I felt the need to post at least once something related to Michael Jackson. One of my favourite so far is Billie Tweets, a clever Twitter tribute to Michael Jackson. Mike Demers of 9Astronauts put that together. Seems like a fitting way to say good-bye to a superstar who died before his time.

As you might know, I'm a trying to push Human-Centered Design methodologies with the people I work with. Human-Centered Design is a process used for decades to create new solutions for companies and organizations. Human-Centered Design can help you enhance the lives of people. IDEO is one of the firm that master this methodology as well as adding his own touch to it to solve problems and deliver innovative solutions. They recently developed a toolkit for applying Human-Centered Design to inspire new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need.

The Toolkit is divided into four sections:

• The Introduction will give an overview of HCD and help you understand how it might be used alongside other methods.
• The Hear guide will help your design team prepare for fieldwork and understand how to collect stories that will serve as insight and inspiration.
• The Field Guide and Aspirations cards are a complement to the Hear guide; these are the tools your team will take with them in order to conduct research.
• The Create guide will help your team work together in a workshop format to translate what you heard from people into frameworks, opportunities, solutions, and prototypes.
• The Deliver guide will help catapult the top ideas you have created toward implementation.

Go to IDEO's website to learn more about it and lets thanks them for sharing such great resources.

The Internet of Things refers to a network of objects, such as household appliances. It is often a self-configuring wireless network. We all dreamed about the new creative opportunities it would create.

Some companies like Violet have been trying to move things forward and exploring opportunities in that space. Though if we want to see a mainstream adoption, we need regulation to enable day to day products to follow similar protocols. This is what the European commission has been working on recently.

The internet is evolving rapidly: while 25 years ago it was connecting only about a thousand users, today it links around 1.5 billion people across the world. An average European has now at least one object that is connected to the internet, be it a computer or mobile phone. But the number of connected devices that are hardly visible, more complex and more mobile around us will multiply a hundred or even a thousand times over the next 5 to 15 years. The European Commission today announced actions to make sure that Europe can play a leading role in shaping these new networks of interconnected objects from books to cars, from electrical appliances to food – in short the emerging 'internet of things'. The EU's Action Plan presented today will help Europeans benefit from this evolution and at the same time address the challenges it raises such as privacy, security and the protection of personal data.

"Every day we see new examples of applications that connect objects to the internet and each other: from cars connected to traffic lights that fight congestion, to home appliances connected to smart power grids and energy metering that allows people to be aware of their electricity consumption or connected pedestrian footpaths that guide the visually impaired," said Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media. "The promise of this new development of the internet is as limitless as the number of objects in our daily life it involves. However, we need to make sure that Europeans, as citizens, as entrepreneurs and as consumers, lead the technology, rather than the technology leading us."

The creative potential of physical world interactivity is largely untapped by brands and agencies. Over the next years, we will need to elevate our focus around the application of technology. Agencies that invest now will be ready for ubiquitous computing.

I've been interested in social shopping for quite a while now and I am happy to see that it keeps growing. Whether it is about merging real and digital world or adding a social layer to a shopping experience, there are a lot of applications out there. Here are a few:

The Webcam Social Shopper: Coupling the functionality of both Augmented Reality and Motion Capture, this application will allow anyone with a webcam to shop online with friends right from within their video feed.



Razorfashion: Retailers can meet shoppers growing expectations for more engaging digital experiences in-store and provide a consistent, integrated experience across the multi-channel shopping ecosystem.



Fluid Social: Real social shopping enables consumers to get opinions they trust - from friends and family - when they need them to validate purchases in your online store.
Turnto: TurnTo tells you when people you know have experience that could be helpful.
Glue: Glue is a free browser plugin that helps you automatically find books, music, and movies through your friends as you browse popular sites.

What bring all these concepts together? They all "activate the receiver" and not "the broadcaster" as explained in this presentation from George Eberstadt, CEO of Turnto.


Some more reading:

• WSJ - Shop Talk
• Wharton - Network-based marketing
• Harvard Business - The Dynamics of Personal Influence

Following the theory that "talent imitates, genius steal". I'm happy to "steal" this great presentation from Faris. It is a brilliant one about social media, full of interesting stories and examples.

A few weeks ago I came across this project from Julian Oliver. The Artvertiser is an urban, hand-held, augmented-reality project exploring on-site substitution of advertising content for the purposes of exhibiting art.

The Artvertiser software is trained to recognise individual advertisements, each of which become a virtual 'canvas' on which an artist can exhibit images or video when viewed through the hand-held device.

After training, where ever the advertisement appears, the chosen art will appear instead when viewed live through the hand-held device. It doesn't matter whether the advertisement is on a building, in a magazine or on the side of a vehicle. If an internet connection is present at the site, the substitution can be immediately documented and published in on line galleries such as Flickr and YouTube.

The Artvertiser: Augmented Billboards. from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

While offering itself as a new platform for public art, The Artvertiser seeks to highlight the contradiction of Public Space in the context of what can and cannot be written on the surface of our cities. Neither graffiti or Fine Art, The Artvertiser exploits the inevitable redistribution of these surfaces in media such as digital film and photography, providing an alternative memory of the city.

By leveraging the internet as a redistribution mechanism, The Artvertiser supposes that an urban site dense with proprietary imagery can be re-purposed as an exhibition space for art and archived as such in turn. Similarly, on-site exhibitions can be held whereby pedestrians are invited to use the looking device to view an exhibition on the buildings around them.

Obviously, using this technology you could transform billboards to project videos or 3D imagery. You could even ask people to add their personal touch by adding content to it. It is definitely an interesting area to explore.

Even if not directly related, my friend Dean mentioned another project hacking urban space. Project Blinkenlighs came to life in 2001 with the original Blinkenlights installation, the world's biggest interactive computer display.



