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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lots more visualisations and ‘making of’ pictures.

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

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The article is called Depth of field: discursive design research through film written by Timo Arnall and Einar Sneve Martinussen. It is about the role of film in interaction and product design research, and the use of film in exploring and explaining emerging technologies.

In the last decade, interaction design has found itself in a rather unique position. As an interdisciplinary field, drawing upon many domains such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI), product and graphic design, informatics, art, engineering and critical practice, it has grown the potential to situate itself in a critical position between emerging technologies and culture. In particular, there are emerging modes of doing exploratory design research that result from the newfound relations between product, interaction and communications design.
In this article we discuss our design research activities that use film as a material for exploring, conceptualising and communicating with emerging technology. We analyse this through existing framings of audiovisual media in HCI, technology, and interaction design research. The central research question we address is how does audiovisual media enable new kinds of practice-based design research with emerging technology?

The relations between scientific advance and cinema are extremely close. Kirby proposes that film establishes achievability of scientific and technical discourses, and ‘cinematic depictions of future technologies demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, viability and benevolence’. Historically, film has been a central part of the communication of new technology with interfaces mediated through film or video demonstrators. From televised events showing off household robotics at the 1939 New York World Fair to the invention of modern computing paradigms such as the mouse – in Engelbart’s ‘Mother of all demos’. Products too are often initially experienced through cinematic forms, from lifestyle commercials for Sony televisions, to explanatory ‘how to’ informercials for the Apple iPhone, to user-generated ‘unboxing’ videos on YouTube. The commercial film for the Polaroid SX-70 camera, directed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1972 is a fine example from design practice of new technology explained to the masses through a product commercial, conveying technology and experience combined into one sequence.

In this research we have used graphical, audiovisual, and time-based media as a tool, a material and a communicative artefact that enables us to approach complex, obscure and often invisible emerging technologies such as RFID. We give an account of how film has played an intricate role in the design research practice, from revealing the materiality of invisible wireless technology, to exploring prototypes in real-world settings, to communicating to a wide public audience.

In the article we propose that this kind of research with technology constitutes what we could call a ‘discursive design’ approach. The films below demonstrate design research approaches to RFID where film reveals and articulates complex subjects, through multiple genres, and for multiple audiences. By approaching design research in this way we may be able to explore emerging technologies through play, invention, imitation and parody in ways that are able to reveal and translate across many socio-cultural contexts.

Exploring materiality

The first films show a research approach that explores the materiality of RFID in experimental and highly aestheticised ways. These films emerged out of probing at the technology with the visual tools of photography and animation.

RFID is a largely immaterial technology, it is literally ‘black boxed’ into packaged components, and the qualities of its invisible radio fields are badly understood. The spatial and material aspects of RFID are important for design, in order to be able to create interactions and products that take advantage of the spatial and gestural properties of the technology.

In this film we use long-exposure photographs, light painting, layering and animation. These techniques support particularly expressive modes of explanation, the visualisations occupy a ‘real’ space and are sequenced in a way that provides an immediately graspable view into the spatial qualities of RFID. The use of documentary film form allows for the visual evidence to be laid out in sequences that contextualise, reveal and explain, the film is a highly communicative package for the methods and results.

This was originally written up here and here

In this related film, we show that the readable volume of an RFID tag can be shaped by actually manipulating the size and shape of the physical antenna. This demonstrates that the fundamental technology is not static and constant, and can be shaped through design. When taken together, these films are intended to build material knowledge of RFID, but also through their form, show how designers might begin to take some control over the technical materials, for aesthetic, interactional or functional purposes.

These creative deconstructions of RFID through film techniques point towards what might call a discursive design approach. Drawing on methods from critical design that unpack and re-conceptualise the technological material, combined with narrative and communicative approaches, we may begin to challenge some of the expectations and dominant understandings of RFID.

Communicating products and prototypes

The following product-focused films show technology in context through experiential and explanatory sequences, such as the use of motion diagrams and narrative ‘vignettes’ which convey experiences of using technological products in specific contexts.

