On Thursday 20th October Kjetil Nordby will defend his thesis ‘Between the Tag and the Screen: Redesigning Short-Range RFID as Design Material’ for the PhD degree at AHO. The title of the trial lecture is “Opportunities and challenges for SR-RFID as design material”.

Industrial and interaction designers are increasingly faced with new computational technologies that may be used as materials in designing. Such materials are important in design practices because they offer conditions for conceptualisation and production of new designs. However, new computational technologies are often very complex and not presented with the intention of supporting design practices. In investigating SR-RFID as a design material, we are faced with two important challenges. First, the available information concerning SR-RFID in relation to industrial and interaction design is limited and often oriented toward finished solutions rather than exposing potentials for designing. Second, it is difficult to find frameworks that show how to analyse such a technology so as to present it as a material specifically oriented toward industrial and interaction design.

The trial lecture starts 10 am, Disputation starts 12.00. It will be held in the main auditorium at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design

Related things:

1. A PhD in Touch Radio Frequency IDentification is a wireless technology that is is......

Curated by Paola Antonelli the exhibition brings together diverse design projects that haven’t been highlighted before and includes numerous projects that we know and admire from around the world. From interfaces, appliances, products, installations, films, websites, games, to speculative objects, tools, visualisations, and information systems, the exhibition bravely takes on contemporary design head-on:

21st-century culture is centered on interaction: “I communicate, therefore I am” is the defining affirmation of contemporary existence, and objects and systems that were once charged only with formal elegance and functional soundness are now also expected to have personalities. Contemporary designers do not just provide function, form, and meaning, but also must draft the scripts that allow people and things to develop and improvise a dialogue.

The two projects, Immaterials and Nearness, both produced with BERG, are featured as films. Both of these projects translate obscure and often misunderstood technologies (like RFID) in a way that directly resonates with the exhibition’s intentions:

“Designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale.”

It’s good that such design research work can be placed in a culturally potent setting, and that otherwise overlooked aspects of contemporary design is exhibited to such a broad audience. In it’s related review of BERG’s work, the New York Times talks about the work in Talk to Me:

“Technology has tremendous potential to enhance our lives, if — and it is a big if — it can be “translated” into forms that make it useful, attractive and accessible. Otherwise even the most promising technological advances risk seeming so opaque and intimidating that we will not make the most of them.”

The exhibition has been reviewed by CNN, the New York Times, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal amongst others. It runs until 7 November 2011. We highly recommend it! Do check it out if you are in NYC.

More pictures from the opening event. And if you can’t make it, watch the two films here:

Related things:

1. Touch at Nordes’09 Touch has an exhibition at Nordes’09 Engaging Artifacts that is......
2. Mobile Camp NYC I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be presenting at Mobile......
3. Two Touch projects on show at DogA Two projects from Touch are on show at the Norwegian......

A quote from the jury (in Norwegian):

Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen og Einar Sneve Martinussen er designere og forskere som jobber med design, media og teknologi. De har base ved Institutt for design ved Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i Oslo, der de formgir, underviser og forsker i skjæringspunktet mellom interaktive produkter og utforskning av digital teknologi og kommunikasjon. Gjennom sine forskningsprosjekter er de blitt en betydelig stemme i forskningsmiljøet, og har vakt internasjonal oppsikt i fag- og populærtidsskrifter. Deres tilnærming til designforskning er praktisk – de designer for å forklare.

De har utviklet nye metoder for å påvise usynlige teknologiske og sosiale sammenhenger, og bruker visuelle midler til å forklare interaksjonsdesign og ny teknologi. Alt er gjort med en god sans for internettkultur og populærkultur.

Det siste store prosjektet de er involvert i er YOUrban, der design forklarer teknologiens effekter på byen. At deres siste video ‘Immaterials lightpainting WiFi’ har rundet 600 000 visninger på nettet og er omtalt i en rekke globale media, sier noe om deres påvirkningskraft.

