"Every so often we’d catch ourselves talking solemnly and straight-faced about some detail involved in building the Learning Room. Then we’d take a step back. “Dude. It’s a talking flower. How the hell did we end up here?” Looking back, there’s no real process or rationale I could outline. It’s a product of many things — our personalities, references to things we like; doodling; tinkering; sketching; prototyping and so on. But, overall, it was born from the material itself."

"Eric Fischer won’t stop. Following up on his Geotaggers’ World Atlas (previously), he’s separated out the geodata generated by locals from that generated by tourists — locals being defined as people taking pictures of the same city over a period of greater than a month. The idea being to see whether locals (blue) and tourists (red) take pictures (which is to say, visit) different areas, which intuitively sounds right, but it’s interesting to see the hard data (at right, San Francisco)"

"Networks of Design maps a new methodological territory in design studies, conceived as a field of interdisciplinary inquiry and practice informed by a range of responses to actor network theory. It brings together a rich body of current work by researchers in the social sciences, technology, material culture, cultural geography, information technology, and systems design, and design theory and history. "

"Blinghouses may not necessarily be smart houses, but they are certainly very very excited ones. They emerge during the run-up to the Christmas season each year, as their owners channel their own festive enthusiasm through the medium of various massive neon and electrical lights whcih cover the house.....

Criticisms of blinghouses often focus on environmental damage, tackiness (and class by association), or one dressed up as the other. For all of this, I am still hugely fond of them: I love the sheer disco exuberance of them, of using the entire structure of your house to create a massive Christmas ornament to send light out into the darkest winter*. The lack of functionality is also fascinating: even at its most overexcited and musical housebling is about being, not doing, in a completely personalised way. Blinghouses are the antithesis of smart homes, whose purpose and design centre on function and practice."

"This dissertation analyzes the use of images on the Mars Exploration Rover mission... Drawing upon three years of fieldwork with the Mars Rover team... the dissertation contributes to the literature in Science and Technology Studies by advancing the analytical framework of drawing as: a practical corollary to Wittgenstein and Hanson's concepts of seeing as that allows the analyst to explore the work of producing scientific images that draw natural objects as analytical objects to enable future representations and interactions. Further, images of Mars betray the social organization of the mission team and its commitment to consensus operations. Observing how images of Mars are drawn as trustworthy documents, drawn as a hypothesis or as a record of collective agreement, drawn as a map for the Rover and drawn as a public space, the dissertation demonstrates how interactions with and around Mars Rover images support this political orientation, making the Rover's body a body politic."

"In its 2010 Touch Panel Market Analysis, DisplaySearch reports that total touchscreen shipments increased 29 per cent in 2009, to 606 million units." via @kickerstudio

"‘Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter’ sets out to provide “original insights on corporate and organizational life, and renewed considerations of the negotiations of anthropological relations and knowledge” (pg. 23) and it succeeds, overwhelmingly. The motivating passion of many corporate ethnographers is to use their work to get their corporations to adopt a different relationships with their subjects – be they customers, markets or processes. This book succeeds in a similar way: it will, I am sure, be regarded as a vital contribution to the process of ongoing re-orientation by academia towards a not-so-new breed of practitioners wit"hin corporations. But it will also help inform the practice of corporate ethnographers already plying their trade in corporate jungles."

"The simplest way of describing the value anthropology is seen to offer to large organisations like Intel is that they increase the probability of creating successful products, services or strategies. According to this line of reasoning, anthropologists are well placed to infuse an organisation, and its development process, with powerful understandings of people and practices. These understanding can be used by strategists, designers, engineers and managers. "

"Our goal is to integrate paper-based geospatial data collection into traditional GIS systems by using QR-coded paper map templates & image processing technologies. This "smart paper" will streamline data collection in infrastructure-constrained environments, while allowing rich collection of both quantitative and qualitative spatial data."

"In an interview last month, Dan Houser, one of Rockstar’s founders and the company’s creative leader, described the challenge and opportunity quite aptly. “Westerns are about place,” he said. “They’re not called outlaw films. They’re not even called cowboys-and-Indians films. They’re called westerns. They’re about geography.”

“We’re talking about a format that is inherently geographical,” Mr. Houser added, “and you’re talking about a medium, video games, the one thing they do unquestionably better than other mediums is represent geography.” "

"The new corporate green thumb is not necessarily a sign that American business culture is becoming more agrarian-minded, said Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It’s more about the popularity of backyard gardening.

A National Gardening Association survey done in conjunction with Harris shows that 41 million Americans grew fruits and vegetables in 2009. That’s about 13 percent more than the year before. "

"The new corporate green thumb is not necessarily a sign that American business culture is becoming more agrarian-minded, said Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It’s more about the popularity of backyard gardening.

A National Gardening Association survey done in conjunction with Harris shows that 41 million Americans grew fruits and vegetables in 2009. That’s about 13 percent more than the year before. "

Christopher Walken shows us how to understand the invisible complexities of categorization and counting.

"CitySourced is a real time mobile civic engagement tool. CitySourced provides a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civic issues (graffiti, trash, potholes, etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution; an opportunity for government to use technology to save money and improve accountability to those they govern; and a positive, collaborative platform for real action. Our platform is called CitySourced, as it empowers everyday citizens to use their smart phones to make their cities a better place."

"The Citizens Connect iPhone app is part of Mayor Menino's and the City of Boston's strategy for Citizen-to-City transactions called Citizens Connect. The Citizens Connect iPhone app is targeted at enlisting Boston residents and visitors to gather information about the physical state of the city. (We refer to this approach as Citizen Sourcing .)"

"Organizational change is notoriously difficult to effect. Management consultants have tried it, now designers are trying it. Building on Roger’s description, and offering my explanation of the underlying value system, I now offer an application designing a design-thinking organization."

"I never knew a designer that got hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a logo. Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace. This is a process that can take a year or more. Getting a large, diverse group of people to agree on a single new methodology for all of their corporate communications means the designer has to be a strategist, psychiatrist, diplomat, showman, and even a Svengali. The complicated process is worth money. That’s what clients pay for. The process, usually a series of endless presentations and refinements, persuasions and proofs, results, hopefully, in an accepted identity design."