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

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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:

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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.

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The interesting bit is that this is the first appliance (that I can buy in a shop) that does things when touched with a mobile phone:

The NFC interaction is demonstrated first-hand with the newly announced NFC-enabled Nokia N9 in this Engadget video.

Nokia has been pushing NFC since 2004, but mainly towards ticketing, payment and ‘smart posters’. We’ve been pushing for more constrained, local and ad-hoc applications of NFC and it’ll be interesting to see if approach fares any better in the mass-market.

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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.

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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.

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“The iCarteTM is a Near Field Communication (NFC) / Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Reader, designed to provide NFC two-way communication, RFID read/write and contactless payment capability for the iPhone. NFC and RFID tag information can be written and read by the iCarteTM and communicated to the iPhone or to any Computer with a USB port. iCarteTM has an embedded smart-chip that can be configured as debit, credit, pre-paid and loyalty cards, for secure contactless transactions. iCarteTM can also read NFC Smart Posters, download or upload electronic coupons, tickets or receipts. iCarteTM is ideal for iPhone users who want to use their iPhones for fast and secure contactless payments, transit payments, loyalty rewards, checking balances, top-up, discovering new services from smart posters or kiosks and exchanging information with other NFC phones. Business iPhone users can use the iCarteTM for commercial applications such as asset tracking, document tracking, healthcare, security and access control.”

I’ve also heard rumours that Core RFID is about to have a reader available for the iPhone, and we’ll flag that up here as soon as we hear anything more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A glimpse behind the scenes of the Immaterials filmmaking.

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

From Paul B. via email:

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

From Dave H. via email:

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

And finally some kind words from both Fast Company:

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

And the Helsinki Design Lab 2010:

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

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Creativity contacted us for a “Behind the Work” feature where Jack Schulze goes deeper into the film:

“RFID is a complex and fairly abstract technology to grasp. We have to be careful in how we communicate with it. There are many leaps of imagination and understanding required to grasp it and hold a useful model of how it works and what is happening, let alone see how it maps usefully and elegantly into the world around us. The familiarity of the chain reaction form, means the audience quickly grasps that the normal kinetic transfer of force in the sequence is replaced by invisible forces that work very closely together. Like invisible digital breaths between objects. Because the form was familiar, our hope was the concept of nearness without touching would be clearly understood.”

Shots Magazine asked us to write about new design futures with rfid chips. Here we went a bit further into our film production process in general:

“There has been constant refinement of the production techniques not only to convey designed objects and their surroundings evocatively, but also the invisible layers of interchange and interaction that are increasingly both digital and physical. It turns out that contemporary cinematic techniques such as motion tracking, match moving and the integration of video with 3D motion graphics are ideal tools for visualising, prototyping and communicating about ubiquitous technology.”

And—in a twist that I find particularly satisfying—the UK newspaper Metro wrote about the film, calling it a ‘fun glimpse at a future where you control machines by waving your mobile at them, and everything goes ‘beep’ as you walk by.’

Since Metro is distributed mainly on public transport, it’s lovely to think of their 1.3 million readers all clutching their Oyster cards while reading about the film.

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The hype and doom predictions around RFID and NFC have been fun to watch, but we’re happy to be working with a technology that is now mature and cheap enough to be useful. (We disagree with ReadWriteWeb that it is fear of RFID that is potentially killing Violet, more like a lack of compelling user-experience).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The console includes versions of Tag, multiple Quiz games, Hide and Seek and Charades. The base-station connects to the internet for uploading scores and downloading content.

The movie on their home page demonstrates some of the simple game mechanics.

It seems that many of the games are about measurement, tracking and timing of otherwise person-to-person negotiated activities. In this way the product becomes more about tagging people and measuring their activity, particuarly when combined with the wristband attached to the body rather than tagged objects.

This might sound insignificant, but the difference between tagged objects and tagged people is quite pertinent, particularly as this is intended as a playful, learning environment for children. The kinds of learnings that are achieved through a digital system that tracks you rather than the objects you manipulate could be very different.

