wordplaystories.com
wordplaystories.com/wordplay-process-festival.pdf

A storytelling tool for young writers to make, share, and remix characters and stories.

As mass literacy shifts from an emphasis on reading to writing, young people need ways to learn about authorship. 

Wordplay is a place for young people to practice their writing skills and become published authors within a community of peers. The site targets young people ages 13 to 18, and can be used both inside and outside the classroom.

Through Wordplay, tweens and teens are able to express themselves creatively. They gain the additional benefits of joining a community, becoming published authors, gaining empathy and perspective, and engaging more deeply with traditional literary practices.

http://surveillancestories.com
http://process.surveillancestories.com

A platform that makes sense of our surveillance culture through personal storytelling. 

When Edward Snowden leaked his first NSA documents, the world finally learned of the size and reach of the US and world surveillance programs. But after the initial alarm that comes with every news report, interest fades, because surveillance culture is portrayed in media as a policy and data-centric topic. There is a lack of personal connection with the public conversation and news cycle about it. Very simply, surveillance is complicated, and people are not yet sure what it means to them, what it could mean some day, and what they can do about it. 

Surveillance Stories gathers and indexes personal experiences with surveillance culture, surfaces ways to respond to the issues both personally and in a civic context, and invites people to become better versed in the language of surveillance.

www.play20q.com

A mobile application for college students that facilitates conversations between two strangers of different racial backgrounds. 

In American culture, there is a huge stigma associated with the subject of race. People either avoid talking about the issue or have tense dialogues that don’t encourage further discussion of racial inequalities in our society.

20 Questions improves these exchanges for college students who want to talk and learn about race. The application creates a safe environment by facilitating an anonymous conversation between two students of different racial backgrounds. A safe space is essential because it allows people to talk openly and listen to each other. Students have the opportunity to express themselves, share their racial experiences, and potentially create meaningful connections with their peers. 

http://wearehomegrown.org
http://ashleymarieandthesea.tumblr.com/tagged/thesis

A system designed to democratize our food and provide the tools to connect people to it in more meaningful ways.

Today’s news feed is filled with reports on climate change, food scarcity issues, and questions about our world’s pending future. How we will feed ourselves in the coming years is a big concern for many scientists and policy makers. People have already started moving towards independence from current food systems by growing fresh produce in their homes but we still have no means to grow meat, one of the least sustainable foods we rely on today. 

Home Grown provides tools for individuals who want to have a say in what they eat and how it is grown, based on open-source frameworks and experimentation. The process is first exercised through home cricket farming. 

EQLs.me

A purposeful offsetting tool for consumers to make meaningful investments in technologies that support and create a more sustainable world.

Forward your receipts to EQL, set a few parameters about energy cost and shipping, and we'll recommend an amount to offset. Select your proffered market to invest in wind, solar, and other clean technologies. We'll keep you up to date on how your investments are doing, and you can keep feeling better about your personal impact.

EQL's goal is to help consumers fight the glut of "climate guilt.” A phrase that recognizes our frustration towards this worldly-large problem. By contributing to technology solutions, EQL looks to bridge a gap between everyday buying behavior and investing in our collective future.

thesis.stevefaletti.com

Meygo is a process framework that aims to bring good design practice into the world of digitally-enabled mass customization.

New manufacturing technology is fast making the concept of Mass Customization, which seeks to combine the speed and scope of mass production with the individuality and versatility of bespoke production, a real possibility. But how does design fit into this new age of automated and algorithmic form-making? How does a customer best convey her desires, needs, and tastes to a digital system that communicates in ones and zeros? 

Meygo aims to connect existing design practices to new manufacturing technologies by keeping human decisions at the core of the system. Leaving design intent in the hands of trained, talented designers, Meygo leverages the strengths of computing systems to augment and aid those designers through rapid and complex iteration. Customers engage with the system as people, not computer operators, and provide information about their tastes and identities that drive a design system structured by people and enabled by technology.

A system to measure, analyze, and optimize our light exposure.

Our exposure to light is universal, and so is our need for light. Light exposure directly affects our physical and mental states. Yet there is currently no way to track our exposure, as a precursor to optimizing it.

PHI—K allows us to track our light exposure over time and take suggestions to optimize it. The system comprises a wearable light-temperature sensor, a smartphone app to record the data and display suggestions, and an open system that communicates to third-party devices.

www.drawingcircles.tumblr.com

An exploration into how we can curate unique dining experiences to influence and change social behaviors. 

Dining serves a vital function to our lives; we need to eat to survive. But in practice it is so much more. Dining not only helps to develop our cultural identity, it is a common ground between people, embedded with its own set of rituals, processes, and relational customs. 

