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Patagonia has a footprint tool on their site to help you understand the environmental impacts of some of their products. Not a bad visualization of the manufacturing process.

Thanks to Allison Woodruff for the link.

Here’s a handy little data source, probably fun for webscraping and visualizations: http://www.worldometers.info/. Thanks to Kristin O’Friel for the link.

Régine Debatty’s interview with Graham Pullin on WMMNA is a good read. I like what I know of Graham’s work a lot, and I love the Museum of Lost Interactions. I think it’s an excellent way to teach about interaction. Looking forward to his new book, “Designing Braille for the Sighted”.

A few people have asked what I thought of the Greener Gadgets conference. The short answer is: had a good time, glad I went, it provoked some good thinking for me. The long answer is over on core77’s site. Thanks to Marc Alt for the chance to go, and Allan Chochinov for the opportunity to write about it.

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design Bill Buxton. Morgan Kaufmann, ©2007. ISBN: 0-1237-4037-1.

In this book, Bill Buxton talks about the role that sketching plays in the design process. He gives a number of good examples from hand sketches to digital sketches. Then he launches into a discussion of what a sketch of an interactive experience is, and gives a number of good examples of interactive sketches and sketching methods. It’s an excellent read for anyone who makes interactive things.

Technorati Tags: design, interfaces, networked objects, networks, pcomp, philosophy, physical computing, sketching, toys, wearables

Shaping Things Bruce Sterling, Boston, MIT Press, ©2005, ISBN 0-2626-9326-7.
Bruce Sterling’s take on a plausible future in which everything made has a network address, and therefore a documented and documentable history. He takes this vision to its extreme, showing how it changes everything from design to manufacturing to consumption to disposal of material goods. An inspiring read if you’re interested in networks, material or information design, or sustainability.

Technorati Tags: design, environment, law, networked objects, networks, pcomp, philosophy, physical computing, RFID, sociology, sustainability

IWAR - the Information Warfare site. A frightening read.

Technorati Tags: infrastructures, networked objects, networks, sociology

Some notes on AODV - An Ad Hoc Routing Protocol, from Ahmi Wolf.
From the intro page:
“The Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing algorithm is a routing protocol designed for ad hoc mobile networks. AODV is capable of both unicast and multicast routing. It is an on demand algorithm, meaning that it builds routes between nodes only as desired by source nodes. It maintains these routes as long as they are needed by the sources. Additionally, AODV forms trees which connect multicast group members. The trees are composed of the group members and the nodes needed to connect the members. AODV uses sequence numbers to ensure the freshness of routes. It is loop-free, self-starting, and scales to large numbers of mobile nodes. ”
This could be very useful for certain types of networked objects, when spontaneous and casual connections are needed, along the lines of edström, Holmquist, Dahlberg and Ljungstrand’s Ad Hoc Information Spaces, among others.
The Mobility Management and Networking Lab (MOMENT), home of AODV.
Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer, who worked on AODV.

Technorati Tags: networks

Brian Jepson and I will be giving a workshop on Making Things Talk at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference in the first week of March this year. It should be a lot of fun. We’ll be teaching participants to make a physical game controller for a networked game of pong. The controller is a variation on some of the projects in the book, and should enable a very special activity that’s not always seen at E-Tech…

I finally got my hands on an Openmoko Neo1973 phone tonight. Not sure if it’s ready for primetime. A few notes:

It took me an hour and a half to flash the root file system and kernel on it. The getting started page and the Mac OSX page were helpful. I used this version of the kernel from buildhost.automated.it and the 2007.11 snapshot of the rootfs.

The operating system takes longer to load than OSX 10.4 on my macbook.

There are a couple things about the UI that bother me:

• It’s not obvious how to answer or hang up a call
• There’s no obvious way to access system settings through the UI, including things as basic as ringtone or volume
• It’s apparently not yet possible to send or get text messages.
• There’s no way to turn it off when the OS hangs, other than removing the battery.

I hope it gets better. It’s a nifty-looking phone.