The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind the building's front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels. During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own love letters on the screen as well.

When looking at successful digital products they often try to redesign our interactions with them. Whether it is the iPhone and its touch screen interface, the Wii and its gesture based user interface. In most of these cases, the breakthrough product and service delivered a new experience to consumers that they had never had before.

Mobile is an obvious one and Nokia is working on experiments to create new mobile gestures. "The recent shift towards including innovative sensors into mobile devices has given birth to a new dialect of mobile interaction and communication in the form of physical gestures - the rise of accelerometers has already facilitated the adoption of a handful of instinctive solutions to common tasks otherwise reserved to the realm of a series of button presses, whether it’s flipping your phone face-down to silence it or turning a device into a landscape position to rotate the image onscreen.



The field of mobile gestures is a fascinating one that Nokia is keenly exploring and researching, with explorative designers Younghee Jung and Joe Macleod on the frontline. One of the most interesting points discovered during the design process is that there must be a metaphorical or physical relationship between a gesture and a task." I think it is a very interesting topic.

More on Nokia Conversations and recognizing gestures.

I'm not sure if it is actually a paid for result or not but it has the colour.

When you care about people you often make the effort to send a postcard over an email. I guess it's more touching because more "work" is put into it - you have to choose the card and it is your handwriting. The only problem is that the picture on the postcard is not yours and not directly related to you.

So what's the most touching gesture? Your own postcard with your words but no real handwriting or your words with your handwriting but with a postcard that you've bought?

I believe in the power of pictures. After all, when you see old postcards in people's home, they often display the picture side, right?

That's why I really like Postino. It is an application that send real printed postcards with your iPhone. Postcards are printed on high-quality paper, and are sent worldwide for a flat price (1.99$ for a single "virtual stamp", but you can get up to a 20% of discount for multi-stamps packs). That is cheaper than most good-quality typical postcard stamp, especially if you send abroad! The app itself is instead free right now, but it will be priced at 0.99$ soon.

The app allows you to send real cards and e-cards too. You have nice features such as the ability to add a frame over the photo, draw a signature/picture with your finger on the touchscreen, and you can check the history and delivery status at any time.

The summer holiday season is approaching, give it a try.

At the E3, Microsoft threw one of the biggest announcement: a new way to control games through your speech, gestures, and your full body.

"Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required. See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun -- the only experience needed is life experience." This is what Microsoft is working on with this new project. The big question of course is: Will Project Natal work as advertised?



The console will also integrate social layer like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter.
More about project Natal

Because my brother is studying sustainable engineering, we had many conversations around the meaning of sustainability. When you think about "sustainable communication", you often associate that with green related communication but I think that it is much broader than that.

Sustainability, in general terms, is the ability to maintain balance of a certain process or state in any system - whether it is an economic, biological or social system.

I was wondering what "sustainable communication" would look like. What the attributes of this system would be and how far we are from reaching these attributes. A sustainable development system is often defined by three pillars: social, economic and environment. Therefore, a "sustainable communication" system could be composed of companies, consumers and channels and I came up with this diagram to represent the attributes of interaction within the system.



For a "sustainable communication" system to thrive, I think that you need three attributes to be true. The system needs to be equitable, spontaneous and lasting.

And then what? I will obviously explain what I mean by these attributes but I wanted to get that out of the door as a first step and continue to investigate this framework further in a collaborative way. I think that we’ve been speaking about these attributes (equitable, spontaneous and lasting) for some time but rarely all together. I hope that "sustainable communication" will link these attributes together in a coherent framework.

Semantic web and portable social graph. If you want an example, check this video of a talk that Alex Iskold gave at the Semantic Web Meetup in NYC. The video covers demo of Glue, AdaptiveBlue Semantic Technologies Stack and AB Meta.

Alex Iskold - AdaptiveBlue at the New York Semantic Web Meetup from Marco Neumann on Vimeo.

If you are living in London and if this topic is of interest, please drop me a line and we could meet for a chat (beer is on me).

As you might have seen in the past, I'm very interested in IDEO. Their culture, their people and of course their work and ideas. I realized that the most interesting thoughts or references I find these days are from service or product design firms and I wanted to share with you some blogs I read.

The last one I found is Do_Matic, Ryan Jacoby's blog. He is a business designer at IDEO and help lead their New York studio. For me, he has one of the best job in the world. He's recently started to blog and I bet he'll have very interesting things to say.

Here are some other blogs I'm reading:

• Choosenick
• Cooper Journal
• Tim Brown
• Design Mind
• Peter Merholz
• Putting People First

Tribal DDB London created the GTI project for the launch of the Volkswagen’s new Golf GTI Mk VI. It is a giant Scalextric track that allows you to race the new Golf GTI online.



The 30ft by 25ft track is the work of a team of 60 modellers and features over 200 scale buildings. The 1:43 scale models of the new VW Golf GTI are fitted with tiny cameras that let you zoom between the 200 buildings of the gleaming model city with a ‘driver’s eye’ view on a Scalextric track, while recording your lap. Users have the opportunity to relive their boyhoods - taking control, crashing round corners, setting their own fast lap then challenging their friends to do better.



There’s no need to spend hours setting it up on the living room floor, no potential damage to furniture (and family pets) should you crash at high speed. Simply log onto www.gtiproject.com and you’ll be guided to the virtual workshops of the GTI Project and the track itself.



The campaign was inspired by the true story of the car’s history: the first GTI was designed and built in secret by Volkswagen engineers in their spare time, purely out of a love for performance motoring. The GTI Project takes you inside a restricted access workroom in the Volkswagen factory, where the GTI engineers are racing their new car in miniature, no less fine-tuned and expertly engineered than its full-size counterpart.

You can also visit the Volkswagen's website to configure your real Golf GTI.