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}

As a product designer it’s basically a foregone conclusion that I had to watch the premiere of ABC’s new Simon Cowell-produced show, “American Inventor“. So that’s what I did.

True to expectation, there were plenty of non-inventive offerings which were pretty obviously ideas generated only to get the participants on television. There was also manufactured drahma, bleeped words, behind the scenes tears and all the rest. But there wouldn’t be a show if there weren’t some worthwhile ideas to pursue in future episodes, so they found a few of those too. More interesting to me, however, is hearing how much money some people spend to develop their ideas.

One idea in particular, the Sand Bag Shovel, comes to mind. The inventor, Mark Martinez, said he’d spent $20,000 to reach a point that seemed to me to be pretty early in development. I certainly hope that included a full-blown utility patent. Even so, I couldn’t help but think he paid twice what he should have … assuming the basic idea he demonstrated was his alone (a safe assumption I believe). No wonder Western corporations are taking their R&D overseas.

{Favorite line: “I don’t know how you make it, I’m just the inventor.”}

Here I was just telling the marketing and branding folks to check out the corporate tie-ins on these things (reLink), when sure enough along comes Vinyl Pulse posting an entry today (Link) specifically dealing with corporate-sponsored trexi’s … in this case, Coca-Cola’s “We All Speak Football” Trexi Series.

Hey. Is that a Nike logo I see buried in the graphics?

{Image source: Vinyl Pulse}

I just received word that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be licensing some of its work to be used within the Second Life virtual world. From a blog posting over on The Daily Graze (Link):

Today he was given the green light by both the SF MoMA and the New Media Consortium to act as curator for the first show at the Aho Museum and Gallery we are building in their Virtual Campus. This is officially licensed art from a selection of works in the Art as Experiment, Art as Experience and Making Sense of Modern Art collections.

This is great news in my opinion. In order for virtual spaces to be taken seriously by the general public, they really do need to take meatspace seriously as well; which – as most of you have probably figured out – means to me recognizing the legitimacy of intellectual property rights (even if it means living with some crappy laws for the time being).

I’ll have to try to stop in and take a look for myself. In the meantime, there’s a Flickr image set available which I’ll be checking. Stop by The Daily Graze for a link to the set and some other relevant sites.