A cou­ple weeks ago, my research into SMS as an inter­ac­tive medium led me to a friend of a friend who hap­pens to be named Brian House. Brian gra­ciously agreed to talk with me on the phone, and our con­ver­sa­tion val­i­dated a num­ber of ideas I had about SMS.

Brian’s most well-known project is called Yellow Arrow. Done in 2004, the project involved dis­trib­ut­ing thou­sands of yel­low arrow stick­ers, on each of which was printed a unique code. These stick­ers were sent all over the globe, where user-participants could stick them on sur­faces, point­ing to things of note. Then, by send­ing a text mes­sage with the arrow’s unique ID, the par­tic­i­pant would “reg­is­ter” a “mem­ory” or story about that place or object, such as “this is where we first kissed” or “this is the best chi­nese food in town.” Subsequent vis­i­tors can send in the same text code and will receive back the orig­i­nal story. Yellow Arrow was fea­tured in the recent Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA.

The real thing I wanted to talk to Brian about, though, was TXTML, a sys­tem he built as part of his Master’s the­sis that can be used to cre­ate “inter­ac­tive text-messaging appli­ca­tions.” I’m look­ing into doing some projects with SMS, and will be eval­u­at­ing TXTML for whether or not it would be a good tool for what I want to do. In short, it sounds like TXTML is great for cre­at­ing indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences and nar­ra­tives. Since it’s smarter than typ­i­cal SMS engines, it can remem­ber each user’s his­tory, and custom-tailor the inter­ac­tion for each indi­vid­ual. (For exam­ple, you text “I am Scott,” and it responds “Hello, Scott, I remem­ber that you like the color blue.”) It may not be suited to medi­at­ing the group expe­ri­ences that I want to design, but I can cer­tainly learn a lot just by work­ing with it.