Arnall, Knutsen og Martinussen har undervist og påvirket flere kull av interaksjonsdesignere til å tenke forbi skjermen, og til å ta i bruk elektronikk og kode som materialer.

Alongside Arnall, Knutsen and Martinussen the nominees are Batlak og Selvig and Yokoland. The award will be given on the 7th September.

Related things:

1. Norwegian Design Council awards Sniff Sniff has won the prize for Design for All at......
2. More press for Sniff Dagens Næringsliv Norway’s daily business newspaper covered two of the......

In the recent “Conversation with Eric Schmidt” with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010, there is a good deal of discussion about the use of NFC in mobile devices. Right at the start of this video there is a demo of as-yet-unannounced Google device with an NFC ‘secure element’ chip, that interacts with a physical Google ‘placemark’.

While this demonstration is basic, and doesn’t actually go much further than what we are already used to with GPS and wifi positioning, it is quite exciting that a platform like Android might open up an open platform for physical-world interaction. I’d really like to see the possibility of actually implementing commercial apps and services that are more about our interaction and engagement with the physical world rather than the screen.

Related things:

1. Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that......
2. NFC in action A video has surfaced from the recent launch of the......
3. Bluetooth 2.1 incorporating NFC The Bluetooth people are now getting on the NFC bandwaggon,......

The Touch project has a new exhibition in collaboration with the Record project at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design.

In recent years we have witnessed the growth of a new breed of consumer products and services that are a hybrid of tangible atoms and online bits. This exhibition offers a selection of products, demonstrators, videos and art objects that highlight the ways in which online social media now are becoming an important part of the functionality, design and desirability of new products and services. As products and services become increasingly digital and disappear into screens, Hybrids exemplifies some alternative strategies, where some of the magic of the social web seep out into the physical world through tangible things.

There are a number of products and services on show, including a new project by Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen:

Related things:

1. RFID and physical social networks Poken is offering a physical networking platform, with physical, RFID-based......
2. Physical hyperlinks presentation at XTech Our presentation on Physical Hyperlinks has been accepted to XTech......
3. New film: Wireless in the World 2 In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations......

In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations of radio ‘spaces’ are overlaid into urban spaces. The film has been made as a follow up to this video experiment and has been specifically designed for exhibition in HABITAR at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial.

Here is an excerpt from the exhibition description:

“Utopian and radical architects in the 1960s predicted that cities in the future would not only be made of brick and mortar, but also defined by bits and flows of information. The urban dweller would become a nomad who inhabits a space in constant flux, mutating in real time. Their vision has taken on new meaning in an age when information networks rule over many of the city’s functions, and define our experiences as much as the physical infrastructures, while mobile technologies transform our sense of time and of space.”

There are photos of the exhibition by Edgar Gonzalez here. The exhibition catalogue with essays by Anne Galloway, Usman Haque, Nicolas Nova and others is available to download here.

Related things:

1. Wireless in the world An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies......
2. Designing with film We’ve compiled a short sequence of some of the design......
3. Immaterials: light painting WiFi “The complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce......

Today has been spent setting up the exhibition space, which consists of three interactive installations that show various aspects of Touch design, innovation and research work including Anne Galloway’s Re/touch and many of the Touch design projects.

The exhibition itself is free to the public, so if you are in Oslo please drop by, and there will be more on the exhibition here next week.

Related things:

1. Tangible Interactions – summer exhibition This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions......
2. Touch at MoMA, NYC We’re very happy that two works from the Touch project......
3. Touch network building The Touch project is receiving considerable interest and over the......

Presenting Touch at a event like this is a good opportunity to provide a glimpse into ongoing design and research and a chance to communicate to a broader audience. The talk focused on design as an approach to RFID and how we can use design to understand, communicate and explore emerging technologies.

The presentation consists of condensed presentation of RFID from a technical and material perspective and goes on to describe various aspects of designing with RFID. In this presentation we use the Touch-projects Bowl and Sniff to illustrate the process of designing RFID products. The presentation is available on Slideshare.

