The near-future success of NFC depends on the usability of mobile payments and ticketing. As interaction designers we of course argue that the success hinges on good design of this experience and recent news suggests that there is little to recommend mobile payments unless they offer some useful new features (see Place and product based [...]

Mediamatic is organising a Physical computing hackers camp in September. The workshop is for designers and hackers to put physical computing ideas into practice with lots of users. The workshop takes place just before Picnic 07.

“A great opportunity to try out your physical computing fantasies with a large number of live-stock. Mediamatic will be providing [...]

Discovered today is Airtag, makers of the AIR kiosk:

“AIRKIOSK is an interactive kiosk especially designed for points of sales.
AIRKIOSK is connected to the AIRTAG central application platform.
Multi-standard, it can read all RFID tags and cards (13,56MHz). Applications include: Express ordering kiosk, Contactless payment, Identification and animation on the POS, Loyalty and couponning, Interactive advertisement.”

Their overall [...]

The promise of NFC is about easily using mobile phones as a part of daily life: ticketing, paying with a credit card, opening doors, sharing, printing and downloading in the physical world. But until NFC technology is widely adopted, are there opportunities for using some of the features of RFID-interactions without the integration into the [...]

All of the Touch design briefs we have been using this spring in the Touch course are now online, have a look.

The Touch course has also just finished, there will be case studies of the student work here sometime over the summer.

I revisited the Near Field Communication at Wikipedia page this week. For a long time it was a copy and paste of the About NFC page from the NFC Forum, but now it has evolved into a page of its own:

However it is still in a pretty sorry state, a mixture of history, standards, soapboxing [...]

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

RFID has the potential to enable new kinds of playful interactions in toys and consumer electronics. There are three features that make this interesting: passive RFID tags don’t require batteries, offer wireless communication and a scheme for identifying physical objects.
The lack [...]

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

RFID may begin to enable cheap – even disposable – products that have identities and connections to a network. What are the opportunities for integrating services, infrastructure, community and online brands into physical objects?
In the longer-term, how does the economics, [...]