Devices for Electroencephalography (EEG) to map the locus and strength of emotional responses in the brain are now available for a few hundred pounds, eg Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset. Sensors positioned over the wearer’s scalp pick up the minute wave patterns produced by brain activity. According to the advertising: “It uses a set of sensors to tune…More
Author Archives: Richard Coyne
The cultural, social and spatial implications of computers and pervasive digital media spark my interest ... enjoy architecture, writing, designing, philosophy, coding and media mashups.
LOL Security reproduces the trickster function
According to its manifesto, LulzSec is (or perhaps was) an “organization” committed to online hacking because it finds it entertaining: “You find it funny to watch havoc unfold, and we find it funny to cause it. We release personal data so that equally evil people can entertain us with what they do with it.” LulzSec seem…More
Obliquitous computing
Augmented reality has gone mainstream, especially with the distribution and promotion of mobile phone apps such as Aurasma. This handy software exploits the camera feature of your smartphone to superimpose images onto the everyday world of objects as seen on your mobile screen. So with the camera active, I move my iPhone around the living…More
Reality re-structured
Mass media entertainment gives the word “reality” a real hammering. Hammering provides a useful metaphor. One of the ways the empirically minded commonly assert the incontrovertible reality of the world is to thump on something solid. Catching up with just 15 minutes of the BAFTA winning “structured reality” tv show The Only Way is Essex…More
Computer-supported collaborative distraction
Communicating with others via laptop, mobile phone or tablet computer while I’m supposed to be listening to a lecture, contributing to a meeting, or socialising face-to-face can be desperately unproductive, and profoundly anti-social. The cure for a wandering mind is to unplug according to recent reports (THE). But social media can nudge the architectural design studio…More
All watched over by Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand fascinates architects. It’s one of the few novels (and films) with an architect as the central character. Loosely modelled on the heroic figure of Frank Lloyd Wright, it elevates and glamorises architects and buildings, or at least supposedly original and authentic highly creative iconic architects … and architecture.More
I am Spartacus
The perennial tussle between the right to free speech and the right to privacy has a spatial dimension of relevance to any designer. Architects, geographers and planners are acutely aware of the relationships between public and private spaces. Free speech roughly equates to the right of access to a place (eg a city square, the…More
Against understanding
Is it just me, or is everyone losing the plot? I think stories in popular fiction, especially in film and television, are becoming increasingly complicated. There’s still heroism, personalised villainy, archetypes, sentimentality, the triumphant ending, and fidelity to genre and type, but the means of getting to the predictable ending seem ever more convoluted.More
Being practical
The recent raid at Abbottabad has shown President Obama to be a leader capable of decisive action after all, as opposed to just an academic (ie a “dithering nerd-in-chief”), at least according to critical commentators (The Guardian, 7 May 2011, p.21). Having read Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, I’m hard-pressed to think of Obama as an intellectual…More
This is not a hideout
After matching the aerial view of the compound published in Tuesday’s Guardian against Google Maps I soon discovered that the site was already labelled helpfully “Osama Bin Laden’s Hideout Compound.” Presumably, this is a recent annotation.More