WiFi-enabled bicycles? Worth a try. Students at New York's Parsons School of Design came up with a novel method of spreading wireless networking to otherwise unconnected locations (such underground subway stations) by rigging up regular bikes with 802.11b access points set to route bits to adjacent bikes until one has a clear Internet signal. The system is still very rough -- it doesn't seem to work when the bikes are moving, and the battery life is pretty lousy -- but I was struck at the willingness of the design students to merge seemingly disparate technologies in order to achieve what they see as a social good (that is, free wireless for everyone).
This also suggests to me that a likely element of the already-arrived (but not yet well-distributed) future is the spread of peer-to-peer systems (technologies and behaviors) into our social and physical infrastructure -- into the very bones and marrow of our societies. "Make the invisible visible" is a good Viridian motto; maybe a good WorldChanging one is "make the networks ubiquitous."









