Social Garden.
Rendering your communications as plants that represent the status of your relationships.
Exhibited at Ars Electronica 2009
Opportunity
The Internet supports many great tools for communicating at a distance in order to maintain personal relationships and build social networks. However, these tools rarely help us realize which relationships are strained by lack of attention. Staying in touch has become a chore.
Solution
Social Garden explores using virtual plants as a metaphor for relationships, encouraging us to cultivate our social connections as we do our gardens. By tracking and analyzing communications through email, instant messaging, social networking sites, SMS and phone, Social Garden proposes to give feedback on the health and hature of our relationships, and organize our social circles.
How it works
The Social Garden application quietly monitors your existing social behavior. With a plug-in architecture, it can aggregate your interactions across many channels through a computer or smartphone.
For each relationship, the application creates a meaningful visualization shared between you and your friend, providing feedback on how your relationship has changed over time, and encouraging you to maintain or even grow it. These visualizations can be delivered as ambient information on your consumer electronics, or integrated into the flow of your communications devices.
Platforms
Clients have been made for the Macintosh, iPhone, and Symbian S60 phones. The mobile clients sync up their activity logs with the desktop app and scale the level of data to the smaller screen.
Procedural plant
A real-time version that grows plants directly from chat conversations or XML files, reacting to the volume of communication from each of the participants, as well as the perceived mood.