Tender Secrets asks Tenderloin citizens, community members, passersby, passers-through and GAFFTA gallery-goers one simple question: “What’s your secret?”

Responses to this question are left as anonymous audio messages through an antique phone situated in the Tenderloin, or through any cellular phone able to dial to a voice-mail box. Visual representations of the messages are created dynamically in real time and projected onto a street-viewable storefront or window. Visitors to the interior of this storefront can listen to the community’s secrets by picking up a phone placed adjacent to the visual projection. The visual archive is updated in real time. When there is no recent message activity, the visual archive is populated with secret messages from the digital archive of all of the past secret messages left behind. Listeners will hear random and anonymous messages that community members left behind.

Ultimately, it is virtually impossible to have the same experience twice. Tendersecrets runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and is always open to listen to your secrets.

As a technical project, tendersecrets has an amazingly low threshold for interaction. Everyone has secrets and most people know how to use a phone or can talk into a microphone – almost everyone can engage with it, and the more diverse the participants, the more engaging the installation becomes.

The Gray Area’s “Tendorama” window space is the ideal interface for these neighborhood secrets. Here it will take advantage of the diversity of the community on the outside – the owner of the Vietnamese sandwich shop, a student and gallery goer, children of a family going to the theater, a recovering addict, you – and it also takes advantage of the visible gallery space and setting from the inside. The installation creates a unique experience both inside and out, encouraging participation from the community and within the gallery itself.

Team Information

The Dacha Art Collective is: Kevin Collins, Scott Doorley, Bjoern Hartmann, Dan Maynes-Aminzade, and Parul Vora

Kevin Collins, CoFounder of Sutro Media. Kevin Collins recently founded Sutro Media, which creates guides and iPhone ap- plications to help make it easier and more fun to explore towns, cities, and places by publishing real world guides on mobile phones. He received his Masters in Human Computer Interaction and Design at Stanford where he taught and worked with Terry Winograd and Scott Klemmer. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego. Prior to starting Sutro Media, he has worked at Genentech, Oracle, CNET, Or- ganic, Brodia, UCSF, and Bank of America. More importantly, he is always the first one on and the last one off the dance floor. Kevin is a co-creator of Wishing Wall

Scott Doorley, Director of the Environments Lab at the d.school at Stanford. Scott Doorley hails from Boston and makes his way to the d.school after a brief return to the cold and snow of the east coast, where he taught film production at Boston University. Unlike most Northern California residents, Scott loves Los Angeles, where, among other things, he attended film school, met his wife, and performed almost every job imaginable in the film industry — from early days in music videos running cases of Crystal to rap stars, to later years shooting footage for CBS reality shows in undisclosed locations overseas (and plenty in between). As a Masters Student in Learning, Design & Technology at Stanford, Scott explored what it means to design for thinking. He joins the d.school with an interest in applying design to domains, such as writing, filmmaking, and informal learning, that don’t always take advantage of design methods. Like many mammals, Scott loves to eat, but he also loves to cook, a habit he developed while working as a “chef” on a dive boat around Catalina Island in Southern California.
Scott is a co-creator of Wishing Wall

Bjoern Hartmann, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Bjoern Hartmann’s research in Human-Computer Interaction investigates authoring tools for professional designers and end-user programmers. He is affiliated with the Berkeley Institute of Design and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Bjoern received his PhD from the Stanford Computer Science department in 2009 and his MSE in Com- puter and Information Science as well as Undergraduate Degrees in Digital Media De- sign and Communication from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. Bjoern is a co-creator of Wishing Wall

Dan Maynes-Aminzade, Software Engineer at Google Co-creator of Wishing Wall
Dan Maynez-Aminzade (or Monzy) received his PhD from Stanford Computer Science department in 2008 and his masters from the MIT Media Lab in 2003 where he was a member of the Tangible Media Group. His earned his undergraduate degree from Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute. He has worked and interned at Walt Disney Imagineering, ABC, Go.com, Adobe, Microsoft, and Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab. Monzy is also a well known (in certain circles) nerdcore hip hop artist, most well known for Drama in the PhD.
Dan is a co-creator of Wishing Wall Parul Vora, Researcher and Designer at the Wikimedia Foundation

Parul Vora is a Designer, Researcher, Technologist, User Experience Specialist, Hacker, and Interactive Artist. She has studied at UC Berkeley, Columbia, the MIT Media Lab, the Stanford d.school, at home, in the shop, and out of doors. She is currently and Re- searcher and Designer at the Wikimedia Foundation and has recently worked at yhaus (the Design Innovation Team at Yahoo!), Y!RB (Yahoo Research Berkeley), and Urban Atmospheres (Intel Research Berkeley). She has a particular disposition for robots, bicycles, polaroid cameras, absurdist humor, halloween, lo-fi music, and Michel Gondry movies. She begins most conversations with “Wouldn’t it be cool if……?” and ends them with “Why not?”Parul is a co-creator of Wishing Wall and will be the project lead on tendersecrets.

Website

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