Thesis Archive: Sections
Link to Projects DBDescription
Description/Abstract - For the show website and your project wall text (300 words max).
V2
Endangered Knowledge Charms is a small network of wearable electronic devices that function as portable, human-curated libraries. Each device stores a deliberate collection of source materials: essays, PDFs, images, scanned archives, and the kind of pre-loved internet artifacts that shaped how someone thinks. Content lives on bodies and objects, not on corporate servers. The first two devices take the form of belt buckles, with future iterations as accessories.
The project responds to a specific cultural moment: an internet increasingly saturated with AI-generated content, SEO-optimized noise, and platform-mediated knowledge. As generative AI floods the web with text that mimics authority without grounding, the original source materials that actually form human thought are quietly disappearing. This project treats that disappearance as a design problem.
Each charm operates as a single-purpose device. It holds a small, carefully edited library, and shares it only through physical, proximate encounters. Two wearers who choose to exchange bring their devices together - through touch, proximity, or gesture - and the buckles trade selected materials in a brief, legible ritual signaled by light or haptics. There is no cloud intermediary. No algorithm decides what you receive. Only another person's curation does.
The form factor matters. By living on a belt buckle - a piece of fashion that announces itself, that nods to the LED accessories of the early 2000s - the project resists the invisibility of contemporary computing. It asks the wearer to carry their knowledge publicly, deliberately, and somewhat playfully. The values driving the work are serendipity, patience, friction, and ownership.
About Project / Thesis Statement
Sum up your project in one powerful, concise sentence (60 words max)
V2
Endangered Knowledge Charms is a network of wearable, single-purpose devices that store human-curated source material and exchange it only through in-person, offline encounters - making the act of preserving and passing on what shaped your thinking a physical, social ritual rather than a cloud transaction.
Technical Description
V2
ESP32 microcontroller; Wi-Fi protocols for device-to-device transfer; haptic driver and LEDs for tactile confirmation of exchange; LiPo battery sized for the buckle form factor; onboard flash storage for the curated library. The enclosure references early-2000s LED buckle-belt aesthetics, with the active interface positioned for proximity-based interaction (worn front or side).
User Scenario
How will people engage with your project?
V2
You wear your buckle as part of your everyday outfit. The device holds a small, deliberate library of source material that matters to you. A scanned essay you return to, a banned book, an internet artifact you'd hate to lose. When you meet another wearer at a community event, on the NYC train, in a friend's kitchen, you bring the buckles close. A light or haptic pulse confirms the exchange. You walk away with something a person, not an algorithm, chose to give you. Later, you connect to the network to read what you received and add more content.
Later, you plug the buckle into your computer to read what you received.
Background (Research / Context)
V2
The interaction logic draws on several reference points. Little Free Libraries and their logic of the pre-loved object passing between strangers. Pokémon GO's insistence that the map must be physically traveled to unlock meaning. Coretos in Portuguese public squares as civic anchors for free, unmediated exchange. The charm-to-charm trade also references the material culture of mix tapes, annotated books, and passed notes. Acts of curation that carry the person who made them.
The fashion-tech lineage matters as well: 2000s LED buckle belts and other wearable electronics that announced themselves as objects rather than dissolving into the background. The project pulls on Tom Igoe's question about single-purpose devices in a phone-saturated world: if your phone can do everything, what are the right things to make a separate device do? The cultural urgency comes from elsewhere. The Internet Archive faces ongoing legal and infrastructural threats. AI-generated content is reshaping what counts as a source. Personal archives - the screenshots, PDFs, and saved articles that constitute a thinking life - have no agreed-upon home. Cloud storage feels permanent but isn't; physical media is fragile but tangible. This project sits in that tension.
Further Reading
Give credit where credit is due
V1
- "The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Mortal Peril," Wired
- Tom Igoe on physical computing
- Kyle Chayka, "Welcome to AirSpace" (cultural homogenization, the SoHo House observation)
- Little Free Libraries
- The history of Portuguese coretos as public-square infrastructure
Best Practices
60 word pitch: It is a X that X for X.
Deadlines
Submission is April 26th.
April 27th Thesis Archive goes public.
May 31st (last chance to edit Thesis Archive)
Final review presentation
Can be done with placeholders.
10 minutes. Budget presentation for 9.
Tools
Omnigraphl