The Vibrancy Project

This project was funded by a grant from the Intel Research Lab that was given to ITP, NYU to be divided among projects relating to Vibrancy in Technologies. The projects that other people worked on were really interesting, and I would like to link to them here soon (I don't have the links yet).

I talk about the topic of vibrancy in my other blog posts and summarize my thoughts on vibrancy as it relates to mobile phone use here, and have more related information in the list of referenced works here. The original proposal from Intel and ITP was this:

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Excerpted from “Vibrant Technologies” [Maria Bezaitis, Chapter in [Radical Flux, Intel Press, 2011]:

“The word vibrant refers on the one hand to a kind of physical movement, specifically vibration or the rapid, rhythmical movement to and from. However, vibrancy also emphasizes vitality, or the capacity to live. A technology that is vibrant is one that can initiate its own movement and generate its own energy, physical or virtual. A vibrant technology is a source of aliveness.

The idea of vibrancy in technology can be envisioned by the metaphor of a cat vs. a dog. Dogs know when it is time to play, when an intruder is approaching, when their owner needs consolation. Dogs are dedicated and loyal pets striving to please. Cats on the other hand are independent, interested in humans only as part of a greater ecosystem, not the center of their universe. The cat surprises. The cat interrupts. The cat comes and goes. The cat does not live for others; it lives with others. The cat represents vibrancy: dynamic, self-centered yet engaged in a dialogic relationship with humans.

Vibrancy is concerned with how technologies engage with people, how they enable people to participate, how they produce context with us. Importantly, the term vibrant pulls attentions away from the question of what people want from technologies, vibrancy asks us to consider the possibility that, along with people, technologies have some kind of agency; that technologies can generate their own movement, that they are participants in life with people, institutions, events, and other things. Vibrant technologies are willful, social and mobile. They can intervene, interrupt or change our minds. They are co-dependent, relying on humans and their environment as sources of information and action. They enable participation and forge new relationships between humans, technology and the environment.”

Intel seeks to fund a selection of ITP student experiments and prototypes that explore the idea of Vibrant Technology. The collaboration with ITP is meant to explore what happens when technologies are re-envisioned as peers instead of tools. We are seeking project proposals that manifest agency in the form of technologies that are engaged with other technologies, people and environments."

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On February 28th, 2012, we presented our progress to Intel and ITP, and you can see this presentation here, but my work on this application is ongoing. It is not yet ready for deployment to Android devices, though it is currently running on mine.

My Proposal for the Vibrancy Project

(some of this has changed throughout the research phase, and I discuss this in other posts)

Mobile and location aware technology have changed our lives, but applications of it continue to enhance already familiar experiences: make travel easier, encourage serendipity, enable social interactions, serve up information about physical locations nearby, help you spend your money with coupons, etc. In this sense, they ground themselves in the physical world, and derive their meaning from the interaction of the physical with the data layers. I am interested in the possibility of a next stage for these applications.


There is an increasing amount of dialogue about a newly emerging sense of place inspired by these technologies (I have been reading Marc Auge, De Certeau, LeFebvre, Lev Manovich, Miwon Kwon, Vito Acconci, Benjamin Bratton, Kevin Slavin, Nichola Nova, James Landay, Julian Bleeker, Yang Boxu, Mizuko Ito, Sadie Plant, Adriana de Souza e Silva, Carl Disalvo and Janet Vertesi, Anne Galloway, Mei-Po Kwan, Mitchell Moss, Anthony Twonsend, Adam Greenfield, William Whyte, the situationists, etc, a mix of older and newer works, that demonstrate this trajectory, as well as how long it has been studied in different ways).


The ubiquity of mobile devices threatens and transforms the sense of physical space as a constant and grounding "location", and create what Dr. Sadie Plan (in her ethnographic study for Motorola) called a "dislocated, slightly schizophrenic world". Can mobile devices offer an alternative but equally grounding sense of place and certainty by creating their own kind of place? What kind of logic and structure would these places have? Perhaps in the information space users' similar interests schedules could define time settings and locations. Groups of people can inhabit the same physical space, but be immersed in shared worlds with only relevant other people or completely alone. The device would have a "personal" responsibility of maintaining that sort of space for the user. Through gaining this kind of semi autonomy, it becomes its own place or main reference point that you cary with you, or perhaps in being so dependable, more of a friend or a pet than a device (I think it is already reality to some extent). Does the device then need or want to interact with or have some sort of attraction to other devices? Can it gain more power from its proximity to another device?


I would like to create proximity triggered behaviors between phones that are not geared at creating interactions for the users but just for the phones themselves, and in turn for making the users aware of the interaction of the phones in their proximity, and the "space" they define. I would create a mobile application that explores these ideas through several functions: One: a user has a phone that they can use to listen to music, then another user enters the subway, when they are within a certain range, their phones begin to play the same song, and they are joined in a similar experience or metaphorical "space" through the negotiation between their devices. Two: both phones light up, or light up another article of clothing to illuminate the formation of a proximity network. Three: a self activating bluetooth radio: a phone becomes a microphone when you are in close proximity to other phones, that then transmits what you say to the other phones around you, effectively using the Occupy Wall Street style of microphone system. Four: a less obvious manifestation: the phone picks up a bug or a habit from another phone. Eventually the phones develop a dialog. If two phones are often in close proximity to each other, they can begin to deduce that the owners may want to share recommendations or sync up in other ways, (similar to women in close proximity beginning to menstruate at the same time). The phones can react to the states and "feelings" or nearby phones, and of their owner. They can, for example, be "inspired" by certain situations and grow to develop their own preferences, based on their owner's and other phones around them's habits and ideas.


Technology used: Android development platform, java, bluetooth modules.