1. Keiichi Matsuda’s “Domestic Robocop” offers a glimpse of an augmented future which is part bliss and part nightmare:
Matsuda’s video is via BLDGBLOG, Serial Consign, @doingitwrong, and more or less everyone else.
2. In BLDGBLOG’s brief entry on Matsuda’s video, he suggests that “augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow”; if that suggestion intrigues [...]
My apologies to our readers for the (almost) week which has passed with nary a peep about the Apple iPad, as an iPad post or article is apparently de rigueur if you write about… anything. The problem is, we have had nothing interesting to say, and I’m pretty sure I still don’t. Instead, [...]
You’ll want to read all of Dan Hill’s post on his involvement in the design of The Cloud, a proposal for “a new form of observation deck” overlooking London and its new Olympic stadium. The proposal draws upon a number of fascinating themes, including urban informatics, cloud computing, weather, crowd-sourcing, and “re-industrial” cities:
Data is to [...]
From the description of the above video at PopSci:
Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D… Each video includes clusters of small diamond shapes, [...]
I see that Dan Hill put the post from the Toward the Sentient City exhibit up at City of Sound, and that version improves on the version at Toward the Sentient City by including links and images. Reading Hill’s post again, I noticed a couple paragraphs that bear on the post below regarding architecture and [...]
[screenshot from Utopia, a rather unique game that blended SimCity-esque urban development with a proto-Starcraft model of realtime combat management in a science fiction setting]
Getting quite close to the (October 9th) release date for Cities XL, which is at least moderately interesting to those of us (I’d imagine a fair percentage of designers in their [...]
A fascinating talk by Danah Boyd, transcribed at alternet, first presenting the evidence of class divisions in social media, and then addressing what the implications of that presence are:
How many of you currently use Facebook? [90 percent-plus of the audience raises their hands.] How many of you currently use MySpace? [A few lone figures raise [...]
New Scientist is partnering with the SENSEable City Lab (mentioned a couple days ago here) for an intriguing project in which thousands of items of ordinary garbage are tagged with SIM cards, generating a live digital map of the waste infrastructures of Seattle, New York, and London.
Dan Hill has a great interview with architect Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, discussing the relationship between digital space and architectural space, the production of both, and the changing role of the architect:
This is hardly the traditional work of the architect, yet this sense of working with a layer of soft infrastructure, [...]
