Drinking and Socialising Ideas.....

A lot of the ideas that came out of the initial brainstorming session tended to revolve around drinking and socialising, which as we all know can be a big part of the university experience. Here are some undeveloped ideas that revolve around this particular theme:

The "how did I get home?" device: An unfortunate question that I'm sure a large number of students have asked themselves, they key idea behind this would be a watch or pda type device with built in screen and gps, that would record the path and places you visited at the street and pavement level, which could be replayed the next day to illustrate just how drunk you where the night before. However I think the novelty of such an idea would be short lived and not enough to carry a device on it's own, but could be interesting as part of a more comprehensive device.

Party Finder: This was primarily envisaged for people in halls or residence to keep track of where their friends currently are so they can traverse from one party to another. The idea would be some form of social networking phone application with a list of all party goers and which bar or venue they are currently at. So one could check on their phone where all their fellow party finder users are and either join them or get together.

This could also be useful if you are not accepted to a bar and to join some friends and you want to find some other friends to join so that the night is not spoiled.

The liver & wallet saviour: Binge drinking can be a particular hazard for students young or old, and it was proposed that it would be good if there was actually some way of keeping track or the amount of alcohol consumed in order to alert the user when the amount of alcohol consumed had reached unsafe levels.

Maybe an application for a mobile phone or pda where one could chose/enter the drink or round they had purchased, and give an alert when the amount purchased reached dangerous levels.
After thinking about this I realised that the majority of people would not be disciplined or inclined to manually enter the details each time.

This led me to think about a slightly different idea, again involving a watch but requiring some hardware at the point of purchase. The user would wear a watch that would perform the usual functions of a watch, but would have some form of radio frequency tag built in, so that when the user purchases a drink or round at the bar as he/she moves their hand over the bar to hand over the money, the till encodes in the watch the value and number of drinks.

This would serve the following useful purposes:

• In groups of drinkers who typically buy rounds it could show whose turn it is to buy the next round, avoiding the typical drinking argument.
  
• The next day it would illustrate how much was being spent on alcohol. Realising that you may have spent £150+ on alchohol that week for example, would be good non-draconian way of reminding people into curbing their drinking.
  
• The user may also realise they have spent too much midway through a night and be encouraged to slow down.
  
• This may aid retailers in telling when people have had too much if the pre-existing value on the watch could be checked before updating.
  

Either way providing the basic watch functionality is not compromised, and the budget monitoring is unobtrusive, the average student drinker I think would enjoy a way of keeping track of whose round it is, while the spending total gives a "quiet" deterrent to over doing it.