Our prototype is nearing completion(April) and we want to gear up to spread the word about the new itsme workstation so that our prototype can be tried and tested not only by the exisiting community but many many more. Itsme workstation is a symbol of innovation and creativity and we want to transmit the same values in the way we promote the project.
With regards to this we are starting to find new ideas to reach people , and one of the directions that we must not ignore is of guerrilla marketing , unconventional and original advertising, potentially interactive, where consumers...
On Saturday, Giorgio and I will participate in the "Collective Intelligence for Organizations" workshop at CSCW 2010. We will present a position statement, expressed in this paper, saying that Collective Intelligence can happen only if individuals have workstations that help them having everything in the right place at any moment.
Abstract: In this position paper, we suggest a different approach for fostering the capability of human beings to develop Collective Intelligence, that may appear counter-intuitive. We think, in fact, that the performances of systems supporting Collective Intelligence are mainly affected by the current status of the workstations...
Itsme academic network lends the concept, research and learning to students allowing them to explore new possibilities and propose new applications with itsme. In the past we carried out workshops with MBD students of Domus Academy, MDS students of Politecnico Di Milano, IULM and many others. Today we FOUND a project published online by one of the student groups of Universita’ Degli Studi di Siena. Quite frankly, I don’t know much about the workshop, and the project proposed by the students, but their research highlights some benchmarks and comparisons studied in the area of education and e-learning. Their Idea, as...
Thoughts around default setup impact in os interaction design, from an article by Kevin Kelly.
During my traditional Saturday lazy breakfast I ran into Kevin Kelly’s post on "Triumph of default". Coincidently we are in this phase of the project, where we are beginning to face all the issues related to personalization, system automatic behaviours, and OS pro-activity versus user intentional profiling.
As KK says,
"the privilege of establishing what value the default is set at, is an act of power and influence",
so we are feeling a bit under pressure now.
There are two main issues emerging from this consideration. On one hand,...
There's some truth in the Czechoslovakian proverb I used for the title of this post, as we've been recently discussing in designing how to deal with security issues in itsme OS. We realized there's a huge amount of possibilities and of different factors influencing strategies that can be adopted, and (in our case) they're multiplied by the fact that we're designing a complex system, with a lot of potentially vulnerable points. I won't go into technical details, but just present the main points our discussion started from. It seems that all existing operating systems are not entirely secure, and they're...
In the last days we exchanged some internal email about Google Chrome OS: we found some similarities with the basic ideas of itsme, and some radical differences. I'll try to summarize the discussion for your benefit, so you can tell us what you think about it.
A few highlights (from google chrome OS presentation) to start with:
the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no Web;
the software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel;
it is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to...
Yesterday Lorenzo, Michele, Bob, and I had quite a long discussion about the role file names will play in itsme. Actually it seems to me like an interaction problem rather than a technical one, but let's start from the beginning.
Let's say we have a system (typically itsme) relying on the data and metadata organization provided by Guglielmo, i.e., implementing a metaphor that is not the classical file system hierarchy. What happens when an application (an existing one: OpenOffice, GIMP, Thunderbird, Firefox, whatever), upon user's command, prompts for a "Save as..." dialog? The user will be choosing a place to save...
We have started a collaboration with CEFRIEL and DISCo to study how Italian general practitioners could benefit from having an itsme machine each. Moreover, we are investigating advanced scenarios, to provide additional functions and services specifically designed (and possibly implemented) to support such peculiar kind of professional users.
In particular, we are working with two specific workgroups of the research entities mentioned above:
at CEFRIEL, the Semantic Web activities research group, that has previously partnered with several successful national and international projects; they will be responsible for designing innovative (semantic) services for our workstation;
at DISCo, the ITIS research group focusing on health-care,...
A couple of days ago I went to the Better Software conference.
The conference was aimed at developers, managers and entrepreneurs - and there were plenty of all three categories. Most of the speakers - especially in the main track - were interesting people, with a ton of experience to share. Having them at hand, ready to answer questions, has surely been one of the major successes of the whole thing.
As with most conferences, you really had to be there to enjoy the speeches (not to mention the lunches and dinners). Anyway, if you couldn't manage, the next best thing is...
Workshop at DA got over last week. We had a fun filled and a very interesting month spent with the students, we miss you guys!
The workshop with Master of Business Design at Domus Academy was basically divided in two main briefs, one was "Business exploitation" - proposing possible product service systems for itsme workstation (Nico, now you know what it means!) while the other one was to analize and find new strategies for our community space.
3 groups with 3 students each worked on each brief and we came out with great proposals. All the groups did a part of analysis...
