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The Compass Phone asks weather mobiles are surveillance tools, digital leashes. It acts as a tether to another, using its GPS function to point you in the direction of the person you wish to be near with a compass. On the top, the amount of time it’ll take you and them to meet is displayed.

The Network & Society Project at the MIT Senseable City Lab employs these large-scale digital datasets to explore physical mobility, social networks and urban places.

Tin Can connects remote meeting participants and gives everyone a better sense of what’s happening in the meeting beyond just who’s talking. The system collects and visualizes background tasks like taking notes, managing the agenda, sharing relevant content, tracking to-dos, and managing meeting process in a distributed interface.

MESSAGE (Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across Grid Environments) demonstrates the potential of diverse, low cost sensors to provide data for the planning, management and control of the environmental impacts of transport activity at urban, regional and national level. This includes their implementation on vehicles and people to act as mobile, real-time environmental probes, sensing transport and non-transport related pollutants and hazards.

Wireless in the world 2

“Utopian and radical architects in the 1960s predicted that cities in the future would not only be made of brick and mortar, but also defined by bits and flows of information. The urban dweller would become a nomad who inhabits a space in constant flux, mutating in real time. Their vision has taken on new meaning in an age when information networks rule over many of the city’s functions, and define our experiences as much as the physical infrastructures, while mobile technologies transform our sense of time and of space.”

The ElectroSmog festival is a critique of the worldwide explosion of mobility, and an exploration of the new forms of connectedness with others offered to us by network and communication technologies.