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 may be used as materials in designing. Such materials are important in design practices because they offer conditions for conceptualisation and production of new designs. However, new computational technologies are often very complex and not presented with the intention of supporting design practices. In investigating SR-RFID as a design material, we are faced with two important challenges. First, the available information concerning SR-RFID in relation to industrial and interaction design is limited and often oriented toward finished solutions rather than exposing potentials for designing. Second, it is difficult to find frameworks that show how to analyse such a technology so as to present it as a material specifically oriented toward industrial and interaction design.

The trial lecture starts 10 am, Disputation starts 12.00. It will be held in the main auditorium at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design

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Curated by Paola Antonelli the exhibition brings together diverse design projects that haven’t been highlighted before and includes numerous projects that we know and admire from around the world. From interfaces, appliances, products, installations, films, websites, games, to speculative objects, tools, visualisations, and information systems, the exhibition bravely takes on contemporary design head-on:

21st-century culture is centered on interaction: “I communicate, therefore I am” is the defining affirmation of contemporary existence, and objects and systems that were once charged only with formal elegance and functional soundness are now also expected to have personalities. Contemporary designers do not just provide function, form, and meaning, but also must draft the scripts that allow people and things to develop and improvise a dialogue.

The two projects, Immaterials and Nearness, both produced with BERG, are featured as films. Both of these projects translate obscure and often misunderstood technologies (like RFID) in a way that directly resonates with the exhibition’s intentions:

“Designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale.”

It’s good that such design research work can be placed in a culturally potent setting, and that otherwise overlooked aspects of contemporary design is exhibited to such a broad audience. In it’s related review of BERG’s work, the New York Times talks about the work in Talk to Me:

“Technology has tremendous potential to enhance our lives, if — and it is a big if — it can be “translated” into forms that make it useful, attractive and accessible. Otherwise even the most promising technological advances risk seeming so opaque and intimidating that we will not make the most of them.”

The exhibition has been reviewed by CNN, the New York Times, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal amongst others. It runs until 7 November 2011. We highly recommend it! Do check it out if you are in NYC.

More pictures from the opening event. And if you can’t make it, watch the two films here:

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A quote from the jury (in Norwegian):

Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen og Einar Sneve Martinussen er designere og forskere som jobber med design, media og teknologi. De har base ved Institutt for design ved Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i Oslo, der de formgir, underviser og forsker i skjæringspunktet mellom interaktive produkter og utforskning av digital teknologi og kommunikasjon. Gjennom sine forskningsprosjekter er de blitt en betydelig stemme i forskningsmiljøet, og har vakt internasjonal oppsikt i fag- og populærtidsskrifter. Deres tilnærming til designforskning er praktisk – de designer for å forklare.

De har utviklet nye metoder for å påvise usynlige teknologiske og sosiale sammenhenger, og bruker visuelle midler til å forklare interaksjonsdesign og ny teknologi. Alt er gjort med en god sans for internettkultur og populærkultur.

Det siste store prosjektet de er involvert i er YOUrban, der design forklarer teknologiens effekter på byen. At deres siste video ‘Immaterials lightpainting WiFi’ har rundet 600 000 visninger på nettet og er omtalt i en rekke globale media, sier noe om deres påvirkningskraft.

Arnall, Knutsen og Martinussen har undervist og påvirket flere kull av interaksjonsdesignere til å tenke forbi skjermen, og til å ta i bruk elektronikk og kode som materialer.

Alongside Arnall, Knutsen and Martinussen the nominees are Batlak og Selvig and Yokoland. The award will be given on the 7th September.

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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 with the newly announced NFC-enabled Nokia N9 in this Engadget video.

Nokia has been pushing NFC since 2004, but mainly towards ticketing, payment and ‘smart posters’. We’ve been pushing for more constrained, local and ad-hoc applications of NFC and it’ll be interesting to see if approach fares any better in the mass-market.

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“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 by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. A four-metre tall measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting.

This builds on a technique that was invented for the 2009 film ‘Immaterials: the Ghost in the Field’ which probed the edges of the invisible fields that surround RFID readers and tags in the world. It also began a series of investigations into what Matt Jones richly summarised as ‘Immaterials’.

While we were mapping out tiny RFID fields, we wondered what it would be like to apply the light painting process to larger-scale fields of Bluetooth, WiFi, GSM and 3G. What if we built huge light painting apparatus that could map out architectural and city-scale networks in the places and spaces they inhabited? We’re still very interested in understanding radio and wireless networks as one of the substrates essential to contemporary design practice.

