Portfolio
Recent Work: Boku Community, Social Genius2, Thesis: CrowdScapes, You Are Being Watched, Second Life Will Eat Itself, Painting with Perspective, Directions as Networks, Live Video Mondrian, Handwriting Project, Digital Diaries, ZoneTag Mapping, Open Planning Project Internship, Therapy Incentives Through Play, RecycleCheck, Architecture and the Mail, WayMarker, City of Memory, TxtSt, Candles, Yenta Squid, Breathable Plushy
Thesis: CrowdScapes
CrowdScapes is a mobile software application that leverages socially created content to give participants an alternate perspective on their everyday interactions.
The accumulated content and descriptive information users create on social media sites such as Flickr have the interesting side effect of community self definition. As the Flickr community uploads and tag photos, they are describing what is important to them and organically self defining what they value. Coupling this activity with georeferenced photos allows us to see the most popular tags and photographs for a particular area, to get a feel for the history and social temperature of a space.
My mobile application, CrowdScapes, lets a user explore a neighborhood through the crowd's eyes. CrowdScapes value is that it leverages the critical mass of a large community of photo takers and sharers, not just a small subset of power users using a custom application. CrowdScapes can give places a user passes through everyday but doesn't really consider a new life and a new possibility. By letting users step outside of themselves and consider what a location means to others, CrowdScapes can give new insight into a place.
The view CrowdScapes provides moves around two core pivots. The ?familiar view? shows localized photographs by a participant?s most used tags, it shows the current location through the lens of the participant?s interests. The ?strange view? shows the most popular tags and their respective photographs as viewed by the global Flickr crowd.
Involvement: Python, J2ME and PHP Programming
