ElectroSmog: Sustainable Immobility

ElectroSmog International Design Competition – ElectroBlog: News about the ElectroSmog Festival:

Today we issued the call for the international design competition for sustainable immobility. We invite young designers, artists and other interested professionals and advanced students in design and art disciplines to submit proposals for designs for ’sustainable immobility’.

ElectroSmog is a new festival that revolves around the concept Sustainable Immobility. The festival will introduce and explore this concept in theory and practice. With Sustainable Immobility we refer to a critique of current systems of hyper mobility of people and products in travel and transport, and their ecological unsustainability.

The exploration of Sustainable Immobility is a quest for a more sustainable life style, which is less determined by speed and constant mobility. A lifestyle that celebrates stronger links to local cultures, while at the same time deepening our connections to others across any geographical divide, using new communication technologies instead of physical travel.

Mobile Interaction Course Design

I’m working on the design for two different mobile interaction courses to be offered next year. One is a Flash/Actionscript class that will be taught next semester. The second is one that I started designing last summer that will be offered online next summer. It is a mobile interaction design course that is heavier on the theoretical and sociological considerations in mobile application use and creation. When I have the structures and content in place, I may post the syllabi.

Flash-built apps heading for the iPhone

Flash-built apps heading for the iPhone | Macworld

This will make it much easier for me to incorporate app development into my Mobile Interaction Design courses:

New features in the upcoming Flash CS5 Professional will allow developers to write applications and compile the code to run on the iPhone and iPod touch. Applications can target the iPhone OS 3.0 and later.

New Mobile Misuse Flickr Collection

Collection: Mobile Misuse

I am slowly getting the past, present and future projects organized so that I can get some new pieces made (besides the iPod drawings - which are addictive to make).

More iPod Drawings in Process

QR Code Sand Castle

Trends in Japan - CScout Japan Blog: QR Code Sand Castle, by Sinap

Can a mobile phone read a QR code created not digitally, but out of sand? This is a question that arose while communication “architects” Sinap Co. Ltd. were brainstorming new strategies for reaching customers in a world suffering increasingly from information overload. A QR code created by a natural substance, and one as fragile as sand, would make an impact, they thought. The question remained, would it actually be usable?

Software Art for the iPhone

iPhoneArt | Software Art for the iPhone

Noticing this shifting dynamic toward the mobile space, early pioneering web and software artist Lia began the website, iPhoneart.org, which aims to aggregate several artist-created applications that use the touch-screen and accelerometer functions of the devices in new and imaginative ways.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen

Rhizome article

Robert Whitman: local report

local report

Local Report is the latest in a series of communication media works that Robert Whitman has produced since 1972.

The basic structure of these works was for 30 people assigned to different parts of the city or calling area to call at five minute intervals and describe something they saw at the moment; these reports were then broadcast live. Whitman put the incoming calls directly on the air as they came in, his only intervention being to end the call when, as he puts it, “The caller has produced a coherent image.” Ninety calls over a thirty minute period produced the final work. The news reports capture the nature of a specific place and time, revealing it to audience and participants alike.

Mind Your Manners

Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners - NYTimes.com

For the first half-hour of the meeting, it was hardly surprising to see a potential client fiddling with his iPhone, said Rowland Hobbs, the chief executive of a marketing firm in Manhattan.

At an hour, it seemed a bit much. And after an hour and a half, Mr. Hobbs and his colleagues wondered what the man could possibly be doing with his phone for the length of a summer blockbuster.

Someone peeked over his shoulder. “He was playing a racing game,” Mr. Hobbs said. “He did ask questions, though, peering occasionally over his iPhone.”

But, Mr. Hobbs added, “we didn’t say anything. We still wanted the business.”

iPhone Art Pool on Flickr

Lily Pads
Originally uploaded by suziq54241

Flickr: The Brushes Gallery – iPhone Art Pool

Great examples of what is possible with the Brushes app. It would be interesting to know how many of these paintings are actually done on top of photos. Some are obviously not.

The Hybrid Book

Pattie Belle Hastings: The Hybrid Book

I just returned from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts where I spoke at the Hybrid Book Conference. My panel was called “The Reciprocity of Books and Digital Media.” I spoke about “Mobile Misuse: the artistic subversion of mobile technologies in the creation of book-like experiences.”

Cell phone distractions impair recall

Cell phone ringtones can pose major distraction, impair recall

The study includes an experiment in which Shelton poses as a student seated in the middle of a crowded undergraduate psychology lecture and allows a cell phone in her handbag to continue ringing loudly for about 30 seconds.
Students exposed to a briefly ringing cell phone scored 25 percent worse on a test of material presented before the distraction.

Students tested later scored about 25 percent worse for recall of course content presented during the distraction, even though the same information was covered by the professor just prior to the phone ring and projected as text in a slide show shown throughout the distraction. Students scored even worse when Shelton added to the disturbance by frantically searching her handbag as if attempting to find and silence her ringing phone.

Texting May Be Taking a Toll on Teenagers

Texting May Be Taking a Toll on Teenagers - NYTimes.com

The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.

“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”

Vodafone | Receiver | Mobile creation – the Japanese way

Mobile creation – the Japanese way

Both psychologically and physically, young Japanese are never too far from their handsets and the connections to the world that come with the devices. For them, a mobile device is a constant companion, time-killer, game machine, television, organizer, wallet, music player and communicator. In short, it's not terribly necessary to own a PC to be connected digitally, so when the creative urge strikes, the mobile generation uses the tool most comfortable to them: their handsets.

The sneaky moves of anti-social smartphone users...

In this funny (and actually poignant) 3-minute talk, social strategist Renny Gleeson breaks down our always-on social world -- where the experience we're having right now is less interesting than what we'll tweet about it later.