In the Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing the article Multi-field relations in designing for short-range RFID analyses some of the conceptual foundations for multi-field inputs with RFID enabled artifacts:

“Multi-field inputs are techniques driven by multiple short-range RFID-enabled artifacts like RFID-tags and RFID-tag readers. The technology is useful for designers so as to enable the construction of advanced interaction through the physical world. To take advantage of such opportunities, it is important to understand the technology in terms of what interactions it might offer designers. I address this issue by unwrapping and exposing elements that can be used to conceptualize multi-field interactions. This is done by way of a design driven inquiry in which design and research methods are used to investigate short-range RFID technology. My approach is informed by activity theory which I use to analyze RFID technology from a design perspective. The study presents multi-field relations as a conceptual framework that can be used to describe and generate multi-field inputs. Four types of multi-field relations are discussed: one-way, two-way, sequence and multiple relations. These are described and analyzed in context of a set of multi-field input examples. The multi-field relations expose elements that can be used to construct interactions. This is important for interaction designers, since new interactions presents designers with opportunities for making entirely new types of interfaces that can lead to interesting and surprising experiences.”

In the International Journal of Design the article Conceptual Designing and Technology: Short-Range RFID as Design Material unpacks RFID—or fields—as design material, and looks at designers motives around emerging technologies:

“Short-Range Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an emerging technology that interaction designers are currently embracing. There are, however, few systematic efforts to utilize the technology as a tool for the development of new design concepts. This article focuses on technology as a design material and its role in the formative process of conceptual design. My approach involves the use of activity theory and the concept of motives, used to analyze short-range RFID technology when considering the field of design. I employ practice-based research where qualitative design and research methods are used to scrutinize the use of this technology in design. A design material perspective frames the short-range RFID technology as a composite consisting of near-fields and the computational. This material is coined near-field material and is further described through six form-making qualities: Tap and Hold, Multi-Field Relations, Multi-Field Distribution, Field Shape, Context Sharing and Mediation Type. I propose that the near-field material and thus the six form-making qualities cited above, offer designers engaged in creating user-oriented experiences, a morphology of form types. I argue that by synthesizing and analyzing emerging technology in relation to designers’ motives for using them, we may further support research and practice by placing technology inside design discourse and culture.”

See more publications from Touch.

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

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From meiwaku to tokushita!

Lessons for digital money design from Japan. Mainwaring, S., March, W., and Maurer, B. 2008. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

“As an example of ubiquitous computing in the here and now, the adoption of digital money is found to be messy and contingent, shot through with cultural and social factors that do not hinder this adoption but rather constitute its specific character. Adoption is strongly tied to Japanese conceptions of the aesthetic and moral virtue of smooth flow and avoidance of commotion, as well as the excitement at winning something for nothing.”

Reminds me of Bell & Dourish’s Yesterday’s tomorrows where ubicomp is ‘highly present, visible, and branded’.

Human-Currency Interaction

Learning from virtual currency use in China. Wang, Y. and Mainwaring, S. D. 2008. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [PDF]

“Virtual and real currencies can interact in complex ways that promote, extend, and/or interfere with the value and character of game worlds. Bringing money into HCI design heightens existing issues of realness, trust, and fairness, and thus presents new challenges and opportunities for user experience innovation.”

I like the way that money as a constraint within HCI research is seen as a way of strengthening research around realness and trust.

Ubipay

Conducting everyday payments with minimum user involvement. Lehdonvirta, V., Soma, H., Ito, H., Kimura, H., and Nakajima, T. 2008. In CHI ‘08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [PDF]

“The aim is to make paying like breathing: something we are only peripherally aware of unless we exert our resources beyond the usual. This idea has powerful implications for business and design.”

Wow, towards true frictionless capitalism.

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Tom Igoe’s new book Making things talk arrived today, full of lovely projects and code examples. Tom’s previous book Physical computing has been the definitive reference for all hardware hacking that goes on at AHO and in the Touch project. Making things talk is structured into specific projects, and covers technology as part of practical examples.

The section on RFID uses the ever-useful ID12 RFID readers with project examples created using Processing.

The processing code was developed with Sara Johansson as part of the Sniff project in our tangible interactions course earlier this year, and it is great to see Sniff in a double page spread:

From our initial reading the book looks like an excellent introduction to creating physical networked things, using a very wide diversity of technologies. The project examples are well designed and extremely useful in order to move beyond conceptually simple networked things. As a place to start prototyping with RFID this is a great complement to some of the other RFID books out there.

