The world’s a small place, and the chance of any interaction happening between two randomly colliding human beings — a handshake, a hug, a watergun battle, a passionate embrace — are almost infinitesimally small, yet all those things happen billions of times per day. The Situationist is an iPhone app that aims to help along that random, serendipitous chance interaction between two people.
What is Situationist? According to the official site, Situationist will alert members to each other’s proximities and get them to interact in random “situations.” If those quotes around situations look ominous, don’t worry: here are some examples.
• “Hug me for 5 seconds exactly.”
• “Compliment me on my haircut.”
• “Help me rouse everyone around us into revolution and storm the nearest TV station.”
Situationist is moderated, but users can suggest their own situations. If you have the Situationist installed, it will alert any nearby fellow Situationalist to your location, as well as send them a picture so they can find you. They must find you within five minutes. Once they arrive, you are both assigned a situation from a pool, which you must perform quickly, then just walk away.
You can download the Situationalist here for free.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
6 responses to “The Situationist Is An iPhone App That Will Help You Start A Revolution Or Fall In Love”
So I don’t need to keep wearing that green shirt with the collar popped?
Instant mini flash-mobs
The usual idea is that you would use NFC to set up the link between the two devices and then do an automatic hand over to a different protocol for doing the actual transfer of data – eg Bluetooth,iphone 5