One of the first long-exposure photographs that proved the mapping technique.

Adam Greenfield uses the work to reflect on how design decisions about seemingly small details—such as the range of an RFID reader—can have significant implications for wider systems and infrastructures:

“Rather than asserting “an RFID” as some eternal given, something that will produce the same linear, determinate effect each and every time it is deployed, Immaterials reminds us that the choice of material, shape, size, direction, orientation and power rating of the components involved have distinct consequences for the uses to which those components can be put. And as we’ve seen, these choices can produce effects on levels seemingly entirely removed from the interaction itself.”

Dan Hill goes back to the ‘invisibility’ of electricity and relates the work to his own experiments looking at the immaterial aspects of the city:

“In their work I even see something of the early experiments of, say, Benjamin Franklin and Nikola Tesla in terms of understanding the behaviour of electricity, such that it can then be tamed, conducted, and put to work. It’s perhaps drawing a long bow to make that comparison, but it feels like a similar sentiment. Whilst electricity is hardly invisible, there is a sense of trying to understand such immaterial phenomena through prototyping and experimentation. ”

Here in the discussion Mitchell Whitelaw responds to what he sees as the false opposition between material and immaterial, suggesting transmaterial as a suitable alternative term for the new kinds of materials that we are working with. Have a look at Mitchell’s weblog for more on the term transmaterial and ‘expanded computing’.

The technically focused audience at Slashdot questioned the reasons for doing such a study. A common criticism here is that manufacturers data sheets and computer simulations should be able to give us a quicker and more accurate model of the interaction:

“For a theoretical/measured depiction they could just read the reader manufacturer’s data sheet, which will almost certainly contain a diagram of the antenna sensitivity pattern in a couple of planes and probably some concrete figures.”

“The subtlety seems to be that they’re not plotting an RF field, they’re plotting the volume in which the passive tag will respond to an RF field (of a given strength). It’s another level of abstraction. Yes, once somebody has come up with the idea then the implementation looks simple enough, but the idea is quite remarkable.”

“The main reason they did this is to map out the field interaction between the RFID tag and the reader, which is not a trivial thing to visualize based on the two data sheets.”

Also discussed here was a technical point that raises wider concerns about privacy, security and eavesdropping:

“Remember, anything radio is not theoretically limited in range. Only practical implementations have set limits. ”

“Yes, but RFID passive responses very quickly go below ambient background noise, in effect limiting even the theoretical range to 1-2 m for all but most exotic radio-noise free environments.”

This discussion shows that—even though we are keen for these images to be used as material in the discussion of privacy and the problem of invisibility—the physical limitations for snooping or eavesdropping are more complex. And if we then take RFID systems as a whole, there are far wider concerns that are much broader than physical/spatial relationships such as the long-term storage of data on travelcard or passport usage for instance.

A glimpse behind the scenes of the Immaterials filmmaking.

We received lots of emails and comments from specialists involved in radio and antenna design, who saw the visualisations as empirical evidence:

From Paul B. via email:

“I’ve worked in both passive and active RFID for about 15 years and want to congratulate you on the very effective and entertaining visualizations. I’ve done my share of winding coils, blinking LEDs and have created diagrams mapping fields so I know how hard it is to make something that is useful and actually helps non-tech people understand the weird world of RFID.”

From Dave H. via email:

“We have had to use huge anechoic chambers with massive parabolic reflectors and extremely stable transmitters to measure the field strength pattern of antennae. I know it’s a world away from that sort of large scale tech but your RFID visualisations blew me away. It’s fantastic. A brilliant idea. And it works perfectly.”

And finally some kind words from both Fast Company:

“As technology progresses, we need better symbols to understand all the gadgets and electrical hubbub that surrounds us. What could be better than symbols that actually reveal a bit about how a technology works?”

And the Helsinki Design Lab 2010:

“Rarely does one have the opportunity to watch a discourse take large strides, but I get the feeling that’s exactly what we’re witnessing as Touch/BERG elaborate nearfield communications as something with nuance – in other words, as a material.”