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“AIRKIOSK is an interactive kiosk especially designed for points of sales.
AIRKIOSK is connected to the AIRTAG central application platform.
Multi-standard, it can read all RFID tags and cards (13,56MHz). Applications include: Express ordering kiosk, Contactless payment, Identification and animation on the POS, Loyalty and couponning, Interactive advertisement.”

Their overall design profile and the attention to detail in their products looks promising.

Their Blog NFC is also a new addition to our list of NFC/RFID related blogs.

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Understanding ritual has long been the domain of anthropology, but one of my professors in graduate school was fond of reminding students that ritual is not just the domain of other, more exotic cultures, or of the intellectually-suspect religious amongst us. If nothing else, ritual is as mundane and crucial as everyday life. In New York, Charlie, Richard Coyne and I also spent some time discussing the religiosity of famous philosophers and theorists, and how embodied ritual is a way for different people with different orientations and directives to come together. Although these activities can involve the magical, they share more in common with Matt Jones’ recent descriptions of play, and Blast Theory or Jane McGonigal’s sense of games. Charlie also alluded to this in his talk when he connected the liturgy to the spectacular (one good reason not to abandon the Situationists in discussions of locative technologies!) and I think there are some interesting, and underexplored, connections between bricolage, hacking, syncretism and ritual.
In Touch in art and elsewhere, a small online exhibition he’s just curated for low-fi.org.uk, Charlie recalls bits of our conversations and continues to inspire me:

“Recently, for various reasons, I have become interested in the question of touch, in art and elsewhere. We live in a world in which the ways in which we can communicate with each other become more and more immaterial, incorporeal and virtual, particularly through the increased use and greater ubiquity of digital technologies. In this context touch is often occluded and, at the same time, overly fetishised. In the last half century or so, there has been an increasing interest in touch in art, especially in relation to performance and telematic works, that may be a response to the increasing virtualisation of culture, though the question of touch can be traced in far older works, particularly some of those dealing with the life of Christ, which is, whether we are religious or otherwise, the founding myth of Western culture, and which has determined much of our understanding of questions of presence and absence, corporeality and spirituality, and our relation to the senses and thus to touch.”

Like Charlie, I’m interested in cultural practices surrounding what can, and cannot, touch. Applied to RFID and Near-Field Communication, this becomes a question of connecting some things and disconnecting others. Put another way: whether we’re concerned with issues of technological privacy or publicity in our everyday lives, I believe we’re well served by a stronger understanding of cross-cultural examples of ritualised contact and avoidance. It’s my hope that the Touchpædia will be a step in that direction, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it might lead.

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The workshop Mobile Interaction with the Real World (MIRW 2006) at Mobile HCI in Espoo was a timely gathering of practitioners concerned with similar issues: connecting the mobile phone to places and things.

The proceedings [pdf] are now online, and well worth looking at.

Some interesting excerpts from the papers:

Telling a Story on a Tag: The Importance of Markers’ Visual Design for Real World Applications

This project designed, implemented and tested a kind of visual tag that can be designed to look like ordinary text or pictograms, but contains a unique code in its topology.

“When designing the physical tag for the Electronic Lens project, the aim was to tell a story by transforming the markers into sets of icons. Supplemental text, illustration and logotypes that had no technical functionality were also used to complete the design from an informational and aesthetic point of view. The design includes icons for expressing one’s opinion, for leaving one’s view of things through pictures, for a networked city with information accessible through mobile devices, and for the pleasure that comes up with exploring what potentially lies quiet behind this physical marker.”

A marker “hidden” in type, and the corresponding region adjacency tree.

User Perceptions on Mobile Interaction with Visual and RFID Tags

This project explored user-reactions to two different kinds of physical world interactions: barcodes and RFIDs. It tested what they thought of each technology, and how they might interact with them.

“The study results reveal that there are potential usability risks with the mobile interaction with RFID and visual tags. Currently, the mental model that people have on the technologies is still very vague, and although different concepts of using tags for mobile interaction have been considered in research communities for years and are currently gaining popularity in an enterprise context, the idea has not yet been adopted by large audiences because of the lack of existing commercial consumer applications. The study showed that there are no existing practices and mental models for the usage of visual and non-visual tags in the studied domain.”

A study participants reading RFID tag with a phone.