Related things:

1. Tangible Interactions – summer exhibition This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions......
2. Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2009 We recently presented our paper Designing with RFID at the......
3. Touch network building The Touch project is receiving considerable interest and over the......

(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......

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…

Related things:

1. The RFID photo booth At last year’s Picnic conference we created a networked Photo......
2. Upcoming conferences There are two ‘Internet of Things’ workshops in the next......
3. RFID and physical social networks Poken is offering a physical networking platform, with physical, RFID-based......

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.

Related things:

1. ikTag and RFID at ETech conferences Conferences make great places for relatively large scale testing grounds......
2. Photos and connections Our photo booth is now up and running in the......
3. RFID and physical social networks Poken is offering a physical networking platform, with physical, RFID-based......

This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions is having its summer exhibition at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The students have been focusing on designing interactions with RFID technology. This years exhibition includes games, token-based media, transactions, wayshowing, a story-telling pillow, ‘twittering’ things and more.

The exhibition is a part of AHO Works.

• 9-12 June 2008 09:00-18:00 in the AHO library (map)
• Official opening 11 June 17:00
• @ Underskog
• Tangible Interactions course blog

• AHO Interaction design Flickr group

Related things:

1. Norwegian Design Council awards Sniff Sniff has won the prize for Design for All at......
2. Touchable services: local interactions In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
3. Workshop: Near field interactions This is a call for proposals for a workshop on......

Both are interactive and are running at the exhibition for you to try them out.

Sniff is also featured in the DESIGNBOKEN 2008 from the Norwegian Design Council.

Related things:

1. Norwegian Design Council awards Sniff Sniff has won the prize for Design for All at......
2. Touch at Kreative Oslo We recently had the chance to present Touch at the......
3. Tangible Interactions – summer exhibition This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions......

Previously Sniff won AHO’s prize for Design for all, and has been included as one of Dagbladet’s trends for 2008.

Here is the feedback from the jury, in Norwegian:

“Sniff er et veldig morsomt spill som inkluderer alle. Det er lett å forstå, og stiller krav til barna uten å kreve forkunnskaper eller stigmatisere. Bruk av RFID-teknologi, som sender ut et signal og skaper kommunikasjon mellom kosedyret og figurene, gjør spillet til en innovasjon på sitt område.

“Tilgang til forskjellige brikker med ulike lyder og funksjoner, gir spillet imponerende mange variasjonsmuligheter. Det fins også RFID-klistremerker, som man kan gjemme rundt i huset og lage enda en ny lek med. Sniff er rett og slett en kjempegod idé, som på en nyskapende måte tar i bruk ny og spennende teknologi.”

“Utformingen er tydelig rettet mot barn, men spillet kan utmerket godt brukes av alle mennesker i alle aldersgrupper. Det egner seg svært godt som en døråpner mellom mennesker når språkbarrierer eller fysiske begrensninger hindrer dem i å kommunisere.”

If you want to try out Sniff for yourself, the exhibition will be open from 27 March until 27 April at DogA in Oslo. The Bowl project will also be exhibited.

If you like Sniff you will be happy to hear that Sara Johansson and the Touch project are developing Sniff 2.0 that includes a revised physical design, new feedback and interactional possibilities.

Related things:

1. More press for Sniff Dagens Næringsliv Norway’s daily business newspaper covered two of the......
2. Sniff After two years of development, many awards and publications, we......
3. Sniff wins prize for ‘Design for all’ Sara Johansson’s project ‘Sniff’ has won the IT Funk prize......

The Green Touch installation at DOTT07 in Newcastle that we created with Helsinki-based Thinglink was a great success. There are a few photos of the event from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. The local newspaper Evening Chronicle wrote a story on the exhibition:

Expect a write-up of the experience soon.

Related things:

1. Framtidens mobil / near future of mobility Norsk Form, the centre for design, architecture and urban area......
2. iPhone RFID and NFC peripherals We are beginning to see RFID and NFC peripherals beginning......
3. The first NFC appliance Nokia has announced the Play 360°, a portable speaker that......

