SDR Deposit of the Week: What’s the Big Idea … Festival?

The Big Idea Festival was a big deal to the students enrolled in "Computers and Interfaces: Psychological and Societal Perspectives", an undergraduate course (Communications 169) taught by Cliff Nass in Winter 2013. The event, which took place at Stanford on March 11, was a showcase of projects produced by teams of students with the assignment to imagine and design innovative interactions between automobiles and the people who drive them.

There is the Intuition rental car, a semi-autonomous vehicle marketed to vacationers, and there is the car that never forgets. With Xpress, you can more easily share your emotions with drivers around you and rate better with insurance companies for the number of “thumbs-up” messages you receive from fellow drivers. Looking for a personalized driving experience? Try FollowMe: “Sync your phone with any new car and automatically have all of your personal preferences (ranging from auto-tinted to glass settings to your favorite radio stations) follow you!”

Clearly this is new and fertile ground for the automotive and technology industries, and you can better believe carmakers in attendance at the Festival were interested in the fresh ideas coming from the minds of today’s Stanford students. Wired magazine was there to report on it.

The Big Idea Festival is also the newest collection in the Stanford Digital Repository. Professor Nass gathered the students’ final project files and provided them, along with the event program containing some basic descriptive metadata, to SUL as a real use case for a pilot with the new SDR Self-Deposit application. A small team of DLSSers threw a “deposit party” with Regina Roberts, subject specialist for Communications, where we shared some lunch while uploading the narratives and storyboards as submitted by the students. It was a fun and quick way to get the collection’s 75 items into the repository. As a bonus, now more SUL staff have some hands-on experience with the SDR Self-Deposit software.

We will see more collections of student works coming to the SDR. This spring, students enrolled in ME310 will deposit their team projects directly in the SDR for long-term preservation and access, adding to the existing collection of digitized reports like this one in the ME310 archival collection.