Skål (Norwegian for Bowl) explores RFID interactions in a domestic media context, where it broadens the activity of television-based media consumption towards playful, physical engagement. Here film is used to communicate a functioning product prototype, while at the same time highlighting playful and tangible perspectives on RFID in use.

In Sniff we see the potential for reframing RFID technology through explanation and experiential representation of use and activities, and not by focusing on the technology itself. Here the use of cinematic qualities such as short depth-of-field and other stylistic devices such as quick-cut montages enable jumps in time and action that strongly reinforce the playful, exploratory perspectives on the technology.

Films as discursive objects

In this last set of films we wanted to create culturally relevant objects that could communicate to a broad audience.

This iPhone RFID film was created to engage with a large online discussion around Apple’s relatively new iPhone. We wanted to question the largely screen-based modes of interaction that the iPhone encouraged, and to subtly reframe the discussion around RFID to include media, toys, play and direct manipulation of objects in the world. The film was a speculative object from which to see the possibilities for the rich, playful interaction between mobile devices and the world.

Nearness offers a particular view of RFID and proximity interaction that playfully resonates with a history of the chain reaction film genre. It is designed to reach beyond a research or design community in order to provoke discussion and to increase awareness of the technological implications. It does this by parodying an existing popular cultural form in a way that inherently embeds the quality of the technology into the narrative. Originally this film was described here and here.

The making of

These films constitute more than documentation of the design research in Touch, they were the medium in which invention and reflection occurred. Audio-visual media allowed for the creation of products, spaces, objects, gestures and environments that supported our internal and external discussion and development around RFID.

This film shows some of the experiments, processes and film techniques behind the creation of the other films in the article. It shows that these design processes work within the material of film, where the analysis and reflection emerged through the design activity of filmmaking. As well as being highly communicative, film sequences provide a space to gather and articulate a set of ideas, providing a relatively stable outcome and further motivation within the design activity.

Summary

This is a body of design research work that demonstrates the communicative qualities of film, that represent physical objects and their interactive, tangible behaviours over time. Time-based, audiovisual media can combine both explanatory and experiential and contextualising power, and this opens up for prototypes, products and processes being externalised within a practice-based design research activity. We see the potentials for a kind of practice where the emphasis of design research is on communication and participation in public discourse.

We have shown how practice-based design research has the ability to create representations and communicative artefacts, as opposed to technological development or mass production. A communicative approach to interaction design is central to this research. It embodies the idea that the communication of ideas, concepts and arguments through mediated design artefacts is essential to both creating effective interactive products, and to provoking discourse in and around technology-centric research. The form of film – that embodies both a highly reflective design activity and communicative qualities – is an ideal medium for interaction design research, where it can coalesce knowledge around practices and processes and project towards potential futures. Film allows for a degree of probing, explanation and reflexive understanding of emerging technologies, but through its communicative qualities, also opens up for participation in broad social and cultural discourses around technology.

We have shown some perspectives on the role that film can play in exploring, conceptualising and communicating about emerging technology. Film can be used for cinematic explorations and enactments that enable speculation in practice-based design research, but we have also pointed towards the use of online mediation to support public discourse around ubiquitous technologies and materials. 

Read the full article here (pdf) which is published as part of a Research by design issue which also includes articles about designing mobile social software and investigations of motion sketching from our colleagues at AHO.

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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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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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This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation. It features Timo Arnall of the Touch project and Jack Schulze of BERG.

The problem and opportunity of invisibility

RFID is still badly understood as an interactive technology. Many aspects of RFID interaction are fundamentally invisible; as users we experience two objects communicating through the ‘magic’ of radio waves. This invisibility is also key to the controversial aspects of RFID technology; once RFID antennas are hidden inside products or in environments, they can be invoked or initiated without explicit knowledge or permission. (See here for more on the invisibility of radio.)

But invisibility also offers opportunities: the lack of touch is an enormous usability and efficiency leap for many systems we interact with everyday (hence the success of Oyster, Suica and Octopus cards). But there is also the ‘magic’ of nearness one of the most compelling experiential aspects of RFID.

As designers we took this invisibility as a challenge. We needed to know more about the way that RFID technology inhabits space so that we could better understand the kinds of interactions that can be built with it and the ways it can be used effectively and playfully inside physical products.

