Ricardo Sato

Talk to me. Not at me.
Thank goodness for modern web services. Apps like Twitter, and Tumblr have taught us all new ways to communicate briefly, and succinctly. It's time that the business world started embracing the new way of talking. If you're stuck in: account/client/project/type-of-data/some-specific-list – Pull your head out. There's a lot of work and communication going on around you. Stay on top of it.

re/touch brings together hundreds of cross-cultural examples of social norms and values involving touch—all categorised according to actions related to touching.
A collection of quotes from ethnographic accounts written between the late 1800s and the present, re/touch encourages designers and researchers to explore how touch is used by people to relate to one another and the worlds in which we live.

As a collaborative learning center, the SMART Table enables engaging and motivating small-group learning experiences. Up to eight students can use their fingers intuitively to sweep, slide and spin objects on the interactive screen. The SMART Table's ready-made activities help primary students gain and further their skills in areas like counting and reading.

Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson (Carnegie Mellon University) came up with a way to use any flat surface as a gesture based input device (Scratch input). An absolute breakthrough which makes extraordinary interactions, like for example controlling your television or music player with your wooden kitchen table, possible.

Scratch input is specifically designed to use augmented existing, passive surfaces as an input device. Using a simple sensor which is sticked on the surface, the sound-waves are captured. Due the fact that every movement produces a different sound-pattern, gestures can be recognized.

Although gesture based interacting is really hot at the moment, we still don’t fully use the power of gestures. That’s what London based designer Zinc Chan must have thought when she came up with the gorgeous looking telephone Icono. Her design was based upon the “iconic hand gesture people use to represent the telephone.” When you want to make a phonecall you don’t pick up the handset like on current telephones, but you put the earphone and microphone around your fingers. By making the telephone gesture you create a phone with your hands.

TEI'09 is the third international conference dedicated to presenting the latest results in tangible and embedded interaction.
Computing is progressively moving beyond the desktop into new physical and social contexts. One key area of innovation has been around tangible computing, which pushes the user interface beyond the digital into the physical world by means of mobile devices, graspable interfaces, physical computing, and interactive surfaces. A closely related topic is that of embedded interaction where the everyday objects and environments we interact with are computationally augmented in new ways. Designing such systems requires interdisciplinary thinking. Their creation must not only encompass software, electronics, and mechanics, but also the system's physical form and behaviour, and its social impacts.

Initially we only had a keyboard for the command line and text entry. Then the mouse appeared for navigating two dimensional plains of UI. Now the field of computing has a new input toy to play with; our hands. Touch, multi-touch and gestural computing, also known as Natural User Interface (NUI) has become the newest input craze. Excitement around this has even spurred comments predicting the demise of the mouse in the next 3-5 years1. Computer designers (and engineers) have become engrossed with the ability to touch the screen with multiple fingers and control software by waving their arms. However in this excitement, have designers overlooked how to properly engage users and use multi touch to create useful, innovative, and interesting experiences? Perhaps touch and gesture are simply the new shiny objects in the room, soon to be discarded for the next new thing.

Siftables are small devices which have a graphical display, a number of sensors and wireless communication capabilities. They are small tangible user interfaces which can function individually or in a group, and can be manipulated to interact with digital information and media.

Zipiko lets you see what your friends are planning to do and allows you to quickly invite them to join you.

mixin lets you share your daily activities and intentions to get together more often with your friends