For my final project, I am interested in working with the idea of serendipity and the kinds of interactions that can be built around this concept. Because of the sensors we have access to both in our cell-phones and in the prototyping tools we are using (RPi and Arduino) the opportunities for facilitating happy accidents opens up. We can use sensors to determine where people are, what they are doing, how active they are… We can connect with each other’s devices and exchange these data and based on it take actions. So I want to focus on these data, the interactions between devices and the way that serendipity can be prompted by them. Some examples I am looking at from different fields:

From Industry – Wakie, a social alarm clock: You set a time you want to wake up and when the time comes,  some random person logged in the app who wants to wake someone up at the time you set will call you from the app. It works the other way too, anytime you sign into the app, it will tell you how many people would like to wake up around the World and you can just click on “wake someone up”

From Art – Serendipity is a project developed by Kyle McDonald while in residency in Spotify. The project detects when two strangers in the world click on play at the same exact time on a song on Spotify and then shows the locations on a map. About once a second the song being shown changes to show a new song simultaneously started in two places around the World.

From Academia – 20 Day Stranger: A project by the MIT Media Playful Systems Group, for a period of 20 days, it connected pairs of strangers in the world and had them share their day to day experience with each other.

Potential tech to emulate or use:

Bluetooth Shields

Estimote Beacons estimote.com/

OSC for data

GPS tracking?