The experiments

In order to study the readable volume around an RFID reader, we built experimental probes that would flash an LED light when they successfully read an RFID tag. The readable volume is not the same as the radio field, instead it shows the space within the field in which an RFID tag and an RFID reader will interact with each other.

One version of our probe containing a tag and LED light connected to the RFID reader that is being studied.

In a dark room, the probes were moved around the various RFID tags and readers that we wanted to study, with a camera taking long-exposure photographs of the resulting patterns of light. In this way we could build up layers by slicing through the field in different ways, creating animations that clearly reveal the spatial properties of this interaction.

These experiments were carried out in order to help us flesh out our own models of the technology, and were not intended to be scientifically accurate. So although they accurately reflect the behaviour of the technologies in the situations that we work with, there were no controlled environments or settings for generalisable technical accuracy.

Innovations ID 20

The Innovations ID 20 RFID reader has become one of the standard components in a lot of our work, it is small, robust and relatively cheap. So it has been very important for us to gain an understanding of the readable volume it produces when we embed the reader inside products such as Sniff and Skål.

Details: Innovations ID20 low-frequency EM4102 reader, 20mm circular EM4102 tag.

The resulting visualisation shows the way in which we have mapped the boundary of the readable volume, although a tag will read anywhere inside this, we have only mapped the edge for the sake of clarity. From the animation (see the video) we start to clearly see that the readable volume is made up of a strong central sphere, accompanied by a smaller lobe that surrounds the edge of the reader.

Oyster card

Mifare cards are one of the largest public applications of RFID, used in many transit systems around the world such as the Oyster and Suica cards. It has become common to have to touch in and touch out of subway stations, and many people have become accustomed to this interaction. So what does the readable volume around an Oyster card look like?

Details: Standard Mifare Oyster card, probed with a Sonmicro high-frequency reader.

With a square antenna inside the Oyster and the Sonmicro reader, we get an elongated main volume, accompanied by long skinny lobes on each edge of the card. This looks very different from the ID 20 mapping.

Orientation

The first two mappings held the reader and the tag parallel to each other, but we predicted that there would be a higher degree of complexity in the relationship if the tag and the reader moved in different orientations. The rig below was built so that we could control the angle between the reader and the tag, which moved along the surface of the table.

Details: Innovations ID20 low-frequency EM4102 reader, 50mm circular EM4102 tag.

There is clearly enormous physical complexity in this relationship, in the animation we can see the volume growing and shrinking, lobes turning into spheres, and vice-versa. But the animation gives us a very clear picture of the ‘throw’ of the reader onto a single two-dimensional plane, almost like looking at it as a torch.

Parallel and perpendicular

To show the two extremes of the relationship between orientation and the readable volume, we created two mappings, one with the tag parallel to the reader, and the other with the tag perpendicular. We mapped them using two different colours of LED: green for parallel and red for perpendicular.

Details: Innovations ID20 low-frequency EM4102 reader, 20mm circular EM4102 tag.

This image is a composite of the two mappings (see the video for animations of the two mappings separately) and it is clear that the readable volume is significantly different. When the tag is perpendicular to the reader, there is a sizeable gap in the middle of the reader where the tag will not read, creating two readable volumes side by side.

Conclusions

We have been continually challenging the ways in which RFID technology has been framed. It is incredible how often RFID is seen as a long-range ‘detector’ or how little relevant information is contained in technical data-sheets. When this information is the primary material that we are working with as designers, this is highly problematic. By doing these kind of experiments we can re-frame the technology according to our experience of it, and generate our own material knowledge.

One of the early motivations in this project was the way in which the animations really captured our tacit, embodied knowledge of the readable volume in a visual way, it was almost as if you could wave your hand through the floating green LEDs and feel them. Of course we had felt it hundreds of times in experimenting with tags and readers, but we had never seen it captured in an image, in a way that was communicable to others without having them try an interactive demonstrator. With this visual material, we can communicate about RFID in ways that we couldn’t previously.

