AUTHOR: egoodman TITLE: I was hoping they made underwear.... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: interactivity = shopping? CATEGORY: interactivity = shopping? DATE: 10/23/2006 02:27:34 PM ----- BODY: 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. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: egoodman TITLE: The new boosterism STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: public spaces CATEGORY: public spaces DATE: 10/12/2006 02:58:06 PM ----- BODY: 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 ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: egoodman TITLE: Going ballistic over the IDSA. STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: interactivity = shopping? CATEGORY: interactivity = shopping? DATE: 10/07/2006 06:13:28 PM ----- BODY: 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. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: egoodman TITLE: 2nd Call for Papers for Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2007 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: thoughtwar CATEGORY: thoughtwar DATE: 10/04/2006 01:51:23 PM ----- BODY: .... 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. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ===================DATES AND LOCATION=================== - Submission information is now available at www.tei-conf.org - Full submissions will be due October 20, 2006. - Submission is open from now. - Notification of Acceptance on December 1st. - The conference will take place 15-17 February 2007 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, followed with a half-day trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Accepted papers will be published in the printed conference proceedings, and will also through cooperation with ACM be available electronically in full-text in ACM's Digital Library. =================== TOPICS FOR SUBMISSIONS =================== Authors are invited to submit high-quality papers about original research that contributes to advancing the field. Appropriate topics include but are not limited to (for more details see our website): ◦ Case studies and evaluations of working deployments ◦ Analysis of key challenges, proposals of research agenda ◦ Relation of tangible and embedded interaction to other paradigms ◦ Programming paradigms and tools, toolkits, software architectures ◦ Novel interactive uses of sensors+actuators, electronics+mechatronics ◦ Design guidelines, methods, and processes ◦ Novel appl. areas, innovative solutions/systems and industrial apps ◦ Theoretical foundations, frameworks, and concepts ◦ Philosophical, ethical & social implications ◦ Interfaces specific in form and context to particular cultures ◦ Usability and enjoyment ◦ Advantages of these kinds of systems, weaknesses, affordances ◦ Learning from the role of physicality in everyday environments ◦ Embodied interaction, movement, and choreography of interaction ◦ Role of physicality for human perception, cognition and experience ◦ Teaching experiences, lessons learned, and best practices ◦ Standardization, production, and business applications =================== SUBMISSIONS =================== Papers must present original material and will be reviewed rigorously by at least 3 reviewers in a double-blind process. Papers in all areas will be reviewed and assessed based on the contribution they make to the field, its significance, originality, novelty, creativity, rigour, quality of thought, presentation and organisation. Submission are to be submitted electronic, as pdf using the ACM SIGCHI format which can be downloaded from: http://www.chi2007.org/submit/chi2007pubsformat.doc Submissions and reviews are handled through the online submission/reviewing tool EDAS. Detailed information is available on the submission page of http://www.tei-conf.org. Papers can vary in length, using the ACM SIGCHI format and have either 8, 4, or 2 pages (including references, appendices, and figures). Submissions must be anonymous. All papers, independent of length, will undergo the same review process and be published in the proceedings. Length should match the contribution, and the general criteria hold for all papers. Papers can be presented at the conference as a talk, a poster, an exhibit or demo, regardless of length. E.g. an exhibit of a novel design can be described and reflected in an 8 page paper, while a talk on a novel sensor technique might fit 2 pages - or vice versa. Authors can indicate what type of presentation they prefer or suits their type of contribution when using the submission webpage. The TPC might suggest a different format of presentation based on the contribution and type of the paper. If authors prefer to present an exhibit (or demo, installation, performance), they may add one page with a sketch as last page to their submission. This will not count as part of your paper In case of acceptance, at least one author must register for the conference in order for the final paper version to be published in the conference proceedings. =================== PROGRAM COMMITTEE =================== Aadjan van der Helm, Alan Dix, Alex Taylor, Alois Ferscha, Anne Nigten, Astrid Twenebowa Larssen, Bert Bongers, Beverly Harrison, Bill Gaver, Boriana Koleva, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Claire O'Malley, Clifton Forlines, Dan R. Olsen Jr., Ehud Sharlin, Elizabeth Goodman, Frank Feltham, F.W. Bruns, George Fitzmaurice, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Giulio Jacucci, Hans Gellersen, Heather Martin, Hernando Barragán, Hiroshi Ishii, Ian Smith, Ilpo Koskinen, Ina Wagner, Ivan Poupyrev, Jacob Buur, Jim Hollan, Jussi Ängeslevä, Ken Hinckley, Kristof van Laerhoven, Kristina Andersen, Kun-Pyo Lee, Lars Erik Holmquist, Luigina Ciolfi, Margot Brereton, Mark Billinghurst, Mark D. Gross, Makoto Watanabe, Marcelle Stienstra, Martin Pichlmair, Morten Fjeld, Narcis Pares, Natalie Jeremijenko, Neema Moraveji, Niklas Andersson, Orit Shaer, Pamela Jennings, Paul Dourish, Peter Gall Krogh, Regine Debatty, Reto Wettach, Ron Wakkary, Sile O'Modhrain, Stephan Wensveen, Steve Gill, Thomas Fischer, Tom Djajadiningrat, Tom Gross, Tom Igoe, Tomas Sokoler, Trevor Pering, William Newman, Yngve Sundblad, Yoshifumi Kitamura, Yvonne Rogers ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- --------