October 2006 Archives

But DIFRWEAR's wallets are looking very practical (probably more practical than this stuff), given today's article in the NYT:

But in tests on 20 cards from Visa, MasterCard and American Express, the researchers here found that the cardholder’s name and other data was being transmitted without encryption and in plain text. They could skim and store the information from a card with a device the size of a couple of paperback books, which they cobbled together from readily available computer and radio components for $150.

And because the cards can be read even through a wallet or an item of clothing, the security of the information, the researchers say, is startlingly weak. “Would you be comfortable wearing your name, your credit card number and your card expiration date on your T-shirt?” Mr. Heydt-Benjamin, a graduate student, asked.

It's true, though, that even RFID-blocking wallets won't address identity and mail theft.

Thanks to the fun@sims mailing list for making the connection.

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Metro & Tri-State :: Daley: By 2016, cameras on 'almost every block' (via telecom-cities)

"By the time 2016 [rolls around], we'll have more cameras than Washington, D.C. ... Our technology is more advanced than any other city in the world -- even compared to London -- dealing with our cameras and the sophistication of cameras and retro-fitting all the cameras downtown in new buildings, doing the CTA cameras," Daley said.

"By 2016, I'll make you a bet. We'll have [cameras on] almost every block."

No one does boosterism quite like it.

It was big—and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains, jewels, muscles, wealth, or words. He was, for a spring-enchanted moment, the lyric and almost unselfish lover of Zenith. He thought of the outlying factory suburbs; of the Chaloosa River with its strangely eroded banks; of the orchard-dappled Tonawanda Hills to the North, and all the fat dairy land and big barns and comfortable herds. As he dropped his passenger he cried, "Gosh, I feel pretty good this morning!"

Sinclair Lewis, Babbit, 1922

Every month we get the IDSA magazine Innovation, and every month I go ballistic.

Every. Month.

Innovation isn't a magazine so much as 100+ page promotional flyer that happens to have glossy pages. It's a thin collection of "articles" promoting one or another product concept where the text is usually written by the product designers. So the articles aren't, you know, reliable reviews. Or even sometimes all that grammatical. But I let that go.

The problem is that every month Innovation features easily a hundred images of products, or product concepts. They're really beautiful too - slick 3D renderings, intensely colorful photographs. And they come fast and furious, sometimes five or six to a spread. The images are typically silhouetted, just the object floating on the white space of the page. Sometimes there's a little Photoshopped-in shadow, just to give a sense of dimensionality.

But here's the weird thing: there's almost never any people in the shots. Or physical contexts of use. It's like the products (most of which are intimately related to the body in some way, like clothing or mobile phones or glucometers) exist absolutely independently from the people and places that inspired their creation. They are a sculptor's dream: pure form disconnected from the messy realities that dent brushed aluminum and put thumbprints on chrome. The white space of the traditional art gallery has become the white space of the magazine page. It just whispers of...

...pointless self-absorption, frankly.

I know this critique is nothing new. But c'mon. In the 174 pages of the "2006 Yearbook of Industrial Design Excellence," there were 37 pictures of people. Which makes for .2 pictures of people per page. That includes images of disembodied appendages like hands, feet, and heads. It also includes figurative representations of people, such as sketches and line drawings. (Like everybody's favorite representational trick: the blank line drawing composited with photographic imagery). It does not include photographs of the designers themselves, unless those designers appeared to be physically engaged with the product. Most product images had no images of humans; the 37 images I counted came disproportionately from a few articles, such as the one by ZIBA on their work with Lenovo (10 images!) which was in fact classified in the "research" section.

The problem is that the democratization of access to design tools (thanks, Usenet!) means that more and more people can make pretty pictures of product concepts, write up their own glowing descriptions of how cool their idea is, and email it all into industry mags like Innovation. So I look for proof that there's something else besides formal innovation. Something like: a hint of honesty about the product's shortcomings. Or: a suggestion of engagement with the physical experience of the product's form. Or: scenarios of use that show me what advantage it brings.

I've fought this battle for a while, and the problem seems to be that many industrial designers feel that they're being judged on the perfection of the physical forms they make - so documentation of projects emphasizes form and finish over all. I've been told by one who would know that storytelling and narrative are now at the basis of many industrial design curricula, but you'd never know it from Innovation.

.... please do submit

in conjunction with 14th Annual Mardi Gras Conference, and
in cooperation with ACM SigCHI

15-17 February 2007, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

CONFERENCE URL: http://tei-conf.org

PROGRAM CHAIRS: Robert Jacob (Tufts University, USA), Eva Hornecker (HIT Lab NZ, University of Canterbury, NZ) Caroline Hummels (ID-Studiolab, TU Delft, NL)

CONFERENCE CHAIRS: Brygg Ullmer (Louisiana State University, USA) Albrecht Schmidt (Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich, Germany)

=================== DESCRIPTION ===================

TEI'07 is the first international conference dedicated to research in tangible and embedded interaction, and held in cooperation with ACM SigCHI. Work addressing HCI issues, design, use context, tools and technologies, as well as interactive art works are all welcome, including especially interdisciplinary submissions across these themes.

The proceedings will be available in printed form at the conference and be published electronically through the ACM Digital Library.

The conference will be held this year as the 14th Annual Mardi Gras conference at Louisiana State University, to be followed with an optional day trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

The conference attempts to bring together the new field of tangible and embedded interaction, providing a meeting ground for the diverse communities of research and practice involved with tangibles -- from computing, hardware, and sensor technology, to HCI, interaction design, and CSCW, to product and industrial design and interactive arts. We invite submissions from all of these perspectives, be they theoretical, conceptual, technical, applied, or artistic. The conference is designed to provide appropriate presentation forms for different types of contributions including talks, interactive exhibits, demos or performances, and posters. We invite submissions in these different areas integrated within a single-track conference. Interdisciplinary submissions are particularly welcome.