This morning a friend, knowing my interest in the use of digital technology to foster human interaction, forwarded to me a link to the Yellow Chair Stories, one postgraduate art student’s experiment in using a wifi connection and one yellow wooden chair to create some community and conversation in the London neighborhood she lived in.

Anab Jain, as a project for the Royal College of Art, placed a brightly painted wooden chair together with a welcoming sign outside her flat which read, “My Wifi network is open for neighbours and passersby – FREE ACCESS FROM THIS CHAIR!”

Jain explains her experiment in art and social interaction this way:

By placing this sign and a yellow chair outside my house, I conducted a live service design intervention and extended the boundaries of my home to encompass the boundaries of my wireless network.

This ‘grass roots’ design approach illustrates how wireless technologies could become interfaces to recreate transient spaces for conversations at the threshold of the public and the private, the physical and the electronic.

Jain is bringing her work to California to ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge & the Thirteenth International Symposium of Electronic Art beginning on August 7.

(Thanks, Connie, for the link!)

The International Trademark Association (INTA) has announced that it is sponsoring an Alternative Dispute Resolution Online Competition to be held in April 2007. Registration is open to law students in the European Union.

According to INTA’s web site:

This online competition is designed to increase the student’s use and understanding of ADR. Law students representing schools throughout the EU will exercise their negotiation, mediation and advocacy skills to resolve hypothetical trademark law disputes. Prizes will be awarded to the most effective advocate teams and the most effective mediator, based on evaluations by distinguished professionals from INTA’s ADR Committee.

The deadline for registering is October 1, 2006, and the competition gets underway in April 2007. Details may be found on INTA’s web site.

(Via the IPKat blog, reporting on intellectual property law developments.)

The World Cup, which, alas, comes only once every four years, is a glorious example of international cooperation. During that time football-loving countries around the world put aside their differences and focus their energy and attention on what is described everywhere (except for the U.S., which in large part remains bafflingly hostile to soccer) as “the beautiful game“.

The World Cup, simultaneously a celebration of national pride and a model for international diplomacy, shows us what is possible when we come together in a common cause.

Dan Hull, host of this week’s edition of Blawg Review, the weekly review of the best in legal blogging, celebrates international relations and the law in what the anonymous editor of Blawg Review has called “The World Cup Blawg Review“.

No passport is necessary for this world tour of the legal blogosphere (which incidentally includes a stop in New Zealand to my friend Geoff Sharp and his blog, Mediator Blah…Blah…).

World Cup soccer fans and mediators alike will also appreciate the link to Why the FIFA World Cup Is and Should Be a Big Deal, an article published at the Harvard International Review, which celebrates the World Cup as a “great social, economic and political leveler”.