Moving on from last weeks information architecture the class were introduced to a new term; Situated Software. To be honest this did not bring any association the first time I heard the term, but after some introduction it become more understandable. This time the task was divided in two different task which was about self ethnografy and of course situated software.
Task 1: Self Ethnography
Observe yourself throughout the two weeks, and take notes / pictures / draw / illustrate / diagrams of how you:
- make arrangements / negotiate with your friend / family
- how you share content / media with your friend / family
- how you communicate / language with your friend / family
- how you consume media with friend / family
- in what context this happens in etc
- and what type of media
Task 2: Situated Software
Design a software of your choice for you and 1, max 2 others, friends, family or colleagues. This ‘situated software’ might be anything ranging from a toy to a co-creation drawing tool to an eclectic hobby scheming venture. It has to be made for small mobile with touchscreen. It can be made in flash, but if you have some good skill in another software feel free to develop it accordingly.
The approach
Task 1
Looking at the first I started to make notes on my social media usage for the last couple of days:
Make arrangements / negotiate
- By email (about 1 -3 hours daily)
- By phone ( about 1/2 – 1 hours daily)
- By MSN (about 10 – 20 min daily)
- By facebook chat ( about 10 – 20 min ) daily
Share content / media
- By websites (about 2-3 hours daily)
- By email (about 1-2 hours daily)
- By skype (about 5 – 20 min daily)
Communicate / language
- By phone (about 1- 2 hours daily)
- By email (about 1 – 3 hours daily)
- Using facebook (about 5 – 20 min daily)
Consume media
- Watching TV (about 5 min- 1 hour daily)
- Surfing internet (random sites) ( about 5 hours daily)
- Listening at Netradio ( about 4-6 hours daily)
- Watching NetTV (about 1 – 2 hours daily)
- Reading online newspapers (a bout 1 hours daily)
- Reading newsletters (about 5 – 30 min daily)
In what context this happens in
- Educational context ( about 5 – 7 hours daily)
- Work context (about 2 hours daily)
- Relaxed context(about 1 – 2 hours daily)
- Meaningless context
What type of media
- Literal ( about 5 hours daily)
- Visual (about 5 hours daily)
- Audio (not sure)
Some key points here are then:
- I use email and phone frequently to communicate
- I rarely use the social site for their social context ( I rarely update my profiles. I mostly use them to read other peoples happenings, and now and then chat with friends)
- I use a lot of time browsing the web in different context
- I rarely watch TV
Task 2
The first thing that crossed my mind regarding this task, was that I wanted to work with the iPhone and some kind of location based software. I was not actually aware of how many this kind of applications already existed, but getting some good resource sites from Mosse I was able to do a deeper dive into this world:
- Future of the web: Location, location, location
- I Am Here: One Man’s Experiement With the Location-Aware Lifestyle
- Brightkite.com
- Sociallight.com
- Loopt.com
- Location based social networks links
Some of my first thoughts were that I wanted to focus on concept that connects friends through position using a GPS and a map, but I was obvious some years late with this idea. One example is Buddy Beacon that does exactly the things I was thinking about:
What is Buddy Beacon?
Bring your social network to your phone with Buddy Beacon. Using GPS, you can let your friends know where you are and find out where they are, making it easy to meet up for a good time. Not in the mood to party? Use the cloaking mode when you want to be invisible to your friends.
And the list goes on…
A step further
So, what else could be done with a hand held device and GPS that is fun? Shopping of course. I must admit that I like shopping so why not do little social shopping. I bet some other like this as well. The concept is to focus on shopping and do social activities regarding shopping. One of the features I was focusing on was that users share a product with others which they can comment on, and like or dislike. Other feature is that users can upload information about a thing they need, or want to buy, where friends can write suggestions and upload pictures if they see anything similar. And the third feature is that users can see on map if there any sales for the current or the upcoming days. Picture prototype and click able prototype below:
Here are some prototype images of the software concept.
Users sigs up on a website.