So we hope that this work goes some way towards building better spatial and gestural models of RFID, as material for designers to build better products and to take full advantage of the various ways in which spatial proximity can be used. And with this better understanding we hope to be able to discuss and design for privacy and the ‘leakage’ of data in a more rigorous way.

Field icon

Download a PDF file of the RFID icon.

This RFID icon is based on the shape of the ‘readable volume’. Created by Timo Arnall & Jack Schulze, it is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Go ahead and use it!

Credits

The project was made by Timo Arnall and Einar Sneve Martinussen from AHO and Jack Schulze from BERG. Thanks to Jørn Knutsen for help in building the rigs.

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This video shows Skål in action. A bowl sits on the living room table and a range of physical objects are used to trigger various kinds of media. For example a physical Moomin character like Little My will play a sequence from the Moomin cartoon where she is featured. Skål can control all kinds of digital media; movie-clips, Youtube channels, Flickr photo streams, home videos and online radio.

The product has been used as a probe to build our understanding of RFID technology in playful and domestic contexts and is the result of extensive enquiry into the area. It differs from other similar products like Touchatag and Mirror by focusing specifically on direct and immediate tangible interaction with rich digital media. In some ways it is similar to the iPhone RFID prototype, and here it reflects on the interchangeability of tags and readers in media interaction: RFID systems are symmetrical and interactions can be built through manipulating the reader (the iPhone) or the objects (Skål).

Visit the Skål website for more on the bowl and how it works and Flickr for more images.

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Sniff is first and foremost a high-quality physical toy dog, that can withstand the rough and tumble of everyday play and activities. But Sniff’s interactive elements add an extra dimension of experience and engagement. Through the use of Radio Frequency IDentification technology Sniff can identify objects that he comes close to, which trigger behaviours that are expressed through sound and vibration. In the Sniff video above you can see three of Sniff’s ‘activities’ in action, in real settings.

Sniff is designed as a companion in daily situations as well as in play and games, alone or together with other children, and including one or more Sniffs. Special attention has been devoted to the design of interaction between sound and vibration. Auditory feedback is important for the sociality of the toy, and makes it possible for a larger number of people to participate in play. Haptic feedback deepens the experience, support hands-on operation and creates a special bond between user and toy.

Sniff is a robust and fully working prototype that has been through several iterations it its physical design, interaction design and technology. This has happened as part of a long evaluation process where it has been tested with many kids and adults.

Book, website and paper

The Sniff website goes further into some of the design and conceptual issues, as well as background material and references.

Sara Johansson presented some of the background and research behind Sniff at The Interaction design and children conference in June 2009. Here is the paper that goes deeper into the design issues particularly issues of abstraction in character and interaction design.

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RFID is becoming more common in mobile phones (under the term Near Field Communication or NFC) from manufacturers such as Nokia. By looking at Apple’s patents we know that the technology is being considered for the iPhone. With the iPhone SDK 3.0 external hardware accessories can be accessed by iPhone software, so third party RFID or NFC readers are also possible.

So what kinds of applications would emerge if an iPhone had an NFC reader? Here we have prototyped a simple media player, which triggers the playback of content on the touch of a tag, and created a set of augmented objects that have relationships to different kinds of audiovisual content.

A lens for media

Compared to other mobile handsets the iPhone is a particularly media-friendly device, with a large, bright screen and high quality audiovisual playback. What if this screen could act as a ‘lens’ to content that resides in the world?

In a screen-based interface content may be buried many levels deep inside an information architecture. But in a physical RFID-driven interface a simple gesture can offer quick and direct access to content. Physical objects afford tangible manipulation that screens cannot, and this is great for playful products. Our Bowl prototype showed a natural blending of media consumption and playful activitiy in children, where media viewing became less passive and a more active experience.

Durrell Bishop has discussed these ideas in a more general way, what if objects were augmented with new properties, that can be perceived through an iPhone lens?

Media objects

In this video demo, the objects have been chosen to physically or visually represent the content. There are some obvious relationships, such as the Moomin figure leading to a favourite episode of a Moomin animation. The less obvious relationships such as the wooden house leading to home videos were chosen because they just somehow felt right. In fact the exact relationship may be of secondary importance, as over time the behaviour of the physical and digital objects becomes known and transparent through exploration and repetition.

