Project first ideas
Hi!
The first crazy idea I got when the project was posted was to find out if Tinder made people go to bars less or more? Or, rephrased, Does Tinder reduce bar use?
The idea involved a technological change and was fun. However, I had no idea how or where to start and if I would be able to do that.
So I continued thinking….
I have a great interest in transportation and mobility issues, so I thought about trying to convey that in this project.
2nd idea: Does transit implementation bring life? (5 words!!)
The idea was to see if places around transit stations were more active than others. As the project initial perspective was about change, I thought about seeing how the implementation of new transit stations in different cities had changed the areas around the station. After the first class tutorial I had some ideas of how I could do that. I could find the location of the New Transit stations and obtain the google street images around that before and after the stations were built. I could build a photography collage of these images though time and see if there is an evolution. However, the incorporation of transit is actually not a “recent technology”.… and the method is biased in many many ways, such as time of the year the pictures were taken, hour and other factors that could affect the outcome.
I got inspired by several projects of this team: http://www.300000kms.net/
Specially one project that tries to grasp the nocturnal image of the city: http://www.atnight.ws/cartographies.php#.WbsWM9GixPY
The idea of working with Instagram and tweets came to my mind and I came out with several ideas at once.
3rd idea: the Image of New York.
I would like to replicate the test made by the 300000kms team in Barcelona and see the density of tweets and Instagram images with the word New York. It would be interesting to filter the tweets with this word to see which kind of image draws.
In the same line but with more complexity we can find this work:
This idea could be iterated with so many different words, such as dirty, beautiful, ugly, sexy, bagel, jerk…. Some of the overlapping could be interesting.
Although I don’t know where the technological change would be there… yet
4th idea: Does city/subway WiFi enhance connectivity?
I thought about the recent incorporation of Public WiFi around the city of New York and I was reflecting on the use of this new feature. If people living here generally had data on their phones why would they use WiFi? Is it something more used by visitors/tourists from other countries or locals? Do local people use it to download heavy data such as videos? Do people chat, tweet or share more than before around those WiFi Hotspots? Is it possible to see that in any way? Specially, the greatest change has been made in transit stations, where before this incorporation the disconnection from the digital world was absolute. I would be very interested in going in depth on that subject, although I still don’t know the final direction. What kind of things do people post? Positive tweets? Negative? Images? In which language? How much is the MTA website/apps accessed to check for delays?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/nyregion/subway-mta-underground-cell-service.html
