Blu Dot is an award-winning creator of modern furniture. But awareness of the brand was limited, so we took to the streets. Inspired by the New York City culture of “curb mining,” or picking up furniture from the street, we devised an experiment. We placed 25 of Blu Dot’s Real Good Chairs all over Manhattan, free to take. The catch: we enabled the chairs with GPS to see where they’d go. The two-day multimedia experiment featured a website with real-time tracking, Twitter feeds and a documentary that revealed the whereabouts of the chairs and told the story of their new owners.

Wow. Emotional design with a compelling, humorous narrative. Loved it! The experiment uses humor to bring to the foreground many issues that contemporary technologies should give us pause to consider: GPS tagging and tracking, real-time web updates, objects that tweet and how those are deployed in our culture. The smart and smart-ass strategy has paid dividends to Blu Dot.