AGE OF HYBRIDS: NOTES ON ETHNOGRAPHIC PRAXIS by JEANETTE BLOMBERG
Abstract. It has been nearly 15 years since Donna Haraway wrote in Simians, Cyborgs and Women that, "In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse and in daily practice we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras." While Haraway’s referent was not the community of practitioners, scholars and change agents assembled for the EPIC conference, her attention to the arrangement of material goods, human labor and social relations in processes and histories that have consequences for people’s lives resonates with the themes addressed in the workshops and with concerns that bring many of us to this conference. In this talk I will explore how ethnographic praxis is constituted by a mixing of such pure categories as, virtual – real, local –global, material – social, spiritual – secular, research – design, mercantile – humanitarian, and academic – applied. I will close with a call to celebrate our hybridity – our lives on the margins and our pragmatism.

UPDATE: Nancy White's notes & Dina Mehta's notes

CRAFT, VALUE, AND THE FETISHISM OF METHOD by NINA WAKEFORD
Abstract. In order to set the scene for the panel on methods, I will be drawing on C Wright Mills' injunction to avoid the fetishism of method. Mills urges us to think about our methods in terms of a process of craft production. I want to explore what key elements of this craft might be, beyond the usual focus on actual techniques such as interviewing or ethnographically informed data collection. Foregrounding the papers in the session, I will examine ideas of value, temporality and transformation (and perhaps even transgression).

UPDATE: Nancy White's notes

See also:

Technology Review: Corporate Ethnography summarises EPIC 2005 (thanks Nicolas)

I also find the following journals are good at covering these and related topics:

Design Journal
Design Issues (a favourite)
Design Philosophy
Design Studies
Environment & Planning B: Planning and Design (another favourite)
Journal of Design History

Why do I reBlog this? This question as to how or by what method one makes assesments of one's research is currently driving me a bit batty. I know it's not enough to be a magpie when describing what one thinks about one's "results", but it still isn't clear to me how an research experiment becomes more than a short, inconsequential statement that gets read (maybe) at a professional conference and forgotten, ultimately..or maybe the holidays just put me into an existential tailspin. --JB

Samsung just announced their SPH-S4000 and SCH-S400 gesture controlled cellphones for Korea. Each of these clamshells is capable of recognizing your convulses for functions such as game play or for skipping or backpedaling MP3 tracks. The S4000 also features a compass, pedometer, thermometer, and health management functions for you out-of-doors active-types which can presumably alert your dietician when it senses the long slow pull of a Big Mac up to your anxious pie-hole.

[Thanks, Mike]

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Why do I reBlog this? While I'm not 100% sold on the gesture notion — it seems like a tricky interface to get to work right — I do like the idea or figuring out how the orientation of a mobile device might be part of the interface design syntax. The compass integration seems promising — at least based on my experience navigating strange cities, it would be nice. As a general thing, who knows? Maybe it's just more gadgets. Jan Chipchase seems to think the most effective way of orienteering when you're lost and there are other people around is to simply ask for directions. --JB

IPXL appeal rejected

Amazon.com has successfully defended a claim that its famous 1-Click payment feature infringed another company's patent for an electronic fund transfer or transaction system. IPXL Holdings had been seeking around $50 million in damages.…

Why do I reBlog this? Intellectual Property as a business asset is quickly eating away at innovation. I mean, there are engineering jobs where you're essentially expected to read the latest conference papers, even papers in review meaning they're not published yet, and carve off some patent meat, get a conference call in with the lawyers, and file it before breakfast. Nasty stuff. --JB

We know Microsoft has a lot riding on the Xbox 360’s success, so it makes sense that in response to the first reports of Xbox crashes, they told Reuters there were “a few isolated reports of consoles not working as expected” for a “very, very small fraction” of Xboxes sold, and that their “number of calls was not unexpected.” Maybe so, maybe no; there are always a certain amount of defective units on any product launch — especially one as huge as this — and it’s not usually something anyone can call just based reports on forums alone. Molly O’Donnell, Microsoft spokesperson, called it “Par for the course.” Then again, we did have to call the Xbox support line about six times before we could even get on hold to talk to someone, and wound up on the horn over two and a half hours because one of our retail units (the one that crashed a couple times) wouldn’t (and still won’t) connect to Live. We’ll have to chalk that up to amazing odds, since only time will tell how pervasive and persistent the Xbox 360 crash problems really are, but in the mean time Microsoft says they’ll overnight repair or replace any defective 360s in your midst. So if you’re seeing screens like those above, holla at ‘em.

[Thanks, gamestopzak]

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Cory Doctorow: A group of UK students have created a king-hell paper airplane for a competition. The Times of London covers the story, along with the team's best tips for making your own prize-winning paper airplanes.

# The nose must be heavy to ensure stable flight. A paper clip on the nose should allow the plane to fly further

# If the plane tends to nose-dive because of the heavy nose, bend the back edge of the wings upwards slightly

# The centre of gravity should be towards the front to prevent the plane from stalling

# The wings should be angled upwards to give the plane a slight “Y” shape when viewed from the front

# Winglets added to the edge of the wings will reduce drag

# Check for symmetry by looking down the nose of the plane and refold it if necessary. It will not fly smoothly if it is not entirely symmetrical

# Be patient and make small adjustments rather than radical changes to the basic design

/www.philpem.me.uk">Phil!)

Update: Philip sez, "Though the judges lauded the Avenger's design, it actually bombed at the competition. The winner was Spruce Moose

Paul has updated his list of mobile phone games using GPS or cell towers signals.

Here's one of the latest additions:

With RealReplay, you can choose the track you want to race on, select your opponent and start playing with everyone, without being dependent on their time.

Whether you're in a car, on a bike, or a sailing boat, all you have to do is tell your mobile phone to start recording. The phone will capture your every movement using GPS. Set checkpoints to define the key parts of your track. Your future opponents will have to pass them and get information on their intermediate time.

Others will find your track and race against you – even without you being present! If you'd like to pit your strength against your friends, inform them about the area where your race starts. They can then accept your challenge whenever they want.

On the display of your mobile phone you will always see your current position and route, as well as the one your opponent took when he recorded his race, which is played back as a replay.

Developed by Mopius.

Why do I reBlog this? Wonderful addition to the library of location-based mobile games! I love the way it uses time-shifting to create a multiplayer experience that doesn't require all the players to play at once. Well done! --JB