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    Lost in Boston: REALTIME

    Knight 2007 News Challenge Winner
    Christopher Csikszentmihályi

    by Christopher Csikszentmihályi (Bio), March 13, 2011

    Tagged: bus, c4, center for future civic media, mit, public transportation, realtime, rick borovoy, sign

    For the last several months, we have been testing a system called Lost in Boston: REALTIME with a variety of community partners. This video describes a bit about the project.

    Rick Borovoy loves Boston, but he hates how hard it is to figure out where one is. Boston is tough to navigate, and while our various government entities do their best to keep up, governments are better at long-term infrastructure than quickly updating signage in a fast-moving, dynamic city. So Rick started looking at how businesses could help. He proposed hosting real-time transit signs in local businesses and non-profits. By hosting the signs on private space, the signs can cost 100 times less, and also help their host's mission. We have signs running in the famous J.P. Licks ice cream emporium, Anna's Taqueria, and Hope House, a local halfway house.

    As mentioned in the video, we use information that MASSDoT has made available. Sure, we could have done an iPhone app, but many bus riders don't have smartphones, and text-based systems tend to be pretty inconvenient. More importantly, at the Center we talk about the "bottled water effect." Contemporary technology is almost always designed for the individual -- it is almost a reflex -- when in fact it might be better to design for the public. After all, we love Boston's public transportation system; it is extensive, convenient, and still pretty inexpensive. Why should navigating that system be any less public?
    More information at http://www.lostinboston.org/

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