What about a scarf or collar so the back of your neck prickles when somebody is talking about you on Twitter. Or a ghost detector for homes, restaurants, etc that glows when someone is "visiting" in Google Maps/Facebook Pages or looking through a webcam? Maybe it would be better to control the air conditioning to produce a chill, or play barely audible infrasound, indications that there is a haunting in progress and the veil here is thin. A look at the ubiquitous computing work that Bret Victor has been doing over the past few years at Dynamicland. Map reading is a complex and uniquely human skill, not at all obvious to a young child. You float out of your body and into the sky, leaving behind the point of view you’ve been accustomed to all your life. Your imagination turns squiggly blue lines and green shading into creeks, mountains, and forests seen from above. Bringing it all together in your mind’s eye, you can picture the surroundings.

Seamful design involves deliberately revealing seams to users, and taking advantage of features usually considered as negative or problematic. House of Lords - AI in the UK: ready, willing and able? Design fiction from the UK parliament. I mean, it’s not exactly a classic of speculative fiction, but it sure beats a white paper. There’s this idea that our homes - and our lives, and our workflows, and everything, really - should be micromanaged and accessed through technology, but, like many new experiments, this kind of technological advance has little actual real-world benefit. Like many new experiments, smart home technology is a perceived convenience masked as a wild hair - it’s advancement because we can, not because we need to. A lyrical assessment of the current state of home automation. Things are getting really smart on their own, but they’re still struggling to interact as a community - the promise of a smart home falling short because our appliances can’t draft a cohesive constitution.

What’s more, we ourselves are struggling to modulate our reaction to these gadgets. We’re getting excited about automated lights and GlycoMode supplement pretending the future has already come. An interesting Xerox-PARC-like project dedicated to making a programmable platform out of paper and other physical objects. A humane dynamic medium embraces the countless ways in which human beings use their minds and bodies, instead of cramming people into a tiny box of pixels. Jonathan takes a look at the physical web. Like me, he’s excited by the possibilities. Sadly, my mind quickly devolved into the annoyance of numerous notifications, like popup windows and other distracting adverts, vying for my attention. This is a common worry with the physical web, but it’s unfounded. All a beacon does is broadcast a URL. You have to actively look for the URLs being broadcast-they can’t send notifications. It all just feels like QR codes. They’ll be all over the place and most of them won’t be very useful.

I understand this concern, but whereas QR codes are completely opaque to humans, at least URLs can-and should-be human-readable … QR codes, a URL can give you some idea of what awaits. In web development, we have this concept of progressive enhancement, which means that you start by building websites with the very most basic blocks - HTML elements. Then you enhance those basic elements with CSS to make them look better, then you add JavaScript to make them whizzy - the benefit being that if the JS or the CSS fail to load, you’ve still go the basic usable blocks underneath. I’m following this same principle in the house. Related: this great chat between Jen Simmons and Stephanie Rieger. But we are promised and shown a world where technology is gorgeous and streamlined and helpful and light and unobtrusive. We don’t live in that world. That world is a fantasy. The hope that the Internet of Things will allow us to be free from GlycoMode Daily Support headaches and logistical errors is naive.