All about everyonea blog about engagement

Thoughts on social swarming: A model for mobile engagement

I came across Ben Reynhart’s blog, as you do, meandering through the net, looking for whatever. Ben’s in his final year of the Digital Art and Technology degree, at the University of Plymouth. What interested me was what he has been doing in his final year project, based around utilising mobile technology and swarm behaviour.

In short, Ben’s practical aspects of his final year project work is concerned with how swarm theory might translate into social, domestic applications, through the use of mobile networks (for a fuller understanding of Ben’s final year work, see his project microsite here).

Ben initially carried out a ’swarm’ behaviour experiment, using a bunch of people, each with a mobile handset, following a few simple rules of engagement. To quote Ben’s own description:

‘Connections made within the swarm are represented by the camera flash on each persons’ phone. We can see that from just 8 people walking randomly over a period of a few minutes, many person to person connections are established. With current mobile technology and software, these potential connections taking place are in no way exploited in any degree. Mobile phones currently require user interaction to initiate communication via centralised control systems, but what if we could exploit local area user connections on mobile phones, without requiring constant and intimate attention to your device…?’

A lot of chins have been flapping over the possibilities of crowdsourcing recently, with new mobile applications being set up to try and harness people en-masse (the navigation app Waze, being one). Also, there is increasing use of AI in mobile applications (My6Sense, for iPhone being one), albeit on a fairly simplistic level, but nonetheless, forays into this area are increasing, seeking to establish some kind of learning principle (intelligent, ‘learning’ search engines, such as Wolfram Alpha, and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft’s Bing).

Increasingly, there is a focus on filtering data, rather than searching for it. Searching we can do, finding is another thing altogether. So, back to the what if. What if mobile networks could learn from our behaviour and apply this to how we enagage with our environments, one another, products?

Well, firstly, a mobile application with AI, that learned from our behaviour (what we did with it, what we did while it is with us) would be reacting to our actions, then feeding back to us, and so on. If it could also learn from others behaviour (our friends, people within our networks, anyone), would be an awfully powerful application. This kind of background, reactionary, behaviour-augmented communication could have several profound effects on the way we engage with one another. Firstly, to the way we behave in groups, whether locally or remotely connected, secondly as individuals reacting to our environments, and thirdly, to the way we behave as consumers, in relation to products and brands.

A few applications that spring to mind are: Crowd-control, traffic congestion and routing, real-time opinion gathering, crisis response, (flooding, for instance) product sales (triggered by crowd behaviour to weather or other conditions), real-time trend analysis, I could go on, and probably will.

How about an automatically created playlist – for a party, dependent upon the listening habits of all of your house guests, triggered by their proximity to the venue, so constantly tailored to your guests tastes (could be awful for a few perhaps?) or the automatic creation of shopping lists, recipe suggestions, event planning, resource marshalling, yada, yada, ya.

I could imagine whole new ways to interact with one another en-masse, at social gatherings like concerts, festivals, rallies and clubs. This kind of aplication  could totally change how we interact with each other at events, as well as exponentially increasing the opportunities for co-creation and collaboration Marshalling people in order to get a group task done might also be a whole lot easier.

Looking at this in terms of how brands and consumers might better engage with one another, I can similarly see benefits of applying a swarm approach. Realtime feedback on consumer behaviour with products themselves (products talking to mobiles, about how they are being used, or even whether they are being used) could throw up some very intereresting CRM prospects for brands. For instance, the ability to target consumers who aren’t getting the full benefit from a product, or could do with a service upgrade.

And what aboiut the greater good? Getting people to lower their carbon emmissions or energy consumption in a particular area, being able to evoke help or support locally, local government services reacting to the local populous better, better emergency response, live calls to action within communities, based on audience behaviour? Urban planning anyone? Policing? Surely there are many more areas where a mobile, swarm behavioural technology could be made good use of?

New forms of social, experiential entertainment could also be brought about by the use of this kind of approach. Shared, group-based entertainment, narratives being shaped in real-time by participants behaviour.

Whoa! I’m going to stop now. But I’d love to hear anyone else’s thoughts or ideas on this.