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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We’ve compiled a short sequence of some of the design experiments and tests in audiovisual media in the Touch project. Here we show some of the ‘behind the scenes’ tests and processes where we used cinematic/video/filmmaking tools as a means to uncover potentials and constraints around an emerging technology.

In these experiments we designed and invented spaces, objects, movements and audiovisual techniques that map and visualise the interactive phenomena of RFID. Many of the visual/cinematic concepts for Nearness and Immaterials were invented by exploring and experimenting with film.

Rather than investing time in creating complex software and hardware prototypes, the interactive experience can be quickly explored inside film compositing applications. These experiments have shown us that there is great value in having tools that offer efficient prototyping of interactions at an experiential level, that don’t need to rely on complex electronics or physical design. There is also value in working within a medium that is not tied to a specific location or a unique demonstrator, and that is editable, reproducible and transmissible allowing it to be shared freely and widely amongst a research group and across the internet.

This is the subject of a forthcoming paper that we’ll flag up here as soon as it is published.

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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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It is great when a project is not just just well received, but thoroughly understood and appreciated for the underlying reasons it was made. The purpose of making the film was to introduce the ‘magic of proximity’ which is largely left out of the discourse around RFID. The film attempts to communicate the delicate and subtle aspects of a rather obscure technology, so we were pleasantly surprised by the engaged, thoughtful and broad discussions that it has initiated.

Adam Greenfield was one of the first people to pick up on the intertwined concept and aesthetics:

“What really gets me about it is the fusion of technical insight, aesthetic sense, skill in execution and sheer patience it represents. If every made thing in the world were even one-twentieth as carefully thought out as the most offhanded gesture here, we’d all of us be in inestimably better shape.”

While Lisa Smith at Core77 immediately saw the way in which the film explores RFID from a new direction:

“The video very sensitively explores the physical implications of proximity, using RFID for much more than identification.”

Moving Brands responded to the strong legacy of Fischli & Weiss and Honda Cog but saw how:

“Nearness takes the Fischli & Weiss concept further though as it explores how modern day interactive technologies (RFID) with the use of proximity detection make “touching” redundant. It’s an original modern day version of a masterpiece.”

We have always framed the film through a vivid memory of our first viewing of Der Lauf Der Dinge. But a cultural reference that emerged very quickly was Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg. The Goldberg reference in particular stuck in many discussions, where the relative merits of physical versus virtual interactions were argued out. On Boingboing some commenters disparagingly described Nearness as the “Phantom Menace of Rube Goldbergs”, while another commenter thought the electronic aspect added a contemporary twist:

“The fact that it is entitled “Nearness” and each interface is from indirect interaction elevates this from science project to art for me.”

Guybrush over at Warrenellis.com has an amusing take on RFID chain reactions that manages to take RFID paranoia to new heights:

“Would be funnier with one of the new Barclaycards: swap your card to pay for groceries, see how thieves invisibly get your number, print a cloned card which is then used to access your bank account and to transfer all your money to Russia, where mafia associates can use it right away to pay for a plasma tv on the web which is then delivered to them in a few minutes. Closing shot of smiling Putin-lookalike turning on the tv by remote control.”

There were lots of lovely links from Delicious:

“A nice way to demonstrate near-field communication without getting all swipe-to-pay-for-x” by technekai

“No surprise, but this single page has possibly the highest concentration of awesome on the internet.” by Blaine Cook

“Lovely film of glancing blows, near-misses, wielded fields, touches-without-touching” by Rod McLaren.

And Twitter:

“Now mildly obsessed by non touch thanks to the awesome twist” by macintosh

“Beautiful piece of design and thinking. Like Moustrap for the digital generation.” by TheLeith

“Quite a thought provoking movie, such a rich capture of the nearness concept” by Dries De Roeck

But we’ll leave the final word (for now) to Bruce Sterling:

“Just cut to the chase and give them the Nobel, that’s what I say.”

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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.

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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

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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.

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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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The Touch course has also just finished, there will be case studies of the student work here sometime over the summer.

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“Sniff is a toy dog that gives feedback through sounds and vibrations on tagged objects that comes close to his nose. The use can be in daily situations as well as in play, either alone, together with other kids or together with other Sniffs.”

Her project is written up as a good case study here (in Norwegian), and there is much more details about the project in Sara’s own report (PDF, in English).

Sara was working with the Playful RFID brief this spring. Her project will be documented further here alongside the other results from the course.

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At the beginning of 2007, as we started to run the Touch course, we decided to document some of the stronger patterns and themes that have emerged in the project. The themes are written as briefs in order to share them with with industry, researchers, designers, other practitioners and students. They assume a certain amount of knowledge about the technology and previous ubiquitous or tangible computing practice, and have been written with designers in mind.

The briefs range from very broad to very specific, and are not designed to cover the entire field of NFC interactions. There is no brief specifically dealing with privacy or trust for instance, which are clearly central issues for RFID. Instead, issues like privacy and trust are implicit in many of the briefs like the Graphic language for RFID and Fields and seams.

