Archive by Author
high-low tech
In the spirit of the public amateur, I’m going to document my way through a class I’m taking at the MIT media lab: Crafting Material Interfaces. It’s taught by Leah Buechley, with instruction and time in her lab to investigate materials and methods. The High-Low Tech group brings together digital and analog, futurist and traditional [...]
read moreurban immune system research
Over at We Make Money Not Art, there’s a long and substantial interview with the Institute for Boundary Interactions and their various prototypes for a large and ongoing project, Urban Immune System Research: The Urban Immune System Research [UISR] project was the culmination of a two day event we ran in December 2010 as part [...]
read moreborder town: beyond ramps [curitiba, brazil]
![border town: beyond ramps [curitiba, brazil]](http://www.ablersite.org/wp-content/themes/gothamnews/thumb.php?src=wp-content/uploads/curitiba_busstube.gif&h=150&w=150&zc=1&q=90)
How does a bold, military-appointed, possibly technocratic architect-turned-mayor create a model universal-access transportation system, cheaply and effectively, and use it—along with other initiatives—to turn around the environmental prospects of the entire town? [image] This post is part of Border Town, now exhibiting at the Detroit Design Festival. Border Town took place in Toronto this summer: [...]
read moremark shepard’s CCD-me-not
This isn’t the first adaptive umbrella I’ve written about, but it’s certainly as timely, and there’s now a prototype in development. Mark Shepard is creating a Sentient City Survival Kit, “set of artifacts for survival in the near-future sentient city”: As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces [...]
read moredeus ex: the eyeborg documentarian
Remember this guy? I mentioned Rob Spence in this post a while back; he’s now working on several film projects around his own and others’ prosthetic gear. Lots to think about here, in the ways he frames the possibilities and discussion. Thanks, Andrew.
read moreall my geek dreams coming true
I really enjoyed meeting and talking with Christina Agapakis, who wrote about the Moveable Chair work for Scientific American’s Oscillator blog. And more on Christina’s very interesting research and projects at her web site. (image: C. Agapakis)
read moremichael kontopoulos’s “water rites”
I had an exchange with Michael Kontopoulos about “Water Rites,” a design fiction where literal and cultural relationships with water are “far less cavalier.” Kontopoulos was intrigued by science fiction narratives like that of Richard Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land; in that story, an arid planet creates social rituals around water—the resource becomes precious, [...]
read moremonu / nerd nite boston
Here’s the sticker project in the current issue (Editing Urbanism) of MONU, the Magazine on Urbanism, out of Rotterdam. And this coming Monday night I’ll be speaking about the sticker project and my work at Nerd Nite Boston—they’re collaborating with the Awesome Foundation for this month’s lectures. Nerd Nite hosts regular short talks, usually at [...]
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