The workshop was initiated by the Digital Methods Initiative that specialises in online research methods:

“The Digital Methods Initiative is a contribution to doing research into the “natively digital”. [...] How does one do research online? What are the new objects of study, and how do they alter pre-existing methods? [...] Which digital methods innovate with and also critically display the recommender culture that is at the heart of new media information environments?”

They have developed a very extensive set of tools that can be used to scrape, crawl and otherwise interrogate online data:

”[A] set of allied tools and independent modules have been made to extend the research into the blogosphere, online newssphere, discussion lists and forums, folksonomies as well as search engine behavior. These tools include scripts to scrape web, blog, news, image and social bookmarking search engines, as well as simple analytical machines that output data sets as well as graphical visualizations.”

The workshop resulted in five visualisations:

The Substantive Composition of RFID According to Folksonomy and the Web

This project asked the question: “which issue language is significantly associated with RFID?” by looking at both del.icio.us tags and Google results.

More…

Wikipedia Anonymous Authorship Cartogram

This project simply asks: “Where do anonymous Wikipedia edits for RFID originate” by using a specialised Wikipedia edit scraper.

More…

Drama in Search Space: RFID and Arphid Queries Over Time

This project looks at the relative rankings of sites in Google over time, to find when and what issues emerged or disappeared.

More…

RFID Imagery: ‘Wet’ and ‘Dry’ Associations Compared

This project asks “Is RFID in its imagery (according to Google Images) largely associated with technonature or technoculture” by visually analysing the results of Google image searches.

More…

Issue Packaging on the Web: Style Sheets for RFID Sites by Site Type

Looking at the colors and styles on RFID-related websites and trying to cluster them. What patterns emerge?

More…

It’s fantastic to have such visual material emerging from a one-day workshop. All of these visualisations feel like they would benefit from some dynamic or interactive elements: representing some variable in time for instance, so that we could see shifts and changes in the landscape.

Related things:

1. RFID & the internet of things Julian Bleecker, Arie Altena and I will be participating at......
2. Hybrid World Lab I’m pleased to announce that we will be involved in......

Here I am presenting at Recalling RFID (photo by Anne Helmond). I talked about the ways in which Touch is exploring RFID interactions from a design perspective. In particular I looked at the physicality of RFID readers and tags and the ways in which we can visualise RFID fields and applications.

Here is my presentation from the conference, with notes on each slide.

Download presentation: RFID as material in design [pdf]

Anne has a great summary, and there are more notes on the talk here and here.

Related things:

1. RFID, logistics and material flow On the final day of How I learned to love......

Recalling RFID was exceptionally successful at creating a space where diverse viewpoints on RFID were expressed, shared and debated. The level of understanding of the issues from all sides was very high. This resulted in a measured sense of agreement, rather than opposition. I found this rather refreshing and even managed to concentrate through lengthy discussions of privacy, security, freedom and control.

Here are my raw notes from the first day conference.

Rob van Kranenberg: intro

You cannot see RFID unless you have an opinion on the ways in which smart / ubiquitous environments work. RFID is like the glue that sticks all these things together.

Today there are many diverse viewpoints: pro, against, and people attempting to re-write the map of RFID.

Christian van ‘t Hof: RFID and police investigation

RFID is digitalising public space: we use rfid in daily life, for transactions, identifying, etc. Every time we access these public everyday services there is some registering of your action: time, date, place, and in many cases, your personal details.

Leaving digital footprints on public transport (most people choose personalised cards, so your data is being linked to your actions). As soon as this data is collected, you can start to profile, pattern match, etc.: all of the stuff that is possible with data mining.

Public support for using personal travel data is very high: over 70% support using the chip card to track suspects.

Is exploring how RFID works in practice, legal issues, etc. Moving towards total internet of ubiquitous network society. Rathenau instituut: www.rathenau.nl

RFID is an enabling technology: there are many other ID technologies. And it depends how much you trust data-mining technologies: costs a lot of money, throws up a lot of results, and means that there is a lack of human resources to follow up on leads.

