Flyer Cafè
About the project
Flyer cafè is a digital bar where people can post and read public announces as everyone usually does on the walls in the streets and public places in general.
The problem with wall posting however is that most of the times people attach too many flyers, one over the other, generating a visual confusion which most of the times have the effect of ruining the streets and hiding many announces under the big confusion. However wall posting has strong good points: everyone can post his announce, announces are under everyone’s eyes and it’s cheap.
The goal for this project was to keep all these good points and the feelings of wall posting, and to translate ist material simplicity and tangibility for the cafè ambient.
Post announces
To post a new announce the user has just to send and MMS to Flyer Cafe adding all the informations and eventual pictures about it’s offer. The MMS contents will fill up a digital “postcard” where the MMS’s subject will become title of the announce, the text will fill the information field and the image will be displayed on the front side to catch the people attention.
The reason because was chose to use the MMS protocol was the need of accessing the system with a mobile technology and also due to the low popularity of smart phones in Italy at that time. Nowadays it would be much easier to send to Flyer Cafè an email, however it’s also true the MMS will probably keep the system accessible to almost everybody’s phone.
Consult announces
To consult announces on Flyer Cafe the user has literally to use the bar’s objects.
Coasters represent the announce category, sugar bags are paperclips to temporary old interesting announces, the spoon behave like a “tablet pen” and so on.
So placing the JOBS coaster on the bar will show all the relative announces clustering around it. Rotating the coaster counterclockwise will hide newer announces. By dragging ad announce with the spoon is possible to isolate it and if there is the need of a physical copy by dragging the announce under the napkins dispenser, immediately a paper copy will be printed out from it.
The prototype
We made two different prototypes. The first was to test the technology, using the reacTIVision protocol to tack all the interactive items on the bar and to understand the feeling of standing at the bar moving objects to read posts.
The second prototype is the one that you can see in the video. It’s a Flash mock-up made to show the flow of the most common interactions around the bar.
An announce being dragged out from the coaster with the spoon.
An announce being printed by the napkins dispenser.
• links | Davide Cocchi