( (( ((( Spectropolis 2004 ))) )) ) Projects

Spectropolis projects: Jabberwocky by Eric John Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman

About Jabberwocky: As humans we live and interact across a wildly diverse set of physical spaces. We each formulate our own personal meaning of place using a myriad of observable cues such as public-private, large-small, daytime-nighttime, loud-quiet, and crowded-empty. Not surprisingly, it is the people with which we share such spaces that dominate our perception of place. Sometimes these people are friends, family and colleagues. More often, and particularly in public urban spaces we inhabit, the individuals who affect us are ones that we repeatedly observe and yet do not directly interact with – our Familiar Strangers. This project explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar Strangers.

Jabberwocky is a mobile phone application that extends the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and affinities with strangers in pubic places. The principle metaphor of Jabberwocky is that of a "digital scent". As two people approach one another, each person’s individually carried Jabberwocky mobile phone application uses the onboard Bluetooth radio to transparently detect and record the other’s unique identity. In fact the beauty of the application is that it still operates even if the other Bluetooth mobile phone is not running the Jabberwocky application. Every enabled Bluetooth device broadcasts a unique identifier. Over time the Jabberwocky application accumulates a log of unique entries of people that have been previously encountered. Later, as the user crosses through another part of the city, takes the subway, or waits at a street corner, the Jabberwocky application senses nearby groups and crows and renders an abstract real-time visualization of familiarity.

About Eric John Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman: Eric Paulos is a Research Scientist at Intel in Berkeley, California where he leads the Urban Atmospheres project (www.urban-atmospheres.net) – challenged to use provocative methods to understand the future fabric of our emerging digital and wireless urban landscape. Eric also directs the Experimental Interaction Unit (www.eiu.org) which produces physical devices designed to explore the interaction dilemmas between humans and technology. Eric received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley where he researched scientific, and social issues surrounding internet based telepresence, robotics, and mediated communication tools. Eric has developed several internet based tele-operated robots including, Mechanical Gaze in 1995 and Personal Roving Presence devices (PRoPs) such as Space Browsing helium filled tele-operated blimps and ground based PRoP systems (1995-2000) (www.prop.org).

Elizabeth Goodman's design, writing, and research focuses on critical thinking and creative exploration at the intersections of new digital technologies, social life and urban spaces. Her work has been shown at Paris' la Cite des sciences et de l'industrie, as well as at a number ofinternational conferences such as CHI 2003, DIS 2004 and Ubicomp 2004. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute.