Public Spaces

Imagine spaces that are created to be personalized. Could an amusement park get customized by your Spotify preferences, world events, or the latest mathematic model? And if not amusement parks, how about gyms in the rainforest or libraries that change their design depending on the material you are researching? Maybe you’d like to change your work environment to feel like you and your colleagues are typing in a forest, riding a train across the Alps, or have windows looking over Mexico pyramids.

Cities

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When the leaves fall, could we add spring? If we are feeling alone can we say, “No, tree, you won’t be barren. Here are some leaves”?

Could we download programs to change a city to a different time period? Feeling like 1950s? Would modern lamps morph into their 1950s counterparts? Or maybe you are missing home? That house on the street, could you watch it morph into a Spanish villa?

Maybe you don’t like graffiti. Could you ad-block graffiti and wipe your city clean?

Civic Participation

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How about seeing what the city has planned to develop? Or what the city wants to strike down? Rather than see a cardboard or wait for the latest tweet from the city council, could you see the current planned projects morphing onto the street? Could you touch those projects to submit your vote or comment on it?

Could you suggest improvements to the city government by annotating the street? Could you see a broken stop light and draw a circle around, alerting your officials?

Studying

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We could create traveling study places. Going into a coffee shop, we might toss a notebook without bothering people. We could write down notes and rather than stashing them in our bag and letting the rain soak them, we could distribute the notes throughout the space and come at a different time.

How would an untether library look? Could unique books pile around the world, where little pagodas open connecting you to other researchers?

Communities

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Could coffee shops invite the latest artist to design the space? Or could you go to a coffee shop where the tea cup changes depending on the culture of the person speaking next to you.

If there is a place your friends like, how about designing a little nook for you in the public sphere? Could you form your own graffiti band and make the city your clique’s?

What if rather than reading the Bible, we could embed the Bible into our reality? How would existing in a Buddhist reality be different than existing in a Taoist one? Would a branch of communism have everyone where the same color and drive the same car?

Business

Marketing

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What might happen if we used an ad-blocker for real life and make billboards invisible? Could we extend this to brands? What if we could pass by a car and remove whether the car is a Ferrari, a Tesla, or a Mitsubishi? Would consumer spending patterns change as we give people an option to hide what other people wear and drive?

Shopping

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Imagine going to a grocery store and filtering objects by price, calories, and allergens. The ones outside your selection get desaturated and factors you look for in a label get augmented. Or how about knowing where the food gets produced and whether it is fair trade? Could augmented reality enable a more ethical shopping experience?

Do you have a dish in mind? Or maybe you are looking for some inspiration? If you are looking at pork belly, would KBBQ ingredients show up and might you be guided on where to find the rest of the ingredients?

Movement

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What would happen if we removed computers from the workplace? If the work that we did sitting on desks could be mapped to activities that allowed us to move around the space?

Rather than loading our emails in a separate tab, what happens if there was a tree in the middle of the room that sorted our emails. Would the most urgent emails translate as the most ripened fruit? Or as you cook, could you hatch an egg to start an email, speak the message as you stir, and add seasoning to the mix depending on how you want your words to come across?

If you are a data scientist who likes soccer, could you go to the soccer pitch to explore your plots? Could the ball’s color change depending on a value that is affected by the x and y coordinate of the soccer pitch? As you dribble, might you kick the ball to accept a higher degree of uncertainty?

Could we keep track of our data science projects or data visualizations by working on top of tree branches. Could we bend-water as a way to manipulate numbers and then sew these functions onto nooks in the tree bark?