It is great when a project is not just just well received, but thoroughly understood and appreciated for the underlying reasons it was made. The purpose of making the film was to introduce the ‘magic of proximity’ which is largely left out of the discourse around RFID. The film attempts to communicate the delicate and subtle aspects of a rather obscure technology, so we were pleasantly surprised by the engaged, thoughtful and broad discussions that it has initiated.

Adam Greenfield was one of the first people to pick up on the intertwined concept and aesthetics:

“What really gets me about it is the fusion of technical insight, aesthetic sense, skill in execution and sheer patience it represents. If every made thing in the world were even one-twentieth as carefully thought out as the most offhanded gesture here, we’d all of us be in inestimably better shape.”

While Lisa Smith at Core77 immediately saw the way in which the film explores RFID from a new direction:

“The video very sensitively explores the physical implications of proximity, using RFID for much more than identification.”

Moving Brands responded to the strong legacy of Fischli & Weiss and Honda Cog but saw how:

“Nearness takes the Fischli & Weiss concept further though as it explores how modern day interactive technologies (RFID) with the use of proximity detection make “touching” redundant. It’s an original modern day version of a masterpiece.”

We have always framed the film through a vivid memory of our first viewing of Der Lauf Der Dinge. But a cultural reference that emerged very quickly was Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg. The Goldberg reference in particular stuck in many discussions, where the relative merits of physical versus virtual interactions were argued out. On Boingboing some commenters disparagingly described Nearness as the “Phantom Menace of Rube Goldbergs”, while another commenter thought the electronic aspect added a contemporary twist:

“The fact that it is entitled “Nearness” and each interface is from indirect interaction elevates this from science project to art for me.”

Guybrush over at Warrenellis.com has an amusing take on RFID chain reactions that manages to take RFID paranoia to new heights:

“Would be funnier with one of the new Barclaycards: swap your card to pay for groceries, see how thieves invisibly get your number, print a cloned card which is then used to access your bank account and to transfer all your money to Russia, where mafia associates can use it right away to pay for a plasma tv on the web which is then delivered to them in a few minutes. Closing shot of smiling Putin-lookalike turning on the tv by remote control.”

There were lots of lovely links from Delicious:

“A nice way to demonstrate near-field communication without getting all swipe-to-pay-for-x” by technekai

“No surprise, but this single page has possibly the highest concentration of awesome on the internet.” by Blaine Cook

“Lovely film of glancing blows, near-misses, wielded fields, touches-without-touching” by Rod McLaren.

And Twitter:

“Now mildly obsessed by non touch thanks to the awesome twist” by macintosh

“Beautiful piece of design and thinking. Like Moustrap for the digital generation.” by TheLeith

“Quite a thought provoking movie, such a rich capture of the nearness concept” by Dries De Roeck

But we’ll leave the final word (for now) to Bruce Sterling:

“Just cut to the chase and give them the Nobel, that’s what I say.”

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The ikTag is an extremely simple interface for social networks, both on and offline. Mediamatic developed the ikTag for people to do nice stuff with their online profile without sitting behind your computer. The ikTag is an innovative and cultural application of RFID technology.

Also, in the past few days, O’Reilly has launched an RFID system at Etech:

That’s why we are giving all of the attendees at ETech RFID tags that can be linked to their conference profiles. Activating your RFID tag and linking it to your profile will be completely opt-in, but with these tags you can interact with several projects we’ll have at the conference.

As we discovered with the Picnic photo booth, there are lots of interesting opportunities to be discovered when a physical tag is linked to a social network…

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A Poken is a connected business card, when you meet people you want to connect to, you touch their ‘poken’ and get added to their Open Social network.

Just tap your poken to theirs, activating Poken’s wireless technology. The poken “high-four” lets you share your online social network profile(s) instantly. At any computer with web access the poken hand pulls out of the body, revealing a USB connector. Insert the poken USB connector into the computer’s USB port to upload your new contacts to the Poken web database.

They have a few interactions that are intended to deal with different social situations, I wonder how they came up with these ‘modes’:

“If you simply touch your poken to another poken without having pressed the palm button, your “Normal” identity is shared. ‘Discreet’ mode requires a double- click of the poken palm. This mode allows you to poken without actually sharing your profile, if you have selected the ‘Ghost’ option or to share a limited profile of your choosing. To be as discreet as possible there is no visible lighting effect. You can, however, check for a little green light that will afterwards flash inside the poken by removing the poken body from the hand. A lengthy press (more than two seconds) of the palm button of your poken will make the hand glow different colors for ten (10) seconds.”

So they are attempting to create culture around the product, of ‘high fours’, ‘light shows’ and discreet ‘ghosting’. But behaviours in social life are so sensitive and context dependent—particularly around the exchange of contact information—it’s hard to see how they will be able to influence them through software or hardware. On the other hand, these limited behaviours might just take off like Tamagotchi or Lighter.