We will be publishing all of the briefs in detail and they will eventually be linked to from this post. New themes may also emerge, and we’ll publish them here. We’d be very happy for feedback and for people to take on the briefs and extend them. We’d be particularly interested in existing projects that deal with any of these areas.

A graphic language for RFID

RFID is being used for an increasing number of interactions with everyday infrastructures. How do we visualise these RFID-based interactions?

Read more…

NFC and access control

Considering the issue of access control as a whole, what kinds of interactions are needed to make access transparent and humane?

Read more…

Touch as an interaction medium

If we are using our mobile phones to interact with the physical world via NFC, what kinds of new interaction methods emerge on mobile devices?

Read more…

The universal controller

If mobile devices start to do a lot more than voice calling and text messaging should the form factor change along with the function?

Read more…

Design for all with NFC

How might NFC be used to create new interfaces that are appropriate for the widest range of users?

Read more…

RFID and the everyday

In what ways will RFID be integrated into everyday things, places and behaviour?

Read more…

Interfacing the ‘internet of things

Do NFC devices have a role to play as an interface for the internet of things?

Read more…

Touch as culture

What are the social and cultural meanings of touch, and how do they vary according to context?

Read more…

Fields and seams

How can we use the increasingly radio-saturated landscape for creative or functional purposes?

Read more…

Playful RFID

How can we use the material and interaction features of RFID to make games, toys or playful products?

Read more

Connected products

What are the opportunities for integrating services, infrastructure, community and online brands into cheap, ubiquitous objects?

Read more…

Interactions of transactions

With the nature of transactions changing as NFC phones replace cash, cards and tickets how should transactions be designed to take advantage of these opportunities?

Read more…

Local applications and services

What applications and services can be usefully tied to specific places or situations?

Read more

Alternative RFID infrastructures

How can RFID infrastructures be designed to support private, bottom-up, ad-hoc and people-to-people interactions?

Read more…

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There have been lectures from Lavrans Løvlie from LiveWork, Paal Smith-Meyer from Lego Mindstorms, Anders Hansen from Sony Ericsson, Petter Brandtzæg from Sintef, Michael Link from Opera on the Nintendo Wii, Jørn Hansen from Oslo Sporveier on RFID ticketing and Odd-Wiking Rahlff from UiO on 2D barcodes.

The students are currently working on prototypes of services, toys, applications, visuals and critical design projects related to NFC, RFID and radio. Some of their progress can be seen on the project weblogs: Katarina Kjelland, Knut-Jørgen V Rishaug, Sara Johansson, Markus Utomo, Einar Sneve Martinussen, Øyvind Østmo, André Granly, David Vågenes, Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas and Una Bjerkan Heimstad.

The course ends in June with an exhibition at AHO, so expect more details then.

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Many people have been passing through Oslo including Adam Greenfield and Bruce Sterling both giving great lectures and running a student workshop at AHO. The project has also started to work with Bengler, Schulze & Webb and Anne Galloway on various research strands.

There is a lot to write up and summarise, so I’m travelling to London for the next ten days to immerse myself in writing and design work, and to set up further workshops in specific areas.

We finally managed to fit in some design work this week, on a range of NFC products that we will prototype over the next few months.

More on this soon.

No related posts.

February

The project was kindly invited to Interaction Design Institute Ivrea by Fabio Sergio who is also doing great work in this area [pdf presentation]. Also in February the first Blogject workshop at LIFT06 was a broad exploration of networked objects, and created many interesting use-cases for early networked objects, many of which can be seen in the report.

March

In March the project was presented to students in the Adaptive Architecture & Computation course at The Bartlett in London. The students there are exploring tracking of bluetooth devices as a way of generating new architectural forms and concepts, and were interested in the use of mobile technology in urban space.

May

At the recent workshop How I learned to love RFID at Hartware in Germany, there were great discussions around RFID and it’s implications, with diverse viewpoints from media art, to industrial logistics to anti-rfid activism. For now there are photos, and there will be a write-up here soon.

At the end of May the second Blogject workshop at EPFL is taking place. This workshop will get hands-on to design prototypes of ‘networked artifacts of the future’, using existing objects as a starting point.

June

At the beginning of June there will be a showcase of our early experiments with touch-based interactions at Reboot in Copenhagen. Reboot promises to be a fascinating event, a convergence of design, technology and social practitioners and researchers.

In the middle of June Aula will be holding an event called Movement in Helsinki. The theme refers to the ‘overlapping of the physical and the virtual, and the social movement-like nature of new technologies’. The speakers are from a diverse background but most interestingly from design and social software.

September

There are interesting workshops at both Mobile HCI and Ubicomp in September. The first discusses approaches that use a mobile device for interactions with objects in the real world. The second looks at ‘applications and scenarios for early adoption of augmented objects’, specifically looking at interaction design for augmented objects. We are submitting papers to both.

October

We are planning a workshop at Nordichi 2006 in October, where we will explore concepts and physical forms for touchable networked objects in collaboration with Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker. More on this soon.

For those interested in the intentions of the project, have a look at this recent interview about Touch.