We built the WiFi measuring rod, a 4-metre tall probe containing 80 lights that respond to the Received Signal Strength (RSSI) of a particular WiFi network. When we walk through architectural, urban spaces with this probe, while taking long-exposure photographs, we visualise the cross-sections, or strata, of WiFi signal strength, situated within photographic urban scenes. The cross-sections are an abstraction of WiFi signal strength, a line graph of RSSI across physical space. Although it can be used to determine actual signal strength at a given point, it is much more interesting as a way of seeing the overall pattern, the relative peaks and the troughs situated in the surrounding physical space.

After a week of walking through urban spaces holding and photographing this instrument, we have a much better sense of the qualities of WiFi in urban spaces, its random crackles, bright and dim spots, its reaction to the massing of buildings, and its broad reach through open areas. The resulting images show some of these qualities, and light painting is a brilliant medium for situating visualisations and data into physical world locations and situations.

Lots more visualisations and ‘making of’ pictures.

Einar writes more about this in an upcoming article called ‘Making material of the Networked City’ in Design Innovation for the Built Environment – Research by Design and the Renovation of Practice. There is also more detail on the project at the YOUrban weblog.

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In the recent “Conversation with Eric Schmidt” with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010, there is a good deal of discussion about the use of NFC in mobile devices. Right at the start of this video there is a demo of as-yet-unannounced Google device with an NFC ‘secure element’ chip, that interacts with a physical Google ‘placemark’.

While this demonstration is basic, and doesn’t actually go much further than what we are already used to with GPS and wifi positioning, it is quite exciting that a platform like Android might open up an open platform for physical-world interaction. I’d really like to see the possibility of actually implementing commercial apps and services that are more about our interaction and engagement with the physical world rather than the screen.

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The article is called Depth of field: discursive design research through film written by Timo Arnall and Einar Sneve Martinussen. It is about the role of film in interaction and product design research, and the use of film in exploring and explaining emerging technologies.

In the last decade, interaction design has found itself in a rather unique position. As an interdisciplinary field, drawing upon many domains such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI), product and graphic design, informatics, art, engineering and critical practice, it has grown the potential to situate itself in a critical position between emerging technologies and culture. In particular, there are emerging modes of doing exploratory design research that result from the newfound relations between product, interaction and communications design.
In this article we discuss our design research activities that use film as a material for exploring, conceptualising and communicating with emerging technology. We analyse this through existing framings of audiovisual media in HCI, technology, and interaction design research. The central research question we address is how does audiovisual media enable new kinds of practice-based design research with emerging technology?

The relations between scientific advance and cinema are extremely close. Kirby proposes that film establishes achievability of scientific and technical discourses, and ‘cinematic depictions of future technologies demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, viability and benevolence’. Historically, film has been a central part of the communication of new technology with interfaces mediated through film or video demonstrators. From televised events showing off household robotics at the 1939 New York World Fair to the invention of modern computing paradigms such as the mouse – in Engelbart’s ‘Mother of all demos’. Products too are often initially experienced through cinematic forms, from lifestyle commercials for Sony televisions, to explanatory ‘how to’ informercials for the Apple iPhone, to user-generated ‘unboxing’ videos on YouTube. The commercial film for the Polaroid SX-70 camera, directed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1972 is a fine example from design practice of new technology explained to the masses through a product commercial, conveying technology and experience combined into one sequence.

In this research we have used graphical, audiovisual, and time-based media as a tool, a material and a communicative artefact that enables us to approach complex, obscure and often invisible emerging technologies such as RFID. We give an account of how film has played an intricate role in the design research practice, from revealing the materiality of invisible wireless technology, to exploring prototypes in real-world settings, to communicating to a wide public audience.

In the article we propose that this kind of research with technology constitutes what we could call a ‘discursive design’ approach. The films below demonstrate design research approaches to RFID where film reveals and articulates complex subjects, through multiple genres, and for multiple audiences. By approaching design research in this way we may be able to explore emerging technologies through play, invention, imitation and parody in ways that are able to reveal and translate across many socio-cultural contexts.

Exploring materiality

The first films show a research approach that explores the materiality of RFID in experimental and highly aestheticised ways. These films emerged out of probing at the technology with the visual tools of photography and animation.

RFID is a largely immaterial technology, it is literally ‘black boxed’ into packaged components, and the qualities of its invisible radio fields are badly understood. The spatial and material aspects of RFID are important for design, in order to be able to create interactions and products that take advantage of the spatial and gestural properties of the technology.

