My final project is call WhataWaste. It’s a system built specifically for mobile phones to help people get information about street discarded items based on their demands.In order to encourage user participation, the point system and feedback system are implemented to WhataWaste to increase contribution and trustworthy behavior.
link to the presentation slides
Service description:
1. Subscription via SMS allows user to get real time information base on their subscription.
2. Instant Search is an advanced service for qualified users to query the real time information about street discarded items base on their location.
3. Call Help is a service for sending SMS to nearby members base on your location for asking help to carry the item if you can’t make it by yourself. The helper can get points by your recommendation
Question:
Forget about the environment! The goal of my project is to make salvage more convenient, to help people get real-time information about street throwaway and find good stuff easier.
The rules of the system are:
1. Setup
The purpose of making specific application for users to install their cell phone is to regular the format of the location and other detail when users are reporting discarded products. At beginning which means the user don’t have any points, they can get information by browsing website or subscribe via e-mail. Once they start providing content, they will earn points. When the points added up to certain level, they can start using the services.
2. Membership (points system):
“New York, the garbage capital of the world”- Lester R. Brown
You probably don’t know that every year New Yorkers have thrown away hundreds of thousands of tons of perfectly useful items in the city. A recent report prepared for the City of New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY) by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) estimated that more than 700,000 tons of reusables are disposed of in NYC’s system every year at a cost that could exceed $50 million annually (Science Application International Corporation, 2000).
It’s very different from where I come from. In Taiwan it has never been an easy way for people to throw away a perfectly functional piece of furniture so they can go out and purchase a new one. They have to contact the sanitation department first and make an appointment to collect the item. In Taipei, people even have to pay per bag trash collection fee to discard small piece of furniture if it’s not recyclable.
It’s amazing to see the amount of waste New Yorkers produced, however, it turns out to be an interesting phenomenon to adventure those throwaways on the street in New York City. When you walk by high standard living area and see residents throw something away, you might want to check twice to see if it’s really junk. With high standard living quality and pretty good sense of style, rich people tend to discard some of the nicest garbage. If you are lucky, you might find the perfect addition to your pad in one of the dumpsters: from a leather couch to a teardrop glass table or an antique pin-up girl lamp.
Even though there are tons of websites, like craigslist are offering online disposal service, people in New York still throw things away to the street probably because it’s the most quickly easy way to get rid of things, they don’t need to spend time doing post, waiting people’s response. Besides, even now we are in the 21 century, not every person is comfortable using internet, especially those rich elder people.
For the final project, I would like to design a solution for budgeted people who are looking for throwaways in street that still in good condition, to help them get real time information about street discards and make the best use of everything.
The technologies for the solution would be mobile technology, mapping, gateway, web design.
I.Web
1.Information/RSS
Title: mapped up
Developer: Jeroen Wijering
Descriptioin: MappedUp is an application that tracks a large number of RSS news sources and displays their latest items on a world map, geographically and in real-time.
Title: 10×10
Developer: Jonathan Harris
Description: 10×10 scans the RSS feeds of international news sources, and performs a process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories by every hour. It automatically drawn about the hour’s top 100 important words with corresponding images from their source news stories.
2.Information/Search
Title: Etsy
Description: users can search and browse items by colors, treasury, showcase, geolocator, time machine, connections, and categories.
3.Location/mashup/travel
Title: TRAVEL TASSIE
Description: Travel Tassie allows you to plan and book your Tasmania-Australia travel requirements. For those of us who cannot decide where to go and stay, or are unsure as to what is available use the Trip Builder to suggest a unique trip.
II.Physical computing
1.Lighting/Interaction
Title: light brix
Production: HeHe
Description: Modular light system for architecture, which reacts to the electromagnetic fields generated by touch.
2.Sound/Interaction
Title: Tuned Stairs
Designer: Hansi, Federico, Carlo and Andy
Description: it’s an installation in for the Fabrica exhibition at Center Pompidou in 2006. As visitors walk down the stairs leading to the exhibition, their footsteps activate a musical sound. The installation refocuses the attention of the visitor onto their footfalls - allowing them the opportunity to compose their timing, movement, and the resulting melody.
The primary questions that explain what I am trying to discover are as follows:
1. There are tremendous amount of behaviors are already out there, instead of thinking about replacing it, what else can be expanded?
2. Mobile technology has transformed our lives in ways that might have seemed unimaginable only 15 years ago. It has brought tremendous potential and opportunities for designers to enable and deliver messages or contents in ways that could not have been accomplished before. How to use mobile communication to break barriers within our communities by allowing us to communicate at any time, in any place, thus ultimately making us more social beings? How to apply mobile communication within web2.0 to create a new way or improve the current operation of the site that I want to go further?
3. What kind of open sources could fit my needs to build the project? How to put them together with some creative forms that is something new than it was before?
Domians
What are the domains/fields with which your project engages?List keywords, terms, phrases, concepts, industry-jargon, tags that illustrate these domains.
Mashups, hacking, online culture, open source, open APIs, Mobile technology, SMS, web2.0, gateway, content sharing, social network, online community, RSS.
What relationships exist between these domains? Illustrate the domains your project deals with in a Venn diagram.
1. A site can let me upload pictures to find other similar picture in the net. The user can choose the filter condition, such as color, light, shape, texture, etc. I remember I was having a hard time in last semester doing my digital motion homework because I couldn’t find enough series pictures to apply into my footage. Therefore, if there is a site that allows me to search by pictures that would be great.
2. I don’t like shopping online, andI really hate looking for things in different stores and still can’t find them. I would like to see a website that allows me to know where to buy certain things in my neighbor shops or department stores. It should contain picture, price, and description so I can quickly find things I possibly like, or know which store has nothing I am looking for.
3. A site combines with mobile tech to share info about street discard furniture or any throwing away product that is still useful to other people. The users who find something good on street can upload picture and text message to the site. Other registered users who subscribed info with certain requirement, like area, specific item, color, etc will get matched info via email or SMS. The site would allow budgeted people to save money and save the environment, and also make the best use of everything.
It’s amazing to see how internet has changed people’s lives, and social network has brought new kind of participation based on sharing. In web 2.0, the user is the key of the site, Lots of web 2.0 sites no only encourage the user create their own contents, but also stimulate the interaction between user and user. The hottest, biggest, fastest growing sites on the Web - YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia - have one important thing in common: These businesses are all being built on our collective backs. The reason those sites are doing well is because of people use them. If nobody contributed content to those sites, they wouldn’t exist.
Kevin Kelly also fathom the future trend of internet in 2015, “In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing.” I still don’t see that day could be coming so fast within 10 years. But one thing for sure, like Kelly says, “Our machine is born. It’s on”
Space Shooter is a 4-week midterm project of team Helmet for major studio II. It’s a screen-based game with Memsic 2125 accelerometer as controller, and we implemented several motors in the controller and cap as feedback to the user. The game code we adapted is from this site.
We are doing the first stage to integrate accelerometer and motors with the game, and have honor to invite Gaelen to be our first user.
