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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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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Last week Interaction Design students at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design participated in a Touch workshop where the brief was to design a playful, exploratory or characterful RFID interface. The emphasis of this workshop was on exploring the relationship between digital interaction through RFID and the material properties of physical objects.

The brief

This week we will be working with a technology called Radio Frequency IDentification or RFID. RFID is exciting for industrial and interaction designers because it is a cheap and simple technology that allows us to build quite advanced gestural and tangible interfaces. When an RFID tag is in the range of an RFID reader (usually about 10cm) it communicates a tiny amount of information, a simple short code that lets the computer know that it is present. This is usually used to identify an object, person or animal, for instance to open a door, to find the owner of a lost pet, to pay for a ticket, or to know if a product that is passing out of a shop door has been paid for.

RFID tags are tiny, fairly cheap and don’t require a battery. They can be embedded inside all sorts of materials easily and without much effort. RFID readers are also small and flat, enabling them to be embedded easily below surfaces such as wood, concrete or plastics. The only physical limitations are metal and water, which absorb radio signals and stop RFID systems from working effectively.

Designing playful RFID

You will design a physical interface that involves a reader, a few tags and a Tikitag application.

Industrial and interaction designer’s haven’t been working with RFID for very long. So RFID systems are usually dull and lifeless, with ordinary plastic or paper tags and flat plastic readers. There needs to be more experimentation with the physical aspects of RFID interfaces in applications such as toys, appliances and domestic interfaces. There may be great playful applications of the technology that have not yet been explored.

You must design the physical relationship between the tag, the reader and the resulting action. Your objects must be finished with quality and material choices that match the intended use and context of the application (such as waterproof plastics for the bathroom or turned wood for the coffeetable).

Methods

You will each choose a different application from our list of Tikitag applications. Sketch out ten ways in which the tags and the reader in that application should look, feel and behave. What kind of approach is most suitable? Should it be characterful, understated, loud? What other kinds of objects should it reference? List out the kind of materials that would be suitable for such an application.

Design one set of tags and a reader for your application. Think about size, shape, durability, surface texture, and the relationship between the reader and the tag. How do the objects relate to each other? How do the objects and the reader fit together? What metaphors and associations can you draw upon, are they like keys, do they encourage swiping, caressing, tickling? How will a user manipulate the objects? Will they have to place them in certain positions or sequences to achieve different results?

References

Bowl: Token based media for children

Designing with RFID

RFID peripherals

RFID and unique physical form

Images of touch interfaces

Previous ‘Touch’ student prototypes

Qubi – Tangible colour game

Hairfid

Storytelling pillow

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Nokia 3220 NFC Shell

NFC is interesting for us because it enables connections between mobile phones and real-world objects: bridging the gap between the real and the virtual. The project offers the possibility of radically simplifying existing applications and providing a new spectrum of local services through the mobile phone. At AHO we have multiple disciplines, including interaction design, industrial design, urbanism and architecture; a group with significant interest in the areas possibilities of NFC technology.

About Touch

The Touch project aims to strengthen research and industry in Norway into user-centred applications of emerging NFC technology. It aims to understand the way people will use tangible, digital objects as part of their daily lives, and to discover the information systems underlying those interactions.

Touch is not a pure technology project; NFC platforms and specifications are already well developed and documented. Instead we are taking a user-centred approach, and focusing on the social motivations behind the use of technology. With this process it will hopefully uncover unexpected uses, and significant untapped markets for the technology.

NFC offers the possibility to radically simplify existing applications and providing entirely new services. This has significant potential to drive innovation in areas such as retail, marketing, and public services, and offers strong potential for emergent social and communicative uses.

The project covers three distinct areas

1. Social and communication. This is a promising area for significant, emergent, potentially unexpected uses, particularly in areas of personal information management, location-based services and social networking.
2. Public services. This area looks at the ways that new touch-based interactions could access public data or services in safe, democratic, appropriate and efficient ways.
3. Retail, services and marketing. Exploring changes to the way we interact with retail services, looking at (but not limited to) payment for both products and services, automated check-out, product information, extended services and relationships, recycling, and tracking products through their cradle to cradle life-cycle.

Touch has a number of formal and informal partnerships within industry and academia. Among these partnerships are Telenor, Opera, Sintef, University of Oslo and the Interactive Institute Göteborg.

Simple scenarios

As part of the advocacy and initial research process we have developed some very simple scenarios to explain the potential of NFC interactions. (Drawings by Lars Haaland).

Transfer and exchange

Tags as gifts

Simple wayfinding

About Timo Arnall

Timo Arnall is a lecturer at AHO, an interaction designer and researcher currently researching in the fields of NFC and RFID. Timo’s research areas include tangible and social interaction, marking in public space, spatial annotation and locative media.

In May 2004 Timo ran a workshop on locative media and public space at the AHO conference Spark: Design and Locality. He has since presented his research at ISEA 2004 in Helsinki, Art+Communication in Riga, at the Interactive institute in Göteborg, and at CHI2005 in Portland, Oregon. In December 2004 he was involved in a seminar on Social Software at Intermedia in Oslo.

Timo Arnall’s paper ’Marking in public space’ was accepted to the Engaging the City workshop at CHI 2005, organised by Intel (US), University of Surrey (UK), Portland State University (US) and Carnegie Mellon University (US). At this workshop Timo looked at ideas for encouraging civic engagement in public space, and gave other researchers an insight into ongoing research into the marking of public space.

About Interaction Design at AHO

The Interaction Design department at AHO has a goal of building up a group comprising lecturers, researchers and PHD students, in which we excel at creative, relevant interactive work that communicates to end users. To do this, we are creating an atmosphere of creativity and collaboration where we collaborate across disciplines and encourage working in multi-disciplinary teams. The department has a focus on (amongst other subjects) physical computing, social computing, experience- and strategic-design.

The department works closely with Norwegian Industry. A recent success story in collaboration involved ASONO incorporating student work in the final design. In addition, students have been working on the Snøhetta modular house, and some of their ideas are likely to be put into production. The ERA World Congress for Design has commissioned two pieces of work from AHO students. One is an installation and one is a monument to mark the event.

Interaction Design is an area showing explosive growth. All of our students have successfully managed to find jobs, and several students have experienced strong competition to get hold of them.

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