This mailbox recently appeared in the Lulu Chow Wang Center near Mail Services. It is part of the “deliver me” project, started by five Olin College of Engineering students, Gaby Clarke, Marie-Caroline Finke, Aaron Greiner, Caz Nichols and Cesar Santana, as a semester-long class assignment for their Products and Markets class. The project was inspired by a program in the Galapagos Islands that works to bring messages to a halfway point by an unofficial messenger to expedite their journey before sending them on through an official mail service, and also by the SOMEBODY messaging app, a system that allows users to to deliver texts in person.

The premise of the “deliver me” project is that written letters are delivered by hand. These deliveries are made by people who stop by one of the mailboxes to pick up a letter when they know they will go to one of the six checkpoints that the project has already set up, or when they know they can deliver the letter in person.This process may not be quick, but the design team seems to realize this, as their tagline is “slow, unreliable mail.” Instead, their purpose is to bring people joy by delivering old-fashioned letters, allowing students and other community members to be involved in something larger than themselves.