“The complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis.” – Adam Greenfield (2009)

Immaterials: light painting WiFi film by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen.

This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. A four-metre tall measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting.

This builds on a technique that was invented for the 2009 film ‘Immaterials: the Ghost in the Field’ which probed the edges of the invisible fields that surround RFID readers and tags in the world. It also began a series of investigations into what Matt Jones richly summarised as ‘Immaterials’.

While we were mapping out tiny RFID fields, we wondered what it would be like to apply the light painting process to larger-scale fields of Bluetooth, WiFi, GSM and 3G. What if we built huge light painting apparatus that could map out architectural and city-scale networks in the places and spaces they inhabited? We’re still very interested in understanding radio and wireless networks as one of the substrates essential to contemporary design practice.

We built the WiFi measuring rod, a 4-metre tall probe containing 80 lights that respond to the Received Signal Strength (RSSI) of a particular WiFi network. When we walk through architectural, urban spaces with this probe, while taking long-exposure photographs, we visualise the cross-sections, or strata, of WiFi signal strength, situated within photographic urban scenes. The cross-sections are an abstraction of WiFi signal strength, a line graph of RSSI across physical space. Although it can be used to determine actual signal strength at a given point, it is much more interesting as a way of seeing the overall pattern, the relative peaks and the troughs situated in the surrounding physical space.

After a week of walking through urban spaces holding and photographing this instrument, we have a much better sense of the qualities of WiFi in urban spaces, its random crackles, bright and dim spots, its reaction to the massing of buildings, and its broad reach through open areas. The resulting images show some of these qualities, and light painting is a brilliant medium for situating visualisations and data into physical world locations and situations.

Lots more visualisations and ‘making of’ pictures.

Einar writes more about this in an upcoming article called ‘Making material of the Networked City’ in Design Innovation for the Built Environment – Research by Design and the Renovation of Practice. There is also more detail on the project at the YOUrban weblog.

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The ‘Radiogenic’

Dunne & Raby introduce the idea of ‘Hertzian space’ in Design Noir and Hertzian Tales where they describe a landscape of electronic products creating a “new, invisible but physical environment”.

In Tunable cities they map the radio signals from domestic equipment such as babycoms and begin to examine the “role of electronic products in the aesthetic inhabitation of a rapidly dematerialising, ubiquitous and intelligent environment.” Here there are visualisations of radio fields as bright red spaces overlaid on the streets of Chiswick, London.

Although their work specifically avoided issues around making the invisible visible or visualising radio, it explored the “links between the material and the immaterial that lead to new aesthetic possibilities for life in an electromagnetic environment”.

“It might seem strange to write about radio, a long-established medium, when discussion today centres on cyberspace, virtual reality, networks, smart materials and other electronic tehcnologies. But radio, meaning part of the electromagnetic spectrum is fundamental to electronics. Objects not only “dematerialise” into software in response to minituarisation and replacement by services but literally dematerialise into radiation. All electronic products are hybrids of radiation and matter. [...] Whereas cyberspace is a metaphor that spatialises what happens in computers distributed around the world, radio space is actual and physical, even though our senses detect only a tiny part of it.”

As Matt Jones points out, they go on to coin the term “radiogenic” to describe objects that:

“function as unwitting interfaces between the abstract space of electromagnetism and the material cultures of everyday life, revealing unexpected points of contact between them.”

The Faraday chair offers a slightly more nuanced ‘visualisation’ of the boundaries of electromagnetic waves through a physical object. These works operate by visualising and making tangible the boundaries between electromagnetic phenomena, and as such, serve to highlight and create discourse around the issue of radio in emerging products and systems

Celebrating the magic of remote action

The language used to describe RFID interaction includes closeness, touch, proximity and pointing but there are few explorations of the way that RFID systems shape the gestural and tangible aspects of this interaction. Within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) there is some discussion of the spatial aspects of sensor technologies. For instance Ailisto et al (2003) discuss the ways that RFID creates contactless interactions on mobile phones: “Physical selection may be based on proximity or pointing. In the case of proximity, the selection is activated by bringing the activating device, e.g. a smart phone, close to the target device.”.

