Untethered & Reaching for the Lifeline: Why Location is Still Essential
November 22, 2005

I’m sitting on the beach in Brazil working for a company located in Hong Kong and earning U.S. dollars. The tweak I’m making to our Internet math company’s question-selection algorithm isn’t that complex, but it will insure that each question delivered to our students is personalized and challenging. The work is engaging and important, and the beach is a great place to ideate creative solutions.

I’m certainly taking advantage of the untethered life that technology has afforded me. However, while my life proves one half of the equation – that location is irrelevant – I aim to create technological applications that presuppose the opposite: that location is essential.

Untethered and Reaching for the Lifeline
Here in Brazil a number of technologies keep me “close” to family, friends, and co-workers. My mom loves to “Skype,” and I enjoy the weekly iChat sessions with my nephews in Chicago. The Minnesota Stories podcast and the online archives of A Prairie Home Companion keep me in touch with my Minnesota ties. Meanwhile, I use the Web to take my friends on a virtual ride through everyday Brazil, posting stories and videos on my site in hopes of persuading them to come visit.

Innovations such as these have freed us from many geographical constraints, connecting us with loved ones and like-minded peers around the world. However, these applications still lack the richness of face-to-face interactions and unfiltered first-hand experiences. Moreover, in tying us to our desks, they interrupt rather than augment our daily routines, inhibiting our ability to forge new relationships with our neighbors and limiting our opportunities for interpersonal contact in the physical realm.

Location-based Technologies: Serendipity Gets a Nudge
So how can the benefits of new technologies be leveraged to enhance our real-world social interactions? Purveyors of the next wave of location-aware devices and applications think they have the answer. As Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, comments:

Location-sensing wireless organizers, wireless networks, and community supercomputing collectives all have one thing in common: They enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before.

Indeed, as the cost of GPS devices has dropped and mobile phones have integrated location-awareness capabilities, applications have sprouted up that use location information to change how we interact with each other and our environments.

Some examples: Building upon the concepts of the Japanese Lovegety phenomenon of the late-1990s, mobile social softwares (so-called “MoSoSos”) such as Dodgeball and Meetro are giving serendipity a nudge, alerting users when a fellow Black-Eyed Peas lover is in the area, and letting the new friends take it from there. Another service called PlaceSite uses existing wireless technologies to augment the Internet café experience, facilitating face-to-face interactions for those within the café. Some new open-source initiatives like Flickrgraph, Geobloggers, and themidnightcoders’ AJAX chat application also inject the concept of place into their programs, changing how we perceive the exchange of information over the Web. Other recent explorations such as Flash Mobs and ImprovEverywhere forgo the computer entirely, creating seemingly spontaneous real-world collaboration exercises that enrich the social fabric.

Augmentative technologies such as these will surely enable richer real-world interactions with our neighbors, but more than likely there will also be some growing pains. As with any nascent technology, where there are spectacular opportunities there often lurk hazardous side effects. Acknowledging this fact, I want to research these emerging location-based technologies and develop my own applications to enrich our daily routines and our social relationships.

Experiences in Social Change through Creative Problem Solving
Over the past decade I have been cultivating a broad set of skills required to develop novel solutions for the social good.

At Cornell’s Department of Design & Environmental Analysis, I balanced my human-behavior-based design program with a heavy dose of research on the relationship between environments and human welfare. Through classes such as Sheila Danko’s “Making a Difference: By Design” and Paul Eshelman’s studio course designing educational play-spaces for Ithaca pre-schools, I learned a design process that acknowledges human tendencies and elicits hidden aspirations to create socially responsive environments. At the same time I had the opportunity to do extensive field research and data analysis in Gary Evans’ longitudinal research project exploring the relationship between housing environments and children’s well-being. The profound experience of working with children in poverty led me to pursue an honor’s project exploring the aspects of space (density, secrecy, personalization) that help these children cope with their multiple stressors.

