Birds have a natural sense regarding where is their "home". But from all the different types of birds, the pigeon is strongly associated to this capacity. That is because of their use in messages and information transportation (mostly in war time, a bird being hard to intercept). The pigeons would be transported from the message destination to whatever location and then would be released and return to the initial point transporting safely the message.
This sense of home is also evolutive through time. If one takes a pigeon to a new place and keeps it there for a certain amount of time, the pigeon will consider that new location to be its new "home". So basically, a pigeon's "home" is defined by the area where it spends most of its time.

Humans, in the other hand, do not have such an instinct. For humans, "home" is defined by a specific location and by a set of social and cultural values like comfort and refuge but it is also strongly linked to a sense of belonging and property. A homeless person is someone who doesn't have such elements in its existence. This brings a series of social issues, such as being marginalized by society.
Also, contemporary lifestyle implies increasing displacements within the city and the world (even though internet may seem to counter such tendency). This displacement are variable in time and distance. Some persons travel half the world in a day while others might just go to the grocery shop in the corner of their streets. In such a context, how would be defined "home" if we apply to humans the pigeon's "home" definition? That is the question that initiated the If we were like pigeons project.

Therefore I started to developed a wearable device that tracks the user's position on the globe's surface. This data is then stored and treated. The result of the treatment defines where is the user's "home". This is made by calculating the area where the user is mostly present in time. For instance, if the user spends 18h a day at his office, the device will consider the office as his home. Even though I never had the chance to experience the world as a pigeon, I suppose that they must have some kind of sensation (be it physical or psychological) pointing where their "home" is. For doing so, I decided to add actuators to the device that are placed around the user in direct contact to his body. The actuators pointing (in relation to the user's body and orientation) to the direction of the user's "home" are activated in a permanent way. This means that, if we come back with that example, when the user goes away from the office, the actuator that is located on the line between the user and the office is active. It's power is also directly proportional to the distance from the user to his "home".
The early development was made using electrodes, as they stimulate the body using the same types of signals as the body produces for internal communication (neural system). Some test made me drop this solution quite fast. I will now be working with vibrating motors as actuator system.

If we were like pigeons is currently under development.

Ecole Supérieure d'Art d'Aix-en-Provence - 2009
Terraz project - 2009
Universidade de Brasîlia (UNB) - 2009