In this film we use long-exposure photographs, light painting, layering and animation. These techniques support particularly expressive modes of explanation, the visualisations occupy a ‘real’ space and are sequenced in a way that provides an immediately graspable view into the spatial qualities of RFID. The use of documentary film form allows for the visual evidence to be laid out in sequences that contextualise, reveal and explain, the film is a highly communicative package for the methods and results.

This was originally written up here and here

In this related film, we show that the readable volume of an RFID tag can be shaped by actually manipulating the size and shape of the physical antenna. This demonstrates that the fundamental technology is not static and constant, and can be shaped through design. When taken together, these films are intended to build material knowledge of RFID, but also through their form, show how designers might begin to take some control over the technical materials, for aesthetic, interactional or functional purposes.

These creative deconstructions of RFID through film techniques point towards what might call a discursive design approach. Drawing on methods from critical design that unpack and re-conceptualise the technological material, combined with narrative and communicative approaches, we may begin to challenge some of the expectations and dominant understandings of RFID.

Communicating products and prototypes

The following product-focused films show technology in context through experiential and explanatory sequences, such as the use of motion diagrams and narrative ‘vignettes’ which convey experiences of using technological products in specific contexts.

Skål (Norwegian for Bowl) explores RFID interactions in a domestic media context, where it broadens the activity of television-based media consumption towards playful, physical engagement. Here film is used to communicate a functioning product prototype, while at the same time highlighting playful and tangible perspectives on RFID in use.

In Sniff we see the potential for reframing RFID technology through explanation and experiential representation of use and activities, and not by focusing on the technology itself. Here the use of cinematic qualities such as short depth-of-field and other stylistic devices such as quick-cut montages enable jumps in time and action that strongly reinforce the playful, exploratory perspectives on the technology.

Films as discursive objects

In this last set of films we wanted to create culturally relevant objects that could communicate to a broad audience.

This iPhone RFID film was created to engage with a large online discussion around Apple’s relatively new iPhone. We wanted to question the largely screen-based modes of interaction that the iPhone encouraged, and to subtly reframe the discussion around RFID to include media, toys, play and direct manipulation of objects in the world. The film was a speculative object from which to see the possibilities for the rich, playful interaction between mobile devices and the world.

Nearness offers a particular view of RFID and proximity interaction that playfully resonates with a history of the chain reaction film genre. It is designed to reach beyond a research or design community in order to provoke discussion and to increase awareness of the technological implications. It does this by parodying an existing popular cultural form in a way that inherently embeds the quality of the technology into the narrative. Originally this film was described here and here.

The making of

These films constitute more than documentation of the design research in Touch, they were the medium in which invention and reflection occurred. Audio-visual media allowed for the creation of products, spaces, objects, gestures and environments that supported our internal and external discussion and development around RFID.

This film shows some of the experiments, processes and film techniques behind the creation of the other films in the article. It shows that these design processes work within the material of film, where the analysis and reflection emerged through the design activity of filmmaking. As well as being highly communicative, film sequences provide a space to gather and articulate a set of ideas, providing a relatively stable outcome and further motivation within the design activity.

Summary

This is a body of design research work that demonstrates the communicative qualities of film, that represent physical objects and their interactive, tangible behaviours over time. Time-based, audiovisual media can combine both explanatory and experiential and contextualising power, and this opens up for prototypes, products and processes being externalised within a practice-based design research activity. We see the potentials for a kind of practice where the emphasis of design research is on communication and participation in public discourse.

We have shown how practice-based design research has the ability to create representations and communicative artefacts, as opposed to technological development or mass production. A communicative approach to interaction design is central to this research. It embodies the idea that the communication of ideas, concepts and arguments through mediated design artefacts is essential to both creating effective interactive products, and to provoking discourse in and around technology-centric research. The form of film – that embodies both a highly reflective design activity and communicative qualities – is an ideal medium for interaction design research, where it can coalesce knowledge around practices and processes and project towards potential futures. Film allows for a degree of probing, explanation and reflexive understanding of emerging technologies, but through its communicative qualities, also opens up for participation in broad social and cultural discourses around technology.

We have shown some perspectives on the role that film can play in exploring, conceptualising and communicating about emerging technology. Film can be used for cinematic explorations and enactments that enable speculation in practice-based design research, but we have also pointed towards the use of online mediation to support public discourse around ubiquitous technologies and materials. 

Read the full article here (pdf) which is published as part of a Research by design issue which also includes articles about designing mobile social software and investigations of motion sketching from our colleagues at AHO.

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The Touch project has a new exhibition in collaboration with the Record project at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design.