Related things:

1. Responses to ‘Nearness’ The broad response to the short film Nearness has been......
2. Fictional radio-spaces In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in......
3. Wireless in the world An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies......

The RFID sniffer is a simple analog electronic circuit which can detect the presence of 13.56 MHz RFID tags. These tags are commonly used in all kinds of plastic cards like access badges, bank cards, library cards, loyalty cards and so on.

RFID is everywhere. Use the easy to build RFID sniffer to find out if objects are tagged. Also many other objects may carry RFID tags without you knowing it. Books, toys, and even clothing might be tagged. Carrying tagged objects with you can reveal your identity or whereabouts to anyone equipped with the appropiate tools to read RFID tags. The RFID sniffer helps you identify which objects are tagged, and which are not.

Looks like a great workshop! And the Sniffers are available to buy from here.

Related things:

1. Workshop: Near field interactions This is a call for proposals for a workshop on......
2. RFID hacking workshop So this week Touch is running an informal workshop where......
3. Nordichi workshop papers Update The papers are available to download as PDF. A......

I am happy to see that in Article 5 they begin to address the invisible nature of RFID readers in public space:

“RFID applications can technically operate without any visible or otherwise perceivable action [...]”

They go further to recommend that there be mandated signage for RFID applications:

“Where RFID applications are implemented in public places, RFID application operators should inform individuals on the use of RFID by providing at least a clear sign, accessible by all, that signifies the presence of RFID readers. Information should include, where appropriate, that RFID tags and readers may broadcast information without an individual engaging in any active action, a reference to the policy governing the use of the RFID application and a point of contact for individuals to obtain additional information.”

While this sounds like a lot of information to get across in a sign, there may be ways of creating recognisable levels of security, various levels of private data use, and visible indications of the ways in which that data is stored or used (something along the lines of better food labelling examples). The success of this depends on creating a useful, user-oriented taxonomy of risks.

See also my work on the graphic language for RFID (paper, design brief).

Related things:

1. iPhone RFID and NFC peripherals We are beginning to see RFID and NFC peripherals beginning......
2. Rob van Kranenburg at ‘How I learned to love RFID’ On the 20th May, Rob van Kranenburg talked at How......
3. Everyware icons (visualising ubicomp situations) In December 2005 Adam Greenfield asked me to work with......

Logistics and supply chain applications are mostly out of the scope of investigation for Touch. However, the discussion covered interesting areas such as the potential of RFID to offer a more transparent supply chain, that may have an impact on the ways in which we interact with things in the future. For this, it was very useful to get a deep insight into the ‘other side of RFID’.

The form of the discussion was an informal talk with Ralf Neuhaus while observing the various testbeds for containers, palettes, conveyors and robots. Then a question and answer session with Hunika Nemeth, a software engineeer working with Enterprise Resource Planning systems.

Background

The Fraunhofer people were very honest that they are still conducting basic research in RFID technology. Their focus is on the integration of standard components that form useful supply chain applications. They are creating prototypes and products around these integrations for their clients. They aim for lean processes that are decentralised, distributed and transparent. This is inspired by MIT ideas about ‘lean production’ and Japanese thinking around management process.

In their view, logistics shouldn’‘t be seen as a discrete, closed, compartmentalised system: Everybody is part of logistics, we start to interact with these systems the minute we order something, or interact with daily life: the systems that order the food we eat, that manage the ways that cities run, that keep higher level systems such as transport running.

Are there new business models around this?

They have the intention of making an ‘internet of objects’ but they foresee huge problems when they move outside of closed systems. They predict that the true internet of things will not happen for a while.

When an RFID supply chain is being designed, negotiation between partners is a critical problem area. Clearly trust is really important between partners, but this needs to be encoded in software and hardware. What if my competitors can see what is on the shelves in my warehouse? How do we balance co-operation and competition?

