1 Invisible Bridges Design and prototype an ‘invisible bridge’: an interactive system allowing people to construct social and/or cooperative relationships. The system is accessed by mobile phone. Focus is on Venice.
For this project:
• ‘Interactive’ means that the user does not passively receive information but contributes to the constantly changing information available to other people through the system
• ‘Mobile phone’ means a communicator that can be held in one hand or stored in a pocket, not a laptop. Mobiles and palmtops can now (or soon) take and send photos, sounds and moving images; receive RSS updates; detect pollution and radiation; read RFID tags and graphic codes like Semacode; act as a ticket or card to debit or charge accounts; locate themselves with GPS. You can also use them to talk to people. You may design for mobiles with any or all of these functions, or with others you invent
• ‘Venice’ means the historic centre, the Comune’s territory, or the region.
2 Social capital Friendship, shared interests, and common civility between strangers: these are examples of ‘social capital’ (as opposed to the institutional and economic capital of laws, governments, companies and so on). Society dies if it cannot generate social capital. This ability of people to construct networks of relationship with other people depends on ‘trust, reciprocity, information and cooperation’ (Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, 2000).
Social-capital networking can be used, among other things:
• To exchange information – like gossip, exchanging scandalous news, or advising a friend how to cook a fish, or telling a tourist how to find the station
• To exchange favours – like baby-sitting circles or lending a lawnmower to a neighbour
• To find or maintain a social relationship, perhaps romantic, or a community of interest, like support for a team
• To enjoy life with other people.
Social-capital networks are defined as ‘bonding’ if they connect people within the same group (similar age, race, interests etc.) and ‘bridging’ if they link between different groups.
3 Social capital media The links in these networks were originally maintained by face-to-face conversations, requiring the interlocutors to be physically in the same place. Later media – letters, or calls between fixed phones – permitted remote networking. But a common complaint, on the street and in newspapers, is that social capital is decreasing: that, both in and outside cities, people are becoming more lonely, more confined within social ‘ghettos’, less willing to converse and collaborate with strangers, and less civil.
This project aims to exploit recent computing and telecommunication technology to generate social capital: to enrich people’s lives through a network-enabled service permitting cooperation and the growth of friendship and civility. Currently, such services are mostly accessed from the PC: output is mostly visual, by a large screen, and input is mostly tactile, by a large keyboard. The project focuses on a more difficult design task: the mobile phone.