Presenting Touch at a event like this is a good opportunity to provide a glimpse into ongoing design and research and a chance to communicate to a broader audience. The talk focused on design as an approach to RFID and how we can use design to understand, communicate and explore emerging technologies.

The presentation consists of condensed presentation of RFID from a technical and material perspective and goes on to describe various aspects of designing with RFID. In this presentation we use the Touch-projects Bowl and Sniff to illustrate the process of designing RFID products. The presentation is available on Slideshare.

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1. Tangible Interactions – summer exhibition This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions......
2. Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2009 We recently presented our paper Designing with RFID at the......
3. Touch network building The Touch project is receiving considerable interest and over the......

Identity and Identification in a Networked World

This is a free symposium open to all on the 29-30 September 2006 organised by graduates at the NYU School of Law.

Increasingly, who we are is represented by key bits of information scattered throughout the data-intensive, networked world. Online and off, these core identifiers mediate our sense of self, social interactions, movements through space, and access to goods and services. There is much at stake in designing systems of identification and identity management, deciding who or what will be in control of them, and building in adequate protection for our bits of identity permeating the network. This symposium will examine critical and controversial issues surrounding socio-technical systems of identity, identifiability and identification. It will showcase emerging scholarship of graduate students at the cutting edge of humanities, social sciences, artists, systems design & engineering, philosophy, law, and policy to work towards a clearer understanding of these complex problems, and build foundations for future collaborative work.

Registration and preliminary program

Architecture and Situated Technologies

First found via Anne, this October 2006 event is being organised by the The Institute for Distributed Creativity, Center for Virtual Architecture and the Architectural League of New York. There doesn’t seem to be a website or a confirmed date yet, but lots of distributed discussion going on the iDC mailing list

“This symposium, organized around the notion of an ‘encounter,’ will attempt to articulate new research vectors, sites of practice, and working methods for the confluence of architecture and situated technologies. What opportunities and dilemmas does a world of networked objects and spaces pose for architecture, art, and computing? How might this evolving relation between people and ‘things’ alter the way we occupy, navigate, and inhabit the built environment? What post-optimal design strategies and tactics might we propose for an age of responsive environments, smart materials, embodied interaction, and participatory networks? What is the status of the material object in a world privileging networked relations between ‘things’? How do distinctions between space and place change within these networked media ecologies? Given the explosive market proliferation of mobile communications and wireless networks, what distinguishes the emerging urban sociality they enable? How do the social uses of these technologies, including (non-) affective giving, destabilize rationalized ‘use-case scenarios’ designed around the generic consumer? These are just a few of the questions we want to address. Through a combination of workshops, presentations, and panel discussions, the symposium will attempt to stage a set of encounters between invited participants, an audience encouraged to participate, and the City of New York. This event will be podcast and a publication will follow.”

Read more

Related things:

1. More upcoming RFID events On Monday 8th May the RFID Innovasjonssenter is having it’s......
2. Upcoming conferences There are two ‘Internet of Things’ workshops in the next......

February

The project was kindly invited to Interaction Design Institute Ivrea by Fabio Sergio who is also doing great work in this area [pdf presentation]. Also in February the first Blogject workshop at LIFT06 was a broad exploration of networked objects, and created many interesting use-cases for early networked objects, many of which can be seen in the report.

March

In March the project was presented to students in the Adaptive Architecture & Computation course at The Bartlett in London. The students there are exploring tracking of bluetooth devices as a way of generating new architectural forms and concepts, and were interested in the use of mobile technology in urban space.

May

At the recent workshop How I learned to love RFID at Hartware in Germany, there were great discussions around RFID and it’s implications, with diverse viewpoints from media art, to industrial logistics to anti-rfid activism. For now there are photos, and there will be a write-up here soon.

At the end of May the second Blogject workshop at EPFL is taking place. This workshop will get hands-on to design prototypes of ‘networked artifacts of the future’, using existing objects as a starting point.

June

At the beginning of June there will be a showcase of our early experiments with touch-based interactions at Reboot in Copenhagen. Reboot promises to be a fascinating event, a convergence of design, technology and social practitioners and researchers.

In the middle of June Aula will be holding an event called Movement in Helsinki. The theme refers to the ‘overlapping of the physical and the virtual, and the social movement-like nature of new technologies’. The speakers are from a diverse background but most interestingly from design and social software.

September

There are interesting workshops at both Mobile HCI and Ubicomp in September. The first discusses approaches that use a mobile device for interactions with objects in the real world. The second looks at ‘applications and scenarios for early adoption of augmented objects’, specifically looking at interaction design for augmented objects. We are submitting papers to both.

October

We are planning a workshop at Nordichi 2006 in October, where we will explore concepts and physical forms for touchable networked objects in collaboration with Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker. More on this soon.

For those interested in the intentions of the project, have a look at this recent interview about Touch.

Related things:

1. More upcoming RFID events On Monday 8th May the RFID Innovasjonssenter is having it’s......
2. Touch at Kreative Oslo We recently had the chance to present Touch at the......
3. Touch at Nordes’09 Touch has an exhibition at Nordes’09 Engaging Artifacts that is......

Then there is the Internet of Things workshop from 9-11 May at Mediamatic in Amsterdam:

“In our RFID workshops we explore the social implications and artistic possibilities of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. This technology uniquely identifies physically tagged objects, and is expected to prompt an all-round ‘Internet of Things’. Through a fruitful mixture of theory and hands-on experimentation, participants get to turn their ideas into creative RFID prototypes.”

I will be participating in the How I learned to love RFID workshop in Dordmund from the 19-22 May.

Here are some details of the public event (which includes Bruce Sterling):

“A series of lectures brings together approaches and projects that artistically and critically deal with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology – a technology that is significantly being developed and advanced by companies and research institutes in Dortmund. This technology which at first glance seems to be a simple further development of the bar code (well known from the supermarket) is much more powerful that the good old bar code technology. RFID tags are passive radio transmitters, which upon receiving a minor wireless energy impulse are sending back the information stored on their memory. Today, this information can be read already at a distance of six meters – without the process getting noticed. In addition, with its unique identification numbering system, this technology will allow for a precise identification of every object worldwide. What will it be like to live in a world where all the objects constantly will be talking to each other?”

10:00-18:00 CEST, 20 May
HMKV, PHOENIX Halle, Hochofenstraße / Ecke Rombergstraße, Dortmund-Hörde, Germany

Then on 29 – 30 May is the followup to the first Blogject workshop organised by Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

“The present workshop is therefore a more “hands-on” follow-up. In the form of a two days retreat, its aim is now to design the networked artifact of the future (be it a blogject, a pervasive device, a slogging place, a locative thing, a pre-spime or an everyware). The idea is to have 3-4 groups made up of people with different skills and background to go through usage scenario, prototype implementation and socio-cultural implementation discussion.”

Reboot is from from 1 – 2 June, not directly related to RFID or ubicomp but if it’s anything like last year, will offer an interesting mix of technology, web and social perspectives, much like LIFT06.

“Reboot is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us… 2 days. 400 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas.”

Related things:

1. Upcoming events Two upcoming events in New York: Identity and Identification in......
2. Upcoming conferences There are two ‘Internet of Things’ workshops in the next......
3. Touch network building The Touch project is receiving considerable interest and over the......