Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

via Joe

/***Edit 2 April 2009 - Pigeon now has an official home online. Please visit callpigeon.com.

I’m looking for people sign up and use Pigeon, my thesis project.  Pigeon is a social network that you access through a phone call.  Pigeon gives you one voice message that lasts one minute to tell your world what’s up.  You can think of your Pigeon message as a voice status update, an audio micro-blog, or space for citizen journalism.  To learn more about the idea of Pigeon watch a video I’ve made on youtube or on vimeo.  Sign up for Pigeon by calling (713) 574-9488.

Once you sign up, you will need to add contacts, so feel free to send this along to any friends along with your new Pigeon number.  My pigeon number is 888-888.  Add me so I can hear what’s going on in your life and you can hear what’s up with me.

Of course this the system is still under development, and I’m excited to have user contribution shape my steps moving forward.  Any and all with an opinion and a little patience are invited to join.  There is currently only one US Pigeon access number - (713) 574-9488.  I also have a Skype code that can be used to call in; please contact me if you are interested in the Skype code.

Feedback about the system can be recorded on Pigeon by dialing “6″ at the main menu.  The comments you record will be sent straight to me.  Any comments about what you like and what you don’t like is greatly appreciated.  At certain times, I will prompt for specific feedback.

I’m also interested in observing people at different stages of Pigeon use (sign up and after using the system for a certain amounts of time).  If you’re interested in that observation, please contact me (and maybe I’ll contact you).

Other photos from the event

I’m presenting my work on Pigeon to date at the Electronic Social Club on Friday

[ ESC ] salon + mixer*
Electronic Social Club: a network of NYC graduate students connected by the practice of creating social dialogue through projects in media, art and design.

Friday November 14 | 7-10 pm
Hunter College | 695 Park Avenue
Room HN 543 | Black Box

…..new media projects, video art, web-based projects, experimental, interactive, performance, media art, installations, sound projects and games…..

Like a social club, [ ESC ] is formed around a common interest, activity or location.  We bring together MFA students from across New York City to meet and showcase their graduate art work, and to form a common network around the theme of creating social dialogue through art and media.

Programme of events to follow.   Past participants include:  ShiftSpace (shiftspace.org), the ICED Game:  I Can End Deportation (icedgame.com), and projects from Hunter College, NYU ITP, Parsons MFADT, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn PIMA, and Brooklyn Polytech.

Frog Design and IxDA hosted a Jan Chipchase talk tonight that I was lucky to attend (thanks yendo!). Chipchase is a design researcher for Nokia, and though he won’t claim the anthropologist title, he does spend lots of time for his job, and just in general, looking at how people structure their lives.  He spent quite a bit of the presentation talking about how to communicated collected design research to a (corporate) organization.  One of his suggestions for how to do the type of work you’d like within an organization was to allow the boundaries between your work and personal research blur.

Jan claimed these were the take away messages from the talk:

• question everything (including the need to do design research)
• participants are in control- His group is given time to spend with people, which comes with a responsibility to let participants shape the products.
• what motivates the researchers- He returned often to this.  If the international researchers and local facilitators have a clear understanding of what the objectives of the research are (and what things are not to be researched), it will allow them to be the most effective in their work.
• what are the boundaries- e.g. If doing data collection in a home, give data (pictures and video) to the participant on a USB drive. If the researchers know people will see the data collected, it will change how they will collect the data.

He also talked statistics.  With 6.6 billion people on earth and about half that amount of mobile subscriptions in the world, it is easy to see how design of mobile phones and applications for mobile phones have such an ability to impact the world.  He did mention that while it is difficult to design something cross platform for all the phones of the world, something designed using call back messages, SMS, or even voice, would have a huge potential market.

Additionally he spoke about projects (such as the Nokia Open Studios) and experiences from the field.  He showed a mobile phone application in Cairo telling the times for prayer and then asked us why such an application would be necessary in a society so completely governed by prayer times.  His answer was that the application was more about intention.  It could be a reminder to a person to do something they’ve decided to do, if it is kept private, or if it is displayed more publically it could show how a religious a person was.  Or even more, it could be a way to show that a person has a sophisticated mobile phone.

Jan also showed a picture of a legitimate electricity hookup and an illegal hookup to the electric system side-by-side on the same house.  The illegal hookup is culturally acceptable and can provide all of the needed power, so why pay an electricity bill as well?  The bill serves as an important form of identification.  Much in a same way, a mobile phone can be a connection to a bank account for people who would be traditionally too poor to interest banks.

The evening ended with Q and A.  Right before the applause, Jan returned to a question about his favorite or most inspirational moment during his travels. Talking about the transformative power of mobile connectivity Jan essentiatlly said: in a place where everyone is going after the newest, glitziest phone, it’s easy to foget how much a mobile connection can change a person’s life.

Pigeon from drewcogbill on Vimeo.

Also available at YouTube.

1. Utterli
2. First Mile Solution
3. Ushaidi - Creation story 1, creation story 2
4. BulkSMS - Creation story
5. InSTEDD - Creation story
6. Dial2Do
7. New York Talk Exchange (NYTE) - creation story
8. Snapvine
9. Jyngle
10. tatango
11. kirusa
12. ccube
13. jajah
14. Common Craft Explanations in Plain English - creation story in pictures
15. MyGADs
16. Phonevite
17. FreeConference
18. RadioActive
19. Telephone Trottorie
20. SayNow
21. TXTML

I met with DT faculty member Dave Carroll to go over my work for Pigeon.  We talked things technical, business, and academic.

Technical:

• Asterisk came up again
• He thought TXTML may be a good prototyping tool for SMS sign up, especially if it could be connected to my current Voxeo prototyping.  SMSs could be handled through some type of IMAP processing.

Business:

• If ad based, the ads could be contextual.  (As creepy as it sounds) messages could be decoded, and if someone mentions the Eifel tower an ad for France travel packages could play or be generated from a google ad words ad.
• Again the idea of some customers paying to support others came up.  I thought that perhaps at sign up users could sign up for a free account or a paying account which will support free acounts (similar to the Radiohead album sales and Good magazine’s newest subscription sign ups).
• Paying customers could perhaps get general or specific information about how their contribution is supporting users who can’t afford (e.g. “Your contribution this month has allowed 42 pigeons to be delivered”).

Academic

• New York Talk Exchange: the book - for statiscal data and essays on how international phone traffic is used by the extremes of the economic ladder.
• Mobile Persuasion - ed. B.J. Fogg
• Mobile Interaction Design - Matt Jones and Gary Marsden - good case studies in evaluating effectiveness of systems
• Mobile Democracy: Essays on Society, Self and Politics

Dave thought that the best case scenario would be to have a working alpha by the end of this semester and a working beta by the end of next semester (”with 5000 users”).

My fellow DTer Erik Burke is in the New York Times for a mural he did in Bushwick!

Pigeon could be used by US undergraduates studying abroad; here’s a storyboard exploring this idea as a user scenario:

More recently, I’ve been considering Pigeon for use in a developed context, and I think this has confused my work a bit.  This issue also came up in my crit.  In talking to Colleen, she said “if you design for the developing world, it could be useful for the developed, but if you design for the developed, it will probably not be useful for the developing.”  I’m really going to focus on developing areas moving forward.  Furthermore, I’m going to spend my next prototyping cycle exclusively considering how to communicate about Pigeon.  I’m going to develop other storyboards, other stories, and perhaps a short “commercial” explaining Pigeon.

I want future presentations of Pigeon to be much more narrative.  Any explinations of technical developments need to be embedded into a story about how this idea for a new system will impact people’s lives.