Archive for the 'Mobile Culture' Category

Habitar – Bending The Urban Frame

Published on July 11, 2010 in Announcements, Augmented Reality, Experience Design, Future of Mobile, Innovation, Innovation in Mobile, Internet of Things, Mobile Culture, Mobile Trends 2020, Near Field Communication (NFC), Sustainability, Ubiquitous Acces, Ubiquity, Urban and mobile 2.0. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Last week, I received a copy of the HABITAR magazine, titled “Bending The Urbam Frame”. Habitar is a walk through new emerging scenarios in the city curated by José Luis de Vicente with the help of Fabien Girardin, both based in Barcelona.

“Utopian and radical architects in the 1960s predicted that cities in the future would not only be made of brick and mortar, but also defined by bits and flows of information. The urban dweller would become a nomad who inhabits a space in constant flux, mutating in real time. Their vision has taken on new meaning in an age when information networks rule over many of the city’s functions, and define our experiences as much as the physical infrastructures, while mobile technologies transform our sense of time and of space.”

The magazine is a catalogue of ideas and images from world-class artists, design and architecture studios, and hybrid research centres including Timo Arnall, Julian Bleecker, Ángel Borrego – Office for Strategic Spaces, Nerea Calvillo, Citilab-Cornellà, Pedro Miguel Cruz, Dan Hill, IaaC – Instituto de Arquitectura Avanzada de Cataluña, kawamura-ganjavian + Maki Portilla Kawamura + Tanadori Yamaguchi, Aaron Koblin, Philippe Rahm architectes, Marina Rocarols, Enrique Soriano, Pep Tornabell, Theodore Molloy, Semiconductor, SENSEable City Lab, Mark Shepard.

Together they come up with a series of potential tools, solutions and languages to negotiate everyday life in the new urban situation.

This new urban landscape is no longer predicated solely on architecture and urbanism. These disciplines now embrace emerging methodologies that bend the physical with new measures, representations and maps of urban dynamics such as traffic or mobile phone flows. Representations of usage patterns and mapping the life of the city amplify our collective awareness of the urban environment as a living organism. These soft and invisible architectures fashion sentient and reactive environments.

The works are also exposed in an exhibition in  LABoral – Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon [Asturias] in Spain.

You can download a PDF copy of the magazine here but I recommend you buy the paperbook version, you can buy it here (English – Spansih – price = 5 €).

The work is a real recommendation for everyone interested in new emerging urban scenarios, urban design, planning & architecture, nomadic architecture, spatial intelligence, urban software, participatory systems in cities and networked urbanism.

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Mobile Design Session Barcelona

Published on September 21, 2009 in Announcements, Barcelona, Conference, Conferences, Entrepreneurship, Ethnographics, Events, Experience Design, Future of Mobile, Innovation, Internet of Things, Mobile Content, Mobile Culture, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Events, Mobile Games, Mobile Lifestyle, Near Field Communication (NFC), Startups, Ubiquitous Acces, Ubiquity, Urban, Usability, User-Experience, iPhone, mobile 2.0 and rfid. Closed

Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona - MACBA

On Thursday October 29, 2009 we’re organizing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona (MACBA) the first Mobile Design Session during the Barcelona Design Week.

For this first Mobile Design Session, we’re inviting some of the most forward-thinking leaders in Mobile including Adam Greenfield – Head of Design Direction for Service and User-Interface Design at Nokia, Timo Arnall – Oslo School of Architecture & Design, Willem Boijens – Principal Manager Global User Experience – Concept Development at Vodafone Group Marketing, and Brian Fling – author of O’Reilly’s Mobile Design and Development, who will share the challenges they see for the coming years: designing mobile services for a total mobile user experience, understanding the needs of the user within her environment.

During the last decade we have seen an increased flow of innovation around the mobile phone, which is becoming an indispensable gadget in nearly everyone’s life. Mobile devices outnumber desktop and laptop computers three to one worldwide and they are already the most popular access platform to the Internet. The convergence of mobile phone and web services is just the beginning of what may be regarded as true “ubiquitous computing”. The paradigm of anytime, anywhere, anyhow has become a reality in everyday life in a very short time.