In recent years we have witnessed the growth of a new breed of consumer products and services that are a hybrid of tangible atoms and online bits. This exhibition offers a selection of products, demonstrators, videos and art objects that highlight the ways in which online social media now are becoming an important part of the functionality, design and desirability of new products and services. As products and services become increasingly digital and disappear into screens, Hybrids exemplifies some alternative strategies, where some of the magic of the social web seep out into the physical world through tangible things.

There are a number of products and services on show, including a new project by Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen:

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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 specifically designed for exhibition in HABITAR at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial.

Here is an excerpt from the exhibition description:

“Utopian and radical architects in the 1960s predicted that cities in the future would not only be made of brick and mortar, but also defined by bits and flows of information. The urban dweller would become a nomad who inhabits a space in constant flux, mutating in real time. Their vision has taken on new meaning in an age when information networks rule over many of the city’s functions, and define our experiences as much as the physical infrastructures, while mobile technologies transform our sense of time and of space.”

There are photos of the exhibition by Edgar Gonzalez here. The exhibition catalogue with essays by Anne Galloway, Usman Haque, Nicolas Nova and others is available to download here.

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In the Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing the article Multi-field relations in designing for short-range RFID analyses some of the conceptual foundations for multi-field inputs with RFID enabled artifacts:

“Multi-field inputs are techniques driven by multiple short-range RFID-enabled artifacts like RFID-tags and RFID-tag readers. The technology is useful for designers so as to enable the construction of advanced interaction through the physical world. To take advantage of such opportunities, it is important to understand the technology in terms of what interactions it might offer designers. I address this issue by unwrapping and exposing elements that can be used to conceptualize multi-field interactions. This is done by way of a design driven inquiry in which design and research methods are used to investigate short-range RFID technology. My approach is informed by activity theory which I use to analyze RFID technology from a design perspective. The study presents multi-field relations as a conceptual framework that can be used to describe and generate multi-field inputs. Four types of multi-field relations are discussed: one-way, two-way, sequence and multiple relations. These are described and analyzed in context of a set of multi-field input examples. The multi-field relations expose elements that can be used to construct interactions. This is important for interaction designers, since new interactions presents designers with opportunities for making entirely new types of interfaces that can lead to interesting and surprising experiences.”

In the International Journal of Design the article Conceptual Designing and Technology: Short-Range RFID as Design Material unpacks RFID—or fields—as design material, and looks at designers motives around emerging technologies:

“Short-Range Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an emerging technology that interaction designers are currently embracing. There are, however, few systematic efforts to utilize the technology as a tool for the development of new design concepts. This article focuses on technology as a design material and its role in the formative process of conceptual design. My approach involves the use of activity theory and the concept of motives, used to analyze short-range RFID technology when considering the field of design. I employ practice-based research where qualitative design and research methods are used to scrutinize the use of this technology in design. A design material perspective frames the short-range RFID technology as a composite consisting of near-fields and the computational. This material is coined near-field material and is further described through six form-making qualities: Tap and Hold, Multi-Field Relations, Multi-Field Distribution, Field Shape, Context Sharing and Mediation Type. I propose that the near-field material and thus the six form-making qualities cited above, offer designers engaged in creating user-oriented experiences, a morphology of form types. I argue that by synthesizing and analyzing emerging technology in relation to designers’ motives for using them, we may further support research and practice by placing technology inside design discourse and culture.”

See more publications from Touch.

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We’ve compiled a short sequence of some of the design experiments and tests in audiovisual media in the Touch project. Here we show some of the ‘behind the scenes’ tests and processes where we used cinematic/video/filmmaking tools as a means to uncover potentials and constraints around an emerging technology.

In these experiments we designed and invented spaces, objects, movements and audiovisual techniques that map and visualise the interactive phenomena of RFID. Many of the visual/cinematic concepts for Nearness and Immaterials were invented by exploring and experimenting with film.

Rather than investing time in creating complex software and hardware prototypes, the interactive experience can be quickly explored inside film compositing applications. These experiments have shown us that there is great value in having tools that offer efficient prototyping of interactions at an experiential level, that don’t need to rely on complex electronics or physical design. There is also value in working within a medium that is not tied to a specific location or a unique demonstrator, and that is editable, reproducible and transmissible allowing it to be shared freely and widely amongst a research group and across the internet.

This is the subject of a forthcoming paper that we’ll flag up here as soon as it is published.

