5 Quick Trends

Collaboration

• Microsoft researchers have developed a way to share and actively collaborate on any surface, in real-time.  Share and compare objects (play a game of checkers or chess), collaborate in real-time on documents, drawings, and whiteboards, hold live tutoring sessions (even music lessons?).  The basics of the technology are a light source equipped with a camera and a projector, so that the space where the light falls becomes the shared space, along with a bunch of programming to prevent the camera from picking up the projected visuals.  Pretty cool way to reshape remote sharing and visual stories.

• Coworking spaces have been around for a while, emerging in all parts of the country.  A new service from ShareDesk in Vancouver is taking coworking the next step – enabling AirBnb style leasing of workspaces.  Have an office that is sitting empty because you’re not hiring to replace its last occupant?  Lease it out for a space of hours up to months.  Need a conference room to run some meetings from while on the road?  Grab an unused one from a local company.  What makes this cool is that the idea is not only to capitalize on sharing spaces more effectively, it is all built around a spirit of collaboration – the idea that people sharing spaces will chat, bounce ideas, share frustrations, and troubleshoot together – in the end fostering greater creative solutions.  I like that.

Connection

• Second-grader Devon suffers from allergies.  They are so severe that attending school means risking his life.  His is confined to his home.  Unlike the bubble-boy, however, Devon is NOT isolated.  He has a robot avatar that goes to school for him.  Through its controls, the robot zooms through the school day, Devon’s face watching and participating via its cameras and screens.  A very cool way to give him a bit of normalcy despite his condition.

These last two are less trends and more just stuff I really appreciated:

• A wonderful post on the impact of writing (and storytelling) on your view of the world.  Thinking about the life you see around you with the mindset of building it into a story makes you pause, makes you look more closely, with greater wonder.  Up the wonder – write, craft stories.
  

  Her field notebook is not some convenient way to store lifeless data to be presented in lifeless papers so that other scientists can replicate some dull experiment; it’s the site of a collision between a mind and a world. That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write.

• Finally, an IKEA ad about hanging, playing, and adventuring with childhood favorites – and the joy of imagination. Watch to the end.
  

What would you do with YOUR piece of the puzzle?

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has announced that they intend to sell ad space on MetroCards.  Already just another piece of paper that is tossed after use, I’m not sure in general what I think about the ad idea.  But taking it to a new level is where it gets fun.  How could you make the cards, and their advertisements, exciting?  Make people want to collect them, rather than litter the ground with them?  And ultimately, could the designs work to bring people together around a common cause?

That’s the approach of advertising firm Mayday Mayday Mayday. They’ve put together a set of potential use cases for collaborative puzzle games using the new Metro Cards. In each, a card is a piece of a larger picture and commuters are encouraged to add theirs to help complete it.

I especially like this idea:

Bringing people together to create a larger piece of art from smaller pieces that might not mean much on their own. Starting some conversations in the process. You could do it with words, too – putting 140 characters on each stub and a code that notes where in the greater story it sits. I really hope the MTA bites and does at least one campaign this cool. I’d go to NYC to participate.