In Touch lets users have an ongoing conversation with each other by transmitting color images over the internet.

Mood Base uses a Zigbee radio protocol, where a coordinating Zigbee, is housed within a large glowing orb placed on the floor of ITP. The orb or Mood Base sends out a heart-beat to a call-and-response network of radios in hand-held enclosures within close proximity of the base station. These smaller \”Mesh Pet\” enclosures, in turn, send out their current mood status, determined by a potentiometer controlling pulse (excitement level) and another controlling a range of colorful LED moods. Each of the four pets will have a different personality, augmented by lights, simple sound-generating hardware, and unique fabrication. On the Mood Base the collective mood of the group is summed into a more complex relay-driven light display and vibrating sub-woofer drones, resulting in a playful a communication of light and sound.

Trigr is a project that attempts to get people to think differently about the moments of life they choose to photograph. Most of us only take photos of \”special times\” like holidays and birthdays. Trigr prompts people via text message at random times during the day to \”take a picture\” to capture potentially important information that we don\’t usually document. Trigr is about memory and connecting to others by sharing the ordinary moments of our lives.

iPLATEu is a patent-pending, toll-free communications platform for motorists. Its purpose: to minimize road rage and make driving a safer, friendlier interaction.

The license plate is by far the most popular, publicly-broadcasted unique identifier known to man. But outside of law enforcement circles, it\’s been of very little use to the general public, that is, until now. What the iPLATEu service does, is it uses those imaginary, meaningless characters found on the backs of our vehicles to make a very real connection.

The way the iPLATEu system works is quite simple. All that participants have to do is log on to the iPLATEu website and register their cell phone and license plate number(s) into the database. Now they\’re ready to receive plate calls. And making plate calls is a safe & easy hands-free experience. Just dial 888-iPLATEu and you\’ll be greeted with a voice menu system asking you to speak the license plate number of the motorist you\’d like to connect with. The phone system then searches for the spoken license plate number in its database and intelligently connects your call.

The benefits of an anonymous contact system for motorists are limitless. Drivers can not only start up meaningful conversations with complete strangers during their morning commute, but they can also use this system for very practical applications such as asking any car around them for directions, coordinating parking space swaps in the city or even notifying someone that their parked car is being fiddled with. But the focus of iPLATEu remains its mission to reduce the dangerous effects of road rage by removing the need for any face-to-face confrontation after an incident. By giving drivers a much needed alternative to physical, potentially violent outbursts, iPLATEu keeps motorists at a safe distance apart yet allows them to express their emotions in a more constructive manner.

Congress proposes over 5,000 bills and resolutions every year. When was the last time you read one? You\’re not alone. Even senators and representatives don\’t read them. Some bills are several thousand pages long, and they\’re filled with legalese that no one human can possibly sort through. This means that most bills do not undergo the public scrutiny they should before becoming law.

Using the same software that runs Wikipedia, ReadableLaws.org lets citizens decipher legislation line by line and turn it into plain English. After that, site members can analyze bills and explain their deeper implications. The result is a clear explanation of legislation and a concise, understandable copy of its full text.

While the Internet’s design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web is undergoing a transformation whose promise is user empowerment—but who controls the terms of this new read/write web? The web has followed the physical movement of the city’s social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall.ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web.

By pressing the [Shift] + [Space] keys, a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional interpretations, contextualizations and interventions – which we call Shifts. Users can choose between several authoring tools we’re working to develop – which we call Spaces. Some are utilitarian (like Notes) and some are more experimental / interventionist (like ImageSwap and SourceShift). In the near future users will be invited to map these shifts into Trails. These trails can be used for collaborative research, for curating netart exhibitions or as a platform to facilitate a context-based public debate.

More at www.shiftspace.org/what-is-shiftspace

Mission
The In(ter)ventions Festival provides a forum for new modalities of personal and public interaction within consumer spaces. The Festival wants to bring together a general public being called upon to re-examine their relationship to personal and group resource use, with inventors and in(ter)ventionists who are building new technological and cultural means to do so. Public site specific installations, walks, workshops, and panel discussions will promote conscious-consumerism through direct and indirect action.

About the Festival
The In(ter)ventions Festival is the first festival dedicated exclusively to questioning consumerism through in(ter)ventions. It is a multi-day experience of public site specific in(ter)ventions, walks, workshops, and panel discussions. The festival will feature a variety of projects in public locations around New York City, from small group curated walks to public installations and do-it-yourself workshops. Participants and artists will have the chance to interact and jointly conceive of the future roles of individuals and society in relation to consumerism.

