Watch the video and read a more detailed description of the application and its conceptual background. I summarize my interest in the vibrancy of mobile phones by describing three ways in which they have fundamentally transformed our lives: They have changed our sense of time, our sense of space, and our sense of self. I also talk about future directions of the application.

The Vibrancy Project is a project was funded by a grant from the Intel Research lab, and their work on Vibrancy in Technology. The grant was given to ITP to administer toward projects related to this vibrant research. This post contains my original proposal, and will soon have links to the other projects made under this grant.

In thinking about agency, and reading Bennett's Vibrant Matter, I am noticing a pattern of moving away from agency toward a systems view, where any agent can be viewed as a conglomeration of systems or as a part of a system, depending on perspective. This seems to come with a kind of apathetic implication, and I wonder to what extent apathy contributes to the view, and vice versa. Diminishing the amount of vibrancy we ascribe to agents limits our sense of what we can demand from them, and ourselves. And these ideas, as abstract as they are, can have very significant political and social effects.

I had a shift in the way that I view agency recently, from trying to identify the agency of an object, to looking at the different layers or levels of systems that the object embodies or is a part of. Here I try to summarize these thoughts and how they will effect the proximity triggered behaviors of the objects I am working with.

In the beginning of the project I began by working with zigbee radios as metaphors for the phones. I thought this would help me explore different learning behaviors and inter-object interactions. I used lights triggered by proximity sensed with xbee radios. However, there were some important limitations, most notably a different network structure, one that requires a coordinator, that I have just realized is not cohesive with my concept. Through a round-about way I realized that the Personal Area Networks of mobile phones (PAN), including NFC (Near Field Communication) and bluetooth, are even more relevant to the development of vibrancy in these devices than I thought. While I originally didn't know how to connect collocated phones, I now realize that the inherent network structure of PAN is the most conceptually cohesive.

The vibrancy research project and grant for ITP projects was funded by Intel research labs, and run by Led by Adjunct Prof. Heather Dewey-Hagborg (ITP), Maria Bezaitis (Intel), who provided us with a reading list that revolves around the topic of vibrancy in technology. This list, in addition to other articles I have read and referenced, that deal with mobile phone use, can be found here.