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“The iCarteTM is a Near Field Communication (NFC) / Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Reader, designed to provide NFC two-way communication, RFID read/write and contactless payment capability for the iPhone. NFC and RFID tag information can be written and read by the iCarteTM and communicated to the iPhone or to any Computer with a USB port. iCarteTM has an embedded smart-chip that can be configured as debit, credit, pre-paid and loyalty cards, for secure contactless transactions. iCarteTM can also read NFC Smart Posters, download or upload electronic coupons, tickets or receipts. iCarteTM is ideal for iPhone users who want to use their iPhones for fast and secure contactless payments, transit payments, loyalty rewards, checking balances, top-up, discovering new services from smart posters or kiosks and exchanging information with other NFC phones. Business iPhone users can use the iCarteTM for commercial applications such as asset tracking, document tracking, healthcare, security and access control.”

I’ve also heard rumours that Core RFID is about to have a reader available for the iPhone, and we’ll flag that up here as soon as we hear anything more.

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One of the first long-exposure photographs that proved the mapping technique.

Adam Greenfield uses the work to reflect on how design decisions about seemingly small details—such as the range of an RFID reader—can have significant implications for wider systems and infrastructures:

“Rather than asserting “an RFID” as some eternal given, something that will produce the same linear, determinate effect each and every time it is deployed, Immaterials reminds us that the choice of material, shape, size, direction, orientation and power rating of the components involved have distinct consequences for the uses to which those components can be put. And as we’ve seen, these choices can produce effects on levels seemingly entirely removed from the interaction itself.”

Dan Hill goes back to the ‘invisibility’ of electricity and relates the work to his own experiments looking at the immaterial aspects of the city:

“In their work I even see something of the early experiments of, say, Benjamin Franklin and Nikola Tesla in terms of understanding the behaviour of electricity, such that it can then be tamed, conducted, and put to work. It’s perhaps drawing a long bow to make that comparison, but it feels like a similar sentiment. Whilst electricity is hardly invisible, there is a sense of trying to understand such immaterial phenomena through prototyping and experimentation. ”

Here in the discussion Mitchell Whitelaw responds to what he sees as the false opposition between material and immaterial, suggesting transmaterial as a suitable alternative term for the new kinds of materials that we are working with. Have a look at Mitchell’s weblog for more on the term transmaterial and ‘expanded computing’.

The technically focused audience at Slashdot questioned the reasons for doing such a study. A common criticism here is that manufacturers data sheets and computer simulations should be able to give us a quicker and more accurate model of the interaction:

“For a theoretical/measured depiction they could just read the reader manufacturer’s data sheet, which will almost certainly contain a diagram of the antenna sensitivity pattern in a couple of planes and probably some concrete figures.”

“The subtlety seems to be that they’re not plotting an RF field, they’re plotting the volume in which the passive tag will respond to an RF field (of a given strength). It’s another level of abstraction. Yes, once somebody has come up with the idea then the implementation looks simple enough, but the idea is quite remarkable.”

“The main reason they did this is to map out the field interaction between the RFID tag and the reader, which is not a trivial thing to visualize based on the two data sheets.”

Also discussed here was a technical point that raises wider concerns about privacy, security and eavesdropping:

“Remember, anything radio is not theoretically limited in range. Only practical implementations have set limits. ”

“Yes, but RFID passive responses very quickly go below ambient background noise, in effect limiting even the theoretical range to 1-2 m for all but most exotic radio-noise free environments.”

This discussion shows that—even though we are keen for these images to be used as material in the discussion of privacy and the problem of invisibility—the physical limitations for snooping or eavesdropping are more complex. And if we then take RFID systems as a whole, there are far wider concerns that are much broader than physical/spatial relationships such as the long-term storage of data on travelcard or passport usage for instance.

A glimpse behind the scenes of the Immaterials filmmaking.

We received lots of emails and comments from specialists involved in radio and antenna design, who saw the visualisations as empirical evidence:

From Paul B. via email:

“I’ve worked in both passive and active RFID for about 15 years and want to congratulate you on the very effective and entertaining visualizations. I’ve done my share of winding coils, blinking LEDs and have created diagrams mapping fields so I know how hard it is to make something that is useful and actually helps non-tech people understand the weird world of RFID.”

From Dave H. via email:

“We have had to use huge anechoic chambers with massive parabolic reflectors and extremely stable transmitters to measure the field strength pattern of antennae. I know it’s a world away from that sort of large scale tech but your RFID visualisations blew me away. It’s fantastic. A brilliant idea. And it works perfectly.”

And finally some kind words from both Fast Company:

“As technology progresses, we need better symbols to understand all the gadgets and electrical hubbub that surrounds us. What could be better than symbols that actually reveal a bit about how a technology works?”

And the Helsinki Design Lab 2010:

“Rarely does one have the opportunity to watch a discourse take large strides, but I get the feeling that’s exactly what we’re witnessing as Touch/BERG elaborate nearfield communications as something with nuance – in other words, as a material.”

