melania

Wi-Fi on Wheels: Wi-Fi Equipped Buses

In California’s impoverished Coachella Valley, where students lack internet access, the innovative “Wi-Fi on Wheels” program transformed school buses into mobile connectivity hubs. This initiative spread nationwide, especially during the pandemic, bringing essential internet access to homeless shelters, rural communities, and underserved areas, turning isolation into learning and networking opportunities.

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Bike Arte Festival: Engaging With Low-Income Communities to Promote Biking

The Bike Arte Festival is a mobile, street-level celebration that merges cycling culture and community building through art, education, and collective action. It happens every year in different low-income neighborhoods, offering residents hands-on workshops and cultural activities centered around bikes, highlighting a sustainable way of moving around and creativity.

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Homes from Waste: The Plastic Bottle Construction Movement

With conventional construction materials scarce and expensive for millions worldwide, marginalized communities have transformed plastic water bottles into viable building materials. Plastic water bottles offer a durable, extremely low-cost alternative that simultaneously addresses housing crises and diverts non-biodegradable waste that would otherwise pollute the environment.

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Encoded Textiles: Weaving Digital Stories into Ancient Cloth:

Encoded Textiles is a collaborative art project between Guillermo Bert and Mapuche weavers by integrating functional QR codes into traditional textiles. Scanning these woven codes unlocks curated content about Mapuche culture, empowering the community to reclaim their narrative through a powerful fusion of ancestral craft and digital technology.

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Canal*MOTOBOY (Motoboy*Channel) Project: Mobilizing Motoboys to Aid Navigation in São Paulo

São Paulo’s known for having the worst traffic congestion in the world. This causes it to be very dangerous for the motorcycle couriers, yet they remain unseen and undervalued. But now the project, Canal*Motoboy, allows them to post their daily realities, forming a community and creating a navigation tool.

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Transborder Immigrant Tool: Repurposing GPS Technology as Humanitarian Aid 

The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a location-based mobile art project designed to guide Mexican migrants to life-saving water sources while crossing the desert into the U.S. This digital lifeline continues decades of electronic civil disobedience, merging 1980s hacker activism with urgent border humanitarian intervention.

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Border Memorial: Visualizing the Dead Forced Migrants in the Arizona Desert 

Border Memorial is an app that uses augmented reality, data collected from volunteers, and GPS data to overlay virtual skeletons in the precise locations where migrant deaths have been recorded in the Arizona desert. This project invites the public to learn about the area and the deceased migrants who have been overlooked and unnoticed.

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