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.

Related things:

1. Nokia releases first mass-market NFC handset Nokia today announced the 6131 NFC phone, the first integrated......
2. Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that......
3. iPhone RFID and NFC peripherals We are beginning to see RFID and NFC peripherals beginning......

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.

Einar Sneve Martinussen, André Borgen, Paolo Dell’elce and Henrik Marstrander looked at how to increase the cohesion of local communities. As a starting point they studied a local record shop and looked at the intricate social and economic relationships around it.

They discovered an existing layer of printed, handwritten, and scrawled information in and around the record shop itself. This was a mixture of content, relying very much on local knowledge and social connections including recent arrivals, staff picks, recommendations and playlists, all of which offered rich opportunities for interaction design. They also discovered intruiging patterns and behaviours, including eccentric opening times that inspired them to look at what happened around the shop during closed periods.

They prototyped a simple application that offered the ability to hear and download music, playlists, new releases, etc. by touching the phone to the shop window, and conceptualised how this might be applied in other areas of the shop.

See more at Henrik’s weblog with their presentation of technologies, wider ideas and research.

This project was very interesting in the amount of ideas that emerged from a single context. It seems that when you begin to research a specific situation, the applications and services that emerge from it are numerous. The students here conducted a kind of situation-based brainstorming that was very rich. Situation and context provide very useful limits for for idea-generation. It also showed that NFC has numerous opportunities in niche communities, in contrast to typical location based services that offer generalised applications to tourists, etc.

Related things:

1. Touchable services: Underskog In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
2. Touchable services: Art Server In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
3. Local applications and services This is a design brief, one of many themes that......