To End the Cheap Umbrella Problem, Make It More Like a Smart Phone
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Tuesday, Apr 20, 2010
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Smart Umbrellas by
Hilary Mason (computer scientist researcher at bit.ly)
Marc Andre Robinson (sculptor, interactive artist)
Amidst hours of conversation, these two came together over their despair of the $5 umbrella, the kind that appears for sale on New York City streets during rainstorms and often ends up broken, lying in a gutter. But these umbrellas don’t begin and end on the street: they’re born by the millions every year in drab Asian factories and end up piling up in landfills or elsewhere.
The solution? Give an umbrella some of the capabilities of a smart phone and make it a shared resource. “It’s about cultural etiquette as much as it’s about technology,” said Mason. With a GPS and an API (and thus a way to turn it into a data recorder), along with some friendly reminders, the umbrella transforms from a cheap, throwaway object to an object with a personality and a future, and a history too. Umbrella 2.0 could also record the stories of its users as they walk. Like the story Robinson told about how he met his wife: singing in the rain, under an umbrella.
The cost of the post-prototype umbrella? Joked Mason: “It depends if you buy it with a subsidized data plan or not.”
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