The ad was made by BBH London with creative director Pete Bradly (more info and making of videos). Interesting to see a one minute commercial explain touch/contactless technology.

No related posts.

This collection of ‘vernacular’ designs for RFID-based interfaces is extremely interesting for us, as we delve deeper into the visual representation of emerging technologies.

If you have images of good, bad and especially odd interfaces where interaction with an RFID tag or NFC mobile phone is indicated with an icon or an interestingly designed physical enclosure, please add it to the pool by tagging it ‘touch interface’.

Related things:

1. Wireless in the world An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies......
2. Re/Touch: Inspiring touch-related interaction design One of the things that social and cultural research on......
3. Immaterials: the ghost in the field This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID,......

“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.

Related things:

1. Nokia releases first mass-market NFC handset Nokia today announced the 6131 NFC phone, the first integrated......
2. iPhone RFID and NFC peripherals We are beginning to see RFID and NFC peripherals beginning......
3. The first NFC appliance Nokia has announced the Play 360°, a portable speaker that......

Nokia today announced the 6131 NFC phone, the first integrated NFC handset that will (operators willing) be available to the public. Previously NFC had been confined to ageing handsets like the 5140 and 3220 via add-on covers, both of which did not support the latest NFC standards and had limited capabilities. The new handset will be available in select markets in the 1st quarter of 2007.

Nokia’s press release:

“Unlike a simple card or keytag, which only allows for one-way communication, an NFC-enabled mobile phone allows users to realize the benefits of a fully interactive experience. For example, touching an NFC-enabled advertising poster or informational kiosk can automatically link the user to interactive Internet based information, open an audio file, or download new content directly to the handset. Additionally, an extra layer of security is enabled when making contactless payments since the handset can be set to allow payment information only when the user expressly authorizes the transaction via a password, unlike a card or tag, which can be used by whoever has it in their possession.”

“Along with its NFC features, the Nokia 6131 NFC phone includes an extensive set of today’s most wanted wireless features. A built-in digital music player with microSD card support and FM stereo radio allow customers to enjoy their favorite music on the go. A 1.3 megapixel camera, featuring a dedicated camera button and 8x digital zoom makes it easy to capture and share images. Bluetooth wireless technology enables easy connection to a wide selection of Nokia enhancements and PC’s or even the ability to go handsfree in compatible automobiles.”

It’s a simple Series 40 phone, not a high-end smartphone, but these features add up to a respectable and hopefully cheap device. It supports Java MIDP 2.0, Bluetooth and EDGE, all of which should make application development with NFC that much easier.

Now the big question is the rollout of NFC services. NFC technology offers very little without a supporting infrastructure of regionally specific ticketing, payment and custom services. Will we see London Transport selling Oyster phones, or Tesco selling loyalty phones? Without services/applications like these, the handsets themselves are likely to be hard to sell.

Related things:

1. NFC in action A video has surfaced from the recent launch of the......
2. The first NFC appliance Nokia has announced the Play 360°, a portable speaker that......
3. Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that......

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.

Related things:

1. Touchable services: local interactions In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
2. Bowl: Token-based media for children In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in......
3. iPhone RFID: object-based media This is a video prototype of an iPhone media player......

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.

Related things:

1. Touchable services: Underskog In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
2. Touchable services: Art Server In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO......
3. Local applications and services This is a design brief, one of many themes that......

There are two elements to this system in Seoul that are interesting. The first is the availability of customised cards and accessories from market stalls and groceries (the subject of a future article). The second is the availability of high-end products containing the T-Money smartcards. These are designed to compete with other products in categories such as consumer electronics, fashion, toys, music and computing.

Here are three examples of this type of product.

RFID Hippo

This ‘Fancy T-Money’ hippo costs 24,800 Won (about €20) available from the online shop. It is a smartcard with a USB interface, which means that you can plug it into your PC and fill it up with money from an online bank account (after installing the right drivers). Inside the hippo you can feel a standard 56×28 mm RFID card that is connected to the mouth via a cable.

The USB plug in this case is thoughtfully placed in the hippo’s mouth, which means it looks like the hippo is chomping away at the computer when plugged in (not as grotesque as the USB bear or as weird as the USB twig).