Some of the objects felt particularly satisfying. The Make Podcast object for instance—where touching the ‘geek’ plays the latest ‘Weekend project’— shows how an object can be used for exploring a dynamic stream of content.

Going further

This video prototype is basic and intended to open up for discussion and new exploration around the experience of media selection through physical objects. At the moment the interaction is a trigger, but what if the phone doesn’t just react as output but also as input to physical objects? How do we programme and manage our sets of media and applications in these objects?

Overall this points towards opportunities around the distribution of media through physical objects, it is an example of general ideas around an ‘internet of things’ or ‘spimes’ applied to the world of media. What opportunities would the distribution of RFID-embedded products open up in terms of media, gaming, services and marketing? What does this mean for the future of products?

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One of the things that social and cultural research on touch attempts to grapple with is everything people are supposed to touch and not supposed to touch—and what we actually end up touching or not touching in any given situation. When I first saw Sameer D’Costa’s photo on Flickr, it reminded me of people’s desire to touch things that we aren’t supposed to, and I wondered what that might mean in terms of research.

A year later we’re excited to share the result of that wondering: re/touch, an online resource for designers and researchers interested in touch-based interactions and relations. As the action of touch is technologically mediated by both contactless interactions in the world and through multi-touch on screen, awareness and reflection on the richness of touch is becoming increasingly important.

The re/touch website

re/touch brings together hundreds of cross-cultural examples of social norms and values involving touch—all categorised according to actions related to touching.

A collection of quotes from ethnographic accounts written between the late 1800s and the present, re/touch encourages designers and researchers to explore how touch is used by people to relate to one another and the worlds in which we live.

You can browse the quotes to create design briefs, refine interaction scenarios or otherwise inspire you to think, make or do things touch-related.

About the project

We like to think of re/touch as a work-in-progress. So far, it contains almost five hundred quotes from dozens of cultural groups around the world, and we’re working to add more. As the collection grows, we expect the action tags to change as well, so over the next couple of months you may notice different words in the tag cloud. In the end, we anticipate having over one thousand quotes and more than fifty categories of touch-related action.

The re/touch website also includes some background information on the content, and we plan to publish a paper on the research methodology and some thoughts on collaborations between anthropology and design.

If you notice any database problems or errors, please leave a comment below and we’ll look into it. We’re also still working on the web design—including making the site work well and look good on the iPhone—so we’d certainly appreciate any feedback you might have along those lines as well.

Ultimately, we hope you’ll find this resource as interesting and inspiring as we do!

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In this process we explore ways in which RFID objects can be designed to balance various physical and digital qualities. This approach has illuminated opportunities and constraints in designing augmented objects that enriches the vocabulary around RFID for industrial and interaction designers where physical and visual material are essential elements.

RFID is most commonly used by consumers for ticketing, payments and access control. The design challenges in these contexts has concentrated on infrastructures and systems as opposed to the design of physical tokens. The design of these objects is limited to simple, mostly flat enclosures; cards, key-fobs or stickers.

The bare RFID tag itself does not offer significant meaning beyond its technical appearance. In order to create meaningful relationships towards these objects, RFID tags must be embedded in an object or signified by shape or sign. The physical design of most current RFID objects are limited to the form factors of the protective encapsulation of the tag. It remains at the simple level of encapsulation and packaging that does not yet address the wide range of physical possibilities for objects in everyday contexts.

Product review

To understand the ways that RFID tags have been designed into consumer products, we conducted a product review that documents the physical aspects of RFID products from around the world. This has been a process of reflection on existing industrial and consumer products that includes a range of cards, keyfobs and tokens, the Mattel Hyperscan games console, Star Wars Commtech figures, Brio Network, Violet Ztamps and other RFID peripherals.

The product review shows many uses for RFID but limited exploration of design qualities such as materials, shape, size, construction, manufacture, build quality, affordance or metaphors. But the potential for RFID in consumer products is significant, given the inexpensive hardware of RFID systems and the opportunity to enable digital interactions with even the simplest of objects. The technical properties of RFID, such as the batteryless tags which allow for cheap and maintenance free operation are perhaps the most significant opportunity for playful products and toys.

