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?

Related things:

1. Bowl: Token-based media for children In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in......
2. iPhone RFID and NFC peripherals We are beginning to see RFID and NFC peripherals beginning......
3. Skål: playing with media Skål (Norwegian for bowl) is a product that has emerged......

(I’m a big fan of dotted or dashed lines, it’s a great visual trick for representing hidden things. Glad to see that Mike is taking up this language, we should develop it further!)

Here’s the description of the talk in full, the slides are available from slideshare and at Mike’s weblog:

Things have long had identifying marks, from silversmiths’ hallmarks to barcodes, but mating machine-readable identification with pervasive networking greatly increases the value of the marks.

For example, when a machine-readable identification method such as an RFID or a high-density visual code is combined with the wireless networking of a mobile phone, a new way of interacting with everyday objects is created. Once you have the capability uniquely identify anything immediately, you can attach meta information to it. Any meta-information. How much is this worth on eBay? Which of my friends has one? Will this go with my Mom’s china? Will it make me sick if I eat it? Was it made by children?

I call this digital representation as accessed through a unique ID, an object’s “information shadow” and I now see them attached to just about everything. Beyond getting meta information, however, lies an even more powerful concept: changing the physical object to a service, for which the thing you’re looking at is but a single instantiation of that agreement. It’s already happened to media, and to car-shared cars and shared bicycles in urban areas.

When this happens, the objects have to change at a fundamental level. They have to be designed differently and they have to be described and discussed differently. The “owner’s” relationship to the object changes. The very idea of ownership changes. The solid object grows a dotted line that is filled-in as-needed, when-needed, and with the features that are needed. This is not the same thing as renting or co-ownership, its anytime/anywhere nature-enabled by the underlying technology makes these new service objects fundamentally new.

Many recent products point in this direction, where objects such as the Amazon Kindle are useless without the service contract, where a Nabaztag/tag is an empty shell waiting for connection to a network full of personal information and social connections, and where NFC phones and RFID peripherals are just the touchpoints between the online and the offline.

Related things:

1. Everyware icons (visualising ubicomp situations) In December 2005 Adam Greenfield asked me to work with......

He covers a lot of ground, including approaches to sustainability, artist use of RFID and proposed interventions, many of the themes from Shaping Things. When he lays out the potential for misuse, the use of RFID for tracking cocaine supply chains for instance, he manages to reverse our pre-conceptions in a very useful way. Some of these statements are deliberately provocative, and they usefully challenge many of the commonly circulated ‘black and white’ opinions about RFID.

This is an outline of the talk that is edited from a rough transcript. It’s impossible to properly capture Bruce’s words that pour out in a stream of tangible utterances, so any errors are probably mine.

Four ideas of sustainability

The talk started with perhaps an incomplete list of designers approaches to sustainability:

1. Collapse
In this scenario we end up in the wreckage of the unsustainable. This is the grim meat hook future that many think we’ll end up in.

2. Make less stuff
In this scenario we have people that want ‘a good design solution to every problem’: permanent tyres, housing, etc. and no more planned obsolescence. A utopia that never changes. In this case the Amish may have done it, but no child ever agrees to their parents version of reality.

3. Biological or biomemetic materials
In this scenario we use only biological or biomemetic materials: only materials that can be recycled or grown. But many believe that we can’t survive without our current heavy industries. This is an interesting approach but may be many decades away.

4. A sustainable internet of things
In this scenario (that Bruce is proposing) we use RFID and green technologies to enhance our current material world. We have a chance to make a whole bunch of really fresh mistakes!

About RFID

RFID is currently being imposed from on high by DOD and Walmart. The ‘RFID industry’ rarely alludes to the larger picture: rfidjournal for instance sees RFID as a glorified barcode in the supply chain. But what about the Colombian use of RFID to track cocaine: there’s your supply chain!

Books and references

Ambient findability Morville. Searching the physical world: looking for a library application to go out and catalogue the planet
Everyware Greenfield. Ubicomp is about the middleware: what is the browser of the ubicomp world? What should you do with ubicomp: what enhances peoples lives, what enhances dignity?
RFID Applications and Security Garfinkel & Rosenberg
Manifesto for Networked objects Bleecker
Shaping things Sterling
Calm, peripheral technology Weiser

What are the important elements of the internet of things?

Primary attributes

The lowest common denominator of the internet of things is a chip with a unique identity. Basically a file with a tag that is findable.

Local positioning systems: located, and histories of location.

Search engines: we’ve got to be able to find objects

Recyclability: have to do something about the end of the supply chain: a bit of economic value in junk. Some have negative economic value.

Secondary attributes

Virtual models of objects: the computer model is the first description of the physical thing. Immaterial instantiations of a material thing: 3D computer models at the start of the supply chain. At the end of the supply chain the practice of the object is still available: the history of the object is still available beyond it’s physical form.

