MarkIt is a project on 'hacking the urban interior'. Focusing on the mid-market area of San Francisco and inspired by the notion of 'guerilla cartography', we wanted to help alleviate the strange, liminal, and alien nature of the area by allowing people to tag it with their thoughts, feelings, anecdotes, etc. What does the metadata of the city look like?

 

In order to arrive at this area of inquiry, we tested a variety of prototypes, ranging from a physical map with stickers placed on the street for people to annotate, to a newspaper vending machine that played the sounds from another part of the city when opened.

 

Our final product is called Mark, short for 'MarkIt'. MarkIt is an urban tagging machine. Press his nose and a thermal printer prints out a receipt with a prompt ('Look up and you'll see', 'this place reminds me of...'). A tape dispenser and pen are located in Mark's 'ears' to make filling out this prompt and affixing it somewhere in the city easy, and his LCD 'eyes' scroll provacative messages as examples. Also on the receipt is an icon representing when the tag was generated (day/night), and a phone number. Once the tag is filled out and posted, passers-by can text the number to engage in a dialogue around the tag, deepening the metadata.

 

Mark's chassis was designed to be easily affixed to streetlight poles or other infrastructure. His aesthetic was intentionally designed to be simple, friendly, whimsical, and approachable.

 

Inside Mark is a thermal printer powered by an Arduino Uno. Mark's eyes are powered by a dedicated Arduino Mega. The text message service is powered by Twilio, running on a NodeJS backend.