Project Brief: Connecting Place with People

Introduction
You always know where your mobile phone is, but does it know where you are?  Does it know where your friends are?  Does it improve your life with that information?  Beyond driving directions and beyond maps, how will location-awareness be useful?  One domain is in connecting people who are geographically near each other.  We normally think of connecting people with similar interests regardless of their geographical location.  But if we have real-time location information, can we connect people who are near each other?  To make the problem tractable, let's explore this in the context of the Stanford University campus, and try to connect people here using a location-aware, mobile-networked campus.

 Your Mission
Create a useful, meaningful, and/or exciting location-aware mobile application that leverages the Stanford University campus space and people within it to increase connections and conversations between them.

What Success will Look Like
Successful projects in this domain will follow a user-centered design process to identify and explore the design space, genuine and specific user needs, and a usable and compelling application design that enhances interpersonal interaction on the Stanford University campus.

 Design Inspiration
  1. How can mobile technology create new experiences for play, curiosity, and serendipity?
  2. How can mobile technology bring people together for impromptu conversations?
  3. How can mobile technology help people find peers for lifting weights, working out, jogging or pick-up games in tennis, basketball, soccer, etc.?
  4. How can mobile technology help people get just-in-time homework help or academic questions answered?
  5. What are the trust and privacy considerations that emerge when mobile devices are keys, business cards, and payment mechanisms as well as communication technologies?
  6. What if a mobile technology could coordinate the sharing of several cars for an entire dorm through ride-sharing?  What if commuters to/from campus had an efficient, easy, and effective ride-sharing system?