They are trying to develop ‘high end and low tech’ systems, meaning that there is the use of off-the-shelf components (that do not require basic research) that used together offer new ways of solving problems.

How is an RFID system organised?

There are three levels to an RFID system:

An Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP)

An ERP is a database that can be leveraged and queried at a management level. It is typically asked questions like ‘how many goods do I have in storage?’. It can be queried about motion and velocity: how much goes in and out over certain time periods. It also links into other personnel, financial and material management systems, where staff, machines and economics can be planned. 30% of the ERP system is about relationships to suppliers and customers.

A Warehouse Management System (WMS)

This system has all of the information about the status of a warehouse, such as the movement/guidance of the vehicles, locations of palettes and items. All things (relationships, movements, contents, etc.) are historically recorded: a kind of ‘archaeological development’: so that jobs or tasks are not done twice.

The interfaces are on control panels and wireless handheld terminals as well as visualisations on large screens that include 2D plans and images, so that people can see with a glance what is going on. The WMS is usually tailored to customer needs, and this is what Fraunhofer have developed most themselves. It’s connected to the ERP, but in some cases might be better off as a single system.

Middleware

Nobody really knows what RFID middleware is yet. It is it something that everyone needs to use, and is developed in situated contexts according to very different needs. There is a huge challenge in that all customers try to integrate their existing software landscapes into an RFID system.

RFID technologies are fundamentally different to previous barcode or signature based systems, in that they contain more detailed information as to history, ownership, value, time constraints, etc. plus the fact that we can read and write to RFID. This means that they are representational different in software. The basic affordances of the RFID needs to be represented in the two systems above.

ERP system providers are working with Fraunhofer, and designing their own middleware. At the moment these providers are integrating their middleware into their customers systems. They are unifying many different chaotic things in the middleware. Each customer is different, they all have historically grown systems.

Fraunhofer tries to make lean middleware, to accept different data streams and to get them into unifying languages. Middleware shouldn’t know what will happen with this data, it just routes data between systems. The leaner the software, the easier it is for the customer to integrate it into their legacy systems.

What is interesting about this is how layered the systems are at all levels. Objects know where they need to go, and don’t need warehouses to tell them. Systems are layered into local levels. Things get pushed to higher levels when needs arise: not central authority, but local reporting. Like blogging! Yet in all cases there seem to be exceptions, and apparently in some special cases, the transponder can go directly into the WMS or ERP and change the direction of the conveyor.

What about hardware?

At a basic level there is only the use of RFID readers and RFID transponders (tags) of many different types.

RFID readers are organised into ‘gates’. There is not yet a technology capable of scanning an entire warehouse and working out what is there.

As the ERP needs to know whether to put the objects on the plus or the minus side of the inventory, these gates cannot just read the IDs, they also need to know whether the items are going in or going out.

RFID transponders are passive and active. Again we see interesting layering of responsibility. Packages or items contain passive tags that communicate to a gate, and the gate then writes an active tag on the palette so that it knows what it contains. This overcomes some of the problems with reading passive tags over long ranges.

Within logistics there is an economic factor: if the product is high-value then it makes sense to have sensors and active tags to track things like temperature limits or shock damage. Active tags used for these purposes can be switched into passive and back again to save battery power.

In typical environments they last for about seven years, and do not have replaceable batteries! On the tag we can store 256 bits of data such as time labelling alongside sensor data. As soon as we have temperature and other measurements then it gets more complicated, particularly integrating the data into the database.

There are also interesting investigations into material handling, such as parcel sorting using distributed intelligence, and grabber technologies that can handle just about any shape of object through the use of rotating rubber bands.

How are you thinking about security?

Security has mainly been a question of whether the objects are online or offline. Fraunhofer have been developing intranets where certain permissions are given and shared between suppliers and customers, this is perhaps a more traditional question of access priveleges.