In the Touch project we have experimented with the spatial aspects of RFID interaction, developing a tacit design knowledge of the technology over time. At an early RFID hacking workshop with BERG/Schulze & Webb we experimented with playful interactions that involved “the magic of remote action” where invisible interactions triggered events in the world.

This is something we went on to explore in much more detail in the film Nearness, where the relationship between proximity and physical interaction is explored in detail.

In projects like the Graphic language for touch we have begun to find ways of representing invisible radio as a tangible design material in a functional setting.

And in her project the Bubbles of Radio (that emerged from our Fields and Seams brief) Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas imagined and visualised many fictional representations of radio fields including Bluetooth and RFID. These drawings provide a playful starting point for the discussion of our relationship to radio fields and the possibilities they open up for interaction.

Exploring and experiencing waves

The political, social and phenomenological aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum are a recurring theme within contemporary media art practice. For instance the exhibition Waves at RIXC tuned in to artistic engagements with the electro-magnetic spectrum and suggested that “artists should take control of the very principles and materiality of the ‘network waves’.”

A common practice is to translate radio space into an audible, sonic experience. In projects like ætherspace, Aeriology, Electroprobes and in many RFID projects some kind of probe that senses radio and offers audible output is held or attached to the body. The experience is then about being mobile, moving through and probing the world to discover how the lanscape and patterns of radio changes through space.

Then there are a number of visual, interactive visualisation projects such as the Wifi camera, the sightseeing telescope that reveals open wifi networks in urban space and the Free Network Visible Network project. In most cases the visual representations of the radio waves are merged and overlaid into optical or video backgrounds of the physical world, in a kind of ‘augmented reality’ genre.

In Edge Town by Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen visual approaches are used to explore the ways in which we can “design interfaces with the flows of electronic data that run through our cities so that they can be experienced as an enriching complement to other, more ‘earthly’ phenomena.” Their garden-like visualisations represent the desire to turn these invisible flows into something more tangible. In another architectural approach, Pedro Sepulveda-Sandoval proposes the demarcation of public areas that are free of mobile phone signals, using the visual language of yellow/black warning tape.

Artists Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt visualised many kinds of fields in Magnetic Movie, where the fields are seen animated as crackling, pulsing and swirling waves that uncomfortably inhabit physical spaces. This animation reinforced by a strong soundtrack that crackles in time with the motion is one of the most engaging and compelling visualisations of radio fields that we have seen.

Spatial and seamful sensors

For engineers and scientists, accurately modelling and visualising invisible radio fields, and engaging in antenna measurement is a difficult task, if not almost a ‘black art’. Using specialist robotic equipment and slowly measuring the intensity of radio signals at various points in space, it is possible to build up a three dimensional map of a radio field. There are also specialist 3D simulation tools that create models of radio fields and their interactions with physical material. These tools are mainly used to optimise the design of radio antennae, probe and problem-solve radio interference problems in electronic equipment and to assess safety issues with human exposure to radio systems.

In a paper called The spatial character of sensor technology Reeves et al (2006) describe the importance of understanding seams and spatiality in sensor-based systems. Although they concentrate on ‘torch-based’ interactions, their concerns are relevant for other sensor technologies:

“We are primarily concerned with the way in which seams between devices create a particular spatial character for the location in which they are deployed. This spatial character of seams derives from the use of spatially-embedded sensor technologies (e.g., GPS, Wifi, etc.) which are particularly prevalent in ubiquitous computing. Sensor technology plays a fundamental part in the creation of seams, and thus the character of the space in which such technology is deployed. The main issue, then, is how interactive and ubiquitous system design may appropriately address this essential spatiality.”

There is also a discussion of the ‘seamful’ character of many ubiquitous technologies.

Chalmers and Galani (2001) describes the ways in which “wireless networks have distinct physical characteristics such as a tendency to be absorbed by metal, water and other conductive materials, and a pattern of coverage that makes for a limited area of usable network connectivity.” They suggest that there may be a method or conceptual process of ‘seamful design’ that builds upon the way that “people accommodate and take advantage of seams and heterogeneity, in and through the process of interaction.”

“We critique the ‘disappearance’ mentioned by Weiser as a goal for ubicomp, and Dourish’s ‘embodied interaction’ approach to HCI, suggesting that these design ideals may be unachievable or incomplete because they underemphasise the interdependence of ‘invisible’ non-rationalising interaction and focused rationalising interaction within ongoing activity.”

