An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies visible, in order to better understand and communicate with and about them (see a Graphic Language for RFID, Dashed lines and Fictional radio spaces).
Right now I am sitting near fourteen objects sending and receiving radio signals, from Oyster cards to mobile phones and wireless routers in a multitude of overlapping and competing fields. Here we are creating communicative material that uses dashed-line abstractions to visualise the presence of wireless technologies in the everyday environment. What if we could see every field produced by an Oyster card or NFC enabled mobile phone for instance?
Using simple abstractions such as the dashed line and the kinds of visual language that we have previously proposed for RFID allow us to quickly communicate aspects such as the spatial properties of wireless technologies that are often overlooked. I’ve been using these images in presentations for a while, to sensitise designers and students to the spatial and embodied properties of RFID, Bluetooth and WIFI.
We are also experimenting with video, where the visualisations are part of an environment in a moving sequence. This is looking like a useful technique for making visual explanations of invisible materials.
Here are more images:
NFC phones and contactless cards.
NFC phones.
Wifi and bluetooth.
An NFC-enabled bus timetable.
An NFC-enabled ‘smart poster’.
An Oyster card reader and cards
Related things:
- New film: Wireless in the World 2 In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations of radio ‘spaces’ are overlaid into urban spaces. The film has been made as a follow up to this video experiment and has been......
- Nokia releases first mass-market NFC handset Nokia today announced the 6131 NFC phone, the first integrated NFC handset that will (operators willing) be available to the public. Previously NFC had been confined to ageing handsets like the 5140 and 3220......
- Fictional radio-spaces In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in a research-driven course called Tangible interactions that investigated themes around RFID, NFC and the Touch project. This is one of the projects that emerged......
- Images of touch interfaces I’m happy to say that with great contributions from Nicolas Nova, Matt Jones and many others, the pool of images of ‘touch interfaces’ on Flickr is growing nicely. I originally asked for contributions in......
- Immaterials: the ghost in the field This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation. It features Timo Arnall of the Touch project and Jack Schulze of BERG. The......
One thing I think remarkable in your photos is that it makes obvious not only the radio zone around us, but that it is objects we are holding which broadcast information and not humans. It creates an opacity layer which is quite interesting and playful.
We haven’t (yet) gone the road of mass inclusion of rfid chips under our skin. Though that could come, it is becoming more and more mandatory for animals (cats, dogs) travelling from one country to another to have an RFID chip. Testing on animals first. :)