1. ‘Copy, Paste and Meta’ - part 1

    A while ago at Electronest, Pierre and I discussed about an application which could use the clipboard to create a book. Since this, the idea received a bit of attention from my graphic designers friends and this evening it came to my mind that this bit of code was in fact quite close from what Internet was supposed to be if for some reason it didn’t take the path of the World Wild Web, but the path from Xanadu.

    Here is a schema of how it could work:

    • 1/ I copy the bit of text (in this example)
    • 2/ I paste it
    • 3/ the pasted text is accompanied by information about the source

    COPYPASTE_META.png

    December 19, 2007
    Categories: book, designing, electronest, experiments, project, thinking loud
    Tags: ,
    What do you think of this?

  2. I wish this ceiling would be connected to parameters.

    light_13-09-07_0958.jpg
    I wish this ceiling would be connected to parameters.

    I am sure you know already about the Nabaztag.

    This device reacts to information, it acts as a tangible filters to information flows on your network and transform them into a audio or visual signal, diffused into your real world - allowing you to go away from the computer to focus on your ‘analog’ things and come back only when this very email you were waiting for has arrived: you are alerted by the bunny on your desk.

    To be honnest: this little rabbit that talks to me or glow in the dark… it just makes me feel stupid. To me it’s not really something I would like to have to interact with. It really feels like being in Disneyland - except it’s at my home, on my desk… sounds like a nightmare!

    But, despite my reluctance I have to recognise I am completely amazed by the gigantic potentials of the brand new applications which arise with intelligent objects.

    On the other hand we could imagine subtle yet meaningful modification of our direct environment, (light coloring or dimming, for example) depending on alteration of our electronic presence. Design and culture to the rescue if I could say so: in fact, I just saw a few pictures from the exhibition of lamp by Ingo Maurer on lightscapes on http://maxspace.funporium.com/ which inspired me to share these reflections.

    One of the first thing which came to my mind is the LightHives project by Alex Haw (another Bunkerer), even if Light Hive goes more about surveillance and community, while those application I’m referring to are more attached to the personal sphere and are a private representation - both share the basic principle of an abstract representation of a live activity

    I wrote a bit about electronic presence and digital objects a little while ago on my personnal hub - but not as much as I talk about those topic everyday when working at Electronest; we should definitely write more about the ideas, concepts and projects that emerged since we started those discussions with Pierre.

    Refering to electronic presence and digital objects is all about expanding conceptual boundaries and design process:

    using terms like ‘electronic presence’ or ‘digital objects’ which are going beyond the simple scope of the web page design. The term ‘electronic presence’ does not only refer to an url with fancy images and well designed logotypes. ‘Electronic presence’ is closer to a global attitude towards digital mediums and cultures embrassing from the simple home page to the electronic installation (tangible computing) through customized content managment systems, home made software, generative application, etc.
    An essential curiosity glues all the separates aspects of a digital communication together and supports the communication expertise background. A website can be an extension or a representation of an activity in real life.

    Lights or simple lamps could then be connected to the local network, and represent events that otherwise coul go unnoticed. It could be a violent reminder, or simple and discreet light dimming. By using light reflection on color, we could use the ceiling as a silent echo of what is happening on the other side of the screen.


    LED Benches
    Ingo Maurer, 2002
    Glass, LEDs.



    LED Wallpaper
    Ingo Maurer, 2007
    Plastic film with conductive circuits, LEDs.

    note: People behind the Nabaztag seems to be more clever than the aesthetic and culture their rabbit promotes; they have a Nabaztag API. Maybe I just should remove the plastic shell of that hideous thing and play with it a little bit…

    edit: roof is the outdoor bit, ceiling the interior one - well well…

    November 27, 2007
    Categories: data beautification, designing, project, tangible, thinking loud
    Tags: , , , , , , , ,
    What do you think of this?

  3. in & out - talk at Camberwell College of Arts

    Speaking about doing things should remain simple - but explaining design while relating it to aesthetical and technical choices can become really complex.
    There was also some ambiguities regarding the fact i’m working mostly in collaboration with various people.

    To reduce the apparent complexity, i used an introduction essentially relying on screenshots:
    - first i decided to have a picture of the 2 other guys (pierre & fritz) from electronest, and a super simplified schema explaining the interaction in between the people i’m working with;
    - then i introduced a short linear serie of works, alternating web and tangible projects, with some keywords and the main idea of the in & out underlying each small presentation.
    The in & out topic/title/keyword of the talk was taken from discussions with Pierre Schmidt. This title was there like an anchor all along the presentation, i was reffering to it almost all the time to explain to students the process of the design+code or even design+code+electronic.
    The in & out has to be understood as broad as possible: having something at the beginning, creating a process or action, and observing the result.

