The Object

© 2011 Julian. All rights reserved.

Design Fiction + Advanced Designing + Trust in Volume Quarterly

The most recent — now a month or two old — issue of Volume Quarterly was on the topic of The Internet of Things. And within that was a small sub-volume of essays and articles on Trust compiled by Scott Burnham … Continue reading

© 2011 Julian. All rights reserved.

Art Center Summer Residency: Learning and the New Ecology of Things

Seems Art Center’s Media Design Program has extended its deadline for applicants for a summer residency — learning and pervasive/ubiquitous/thing-y computing. http://www.artcenter.edu/mdp/research/summer2011/ === Learning and the New Ecology of Things We are particularly interested in projects that explore learning in … Continue reading

© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.

When Not To Use Doorknobs

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 … Continue reading

© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.

And the time it takes to make them is the time taken to mean it.

[Martin Puryear's] sculptures look the way they do because they need to in order to mean what they do. The labor that is compressed into them allows them to work over time, and the time it takes to make them … Continue reading

© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.

Weekending 07112010

Good lord. What happened just then? Well — I missed a weeknote last week, but I’m not going to do penance. It happens. I’ve been working — mostly in my head, with a swirl of notes — on two casual commissions for … Continue reading

© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.

Five Advantages of The Concept of "Design"

((Via Unhappy Hipsters. The photo caption is: It was far more satisfying to relive their romance via iPhoto slideshow.)) The Unhappy Hipster site has the tag line “It’s Lonely In The Modern World” dryly shifting design toward self-mocking irony. Perhaps … Continue reading

© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.

Really the Fake: Derived, Diacritic'd, Differenced Things

A Wii Mote and a Wii ‘KLIK-on’ Candy Dispenser which uses the ‘B’ trigger control to dispense little candy pills. Something Tom Clancy — the guy who writes worlds he wishes he inhabited, which is always a good motivation for … Continue reading

© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.

Fake for Real

Found in a small toy/novelty store in Jeju, South Korea. Two forms of fakery. On the left, a faux Lego set using all the cues and clues of the real, Danish deal for a Lego build set of the Space … Continue reading

© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.

Undisciplinarity (essay in book)

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. The book ‘Digital Blur: Creative Practice at the Boundaries of Architecture, Design … Continue reading

© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.

Showing And Telling: Some Notes On Visualisation and Cognition

Reality augmentation instruments, designed with more than a suggestion of the now-canonical handheld device footprint. These are practically those sort of *kids’ toy* editions of adult devices, you know? I’ve become recently consumed by what a reality augmentation device might … Continue reading

WhyThingsMatter © 2006 Julian. All rights reserved.

A Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things

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’ projects, and so forth. It then grew into more of a polemic as I recognized what were some consequential stakes — why things would matter, or help, if Things were networked? Why would I want a world such as that? And how would I design interactions for such a world?

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