RCA Design Interactions’ Tribal Futures project for Vodafone

Matt Jones writes about a short project he worked on last November with the students on the Design Interactions course at the RCA in collaboration with Vodafone’s User Experience group.

The brief was deliberately wide and intended to steer us all from thinking about mobile phones. It was entitled “Tribal Futures”, and asked the group to:

“…focus in on the mundane and the extremes of our behaviour in groups and propose design interventions to support, subvert and celebrate our tribal connections. We encourage you to extrapolate the current trends in mobile, social and other technologies in terms of their failures as well as successes, and examine what technologies intended and unintended consequences might be.”

A short summary of the work can be found on Matt’s Magical Nihilism blog.

All of the projects can be found at http://beta.interaction.rca.ac.uk/ft/ and they have kept the project blog that the group used for research and work-in-progress live (but with comments closed) at http://beta.interaction.rca.ac.uk/futuretribes/ to show some of the process along the way.