    When you switch a light on, or turn a tap to get a glass of water, you create an action, a process and a result. This is exactly what happens when accessing a dynamic website with a database - you have some unsorted & undesigned content, a script that processes the content and finally a screen with the information organised and designed.
    And that’s also what happens in the webjing projects we did in Bruxels (as one of the many examples): you have a set of data (news paper content parsed from websites + a sonor context made by the dj), a process (an application that listens to the sound’s frequencies) and a visual result: typography displayed and sized depending on some specific rules set up in the proccess.
    Projects can handle various and complex processes, transforming many sets of data.

    The process of design is all about choices and constraints; generating anything is always possible, but the designer’s role (or at least: my understanding of the designer’s role) is to produce meaning out of the raw content. To create an emotionnal interface to the data - this interface can be visual, but can also be an animation, a movement, a sound, …

    Once the introduction was over we started to look at projects more deeply, and more hypertextually - linking elements of projects, explaining the links, the stories and the technicalities.

    These technical complexities are what I was afraid of: loosing the students to the various complicated details that the scope of those projects generate. Apparently, the informal tone and the variation of various projects kept them on track with what i was talking about - nobody left the conference room before the end: good news.

    February 21, 2007
    Categories: electronest, teaching, workshop
    Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
    What do you think of this?

  4. mass media diving (old edit video)

    this is an old edit of a video, introducing my MA researches about information fluxes. the main end product of it was a helmet, kind of personnal theatre which would plugs you to the infosphere in realtime.
    click the image underneath to play the video in a new window

    February 01, 2007
    Categories: data beautification, memory, typography
    Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
    What do you think of this?

  5. r-echos v3.2

    r-echos.jpg

    an intermediate version with larger image content preview - this should be longer to load, but opens new space for future interface improvement.

    December 22, 2006
    Categories: r-echos
    Tags:
    What do you think of this?

  6. r-echos

    r-echos

    October 25, 2006
    Categories: r-echos
    Tags: , , , ,
    What do you think of this?

  7. r-echos - (memory)

    this page contains some articles’ extracts and links - kind of news/blogs personnal review this page exists due to a hack in the project called «feedonfeeds».

    find out more here: http://feedonfeeds.sourceforge.net/ the idea of the hack comes from eyebeam http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog/archives/000076.html and also thanks to a discussion with christophe from fabric|ch http://www.fabric.ch/ / r - echos / is based on the feedonfeeds project. feedonfeeds is an opensource software elaborated at sourceforge which collect all the feeds from the website/blog you generally reads, and then display the recent updates. it’s exactly the same process as a newsreader, execpt that it works on line. the purpose of / r- echos / is that the news should be immediatly republished to output a kind of news review. the other objectives behind /r-echos/ is to re-design the information (information, which originally means giving forms)

    May 27, 2006
    Categories: memory, r-echos
    Tags:
    What do you think of this?

  8. r-echos - micro map - information/interface design

    r-echos

    Inside the side bar a sort of micro-map of the page has been inserted; it works as follow:

    - the color are representative of categories, it gives a glimpse of the repartition of the topics on the page , with no clear indications about what the topic is (point to work around and fix)
    - on roll over, if an image is present in the post, it’s displayed along with the title of the post
    - by clicking on the expanded coloured surface you expand the corresponding article on the left

    The ideas it brings: The multi-categorised post should possess many colours, or - maybe - a gradient fill. The tags used for each post could modify the hue of the post as well - but on a more subtle way (there it needs a kind of semantic bundles of tags - à la delicious). Also it needs a more restrictive set of rules to distinct and establish colour’s categories.
    The access to the information leads almost directly to the researched article’s page because of the link directly on the title - might be a good idea to move the link to the post inside the layer, and use the javascript which extend the layer there as well, instead. The sidebar should follow the scroll, meta-information should be removed from it and transfered to a place right under the Header (where there’s already 3 of them recently displaced) - in an unique layer which would be opened/close and populated by some h2 button in the sidebar; the sidebar remaining a simple navigation tool with no content at all inside.
    On another hand, an ajax-like interface might be useful to populate article on the fly instead of (hard) loading everything from the beginning. This might allow the interface to incorporate much more articles at once. The sidebar could then remains permanent and host some specific tools - like note taking, bookmarking, etc.

