Bright Ideas—Current startup. Great activities, shared by people in your city.
Come Out and Play—We collect new real world games and find audiences for them around the city.
Center for the Study of Human Satisfaction—Working for a new framework for product design based on the economics of satisfaction.
Inventions
CEML—a scripting language for coordinating real-world interaction.
Groundcrew—a mobile and web platform for organizing events in real time.
Notecard Parties 2002-2012— All guests at a party are assigned precisely-timed tasks, distributed on little cards or via SMS. Tasks interweave. Strangers find themselves in intimate encounters, quiet moments, facing challenges together, being theatrical, etc. In some versions (2004-2006) tasks were developed by an onsite team, based on the wishes and dreams of the party guests themselves.
Continuous Play (2008)—A performance collaboration with choreographer Maura Donohue in which the audience switches from passive to very active performers, directed via SMS, over the course of the evening. (photos)
EarthSync (2006)—A social calendar-sharing website. Allowed you to see what all of your geographically-dispersed friends are doing today and "sync-up" by doing the same thing at the same time.
Take to the Streets Radio (2005)—A radio show and weekly street event for more than a year. We give listeners instructions every week for public space adventures near the centers of Northampton and Florence, MA.
Share a Quiet Moment with a Distant Stranger (2006)—A web installation. Spend a minute or two in synchronous silent contemplation with a stranger somewhere else on Earth. Users are given the relative compass bearing and degreesbelow-the-horizon of their companions, so as to more fully feel "with" them in contemplation.
Inaction at a Distance (2003)—
Site-specific performance. Two people stand quietly, shoulder
to shoulder, 250 miles apart, for 10 minutes. Synchronized to
atomic time, they inhale at the same moment to begin.
Performed three times in NYC and VT.
Geoloitering (2003)—
Email/physical installation. For more than a month, I spent part
of each day standing quietly in Vermont while elsewhere in the
world (Ireland, Australia, New Mexico, Japan, etc) a complete
stranger was also standing quietly
Trustfall Dinner (2001)—
A computer program was used to scramble the
instructions of several gourmet recipes and to assign guests at
the dinner party cooking tasks in such a manner that it was
difficult for anyone to guess what was being prepared until the
very end. A primary focus was on the mechanics of danger and
trust -- for instance, in having one participant leave something
prone to burning on the stove and having another participant
remove it.
Invoke (2000)—
Web/physical installation. A gift-exchange community was
created. Participants were making, hiding, and finding postcards
in back pages of low-circulation books in the San Francisco
public library. Each user would enter the call number and page
of a book within which he or she would like to receive a
postcard, and within a week another user would place one there.
Past work
Joe has worked for The Gov’t of Tibet in Exile, Interval Research Corporation, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, WGBH Television, Dartmouth College, a post-Katrina soup kitchen, couchsurfing, an unschool called North Star, renesys.com, and other companies.
