Enhance the group experience
Red Cross volunteers are people from 18 to over 60 years old with different cultural backgrounds and skills who dedicate part of their free time to help the local community.
Being a volunteer requires great determination and emotional commitment: it’s an extra job where the group experience and the sense of sharing something important—sometimes even dramatic—with other group members are the most important rewards.
Mash (the name is a dedication to Robert Altman’s brilliant movie) has been designed to enhance the group experience and help the volunteers in building the common memory of their group.

I conducted reasearch and observation on how common spaces (for instance kitchen rooms in students houses) are used by the community members to communicate with each other and interviewed Red Cross volunteers to create a better profile of the potential users of Mash.
A few interesting points emerged:
Noticeboards are the easiest and fastest way of communication in commom spaces for small groups.
Red Cross volunteers are nomadic since they come from different cities and spent a lot of their duty time away from the Red Cross headquarters.
They consider the Red Cross headquarters as a second home, a social space where they can relax and share stories. They enjoy spending time in it even after the end of their duty.
Volunteers have different technological skills.
Volunteers generally feel part of an elite group.

Mash is a multi layered communication tool comprising four elements:

A RFID pin that detects the presence of the volunteer in the Red Cross headquarters and identifies the volunteer in public spaces such as museums, train stations or airports in case of an emergency.
A LCD screen noticeboard located in the Red Cross headquarters where 1) handwritten messages are captured and converted to digital, and 2) computer generated messages are displayed on the same surface.
A desktop application connected to the physical board in the headquarters that displays and stores all the messages—both computer-generated and handwritten.
A mobile application connected to the physical board in the headquarters,  used for on-the-fly communication and updates.

Volunteers can use Mash to check who is in the headquarters and communicate, share and save stories both inside and outside the building. Mash seamlessly merges handwritten and digital messages building and maintaning a private visual archive of the group’s stories and activities.

Designed in 2006 at IUAV University of Venice with Professors Gillian Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor with technical support from Vinay Venkatraman.
Prototype developed with Processing.