Dining Interactions sets out to understand how we can leverage these customs so that we may intentionally reinvent how we relate around them. The final output is a series of dining experiments focusing on different social behaviors and a framework that outlines the criteria for making these experiences.      

engauge-app.com

A mobile app and interactive phone cover that tracks smartphone use throughout the day with the aim of reducing unintentional and habit-driven interactions.

Do we really need our smartphones every time they end up in our hands? Smartphones provide many benefits like social connection and information, but unintentional or habitual use can distract, interrupt, and separate us from our surroundings. 

Engauge combines a mobile app with an interactive phone cover that together track, and make the user aware of, the quantity of smartphone use sessions they initiate throughout the day. The goal is to limit the habit-driven impulse to check through raising the individual’s awareness around each smartphone interaction. Engaging in mindful smartphone use driven by intent will decrease our daily use count, ensure fulfilling on-phone experiences, and give us back just a little more time each day to raise our sights, notice the people and community around us, or have a minute or two more with those we love.

 A tool that enables you to take a break from your phone. With one simple action, you are free from the digital world’s interruptions. 

According to a Morgan Stanley Internet Trends report, more than 90 percent of people keep their phones within three feet of them, twenty-four hours a day. Always present and on hand, smartphones often interrupt our experiences. The mental and physical presence is difficult to draw away from. Smartphone users need to take a break from their devices every now and then. 

Timeout is a handmade wooden box that enables you to take a break from your phone, simply by placing it inside. With one simple action, you are free from the digital world’s interruptions. Spend quality time interacting with people around you. Work on a task that requires concentration or spend the time for pure relaxation. 

http://slowdown.io

An (anti) social media digest for the digitally stressed.

These days, there is always more to read, or watch, or like, or share, or retweet, or bookmark on the web. The infinitely scrolling stream rushes by us at an increasingly rapid pace, and it has become harder and harder for us to stay afloat. Slow Down provides a bit of digital stress relief amid the chaos of our hyper-connected, information-overloaded lives. It questions our existing, often unhealthy relationship with social media and digital content, and asks, how might we make all of this stuff a little more meaningful and a little less stressful?

Slow Down serves two distinct purposes. It's a useful tool for managing your social media feeds. It reduces both the volume and velocity of the stream, by constraining the amount of content you receive and delivering it at a predictable time to your email inbox. It also experiments with the nature of social media and the ways in which we consume it. The digests use familiar content as source material and transform it in unexpected, often delightful ways.

http://www.for-thepeople.org
www.story.for-thepeople.org 

A service that enhances anybody’s ability to get government-issued identification, with clear and actionable information, delivered through trusted people and familiar resources.

Legal employment, the ability to open a bank account, and access to public benefits are dependent on having government-issued ID, like social security cards and state IDs, which over 20 million Americans do not have. Applying for ID is difficult due to incomplete, inaccessible, or confusing instructions. People who need ID to get back on their feet, like ex-offenders, homeless youth, and recent immigrants, find application instructions especially difficult to use.

ID For the People shows people without government-issued identification the quickest and easiest way to get ID, with print and online guides personalized to their situations. It is currently being piloted at community organizations in Chelsea, the South Bronx, and Bed-Stuy in New York City. Guides come in low-literacy friendly formats that are accessible for people with limited resources: printed pamphlets at community organizations, an SMS hotline, and a mobile-friendly website.

ID For the People is the first initiative of For the People, which creates tools to help a broader range of Americans navigate and access government services.

makeitnoteworthy.com

A service that  helps you capture and share memories by linking them to music.

Personal memories are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They become the basis for the way we relate to each other, and ultimately, shape the world. Now that smartphones have given users a startlingly efficient documentation tool, we have no shortage of digital artifacts of our personal stories. But how do we make meaning out of this digital detritus?

As it turns out, music is a powerful tool in unlocking detailed, nuanced personal memories. Because of the way it interacts with our brain, music triggers do an amazing job of capturing and cataloging memories. Music calls to us on a personal level, but it is of the larger world. It is therefore an amazing tool in drawing us out of ourselves, and connecting us to each other.

For those looking to create meaningful records of their life, Noteworthy is a platform that uses music as the means to document their personal stories as well as begin sincere conversations with friends and family. 

unveil-interactive.com
unveil.tyler-davidson.com

A projection based, immersive educational platform for learning skills in the physical world.

Over the last few years, we have witnessed the meteoric rise of web-based educational platforms. While they are quite powerful at placing vast amounts of knowledge at our fingertips, they are not so good at extending that power to our interactions with physical objects and spaces.

Through a combination of video projection and motion sensing technology, unVeil transforms ordinary surfaces and objects into tangible interfaces, giving us the power to learn anything, anywhere.