University of Babel

Our concept is about the University of Babel. We started using a wiki to collect our research and as a cooperation tool for creating the concept document. See the process at University of Babel @ jottit. Below is our current idea of the concept, the goal of the University of Babel (UoB) is to learn about other cultures.

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One university in Turkey and one university in Sweden. The Turkish university has a Arabic speaker tower to send information to other universities and can also receive messages with the tower too. The Swedish university has the same, but instead of a speaker tower they have a Christian church bell which acts in the same way. When a message is received by a speaker tower or church bell it is send to bacteria inside the university. These bacteria sit in the walls inside the university and aline in a certain pattern to display the message received by the tower on the walls. This message is in a general standard language which we will come up with. This language is a mixture of images and text, with latin letters creating the image. And thus multiple layers of the alphabet get visible (like in calligraphy with the background story and everything). For new users (that don't understand the language) there is a Primer. The Primer is a digital book explaining how to read and write the language. The book adapts to the learning curve of the user by dynamicly changing according to the questions the user has about the language. (See the book The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson for more information about the Primer.)

The messages are displayed on different walls. Every wall can represent a subject or another university, country or culture.

Inside the university the students read the messages on the walls. In this way they learn about other cultures. The environment of the message is lacking because the message in transmitted to the other university with another culture. There the teacher comes in sight. The teachers -or supervisor- will help the students by explaining the environment or the background stories behind the messages.

What this all points to is love, peace and happiness. As the students from the different universities, different countries and different cultures talk to eachother and get to know each other they can solve world problems. The UoB helps the students in reaching this goal by transmitting messages to the other university and starting a conversation between the cultures.

The love, peace and happiness (LPH) is not our goal, it might be the goal of the students. We try to create a system which supports the students in their goals, be that LPH or something else. This way we release the stress between the different countries and cultures and build bridges between the universities.

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We've got some extra ideas for combining personal messages on your own arm, retrieving and publishing messages from and to media companies, and receiving and sending messages to gods via Me.

Furthermore, we just got our first critique round from our supervisors. They thought we should be focus on one part of it (for example leave the communication between universities which we already thought of) and focusing on the interaction parts of the concept. Also they pointed us at washing hands, using OLED-displays, Peter Hoffman and the Game of Life.