Form experiments

The intention for this series of experiments was to gain a rich working knowledge of the kinds of design qualities that RFID objects may embody. We used an explorative design approach to the physical aspects of RFID and this involved a process of prototyping, where physical RFID objects were built and evaluated in the Bowl environment. Through a sketching process we developed an understanding of the relationships between physical forms and tags. Form-explorations were then used to visualise findings, to generate further models and to examine surface qualities.

This approach has illuminated opportunities and constraints in designing physical RFID objects that now need to be translated into patterns and models that are useful for interaction and industrial design. See the full paper below for more detail around the objects, sketches and models.

Literal associations

The interactions and gestures that have been learned over time for such objects as dolls, toys, chesspieces, microphones, shower heads, telephones, flashlights, magnifying glasses, spraycans, screwdrivers, hammers, kitchen utensils, stamps, and handles, with gestures like stirring, pointing, poking, drawing and shaking are useful starting points for imagining RFID objects and interactions.

Two very distinct kinds of gestures emerged from our workshops and experiments with the Bowl and Orooni Table interfaces. These gestures are pick and place (eg. moving a chess piece) and grab and point (eg. waving a wand).

A form vocabulary for RFID

Designing new gestures, taxonomies of form and affordances specifically for RFID will come only from designing a new set of objects, with their own elements and properties. Through the process of designing new RFID objects we uncovered properties such as direction, balance, similarity and geometry. Here we see some of the variations and abstractions around the elements of RFID form. This is the beginning of a form vocabulary for RFID including balance, similarity, direction and multi-direction.

Through introducing RFID as an element that influences the shape of physical products, we begin to design an inspirational or generative set of forms for RFID-enabled objects. They effectively communicate the physical aspects of the design findings and help us to evaluate and refine a vocabulary of forms.

Conclusions

As the internet of things emerges as an increasingly important discourse within research and consumer products, the design of the RFID things themselves needs to be addressed. Our practice-driven approach involving products, models, objects and visualisations has resulted in a vision for an ‘internet of things’ that places designed things in the centre.

A hands-on approach has allowed a re-evaluation of RFID technology through the lens of design, and communication of this in design-focused language. Through a process of making, evaluation and communicating a number of artefacts and an emergent design vocabulary is being built, that talks to the needs and concerns of interaction and industrial designers.

These making, sketching and visualisation processes may also be important for the design of emerging technologies in general. With the increasing implementation of networked and interactive technology in consumer electronics, aspects of digital and physical design will increasingly need to be addressed by both industrial and interaction designers. Physical design is a critical part of the way in which tangible technologies are experienced, and by allowing design processes to guide product development we are able to approach emerging technology in a plausible and understandable way.

Full paper

‘Designing with RFID’ is being presented at Tangible & Embedded Interaction 2009 in Cambridge UK.

The paper contains a full account of the product review, the sketching, making and modelling, and conclusions around the design for RFID objects. The paper from the Tangible and Embedded Interaction conference will be available at the ACM digital library. You can also download the full PDF here.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is a pattern for Bluetooth:

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

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

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Bowl is a project by Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen and Timo Arnall and investigated two design briefs: RFID and the everyday and Playful RFID. The concept, technicalities, process and results are described in detail in the paper at the end of this post, read on for a summary.

Simple access to media

The Bowl is a simple media player that can be used by people of all ages, particularly young children. A bowl sits on the living room table and range of physical objects can be placed within it. When an object is placed in the bowl related media is played back on the TV.

For example a physical Moomin character like Little My will play a sequence from the Moomin cartoon where she is featured. Through this simple interface, Bowl encourages new, engaging and playful activities around the media experience.

Background

The project draws on a long history of research into ‘tangible interfaces’ for media (some examples). But it is distinct from other projects in that it applies the idea of tangible manipulation of media to the very specific context of the home. It also disregards complex editing, browsing or manipulation of media in favour of providing simple interactions that work for young children.

