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Monday, June 7
(Thanks Karmen!)
15:01 | p-link
[ no comments ]Maps! You have taught me the fear of becoming lost
Jane England in ROAM - a Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility
There it is again. That tension between security and insecurity...
13:59 | p-link
[ no comments ]Chuck out those wrinkled copies of FHM. Apparently, women prefer men who read books.
Penguin UK's Beautiful Women Want Good Booking Men: if you get spotted reading the book-of-the-month by their Stunning Good Booking Girl (scroll down) you get the prize.
Into guys? No problem.
Um, wow.
11:54 | p-link
[ no comments ]Saturday, June 5
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[ no comments ]Friday, June 4
So what are laboratories and research, anyway?
Of course I have been following the all-too-real story of Steve Kurtz - member of the awesome Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) and Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
On one hand, I am deeply saddened and concerned about the implications for artistic and academic freedom. On the other hand, I am completely fascinated by the challenge taken on by the American government: to define exactly what constitutes a laboratory and acceptable research.
So what's a lab then? Or research, for that matter? Is the only model a government-sponsored scientific one? And what kind of science is that anyway? Is there any way to critique that practice?
We know there are cultural expectations about how, where and by whom science is practiced - so what are the differences between Nexia Biotechnologies, extracting your own DNA at home and Steve Kurtz's research for the CAE? Is it really just a matter of location? Or is it intention? Who decides? And using what criteria?
**
Georges Braque: "Art upsets and science reassures."
10:31 | p-link
[ 7 comments ]I was 16 years old and just finishing my final year of high school when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. I wept. That was 15 years ago today.
"Our hearts still tremble and bleed."
State terrorism continues to kill people around the world every day, and we do precious little to stop it.
10:03 | p-link
[ no comments ]Thursday, June 3
The Honeywell Kitchen Computer (1969) "If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." It cost $10 000, took two weeks to learn how to use, and would balance your chequebook as well as plan the meals. Sweet!
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The Dutch Kitchen of the Future
MIT Media Lab's Kitchen of the Future
Microsoft's Kitchen of the Future
Salton's Kitchen of the Future
Philips Design Kitchen of the Future
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The Kitchen of the Future "The people of the kitchen began to believe that the kitchen was so good that the whole house should be one big kitchen" by Joe Thompson
**
The Practice of Everyday Life Volume 2: Living and Cooking by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol
Update
Designing technology for domestic spaces: A Kitchen Manifesto (pdf) by Genevieve Bell and Joseph Kaye
(Thanks Simon!)
Another update
From the ever-awesome Prelinger Archives:
Design for Dreaming - Set at the 1956 General Motors Motorama, this is one of the key Populuxe films of the 1950s, showing futuristic dream cars and Frigidaire's "Kitchen of the Future."
(Thanks Peter!)
See also:
Practical Dreamer - A fantasy of kitchen planning and modernization, 1957.
Step-Saving Kitchen - Demonstrating a U-shaped kitchen developed by the housing staff of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, 1949.
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[ 3 comments ]The Corporate Anthropologist (and ethics)
Christian Science Monitor - Anthropologists on the job
Katie Hafner - Coming Of Age In Palo Alto
CNN - Corporate anthropology: Dirt-free research
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Anthropology as ‘Brand’: Reflections on corporate anthropology (pdf) by Lucy Suchman
Now that's something to think about.
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Society for Applied Anthropology - Ethical and Professional Responsibilities
American Anthropological Association Ethics
Association of Social Anthropologists - Ethical guidelines
American Sociological Association Code of Ethics
16:27 | p-link
[ 1 comment ]I am still loving knitting, but I'm still not as good as this guy.
I think it's supercool to knit superhero costumes!
Nice combination of the (traditionally) masculine and feminine.
(via)
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[ 2 comments ]It seems that drawing the continents - keep scrolling down - is not unlike drawing haircuts.