There is something in this ‘seamful design’ process that may help us to understand of the way that we deal with the invisible aspects of radio-based interaction, and the ways that mental models are built out of these systems.

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(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.

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Edit The book is now available as both a free booklet and downloadable PDF.

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RFID readers are small and cheap, encapsulating them in packaging and offering a standard USB interface makes for a versatile product. What we need to see now is some applications and platforms that make these products useful and desirable.

Mir:ror

Designed as a commercially available product, similar to the Nabaztag rabbit, the Mir:ror is intended to allow physical objects to work with online services. “Violet was inspired by a simple fact: the rift between the virtual world – everything happening on the other side of your computer screen – and the physical world we live in is growing, and growing fast.”

Mir:ror

Tikitag

Tikitag is offering a small, cheap USB reader that plugs into any computer with compatible drivers “Tikitag is an Alcatel-Lucent Venture based in Antwerp, Belgium which provides a service to link the real world with the online world.”

Tikitag

Bowl

The Bowl was created as part of the Touch project and designed to be an object that wouldn’t look out of place in the living room. “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.”

Bowl

ThingM

ThingM has been developing RFID-driven interfaces in their WineM concept for a while, and they have developed a smaller, USB version finished in wood.

ThingM / WineM

Airtag

Aimed more towards the high-end, for custom installations in retail environments, “the Airtag reader is a contactless reader for point of sale (POS). Easy to install it can be plugged to any cashier system, or standalone for smart poster.”

Airtag

RFID mon amour

For the sake of completeness, this was perhaps the first commercially available plug-and-play RFID prototyping platform. “Rfid mon amour 1.0 is a kit for designers, artists and architects, which allows the realization of interactive exhibitions in a very simple manner, without any specific knowledge of programming or electronics. The kit comes with an USB based RFID player, Mac OS X compatible software, 10 RFID tags and some sample videos.”

RFID mon amour

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For the second year we are teaching an MA interaction design course called Tangible Interactions that is driven by the Touch project at AHO. Last year the course was largely successful both for students and for our research interests. It resulted in such projects as Sniff and The Bubbles of Radio.

This year we are building on our experience and creating both a better formal framework and a more focused environment for industrial, product and interaction design with RFID. The course plan can be downloaded here.

For the framework we have created a course compendium that introduces themes from ubiquitous, mobile and tangible computing as well as products and methods. Practically we have taken the RFID platforms from last year and are using them to get the students into interactive prototyping at a much earlier stage. We are also lucky enough to have Einar Sneve Martinussen working on Touch, and he is supporting much of the practical and theoretical side of the course alongside Mosse Sjaastad.

For the first four weeks the students received four short design briefs that explored both the context of mobile, ubiquitous and tangible computing and the detail of with interactions with RFID. This has created great momentum and resulted in various vocabularies, material explorations, evidence and paper prototypes amongst other things.

The students now start a major project based on the Touch design briefs, where they work through a number of iterations in research, ideation, concepting, sketching, prototyping and evaluating.

The students have weblogs again this year: Alice, Christer, Fan Fan, Gudmund, Gunnar, Ingrid, Knut, Kyrre, Marianne, Martin, Natacha and Silje.

More photos in the AHO interaction design pool at Flickr.

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In this project called “the bubbles of radio” Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas used critical, visual design as a way of exploring the perception of many kinds of electromagnetic fields. The project answered the brief Fields and Seams that asks “How can we use the increasingly radio-saturated landscape for creative or functional purposes?”

Inspired by Hertzian Tales by Dunne and Raby as well as other projects including Cell Phone Disco, Ingeborg explored many critical design products or services that would engage with the landscape of radio. Some of these early concepts can be seen on her weblog.

Using inspiration from richly illustrated books on botany, zoology and natural history, Ingeborg arrived at the concept of an encyclopeadia of radio waves that contains a selection of fictional radio ‘species’. Armed with a well researched and advanced knowledge of the use, application and technicalities of each radio technology she created fictional visualisations of the ways in which radio waves inhabit space. These are creative expressions based as much on personal creativity as on technical or scientific data like range and signal strength. Six contemporary radio technologies were visualised: Bluetooth, DMB, GSM, RFID, Wifi and Zigbee.