Understanding the user context (who? what? where? when? how?) has become the major challenge for designers of all industries, also in order to create mobile services that are relevant in people’s everyday life.

With improved capabilities of devices including sensoring technology, we’re moving towards networked and context-aware environments, embedding computational power into the objects and environments that surround us (also known as “urban computing” and “locative media”). Visual browsing is possible today with augmented reality solutions changing the way we interact with what’s around. This increasing influence and permeation of the digital layer is launching a new wave of service ideas in industries such as media, consumer goods, retail, automotive, healthcare, etc.

Understanding how the mobile ecosystems work and in particular the correlation between design and mobile and between innovation and technology becomes increasingly important for any designer working in any industry.

More info to be released soon on the Barcelona Design Week website . Stay tuned!

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Startups in mobile: join the PICNIC Mobile Bites!

Published on September 7, 2009 in Announcements, Events, Innovation, Mobile Apps, Mobile Culture and Startups. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

dotopen - PICNIC partnership

One of the coolest events in Europe is coming soon: it’s PICNIC Amsterdam 2009!

PICNIC is a cross-discipline platform for creative conversation and collaboration. It’s a unique festival featuring a strategic conference, complimented by hands-on workshops and matchmaking sessions. PICNIC unites thousands of creative minds every year in Amsterdam. PICNIC will surprise you, inspire you and offer a breath of fresh air from your daily routine PICNIC ’09 takes place from 23 to 25 September at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Don’t miss the year’s most inspiring, fascinating and entertaining festival!

On Thursday September 24, PICNIC and dotopen organise a short but sweet PICNIC Mobile Bites: I’m going to introduce a series of short demos of five of the most interesting, creative, touching, weird or exciting applications in mobile to be showcased to the PICNIC audience in mini-presentations lasting 3 minutes each.

If you have a really cool mobile application that you would like to demo or pitch during PICNIC ’09?  Then this might be your chance! Go to dotopen.com/PICNIC event page to participate, before September 10 midnight CET. * dotopen members can register with a one-click access, once filled in your company data, you don’t need to enter your data again for every event.

Get a special rate on tickets

Dotopen members get a 15% discount on the PICNIC tickets. Log in or register at http://www.dotopen.com to get your discount code.

I hope to see you there!

* PICNIC and dotopen will review all applications based on the applicant´s profile page on dotopen. The selected companies will be notified by September 14. We will provide you with a free all day Festival ticket** that will allow for access to all the Festival activities that take place on September 23, 24 and 25!

**The Festival ticket does not give you access to the PICNIC Conference. Travel and hotel fees are not included.

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Sons of Wireless

Published on June 13, 2009 in Barcelona, Entrepreneurship, Mobile 2.0 Europe, Mobile 2.0 Event, Mobile Culture, Mobile Events, Moble 2.0 Europe and mobile 2.0. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

Sons of Wireless

Inspired by the Sons of Wireless (how good a name can get?) I’m giving away 2 duo tickets to attend the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference and the Developer Day.

Check their story: started by announcing they’d like to attend the conference without anyone noticing their message, then did a 2nd post, titled Mobile 2.0 Barcelona. Primer Asalto – in which, apparently, they didn’t get heard again, and decided to hit the streets with an increasingly devastating message (see picture below).

Sons of Wireless

Foto: Rafael Goicoechea.

Here’s the game: I will give away the tickets to the local people in Spain who can come up with the most creative, funny and entertaining campaign how to create buzz around Mobile 2.0 Europe towards the Spanish and Catalan speaking local communities. Use your imagination to  spread your message virally across the local communities and who knows, you might make it to the stage next Friday at Mobile 2.0 Europe!

I will decide by Wednesday 14 hrs local time, not much time but a bit of online guerilla should make sure I can pick up the noise by then :)

Why not start by translating this post into Spanish and throw it inside the networks!

New generation coming to wireless?

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