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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 problem and opportunity of invisibility

RFID is still badly understood as an interactive technology. Many aspects of RFID interaction are fundamentally invisible; as users we experience two objects communicating through the ‘magic’ of radio waves. This invisibility is also key to the controversial aspects of RFID technology; once RFID antennas are hidden inside products or in environments, they can be invoked or initiated without explicit knowledge or permission. (See here for more on the invisibility of radio.)

But invisibility also offers opportunities: the lack of touch is an enormous usability and efficiency leap for many systems we interact with everyday (hence the success of Oyster, Suica and Octopus cards). But there is also the ‘magic’ of nearness one of the most compelling experiential aspects of RFID.

As designers we took this invisibility as a challenge. We needed to know more about the way that RFID technology inhabits space so that we could better understand the kinds of interactions that can be built with it and the ways it can be used effectively and playfully inside physical products.

The experiments

In order to study the readable volume around an RFID reader, we built experimental probes that would flash an LED light when they successfully read an RFID tag. The readable volume is not the same as the radio field, instead it shows the space within the field in which an RFID tag and an RFID reader will interact with each other.

One version of our probe containing a tag and LED light connected to the RFID reader that is being studied.

In a dark room, the probes were moved around the various RFID tags and readers that we wanted to study, with a camera taking long-exposure photographs of the resulting patterns of light. In this way we could build up layers by slicing through the field in different ways, creating animations that clearly reveal the spatial properties of this interaction.

These experiments were carried out in order to help us flesh out our own models of the technology, and were not intended to be scientifically accurate. So although they accurately reflect the behaviour of the technologies in the situations that we work with, there were no controlled environments or settings for generalisable technical accuracy.

Innovations ID 20

The Innovations ID 20 RFID reader has become one of the standard components in a lot of our work, it is small, robust and relatively cheap. So it has been very important for us to gain an understanding of the readable volume it produces when we embed the reader inside products such as Sniff and Skål.

Details: Innovations ID20 low-frequency EM4102 reader, 20mm circular EM4102 tag.

The resulting visualisation shows the way in which we have mapped the boundary of the readable volume, although a tag will read anywhere inside this, we have only mapped the edge for the sake of clarity. From the animation (see the video) we start to clearly see that the readable volume is made up of a strong central sphere, accompanied by a smaller lobe that surrounds the edge of the reader.

Oyster card

Mifare cards are one of the largest public applications of RFID, used in many transit systems around the world such as the Oyster and Suica cards. It has become common to have to touch in and touch out of subway stations, and many people have become accustomed to this interaction. So what does the readable volume around an Oyster card look like?

Details: Standard Mifare Oyster card, probed with a Sonmicro high-frequency reader.

With a square antenna inside the Oyster and the Sonmicro reader, we get an elongated main volume, accompanied by long skinny lobes on each edge of the card. This looks very different from the ID 20 mapping.

Orientation

The first two mappings held the reader and the tag parallel to each other, but we predicted that there would be a higher degree of complexity in the relationship if the tag and the reader moved in different orientations. The rig below was built so that we could control the angle between the reader and the tag, which moved along the surface of the table.

Details: Innovations ID20 low-frequency EM4102 reader, 50mm circular EM4102 tag.

There is clearly enormous physical complexity in this relationship, in the animation we can see the volume growing and shrinking, lobes turning into spheres, and vice-versa. But the animation gives us a very clear picture of the ‘throw’ of the reader onto a single two-dimensional plane, almost like looking at it as a torch.

Parallel and perpendicular

To show the two extremes of the relationship between orientation and the readable volume, we created two mappings, one with the tag parallel to the reader, and the other with the tag perpendicular. We mapped them using two different colours of LED: green for parallel and red for perpendicular.

Details: Innovations ID20 low-frequency EM4102 reader, 20mm circular EM4102 tag.

This image is a composite of the two mappings (see the video for animations of the two mappings separately) and it is clear that the readable volume is significantly different. When the tag is perpendicular to the reader, there is a sizeable gap in the middle of the reader where the tag will not read, creating two readable volumes side by side.

Conclusions

We have been continually challenging the ways in which RFID technology has been framed. It is incredible how often RFID is seen as a long-range ‘detector’ or how little relevant information is contained in technical data-sheets. When this information is the primary material that we are working with as designers, this is highly problematic. By doing these kind of experiments we can re-frame the technology according to our experience of it, and generate our own material knowledge.

