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Programming: Erez Kikin-Gil , http://www.tiltool.com Visual Design: Ruth Kikin-Gil, http://www.ruthkikin.com |
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About the Social Garden project Background New Year was approaching and we wanted to greet our family, friends and colleagues with a happy new year. Now, a new year’s time is always a period for reflection on life, and on the people that are part of life. We did that and we realised that the people we know are spread among many countries and across several continents. Some of them know each other, others don’t. We thought it would be interesting to create a tool that will not only allow us to greet our friends, but will also reflect some of the relationships among them (and among them and their friends) through the way they greet each other. So we created the Social Garden . ( Read about social networks) Concept The Social Garden is a pl ace where anyone can
grow the flowers of friendship by wishing good fortunes to the people
they love. They do it by sending greeting cards through the system. |
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Understanding the interface |
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Yellow flowers signify a greeting sent to a person |
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Pink flowers signify the activity
level of the sender. Pink flowers grow and increase in numbers according
to the amount of greetings a person has sent |
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The grey lines signify a connection between a sender and a receiver. |
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Moving the mouse over a name or a flower reveals the associated greeting. |
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Viewers can move the content up, down, right and
left, and can zoom in and out. |
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To greet a friend and to add flowers to the garden – click on “ADD A GREETING BY CLICKING HERE ” |
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Pretty easy, right?
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About the technology The Social Garden in an online data base driven application, based on Macromedia Flash, AMFPHP – Flash Remoting technology, PHP and MySQL. The programming languages used in this project are Action script 2.0 and PHP. What’s next? We really don’t know yet. Although we created it for New Year’s, we think it is open enough to keep on living throughout the year. So why don’t you take a few minutes, send a greeting to a friend and plant a seed in our social garden? When looking at computer and telecommunications technology we can see that they lead to further spre adi ng of the society, by detaching it not only from geographical limitations, but from temporal restriction as well, thus enabling people to create and sustain societies anytime and anywhere. Researchers like Castells look at these new communities as existing only in terms of connections (or ‘information flows’) between remote individuals [1], and Wellman defines community “ as network of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity. I do not limit my thinking about community to neighborhoods and villages. This is good advice for any epoch and especially pertinent for the twenty first century”[2] A new form of community or “tribe” has emerged, based on contexts instead of locations. Sport, music, sex and brands are the new catalysts for creating communities, coupled with the need of being together. These Neo tribes are emotion-based, internally diverse and temporary. The communities do not share pl ace , but have strong social relationships based on mutual aid, conviviality, and professional support. Each community builds an ethics, which creates "ambiances" - atmospheres, life-styles, that distinguish one network from another[3] Mobile communication devices are the optimal vehicle to support these types of communities, as they provide a ubiquitous contact, both in social terms and in terms of access to information. When the technology is coupled with a social need, a cultural shift is happening. REFERENCES [ 1] Castells Manuel., “The Rise of the Network Society”, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. [2] Wellman Barry, “Physical place and CyberPlace: The rise of personalized networking” , International journal of urban andregional research Vol. 25, No. 2, Blackwell Publishing , 2001 p.228 [3] Maffesoli, Michel, “Post-Modern tribes and communication”, A talk given on August 19th 2004 in ISEA2004 conference, Helsinki , Finland .
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