(first link via)
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[ 2 comments ]Cities through the eyes and minds of scientists
NASA's Cities Collection - Outstanding Astronaut Photography of Cities Taken During Spaceflight (via)
The Optimal Shape of a City - if you're a theoretical physicist (via)
09:54 | p-link
[ no comments ]Wednesday, June 2
Fashion Victims by Davide Agnelli, Dario Buzzini and Tal Drori
- bags that permanently stain red when they're exposed to cell phone radiation
Mass Distraction by Davide Agnelli and Tal Drori
- a set of three jackets, each of which require the wearer to do a specific thing in order to carry on a mobile phone call
Hybridization by Tal Drori
- a hat that changes according to whether the person is listening to music or ready for conversation
(via)
Haptic Chameleon by Sony
- a video control knob that a user can switch to round, rectangular and semicircle shapes that have different functions and different force feedback effects
10:45 | p-link
[ no comments ]Tuesday, June 1
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[ 5 comments ]Tori Orr is, amongst other things, a Master's student interested in the "potential of social software for dead people." Cool. In March I posted on this student project because I was all excited about social software for the dead too.
This is a lightly-edited bit of recent email conversation we had:
Tori: I've done research all over the board trying to use social network analysis as a way of linking the living with the dead (our personal present with our communal past). I am interested in representing the type of subject matter (say, in literature, oral histories and other associated digital resources) that helps users find relevant links to the past, to tradition and the deep (buried!) interconnectedness of communities. I've used keywords like phylogeny, ontogeny, story-telling, personal histories, interpersonal awareness, memoirs, memory, (auto)biography, and interaction histories.
Anne: Sounds great. And don't forget kinship charts. I can't really recommend them as visuals, but their terminology is probably the most comprehensive ever created. Kinship terms reflect both biological and cultural relations.
Tori: I'm trying to find new ways of representing and expanding traditional family tree relationships.
Anne: Now there's a fun challenge! Alternate ways of representing family relations might connect people according to interests or characteristics, rather than biology. Even biologically-related families can be ordered differently.
Tori: Yes! Like families of dressmakers and families of writers, as well as families with similar surnames...
Anne: Or you could represent people according to the rights and responsibilities we have to each other. I quite like the idea of charting obligations. Not like they're oppressive (although they may very well be) but as a way of rendering tangible something that is increasingly difficult to locate: accountability. I imagine snazzy posters for the upcoming elections that outline the relationships between governments and citizens, and what is at stake.
Tori: Hmm. Rights and responsibilities. Sort of like a covenant? That almost makes it sound spiritual. And so back to the dead!
Anne: Right. I sort of went off on a tangent there, didn't I? Sorry.
Tori: That's okay, but I wonder if the dynamic nature of relationships ceases when a person dies? Not only does their body become stiff with rigor mortis, but their relationships settle and solidify as well...
Anne: Fascinating! My first thought is that our relationships never "settle and solidify". If you believe that 'who we are' means 'who we are with other people' then the dead continue to have relationships with the living and vice versa. The key - whether people are living or dead - is to find ways to represent the many and shifting kinds of relationships we have. To avoid being reductive or rigid (and that means no universal ontologies ;)).
What do you think?
12:34 | p-link
[ 3 comments ]Monday, May 31
One step closer to the promise of technogically augmented spaces:
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[ 3 comments ]This morning, I see that Howard Rheingold is asking if location blogging will take off. Oh probably, in some form or another. But until GPRS rates come down significantly, the opportunity for public authoring will only be available to a select few (which, of course, is not very public). And ever-skeptical, I do wonder if never missing a friend (or always knowing if you have a friend nearby) is better than not.
Shifting from local to global scale, check out Message in a Bottle: From Ramsgate to the Chatham Islands.
But oh no! It seems that on Friday the automatic reports stopped and they now have only a "few days to recover them, diagnose then fix the problem, then put them back into the sea." So if you find one of the GPS bottles, let them know!
(via)
This reminds me - in researching ubiquitous/pervasive computing the past few years, I have rarely seen or heard public discussions about how these technologies often don't work, and if they do, they often don't work well. (Just one example: GPS doesn't work well in dense urban areas where buildings block the signal.) A couple of months ago, Gene Becker wrote: "Ubicomp is hard, understanding people, context, and the world is hard, getting computers to handle everyday situations is hard, and expectations are set way too high. I used to say ubicomp was a ten-year problem; now I'm starting to think that it's really a hundred-year problem." Indeed!
Update - The Feature: These Streets Were Made for Talking. An article on, you guessed it, the Talking Street project.
07:45 | p-link
[ 6 comments ]
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