In the future, our electronic devices will be networked together and all our digital content will be available when we need it. We’ll have thus ever more data to sift through.

Exploring the Content Network, Thomas Stovicek‘s thesis project, is a a set of screen-based software and hardware interactions between devices that looks at new ways to access, view and filter this growing store of information.

Devices are physically manipulated and keywords used to make a more intuitive way to access content- text, photos, videos etc.

The coordinating system, called Content Network, connects a group of devices and gives them access to each others’ content. One of its elements, Navigation Through Related Tags, lets people find their content based on keywords instead of folders. Combining Devices to Navigate Content uses very short-range wireless between the devices to detect how they are interacting and triggers data transfer and shared actions: placing one person’s mobile phone over another’s, for instance, bring up, on both screens, a combined calendar highlighting available times for a proposed meeting.

“Related tags allow to sort and organize your content by keyword. Physical interactions helps by using intuitive actions to interconnect the devices of a group of people, to show only data relevant to, and organized for, the task in hand. These concepts, which apply to both work and social groupings, demonstrate new potentials in navigating your content without the fear of information overload normally associated with it.”