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On Friday, August 7, 2015, Vox Product, Hyper Island and Spotify Design hosted Communicate 2025, an event about the future. 36 students from the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club and 36 designers from the greater NYC tech scene spent a day brainstorming and inventing.
The participants spent the day doing hands-on exercises to think about the core values of communication. What are the ways we express ourselves without technology? What does it mean to be understood? What will life be like in 2025? These activities built up to the final big project: prototyping a product that allows you to communicate with people who are far away. Those final projects are summarized below.
Participate Next YearThe concept is that when you send someone a text message, you can also choose a song to send to convey your mood, so that your texting session has a soundtrack.
This project lets you send smells to each other, and also save your favorite smells to a library. For example, if you’re video chatting with your dad and want to show him your food, he can smell it. Or if you smell a plant in the park and enjoyed it, you can save the smell so you can buy the plant later.
The idea behind this project is that we, humans, will become the device in the future. With this concept, you would take a pill to tune into frequencies of other people, to feel what they’re feeling and see what they’re seeing, and even share their dreams.
This is an app that is a way to communicate with your pet every day. The app has a treat dispenser, GPS in the collar for finding your dog, sensors on the dog’s tail, and doggie chat time. You can also track data around your pet throughout the day, like its movements and its mood progression.
MC is a system where you can tattoo symbols on yourself as a communication system for others. Alternatively to tattoos, you can also communicate using existing items like glasses. MC uses a color system as its primary way to share messages, where each color represents a different concept. It works internationally.
Imagine you have gone to Paris and your dog is in New York City. With Pet Bot, you can apply a collar on your real dog and take your robot dog with you on the road. When you feed the robot, your real dog is fed. When you pet your robot, the real dog is fed. It folds up for easy travel and when you’re in “home” mode, your robot becomes a friend for your dog rather than a clone of it.
In the future, forget about simple voice calls and video. The future of communication will be much more 3D, through hologram-style projections.
What better way to talk to the people you care about than through a stylish accessory? The Moodora Bracelet is a fashionable charm bracelet where each chart represents a person in your life, and the color of the charms represent those people’s moods.
Current communication mechanisms lack perspective and make it difficult to see the world through others’ eyes. Empact solves for this through a headset mechanism with 360 degree cameras and lenses, so that when you want to see the world through someone else’s eyes, you just swipe down your lenses and hop into another world.
This is a telecomm capsule. You step into your capsule if you would like to talk to someone who is far away, like on another planet. Doing this creates a 3D projection of yourself to the other person you’re talking to, no matter the distance.
Imagine a little blue, floating, waterproof orb that floats around and follows you where you go. It detects the activity level of its owners, and if two friends have nothing to do and are looking for an activity, it sets them up to talk with each other.
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