Melanie Rieback: Security and privacy in RFID: the RFID virus.

History: IFF systems, using radar and modulating signals to change the signals of planes.

Auto-ID labs were the first to publish papers on RFID privacy and security.
The RSA blocker tag was one of the first.
Problems: unauthorised tag reading (most tags are not secure), eavesdropping, tracking, tag cloning, denial of service (breaking tags)

RFID malware. RFID is not just a new barcode, it’s the low-end of computing!

There are three kinds of malware: exploits (buffer overflows, code injection, sequel), RFID worms, RFID viruses (getting them to replicate).

The RFID guardian is like a firewall for RFID: a tool for testing RFID deployment. A handheld device for personal RFID privacy management: portable, battery-powered, 2-way communications (can be a reader or imitate a tag, up to 16 tags)

It allows auditing of RFID usage: who is using what and when, are they tracking in the way they say? It allows us to manage keys: we can kill, enable tags, etc. It can also create access control for RFID, do we want to allow reading or writing of tags.

Stephan J. Engberg: Priway.com

Identity management: RFID is one of the largest problems for identity management. The locks on their RFID tags can lock down a tag so that it doesn’t communicate, doesn’t give up any kind of identifyable data.

Defeatism, fatalism. Is individual sovereignty doomed?
Stephan is a constructivist: making and solving things.

We cannot use physical paradigms from the 60’s for digital space.

How to design devices that don’t leak information: zeroleak™
Why are we not starting to secure RFID?
Semantic resolution: dealing with knowledge about others to determine whether transactions should take place.
What should we do when things go wrong?

About transferring control to you. Collaborative mechanisms, where we have control and interfaces for the technology.

Rafi Haladjian: Violet

Why do teddy-bears speak? To add-value to a commoditised teddy-bear.

The vision of the smart house has so many barriers: high costs, not appealing, no fun factor, complex, proprietary technologies, consumers losing control.

How do we get from the Flintstones to the Jetsons with ubiquitous computing? What’s important is in the middle. The process shapes the way things go.

Violet wants to make affordable (€20-200) objects that are one-at-a-time buying decisions. Fun and interpersonal communication are as powerful as usefulness.

Some intentions for Violet:

• Design matters
• Simple
• New image of technology
• Use open standards, explot existing contents, interoperate with existing devices
• Empower the user

• Build a community to help build the brand and make killer apps.

  An anthropomorphic rabbit that you can deal with on an emotive level. Nabaztag was interfaced only through a computer, but Nabaztag/tag offers a spontaneous, direct relationship.

  Why a rabbit? Rabbits multiply, rabbits are trojan horses (monty python), etc.

  Going beyond the rabbit:
  Ztamps: RFID tags that you can define yourself. To allow users the same control over RFID as the big guys. A collaboration between Nabaztag + Gallimard Jeunesse to make physical audiobooks.

  Mentions the interesting photographer Peter Menzel: material world taking photos of household belongings.

  Wouter Schilpzand: RFID in Japan

  The Japanese market is relatively homogenous and convenience driven, new products get lapped up, good for RFID adoption.

  It’s not just Suica: lots of loyalty cards too.

  Suica has 13 million transactions a day. It was introduced to cut costs, it was developed to improve services.

  Next step is integrating smart cards into mobile felica. 80% of new mobile phones have felica. Since 2004. More than 10 million users and 120 different handsets.

  These are mainly used for paying for things, collecting coca-cola points. Mainly used for small payments or loyalty cards.

  Felica adds something very powerful to this smart card system: the internet. It allows more information than a smart card: more services, and value added stuff.

  Children tracking service: active RFID tags that track kids. “peace of mind” and a sense of control, allows parents to have this feeling (scary). But children started sharing codes and seeing where each other are (cool).
  Ken Sakamura: driving user-applications of RFID in Japan.

  A vision is developing in Japan: that everything will be connected and there is a convergence of networks: everything will be internet based. And RFID is expected to play a major role in this vision.