While it’s good that they are taking an open approach to managing contacts (using Open Social and an API), where they can plug into almost any other social network platform, the physical interface presents much harder problems. There is an enormous effort to reach the critical point at which cluster effects can take place, and many users will feel the full brunt of the ‘first fax machine’ problem.

We are currently spoilt by abundant network connectivity, compressing time and space. But the traditional limitations of the physical world such as scarcity and distance affect all physically situated interfaces, and design approaches that deal with these limitations will increasingly be needed.

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One of the aims of the Mediamatic workshop was to experiment with ubiquitous technology for social and playful purposes. Every participant in Picnic was issued with an RFID tag that could be used by various installations around the conference venue. As a controlled setting this was a very interesting environment to experiment with RFID technology in use, and in particular to experiment with physical interactions in online social networks.

One of the participants on the first day. Photo by Anne Helmond.

The photo booth team consisted of Timo Arnall, Anne Helmond, Jorn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen. We wanted to create something that brought people together both in a physical activity and in an online social network. Initially we described it like this:

A photo booth that encourages people to take photos of themselves with others. By waving multiple tags over a touchpoint inside the booth, a photo is taken, a connection is made and pictures are added to the Picnic website.

We built the booth in three days, with many design iterations, and ended up with a large white box with a picnic-themed grassy interior that allowed up to about 10 people to have their photo taken at once.

Inside there was an RFID reader, a camera and a screen that would show what was being recorded, as well as showing a countdown for picture taking. Outside a large LCD screen showed recent and random pictures from the booth, encouraging participation. By touching your tag to a reader outside, you could see pictures of yourself.

Over the course of the three-day event the photo-booth was extremely popular and resulted in literally thousands of pictures and social connections.

Physical interactions manipulate the network

Every attendee’s RFID tag contained a link to their profile within the Picnic network site (their tags were registered and connected at the registration desk). This profile contained their name and any descriptions or tags that they had decided to include, we also had access to their contact details and payment information if we had chosen to do so. When the photo booth detected their tag, it could look them up in the Picnic social network, get their details and manipulate their profiles.

Left: Inside the booth. Right: Tags on the RFID touchpoint.

The booth attracted curious attendees, who looked at the photos playing on the outside. When they walked into the booth, and touched their tag to a ‘touchpoint’ their name would appear on a screen and a countdown would start. If others then touched their tags within this countdown they would also have their names appear in the photo. People who had their photo taken together would have a connection created between them on the Picnic network site.

On the web the Picnic network showed the pictures from the booth with the names of all the people that had been photographed together. People’s profiles included the photos of them and their connections. This was a different and new way of exploring the network and seeing the connections that had been made.

Photos from the booth were also uploaded to Flickr and tagged with the people’s first name (see for example all the photos taken of me and the tag cloud of the names and IDs of people who used the booth most).

This realtime Flickr stream appeared on the outside of the booth, where people stood around watching their recent creations, as well as seeing random photos where they or their friends appeared.

Physical proximity

With around two thousand tagged attendees this was a great opportunity to design for and study the application of social networks in physical space, and to better understand the relationship between physical interactions and the resulting effects in online spaces. The way in which the photo booth took elements of a digital network and made it manipulable in a physical context was very interesting to us.

We were interested in the details of the interactions between people, their tags and readers. In practice RFID is a relatively mundane technology, it doesn’t flash or beep or cry out for attention when it’s encased in plastic packaging. It is also very limited technically: the read-ranges are typically so low that we require people to ‘touch’ their tags to the readers.

Without explicit instruction or ‘attractor loops’ the booth worked through certain ‘gestures’ that were socially learned; people observed and then participated. The activity of ‘touching’ actually brought people—who perhaps had only recently met—into very close physical proximity. This strangely intimate setting, combined with the activity of negotiating, framing and posing for a group photo provided a space for new connections to be formed, and existing relationships to be reinforced.

The attendees also became familiar with RFID interactions over time, and once they had experienced one kind of interaction, wanted to try more. Other RFID-based installations, in particular the free-beer-machine was a very low-threshold introduction to RFID interaction with a very high-degree of motivation… This benefited us all by lowering the threshold to participation.

Playing with controversial technology

With a single touch of a tag to a reader, we could have initiated many different actions within the Picnic network site; we had access to names, profiles, contact information including addresses and phone numbers and even perhaps payment information. But we chose fairly simple events: displaying people’s first name, updating the relationships between people, and relating photos to profiles.

However given that we had access to this data, we were very surprised that nobody questioned the fact that the booth knew their name. We expected there to be questions of privacy and security and perhaps some resentment towards the ease with which the booth accessed data. It seemed that the gesture and the resulting feedback was so natural that there didn’t seem to be anything scary about a name appearing on screen, in fact people assumed that somehow the RFID tag contained the information, the network wasn’t seen as part of the interaction. This shows how readily emerging technologies can be accepted without question, and how their implications remain obscure under the surface of an engaging experience.