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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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Touch is interested in developing user-centred applications and services: assessing ways in which the technology might be used in everyday life in useful, fun and non-invasive ways. The growing integration of RFID readers in mobile phones enables simple interactions between phones and physical objects with a ‘swipe’ or ‘touch’. In Japan there are around 10 million people paying for tickets and other services with ‘wallet phones’ and near field communication. These applications in ticketing and retail are the first areas to emerge as mass-market uses.

An initial exploratory period will develop specific research questions and application areas. Touch will look closely at social practices around mobile use and RFID. How does the increasing digitalisation of physical objects affect identity, culture, play, and issues of social transformation. Are there areas of everyday physical activity that would benefit from network intervention? Are there networked, online activities that could be supported by interactions with the physical?

The project will develop a number of practical investigations of the relationship between the digital and the physical. In particular looking at shifts in advertising or marketing, retail activity, public and civic services, gaming or play, and issues around personal, social and communicative uses. Through the design of digital and physical artefacts, applications and prototypes, the project will build a body of knowledge around near field interactions.

The PhD will work on specific themes within the project. This will require self-initiated research, as well as collaborative development with other designers, an anthropologist, software developers, the mobile industry and user groups. Applicants should have a design background and be able to demonstrate knowledge of social, tangible or mobile interaction design. Applicants are encouraged to submit a diversity of themes and approaches within these areas.

The fellowship is provided by Institute of Design, AHO, Oslo, Norway, and has a duration of 3 years, starting date early to mid 2006. The yearly salary amounts to NOK 292.000.

Applications are now closed.

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Nokia 3220 NFC Shell

NFC is interesting for us because it enables connections between mobile phones and real-world objects: bridging the gap between the real and the virtual. The project offers the possibility of radically simplifying existing applications and providing a new spectrum of local services through the mobile phone. At AHO we have multiple disciplines, including interaction design, industrial design, urbanism and architecture; a group with significant interest in the areas possibilities of NFC technology.

About Touch

The Touch project aims to strengthen research and industry in Norway into user-centred applications of emerging NFC technology. It aims to understand the way people will use tangible, digital objects as part of their daily lives, and to discover the information systems underlying those interactions.

Touch is not a pure technology project; NFC platforms and specifications are already well developed and documented. Instead we are taking a user-centred approach, and focusing on the social motivations behind the use of technology. With this process it will hopefully uncover unexpected uses, and significant untapped markets for the technology.

NFC offers the possibility to radically simplify existing applications and providing entirely new services. This has significant potential to drive innovation in areas such as retail, marketing, and public services, and offers strong potential for emergent social and communicative uses.

The project covers three distinct areas

1. Social and communication. This is a promising area for significant, emergent, potentially unexpected uses, particularly in areas of personal information management, location-based services and social networking.
2. Public services. This area looks at the ways that new touch-based interactions could access public data or services in safe, democratic, appropriate and efficient ways.
3. Retail, services and marketing. Exploring changes to the way we interact with retail services, looking at (but not limited to) payment for both products and services, automated check-out, product information, extended services and relationships, recycling, and tracking products through their cradle to cradle life-cycle.

Touch has a number of formal and informal partnerships within industry and academia. Among these partnerships are Telenor, Opera, Sintef, University of Oslo and the Interactive Institute Göteborg.

Simple scenarios

As part of the advocacy and initial research process we have developed some very simple scenarios to explain the potential of NFC interactions. (Drawings by Lars Haaland).

Transfer and exchange

Tags as gifts

Simple wayfinding

About Timo Arnall

Timo Arnall is a lecturer at AHO, an interaction designer and researcher currently researching in the fields of NFC and RFID. Timo’s research areas include tangible and social interaction, marking in public space, spatial annotation and locative media.

In May 2004 Timo ran a workshop on locative media and public space at the AHO conference Spark: Design and Locality. He has since presented his research at ISEA 2004 in Helsinki, Art+Communication in Riga, at the Interactive institute in Göteborg, and at CHI2005 in Portland, Oregon. In December 2004 he was involved in a seminar on Social Software at Intermedia in Oslo.

Timo Arnall’s paper ’Marking in public space’ was accepted to the Engaging the City workshop at CHI 2005, organised by Intel (US), University of Surrey (UK), Portland State University (US) and Carnegie Mellon University (US). At this workshop Timo looked at ideas for encouraging civic engagement in public space, and gave other researchers an insight into ongoing research into the marking of public space.

About Interaction Design at AHO

The Interaction Design department at AHO has a goal of building up a group comprising lecturers, researchers and PHD students, in which we excel at creative, relevant interactive work that communicates to end users. To do this, we are creating an atmosphere of creativity and collaboration where we collaborate across disciplines and encourage working in multi-disciplinary teams. The department has a focus on (amongst other subjects) physical computing, social computing, experience- and strategic-design.

The department works closely with Norwegian Industry. A recent success story in collaboration involved ASONO incorporating student work in the final design. In addition, students have been working on the Snøhetta modular house, and some of their ideas are likely to be put into production. The ERA World Congress for Design has commissioned two pieces of work from AHO students. One is an installation and one is a monument to mark the event.

Interaction Design is an area showing explosive growth. All of our students have successfully managed to find jobs, and several students have experienced strong competition to get hold of them.

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