One of the early motivations in this project was the way in which the animations really captured our tacit, embodied knowledge of the readable volume in a visual way, it was almost as if you could wave your hand through the floating green LEDs and feel them. Of course we had felt it hundreds of times in experimenting with tags and readers, but we had never seen it captured in an image, in a way that was communicable to others without having them try an interactive demonstrator. With this visual material, we can communicate about RFID in ways that we couldn’t previously.

So we hope that this work goes some way towards building better spatial and gestural models of RFID, as material for designers to build better products and to take full advantage of the various ways in which spatial proximity can be used. And with this better understanding we hope to be able to discuss and design for privacy and the ‘leakage’ of data in a more rigorous way.

Field icon

Download a PDF file of the RFID icon.

This RFID icon is based on the shape of the ‘readable volume’. Created by Timo Arnall & Jack Schulze, it is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Go ahead and use it!

Credits

The project was made by Timo Arnall and Einar Sneve Martinussen from AHO and Jack Schulze from BERG. Thanks to Jørn Knutsen for help in building the rigs.

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Creativity contacted us for a “Behind the Work” feature where Jack Schulze goes deeper into the film:

“RFID is a complex and fairly abstract technology to grasp. We have to be careful in how we communicate with it. There are many leaps of imagination and understanding required to grasp it and hold a useful model of how it works and what is happening, let alone see how it maps usefully and elegantly into the world around us. The familiarity of the chain reaction form, means the audience quickly grasps that the normal kinetic transfer of force in the sequence is replaced by invisible forces that work very closely together. Like invisible digital breaths between objects. Because the form was familiar, our hope was the concept of nearness without touching would be clearly understood.”

Shots Magazine asked us to write about new design futures with rfid chips. Here we went a bit further into our film production process in general:

“There has been constant refinement of the production techniques not only to convey designed objects and their surroundings evocatively, but also the invisible layers of interchange and interaction that are increasingly both digital and physical. It turns out that contemporary cinematic techniques such as motion tracking, match moving and the integration of video with 3D motion graphics are ideal tools for visualising, prototyping and communicating about ubiquitous technology.”

And—in a twist that I find particularly satisfying—the UK newspaper Metro wrote about the film, calling it a ‘fun glimpse at a future where you control machines by waving your mobile at them, and everything goes ‘beep’ as you walk by.’

Since Metro is distributed mainly on public transport, it’s lovely to think of their 1.3 million readers all clutching their Oyster cards while reading about the film.

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The ‘Radiogenic’

Dunne & Raby introduce the idea of ‘Hertzian space’ in Design Noir and Hertzian Tales where they describe a landscape of electronic products creating a “new, invisible but physical environment”.

In Tunable cities they map the radio signals from domestic equipment such as babycoms and begin to examine the “role of electronic products in the aesthetic inhabitation of a rapidly dematerialising, ubiquitous and intelligent environment.” Here there are visualisations of radio fields as bright red spaces overlaid on the streets of Chiswick, London.

Although their work specifically avoided issues around making the invisible visible or visualising radio, it explored the “links between the material and the immaterial that lead to new aesthetic possibilities for life in an electromagnetic environment”.

“It might seem strange to write about radio, a long-established medium, when discussion today centres on cyberspace, virtual reality, networks, smart materials and other electronic tehcnologies. But radio, meaning part of the electromagnetic spectrum is fundamental to electronics. Objects not only “dematerialise” into software in response to minituarisation and replacement by services but literally dematerialise into radiation. All electronic products are hybrids of radiation and matter. [...] Whereas cyberspace is a metaphor that spatialises what happens in computers distributed around the world, radio space is actual and physical, even though our senses detect only a tiny part of it.”

As Matt Jones points out, they go on to coin the term “radiogenic” to describe objects that:

“function as unwitting interfaces between the abstract space of electromagnetism and the material cultures of everyday life, revealing unexpected points of contact between them.”

The Faraday chair offers a slightly more nuanced ‘visualisation’ of the boundaries of electromagnetic waves through a physical object. These works operate by visualising and making tangible the boundaries between electromagnetic phenomena, and as such, serve to highlight and create discourse around the issue of radio in emerging products and systems

Celebrating the magic of remote action

The language used to describe RFID interaction includes closeness, touch, proximity and pointing but there are few explorations of the way that RFID systems shape the gestural and tangible aspects of this interaction. Within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) there is some discussion of the spatial aspects of sensor technologies. For instance Ailisto et al (2003) discuss the ways that RFID creates contactless interactions on mobile phones: “Physical selection may be based on proximity or pointing. In the case of proximity, the selection is activated by bringing the activating device, e.g. a smart phone, close to the target device.”.

