Imagine a micro-community engineered right into a physical space. The ability to ping and communicate directly and indirectly with neighbours. The Greener Gadgets Design Competition introduced the eco-neighbuzz, an apartment buzzer with an integrated internal communication system which looks to create such a system.
Even though today we are living in tall concrete blocks built in big metropolises, we are not communicating with our neighbours as we did years ago. Sometimes we even don’t know who is living in the building and what they are doing.
When thinking about green design, we need to design good services which help us to consume less and share more. This means car-sharing, free-cycling (giving unused items for free), recycling, etc. We should first start doing this with our closest community – our neighbours. Even when we have good relationships with our neighbours, we are still missing a good service platform to improve upon it.
Now, many might say: why not just go ask for a tool or sugar? One answer lies in the success of social media: the incredibly low-cost of entry and the low-cost of failure for all concerned parties encourage interactions that previously wouldn’t be worth the effort or had less perceived payoff. New problems can be tackled and interactions/transactions that don’t require a physical visit or more intensive tech-enabled interaction (phone, email, etc) will occur more frequently and successfully. (See Clay Shirky’s Here Come Everybody for more on this.)
Consider an ad-hoc tool-sharing network, an emergency or alert communications system, car-pool and trip coordination, free-cycling, or indirect/passive messaging (news, hyper-local classifieds, etc.).
Working through this, I began to think of how Twitter behaviours similarly emerged organically and how that model could be applied to community-living.
The dominant thought I took away from this was, quite seriously, why wait? Why not connect your floor, building, or block with an existing micro-blogging tool? It won’t be a fancy new intercom, but everything available in this design spec could be provided by open source software or no/low-cost web apps, such Laconica, identi.ca or Yammer. It’s not even clear to me that the buzzer would be an improvement in any way. With an open micro-blogging platform I’d be able to connect with my neighbours and make decisions about cooperation or trade wherever I happened to be: an iPhone, a desktop at work or in Europe.
I imagine this is already being tried somewhere either organically or purposefully. And at the very least, I’ll look to adding more of my neighbours to Twitter.
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Why not put up a notice in your building? ie add me to twitter?
Then again, you might get some creeps :S