Showing mutual support through digital empathy badges

Charity badges and empathy (awareness) ribbons are common tokens of support for charities and other worthy causes. In this paper we revisit the concept of smart badges with the aim of developing digital equivalents of the charity badge/empathy ribbon. We describe the design of prototype low–cost digital empathy badges based around infra-red transceiver technology, that light up and play a ringtone in the presence of other badges and we present the findings of a small pilot study involving a dozen badge wearers