In the Touch project we have experimented with the spatial aspects of RFID interaction, developing a tacit design knowledge of the technology over time. At an early RFID hacking workshop with BERG/Schulze & Webb we experimented with playful interactions that involved “the magic of remote action” where invisible interactions triggered events in the world.

This is something we went on to explore in much more detail in the film Nearness, where the relationship between proximity and physical interaction is explored in detail.

In projects like the Graphic language for touch we have begun to find ways of representing invisible radio as a tangible design material in a functional setting.

And in her project the Bubbles of Radio (that emerged from our Fields and Seams brief) Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas imagined and visualised many fictional representations of radio fields including Bluetooth and RFID. These drawings provide a playful starting point for the discussion of our relationship to radio fields and the possibilities they open up for interaction.

Exploring and experiencing waves

The political, social and phenomenological aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum are a recurring theme within contemporary media art practice. For instance the exhibition Waves at RIXC tuned in to artistic engagements with the electro-magnetic spectrum and suggested that “artists should take control of the very principles and materiality of the ‘network waves’.”

A common practice is to translate radio space into an audible, sonic experience. In projects like ætherspace, Aeriology, Electroprobes and in many RFID projects some kind of probe that senses radio and offers audible output is held or attached to the body. The experience is then about being mobile, moving through and probing the world to discover how the lanscape and patterns of radio changes through space.

Then there are a number of visual, interactive visualisation projects such as the Wifi camera, the sightseeing telescope that reveals open wifi networks in urban space and the Free Network Visible Network project. In most cases the visual representations of the radio waves are merged and overlaid into optical or video backgrounds of the physical world, in a kind of ‘augmented reality’ genre.

In Edge Town by Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen visual approaches are used to explore the ways in which we can “design interfaces with the flows of electronic data that run through our cities so that they can be experienced as an enriching complement to other, more ‘earthly’ phenomena.” Their garden-like visualisations represent the desire to turn these invisible flows into something more tangible. In another architectural approach, Pedro Sepulveda-Sandoval proposes the demarcation of public areas that are free of mobile phone signals, using the visual language of yellow/black warning tape.

Artists Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt visualised many kinds of fields in Magnetic Movie, where the fields are seen animated as crackling, pulsing and swirling waves that uncomfortably inhabit physical spaces. This animation reinforced by a strong soundtrack that crackles in time with the motion is one of the most engaging and compelling visualisations of radio fields that we have seen.

Spatial and seamful sensors

For engineers and scientists, accurately modelling and visualising invisible radio fields, and engaging in antenna measurement is a difficult task, if not almost a ‘black art’. Using specialist robotic equipment and slowly measuring the intensity of radio signals at various points in space, it is possible to build up a three dimensional map of a radio field. There are also specialist 3D simulation tools that create models of radio fields and their interactions with physical material. These tools are mainly used to optimise the design of radio antennae, probe and problem-solve radio interference problems in electronic equipment and to assess safety issues with human exposure to radio systems.

In a paper called The spatial character of sensor technology Reeves et al (2006) describe the importance of understanding seams and spatiality in sensor-based systems. Although they concentrate on ‘torch-based’ interactions, their concerns are relevant for other sensor technologies:

“We are primarily concerned with the way in which seams between devices create a particular spatial character for the location in which they are deployed. This spatial character of seams derives from the use of spatially-embedded sensor technologies (e.g., GPS, Wifi, etc.) which are particularly prevalent in ubiquitous computing. Sensor technology plays a fundamental part in the creation of seams, and thus the character of the space in which such technology is deployed. The main issue, then, is how interactive and ubiquitous system design may appropriately address this essential spatiality.”

There is also a discussion of the ‘seamful’ character of many ubiquitous technologies.

Chalmers and Galani (2001) describes the ways in which “wireless networks have distinct physical characteristics such as a tendency to be absorbed by metal, water and other conductive materials, and a pattern of coverage that makes for a limited area of usable network connectivity.” They suggest that there may be a method or conceptual process of ‘seamful design’ that builds upon the way that “people accommodate and take advantage of seams and heterogeneity, in and through the process of interaction.”

“We critique the ‘disappearance’ mentioned by Weiser as a goal for ubicomp, and Dourish’s ‘embodied interaction’ approach to HCI, suggesting that these design ideals may be unachievable or incomplete because they underemphasise the interdependence of ‘invisible’ non-rationalising interaction and focused rationalising interaction within ongoing activity.”

There is something in this ‘seamful design’ process that may help us to understand of the way that we deal with the invisible aspects of radio-based interaction, and the ways that mental models are built out of these systems.

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