May 3-7, 2005
Thesis Presentations
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| FoundCity | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | John Geraci | |
| Instructor: | Barton, Jake | |
| Class: | Final Project Seminar | |
| URL: | http://www.foundcity.net | |
| FoundCity allows people to collaboratively map their city with folksonomy tags via cellphone, and defines a new social practice, termed folkmapping. | ||
| What are the features in your personal city? How do they compare to my personal city? How do the things we like about the city overlap, or relate to each other? Can you share your discoveries from the streets with others who have similar interests, and at the same time discover their found locations? FoundCity is a tool for collective mapping of public urban space. People using it tag spaces they find interesting with keywords, and these spaces are then grouped with other places tagged with the same words. By entering a specific keyword into your cellphone, you can retrieve a list of ALL of the places in the city marked with that keyword. | ||
| Personal Statement: | I\'m interested in social aspects of computing, and in particular in ways in which network technology and physical location can be combined to offer new opportunities for social interaction. | |
| Context: | My most recent project was called Grafedia. The way I saw the project, and the way I explained it to others, was that it was \'turning walls into webpages\', allowing users to write \'hyperlinks\' on any physical surface in the world. The project was about creating a link between the physical world and the Web. For my thesis, then, I began by taking this idea a step farther, asking, \"what if we just linked physical surfaces to one another, and did away with the web entirely\"? (or as much as was possible, given that technology was needed to do this). This was the initial thought from which FoundCity spring. | |
| Audience: | Everyone with an interest in discovering the unknown in their city. | |
| User Scenario: | User finds something interesting in the city, uses her cell phone to submit info about that thing to FoundCity. That thing gets plotted to a map online, which other people can reference by folksonomic keyword. | |
| Methodology: | Web server receives messages from cell phones and plots data from them to a Google map. Cell phones can also request info on what has been tagged with folksonomies near them. | |
| Sources: | del.icio.us
www.flickr.com Smartmobs | |
| Conclusions: | The idea of \'linking physical places to each other\', while not necessarily desireable or even possible in the literal sense, is nonetheless a useful model to work from, which can yeild interesting results with a high degree of utility. | |