myhd.org: mDisco

MDISCO

mDisco was my main semester project from the 2000/2001 season at the “Designing with Digital Media” class at UdK Berlin, Germany. The acronym stands for Mobile Distributed Computing and is a concept for community building / intrapersonal communications with mobile devices, e.g. mobile phones or PDAs.

In the meantime (as of 2006), several similar products are available commercially.

The following slides show the results of the creative process: a combination of hardware and software to find new “buddies” in public spaces.

Setup

Image you are somewhere in a public library, a café or just strolling the street. You feel like spending time with someone nice, but all your friends are all out of reach. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could spontaneously team up with a friendly person who has some common interests and … let’s say … thirty minutes at hand? Under normal circumstances, this is not too easy. Let’s assume you would be …

Making contact by phone

You want to meet an aquaintance or a friend. Why not call them and make an appointment?

PRO: Known friends, as you have their numbers. Easy medium: Just pick up the phone and call them.

CON: Relatively small target group. Plus, they may be miles away.

Making contact via the net

PRO: Huge target group, fast contact (email, chat)

CON: Someone could be located at the other side of the world. People could be psycho killers.

Solution: Use mDisco!

PRO: Proximity, as the system uses short-range data transfer (Bluetooth, ZigBee etc.). Set & Forget. Privacy.

CON: Standardization, general protocol necessary. People without mDisco system are “shut out”.

Stuff neccessary

At first, you’d be needing some public space and people who have a.) a mobile device at hand and b.) the mDisco application installed and running.

You would once set your interests and personal data, then put the machine on “discovery mode”...

Sitting in a cafe, for example, you would then be able to look up people with same interests and some spare time at hand. If both parties agree to connect, some indicator is given so that both can recognize aech other in “meat space” and go to the museum, to the beach, cinema or whatever.