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

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This is a simple ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ design like the earliest NFC models. Nokia has a history of basing its NFC devices on existing models (see the 5140 from 2004, the 3220 from 2005, and 6131 from 2007). The 6212 looks like it is based on the 3120 classic (announced in February 2008) with the addition of an NFC module and a slightly simplified physical design. Compared with the most recent NFC phone, the 6131, the 6212 is slightly smaller and lighter with a smaller display at the same resolution. More notes on the design details below.

The demo

This interview with Jeremy Belostock—Nokia’s NFC Sales & Marketing Director—has a number of cutaways that show some of the new NFC features in action.

There is a discussion about the path towards the mass market: whether to focus on user acceptance or building infrastructural ‘ecosystems’. NFC is discussed as being immediately suitable for developed markets where there is infrastructure already in place (such as RFID ticketing and credit card systems such as Oyster and Visa Wave). Although emerging markets are interesting, there is a particular emphasises on Western Europe and Asia in NFC transport and payment, because of the immediate benefits in these areas. The interview ends with a brief (and rather odd) discussion of the environmental benefits of NFC. I’m not sure replacing a stack of plastic cards with a mobile phone is necessarily an improvement towards sustainability (most of my credit and debit cards outlast my mobile phones by a factor of 2 or 3).

Interaction design notes

Nokia is attempting to focus on features such as sharing content through touch-interactions and using tags as a way of controlling phone functions. Nokia seems to call these emerging interactions “tapping and sharing”. In the demo we see:

• Tag access to the system functions: we see a tag setting an alarm
• Tag access to files on the system: we see loading and playing of music files

• Peer to peer exchange of content: we see the ‘sharing’ of files

  The specifications also note that it’s possible to “share business cards, bookmarks, calendar notes, images, profiles, and more” so there is clearly a deeper integration between the Series 40 system and the NFC functions here than with earlier devices (we called for this in 2005 when we had the first look at the 3220). What is not shown is the before/after interactions that are required to set up these sharing actions. How do I set up the transfer? What happens if we simply touch phones together? What are the default events? Where and how are these actions phrased within the menu system? Without seeing these we cannot yet assess the quality of these new NFC interactions.

  

  Touch-based interactions are super-simple, orders of magnitude less button clicks and less security hassles than a technology like Bluetooth. This simplicity stems from the physical proximity required when interacting with tiny RFID fields. The demo shows NFC pairing between two devices working in various physical ways: two phones are tapped side to side, face to face and face to back. Previously these interactions were imagined to work back to back but since RFID works through electromagnetic induction, which creates a field that encompasses both sides of the antenna, other physical gestures are possible.

  

  When the NFC chip is given enough power and when the interaction involves two readers rather than a reader powering a passive tag, phone-to-phone interactions will work in many configurations around the device. Although this seems to be a technical reality, I wonder if it makes sense to visualise and explain NFC in this way? Should there be an active point of connection on the phone that is more like a button rather than an active aura surrounding the entire phone? There is an interesting study to be created here about the user’s mental models formed by these subtly different interaction types. More on touch-interaction affordances later.

  This launch is not just about the NFC phone, but points towards a range of NFC appliances: “pairing with a Bluetooth NFC-enabled device, like the new NFC variant of the Nokia BH-210 headset, happens with just one touch”.

  

  At first glance this suggests that new Nokia accessories may have embedded NFC tags, but it seems that “the Bluetooth Headset BH-210 sales package includes a pairing tag that has BH-210 address information in it. Pair the device and headset conveniently by tapping the tag with the device.” When suitable Mifare tags are available down to about 10mm in diameter, why not embed the pairing tag inside the device itself? Perhaps the fear is that pranksters could sneak up to unsuspecting bluetooth-headset-wearing businesspeople and pair with their devices through a sneaky swipe…

  Nonetheless, this points in some interesting directions, towards interfaces and control for all sorts of consumer devices. It highlights the possibility of the mobile phone as a ubiquitous controller where it interacts with a multitude of inputs and outputs from games controllers and sensors to printers and screens, and then perhaps a whole host of other devices that require a rich interface but don’t have the physical form or price range to justify one. For more on this see our thoughts on the universal controller and this research paper by Christof Roduner.