But when it comes to RFID transponders and readers, the security question is more open. There is no established rules yet about the permissions structure for transponders: who is allowed to read the transponder data? Who is allowed to write over the data? For each customer the question is different. In pharmaceuticals for instance they need very strict documentation of processes, there must be no permissions for manipulation, what is written on the contracts must be fulfilled, and transponders and readers must obey this.

Then there are material security questions, such as the kind of ‘logistics of goods that you use more than once’. There is always loss, even in closed systems. In one year a typical logistics firm will lose about 30% of their containers: they are re-appropriated for other purposes. This is experience from everyday life and must be encoded into the software systems.

What about the internet of things?

There is pressure from industry to put everything on the internet, which is difficult from both a security and management perspective. If we put a transponder on every product then we will have data-overload problems, even if we are running local servers. Future intra and internets will need to be powerful, scaleable and high-bandwidth.

Fraunhofer runs a project that asks what will happen if everything has a transponder? If we take yoghurt pots for example. We have 1000 yoghurts on one two metre high palette. Where do we put all of the transponders? The gates typically break down after 150 IDs, and it breaks down at the level of physics, not software. But should we solve this problem? Is it important? If we solve this then perhaps the middleware becomes too overweight. This is then not sellable, because the software will be too complex to integrate into legacy systems. The ERP could then be overloaded, and would require a huge management task.

At this point many of us in the room shouted out that of course it will be solved! If we look at Moore’s law, the history of technology, mobiles, laptops, wifi, etc. it all seems to work on desire.

The Fraunhofer people partially agreed, but re-iterated that there is a problem with physics, not software. At a certain point hundreds of tags pulsing is indistinguishable from background radiation.

What about printed electronics?

At the moment it’s not even possible to get a prototype of printed RFIDs from the research labs, so it hasn’t yet been possible for them to test out the technology. Maybe in 2 or 3 years printed tags will reach the power levels that the silicon/metal/soldered labels currently in use.

There is still the need to develop the right polymers for use in the printing, at the moment the base-material in many of the polymers is not activated by UHF radiation, making it useless in current reader systems. And then even if we have the polymer transponder: there are still huge infrastructural developments to make it work. Until the right material technology is found we can use the experience that we gain with non-printed tags.

In order to reach the internet of things Fraunhofer wants to try to integrate tags in packaging. When people talk about RFID they often refer to the 3 cent goal for the tag, but if we look at the whole picture there are also other printing, moving and ‘sticking’ costs which all cost time money. This is why printed polymer technologies are promising. This is interesting both for putting on ‘yoghurt’ items and for integrating into packaging.

Is RFID designed to remove people from the process?

At this point there was discussion around real industry intentions, are they just removing checkout and warehouse workers. Is it about efficiency or removing people?

The response from Fraunhofer was that perhaps we are removing some ‘slave jobs’: the jobs are being transferred into IT and integration work. Fraunhofer stated that they probably cannot be addressed at the institute, that the problems were too complex.

What about embedding privacy at the hardware level?

Rob Van Kranenburg is adamant that privacy can also be a unique selling point: look at the IBM clipped tag, customers and users are less critical once they have control over it. If privacy had been considered and integrated from the very beginning, then it would be now much easier to sell RFID. Very many people are critiquing RFID now, from science fiction to art, politics, activism.

In the next three years privacy will be in the centre of international attention, and even technical RFID research should engage with this.

The response from Fraunhofer was non-committal about this, it seems as if they had not fully considered the privacy issue at a hardware or software level. Overall they are not yet considering the technology at the level of culture or society, instead focusing on fundamental hardware and software problems. This seemed like somewhat of an oversight, and it could be something that they factor into their research, at least at a high level.

Thanks to Susanne Ackers and Francis Hunger for the excellent realtime translation.

Related things:

1. RFID as material in design Here I am presenting at Recalling RFID (photo by Anne......
2. Rob van Kranenburg at ‘How I learned to love RFID’ On the 20th May, Rob van Kranenburg talked at How......
3. Bruce Sterling at ‘How I learned to love RFID’ On the 20th May, Bruce Sterling talked at How I......

