People will often want more information than they can actually process. Having more information makes people feel that they have more choices. Having more choices makes people feel in control. Feeling in control makes people feel they will survive better. — The Psychologist’s View of UX Design by Susan Weinschenk versus Autonomy and Freedom of […]
Mario, was a recent Italian immigrant, just trying make a living cleaning drains and fixing leaking pipes. No one paid much attention to him at first, but as the number of recent arrivals from Italy increased, tensions in the community grew. On that fateful Saturday, a rumor spread that Mario had been caught trying to […]
When I first saw the Pinball coffee table back in 2006, I thought it looked cool (colored lights shining up on people’s faces always brings a warmth to the heart of this scifi geek.), but at the same time, I couldn’t imagine actually having one. A couple of years ago, I went to Shorty’s in […]
I ditched Facebook. I’ve grew tired of: RSS feeds not updating. Being frequently mysteriously logged out Having applications being added just for accidentally clicking on a damn Farmville-esque wall post. Being straight, and yet being served ads for gay dating sites. Applications getting all your information. Seemingly,. everyone getting your information. Being tracked. Facebook always […]
Like many people, growing up, my family used to decorate Easter eggs, Only our eggs tended to be decorated like Ukrainian Easter eggs, or pysanky. My mom learned how to do this from a friend of hers, that truly an artist at it. Every year, we’d break out the beeswax candle, heat our styluses and […]
Jim Blackhurst’s SmartLED SolarTherm is a minimalist information display. Consisting of an RGB LED, a watch, and an ATTiny25 microcontroller. The chip contains a temperature sensor whose reading is displayed as light pulses. According the comments on Makezine, the internal temperature sensor is +/- 10 C (+/- 18 F), so its not very useful. SolarTherm […]
Spanish art collective, Luzinterruptus latest creation, JardÃn para un Futuro, No Muy Lejano (Garden for a Not Too Distant Future), is 110 clear plastic containers, each containing a few leaves and branches, along with a green LED. The artist statement says that installation was a humorous statement about the lack of green space in modern […]
Now this is inspired. Mike Davey has built an actual Turing Machine. A bit of background for non-CS people out there. A Turing Machine is a thought machine postulated by father of modern computing, and persecuted hero of World War II, Alan Turing. It was described as a machine that with a read-write head and […]
Lighting artists, the Moment Factory installed on the front wall of Montreal’s La Vitrine theater a full length interactive LED display. Made up of hellalot of RGB leds, the patterns react to people as they pass on the street. Moment Factory designed the lighting effects for Nine inch Nails‘s (w00t) 2008 Lights in the Sky […]
Evan Miller‘s (Pixelante Studios) art game ImmorTall is an poignent game about an alien that crashes to earth, befriends a family, and then must protect them from the military. What I found most interesting about this game was the comments on Kongregate that sprung up around it. Predictably, there were those that got it, and […]