I’ve been sitting on this research for a while now, waiting for time to go over it myself. Now that I am (what’s the “Super Bowl”?), I’m fascinated by it.

A research group at Berkeley is called the Familiar Stranger Project. They extend the work of Marshall McLuhan (”The Medium is the Message”) and Stanley Milgram (Six Degrees mail experiment; “Obedience to Authority” stranger pain-infliction experiment) into tech devices and neighborhood networks.

One proposal is the creation of little electronic buttons that allow you to rate your environment as good or bad, and also help guide you to people and things that are familiar or unfamiliar (depending which you want at the time).

It is and always has been my intention with ISIS to help our products create an atmosphere of “familiar strangers” on campus, where everyone is open to conversation, friendship, and cooperation with each person they meet. By helping like-minded people find events with E@S and mixing different groups in the Blender, I think we are well on our way to doing so. Kudos.

Also note the project’s use of video, prototyping, and imagery to make their point, something we have yet to exploit fully in our marketing. Any ideas?