Like all good scientific guides, the bubbles of radio includes a visual scale:

The scale of radio is usefully measured at the scale of the device, at the scale of the body and at the scale of the building (see also Everyware on scale). The visualisations are thus placed in this context and we are left with the drawings themselves, where the shape, texture, direction and density gives us a sense of each technology. Click on the following for full size images:

These visualisations are not intended to be technically accurate or to offer actionable information. Instead they provide a playful cue to reflect and consider radio as something tangible and physical to be experienced by other senses, not just through a screen.

Just for fun, here are the latin names of each field:

Bluetooth : Nevrotis Dentus Aquarae
DMB : Spherum Elektrum Multanum
GSM : Spherum Magnea Globalum
RFID : Raptus Arphadus
Wifi : Videus Fidelus
Zigbee : Nevrotis

Ingeborg then hand-crafted a pocket field-guide from these illustrations, in a physical form that even smells like an age-old dusty guide to flora and fauna.

This book also included pattern samples; a mixture of wallpaper, fabric and textile patterns that could act as ways of identifying wirelessly augmented spaces or objects. Here is a pattern for RFID:

And here is a pattern for Bluetooth:

This project explored radio in a unique way. Ingeborg has created visual expressions of radio that are immediately accessible and beautiful. Although their usefulness is harder to define they have provided us with many opportunities to discuss and reflect on these intangible technologies.

Download a poster (PDF) of all the radio visualisations here.

See more student work from the Touch project.

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“The age of ubiquitous computing is here: a computing without computers, where information processing has diffused into everyday life, and virtually disappeared from view. What does this mean to those of us who will be encountering it? How will it transform our lives? And how will we learn to make wise decisions about something so hard to see?”

The icons were for the section headers of the book, covering the ideas that Adam felt were important around making aspects of ubiquitous computing visible. These were the suggested themes:

• Augmented-reality information is available in this location
• This object has invisible qualities (could be almost identical with the last of these four)
• Warning: sensor field
• Information processing dissolving in behavior (i see this as bits flowing through a handshake)
• Media surface

• Network dead zone

  I made a quick sketch that has some icons that are consistent with my earlier work on a graphic language for touch-based interactions. I’ve used the dashed line again to show borders and invisible geometry. Not all of these are successful, but I think they show some interesting directions for the future.

  

  Click for a larger size image. Download as pdf.

  I think in particular the Network dead zone, Warning: sensor field and this object has invisible qualities are particularly successful. The book used a set of icons inspired by these, you can see a selection on Flickr.

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  2. The EU on the visibility of RFID The EU is conducting a new online consultancy on privacy,......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/everyware-icons-visualising-ubicomp-situations/feed 2 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/06/workshop-near-field-interactions http://www.nearfield.org/2006/06/workshop-near-field-interactions#comments Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:46:57 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/06/workshop-near-field-interactions This is a call for proposals for a workshop on user-centred interactions with the internet of things at Nordichi 2006, October 14 and 15, 2006 in Oslo, Norway.

  The user-centred Internet of Things

  The so-called ‘Internet of Things’ is a vision of the future of networked things that share a record of their interactions with context, people and other objects. The evolution of networking to include objects occupying space and moving within the physical world presents an urgent design challenge for new kinds of networked social practice. The challenge for design is to overcome the current overarching emphasis on business and technology that has largely ignored practices that fall outside of operational efficiency scenarios.

  What is imminently needed is a user-centred approach to understand the physical, contextual and social relationships between people and the networked things they interact with.

  The mobile device as early enabler

  The mobile phone is likely to play a key role in the early adoption of the internet of things. Mobile devices offer ubiquitous networks and interfaces, enabling otherwise offline objects at the edges of the network. Near Field Communication (NFC) is a mobile technology that has been designed to integrate networked services into physical space and objects. NFC introduces a sense of ‘touch’, where interactions between devices are initiated by physical proximity.

  In use, the mobile phone brings with it a history of personal and social activities and contexts. It is in this evolution that we see user-agency and social motivation emerging as an interesting area within the internet of things.

