This Matt Jones talk at TechnoArk introduces the idea of Mujicomp, the widespread use of simple, interactive, and social gadgets. It’s a speculation about where the future of hand-held devices might be heading. Jones offers some examples of items that are almost there, but doesn’t really offer a good idea of what the object might be that would really be mujicomp. Fon is close, but not quite what I think he has in mind. (Muji is a popular Japanese retail store that is now global. They sell inexpensive, popular consumer goods and stuff for your house).
While tracing the history of ideas that led him to mujicomp, Jones touches on the 60s-era architectural group archigram, Guy Debord‘s theory of psychogeography, smart cities, and how people moving through the urban space create their own information architecture (we just don’t capture that information very well). An example of the latter is the Open Street Map project.
It’s an interesting talk, full of nifty ideas, and one of his examples of a social artifact prompted a speculative social object of my own.
Jones talks about his company’s Availabot, which seems destined to never make it to market, but is a nice representation of what he means by social object. The availabot is a little toy avatar that plugs into your USB port. It represents your friend, and when your friend is available to chat, the availabot stands up, and when your friend is not available to chat the availabot lies down. Simple, clever, a physical manifestation of your online world in real life.
Of course, who wants just one availabot for one friend? I want dozens, maybe scores, and I want them to look like cartoon versions of my friends and I want them to be wireless. I don’t have enough USB ports for all my friends.
And then, since 3D printing has been floating around in the back of my brain, wondering how it can be useful, I realized that this might be a perfect object for 3D printing. I want a 3D printer that prints toy avatars of my friends, that are then animated by the open source hardware arduino chip and connect wirelessly with my computer. I want a homebrew version of the availabot.
I can see them now, all standing on my desk, scores of little animated cartoon avatars of my Facebook friends, rising and falling as friends log on and log off.
For the next generation of these social network avatars (social information appliances?) each availabot would have a unique pattern that interacted with my augmented reality spectacles and produced a cloud of information above the avatar, perhaps a speech bubble representing their status update and our chats.
