Product design

Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments

On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that incorporates Near Field Communication technology. This phone is the fourth NFC-capable phone from Nokia in as many years and it is the first NFC device that supports 3G data connections.

This is a simple ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ design like the earliest NFC models. Nokia has a [...]

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 [...]

RFID and unique physical form

Lisa Smith is a Masters of Design student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago / Designed objects. I first encountered her work through pictures of her project ‘Cuteness generator’ on Flickr. This looks like a lovely project dealing with many issues through visual, physical and interactional material.
One of the key aspects of [...]

Bowl: Token-based media for children

In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in a research-driven course called Tangible interactions that investigated themes around RFID, NFC and the Touch project. This is one of the projects that emerged from the course.
Bowl is a project by Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen and Timo Arnall and investigated two design briefs: RFID [...]

Green Touch at Dott07

In collaboration with Helsinki-based development project Social Objects we have developed an installation called Green Touch. The exhibition encourage visitors to touch the design objects on display with mobile devices, in order to explore different aspects of their making, production and impact.
Green Touch builds upon Thinglink that socially connects and creates information surrounding products, [...]

‘Touch orders’ with ‘RFID dongles’

A while ago some interesting projects attached passive RFID tags to ordinary mobile phones to enable participation within RFID-based ticketing, payment or infrastructure.
I wrote about this way of retro-fitting mobile phones with RFID. Simply attaching passive RFID tags to mobile handsets allows new functions to be added without integration into the phone itself. This [...]

Playful RFID

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

RFID has the potential to enable new kinds of playful interactions in toys and consumer electronics. There are three features that make this interesting: passive RFID tags don’t require batteries, offer wireless communication and a scheme for identifying physical objects.
The lack [...]

Connected products

This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating.

RFID may begin to enable cheap – even disposable – products that have identities and connections to a network. What are the opportunities for integrating services, infrastructure, community and online brands into physical objects?
In the longer-term, how does the economics, [...]