  Workshop goals

  In this workshop we intend to build knowledge around the hands-on problems and opportunities of designing user-centred interactions with networked objects. Through a process of ‘making things’ we will look closely at the kinds of interactions we may want to design with networked objects, and what roles the mobile phone may play in this.

  We will focus on the design of simple, effective and innovative interactions between mobile phones and physical objects, rather than focusing on technical or network issues.

  The primary questions for the workshop are:

  • What kinds of common interactions will emerge as networked objects become everyday?
  • What role will the mobile phone have to play in these interactions?
  • How do we encourage playful, experimental and exploratory use of networked things?

    Some secondary questions are:

  • What interaction models can we bring to the internet of things? Do the fields of embodied interaction, tangible, social, ubiquitous or pervasive computing cover the required ground for designers?
  • What new kinds of social practices could emerge out of the possibilities presented by networked things? 
  • How will the physical form of everyday objects and spaces be transformed by networks and near field interactions? How this would be reflected in users’ behavior?
  • How can the design of physical objects help in overcoming potential information or interaction overload, and how does search or findability change when in a physical context?
  • How can we move beyond commonsensical features such as object activation or findability?
  • What kind of user-communities will co-opt the technology and how will they hack, adjust and re-form it for their needs?

    Workshop structure

    Each workshop day will begin with a keynote presentation from invited experts. On the first day, participants will each give a short presentation of their position paper, no longer than 5 minutes.

    Then groups of 3-4 people, each with different skills and backgrounds will then work on concepts, scenarios and prototypes. Prototypes may take the form of physical models, scenarios or enactments. We encourage the use of our wood, plastic and rapid prototyping workshops to create physical prototypes of selected concepts. We will provide workshop assistants for the creation of physical models.

    Outcomes

    The outcomes should be in a range of implementation styles allowing for a variety of outputs that speaks to a wide audience. A report will be written on the workshop, and published on the Touch project website and in other relevant channels.

    Call for participation

    The workshop is open to participants from human factors, mobile technology, social science, interaction and industrial design. Practitioners and those with industrial experience are strongly encouraged. Prior research work on embodied interaction, social and tangible computing would be particularly relevant. Participants will be selected based on their relevance to the workshop, and the overall balance of the group. Space is limited to 25 participants.

    Call for short position papers

    Application is by position paper no longer than two pages. The position paper can be visual or experimental in design and content. The themes should cover an issue that is relevant to the design of interactions with everyday objects.

    Deadline for papers is 1 August, selected participants will be notified on the 9 August. The workshop itself is October 14 and 15, 2006.

    Papers and any questions should be submitted to timo (at) elasticspace (dot) com before 1 August.

    Organisers

    Timo Arnall is a designer and researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design (AHO). Timo’s research looks at practices around ubiquitous computing in urban space. At the moment his work focuses on the personal and social use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies, looking for potential interactions with objects and city spaces through mobile devices. Previously his research looked at flyposting and stickering in public space, suggesting possible design strategies for combining physical marking and digital spatial annotation. Timo leads the research project Touch at AHO, looking at the use of mobile technology and Near Field Communication.

    Julian Bleecker is a Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication and an Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media Division, part of the USC School of Cinema-Television. Bleecker’s work focuses on emerging technology design, research and development, implementation, concept innovation, particularly in the areas of pervasive media, mobile media, social networks and entertainment. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in computer-human interaction. His doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Santa Cruz is on technology, entertainment and culture.

    Nicolas Nova is a Ph.D. student at the CRAFT (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) working on the CatchBob! project. His current research is directed towards the understanding of how people use location-awareness information when collaborating in mobile settings, with a peculiar focus on pervasive games. After an undergraduate degree in cognitive sciences, he completed a master in human-computer interaction and educational technologies at TECFA (University of Geneva, Switzerland). His work is at the crossroads of cognitive psychology/ergonomics and human-computer interaction; relying on those disciplines to gain better understanding of how people use technology such as mobile and ubiquitous computing.

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    3. Tangible Interactions – summer exhibition This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions......
    ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2006/06/workshop-near-field-interactions/feed 6 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/05/touch-project-interview http://www.nearfield.org/2006/05/touch-project-interview#comments Wed, 10 May 2006 06:46:03 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/05/touch-project-interview In December 2005 I was interviewed for Printed and Disposable Electronics News about the Touch project, the future of RFID and on the social implications of NFC. Here is the plain interview, since an online version of the magazine is not available.

