Proverbial Wallets

I visited the MIT Media Lab yesterday as part of a day-long gathering of EMC Distinguished Engineers/Fellows. We were given a tour of the new building. It’s worth visiting the web site to see the new construction (look at the slide show) because the building itself is UN-BE-LIEVABLE.

Given EMC sponsorship of the Media Lab, EMC employees are able to roam around the building at will and talk to the students, teachers, and researchers.

One of the themes I noticed during the tour is that the problems experienced by “young people” often take front and center stage. I saw a demo of something called a “Proverbial Wallet” and I thought it was relevant to something my own kids are experiencing.

For example, my daughter picks up her paycheck, deposits it, takes out her cash and puts it in her wallet. As we talk about things such as direct deposit and credit cards, she is delaying the use of those options because she prefers to “know how much cash she has”. After last week’s school vacation in which she visited Boston, paid for her own parking, etc., I asked her what she was doing on Friday night and she said “something that doesn’t cost any money”.

The Media lab is addressing this issue as part of its Information Ecology department. The amount of cash we have is essentially stored as digital bits “out there on the internet”. When you are at the cash register making a purchase, it is inconvenient (and annoying to the people in line) to surf onto your bank’s web site and check your bank balance.  The Information Ecology team is looking at ways for digital media to intersect more effectively with the physical world. As one of their experiments they have designed a proverbial wallet.

This wallet contains a bluetooth device and some interesting mechanical features. The bluetooth device is aware of the balance in your account and can take the following “actions”:

• It can cause your wallet to vibrate when your bank account decrements
• It can tighten the hinge on the wallet to make it harder to open it when your balance is low
• It can inflate your wallet when there’s plenty of cash to spend

This cool idea, described as a “tangible interface for financial awareness”, is described further here. The proverbial wallet is one of seemingly hundreds of experiments that are going on at the Media Lab. The tour we took yesterday stimulates ideas that can be brought back and shared within EMC at large. For example, when we think of managing storage devices, today we use things like browsers and/or pre-installed management software. What if we were to use fluid interfaces like Sixth Sense? (watch the videos).

My final thought on the visit is that each and every person in the Media Lab is a social scientist to some degree. We have a good laugh when we talk about how their inventions could backfire or cause awkward relational interactions. For example, if my wallet starts vibrating during a meeting, does this mean my wife has just finished coloring her hair? Do I need to call and ask “what are you doing right now?” As we laughed about these types of implications it became clear that they consider these scenarios all the time. They can eventually lead to privacy and real-world use-cases that need to be solved.

I’m always looking for an excuse to visit, so whether you are an EMC employee or not, drop me a
note when you’re in town and I’ll try and bring you in.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur