DesiSi: Family empathy communicator? Automatic group hug announcer?

Personal disgust preventer, how neat is that? How about this? A transceiver is mounted in a box on a tree or near a vista or statue & etc. A user sends a short SMS to the transceiver along with the phone number of an intended recipient & it is stored on an attached drive, along with the inbound phone number. When either stands within 5-10 ft of the box, they can receive the message, just as if they were reading the carving on a tree. A bit like SMS graffiti but used to hide secret messages to friends and loved ones around a city. The messages prevent boredom. A telephone number taped to the tree could work as well but the box lends intimacy.

Family empathy communicator? Automatic group hug announcer?

via we make money not art by Regine on Jun 18, 2007

More projects seen at the RCA Summer Show. Chris Hand has made a fascinating object called 139,590 Devices which challenges designers to turn into objects the names it generates and prints on a piece of paper. Just press the button and on the screen will appear three words whose combination always seem to make perfect sense: wireless road rage communicator, dog-mounted love alarm, gardener's neighbourliness matcher, gps-based group hug finder, peer-to-peer frustration reducer, domestic happiness announcer, pensioner's obsession matcher, community homesickness reflector, etc.

You can't predict which words will come up as the process is random. The only rule is that the first one relates to a technological or social context, the second one to an emotional situation and the last one to a function.

Funny how each time, you can't help imagining an object that does not exist and that you've never heard of. Natural instinct has us fill the gaps between the words.

Chris even designed scenarios and devices for such randomly named objects. One was meant for people living in boring towns. It's a little object that sends you a small electro-shock each time you arrive at a certain location. By passing repeatidly by that point, a pavlovian conditioning takes place and after some time users won't need the device anymore, their heart will start beating as they come near the location and the boring city will be filled by as much thrill-generating places as they wish.