This is a short summary of a huge presentation on RFID issues, that covered many valuable topics including local activism, EU policy on ubiquitous computing, participatory culture and distributed computing. Rob seems to be someone that thinks many times faster than he talks, and has so many valuable things to say, that it’s very difficult to succinctly summarise his presentation.

Rob van Kranenburg lecture at HMKV, Dortmund.

Background

Few people talk about genetically modified foods anymore, genetic modification is now something that is talked about in fashion circles as a creative technology. The field has taken about 10 years to get to the point where the discussion is no longer about ethics but about fashion.

In the case of RFID, we are perhaps at the beginning of this process: RFID has become Smart Cards, Near Field Communication, M2M, etc. There is a huge re-branding effort going on, and there is little debate about using Smart Cards for public transport for instance.

We are dealing not just with technology, protocols or standards: but a context: a deadlock between technology and the environment. From the technology of the pen onwards there has been tension about externalising what should be internal. Distributing information to the environment implies that we trust the environment. But people have a deep, deep mistrust of the environment. It is also very hard to come to terms with something that has a 100% memory, we are all highly analogue.

In an experiment to probe this mistrust The Watch out team was welcomed to a small town in Netherlands: to watch out for everyday things. The enthusiasm with which they were welcomed was scary, see this quote from the above link:

“The idea of this performance like intervention was to draw feedback of the kind that would get the joke, that would be aimed at the experienced top down disciplining process going on. What happened instead was far more interesting but also far more disturbing. Whenever they were approached with a question like what kind of organization are you from, they’d reply: the government. We are the Watch Out Team, a new government sponsored initiative. At the market where they dished out watch out umbrella stickers to grateful umbrella holders I overheard a daughter telling her mother: “They should have done this much sooner!””

RFID and the EU

“I will not see the liberty of citizens and their fundamental rights being compromised”
– Viviane Reding

The EU sees RFID as a key technology that will shape the age of the Ubiquitous Network Society. RFID tags will be nodes in most future ubiquitous IT systems, and the glue that binds ubiquitous computing together.

Behind this vision, they claim a strong social concern. Can this intention be upheld when we are in the midst of a ‘war on terror’ and RFID is a perfect candidate for tracking and control?

But overall the EU seems to be doing a pretty good job of scoping out the issues of RFID, and aiming towards world governance of RFID issues.

How should we deal with privacy?

It is naive to say that RFID tags do not contain information, and thus cannot be linked to individuals: that disregards the whole history of data mining. Transparency is important, individuals should certainly have access to the information that their tags carry. This view has been fuelled by the Nokia phone that reads and writes tags.

EMF leakage will also be a huge problem. One approach would be to specify zones for different kinds of sensors, how do we solve this visually? Digital territory, digital bubbles, various mediascapes, seamless technology, networked objects, etc.

We need to design for emergence: the behaviour of an agent cannot be entirely pre-programmed: we need to launch and learn. We also need better interactions and relationships, opening up space for more consumer control. Interestingly, and perhaps problematically, there is currently no competitor/predator for the ubiquitous computing model.

Changing dynamics of society

A digital network turns civilians into professional amateurs. We see a growth of informal networks operating between a formal policy level, and a idiosyncratic everyday life. As an example, the browser has drastically disrupted the dynamics of society, from house buying to local politics to personal relationships. We are seeing a revolution from below. We cannot hand over ubiquitous connectivity and expect people to stay the same.

To probe this, a scenario was created, depicting the death of the EU in 12 steps which shows that Europe is a dying dynamic. People are being more pro-active in local planning, new business models disrupting existing businesses (real estate for instance), and the localised tax system becoming increasingly irrelevant. It was particularly interesting to start to make this link between bottom-up, participatory culture and the distributed technologies like RFID.

