Samsung, one of the largest vendors of NFC-enabled mobile phones, unveils their new ‘Wallet’ app: When we asked why Samsung did not include NFC tap-to-pay features in Wallet, the company said that retailers prefer barcodes over NFC because they don’t have to install any new infrastructure to support it. The failure of NFC adoption summed [...]
About Timo
Timo is a director, designer and researcher working with interactive media and emerging technologies.
Between the Tag and the Screen: Kjetil Nordby’s PhD
On Thursday 20th October Kjetil Nordby will defend his thesis ‘Between the Tag and the Screen: Redesigning Short-Range RFID as Design Material’ for the PhD degree at AHO. The title of the trial lecture is “Opportunities and challenges for SR-RFID as design material”. Industrial and interaction designers are increasingly faced with new computational technologies that [...]
Touch at MoMA, NYC
We’re very happy that two works from the Touch project are featured in the latest exhibition ‘Talk to Me’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We’re proud to be exhibited alongside so much outstanding work of contemporary design practice and research. Curated by Paola Antonelli the exhibition brings together diverse design projects [...]
Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen & Einar Sneve Martinussen nominated for the young designer award
The Foundation for Design and Architecture in Norway ‘Norsk Form’ has nominated Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen & Timo Arnall for the ‘Young Designer’ of the year award. The nomination follows the public success of Immaterials: Light painting WiFi project in both the Norwegian and international media, as well as the work in the Touch [...]
The first NFC appliance
Nokia has announced the Play 360°, a portable speaker that on the surface looks like a fairly ordinary bluetooth-enabled, battery powered speaker system. The interesting bit is that this is the first appliance (that I can buy in a shop) that does things when touched with a mobile phone: The NFC interaction is demonstrated first-hand [...]
Immaterials: light painting WiFi
“The complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis.” – Adam Greenfield (2009) Immaterials: light painting WiFi film by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen. This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces [...]
Google, Android and NFC
Alongside the persistent rumours of an Apple iPhone with an RFID/NFC reader (and our own experiments with iPhone NFC interactions) it seems that Google is really beginning to push for NFC as part of its Android operating system and hardware guidelines. In the recent “Conversation with Eric Schmidt” with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at [...]
Depth of field: Film in design research
We’ve just had a new article (pdf) published as part of a Research by design issue at Form Akademisk. What follows is a summary of some of the key points, alongside the embedded videos that form the central arguments in the research. The article is called Depth of field: discursive design research through film written [...]