Upon graduation from Cornell, I continued my efforts to effect social change through technology by using my creative problem-solving skills to help build PLANETii (www.planetii.com), a start-up company aimed at rethinking K-12 math education using the Internet. Capitalizing upon our multi-cultural connections and passion for education, the co-founders and I set out to create a personalized interactive math experience for children and a worldwide progress assessment tool for their parents. We approached the challenge as we would any complex problem, researching extensively and using our findings to build a prototype to test and revise.

My role in the company expanded as the company grew, starting with research and curriculum work, continuing to back-end algorithm development, and extending to user-experience building and team management. As the company began, I acted as the user research coordinator, leading focus groups, attending classes, and conducting “vision sessions” with children and teachers to discover their motivations and unique perspectives on learning. We also looked into various international mathematics curricula, fusing them into a “super-curriculum” of interconnected math topics. Combining this “networked” curriculum with our heuristic-based topic-selection algorithm enabled us to provide our students with personalized topic recommendations based on their past performance.

My work in curriculum and algorithm development was instructive as our team sought to create an interactive world for the user experience. Capitalizing on the networked aspect of the curriculum, we represented each learning category (such as Measures or Numbers) as a separate world whose environment grew as the child completed math topics—it was a simple solution that rewarded our students’ hard work and motivated them to practice more.

Today PLANETii is an international (and multi-lingual) math practice service that helps parents track their children’s progress against their peers around the world. My role in the heuristic-based topic-selection algorithm and question-selection algorithm continues to this day, even commandeering my thoughts as I try to relax on the beach.

Through my personal projects I have also challenged myself to think creatively.

In the spring of 2000, I sent a gift of $20 to each of twenty friends to do with as they pleased, but with a simple message that “a gift is meant to be given.” I had been seeking to identify more creative uses for my charity money, and my friends responded impressively. They grew my $400 up to $680 and donated the money to various causes, from surfing charities to animal rights organizations to university scholarships.

As a volunteer last year at B.J. Fogg’s Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford (captology.stanford.edu), I worked with the research group on a project to persuade people to try a mobile text reader (BuddyBuzz) that flashed one word at a time on a cell phone’s screen. This difficult task was accomplished through a re-branding of the service as a community reader, motivating group members to read more and share the stories they enjoyed.

I have spent the last year in Brazil learning Portuguese and mastering the art of churrasco (Brazilian barbecue) in an effort to connect with my Brazilian roots. My “Black Beans & Rice” everyday experiences are being documented on my website (iid8.com), comprising stories, pictures, videos, and a special “digit$” section devoted to illuminating the differences in cost of living between Brazil and the U.S.

As I continue to learn more programming languages over the next year, I will be using the webspace at iid8.com to launch unique explorations into social networks, collaborative design, and multi-national social work projects.

Guerrilla Giving (…and Other New Ideas)
My experiences over the past few years have led me to focus on the intersection between geography, technology, and human behavior. In this process I have developed some ideas for projects that use location-based technologies to change how we interact and build community.

The Semidat.foto project would give people access to any photo taken in their immediate vicinity and made public by friends (or strangers). The service would be time-sensitive as well, creating a no-effort virtual photolog of one’s experiences and effectively quieting the incessant “Can you send me that picture?” party requests.

TraveLounge would provide a social networking service for salespeople and other frequent travelers, linking them not only by their social connections (which are numerous but often superficial), but also by their “close encounters” in airports around the world. When passing through an airport at the same time as fellow member, a connection is made. One’s “travel buddy” network could then be superimposed over a “travel world” of frequented locales, linking people who share particular routes and who deal with the peculiarities of life in the cities and countries along those routes.

Perhaps the most ambitious and socially delicate project in mind is anonDOT, the “guerrilla giving” project. Combining aspects of Flash Mobs and guerilla marketing with anonymous giving, anonDOT would create unconventional projects that provide anonymous assistance to community projects that lack sufficient resources.