Clearing the tabs

Doors of Perception weblog: How dematerialisation adds value
Good idea. It also shows how clever design techniques so often _don't_ depend on having an 'academic' descriptor to be inspired in the first place. 'How dematerialisation adds value' is a great way of phrasing it, but was it ever thought of in those terms when the biscuits [...]

London Design Festival: Greengaged

The London Design Festival always throws up some interesting events, especially involving clever people trying new things in design and sharing their experiences and expertise.
This year, the Design Council are running Greengaged, a “sustainability hub… developed and organised by [re]design, thomas.matthews and Kingston University with Arup and Three Trees Don’t Make A Forest”. It’s a [...]

A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media: PhD Dissertation | Anne Galloway
"The dissertation builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape our experiences of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. It contributes to methodological innovation through the use of data bricolage [...]

‘Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen’ Seminar, 17th October – programme updated

Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen, mentioned a few days ago, now has a full agenda available [PDF] (thanks Debra) – here are the abstracts:

Skinner and the Mousewrap

Dontclick.it, an interesting interface design experiment by Alex Frank, included this amusing idea, the Mousewrap, to ‘train’ users not to click any more “through physical pain”.
It did make me think: is the use of anti-sit spikes on window sills, ledges, and so on, or anti-climb spikes on walls, intended primarily as a Skinnerian operant conditioning [...]

The detail of everyday interaction

Understanding what people really do when they carry out some ’simple’ task, as opposed to what designers assume they do, is important. Even something as mundane as boiling a kettle to make a cup of tea or coffee is fraught with variability, slips, mistaken assumptions and so on, and can be studied in some depth [...]

‘Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen’ Seminar, 17th October

Debra Lilley, who runs the very useful Design-Behaviour website, sends details of an interesting forthcoming seminar at Loughborough University:
Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen!
The 13th Sustainable Design Network Seminar Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen! will be held on the 17th October 2008 at the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (engCETL), Loughborough [...]