The festival will feature roughly twenty (20) different in(ter)ventions for three (3) days during the Fall of 2007. Most events will take place outside of the festival headquarters but will be tracked with live video feeds so that participants can join in-progress walks and in(ter)ventions, in hopes of capturing the gallery going crowd as well as local residents. This is meant to encourage participation that transforms urban public spaces in meaningful ways. In(ter)ventions invite spectators and participants to recontextualize places and transactions in unconventional ways.

The In(ter)ventions Festival is premised on the observation that inventions create interventions. The influence of invention is often a driving force behind change: often a will to change exists long before the wide adoption of the ability to manifest change appears in popular culture. Within the contemporary cultural context of global warming, natural resource competition, and heightened interdependencies ranging from economics to religion to culture, many activists have turned to building change from the ground up at the same time as large international bodies are searching for the means to do the same. From the success behind Make Magazine, Home Depot, World Changing, and the recent partnership between the National Resources Defense Council and utility giant TXU, people are beginning to embed small changes into their everyday lives not just in terms of using new technologies, but also re-purposing old ones in radical ways. The In(ter)ventions Festival will nurture and capitalize on a growing interest in and awareness of conscious consumer options and reconfigurations for everyday life.

The accumulated content and descriptive information users create on social media sites such as Flickr have the interesting side effect of community self definition. As the Flickr community uploads and tag photos, they are describing what is important to them and organically self defining what they value. Coupling this activity with georeferenced photos allows us to see the most popular tags and photographs for a particular area, to get a feel for the history and social temperature of a space.

My mobile application, CrowdScapes, lets a user explore a neighborhood through the crowd\’s eyes. CrowdScapes value is that it leverages the critical mass of a large community of photo takers and sharers, not just a small subset of power users using a custom application. CrowdScapes can give places a user passes through everyday but doesn\’t really consider a new life and a new possibility. By letting users step outside of themselves and consider what a location means to others, CrowdScapes can give new insight into a place.

The view CrowdScapes provides moves around two core pivots. The ‘familiar view’ shows localized photographs by a participant’s most used tags, it shows the current location through the lens of the participant’s interests. The ‘strange view’ shows the most popular tags and their respective photographs as viewed by the global Flickr crowd.

Indigi-Net investigates ways in which technology can help eliminate the existing layers and bureaucracies separating between those who have, those who need and those who can actually deliver to developing nations. This is a service aimed at creating more meaningful connections between independent travelers and local entities in developing countries by facilitating service and skill exchanges between the two. Indigi-Net takes advantage of technology to help empower locals in developing nations and support these connections made when travelers visit the third world. The service supports a grassroots movement of socially aware travelers, resulting from a change in perspective. Every year millions of people strap on a backpack and go off to see and be part of the world. They visit small villages and remote locations. No one wants to be just a tourist, and many often wish they could do something that could both connect them in a more substantial way to local people and also be truly useful for the local communities. I see these explorers as a potential distribution system of needed resources and information – a perpetual and sturdy link between the remote and the urban, the developed and the third world. Each person has different skills and knowledge that can be used to the local community’s advantage. They are also usually “armed” with mobile phones and cameras, amongst other devices which enable both data storage and communications.

Indigi-Net focuses around three main possibilities for exchange: knowledge, skills and conversation. I believe that each traveler can use their different skills and strength to the benefit of the local communities they visit. This provides foreign visitors a way to truly give back instead of constantly taking from the hosting community. There are endless ways to contribute while traveling; if by having a conversation in English with a local student or even by simply painting a mural on a wall. I believe that a traveler can directly benefit local artisans by uploading photographs taken while traveling to the web and writing information to help promote their webpage, increasing their web presence. One can teach a local businessman how to use Microsoft Word to his advantage; how to format a formal letter to a potential partner, or how to label an invoice. If someone is interested, it is even possible to help paint the decaying walls of a preschool’s playground. The possibilities are endless, and every person can contribute somehow. It is possible to browse through the different needs and exchange possibilities on the Indigi-Net website. Information is fed directly from local entities or from travelers who roam those areas. As a result, instead of simply bringing candy and chocolates, it is possible to gather enough information from the site, providing users with more meaningful exchange opportunities while traveling.

Indigi-Net incorporates mobile phone technology along with online social networking. More than 80% of the world\’s population is covered by the GSM cellular networks , and more than 2 billion people own a mobile phone. Indigi-Net takes advantage of this increasing penetration of the cellular networks. By merging a mobile phone based service with the additional strength that social networking has in connecting between people with similar interests, it is possible to create a powerful tool which is accessible, inexpensive and simple to use. This results in a lower entry barrier, allowing for active participation even from those who do not have internet access, or are computer illiterate. Indigi-Net\’s underlying goal is to empower local communities by facilitating the ability to post and edit data regarding their initiatives online. By letting locals post their own initiatives, it is possible to take that one step further. In this case, technology is used as a tool to encourage connections to take place between locals and travelers and not as the main focus of the service.

