gyulasimonyi.com

input output

2011-05-13T23:00:00.000+01:00

sent from my android.

taxi call

2011-02-28T15:55:00.000+00:00

Singapore - designated, marked place for taxi wait queue. Button to call car. Regulated, clean, sterile.

As I learned from one of the drivers there, taxis in Singapore are considered part of the public transport system and as such, are well regulated. From a user perspective, one of the best run taxi services in the World. In a Singapore taxi, you can be sure that you'll get a polite service, that you'll end up where you wanted to go, you'll pay the fair price (no running meters, no taking you around town kinda scams..). In other recent destinations (Vietnam, Ireland), taxi experience is infinitely more saturated.

This button serves one purpose, instructions clear. Only if you notice it though.

sent from my android.

Layered expressions

2011-02-22T18:01:00.000+00:00

sent from my android.

customization sans request

2010-11-21T02:28:00.000+00:00

Self-loading cargo

2010-10-22T03:42:00.001+01:00

Found in the fascinating album about the construction of the Rarotonga airport.

If you fancy seeing more updates from our ongoing round the world trip, lift this blog into your reader list.

sent from my android.

stencil science

2010-10-18T09:55:00.002+01:00

parallel past and present

2010-10-11T09:33:00.002+01:00

embedded art

2010-10-05T21:55:00.001+01:00

Vilnius is a city featuring a vibrant, lively amateur art scene - and serving as the canvas for it too. What are the policies, practices, rules, spaces that a city's leaders should think of, for the city to shape/endorse such a culture.

urban canvas II.

2010-10-01T09:55:00.003+01:00

Drawing on the wall - city center, Vilnius, Lithuania.

urban canvas I.

2010-09-28T22:04:00.001+01:00

Writing on the wall - city center Vilnius, Lithuania.
Pointing my smartphone on these, I was wondering, how many 'likes' did this piece get, who favorited it, how many people shared it with their various social circles, how many thumbs ups/downs did it get, and of course what comments people had about it - wanna add mine too. Also would be nice to know the creator, date of creation, other nearby works.. not to mention the track the graffiti artist listened to while working on it..

photos: htc nexus one, android 2.2

crowdsourced sensor

2010-09-20T22:54:00.003+01:00

Malahide, Ireland.
sent from my android.

professions: escalator help desk

2010-04-12T15:17:00.002+01:00

The lady in between the escalators with the phone? solving puzzles?

This is one of the oldest escalators in Kyrgyzstan, in a shopping center in Bishkek. At every turn there is a lady, with the phone, ready to escalate any problems with the escalator.

prison break for real

2010-02-11T17:30:00.014+00:00

Photo: A4 size paper asking citizens' assistance in catching a prison escapee, at a highway McDonald's somewhere between Boston and New York.

Seriously. In 2010, at least put a QR code, so people can load this info to their smart phone.

efforts to regain trust

2010-02-04T15:12:00.000+00:00

The child abuse scandals ridden church in Ireland now begins events in the church with drawing churchgoers' attention to the child protection policy, and the location where it hangs on the cold walls, near the entrance.

While the introduction of such policies and establishment of complaint hotlines might work in rebuilding people's trust, and even preventing child abuse from happening, it certainly leaves intact the systemic, institutional reasons behind the 'eventful' past of priests in Ireland.

illegal eligibility

2010-01-30T20:36:00.001+00:00

The dynamics of...

Provision of trust and a body modified by (sometimes illegal) substance, in return for anonymity and money, for the purpose of studies, clinical testing of drugs, etc.

Photos: ads from the Voice (NYC weekly free magazine)

alternative currency for charity

2010-01-25T14:38:00.001+00:00

Photo: bus ticket collecting box in a Dublin elementary school.

Buses in Dublin take only coins, and give no change. However, if you have to overpay, the difference is printed in your ticket as a 'refund', that you can claim at the Dublin Bus office.

Since most people don't make the way to this office for the 10-20-30.. cents per ticket, they are more willing to drop it in a charity box than real Euros. Actually such 'charity collection' can be also perceived as a service provided, people happily unload their tickets from their wallets.

As an unintended side effect, this public transport fare payment system fosters the giving mood in the city. Wonder if it was foreseen at design.

enraging waste of keyboard real estate

2010-01-21T14:20:00.034+00:00

Most people never/very rarely use CapsLock. Some people really hate it even. A few will even go as far as self-handedly customizing their keyboards.