Rapid prototyping of objects: fabjects. Solid plastic and metal objects from virtual models are now possible.

The future of RFID?

We could have an RFID boom and bust. Once we have printable RFID ink, sprayable tags made from organic semiconductors without silicon, this thing is going to be huge, and we cannot police ink!

Ubicomp will not actually be about ‘smart’ objects: not about ubiquitous, intelligent computing but about ubiqitous tagging: the dumbest, cheapest, walmart fodder: it’s about the everyday. Not about getting your fridge to talk to your cooker. There more of it there is in the landfill the more it needs tags. This is the war of the landfill!

What is the job at hand?

There is some overlap between the ‘web 2.0’ social phenomenon and internet of things (IOT), this is the most exciting time on the net since the invention of the browser. IOT is perhaps web 5.0…

The Web 2.0 meme map from Tim O’reilly helped the idea of web 2.0 to pass into general parlance, it became a web nexus of social practices. Overall it was very ambiguous, not disambiguating, and described more of an attitude than a technology.

We need an Internet of Things meme map: The IOT theory object, we need great THEORY ENGINEERING: What are the champions, heroes, ideas, corporate strategic bullshit in this space. We need to include ideas of small objects loosely joined: geolocation, storage, bandwidth, information architecture, interaction design, participation, reality augmentation, standardisation, customer self service, user positioning, etc.

The Internet of Things cannot grow from anything other than the internet itself: created with linked ideas: linked objects will form and thrive on the internet: the objects will come from the exact technical substructure that created web 2.0. RFID has reached the level of popular mechanics, and people looking at the map should feel like they could take it all home and whip some together.

RFID for artists

Artists have a seven year window of opportunity. RFID at the moment is basically magic: the classic force of technology art. This might be a more interesting immediate use of RFID than the classic bohemian kick-back of protest: I’ve got RFIDs too. Until people get used to it.

Artists should use the term ‘Arphid’: to distinguish practice from the haze of millions of blogs and RFID as barcodes in searches. This would help to define and establish an alternative community or practice.

Interesting arphid artists / people

Meghan Trainor: With Hidden Numbers
Mary Hodder: itags
Ulla-Maaria Mutanen
Semacode
Yellow Arrow
xbox Blogjects
Urban Eyes
Arphield recordings: tracking oyster cards
Katherine Albrecht

The issue of privacy

Of course corporations are tracking and tagging: Google is tracking and tagging everything you search and mail. Amazon tracks and tags: look at the ‘page you made’! Every argument made against RFID now was made more eloquently against computers in the ‘60s.

Verichip is trying to push the contradicions: releasing implantable chips for immigrants. These are ‘Warholian’ stunts, ‘Yes Men’ style interventions.

Ubicomp is extremely potent. There is a lot of interest in geo-locative stuff at the same time: lots of journalists working in the same space. ‘Sometime it’s steam-engine time’.

Questions

Is it possible to tell that something is authentic just through an RFID tag?

There will be intense effort to break RFID. It is the ideal hacker technology. With such limited physical means it’s very hard to stop hacking and vandalism. The IOT has every internet problem, plus a million more. Because they are THINGS! Crashing will be a whole lot worse. A large surreptitious tracking community may emerge with the intention to take down and crash the system: it’s possible. There are a million ways to hack an arphid, plenty of opportunities to wreck the technology.

Is the Achilles heel of this technology the hackability?

The Achilles heel is not the technology, but the ‘spook aspect’ in public opinion: moral panic. But the more people that understand RFIDs the less it will be possible for Walmart and Darpa to use it for nefarious purposes.

Are we not heading for a world full of mental junk: managing hundreds of bleeping objects?

It’s a question of ‘cognitive loading’ how much do I have to think about this? One of the reasons that environmentalism has failed is it has too much cognitive load: the notion was that we would be mindful of our objects, and pay attention to using them thoughtfully or where they went once we had finished with them. The correct approach is to remove mindfulness from the system. Perhaps spimes could allow us to do something once and never think about it again. Want to move away from a potential obsessive compulsive thing disorder.

From a 20th Century design perspective Spimes would be really problematic: too much upfront configuration, categorisation and control. But on the web we are moving away from a ‘sort then publish’ model to a ‘publish then sort’ model. The cure then for ‘mental junk’ is twofold: a machine that gets rid of the spam, then a community that filters stuff for me. We want to do/make less with more, do more with data.

What would an effective intervention with this technology look like?

RFID is not going away, there’s very little possibility of popular resistance, because it’s being mandated by the Pentagon! A successful intervention might look more like Wikipedia: not sucking encyclopaedia Britannica dry, just a different approach.

Related things:

1. Rob van Kranenburg at ‘How I learned to love RFID’ On the 20th May, Rob van Kranenburg talked at How......
2. FoeBud: How we learned to stop RFID FoeBud are a German group of privacy activists that has......
3. RFID & the internet of things Julian Bleecker, Arie Altena and I will be participating at......