The new interfaces are changing the way we interact with computers. In the musical context, those new technologies open a wide range of possibilities in the creation of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). Despite 10 years of research in NIME, it is hard to find artifacts that have been widely or convincingly adopted by musicians. In this paper, we discuss some NIME design challenges, ...

This is a theoretical paper about artifacts that have been designed to enable processes of collaborative knowledge creation and innovation. We refer to these artifacts as Enabling Spaces, and they comprise architectural, technological (ICT), social, cognitive, organizational, cultural, as well as emotional dimensions. The paper claims that innovation is a highly challenging social and epistemol...

The discovery of 24 stone artifacts and two bone tools at the German fluvial site of Untermassfeld associated with a rich vertebrate fauna of the Epivillafranchian provide further evidence of a Lower Pleistocene arrival of early Homo in northern Europe, since results of geological, paleomagnetic and biostratigraphic investigations point to an absolute age of approximately 1.07 million years (ma...

Digital imaging of cultural heritage artifacts has become a standard practice. Typically, standard commercial cameras, often commodity rather than scientific grade cameras, are used for this purpose. Commercial cameras are optimized for plausible visual reproduction of a physical scene with respect to trichromatic human vision. However, visual reproduction is just one application of digital ima...

The eHumanity Project, developed by Indiana University in collaboration with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), aims to create an evolving online cultural repository for the native tribes of the North American continent. By establishing a database from the collections of the Smithsonian Natural Museum of the American Indian and Autry Southwest Museum of the American Indian...

This paper offers a non-representational alternative to semiotic notions of meaning as the designatum of signs, the content of messages, or what a text is about. It derives from considerations of how things — artifacts and objects of nature — could mean something to somebody. Rather than treating things as signs of themselves and thereby undermining the two-world ontology of semiotics, it explo...

In our research, we have been expanding our conceptual and methodological frames of reference as designers, in order to explore the complexity of factors involved in environmental sustainability and the consequent challenges posed for design research. In this paper, we discuss some of these issues in user-centered and sustainable design, drawing out and developing relations to concepts from oth...

Providing information can be expanded to include systems that deliver information-like artifacts. They provide such “things” as advertisements, propaganda pieces, and meme artifacts. Memes are the subject of extensive intellectual debate in science and popular culture because it is claimed that parallels can be drawn between theories of cultural evolution manifested in memes, and theories of bi...

Hispanic women living in the US have a higher rate of later-stage diagnosis of breast cancer, thereby decreasing their chances of surviving the disease. Research shows print materials are more heavily relied on than any other medium to inform this population about early detection and treatment of the disease. Hispanics, moreover, are more likely to read English at below the fourth-grade level t...

Digitization has immense potential to store, preserve, disseminate and redistribute cultural materials, if the materials are captured in a bit stream format so as to enable to access through network for learning and understanding the history and culture of a civic society. Generally these materials are stored in museums or in libraries, but they can be spread over the globe and with the spread ...