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🟡 Sci-fi 🔘 Arch

Interestingly, cinema has long served as a testing ground for such ideas. While often dramatized for effect, sci-fi films offer surprisingly sharp insights into what it takes to live on Mars. They explore everything from structural resilience and closed-loop systems to the psychological impacts of isolation and the importance of community. Some even undertake agriculture (potatoes, anyone?). For architects, science fiction becomes a speculative lab where imagination meets problem-solving and storytelling becomes a tool for prototyping the future.

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🟣 SC 🌀 DTech 🔴 HCI

Highlights include the fact that 27 percent of U.S. adults have used VR – up from 25 percent in Wave 8 of the research. 32 percent of those engage monthly, 25 percent do so weekly, and 26 percent daily. However, the engaged behavior of VR users is contrasted by non-users, who signal low interest. Specifically, only 20 percent of non-users report a desire to try VR in the near term.

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🟣 SC 🌀 DTech 🔴 HCI

Google's approach with Android XR devices today is to augment existing phones, not replace them. "I know some people think about glasses one day replacing smartphones," says Izadi. "I think it will be this growing ecosystem approach. But we do feel that XR is going to be the next frontier for Gemini, and for AI."

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🟣 SC 🌀 DTech

Rokid has officially unveiled its latest “AR Spatial” display glasses: a lightweight device capable of projecting a virtual image with a diagonal of up to 300 inches (about 5 meters). At the heart of the glasses are 0.68-inch micro-OLED displays from Sony, delivering a resolution of 1,200P, a 90 Hz refresh rate, and a peak brightness of 600 nits.

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🟠 Des-fi

Design is often seen as a human-driven process, where products, services, and interventions serve as neutral tools for change. However, new materialism challenges this perspective by emphasizing the agency of materials, infrastructures, and systems in shaping society. This article examines the intersection of design, sociology, and new materialist philosophy, exploring how designed artifacts are not merely passive elements but active participants in shaping behaviors, power structures, and cultural shifts. By integrating sociological insights, it calls for a more relational, systemic view of design—one that acknowledges the entanglement of human and non-human forces in the transformation of our world.

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🟠 Des-fi

Design is at a threshold—caught between collapse and renewal. As the complexity of today’s challenges grows, traditional design methods are no longer enough. Climate breakdown, social inequality, and collapsing systems expose the limits of human-centred thinking in addressing wicked problems. The future, like a layered dream, unfolds unpredictably, revealing multiple possibilities.

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🟣 SC 🌀 DTech

In 2024, Qatar Airways, a frequent winner of the World’s Best Airline award, released its AI “social media ambassador,” Sama (meaning “sky” in Arabic), at the travel conference IBT Berlin. At the start of 2025, Sama was brought to the public with the Instagram profile @SamaOnTheMove. The word “human” comes up more times than you would probably guess for a release about an AI product.

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🟣 SC 🔴 HCI

Surface electromyography (sEMG) technology at the wrist represents the next groundbreaking way for people to control devices throughout their day. This non-invasive wrist device senses and interprets muscle activations that can be used as computer inputs in the form of a human-computer interface (HCI). This will enable people to control their devices “on-the-go” using simple, easy, and expressive input—without needing to shift their attention to a touchscreen or another physical input device.

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