Digital media is an essential part of our everyday lives, but the possibilities within the dominant user paradigms are limited. To overcome the gap between the virtual and the physical world we need to find new, revolutionary ways to interact with digital information. The box system proposes to create a environment that couples virtual & actual space by building a network of information objects.
Goals
This project aims to provide an open platform for people, where knowledge and ideas can be exchanged and an immersive information experience is constructed to transform the users into active interpreters of information. It is set in the context of connected communities: A group of people in local or remote situations that share some kind of information on a regular basis and that communicate through network technologies.
Additionally a new language is created to describe the structure of information networks. This language is not further specified in this summary.
Designing for Connected Communities
The "Box" is based on the idea of distributed constructionism. The theory of constructionism asserts that learning is an active process, in which participants gain knowledge by actively making experiences with their surroundings. Additionally it assumes that learning can happen most effectively when people are active in making tangible objects in the real world.
Distributed constructionalism expands the theory of constructionism, by focussing on situations where more than one person is involved in design and construction processes. Those collaborative activities promote the learning-effects because there is not just an exchange of information, but a construction of meaningful environments and artefacts.
To facilitate the development of knowledge-building communities an open network of unlimited entities is assumed, where participants are allowed to take control of their own communication and information sharing mechanisms. This way the user is included in the design process and a new potential emerges.
A distributed model—where one entity has only one simple function—adapts best to the requirements of a connected community, because it integrates better into the social dynamics and learning processes, than a centralised system. Furthermore it enables to create complex systems by connecting entities in different ways, while still being relatively robust and efficient. This is accomplished because none of the components is really in charge of producing complexity.
With this modular emergent system a playful learning and developing process is necessary to achieve good results. First designing a structure and then experiencing the consequences of working with the structure is the best way to design, because such systems can not be defined beforehand.
Implementation
The described network is implemented by placing boxes around a building or public space. Each box contains a micro controller, an radio frequency (RF) communication module and the specific interface of each object e.g. a display. The boxes share a connection to the internet and communicate with PCs. A server holds the inherent structure that can be accessed through a normal web browser. As the structure is stored online, nodes can be placed on remote locations, allowing platforms to communication between boxes far away from each other.