JonathanMelhuish.com

I finally got around to editing and uploading the video of our team’s final presentation at Social Innovation Camp 2007.  Over the course of the weekend, a team of half a dozen techies put together a piece of mobile phone software that reads a barcode and loads up a wiki page.

Of course, as Richard Pope emphasises in the video, the beauty of this technology is that it’s really flexible – you’re just using the barcode as an entry point to related information.  As it’s user-editable, people can put anything there.

Still, I thought it’d be interesting to have a vague idea of what people might use such a device for, i.e. what unsatisfied informational needs they are aware of during their shopping process.  So I gathered a team (including ethnographer Charles Armstrong) to go to the local supermarket and pounce some unsuspecting shoppers!

Here’s the presentation showing some of my research results, followed by a live demo of the software:

Thanks to The People Speak for shooting the original footage and patiently transferring it all to my laptop for me.  Here’s their video of me attacking one of the techies and trying to pin down some use cases for this technology, and then going on to explore the potential for promoting ethical information.  Here’s my photographic exploration of ideas surrounding attaching objects to information.  The source code for this project is still available for anyone to build on.