Corvus Consulting

A rare personal note to the blog today, letting you know that the Illuminares festival happens tomorrow. Also known as the Lantern Festival, this Public Dreams Society production is a signature summer event for Vancouver locals, and one of the purest community experiences I’ve ever seen. I’ve used my summer posting to the Slow Blog project to reflect on the personal and public value in this utterly unique event, and to announce that I’ve recently joined the society’s board of directors.

It’s an amazing event produced by an amazing group of people. It’s a chance to enjoy a family-friendly, non-corporate and truly memorable event. For those interested in technology, culture and the arts, it’s a chance to see how low-tech can create high-grade experiences, and to witness an emerging tradition of even documentation by attendees through cellphones, photos, and blogs.

Over the holidays, I decided to make 2009 a year to explore the more physical side of interaction design. That thought is largely inspired by the Touch platform found in the iPhone and iPod Touch, and to some extent in the trackpad gestures showing up in the latest Macbooks. It’s also driven by my belief that interaction design is going to become a much more physical enterprise with… the rise of robots! Woooo…. read on, for more than ironic futurism gags.

The most common real-world automaton is still the single-purpose robot: assembling in factories, exploring on Mars, vacuuming the living room. The robot’s current lot seems to be one of dangerous places and mundane business. In other words, what people don’t like to or can’t be around.

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Today is a big deal in the United States. In the midst of this historic election, there’s a lot of anxious uncertainty around the reliability of the voting process as it adapts to new technologies. At home in Vancouver, we find ourselves in the tail end of a streak of elections, from the federal level to the municipal (and likely the provincial before too long), so I’ve found myself reading and thinking about how elections work as a technology.

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