The Inspiring Path Project

The Inspiring Path team is creating a “mind map,” an application for sharing ideas between users. The mind map allows for quick and easy navigation between ideas, creating a space where NEC’s employees can quickly draw inspiration from each other.

The Inspiring Path project is more than just a mind map; the team is exploring new ways of presenting collaborative idea generation with a unique user interface. In this mind map, ideas submitted by users become cities in Asuka-period Japan. As more ideas and discussions fill the mind map, the settlement grows into a region bustling with life, built on the foundation of creativity and collaboration.

Like the real Asuka-period Japan, the mind map must struggle against the elements to carve out a life for itself. Natural disasters roll through the Mind Map, upturning the order of posts and topics and forging new juxtapositions of ideas. As in Japan’s actual history, hardship and chaos will be overcome by human innovation, as employees draw inspiration from the disaster’s aftermath and work to rebuild.

The Inspiring Path

The Inspiring Path team is working on the Inspiring Path, which is an installation in NEC’s Computers and Communication Innovation Laboratories. This is very confusing, I know.

The Inspiring Path is a veritably veritable cornucopia of hardware. The installation exists in hallway between two project rooms, and consists of the following:

-Pressure sensors in the floor

-34 pipeline speakers lining the ceiling

-Three 3x3 LCD screens, one of them a touchscreen

-A four-screen-wide projected computer touchscreen

-A “smart locator” that communicates with RFID tags to determine the location of people inside the hallway

Our Client

NEC is the Nippon Electric Company, a Japanese leader in electronics.

NEC’s offices in the city of Nara hose their Computers and Communication Innovation Research Laboratories, which is a research division devoted to researching the next thirty years of computers and communication. The CCIRL is an international collection of students and professionals whom NEC has tasked the ETC-Osaka team with inspiring.