In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO conducted intense one-week investigations into Near Field Communication in a project called Touchable services. See more student projects.

Einar Sneve Martinussen, André Borgen, Paolo Dell’elce and Henrik Marstrander looked at how to increase the cohesion of local communities. As a starting point they studied a local record shop and looked at the intricate social and economic relationships around it.

They discovered an existing layer of printed, handwritten, and scrawled information in and around the record shop itself. This was a mixture of content, relying very much on local knowledge and social connections including recent arrivals, staff picks, recommendations and playlists, all of which offered rich opportunities for interaction design. They also discovered intruiging patterns and behaviours, including eccentric opening times that inspired them to look at what happened around the shop during closed periods.

They prototyped a simple application that offered the ability to hear and download music, playlists, new releases, etc. by touching the phone to the shop window, and conceptualised how this might be applied in other areas of the shop.

See more at Henrik’s weblog with their presentation of technologies, wider ideas and research.

This project was very interesting in the amount of ideas that emerged from a single context. It seems that when you begin to research a specific situation, the applications and services that emerge from it are numerous. The students here conducted a kind of situation-based brainstorming that was very rich. Situation and context provide very useful limits for for idea-generation. It also showed that NFC has numerous opportunities in niche communities, in contrast to typical location based services that offer generalised applications to tourists, etc.

Technorati Tags: RFID, NFC, Near Field Communication, mobile, music

4 September 2006 by Timo