For Who?

Locating trust and novel forms of sharing.

Unique combinations of sensors, hardware, and synthetic rulesets govern our Western world. We believe by developing novel mobile hardware that scaffolds localized trust by reducing interactional affordances and introducing physical-digital sharing protocols, we can support a more relationally connected future.

Peer2Peer

We are developing a novel navigation and social networking experience that fosters trusted real-world interactions through generating contextual itineraries from aggregating your peers’ location-recommendations with your personal context and location intelligence to reduce screen dependency and build relational trust and intersubjectivity within communities through shared experiences.

Computational Methods

Stephen Levinson’s work on the Human Interaction Engine attributes three properties of Human social interaction: The attribution of intention through behavior mapping onto goals, mutual salience or common ground—necessary for cooperative interaction, and intentions that drive behavior solely effected by virtue. Because technology and tools become an extension of our cognition, it is important to explore and create new configurations of sensors and rulesets to afford a different texture of presence that preserves the elements of our human sociality. This is a socially oriented practice, which aims to create new social structures and scaffolding for more authentic relations than incumbent digital systems do.

Precedents

There have been a number of precedents, either full reduced affordance provocations or companion device consumer hardware for different use-cases. Take SUSA for ASUS for example, a device that aims to suggest how AI could be used to shift how we interact with certain digital devices to create a more intuitive, tactile, and less distracting experience. Our project provides a tangible intermediate step to approaching the idea of new mobile computation methods through positioning a commercially viable use-case for reducing our time spent on devices in a social and navigational context.