Hovering: Visualising RFID Hyperlinks in a Mobile Phone

This project developed an application called Hovering that let users visualise the tags that are present in local objects or the environment before activating them.

“As links in desktop web, the physical hyperlinks should be visualised to let the user know that 1) there is a link, 2) where it is located, 3) how it can be selected and 4) what will happen after the link is selected. The visualisation can happen in many levels: in the physical object itself the tag may have some icons representing its action and selection method, or the link can be visualised in various ways in the graphical user interface of the mobile terminal.”

On the left is shown the single link display mode. Only one link is displayed but with more information than in the list mode on the right.

The Mobile Phone as a Universal Interaction Device – Are There Limits?

This project prototyped two interactions with consumer products where the mobile phone replaced some of the physical interfaces that otherwise would have been part of the product themselves. They tested out the suitability of the mobile phone for these kinds of interactions.

“We believe that this hybrid approach of a traditional, haptic user interface, combined with an extended user interface on a mobile device, offers many benefits. Users can continue to directly interact with appliances, which is desirable in most everyday situations. However, in special situations where users would have to remember complex and clumsy sequences of pushing buttons or manipulating the appliance, it is much more intuitive to use a mobile device with its powerful and versatile user interface for interaction. For user interface designers, this is an interesting approach, as it allows them to make use of the full range of possibilities offered by modern GUI toolkits, without the physical and monetary constraints of adding such complex functions as a separate physical control.”

Change of water filter prototype.

Thanks to the organisers Enrico Rukzio, Massimo Paolucci, Tim Finin, Paul Wisner and Terry Payne for organising this focused and timely workshop.

[tags] Mobile HCI, MIRW 2006, NFC, RFID, barcodes, mobile, mobile technology, ubicomp [/tags]

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It may be updated as new things become available.

Books

Some recommended books on RFID theory and practice.

RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy

This is probably the best book on RFID to date, covering a wide range of issues including economics, technologies and applications. Comes highly recommended by Bruce Sterling too. It was catalysed by a workshop at MIT in 2003:

“Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is rapidly becoming ubiquitous as businesses seek to streamline supply chains and respond to mandates from key customers. But RFID and other new wireless ID technologies raise unprecedented privacy issues. RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy covers these issues from every angle and viewpoint.”

RFID Handbook

This book covers the fundamentals and applications in contactless smart cards and identification, and gets quite deep into technology issues in RFID. Although it is primarily a technical book, full of equations and diagrams, it offers a lot of insight into the fundamentals of making this technology, as well as covering basic applications and services.

RFID Essentials

Good basic grounding for application, business and technical issues. Focused on EPC applications and logistics and includes sample pseudo code for managing RFID tasks. Read this for the groundwork before exploring the equations in the RFID Handbook above.

RFID Toys

A hands on book for hacking RFID readers, writers and transponders. Covers lots of ‘home automation’ and security applications as examples with instructions for making complete systems. Includes a good list of simple RFID hardware for prototyping. It’s available as part of a kit with the Phidgets USB reader/writer.

Smart card manufacturing

For industrial designers and manufacturing engineers, covers in great detail how to embed microprocessors into little pieces of plastic. Great diagrams.

Internet of Things ITU report

This ITU report looks at the economics, theories and applications that are driving the development of RFID.

“Takes a look at the next step in “always on” communications, in which new technologies like RFID and smart computing promise a world of networked and interconnected devices that provide relevant content and information whatever the location of the user.”

Shaping Things

Bruce Sterling’s book is a manifesto for a more sustainable approach to design, manufacture and everyday life. It’s a fairly quick read, enjoyable and contains many ‘aha’ moments.

“Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production.”

Spychips

Katherine Albrecht & Liz McIntyre write about privacy issues in RFID, offering a stark vision of a future where everything is tracked and connected. Their tone is dramatic and their research examples are often taken out of context, but this is a useful counterpoint to RFID hype.

Everyware

Adam Greenfield’s writes about the likely emergence of ubiquitous computing and the social, cultural and ethical problems that may emerge in it’s design and use. Particularly relevant here are thoughts on seamfulness, on mechanisms of payment ‘dissolving in behaviour’ and some great musings on the embodied significance of the Octopus card in Hong Kong.

“The age of ubiquitous computing is here: a computing without computers, where information processing has diffused into everyday life, and virtually disappeared from view. What does this mean to those of us who will be encountering it? How will it transform our lives? And how will we learn to make wise decisions about something so hard to see?”

