Cool little story over on C|Net called “Video game therapy–a new frontier” (Link). I usually talk about blurring lines between work and play, but here there are blurring lines between healing and playing. I guess maybe healing is really just another form of working. Anyway, this reminds me of other stories, most especially those concerning Iraq war veterans using videogames to deal with their trauma.

Always nice to read articles where technology, once considered pretty useless by so many (just the way home computers were generally considered useless by the public in the early 80’s), winds up having such a wonderful impact. Good read for the weekend.

It’s both a bit odd and pretty cool seeing the core idea behind my RadTag concept take off like it has (you can see just the support images for that thing on my Coroflot page – Link; other discussion and links you can pick up from my earlier post – reLink) .

I’ve been slowly starting up a conversation about this on the Core forum (Link), but while that remains mostly ignored, I’m finding plenty of conversation elsewhere. I’m thinking maybe the Industrial Design community just isn’t the best place right now for these sorts of discussions. A shame since IDer’s are generally at the crossroads of so many relevant disciplines.

In any event, while doing a little surfing, I came across a post on Julian Bleecker’s blog (Link) that contains a link to a report from a workshop called “Blogjects and the new ecology of things”. I’ve not yet read the report, but will hopefully find time next week. It should be interesting.

{btw, I was going to post a “Thank You” on Julian’s blog, but it identified me as a spammer; apparently my new IP address had been previously misused. Oh well. Hopefully if he stops by, he’ll read it here.}

Okay, Curt Schilling is a pitcher, but you get the idea. From the Kotaku.com website (Link):

Red Sox pitcher and World Series MVP Curt Schilling has a new endorsement deal: online games. The die-hard EverQuest II fan has been spotted out and about in Magic Kingdom flying his MMORPG colors.
…
There’s no end to it, the world is enormous, the possibilities are endless, and above all else, it’s a place to go and relax amongst friends. What I can’t get enough of is your ability to interact with real live people.

Maybe it’s time for some new kinds of mashups in the entertainment world. What do you think about these:

{I’ll stay clear of mashing up basketball. Now is not the best time to go suggesting something like Bracket Fairy Basketball.}

via Blue’s News

I don’t think this is new since it sounds really familiar to me, but I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it before, so here it is now. STAMPs (Link):

This work targets specifically a human activity that we defined as Collaborative Annotations of a Map in a mobile setting. In general, this can be seen as a form of `Spatialised’ communication, which means that communication makes explicit usage of the geographical/physical context as referent to the message content. The goal of this study is to develop modeling schemas that enable to integrate spatial information, as embedded in maps, with the textual information produced through computer-mediated communication.

In English:

STAMPS is a little program. It can run on your Mobile phone. Using this program you can see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map. You can write for instance: “this is my preferite pizzeria!”, to offer advice to your buddies. All the messages left in the system say something about the city where you live: what are the sport locations, the place to eat, the meeting spots. After a while, we want to use all these information to help the users to navigate the city. You can ask the system, for instance: “where is a pizzeria near by?”, and the system will search for other people’s messages which refer to the term pizzeria to give you an advice.

Just wait til someone embeds hardware into cell phones so that people can add smell. When that happens, just remember: on the cell phone network, you never know who’s a dog.

This one should prove interesting to follow. The Washington Post reports (Link) of a new interactive museum web site being developed for the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum by design firm Method … with MIT’s John Maeda (Simplicity weblog) keeping a close eye on the project. There’s some interesting information in the piece, including mention of a Guggenheim Virtual Museum that never got beyond prototype but sounds intriguing.

However, my favorite part of the article is this:

More funding will be needed, but Maeda points out that interactive technology has already been invented and can be acquired at reasonable cost.

Over recent weeks, Kevin Farnham, Method’s chief executive, lead the museum’s staff through brainstorming sessions. While curators distilled aspirations into key words on Post-it notes, Maeda kept the group from straying into costly bells and whistles.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed over the past few years it’s the increased hiring of interactive/digital/web/etc designers by some of the more elite design firms out there (actually, some have been doing it for the better part of the last decade). But as digital tools become increasingly simple to use, I have to wonder at what point that whole community becomes inbred and real creativity starts coming from the “unwashed” masses.

Just wait til the digital equivalent of David Carson‘s Beach Culture hits the scene. That will be some fun.

{via TP Wire Service}