    1. Explain what the ‘The Touch Project’ is and what it hopes to achieve?

    The Touch project looks at the personal and social use of RFID, driven by the growing availability of NFC enabled mobile phones. We see that there is significant potential for user-driven applications of RFID beyond logistics and supply chain management. We envision RFID not just as a replacement for barcodes, but as a technology that could affect our interactions with everyday objects. Simplistic examples of this might be personally marking the physical environment with information or enabling social contact through physical things. Touch intends to look closely at behaviour and activities in everyday life, and to build RFID applications that support, enhance or change those activities in useful, interesting or playful ways.

    2. What technology will the project make use of and what advances do you hope to make in the uses of these technologies?

    At the moment the project makes use of standard mobile phones from Nokia (the 3220 and 5140) and re-writeable MiFare RFID tags.

    

    The project doesn’t intend to advance the state of the art in technology, it hopes to develop applications and knowledge around the use of RFID. However, it is likely that the project will uncover latent needs for certain kinds of tags and technologies, for example printable tags in mass-produced stickers or washable tags in clothes. It is also clear that the project will have a voice on user-centred privacy, and this may turn into technological recommendations for the privacy and security of tags.

    3. Explain how the project will make use of RFID tags?

    The project looks at the ways in which tags can be embedded in everyday objects, spaces and environments. At the moment we are particularly looking at the personal space of the home, as a place to augment things with information.

    

    In the near future we will be looking at the ways in which RFID tags can be used as social objects: gifts, business cards, stickers or flyposting in public space.

    4. What has been the reponse of industry and the retail markets to the project? Will the new concepts developed aid advertising and marketing in the future?

    At the moment there is a lot of interest in NFC in general, we are looking at ways of presenting our research to industry: to encourage it to shift it’s focus from traditional markets (the back-end logistics side) to making useful products for users. We are not interested in aiding the marketing of RFID as a technology, but we are interested in new activities and behaviours around it, that may in turn, make it more visible, useful and acceptable to people.

    5. How will the use of NFC help drive innovation in retail, marketing and public services?

    In retail the innovations are mainly around usability improvements. The ability to connect the real world to the virtual world: the billing and banking abilities of the telecoms directly to ‘touchable’ physical objects may change the retail experience drastically. This change may uncover new markets around craft objects and short-run items outside of the mass market. In marketing there are clear applications for service discovery: touching a poster or magazine to download a URL or ringtone. In public services it should become easier to report local issues, by easily notifying services about problems in specific locations.

    6. What new markets and uses for technology have you uncovered so far during the course of the project?

    Games are an interesting area of development, we are thinking about prior examples such as “Pokemon”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokémon and NeoPets, that are based on real and virtual trading.

    

    We think that RFID based functions will have a large part to play in these socially driven gaming worlds, where physical objects can be swapped and combined in different ways to affect virtual games worlds. We think there are also markets in furniture, industrial and service design, where RFID can provide object history, re-cycling information, located instruction manuals, etc.

    7. How has ‘The Touch Project’ changed peoples attitude to technology? Do you think the use of RFID, NFC and interaction with digital services and objects will become as easy for Europeans as it is starting to be in the Far East, particularly Japan?

    This has yet to be seen. This is the first time in the popular-history of RFID that it is actually useful for the user or consumer; until now it has been an invasive, corporate technology. NFC tests by Philips in Caen, France have been very positive, and generally the people that are using the phones here have said that it feels very natural to touch tags with the phone, and to interact with information in a more tangible way.

    

    So far we have encountered some physiological and social problems with the technology: for instance it is difficult for people to walk up to posters or stickers on the street and touch them with their phone. This is not ‘normal behaviour’ in public space, at least in Scandinavia. However, given that the technology is being pushed heavily as ‘Wallet phones’ and for ticketing, we expect these kinds of interactions to become more natural and habitual over time.

    8. Are people just inherently suspicious of technology or are you finding an open mind set on these things?

    Amongst technology-literate users there is a very suspicious attitude towards the technology. The governmental (In Norway, US, etc.) use of RFID in passports and other sensitive places (like Goodyear’s tyres) is quite rightly furthering this negative attitude. We are working with a technology that has huge potential for creative mis-use and we need to be very sensitive to that.

