Tag: Design

Complicating simplicity: Rube Goldberg Machines connected through the internet
Sep 30

Complicating simplicity: Rube Goldberg Machines connected through the internet

Fig 1. The self-operating napkin (September 1931) \’gold,berg\ adjective.
A comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation. — Webster’s New World Dictionary  In the early 1900s, the cartoonist Rube Goldberg drew a series of mechanical chain-reaction illustrations in a bi-weekly series called “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Butts,” which consolidated as…

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New Paper: Rethinking Appropriation in Global HCI (#CHI2024)
Apr 23

New Paper: Rethinking Appropriation in Global HCI (#CHI2024)

In a new CHI 2024 paper titled “Air/time Travel: Rethinking Appropriation in Global HCI and Futures of Electronic Exchange,” we study technology transformations in Africa and other parts of the Majority World [1] (preprint here). We foreground an earlier informal practice of airtime exchange, where people ingeniously traded airtime (phone credits) for cash. In the…

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Typing Gayogohonǫˀnéha:ˀ
Mar 29

Typing Gayogohonǫˀnéha:ˀ

The Gayogohó:nǫˀ Indigenous people (named -mispronounced- Cayuga by the English and American settlers) have a longstanding relationship of more than 13.000 years with the Cayuga Lake region, where the main campus of Cornell University is situated (Cornell University, 2021). This history includes a critical and painful event in 1779 when soldiers from the American armed…

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