We had the opportunity to attend a symposium at Pratt Institute as part of their “ReIGNITE!” series during alumni weekend. The event brought together a group of panelists from across a wide range of disciplines speaking on ideas related to redefining the good life and reconsidering creative value in the 21st century.

Touch is a research project that’s exploring NFC, or Near Field Communications. NFC is kind of like the technological “glue” that allows connections between various mobile devices and physical objects.
One of the areas Touch is looking at is how to make invisible wireless signals visible to gather a deeper understanding about them.  On the Touch blog, they’ve posted a gallery of images visualizing the existence of wireless signals with white dashed lines. The subtle overlay of the white dashes over photos, show us a hidden world of networked communication going on between phones, contactless cards, RFID, WiFi, Bluetooth and more. [...]

Is cursive handwriting even a valid skill anymore? A sentimental Boston Globe article explores this rapidly atrophying communication method, and discovers, although it has its fans, it’s essentially going extinct.
In today’s world, this seems logical – formal cursive handwriting just doesn’t seem necessary when so much communication is done via keyboard entered text. Even schools are phasing out penmanship. The Globe reports that A 2007 US Department of Education study shows nine out of 10 teachers only devote an average of 70 minutes per week to the teaching of handwriting.
But some, like Kitty Burns Florey author of Script and Scribble: [...]

Short text based communications on the web, or on a mobile devices can leave a lot to be desired as far as effectiveness of accurately communicating a message. Without a richer set of context clues, words can be misinterpreted and understood in ways the sender never intended. A recent NPR piece explores this problem, and the question of social responsibility on the web with the story of Twitter user “Thordora“.
NPR reports:
Alarm bells went off Sunday night for readers of a Twitter message by a woman known on the Web as Thordora. She writes a “mommy blog” — Spin Me I [...]

In a press release detailing the perils of texting at the wheel, SayType just announced their speech-to-text service that enables hands-free texting, email and internet search. What really caught our eye, though, was a service called “license plate messaging”. Here’s how it works:
Say “Plate” then begin with the license plate number. e.g. 7k66665, then continue with your message, you left your car door open and your lights on. To add a license plate number, or add/modify/remove contact information, visit www.whyhonk.com.
WhyHonk marks the emergence of a truly “mobile” social network. You can send a voice message to any car you see [...]