In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO conducted intense one-week investigations into Near Field Communication in a project called Touchable services. See more student projects.

Anna Daniell, Castilnano Simoons, Stig Skjelvik and Christopher Svendsen looked at new commercial models for artists and galleries, and the social sharing or artwork.

Stig Skjelvik explains:

‘For most people art is expensive. You have only the possibility to look at it in a gallery, buy a poster, or find a picture on the internet. But what if we can make a system that makes it possible to se the art, and then send it home, or even more interesting, to send it to a friend, loved ones or family.’

In their prototype, the students placed RFIDs alongside artefacts at a gallery. When touched with an NFC phone, an image of the artwork was sent to a digital picture frame in another place.

The prototype was very simple and loaded URLs from the phone that prompted changes on a standard web-page. This was just enough to test out the interactions between users at the gallery and in the home context, which proved to be interesting and engaging. The system reinforced a strong connection between the two users, and the appearance of new images created the sense of a ‘gift’.

This project is particularly interesting in its realisation: all the elements of the service were prototyped, from the gallery interface through the web server application through to the industrial design of a digital LCD frame. Quickly prototyping all elements of the system in this way allowed them to test the service in context: in a gallery and in the home. This allowed the students to really get a handle on the experiential side of the prototypes.

Artwork by Anna Daniell. More detail at Stig’s weblog.

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Marko Ahtisaari talked about the Seven Challenges to our Shared Mobile Future, and in particular the overall goal of reaching the next 2 billion mobile phone users. It’s clear that this future is not just about Nokia’s multimedia computers, but will also be about making simple voice and text experiences more beautiful and engaging.

Chris Heathcote presented a ‘manifesto’ for the mobile internet; design patterns and approaches for the internet on mobile devices. He demonstrated the new Mobile web server as a universal tool for things like presence. This brings with it interesting issues like serving data with a device that may be out of coverage or batteries.

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