brightly colored food

Andrew pointed the other day to some interviews of various designers and technologists on the Ivrea website. I’d also add that there are some interesting reports assessing the progress the school has made since its inception two years ago.

The building that houses the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon sits at the bottom of a hill. The apartment complex where Mister Rogers lived is at the top. I walked by the place a couple of times and always hoped he’d exit the lobby wearing a nice cardigan, checking the sky for rain, about to head out for a walk.

Keeping with my tendency to collect reading lists, here’s a list of readings on social networks. I’m doing research and early design work around some concepts involving social networks, so suggested resources are welcome.

I was trying to phrase my discomfort about the current trend to apply network theory (especially power laws) willy-nilly to social networks, and thankfully Anne already spoke more eloquently than me. The above stuff is written by social scientists, not physicists, their eagerness to contribute notwithstanding.

From Seb’s Open Research

There’s some new stuff on interactive conversation interfaces (iCi) at Jellyvision, the crew that did “You Don’t Know Jack” and established “The Jack Principles”. Unfortunately, their site is all Flash and I can’t link directly to the page, so you’ll need to navigate the menus - select “iCi Design”.

Here’s a nice collected listing of research on tangible and graspable interfaces.

Things are a bit hectic around here - still trying to get this platespinning act together. Instead of carrying on I’ll refer you to Bruce Sterling’s most recent post to his Viridian List, which contains maybe two dozen high-quality links. I just read his book Tomorrow Now, and I’m still trying to make up my mind about it…