Kleine Linksammlung zu Physical Computing für Jung und Alt

March 25th, 2013 No comments

Physical computing Linksammlug

Für einen Kollegen mußte ich neulich eine kleine Linksammlung über die Maker Szene in Deutschland zusammen stellen. Die Liste ist sicherlich nicht vollständig, liefert dennoch meiner Meinung eine gute Orientierungshilfe in Sachen Physical Computing. Bin um jede weitere Quelle sehr dankbar, daher bitte benutzt die Kommentar Funktion und ergänzt diesen Artikel mit weiteren Quellen bzw. Anlaufstellen.

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Subdisciplines of botany in context of Interface Design

March 11th, 2013 No comments

In my previous post I presented a text collage about the basics of botany. In this blog post I created again a text collage about the subdisciplines of botany for Interface Designer. In my opinion there only four really interesting subdisciplines: Plant perception, plant defense against herbivory, Ethnobotany, and Horticulture. Each subdiscipline has a short description (text collage from wikipedia) what it does and a comment of mine. In the comment I give an argument why I think this topic is important for a deeper research. So here it goes:

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The basics of plants and botany

March 4th, 2013 No comments

As a teenager, I spent too much time on skates, and I did not get teacher message why I should spent time for education. For this reason, my knowledge of biology - especially of plants - is so fucking minor. However, sometimes you got fucked, and then you have to kick your ass by yourself. Still, I am a little lazy m***f***r so the result is more or less a text collage of wikipedia articles. Here it goes:

Definition of plants

Plants,  focus is on green plants (Viridiplantae in Latin), are living organisms of the kingdom Plantae including such multicellular groups as flowering plants, conifers, ferns and mosses, as well as, depending on definition, the green algae, but not red or brown seaweeds like kelp, nor fungi or bacteria.

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Falling in love with REST APIs and Backbone

February 28th, 2013 No comments

How I mentioned in my previous post, there is some stuff that I really like about developing with JavaScript. Especially, working with REST APIs and Backbone is so simple. There just a view steps to do. In my case I have chosen the Qype Rest API. Create your model and define your properties you want to work with.

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Nature – Documents of Contemporary Art (Plants interfaces)

February 20th, 2013 No comments


During my research on Human Plant Interfaces I stumbled on the book "Nature" published by MIT Press and the Whitechapel Gallery. It is a collection of texts (essays, interviews, etc.) about the Contemporary Art history related to the topic Nature. This book is a nice inspiration source for every artist, scientist, developer who is dealing with nature. In my special case I was mainly interested into plants. You can read a short summary of my readings for my master thesis in Human Plant Interfaces: Read more...

Masterthesis: Human Plant Interfaces

February 15th, 2013 No comments

Masterthesis Starter

Since October I am working on my masterthesis about Human Plant Interfaces. I chose this topic because plants are not well researched in an interface design context. Plants are vital for our life but they are very rare in urban environments. In the context of my thesis I will research plants under the point of view of an interface designer. My objective is to find ways for integrating plants more in our daily life. The results of the research will be shared on my blog. I am happy about every feedback and open minded for discussions. At the university I showed a small presentation of my topic, it will give you an idea what I am planning to do.

*** UPDATE: Download the masterthesis here ***

My most important Twitter Messages #15

February 8th, 2013 No comments

Twitter von der hess

A small summary of my Twitter messages from July 2012- January 2013:

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New place – new people – new projects

February 1st, 2013 No comments

More than one year ago I moved from Linz to Berlin. I have never  regretted it. I had and still have many friends here, for skating the city is just great, a lot of things are going on here, especially in media art and of course  more than enough party. So it's definitely enough for not getting bored.

During last 13- 14 month I got involved in some projects with friends and new people. In this blog post I give a short overview of these activities.

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Get in touch with JavaScript

August 26th, 2012 4 comments

Some time passed since this Adobe public relation dilemma about Flex and Flash happened. Honestly, it hit me very hard. Exactly at this time, I was diving deeper into the Flex 4 Component Framework and tried to adapt my new knowledge to Flex Mobile. After some failures and misunderstandings I was on a good way and I was convinced that the (new) Flex 4 Framework is a real step forward for developing User Interface. For this reason, I got a little bit mad about the whole discussion of HTML5 vs. Flex. I expected that HTML5 + CSS3 + JavaScript will come, but not so fast and powerful. However, I got a good opportunity and checked what it is all about this new hype of web technologies. As a Flex and Flash Develeoper the transition to this open standard development approach is not very difficult, except the tooling is like from another planet.  I had the feeling that finding the right tooling is as difficult as finding the appropriate life partner. There doesn't exist an one simple solution for everything like Flash Builder environment. In my case I recommend for writing Code to use the IDE Webstorm, for debugging I am using Firebug for Firefox. Whatever everyone has his own preferences, so decide for yourself what is the best.

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My most important Twitter Messages #14

July 17th, 2012 No comments

Twitter von der hess

A small summary of my Twitter messages from February 2012- July 2012:

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