    

    Amongst non-technology-literate users there is a very valuable process of discovery, as the phones open up new possibilities of interactions that were previously hidden. This opens up the controversial technology to discussion in places where it wouldn’t have arisen before.

    9. In the design of ‘The Touch Project’ have you looked at the way the Japanese use mobiles,digital and NFC technology?

    We are following Japanese developments closely, particularly through Shin’ichi Konomi’s great weblog. Our exploratory research begins in Tokyo and Seoul in 2006. The use of NFC compatible phones is reaching critical mass, with DoCoMo predicting “ten million “wallet phones by March 2006. The use of 2D barcodes or QR codes in magazines, advertising and signage is also great inspiration, it is ‘prior art’ for things that RFID may be applied to.

    9. What do you see as the future in these areas of technology? How will our lives change over the next 20 years in terms of interaction with technology?

    The big shift that we are seeing right now is a move towards tangible interaction: a move away from the screen and into physical objects and spaces. At the mass-market forefront of this is gaming with Sony’s EyeToy and Nintendo Revolution with gestural control.

    

    RFID and NFC should be the enablers of the move towards tangible interaction within everyday objects. There are enormous cognitive, physiological and social problems with using small screens in our rich, messy world (for example browsing a web page on a busy bus with shopping, text messaging while walking, or browsing in a restaurant). If we can move any of these functions out into the real world: answering the phone by touching a tag, or setting the profile of the phone to silent by putting it in a certain spot, then we have reduced the reliance on the already overloaded screen.

    10. Do you think that this type of technology could actually become invasive and be used as a tool to track peoples movements or spy on them?

    This depends if we are talking about NFC phones or RFID tags.

    The phones will usher in a more secure use of RFID: they can be turned on and off at will, and have more processing power for security and encryption, unlike most contactless ticket/credit cards that feature relatively weak security. One of the interesting potentials in NFC is the ability to read and write your own tags via the mobile phone, which effectively reverses some of the usual notions of RFID as a tracking and surveillance medium.

    However, once written, most tags are insecure and we can’t control the leakage of data from them. If the use of NFC leads to us adorning our friends, clothes, objects and artefacts with tags, then there are of course implications for tracking and surveillance. This needs to be taken into account as we design applications and services around it.

    

    Compared with other pervasive technologies however the implications for RFID are quite low. Of course there are already cases of Skimming of cards in wallets, hacking of Speedpass payment systems and it’s possible to ‘Relay’ a contactless credit card from someone’s pocket to a reader. But in terms of tracking people and surveillance, RFID has physical limitations on reading distance, in that beyond a few metres the signal is reduced to noise. If we compare this with an ordinary mobile phone, which most of the time knows where you are to within about 100 metres, knows what you say both in voice and text messages (with no guarantee of privacy), the privacy issues are somewhat out of proportion.

    This is also generating fascinating new counter-markets for things like RFID-proof paper and fabrics. Contactless credit cards for instance need to be sent in the post, and RFID ‘smart cards’ might be held safely within a faraday cage wallet.

    11. Obviously these types of technology are to aid in the accumulation of information or dissemination of information but could there be a potential for misuse of such information or fraud?

    On a broad level there is a clear danger of that. The thoughtless use of biometric RFID data in passports and other documents will inevitably lead to cases of digital fraud and misuse.

    On a narrower level though, I am more concerned about how RFID, GPS and other ‘tracking’ technologies may effect our close social relationships. Much is made of the typical scenario for location based services: the ability to ‘see that my friends are just around the corner’. But the management, reciprocity and deniability of this information needs to be taken into account.

    12. What social and communicative uses for this type of technology has ‘The Touch Project’ uncovered so far?

    So far we have been looking at augmenting personal objects in the home: the desk, the fridge, the doorframe, the kitchen table, etc. It has so far been possible to test out the use of everyday objects as triggers for phonecalls, SMSes and URLs. We haven’t started looking at the more social and communicative aspects of the technology yet, we are waiting for more phones to reach the market, and the general awareness of the technology to be higher before we conduct larger scale studies.

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