This video shows Skål in action. A bowl sits on the living room table and a range of physical objects are used to trigger various kinds of media. For example a physical Moomin character like Little My will play a sequence from the Moomin cartoon where she is featured. Skål can control all kinds of digital media; movie-clips, Youtube channels, Flickr photo streams, home videos and online radio.

The product has been used as a probe to build our understanding of RFID technology in playful and domestic contexts and is the result of extensive enquiry into the area. It differs from other similar products like Touchatag and Mirror by focusing specifically on direct and immediate tangible interaction with rich digital media. In some ways it is similar to the iPhone RFID prototype, and here it reflects on the interchangeability of tags and readers in media interaction: RFID systems are symmetrical and interactions can be built through manipulating the reader (the iPhone) or the objects (Skål).

Visit the Skål website for more on the bowl and how it works and Flickr for more images.

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RFID is becoming more common in mobile phones (under the term Near Field Communication or NFC) from manufacturers such as Nokia. By looking at Apple’s patents we know that the technology is being considered for the iPhone. With the iPhone SDK 3.0 external hardware accessories can be accessed by iPhone software, so third party RFID or NFC readers are also possible.

So what kinds of applications would emerge if an iPhone had an NFC reader? Here we have prototyped a simple media player, which triggers the playback of content on the touch of a tag, and created a set of augmented objects that have relationships to different kinds of audiovisual content.

A lens for media

Compared to other mobile handsets the iPhone is a particularly media-friendly device, with a large, bright screen and high quality audiovisual playback. What if this screen could act as a ‘lens’ to content that resides in the world?

In a screen-based interface content may be buried many levels deep inside an information architecture. But in a physical RFID-driven interface a simple gesture can offer quick and direct access to content. Physical objects afford tangible manipulation that screens cannot, and this is great for playful products. Our Bowl prototype showed a natural blending of media consumption and playful activitiy in children, where media viewing became less passive and a more active experience.

Durrell Bishop has discussed these ideas in a more general way, what if objects were augmented with new properties, that can be perceived through an iPhone lens?

Media objects

In this video demo, the objects have been chosen to physically or visually represent the content. There are some obvious relationships, such as the Moomin figure leading to a favourite episode of a Moomin animation. The less obvious relationships such as the wooden house leading to home videos were chosen because they just somehow felt right. In fact the exact relationship may be of secondary importance, as over time the behaviour of the physical and digital objects becomes known and transparent through exploration and repetition.

Some of the objects felt particularly satisfying. The Make Podcast object for instance—where touching the ‘geek’ plays the latest ‘Weekend project’— shows how an object can be used for exploring a dynamic stream of content.

Going further

This video prototype is basic and intended to open up for discussion and new exploration around the experience of media selection through physical objects. At the moment the interaction is a trigger, but what if the phone doesn’t just react as output but also as input to physical objects? How do we programme and manage our sets of media and applications in these objects?

Overall this points towards opportunities around the distribution of media through physical objects, it is an example of general ideas around an ‘internet of things’ or ‘spimes’ applied to the world of media. What opportunities would the distribution of RFID-embedded products open up in terms of media, gaming, services and marketing? What does this mean for the future of products?

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In this process we explore ways in which RFID objects can be designed to balance various physical and digital qualities. This approach has illuminated opportunities and constraints in designing augmented objects that enriches the vocabulary around RFID for industrial and interaction designers where physical and visual material are essential elements.

RFID is most commonly used by consumers for ticketing, payments and access control. The design challenges in these contexts has concentrated on infrastructures and systems as opposed to the design of physical tokens. The design of these objects is limited to simple, mostly flat enclosures; cards, key-fobs or stickers.

The bare RFID tag itself does not offer significant meaning beyond its technical appearance. In order to create meaningful relationships towards these objects, RFID tags must be embedded in an object or signified by shape or sign. The physical design of most current RFID objects are limited to the form factors of the protective encapsulation of the tag. It remains at the simple level of encapsulation and packaging that does not yet address the wide range of physical possibilities for objects in everyday contexts.

Product review

To understand the ways that RFID tags have been designed into consumer products, we conducted a product review that documents the physical aspects of RFID products from around the world. This has been a process of reflection on existing industrial and consumer products that includes a range of cards, keyfobs and tokens, the Mattel Hyperscan games console, Star Wars Commtech figures, Brio Network, Violet Ztamps and other RFID peripherals.