Ambient Findability

Peter Morville’s book on the ‘design of findable objects’ takes ideas from wayfinding, the web and information architecture, particularly around search, and puts forward ideas on how these might be applied in ubiquitous computing environments.

“Discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses.”

Weblogs

There are many weblogs on RFID being built upon the recent hype around RFID in the supply chain, and they mostly offer industry focused information. Below I’ve listed most of the weblogs I have found, including some that are not about RFID, but cover overlapping ground. The weblogs I find valuable have comments.

The Pondering Primate

High volume and interesting weblog by Scott Shaffer that looks at all of the emerging technologies and services that attempt to connect digital information into physical space.

“As the Internet becomes mobile through the cell phone, I realized the physical world would merge with the electronic one and a tsunami of opportunities would be created. I constantly search for companies and news associated with mobile search, mobile marketing and mobile commerce.”

Bar Code Nerds

People obsessed with barcodes and the things you can do with them, and they really are nerds:

“You know what pisses me off? I’m in the store. I buy 5 different flavors of fruit leather. They are different colors in different packages. Different SKUs with different GTINs, hence each has a different UPC barcode. So what does the cashier do? Scan one and hit the ‘repeat X5’ key. I realize all she’s doing is harvesting the price. To hell with real time inventory tracking.”

Barcode Blog

Less commentary and more links to other news sources, but it’s good to see a balanced view between technologies like barcodes and RFID i.e. not so much hype about RFID.

Semapedia weblog

A weblog about developments in the Semapedia community:

“We invite you to create Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks. You can create such Tags easily yourself by choosing and pasting a Wikipedia URL into the form above. Once created, you put the Tags up at their according physical location.”

Semablog

Simon Woodside writes about the development of semacode: a 2D barcode system that is an open platform, and plugs into many of the important building blocks of the internet and mobile platforms.

“Semacode’s software provides the tools necessary to build applications that combine aspects of the virtual world into the real world. It works by combining existing standardized elements — camera phones, optical barcodes, URLs — into an integrated system.”

Contactless News

Lots of news and articles on developments in contactless payment including smart cards and NFC. The articles go behind a subscription service after 60 days, so make sure you get relevant quotes while they are still there…

Spychips blog

Albrecht and McIntyre, authors of Spychips rampage against RFID and forefront privacy issues with auto ID and tracking technologies.

RFID Innovationlab

A Danish RFID weblog from people at the Innovation Lab in Katrinebjerg that covers a lot of ground.

RFID in Japan

Shin’ichi Konomi writes about developments in RFID in Japan. This blog has uncovered numerouse interesting user-centred developments in RFID and barcode technology as well as unusual and quirky uses.

RFID Law Blog

This weblog could be really good (and it gets it kind of right in the legislation category) but it tends to re-publish other news stories when it could be providing useful insight and commentary on important legal issues.

RFID Buzz

A low volume but very smart and focused weblog, looking at privacy issues in passports, credit cards, gaming and other alternative uses.

RFID in libraries

I trust the librarians to get it right.

RFID Journal

The RFID industry authority, with events, news, features and case studies. Very industry focused.

RFID Gazette

High volume weblog with lots of industry news.

Other weblogs: Payments news, RFID Lowdown, RFID Times, RFID Today, RFID Detail, The RFID Weblog, Using RFID news, RFID Update.

Online resources

Mediamatic Reader on RFID

This reader compiles a number of resources on the technical and philosophical aspects of RFID.

Security & Privacy in RFID Systems

A large resource of technical papers on security and privacy. You can subscribe to a mailing list to be notified when new papers are added (Could we have an RSS feed too please)!

“The goal of this page is to reference works related to security and privacy in RFID systems. The bibliography contains references toward refereed papers published in journals and conference proceedings, as well as technical reports and thesis. It is updated on an irregular basis depending on the flow of papers published in the domain.”

RFID Primer

There are numerous guides and primers on RFID around the web, but this is perhaps the best, from AIM the global association of everything Identifiable.

Internet of things: Working bibliography

This Internet of things bibliography compiled by Anne Galloway is a good place to start looking at the wider implications of RFID as seen by industry and (primarily ubiquitous computing) academia.

No related posts.

RFID Applications, security and privacy
Fitting the task to the man
Shaping things
Thoughtless acts
Objects of Desire
The meaning of things
Spychips

No related posts.