Monkeys and E-Mail

This is a fascinating piece on the thing in the office we all love to hate - E-Mail.- Six Monkeys: Physical interactions With E-Mail.

Six Monkeys – commissioned by Mailchimp – explores our interactions with email through physical Internet connected objects.

Email is often thought of with negative connotations; overflowing inboxes, strategies on how to get to inbox zero, dealing with the constant barrage of spam whilst each week seemingly giving raise to a new start-up that will promise to tame the evils of email.

There is however another side. Email is a ubiquitous, easy to understand system, working across any platform that can deliver not just the unwanted and the unloved but often the exact opposite; messages from friends, exciting opportunities, memories of trips taken and a million other things. It may not be perfect, but what is? It's flawed yet it's also beautiful.

Six Monkeys is a series of six connected objects that look at how we might change our relationship to email by changing the surrounding context of how we interact with it. By placing email within our everyday physical spaces it may get us to look at the familiarity of email in a new light; we may even learn to love it again.

Lucy

Lucy responds to commands sent via email. Email Lucy with the subject "blink" and a colour in the body of the message and she will blink that colour. Set the subject to static and she'll stay at whatever colour you specify, either through a keyword or using RGB values.

Anything that can send email can talk with Lucy. This is email as an API, without having to write a specific API. Have a device or a service that can send email? Then it can automatically talk with Lucy. In our research we hooked it up to ifttt.com, without having to create any kind of specific channel, and had it telling us changes in the weather, sending us alerts to remind us about important appointments and anything else we could think of......

Much more at the link.