  

  The phone is packaged with three tags, one of which is a ‘tutorial’ tag that teaches the use of NFC with on-screen tutorials. This learning mode seems to include lots of animations where phones and tags are brought into contact with each other, perhaps the least complicated part of NFC interactions. Without seeing it for ourselves its difficult to say, but the tutorials could perhaps be more useful for explaining the possibilities inherent in putting URLs, phone numbers, etc. onto tags.

  Physical design notes

  If we are expected to regularly touch our phones against grubby payment terminals, subway gates and public advertising, the surfaces and materials both on the phone and in the world must encourage this touching action. A robust and rugged shell is essential.

  From the very first mobile phones that could be operated with one hand, Nokia has traditionally been good at creating robust, over-engineered devices that play well in the messy, physical world. The challenge with NFC is to create natural, basic touch interactions through material, ergonomic or other affordances. What are the physical affordances that would encourage—- as Dourish puts it—‘interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflective manner of normal experience.’? So beyond ruggedness and a degree of scratch-proofing, what is necessary for these touch-interaction affordances?

  

  The first consideration is the placement of the reader. The above image is a quick excercise imagining where readers might be placed on various phone models. The 5140 RFID kit and the 3220 NFC shell had a ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ form that meant that the NFC reader was placed on the lower back of the device. Apparently this was to separate the various radio antennae (GSM, Bluetooth, etc.) from the RFID antenna, but all of our experiments showed that this was confusing to users. The 6131 solved this by placing the NFC reader at the top of the flip-up screen, away from the other antennae at the hinge.

  Somehow the NFC reader in the 6212 is at the top of the device. This is a very good place to have an ‘active area’, it’s outside of the natural hand-grip, and its the part of the phone that most often faces the world, encouraging intuitive pointing and selecting gestures. With this placement the phone becomes a kind of ‘wand’, that perhaps draws on the metaphor of magic in ubiquitous computing. Whatever our thoughts on magic in interaction design, there is no doubt that this gesture is culturally significant and is likely to be a useful model.

  

  More practically, the 6212 features a camera lens in roughly the same position as the reader. This combined with the perforated loudspeaker work against the idea of a robust active area. This is clearly a tradeoff, will scratches and grit getting into these delicate areas hinder touch-based interactions, and will keeping the phone pristine in general be a problem? Would a shiny iPhone ever be suitable for touch-based interactions?

  The second consideration is signs and symbols. There was a time when Nokia thought it necessary to indicate the active area of NFC phones with a visual icon, starting with two concentric rings and moving on to the ‘wireless fingerprint’:

  

  But the 6131 and 6212 have no visible indication whatsoever that they offer any sort of NFC functionality. The clear plastic film that protects the 6131 screen had a diagram of a phone-tag interaction but that of course gets quickly removed.

  My feeling is that there should be clearer markings for the NFC active areas on these phones, even if it is a change in texture, colour or material, it seems like a functional necessity until NFC is properly accepted and understood in the mass market. It’s also a particularly easy thing to do. When music phones have very clearly marked dedicated buttons devoted to specific media functions, why shouldn’t a significant functional and interactional surface be clearly marked on the device?

  

  A few quick sketches using some of the icons from the graphic language for touch. Whether the possibilities inherent in NFC are indicated through clear affordances or explicit symbology, this is extremely important to get right.

  Other technicalities

  The 6212 has a slightly better higher resolution camera than the 6131. It also offers a second video camera on the display side (why do they still include these, does anyone actually do video calling? Is there a secondary usage that I’m missing, YouTube?)

  The press-release and demos emphasise the new level of integration between NFC and Bluetooth but the specifications don’t list Bluetooth 2.1. Of course it supports the standard contactless communication API (JSR 257) so that 3rd parties like us can develop applications for NFC. We hope that it gives us more leeway than the implementation on the 6131. Includes MIDP 2.1 and a few other Java APIs.

  The phone also supports the Nokia Software Market for application discovery and this might be very useful for distributing consumer-focused NFC applications.

