links for 2010-05-17

Had a chat with some of the guys behind this com­pa­ny at Thought­Made. They showed a bit of pat­terned foil that you could print and stick on a reg­u­lar screen, mak­ing it work with their dig­i­tal pens. A cheap way (com­pared to Wacom’s Cin­tiq, for instance) to make big screens with pen based interactions.

Ran into the peo­ple behind FIELD last fri­day, who were in Copen­hagen to present this video that was com­mis­sioned by Net­film­mak­ers Gallery: “In their video Muse, FIELD is remix­ing their pri­vate dig­i­tal scrap­books from the last 3 years. A flood of inspir­ing images and ref­er­ences is trans­formed into an ocean of colour, fuelled from Ever­note, our blog field.io/process, our favourites on Google Read­er and Flickr, and oth­er sources.”

““The use of cer­tain prod­ucts, such as kites, moun­tain bikes and GPS mon­i­tors, has a bear­ing on the way in which land­scape is under­stood.” The land­scape is instru­men­tal­ized, we might say, dis­tilled through dense lay­ers of tech­no­log­i­cal abstrac­tion to become, once again, a place inhab­it­able by human activ­i­ty, how­ev­er pathet­ic or impres­sive­ly per­sis­tent it might be.” Which more or less sums up what I find so fas­ci­nat­ing about work­ing in new urban devel­op­ment areas such as Lei­d­sche Rijn. To see if there are ways to trans­form in between spaces into social places for play.

“The New Weird has come into being, such as it is and what­ev­er it should be, on its own and not by dint of any deci­sion or pro­gram, so the attri­bu­tion of deci­sions and schemes to it ought to be seen as pre­scrip­tions rather than as descrip­tions.” This pas­sage, from a slight­ly con­fus­ing essay on the con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary fan­ta­sy scene, got me think­ing about dis­cus­sions about inter­ac­tion design and this exact kind of con­fu­sion that often hap­pens. Peo­ple express­ing a hope or a wish about it, but pre­sent­ing it as an objec­tive fact. Where­as, for instance, what we are try­ing to do with This hap­pened is to just show the work and in doing so, just describe what is going on.