Digital Dystopia are design proposals that explicitly satisfy selfish personal motivations, and cause intentional disruption or harm to those around you. One of the concepts exploring the sinister potential of existing mobile phone functionality is called Who Is Mr Fagin?, a mobile service for Bluetooth pickpockets

The inspiration comes from Bluesoft’s project to include distance recognition into Bluetooth devices, analysing relative signal strength to measure distances accurate to 0.2m increments. The technology may soon be included into our handsets to, say, monitor a child’s location.

The Who Is Mr Fagin? software applet would silently inform a mobile phone thief of their relative proximity to another device. It piggybacks the distance detection capabilities to guide you, via a series of vibrations pulsed through your handset, to the latest technologies carried by others. While the legality of such a software product is unclear, marketing would stipulate (in the small print) that the service is not intended for illegal use. Just as radar detector manufacturers neither condone or accept responsibility for breaking traffic speed limits.

A project by Tom Jenkins.