More

Rob has just completed a report on RFID with co-authors Matt Ward and Gaynor Backhouse. It’s a great overview of RFID technology and use:

“This TechWatch report provides a brief discussion of these issues as well as a detailed examination of RFID technology, including some of the current uses within research, administration and teaching and learning. The report also includes an overview of the significance of RFID as an enabling technology towards achieving the ‘seamless’ and ‘calm’ vision of ubiquitous computing, the role of the Internet of Things, and plots a future trajectory for RFID development within the wider context of wireless, networked environments.”

Download the report here.

Related things:

1. Bruce Sterling at ‘How I learned to love RFID’ On the 20th May, Bruce Sterling talked at How I......
2. FoeBud: How we learned to stop RFID FoeBud are a German group of privacy activists that has......
3. The RFID photo booth At last year’s Picnic conference we created a networked Photo......

In the past they have organised the Big brother awards, and Stop RFID campaigns at high profile industry events. They have gathered momentum in public opinion, to the extent that many German retailers and manufacturers have had to change their policy on RFID usage.

The FoeBud data privatizer can read, write and copy RFID tags.

They have probed the issue of privacy with such actions as printing personal information on personalised t-shirts to understand why there is a general lack of knowledge about the valuable data that people willingly give up. How do people feel about walking around with their marital status, passport numbers, age, address etc. in full public view. This is somewhat related to the experimental project called Loome by Livework about personal information and value.

They have also created a set of scenarios (in German) that probe the potential misuses and problems with RFID and tagging of things. As a design exercise these are really creative and interesting. They have also apparently had a large effect on public opinion of RFID.

Detecting radiation from the Nokia 3220 NFC phone with FoeBud’s bracelet.

In one large intervention they invited Katherine Albrecht to visit the Metro future store. The Metro group is exploring advanced uses of RFID on the customer side of the supply chain. They are using RFID enabled DVD covers that act as physical tokens for movie trailers on an in-store screen. On the surface this seems like an intuitive example of interaction design, but customers must also use their RFID enabled customer card to verify that they are 16 years or older in order to view the movie. This leads to concerns that the store is tracking the viewing habits of their customers. This is not the most pressing privacy concern, but what is problematic is the way in which the tracking process was invisible, the Metro group tried to hide the fact that they had RFID in the customer cards and were secretive about the technology involved in the process. Clearly this is not the way to roll out a new user-centred technology.

They have also explored the upcoming use of RFID in the World Cup. In this case the organisers are using customers passport numbers to verify them: and embedding RFID into the paper tickets. What is interesting here is that it is very difficult to find out why they are using RFID, it seems that it’s a large scale technology trial that is overly invasive, without any user-benefits.

The FoeBud tagfinder.

During the workshop we created two electronic prototypes: an RFID reader detector and a tag detector. Both products are sold by FoeBud on their website. These are extremely interesting products: well made and useful. In the same way as NFC in mobile phones starts to offer end-users some control over RFID, their products start to give us an awareness of the emerging readers, writers and tags embedded in the environment and in objects.

Bruce Sterling solders surface mount components for an RFID ‘Tagfinder’

These products seem like the first signs of an emerging market for tools that allow greater user-awareness of RFID. It would be useful to explore how we might embed such technology in other everyday products, or make more commonplace objects for detecting, reading, writing, copying and perhaps jamming.

An RFID reader detecting badge, soon to be available.

Overall it’s great to meet people that have a lot of fun doing the work that they do, they seem to get an enormous sense of satisfaction out of the triumphs they have over large industry. Although I disagreed with their presentation of RFID as being uniformly invasive, it was great to see a group being so pro-active in offering ways for people to visualise and protect their own privacy.

You can buy some of their ‘privacy enhancing’ products at their online shop, look particularly for their RFID products.

Related things:

1. Rob van Kranenburg at ‘How I learned to love RFID’ On the 20th May, Rob van Kranenburg talked at How......
2. Bruce Sterling at ‘How I learned to love RFID’ On the 20th May, Bruce Sterling talked at How I......
3. RFID, logistics and material flow On the final day of How I learned to love......