Super busy at the moment but I’m delighted to announce “BumpList: An Email Community for the Determined” (my project in collaboration with Jonah Brucker-Cohen) is back online after being offline for 4 years! So now is your chance to join the email community that had most people scratching their heads and wondering what happened to email as they knew it.

Join the list here!

We’ve put it back online because it’ll be showing in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) as part of “The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now” from November 8, 2008, through February 8, 2009. Press release for the show is here.

Other artists in the show include “bramović/Ulay; Vito Acconci; Francis Alÿs; Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier and Bruce Tomb (former members of Ant Farm); John Baldessari; Joseph Beuys; Blank & Jeron and Gerrit Gohlke; George Brecht; Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Mike Bennett; John Cage; c a l c and Johannes Gees; Janet Cardiff; Lygia Clark; Minerva Cuevas; Maria Eichhorn; VALIE EXPORT; Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin; Fluxus Collective; Jochen Gerz; Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz; Matthias Gommel; Felix Gonzalez-Torres; Dan Graham; Hans Haacke; Lynn Hershman Leeson; Nam June Paik; Allan Kaprow; Henning Lohner and Van Carlson; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; Tom Marioni; MTAA (M.River and T.Whid Art Associates); Antoni Muntadas; Yoko Ono; Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv; Raqs Media Collective; Robert Rauschenberg; Warren Sack; Mieko Shiomi; Torolab; Wolf Vostell; Andy Warhol; Stephen Willats; and Erwin Wurm.”

Enjoy, next week regular blog posting will resume.

If you only ever subscribe to one podcast then I cannot recommend WNYC’s marvelous Radiolab enough. Over the last few months I’ve been listening to their back catalogue – science radio at its very best. A dash of depth, a dash of humor and lots of interesting diverse topics. It always leaves me delighted and wondering could I do research in that field, and that field, and that field. Boo, there’s never enough time for all the interesting things in the world!

What’s cooking in Research and Development at IBM, Microsoft and HP.

Blog-a-licious 3 Quarks Daily – An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature.

Zoomii reminds me of my old MLE project Media Dive. Media Dive was a graphical and audio ZUI for browsing large collections of music, where I played around with integrating zooming with controlling exposure to multiple spatially arranged audio sources. One feature of Media Dive enabled you to zoom towards a song/album to select what music to hear while also increasing (or zoom out to decrease) the music’s volume.

Fifty years of DARPA: Hits, misses and ones to watch.

Sit back and watch the addictive flickrvision. flickrvision is a spatial photo visualisation that shows photos on Google Maps as the photos are uploaded to flickr.

Jump around jump around and smile Where the Hell is Matt?

Neat – Kickable self-reassembling robots. (thanks Graham)

Get some insight into how Google approaches usability and HCI in the talk The Art and Science of User Experience at Google.

An amusing ad. Have you ever felt like that forward thinking little girl when explaining some far out research and design concepts?

Affordances – a common usability term. Do you mean Gibson’s or Norman’s sense of affordances?

Just a quick blog note: For the last few weeks I’ve only posted a weekly Link Bucket. A lot of my time and energy is going into writing up my HCI PhD (woohoo!). Every week I’ll continue sending interesting links your way BUT for the next while I won’t be writing longer speculative and reflective pieces. Got to keep focused.

Lovely overview about The History Of Visual Communication.

A bunch of interviews with User Experience pioneers.

Can you touch it? Workshop on designing multi-touch interaction techniques for displays (thanks Aaron). Invent a new interaction technique for the likes of Microsoft’s Surface and the DiamondTouch.

Can you sing it? World’s First HCI Rap

Chill out and sketch a personal kaleidoscope. Interactive realtime feedback on how your design changes over time.

A very funny spoof paper discussing “The Etiology & Treatment of Childhood“. Found via Mind Hacks.

ThinkCycle: Open Collaborative Design is a small follow up related to yesterdays post about Personal Fabrication. Its a community based around sharing designs usable in personal fabs. We’ll probably see a lot more like-minded communities over the coming years?