In a TED Talk, Clay Shirky discusses the transformative power of tools that turn planning problems into coordination problems.

You’ll have experienced this in your life whenever you bought your first mobile phone, and you stopped making plans. You just said, I’ll call you when I get there. Call me when you get off work. Right? That is a point-to-point replacement of coordination with planning.

Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration

photo credit: qwertyuiop

The other night, some of my co-workers were having a get-together before everyone when out to wherever. Two different groups were going to two different places but everyone was expressing a desire to meet up later and making plans to do so.

Semi-drunken pre-going-out plans never, ever pan out. Everyone involved must know this, but they make them anyway. It’s a complicated communication where the only real message is: “I like you well enough to politely pretend I might make an effort to see you in a few hours.”

One of the participants explained that, before cellphones, she used to carry chalk with her at all times. When she was supposed to meet someone but they were late or the group was getting bored or whatever she could just scrawl a message for them on the sidewalk. Which is kind of awesome and feels like Foursquare/Gowalla/Geoloqi without all the stupid badges and mayorships.

photo credit: James Jordan

What’s really appealing about a chalk message beyond the hint of hobo code is the sheer size and physicality. One of the problems with cellphones as a window into AR interfaces is that they are so tiny. They must be, when you are going to stuff them in your pocket. But the result is a tiny little frame with barely more field of view than a compact mirror. It’s a worse interface that the narrow viewport of an FPS. It lacks all the peripheral/spacial feeling of things scrawled on the world.

I want a public infrastructure of projectors that activates when triggered by the presence of registered users. I want them to project messages, updates, and advertising out into the world. The landscape should spring to life around us, pregnant as it is with hidden meaning and promise. The hills should be haunted and we should all live in an enchanted forest.

photo credit: Dakota Blue Harper

P.S. Here’s some hobo codes for the 21^st century.