This past Saturday and Sunday a team of ITP students (including myself) created and presented API for the World at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hack Day. Here’s the rundown: API for the World is a sensor and web application that turns anything with a power cord into a networked object. At the flip of a switch [...]
Entries Tagged as 'ITP'
Global Services for Local Good
April 11th, 2010 No Comments
Bridge into Beacon is an application to encourage economic growth in Downtown Beacon by providing context to visitors and tourists. I began the project with a post about resilient communities, and an intention to create an app that promotes resilience. From the beginning, I’ve tried to keep the application simple, not just for the end [...]
Tags: api · beacon · cloud · resilience
Impulsive and on-the-go
March 2nd, 2010 1 Comment
I had a meeting at BEAHIVE in Beacon, NY last week to present my ideas for a “digital bridge into Beacon” and got some great feedback. Based on the conversation and subsequent consideration, I’ve decided to focus most heavily on the mobile web component. BEAHIVE member Chris Joslyn highlighted the importance of knowing the user’s [...]
Tags: beacon
Hybrid Communities: Etsy and the Apocalypse
February 10th, 2010 No Comments
I was telling a friend about my thesis direction and he made an interesting observation: post-apocalyptic scenarios make problem solving easy. This is because it creates a clear set of constraints and eliminates many of the complexities of our current way of life. Hearing this, I realized that perhaps I’ve been leaning too much towards [...]
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Standalone WiFi Application Hubs
February 7th, 2010 No Comments
Continuing on my foray into resilient communities via local community tech hubs, I’ve begun thinking about extreme scenarios. Imagine a community with limited power and little or no internet connectivity; standard hosted platforms for commerce and communications – Ning, Twitter, Etsy, Facebook, Gmail, etc – would cease to be effective. It is possible, however, to [...]
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Community App – Custom vs 3rd Party
February 7th, 2010 No Comments
Thanks to encouragement from Mark Frazier at Open World, I’m more seriously exploring existing platforms and content management systems as digital hubs for local communities. I had been thinking along the lines of a fully custom app that I could open-source, but the development and documentation overhead would be high on a project like that. Right [...]
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Thesis Focus: Resilient Communities
February 6th, 2010 2 Comments
For some time, I’ve been mulling over John Robb’s portrayal of “resilient communities“. This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. Robb believes that resilient communities [...]
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ITP Thesis Ideas – Communities
January 30th, 2010 No Comments
Still considering thesis directions, here are my current thoughts, back in line with communities. Working with communities is a strong interest of mine. I want to encourage sustainable, resilient networks in my communities and to create a “curriculum” that can guide other communities to do the same. Some of the groups I’ve been thinking about: [...]
ITP Thesis Ideas – Application Prototyping
January 23rd, 2010 No Comments
I’ve been considering ITP thesis ideas (see also “Social Tech Under the Radar“), and I keep coming back to the idea of prototyping. Based on my work with BeeMe and at Etsy, I’ve seen the value of using prototypes for product discovery and refinement. I’d like to experiment with and improve upon existing approaches: agile development, rapid [...]
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Social Tech – under the radar
January 10th, 2010 1 Comment
In Brooklyn it’s clear that the market is inundated with tools and services to support community and commerce: Craigslist, Browstoner, and Etsy to name a few. I’ve been thinking about new tools for commerce and community development, but as the proverb goes, you can’t fill a cup that is already overflowing. I just returned from [...]
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