The product review shows many uses for RFID but limited exploration of design qualities such as materials, shape, size, construction, manufacture, build quality, affordance or metaphors. But the potential for RFID in consumer products is significant, given the inexpensive hardware of RFID systems and the opportunity to enable digital interactions with even the simplest of objects. The technical properties of RFID, such as the batteryless tags which allow for cheap and maintenance free operation are perhaps the most significant opportunity for playful products and toys.

Form experiments

The intention for this series of experiments was to gain a rich working knowledge of the kinds of design qualities that RFID objects may embody. We used an explorative design approach to the physical aspects of RFID and this involved a process of prototyping, where physical RFID objects were built and evaluated in the Bowl environment. Through a sketching process we developed an understanding of the relationships between physical forms and tags. Form-explorations were then used to visualise findings, to generate further models and to examine surface qualities.

This approach has illuminated opportunities and constraints in designing physical RFID objects that now need to be translated into patterns and models that are useful for interaction and industrial design. See the full paper below for more detail around the objects, sketches and models.

Literal associations

The interactions and gestures that have been learned over time for such objects as dolls, toys, chesspieces, microphones, shower heads, telephones, flashlights, magnifying glasses, spraycans, screwdrivers, hammers, kitchen utensils, stamps, and handles, with gestures like stirring, pointing, poking, drawing and shaking are useful starting points for imagining RFID objects and interactions.

Two very distinct kinds of gestures emerged from our workshops and experiments with the Bowl and Orooni Table interfaces. These gestures are pick and place (eg. moving a chess piece) and grab and point (eg. waving a wand).

A form vocabulary for RFID

Designing new gestures, taxonomies of form and affordances specifically for RFID will come only from designing a new set of objects, with their own elements and properties. Through the process of designing new RFID objects we uncovered properties such as direction, balance, similarity and geometry. Here we see some of the variations and abstractions around the elements of RFID form. This is the beginning of a form vocabulary for RFID including balance, similarity, direction and multi-direction.

Through introducing RFID as an element that influences the shape of physical products, we begin to design an inspirational or generative set of forms for RFID-enabled objects. They effectively communicate the physical aspects of the design findings and help us to evaluate and refine a vocabulary of forms.

Conclusions

As the internet of things emerges as an increasingly important discourse within research and consumer products, the design of the RFID things themselves needs to be addressed. Our practice-driven approach involving products, models, objects and visualisations has resulted in a vision for an ‘internet of things’ that places designed things in the centre.

A hands-on approach has allowed a re-evaluation of RFID technology through the lens of design, and communication of this in design-focused language. Through a process of making, evaluation and communicating a number of artefacts and an emergent design vocabulary is being built, that talks to the needs and concerns of interaction and industrial designers.

These making, sketching and visualisation processes may also be important for the design of emerging technologies in general. With the increasing implementation of networked and interactive technology in consumer electronics, aspects of digital and physical design will increasingly need to be addressed by both industrial and interaction designers. Physical design is a critical part of the way in which tangible technologies are experienced, and by allowing design processes to guide product development we are able to approach emerging technology in a plausible and understandable way.

Full paper

‘Designing with RFID’ is being presented at Tangible & Embedded Interaction 2009 in Cambridge UK.

The paper contains a full account of the product review, the sketching, making and modelling, and conclusions around the design for RFID objects. The paper from the Tangible and Embedded Interaction conference will be available at the ACM digital library. You can also download the full PDF here.

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One of the key aspects of the project for me is the translation of the unique identity of RFID into a unique physical form. Each object in the project has a visual appearance and shape that is generated uniquely for each user. This reflects the unique identity contained in the RFID chip. This is an interesting approach to the visual and physical affordances of RFID technology.

The object above (photo by Lisa Smith) is a rapid prototyped object that has a unique shape:

They’re designed to be artifacts for schoolkids (K-12) that slowly gather informational histories as the kids interact with each other and grow. It’s part of a larger project about turning a school and its artifacts into its own yearbook while also encouraging the development of criticality through annotation.

The unique form emerged from what looks like a parametric model that generates unique shapes:

The cuteness generator is a visual language for RFID. The project uses identity, legibility, and desirability in order to help us sort through the large amounts of information that can be represented by RFID and spatial annotation.

The forms are generated with a small piece of front end software, with partial control from the user (for example, there is a cuteness<->grossness slider, and they can specify the number of eyes, but the form is also linked to their age and other friends/family in the system, etc). It pulls from sticker/graffiti culture, urban toy culture, and also heraldry (allows for the visual expression of human relationships and room for a visual subculture to emerge in the system).

This project shows one way in which fundamentals of RFID technology such as uniqueness, identifiability, recognition and personalisation can be explored through visual and physical affordances.

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