There are very few products which allow access to media in a way that can be used by children younger than four. Although it might be argued that children under four shouldn’t have access to media, there is no doubt that they do and in fact there is an enormous amount of content designed exclusively for this audience (see Teletubbies).

Existing media interfaces are overly complex, allow access to unsuitable content and encourage extended viewing habits. By creating a space for physical and playful engagement where screen-media is only a part of the experience, the Bowl intends to create constrained but self-directed activities that are not only passive, lean-back experiences.

Testing

Einar’s daughter, Anna – who features as our main user in this project – was 2 years old at the start of the project. We saw an opportunity here to design, evaluate and iterate an interface aimed particularly at children of that age.

The prototype has been developed through an extensive user-driven process where the product was tested and developed in-situ. The interface has been refined and the content re-edited as we learnt about problems and opportunities through a series of tests.

A standard platform was built very early in the project, from which many bowls and tokens could be evaluated. It was important for this set-up to be lightweight and dynamic so that important interaction parameters could be tweaked and altered. The early prototype was constructed in wood from a simple 2×4 with existing bowls as the interface. This allowed rapid modifications to the setup and although not aesthetically pleasing, didn’t disrupt the home environment or introduce any explicit new ‘gadget’ to the living room.

Through the development of the physical prototype the technical possibilities and challenges were rapidly discovered. Interestingly many technical limitations inherent in the RFID system that we used for prototyping turned out to be non-issues. Some of these limitations actually turned out to be opportunities in the interaction design of the interface. See the paper below for more details.

Conclusions

This study has been rich in both the details of physical interactions and conceptual possibilities. We have come a long way towards realising a suitable home media interface for children, using everyday objects and containers. The interaction is simple, natural and works seamlessly as a media experience. The interface can be immediately satisfying without guidance or instruction. As a simple interface rather than a ‘gadget’, it doesn’t depend on changing media infrastructures, standards or platforms. We have designed it as a ‘front-end’ that can be adapted to any kind of home-media system, thus its requirements are likely to stay the same over the lifetime of it’s use and even be adaptable to future technologies.

The initial planning involved five user-test tasks but due to the richness of the process, we ended up conducting about ten discrete topics and twenty different tests. We regard this sustained, rich access to relevant people and contexts and essential part of developing new interactive products.

One of our goals was to examine the effects of the changing role of digital technology and content in the home as a result of new interfaces. The long-term testing has offered us an insight into this changing television-based experience. We see increasing connection between playing and watching and more physical activity around media usage.

Further work

Beyond this testing process we are in the process of building the next prototype. It has been designed as a durable product that fits within the home context by using standard components and high quality materials.

Here the project is being extended to look at how it might be turned into a product. How it might be ‘shelf explanatory’ and how it might relate to existing media products and services.

More about Bowl

Einar has posted more pictures and information about his design case study presentation at DUX 07 including an annotated PDF of his very accessible presentation.

This paper contains a full account of the background, the design process, the testing, technicalities and a discussion of the results. The paper from ‘Designing For User Experiences’ in the Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences are available at the ACM digital library. You can also download the full PDF here.

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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, and brings the interface to mobile devices. We use the NFC-enabled Nokia 6131 to connect design objects to information about the maker, the materials and processes behind the objects. Although this has been explored from a system perspective – particularly with barcodes – here we focus on the experience of using a mobile interface to access this kind of information: through images, sound and tactile feedback.

The installation consists of Finnish design products that all carry a unique story. The products are marked with Near Field Communication (NFC) tags that link to content that can be seen and heard on the mobile phone. When you touch these products with a Nokia 6131 they give you audiovisual and tactile feedback.

Come and see it demonstrated at Dott07 in Newcastle on Tuesday 23 October 2007.

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Although the Touch project is primarily about NFC and mobile phones, we recently created a table-based interface. Why have we done this? Because it’s a quick demonstrator of near-field interactions in a setup that is instantly accessible.

Our intentions are:

1. To probe the perceived relationships between physical characters and their digital counterparts. It isn’t yet clear to us what kinds of interactions people will want between physical things and digital content. This is an important question for user-centred interactions with the Internet of Things.
2. To investigate the embedding of RFID in physical objects, from an industrial design and material technology perspective.

