Presentation of stipend project
Veranstaltungsraum des Edith-Ruß-Hauses
Exhibition from 15. - 20. March 2011
As Internet becomes more and more popular and advanced, people want
to keep online and share his/her status with friends at any time and any
place. Because of this trend, all kinds of websites that provide SNS
(Social Networking Services), such as Twitter (a kind of micro blogging
service), become very popular rapidly.
However, as more and more social networking users
demanding higher immediateness and interaction, using mobile device to
send message or to “twitter” their status is still insufficient.
Consequently, we start to integrate everyday commodities (such as coffee
mug and indoor slippers) with electronic sensors. These reformed
commodities or furniture can communicate with computer through wireless
channel, so that the system could know the current status of the user.
With this configuration, the system would “twitter” what we are doing to
the social networking website. For example, when we turn off the light
at the living room and get ready to go to bed late at night, the system
would send message such as “I am going to bed, good night” automatically
because the light is obviously dimmed; or when the user holds his/her
mug, the system would send message such as “so thirsty, let’s have a cup
of mocha” (as shown in Fig. 1).
During the exhibition,
participants can “share own private status” with worldwide friends by
just a simply behavior of using these reformed commodities or furniture.
On the other hand, participants also can add the “Life Twitter” (our
work) as a friend in Twitter website, and therefore they can “monitor”
everything in the exhibition space anytime anywhere.
In summary, this project proposes a system which can
send message to the social website automatically based on user
behaviors. Technically speaking, this project is an experiment that we
carried out for “heavy user of SNS”. During the experiment, we found out
that sometimes some unknown factors would lead to the erroneous
judgment of micro-controller, and then the system would “twitter”
something that the user does not do. Interestingly, when the user knows
that something he/she does not do has been “twittered” by the system,
he/she would follow the “twittered” content
and actually do it; thus, it always confuses us - whether the user is
controlling the system, or the system is changing the user's behavior.
The above-mentioned situation does not happen often, but it motivates us
to consider the problem of privacy. When the reformed commodities
distributing over our environment, what would happen if the status of
the people who are unaware of such a configuration is broadcasted to the
Internet. Or, would the living style of people who know the fact be
changed? It is likely that Life Twitter would become Life Changer, and
this is the issue that we need to pay attention to.
