Social Resonance: Balancing Reputation with Tangible Design

Online data about our everyday activities is available for almost anybody who takes the time to spy on us. Everything that makes us live in the real world through emails, video, photo, blogs, online shopping, calendar, to name a few, is "trackable". We are entirely public, our virtual identity is somewhat the shadow of our physical existence. Not talking about avatars up to anonymous content that gives us a second life on the screen, but wouldn't that be scary to have our anonymous virtual self reflected back to us?

The research of Alyssa Wright at MIT's Ambient Intelligence research group directed by Pattie Maes consists of the ongoing design of a tangible reputation system, Social Resonance, that uses a wearable device to merge face-to-face interaction with online networking.

I love her attempt to bridge a virtual identity with a "real world" one. New forms of tangible systems can be designed to leverage the strengths, and bridge the discrepancies, of reputation systems. Like its virtual counterparts, this system aims to make explicit the perspective of anonymous actors. Yet unlike online reputations, this system is negotiated through real world action and signals.



Reputation data is mapped to an ambient display and used to preserve public readability without creating personal distress. At any state, the device is on and provides readable data. It is the shift between states, visible over time, that allows for introspection. Social Resonance attempts to map the journey, not the destination, between colors.


Mapping resonance to 5-phase color shift


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
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Abstract by Joëlle Bitton

Abstract is the upcoming interaction installation by Joëlle Bitton at Gallery EF in Tokyo.

On the theme of waiting and the perception of the time passing-by: inviting visitors in a space where the body and its movement play the role of interfaces. From a point of view on the Japanese garden and its vision on the surrounding, aesthetic and philosophical world, this project is inspired by the tension between elements intentionally thought here in a contradictory dialog: abstraction and texture, concealment and disclosure, empty space and framed space. This installation places the visitor on the razor's edge: always on the border, between two worlds, passing from one to the other. This is the experience of difference and of a fragile balance, of what is called in the Japanese culture, the impermanence of things. The latter is then staged in a relationship to the cycle of time, to the emotions that the expectation of something to happen can generate.

Joëlle's portfolio

Light hidden within the wood

Light Play

Back in 2005, I saw the light play table, created by Anab Jain and Stuart Wood, a beautiful fiber optic table of natural light.

Recently I came across the work of the evil mad scientists and the because we can. A table that reacts by light to your motions and without motion it calms down to a very slight attractive twinkling.

The entire table pulls a total of 35 watts when it is fully active. That's less than a single common household light bulb!
Using a network of 32 active and passive near-infrared optical sensors, it detects motion above the table and changes in ambient light. Made of fully analog circuits, the light patterns sweep outwards from your motion with perfect fades, glowing stronger the closer the movement is, rippling across a pool of 480 super-bright white LEDs. It works in full sunlight or total darkness.

The cat is on the table, only his moving tail is setting off the lights