Given the Korean love of characters, I’m wondering if the hippo is becoming a symbol or mascot for T-Money, in the same way as the Suica Penguin has become synonymous with mobile payment in Japan. Or will this be the start of a collectible range of characters? Some T-Money is bought with discounts built in (for kids or elderly for instance), it would make sense that this is for children, but I’m not certain that this is the case. Let me know if you know more. More photos at Flickr.

T-Pop

This is a tiny RFID reader/writer that is bought alongside a standard T-Money card for 9,900 Won (about €8). Plugging the T-Pop into the USB port and placing the card on top allows it to be topped up. The T-Pop is designed with a clip so that it can be carried around, but the clip also acts as a holder when the card is being charged. This might have been a nice compromise on the drawing board, but in practice it seems clunky: the action of charging a card could be embodied in the physical form, rather than as an afterthought. This is interesting as the first consumer RFID reader/writer that I have found.

What does putting the RFID reader/writer in the hands of users do to the service in terms of hackability? One would think that both the near-field and USB transfer of cash could be analysed in detail and reverse engineered in the comfort of one’s own home (it’s very different from trying to analyse transactions in the wild).

+Plus

This last example is a simple memory stick that also acts as a T-Money card, a 256 Mb version is available for 39,800 Won (about €32). As the designers began to explore the recharging of cards via USB it must have seemed obvious to integrate other USB devices. Thoughtful convergence means that topping up money on this kind of T-Money can be done at the same time as transferring or using files.

There are other convergent examples, some of which I will cover in the future. The T-Money mp3 player, also available from the online shop, was beyond my budget.

New service touchpoints

Overall the re-packaging of contactless cards is an interesting mix of service, interaction and product design. The way in which the service touchpoints of the Seoul transport system are fanning out to include the home PC is interesting. By providing software and hardware for charging smart cards at home, T-Money have invested a lot in technical and service development. What kind of studies went into making these products: who said that they needed to top up their cards at home? Would the same service work in other places, with the Oyster card for instance?

Convergence

It’s difficult to know the relative success of these convergent devices (MP3 players, memory sticks, even mobile phones). My contention is that the usability benefits of these converged things do not outweigh the drawbacks of using a compromised device, or having options in style, interface, or any of the other things that people like to have choice in. When T-Money cards can be attached to phones, cameras or any other device as straps, embedded within wallets or handbags, or worn in sleeve pockets, the arguments for convergence seem quite weak. Products like the hippo show us that many functions will remain discrete.

Materials & product design

Products like the hippo are just scratching the surface of possibility, particularly around the use of materials and the kinds of emotional attachments we have to everyday objects. The underlying technology (RFID) allows easy re-packaging in almost unlimited forms and materials (as long as it’s not metal or liquid). I’d like to see explorations of high-end materials like leather, glass, stone and ceramics, to look at reliability, trust and to think more about the ways in which these functional things could be inflected by fashion, design and everyday behaviour.

What would the ‘ideal’ payment device look like? Does the fact that these things are designed for public transport place them within a certain category of objects that are mundane and everyday, or even within a certain social status?

Related things:

1. RFID in Seoul: first impressions I’m in Seoul, South Korea looking at the use of......
2. RFID and physical social networks Poken is offering a physical networking platform, with physical, RFID-based......
3. RFID peripherals Plug and play RFID-reading USB peripherals are all the rage,......

The first encounter with RFID came only an hour or so off the plane by the Metro ticketing machines, a kind lady showed a mobile phone strap that contained a T Money card:

Within a few minutes I had a charged up T Money card and figured out the over-designed ticket gates. Quite good for a totally new system with new languages and currency.

Later, at a ‘Family Mart’, there was a hastily placed payment terminal that offered payment for mobile phones.

The touch indicator is very HAL-like, I imagine it glows softly red when a payment is made. More to investigate…

Related things:

1. RFID in Seoul: High-end smartcards The contactless ticketing and payment system of choice in Seoul......
2. RFID gestures While thinking about radio-field-based interactions and the gestures that they......
3. Lightweight, parasitic services Touch and travel is a German pilot scheme (one of......