    May 20, 2006
    Categories: designing, r-echos
    Tags: , , , , ,
    What do you think of this?

  9. r-echos v0.3 b / a color adventure in an electronic presence

    r-echos v0.3 b / a color adventure in an electronic presence

    an ongoing experiment around mapping the topics constituting the base ground structure of th incoming info_hub projects leaded r-echos in a slight redesign.

    First:
    no more black and white for the title, but rather using colors which lets identify the subject/topic/category. Possible feature would be to have more color organisations - thinking about a stronger system. At the moment it’s a very simple hack in the r-echos theme based on the id of the main category of the post.

    Second:
    no more complete view of the whole content in the page, this should clarify the whole thing and allow a different perception of the activity.

    Third:
    as image consequently disapeared - installed a simple preview of the first image inside the post. This feauture is at a very early stage.

    Planned development:

    More on the category/color relationship

    Making tags visible - the same way as colors, maybe the tags colors could influence the category color.
    ie: a blueish/redish grey, would say same category but different amount of tags. This would need a semantic approach of tags (del.icio.us’ bundles)

    Mapping the category, evolution of topics through time (zeitgeist), simple preview of page in the top, no more right handed menu, but rather a bunch of links that would push content in the dedicated placeholder - the one right under the banner.

    Connection with the spiderbot project - automation of content discovery through keywords lists. Development of filters for information retrieval in the various tools already in use. Experimenting with new ones. Conducing specific research for tools that might be of any help.

    May 18, 2006
    Categories: designing, r-echos
    Tags: ,
    What do you think of this?

  10. notes and comments on a possible to do list for r-echos

    on /r-echos/

    stattraq from http://randypeterman.com/StatTraq/ produce stats of access. even if i installed the last version (b), the (a) still is there - weird. side note: it seems not to appreciate the url_rewrite i have installed. still have to investigate but no time at the moment.
    common tools are there, so it’s fine - maybe having a look to the db could be bring some new alteration in the process.

    ultimate tag warrior from http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/ let you insert tag by hand in your post with [tags][/tags]. neat! also it can put the mess in your category to transform them in tags. i did it! it works very well! some older posts completely change of category - which lead me to use simple categories system instead of full range of taxonomy. but still: most pf the oldest post have some weird tags…

    url rewrite seems ok for the most recent posts (i’m using /year/month/day/title/ ) - not for the oldest archive; the given link on each post reflects just the date, not the name. certainly during the transfer something got squeezed and broke it.

    the zeitgeist and visual_zeitgeist are on hold at the moment. they haven’t been transfered/converted to / r-echos /

    March 24, 2006
    Categories: r-echos
    Tags: , ,
    What do you think of this?

  11. some news from the rebloging frontline

    after a few hours playing/hacking the blogger api, i felt a bit disappointed

    finally,
    i decided to «hack» wordpress to fit my needs.
    It has been a while since i planned to have a deeper look in those blogger’s specific cms - it started well before the first lines of the hierarchical cms which on their side kept me away from any intense activity on the experimental side of my work. I’m now transfering/recoding r-echos database to fit wp’s criterias, a few mysql queries like copy/pastes on the keyboard, and the work should be over - then, the next step, is to convert all the tools and experiments so that they could survive the arrival of the new system, not as easy as the first step. First things first: the sql queries of feedonfeeds i was using until now… I would like Feedonfeeds to act like the admin of wordpress, letting me consequently post/reblog while away from my beloved powerbook (yes, it happens sometimes). There are still however a certain quantity of issues which have to be solved before the transfer could be officially said done (more especially, the relationship between the opml list from feedonfeeds and the converted posts in wp, also the hit system developped inside r-echos, the tagging system which has to be redesigned as there’s only one category per post in wp, … well… still a few things to keep me awaken).

    What were the motivation: apart all the conceptual fuss, i wanted to keep to possibility to have a console online for republishing as well as a tool to read my rss feeds when off from my computer. So keeping Feedonfeeds in its very own place on the server was obvious. The main need which directed this big move has appeared more and more crucial as i was facing more and more rss sources - the need of filters - smartLists à la iTunes. Netnewswire offered this since a while and i was quite happy to buy the bundled licence (nnw2+mars edit 1.0). Now i plan to read most of the stuff in nnw2 and use mars edit 1.0 as an evolved interface to reblog.
    Once everything (not only the content of the db, but all the experiments) will be ok_back_in_the_business, i would like to give a go to Ecto.

    [tbc.]

    December 30, 2005
    Categories: r-echos
    Tags: ,
    What do you think of this?