scenario.

image acquisition

each morning, thomas scopes out the latest news and blog entries online. he frequents a popular design blog, and is an active member on a tea connoisseur mailing-list community. on tuesday he finds a link on boingboing to an innovative furniture designer, and downloads an image of a chair provided by the site because the designer's unique style goes with thomas' offbeat, modern aesthetic. thomas also checks out a photograph recently taken by a fellow mailing-list member of a recent trip to a chinese tea village. He downloads that as well, since it's an interesting photograph to explain to anyone who asks about it, and perhaps might intrigue a fellow tea-drinker. thomas downloads a couple more images to his bag, and chooses to default his display to the tea image. thomas renews his collection of images every day or as often as he can, to refresh the temporal quality of his fashion signal.

connection of source

users are notified if their bag display shares a common source with an image visible nearby. for example, if claire is displaying the latest image off of dooce and bette has another dooce image in her collection, if bette is near claire urbanhermes will ask bette if she would like display her dooce image as well. If bette takes action, claire can recognize bette as a fellow dooce reader and adjust her impression of her accordingly. if bette declines action urbanhermes still assists her in directing her attention to fellow dooce-reader claire, who she might not have noticed otherwise. the extra knowledge bette has about claire can also influence her impressions. if other aspects of claire appear particularly unfashionable (clothes, hair, language) to bette, bette may change her behavior to seek out more obscure news blogs which will not have quite a diluted audience. the signals that urbanhermes displays work in tandem with all other personal fashion signals; as a worn accessory, it provides a public tangible link between online activities and physical identities.

social intersection

another notification is one of shared social networks. suppose peter displays a photo which he acquired yesterday from his professor, dana, a well-known designer. hunter, who is unfamiliar to peter, happens to be nearby. hunter's bag notifies him that one of his images in his collection shares a common contact—Dana—with one of the images in view. hunter looks around, doesn't recognize any of the other people or other images, but decides to change his display. peter, however, recognizes hunter's new image as dana's cat and approaches him. peter discovers that hunter is dana's brother, and a natural connection has been made. the users may define the number of degrees away that a shared contact can have, though one or two degrees away may optimize the recognizability factor.

authenticity and counterfeiting

because urbanhermes maintains secure authenticity of image sources, counterfeits or knockoffs will not be able to share the same source. the counterfeits, therefore, will be distinguishable through the shared-source notifications. for example, kathy is sitting across from hannah in the subway. kathy notices that hannah's bag seems to display a familiar image. kathy recognizes it as a 500-copies-only limited-edition image designed by gucci, distributed at an exclusive, insider's party last night in the city. because she attended the party, kathy is displaying her gucci image that day. kathy initially has a positive impression of hannah, except she realizes her shared-source notification isn't going off. kathy realizes hannah's "gucci" image was fabricated that morning and is not officially distributed by gucci. kathy instantly forms a negative impression of hannah, though most of the subway riders, who don't recognise the image at all, may come away with a neutral impression. the signal of inauthenticity, therefore, is selective.