(Re)Arrange Your House With Twitter: A Social Experiment

Announcing our first social experiment on improving the quality of our daily life with the use of a new social media tool: Twitter.

Twitter

Readers will remember our house tour of my friend Cristina’s new apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It struck me that this apartment, being empty, had unlimited potential for invention.

I was inspired to attempt this social experiment by an article I read in the New York Times a few months ago, by Clive Thompson. Here is the point in the article that really got me thinking:

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like “I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus”; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

I realized that this “picture” of the rhythm of people’s lives could be put to many practical uses. So I spoke to Cristina and her partner Lisa about it and we decided to embark on this experiment together. Here’s how it’s going to work:

1. They have opened a Twitter account and have followed each other. I have followed them and they have followed me;
2. Starting tomorrow, Monday, January 5, 2009, they will tweet every hour or every time they change their activity, whichever comes first, answering the typical Twitter question: What are you doing? The total duration of the experiment will be two weeks.
3. They have to be factual in their tweets, detailing where they are standing or sitting and what they are doing;
4. They must also give some kind of qualitative evaluation of their activity. Are they comfortable, do they like the light where they are sitting, could this activity be more pleasurable on the other side of the room, sitting, standing… and so forth.

At the end of week one I will post a mid-experiment update in which I will publish a few of the tweets and attempt to analyze them. I believe that I will get a very interesting picture of their daily rhythms and that at the end I will be able to give them some valuable advice on how to arrange the layout and functionality of their new home.

Their living situation presents some unique challenges that have to be addressed in setting up the new apartment. Cristina lives and works in New York. Lisa lives and works in North Carolina and visits New York as often as possible, but might be able to visit more often if the setup in the new apartment allowed her to transition more seamlessly and just pick up where she left off with her work. They are both academics and a lot of their work is computer-based research and writing.

What I am hoping that we will achieve with this experiment is this:

1. Cristina and Lisa will gain insight into their own lives, learning things they had previously overlooked, ignored or were not even aware of;
2. Priorities will shift — things that seemed unimportant will be revealed as more essential to their well-being and vice versa;
3. They will be inspired by the patterns that emerge from the tweets and will hatch new ideas on the distribution of the space in the new apartment;
4. I will be able to use my expertise on interior design and my own analysis of the tweets to give some valuable contribution to this process.

Stay tuned. A week from today I will post the mid-experiment update and we will assess our progress. I think this will be a fascinating experience for all three of us!

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Tagged as: Clive Thompson, NewYork, North Carolina, Twitter