From the Picnic conference last year, Mediamatic’s ‘RFID safe’ which protects your wireless RFID cards from being read or ‘skimmed’. With Mifare security problems a reality, and the ability to skim cards such as the Oyster fairly easily, I wonder how common these things will become?

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At last year’s Picnic conference we created a networked Photo Booth as part of the Mediamatic RFID hackers camp. Picnic is a conference with about two thousand attendees and multiple venues in the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam.
One of the aims of the Mediamatic workshop was to experiment with ubiquitous technology for social and playful purposes. [...]

While thinking about radio-field-based interactions and the gestures that they entail I’m reminded of this quote by Adam in Everyware:

“If you really want to know what information processing dissolving in behaviour really looks like, catch the way women swing their handbags across the Octopus readers at the turnstiles of the Mong Kok subway station; there’s [...]

I happened to catch the American-centric documentary history of the mobile phone called The Cellphone Revolution yesterday.

The most compelling content was the early visualisations of cellular networks, made by Motorola and AT&T at the time that they were trying to convince the FCC that mobile telephony was important.

It also features rather nice footage and [...]

The rhetoric of ‘mobile life’ is that technology will make motion more possible, easier, and that having access to information will make our lives easier, transcending time and space. This spectacular notion of global mobility has been around since the mobile phone became an essential business tool. Indeed mobile telephony, mostly voice and SMS has [...]

All of the Touch design briefs we have been using this spring in the Touch course are now online, have a look.

The Touch course has also just finished, there will be case studies of the student work here sometime over the summer.

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

One of the most important features of NFC is that it only works at a very short range. This ties our interactions to particular places or objects, and forces us to design applications or services that work on a local level. [...]

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

Anne Galloway is a social researcher working at the intersections of technology, space and culture. Anne’s research in the Touch project involves looking at touch in different social and cultural contexts, in the first instance working towards Touchpædia, a reference and [...]