  Willem Velthoven: social RFID in libraries

  The public library: all the books are tagged, everybody is tagged.
  The ‘lendomat’ scans the books, confirms the books, and prints a receipt.
  Nice interface: replacing people.
  RFID is an update to their barcode system.

  Katherine Albrecht

  The RFID industry has used the comparison to barcodes to their advantage: it seems safe if it’s just a barcode. But unlike barcodes RFID has unique IDs, which differentiates between individual items.

  

  The very contentious Hitachi mu chip does have an integrated antennae but only an extremely short read range (the one the size of a grain of sand).

  What about increased exposure to EMF and the safety of it?

  Some other RFID-like technologies: Inkode : chipless tags and conductive ink used as antennae: printed technology, EnOcean: powering devices through vibrations.

  The scariest company at the moment: Checkpoint systems: they do retail anti-theft technology which in itself is ok, but they have a service called sourcetagging: where they work with suppliers and sources to deeply embed unique RFID chips into products, inside the mouldings, the fabrics, the plastics, etc.

  Even with a short read range, the technology can be used to be invasive. If we put a ubiquitous computing network around us, then we are creating a space for surveillance and control that we may not want. No matter how much privacy or limits we put into the technology, someone will find a way to exploit it.

  All consumer use of RFID should be stopped – dead – right now, so we don’t have to try to clean up a huge ubiquitous mess.

  Bart Schermer

  Picturing the internet from a utopian or dystopian perspective can be very extreme. Argues that RFID is the same. It is easy to create dystopian scenario and more fun, but we shouldn’t create a debate based just on possible misuse or abuse.

  RFID can be used to surreptitiously gather personal data, etc. But that it is not in the interest of business to do so.

  Reasons why companies won’t surreptitiously gather data:

• They are in violation of the law: data protection directive
* Using personal data for other purposes than they have been gathered is a violation
• Surreptiously monitoring and following people is a criminal offence

• Targeted advertising without prior permission from consumers is also a violation of the data protection directive.

  Privacy is very difficult and context sensitive. Privacy is a means to maintain economic equality between consumers and companies.

  Consumers are overwhelmingly in favour of using RFID for law-enforcement: valuing convenience, price and speed over privacy (even if they say different).

  Therefore the single biggest threat to privacy is you. (Big brother awards)

  Consumers must always be made aware of how, where and when RFID is used.
  Should be made more aware of the importance of privacy

  Conclusions

• Use RFID in a responsible manner: privacy is good business sense
• Provide benefits not only to themselves but to consumers
• Provide openness and transparency about the use of RFID

• Create tools for the protection of privacy (PETs, RFID guardians, logo systems)

  Working towards a mandatory logo system for RFID in the Netherlands

  Discussion between Katherine Albrecht and Bart Schermer

  KA:
  With ubiquitous networks such as RFID it’s so difficult to find violations; what was read, by who, when, what info, etc. with who was it shared? Who has a backend connection with this card, and this ID? i.e. who knows who I am.
  The problem with ubiquitous technology is that enforcement is virtually impossible. So prevention is better than the cure.

  BS: we need more critical consumers, who can create backlashes for companies.
  People are becoming very open with their data: Facebook et al doesn’t give strong indications and people don’t realise that the data may leak from one container to another.

  KA: The technology is not inherently malevolent but some technologies invite abuse.
  When you see something like RFID you see that history is flowing towards collecting more data and more control. If that is where the money and R&D is flowing then we shouldn’t be surprised if RFID ends up in the same place.

  BS: You can’t stop technology, particularly if it has so many benefits. Technology will work out for the best: take the example of the internet. Stop the dictator rather than stop the technology that enables the dictator.

  KA: developing networks that forget. When does the forgetting occur? Negotiating the kind of databases and timings and permissions. Look at existing technologies that are problematic and look at solving them.

  More

  More notes here and here. Photos at Flickr.

  Related things:

  1. Touch at Recalling RFID I will be presenting at Recalling RFID in Amsterdam on......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/10/recalling-rfid/feed 0