When implementing IT related projects in rural locations around the world, throwing technology at the local communities in what is called the “parachuting approach”, is quite common. This method does not take into account social aspects and cultural differences in technological implementations. Implementation of technology is rather a social matter, not only a physical one. Some refer to a “parasite approach”, or parasiting (in contrast to parachuting), where the new technology almost acts like a parasite in the community. It makes an entry with a meager presence, growing and becoming more and more refined as time goes by. Physical implementation is just the first stage of the social implementation, which takes into account a two-way cycle of operation between the technology developers and the local communities.

Independent travelers are usually technology savvy and most of them own mobile phones. Many of them go back and forth between the more urban, central regions and the remote, rural areas. I see great potential in taking advantage of this already existing network of people who are “armed” with technology in addition to a variety of valuable knowledge.
This existing gap, or so called feedback loop, in network terms, is an opportunity; an opportunity to enhance the traveling experience on the one hand by making it more engaging, educational and reaching out to the needs of local communities. While on the other hand, using people’s knowledge and familiarity with technology, as an access method to allow for a more meaningful way for information and services exchange; a physical gateway to some of the services we take for granted by having unlimited and access to the web.

PROJECT GOALS:

I dream of Indigi-Net growing to be a global and actively updated repository of data on local initiatives and exchange opportunities in developing countries. The millions of travelers who roam these nations on a yearly basis would be able to consult this information before heading out on their adventures, similar to the way a Lonely Planet guide book is used. Whole trips could be planned around ‘where I could do what’ for a local cause. With the existing structure of travel-volunteering opportunities, it is unbelievably difficult to gather valid and updated local information before visiting a developing country. Backpackers and independent travelers go to these locations anyhow; almost all take photos and update personal trip journals. I see this data used to help promote local causes. Just by writing about a local organization and placing that text in an online space, it is possible to raise awareness to problems that a community faces. By promoting their initiatives it is possible to get many more people to help them out. This can be seen as a form of micro-philanthropy, allowing foreign travelers to take part in small yet meaningful actions while visiting a country.

I see travelers as agents of change, being able to engage with their hosting communities instead of taking the passive role of a viewer. My hypothesis is that with increasing local information coming from these areas, the connections made between those who have, those who can need and those who can get it there could have a long-lasting positive effect on locals, communities, travelers and local non-governmental organizations.
The immediate project goals for this thesis project are listed below. If successful, this will serve as a proof of concept, which can then be magnified on a much larger scale.

* Focus on a simple, grassroots solution using technology. Prove that a bottoms-up method can also serve as a solution to help lessen the imbalance caused by travel and generally the tourism industry.

* Make sure the system is sustainable and aimed at truly empowering local communities. Finding representatives from the local communities who are willing to participate is a key factor for testing usability of such a system.

* Use technology as a facilitator, not the main focus of this service.

* Simple and cheap to use: the system must be affordable for locals as well as travelers in developing countries.

* Use this written paper as the base-line structure for a grant proposal in order to continue this project either at a university setting, or through a business venture.

* Develop a presentation to promote the idea with possible partner organizations such as airline carriers, Kiva and Lonely Planet, amongst others.

Second language students become better speakers if they practice speaking their target language more often. Unfortunately, most students fear embarrassingly simple and error-prone conversations with \”judgmental\” fluent speakers to the point where they stop practicing. The Language Dialer addresses these issues by offering practice conversations that encourage errors in a safe environment to develop listening and speaking skills. It is designed to encourage practice, rather than teach language lessons. This is an important distinction. It uses telephony and dynamic web technology to foster simulated conversations. The conversations occur over the telephone. This is how it works:
1. The Language Dialer website stores pre-recorded scenes into which a student calls and speaks. A scene is a conversation that follows a specific theme. These themes are designed to mimic everyday conversations, like ordering food in a restaurant. In this example, a student would hear a waiter asking questions, with pauses in between words, that need to be answered. A student controls the topic of conversation – choosing one scene over another to match his comfort level – as a way of encouraging practice. A student can preview a call\’s audio file before calling to eliminate surprises.
2. When ready, a student calls the telephone number, enters the code number that triggers that scene\’s audio file and talks with the pre-recording. This conversation is itself recorded and replayed to the student for review. It is also stored on the student\’s personal page through the Language Dialer.
3. If registered, the student can also email each scene recording to a \”tutor\” – someone close to the student who is fluent in the target language. The tutor can also review the call, and phone in a critique message for the student, to whom it will be emailed.
The Language Dialer uses tutors to create scene files. If a first-time registered student, studying German, for example, needs scenes to call, she can ask her tutor to call the Language Dialer phone number to record the conversation she wishes to practice.