Low-threshold interactions with social media

Conferences are a relatively constrained setting where there is an impetus to connect with people and social networks that expand, shift and change over the course of a few days. Social networks in this controlled space have many different qualities to the ones experienced in everyday life. So installations such as the photo booth must be designed to play with the existing social fabric and activities of the conference environment.

There are many different ways in which technology can intervene in these settings, something Clay Shirky has called situated software. Whereas most online social networks require users to explicitly state relationships to each other such as ‘friend’, ‘contact’ or ‘follower’ with these physically-based interactions the connection is much more implicit and less formal.

A simple physical gesture—touching some tags together at the same time—is all it takes to create a connection. Browsing through the Picnic network after having used the booth for a few days was an entirely new experience; the network was more random and chaotic, but because it had emerged from physical, social proximity there is a richer texture to the network than one built through explicit selection. Growing an online social network through these kinds of low-threshold physical interactions seems like a interesting pattern that we might see more of in the future.

More photos from the booth and of the booth.

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Bowl is a project by Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen and Timo Arnall and investigated two design briefs: RFID and the everyday and Playful RFID. The concept, technicalities, process and results are described in detail in the paper at the end of this post, read on for a summary.

Simple access to media

The Bowl is a simple media player that can be used by people of all ages, particularly young children. A bowl sits on the living room table and range of physical objects can be placed within it. When an object is placed in the bowl related media is played back on the TV.

For example a physical Moomin character like Little My will play a sequence from the Moomin cartoon where she is featured. Through this simple interface, Bowl encourages new, engaging and playful activities around the media experience.

Background

The project draws on a long history of research into ‘tangible interfaces’ for media (some examples). But it is distinct from other projects in that it applies the idea of tangible manipulation of media to the very specific context of the home. It also disregards complex editing, browsing or manipulation of media in favour of providing simple interactions that work for young children.

There are very few products which allow access to media in a way that can be used by children younger than four. Although it might be argued that children under four shouldn’t have access to media, there is no doubt that they do and in fact there is an enormous amount of content designed exclusively for this audience (see Teletubbies).

Existing media interfaces are overly complex, allow access to unsuitable content and encourage extended viewing habits. By creating a space for physical and playful engagement where screen-media is only a part of the experience, the Bowl intends to create constrained but self-directed activities that are not only passive, lean-back experiences.

Testing

Einar’s daughter, Anna – who features as our main user in this project – was 2 years old at the start of the project. We saw an opportunity here to design, evaluate and iterate an interface aimed particularly at children of that age.

The prototype has been developed through an extensive user-driven process where the product was tested and developed in-situ. The interface has been refined and the content re-edited as we learnt about problems and opportunities through a series of tests.

A standard platform was built very early in the project, from which many bowls and tokens could be evaluated. It was important for this set-up to be lightweight and dynamic so that important interaction parameters could be tweaked and altered. The early prototype was constructed in wood from a simple 2×4 with existing bowls as the interface. This allowed rapid modifications to the setup and although not aesthetically pleasing, didn’t disrupt the home environment or introduce any explicit new ‘gadget’ to the living room.

Through the development of the physical prototype the technical possibilities and challenges were rapidly discovered. Interestingly many technical limitations inherent in the RFID system that we used for prototyping turned out to be non-issues. Some of these limitations actually turned out to be opportunities in the interaction design of the interface. See the paper below for more details.

Conclusions

This study has been rich in both the details of physical interactions and conceptual possibilities. We have come a long way towards realising a suitable home media interface for children, using everyday objects and containers. The interaction is simple, natural and works seamlessly as a media experience. The interface can be immediately satisfying without guidance or instruction. As a simple interface rather than a ‘gadget’, it doesn’t depend on changing media infrastructures, standards or platforms. We have designed it as a ‘front-end’ that can be adapted to any kind of home-media system, thus its requirements are likely to stay the same over the lifetime of it’s use and even be adaptable to future technologies.

The initial planning involved five user-test tasks but due to the richness of the process, we ended up conducting about ten discrete topics and twenty different tests. We regard this sustained, rich access to relevant people and contexts and essential part of developing new interactive products.

One of our goals was to examine the effects of the changing role of digital technology and content in the home as a result of new interfaces. The long-term testing has offered us an insight into this changing television-based experience. We see increasing connection between playing and watching and more physical activity around media usage.

Further work

Beyond this testing process we are in the process of building the next prototype. It has been designed as a durable product that fits within the home context by using standard components and high quality materials.

Here the project is being extended to look at how it might be turned into a product. How it might be ‘shelf explanatory’ and how it might relate to existing media products and services.

More about Bowl

Einar has posted more pictures and information about his design case study presentation at DUX 07 including an annotated PDF of his very accessible presentation.

This paper contains a full account of the background, the design process, the testing, technicalities and a discussion of the results. The paper from ‘Designing For User Experiences’ in the Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences are available at the ACM digital library. You can also download the full PDF here.

See more student work from the Touch project.

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