How geeks spread sweetness and light

Take a look at this:

It’s a bike adapted by Josh Kinberg for his master’s thesis in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York City. The bike receives text messages and prints them in foot-high chalk letters, then blogs a digital photo and GPS map of the printing, all while the rider cruises along.

A self-described “hacktivist,” Kinberg’s other school projects have included Magicbike (a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot he and a professor take to outdoor cultural events) and the Hello World Project, which let people laser-project their own messages onto landscapes and landmarks all over the world.

Josh will officially, er, roll out the bike during August’s Republican National Convention in New York, but he says the project is as much performance art as protest. The project homepage can be found here.

Now I know what you’re thinking: this may be very clever but what use is it? Wrong question IMHO. What’s lovely about these projects is that they are enjoyable to do, require considerable ingenuity, and give innocent pleasure to millions. [Thanks to Dave Hill and Popular Science.]