Proximeter ambient social navigation instrument.
A physical instrument that abstracts the location of your friends and family into paths tracing their proximity to you over time.
Exhibited at Ars Electronica 2009
Opportunity
Social networking services provide a constant, low-resolution stream of what friends are doing. While this would seem to induce information overload, these services have developed in users a sense of the general state of our tribe that we have struggled to retain in globalization. While computers have the communication capabilities to produce such a sense, their complexity calls for a divergence toward simpler, more appropriate tools.
Solution
The proximeter is both an agent that tracks the past and future proximity of one's social cloud, and an instrument that charts this in an ambient display. By reading existing calendar and social network feeds of others, and abstracting these into a glanceable pattern of paths, we hope to nuture within users a social proprioception and nudge them toward more face-to-face interactions when opportunities arise.