1. To uncover opportunities for new interactions that are possible with limited-range RFID such as that found in NFC phones and contactless ticketing.

   Our demonstrator is similar in functionality to the Symbolic table by Mediamatic, but very different in content and behaviour. It also draws on long history of research and projects in table-based interfaces.

   

   The set-up involves a table with multiple RFID readers under a glass surface, physical characters (animals, birds, figures, robots and dinosaurs) and a large screen. Each character has a unique digital identity through an embedded RFID. When a character is brought into contact with a certain point, it triggers specific animated behaviours on a large screen. These behaviours are from Orooni and are typical Instant Message (IM) status like hug, angry, happy, sick, sad, etc.

   The characters have been designed by PhD student Kjetil Nordby and rapid prototyped using the selective laser sintering machines at AHO. Programming and the screen-based interface were created by Orooni.

   It has been remarkably quick to prototype; we have spent three weeks from concept to delivery and a week building the demonstrator. It is rapid prototyping in a broad sense: materials from IKEA, computation from Apple, off the shelf Phidgets and connectivity through USB. The software is also relatively simple, triggering events based on combinations of IDs and readers.

   We are rolling out the demonstrator this weekend at Forskningstorget where it will be used by hundreds (if not thousands) of people. We’ll post more about our experience soon.

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   ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/orooni-table/feed 2 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/place-and-product-based-collaborative-filtering http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/place-and-product-based-collaborative-filtering#comments Thu, 07 Sep 2006 08:42:53 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/place-and-product-based-collaborative-filtering In March 2006 fourth year interaction design students at AHO conducted intense one-week investigations into Near Field Communication in a project called Touchable services. See more student projects.

   Jon Olav Eikenes, Guilia Schneider, Bjørn Erik Haugen and Marie Wennesland created a high-level concept that proposed the idea that once we start to use our phones to pay for things, couldn’t we also start to use collaborative filtering of places and purchases?

   

   As ‘wallet phones’ become commonplace across Asia, we need to think about how these applications will be created and marketed here in Europe. What ‘added value’ will these phones offer over cash or credit cards? In this scenario, the ‘wallet phone’ not only let the user know how much they have paid, but it will recommend and offer social commentary on their choice of both products and places.

   

   Building an ‘Amazon’ for places and products is interesting because it builds upon everyday transactions and behaviour. The data that users and communities could pull out of these transactions is potentially very rich and useful. It also raises privacy concerns, but with the focus on users or communities owning and managing their own data on their personal devices, this project advocates for user-agency in such a system.

   More details and images at Jon Olav’s & Giulia’s weblogs.

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   ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/place-and-product-based-collaborative-filtering/feed 2 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/touchable-services-local-interactions http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/touchable-services-local-interactions#comments Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:44:06 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/touchable-services

   In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO conducted intense one-week investigations into Near Field Communication in a project called Touchable services. See more student projects.

   Einar Sneve Martinussen, André Borgen, Paolo Dell’elce and Henrik Marstrander looked at how to increase the cohesion of local communities. As a starting point they studied a local record shop and looked at the intricate social and economic relationships around it.

   

   They discovered an existing layer of printed, handwritten, and scrawled information in and around the record shop itself. This was a mixture of content, relying very much on local knowledge and social connections including recent arrivals, staff picks, recommendations and playlists, all of which offered rich opportunities for interaction design. They also discovered intruiging patterns and behaviours, including eccentric opening times that inspired them to look at what happened around the shop during closed periods.

   

   They prototyped a simple application that offered the ability to hear and download music, playlists, new releases, etc. by touching the phone to the shop window, and conceptualised how this might be applied in other areas of the shop.

   

   See more at Henrik’s weblog with their presentation of technologies, wider ideas and research.

   This project was very interesting in the amount of ideas that emerged from a single context. It seems that when you begin to research a specific situation, the applications and services that emerge from it are numerous. The students here conducted a kind of situation-based brainstorming that was very rich. Situation and context provide very useful limits for for idea-generation. It also showed that NFC has numerous opportunities in niche communities, in contrast to typical location based services that offer generalised applications to tourists, etc.

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