Interesting to see how some features from the birth of computing still haunt around and weather the lightning fast evolution of technology. Think slide presentations for example.

rule #17: enjoy the little things

2010-01-17T14:16:00.002+00:00

luggage compartment on the heathrow express on an early january day.

the war against/for waste

2009-12-29T15:56:00.000+00:00

This waste bin on the Sandymount DART station in Dublin promises that 70% of its content will be recycled. Nice to see, but far from a perfect solution.

From the marriage of increasing primary resource scarcity, hiking landfill prices, growing social awareness on one side and cheap-accurate-invisible object tracking on the other, hopefully soon we will see a transparent and precise, granular yet simple solution.

Today you pay for waste disposal at home, by the bin. Not when using public bins.
Imagine:
- paying for throwing away anything, anywhere.
- different micro-payments for each piece of waste at disposal, based on recycling-ease, material-value, total-volume-per-person-per-month, sorting.
- paying the harshest price (unsorted, etc..) up front at purchase for everything, to then get refunded for the difference (if any) at disposal.

Such system could encourage:
- making the effort to sort over not-sorting,
- buying (therefore also producing) packaging-light products, favoring easily recyclable materials, methods,
- fixing, reusing goods over throwaway culture,
- growing local, composting-biodegrading.

transparency, using social media

2009-12-15T10:04:00.030+00:00

Businesses use the web and social media for communicating with customers in colorful ways, and with various purposes.

A particular purpose of such communication can be transparency, revealing section(s) of the background process(es), that usually remains hidden.

Some examples that I saw recently:
- Angavallen, a Swedish eco farm shows its pigs proudly on flickr
- Pastrami, a restaurant in Budapest offers a live webcam feed from their kitchen on their website.

Photo: extra attentiveness on Pastrami's website shows that parking is free, dogs are welcome and served with water, wifi is free, mobile chargers are on stock, there is place for changing diapers and of course there are child seat and toys available, and also that bike path leads to the restaurant.

tweeting in your sleep

2009-12-07T15:35:00.001+00:00

being off the grid.

for you:
how many hours a day? days a year?

for you:
not tweeting/blogging/chatting/following for some time by choice? versus deprived of connection and truly hard/impossible to reach due to circumstances?

sleep = off the grid. now maybe.

but how long before your unconscious will write posts and tweets, chats around while you are asleep?

what risks/opportunities are involved in opting-in to a true 24/7/365 connectedness? what changes will the connected unconscious bring to social concepts such as political transparency, corruption, crime, trust, faith, business, etc.

photo: long exposure experiment on a midnight rooftop, Hyderabad, India

connected: adam wilson tweets using brainwaves.

body embedded technology

2009-12-04T13:40:00.005+00:00

photo: basic words in kyrgyz, written up on a napkin, kept in back pocket for a trip.

language skills are essential. fluent english is a must, mandarin, spanish, japanese, german and others come as a plus.

how long until good enough autotranslation is integrated real time into any conversation via voice recognition, text-to-speech technologies (in the cloud) and invisible devices?

when can we expect such solutions becoming mainstream enough to render language skills as something nice-to-have, as opposed to must-have today?

having a voice recognizing device, connected to the cloud, invisibly and constantly available for you, also enable possible side effects, such as:
- all your conversations recorded for you in the cloud
- tweets, posts, status updates are born through dictation on-the-go
- you can ask your questions any time in any language, you will get the answer from Google instantly, read out for you, in your language. imagine the perspective for illiterate people.

immigrant population patterns

2009-11-29T11:15:00.084+00:00

Photos from Lithuanica, the store for Lithuanian and some Polish products (mainly food), in a Dublin city center mall.

The patterns of service and societal layers crystallizing around sizable immigrant populations.

The size of an immigrant population as a factor in:
- how actively will its members look for, socialize with each other,
- how they are regarded by locals (on the scale from a positive color, exotic quests, towards a threatening intruder),
- how developed and concentrated are the service institutions (appearance of national stores, services like barbers and cleaners, restaurants, and the unofficial labels such as lebanese street, china town, arab district, etc).

micro regulation

2009-11-25T11:15:00.033+00:00

This traffic regulation sign near a one-off street music event (Copenhagen), is very narrow in scope. Limits only one kind of behavior, only on one street section, and only for 10 hours on one given date.

How long until such micro regulations will be factored in real time for turn-by-turn navigations, such as Google's for Android phones?

low range urban status message

2009-11-22T11:15:00.004+00:00

Looking for open signals in range on a Copenhagen corner. Using your wifi network name as a messaging platform.