Instant Places

I'm currently rewriting my Expresion of Interest, and intend to shortly begin what is essentially a design activity, proposing a number of systems to promote spontaneous interaction within the school. In the course of some further reading I came across this article from IEEE by a team from Microsoft.

There project used people in a bar's own private Bluetooth devices to drive a display screen, based purely on the names they assigned their smart phone or laptop. At its most basic, the display would show the name as a form of avatar, but could also read tags to draw in photo streams from sites such as flickr, and in later implementations could filter tags based on popularity within a time frame and place relevant information to the fore.

Ultimately whilst never setting out what users were meant to do or to achieve, the project created a system where by users could create an online space through their interactions rather than by design. The notable thing from my point of view is the recorded upsurge in activity before and after the project went live; people in a purely social context wanted to join this rudimentary social network.

I think a similar system could be an interesting proposal within the school and go a long way towards promoting the sort of spontaneous interactions I believe could be of benefit to students. I would be interested in looking at expanding the idea to look at drawing avatars together to trigger more tangible interactions, and could also see some interesting mapping emerge from such a project.