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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2008/05/thoughts-on-nokias-nfc-developments/feed 16 http://www.nearfield.org/2008/03/more-press-for-sniff http://www.nearfield.org/2008/03/more-press-for-sniff#comments Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:35:53 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2008/03/more-press-for-sniff Dagens Næringsliv Norway’s daily business newspaper covered two of the Unge Talenter winners last Friday, including Sniff.

  

  

  Some quotes:

  Vinner Design for alle: Kosehunden og spillet Sniff av Sara Johansson

  “FOLSOM HUND. -Jeg tenkte litt på å lage en rotte, men da jeg tok kontakt med Tamtbartun kompetansesenter for blinde for feedback i designprosessen, mente de at det var lurt at det var en hund, siden mange av barna skal forholde seg til en hund senere i livet, sier industridesigner Sara Johansson (34), som fullførte studiene på Arkitekthøgskolen i Oslo forrige semester.”

  “Hun har utviklet spillet Sniff, et kosedyr som identifiserer radiofrekvenser. Når Sniff snuser på en gjenstand lager den forskjellige lyder og vibrasjoner. Med denne teknologien har Johansson designet både et Memory-spill og en lek der man kan gjemme klistremerker rundt om i huset. Hunden kan identifisere ulike type stemminger som glede og sinne, takket være RFID-teknologi.”

  “Nå jobber hun med å utvikle prototypen, både for å gjøre hunden mer robust og for å få inn en Mp3-spiller som kan inneholde flere lyder. Foreløpig er det mest blipp og blopp. -Jeg synes ikke det finnes noe verre enn dyr og leker som snakker. Jeg vil heller forsøke å abstrahere noen lyder som passer til sniffs karakter. Finne en stemme som kan gi ham liv, sier designeren.”

  “Johansson, som kommer fra Umeå i Sverige, begynte å sy forskjellige type kosedyr da hun var 10-12 år. Det er med andre ord ikke helt tilfeldig at bullterrieren Sniffs pels består av typisk syttitallsvelur og cordfløyelprikker.

  – Det var også viktig for meg at ikke kosedyret skulle se ut som en teknologisk leke, sier hun. Da Blindesenteret hjalp Johansson med å finne testpersoner for spillet, var de blinde og svaksynte barnas foreldre opptatt av hundens potensial for å uttrykke følelser.

  – Noen av foreldrene mente at det kan være vanskelig å snakke om følelser. De kan for eksempel ikke tollke følelser i barnas blikk. Jeg tror Sniffl kan være et nyttig redskap i så måte. Barna var mest opptatt av å kjenne på selve hunden. Det var viktig at den hadde fire ben, hale og snute. Jeg fikk lov til å gjøre noe noe med det, sier Johansson.

  – Hva betyr det for deg å vinne Unge Talenter?

  – Det er noe av det fineste du kan vinne her i Norge, men det betyr først og fremst at noen har tro på prosjektet. Nå har jeg en god grunn til å fortsette arbeidet. Jeg håper det kan bli enklere å få spillet i produksjon, eller å skaffe en investor.”

  Other press (in Norwegian) includes Aftenposten, Østkantavisa, Dagbladet, Dinside and Norske Industridesignere NID. Press release.

  Related things:

  1. Norwegian Design Council awards Sniff Sniff has won the prize for Design for All at......
  2. Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen & Einar Sneve Martinussen nominated for the young designer award The Foundation for Design and Architecture in Norway ‘Norsk Form’......
  3. Sniff After two years of development, many awards and publications, we......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2008/03/more-press-for-sniff/feed 0 http://www.nearfield.org/2008/03/norwegian-design-council-awards-sniff http://www.nearfield.org/2008/03/norwegian-design-council-awards-sniff#comments Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:14:44 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2008/03/norwegian-design-council-awards-sniff Sniff has won the prize for Design for All at Unge Talenter 2008 (Young Talent 2008) from the Norwegian Design Council. The project is acclaimed for its inclusive design that encourages playful activity, particularly for overcoming spoken or physical barriers to communication between people of different ages and abilities. It also gets praised for its self-explanatory approach to play and its appropriate use of technology.

  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:

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  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......
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