Touch » Service design

From ubicomp to service design

Timo — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:26:23 +0000

Mike Kuniavsky presented at ETech 2009 on the Dotted-Line World on the links between ubiquitous computing and service design, where subscription-based services are based on everyday objects.

(I’m a big fan of dotted or dashed lines, it’s a great visual trick for representing hidden things. Glad to see that Mike is taking up this language, we should develop it further!)

Here’s the description of the talk in full, the slides are available from slideshare and at Mike’s weblog:

Things have long had identifying marks, from silversmiths’ hallmarks to barcodes, but mating machine-readable identification with pervasive networking greatly increases the value of the marks.

For example, when a machine-readable identification method such as an RFID or a high-density visual code is combined with the wireless networking of a mobile phone, a new way of interacting with everyday objects is created. Once you have the capability uniquely identify anything immediately, you can attach meta information to it. Any meta-information. How much is this worth on eBay? Which of my friends has one? Will this go with my Mom’s china? Will it make me sick if I eat it? Was it made by children?

I call this digital representation as accessed through a unique ID, an object’s “information shadow” and I now see them attached to just about everything. Beyond getting meta information, however, lies an even more powerful concept: changing the physical object to a service, for which the thing you’re looking at is but a single instantiation of that agreement. It’s already happened to media, and to car-shared cars and shared bicycles in urban areas.

When this happens, the objects have to change at a fundamental level. They have to be designed differently and they have to be described and discussed differently. The “owner’s” relationship to the object changes. The very idea of ownership changes. The solid object grows a dotted line that is filled-in as-needed, when-needed, and with the features that are needed. This is not the same thing as renting or co-ownership, its anytime/anywhere nature-enabled by the underlying technology makes these new service objects fundamentally new.

Many recent products point in this direction, where objects such as the Amazon Kindle are useless without the service contract, where a Nabaztag/tag is an empty shell waiting for connection to a network full of personal information and social connections, and where NFC phones and RFID peripherals are just the touchpoints between the online and the offline.

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Lightweight, parasitic services

Timo — Mon, 26 May 2008 13:31:34 +0000

Touch and travel is a German pilot scheme (one of many) that is testing NFC for ticketing on public transport. One of the partners in the trial Giesecke and Devrient describe it:

“With the new eTicketing System Touch&Travel from Deutsche Bahn (DB), the mobile phone serves as an electronic ticket on trains, buses, streetcars, subways, etc. The SIM cards inside the phones are provided by Giesecke & Devrient. The Touch&Travel project is initiated by Deutsche Bahn, the German railway, and the mobile operator Vodafone.”

This trial shows one of the ways that NFC changes the infrastructure required for a ticketing or payment service. In this case it is a lightweight, parasitic infrastructure that can fairly cheaply be added to other ticketing methods. The service relies on three elements:

Passive NFC tags at stations that contain a unique identifier or geographic information for that location. In this case they are embedded inside what must be a cheap container of aluminium, a printed surface and glass. This doesn’t require power or a network connection, and serves the same function as a large, powered, and networked ticket machine.
The mobile phone is the window into the service; it interprets the location/identification data, connects to the ‘cloud’ and provides an interface. This interface could show location, ticket prices, ticket options, time of journey, routes, transaction history, etc. Here there is the opportunity to create a service that offers more utility, value and experience than traditional ticketing.

The mobile data network connects the user to the service, in many cases this data connection already exists, and doesn’t require infrastructural development. Of course here there are issues with underground metro systems that don’t offer mobile coverage.

More details on the service/interaction design:
By waving your NFC mobile handset over the so called Touchpoint before entering the train, located at the platforms, the system registers the beginning of a trip.
The ticket is stored on the SIM card inside the mobile phone
The conductor checks the ticket by scanning the phone with a portable reader.
Having arrived at the destination, the handset is waved over the Touchpoint again. The system registers the end of your trip. The system processes the data and calculates the correct cost for the distance traveled.

The passenger is billed once a month
Of course the service requires that NFC handsets are easily available, or that the service is sold through SIM add-ons for existing mobiles (perhaps as an alternative to a contactless card like Oyster/Suica).

I wonder how a service that relies so heavily on an ad-hoc infrastructure will be accountable to failure and who holds responsibility and the problem-solving ability for errors and misunderstandings?

Thinking also about the parasitic; might multiple services compete with each other for approachable station space? In a de-regulated environment (I’m thinking of the UK here) who you touch might define what service you get…
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Bowl: Token-based media for children

Timo — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:19:28 +0000

In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in a research-driven course called Tangible interactions that investigated themes around RFID, NFC and the Touch project. This is one of the projects that emerged from the course.

Bowl is a project by Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen and Timo Arnall and investigated two design briefs: RFID 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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‘Touch orders’ with ‘RFID dongles’

Timo — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:17:56 +0000

A while ago some interesting projects attached passive RFID tags to ordinary mobile phones to enable participation within RFID-based ticketing, payment or infrastructure.

I wrote about this way of retro-fitting mobile phones with RFID. Simply attaching passive RFID tags to mobile handsets allows new functions to be added without integration into the phone itself. This offers some insight into the ways in which the phone is becoming central to everyday activity; where it acts as a hub for other touch-based functions like payment, ticketing and access.

Now there are some very interesting observations by Flickr user Superlocal (on the Poketo blog) about the integration of NFC readers into standard Korean mobile phones. This is enabled by the mandated standards for data and power connections for mobile phones in Korea, so that any phone has a standard hardware interface.

Here McDonalds is offering customers an “RFID Dongle” that plugs into the data and power connections of almost any phone. Once an application is downloaded, the dongle allows selection and payment to be made from an RFID menu at every table. The system is called ‘touch order’.

This system allows much richer mobile interaction than a passive RFID tag allows, given that this is a reader, with access to secure phone applications, billing and data services – the full functions of NFC.

There are other manufacturers such as SDID, Sirit and ACG that offer NFC modules that plug in to standard interfaces like SD slots, but these are not yet being used for mass-market applications.

It is interesting to see McDonalds and SK Telecom introducing such a high-technology solution and providing shared hardware infrastructure to customers in order to enable it before NFC phones are mass-market. The application and service is rather mundane (in fact we might even call it an interaction design cliché), but it’s interesting that it has been made; it is out in the world being used. I’m interested to know how this works in practice, over the long-term.

CNET Asia, My digital life and Far East Gizmos write more about the context of the ‘touch order’ system.

More photos of the menus, instructions and screen interface from Superlocal.

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Mobile payment demo

Timo — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:47:31 +0000

The near-future success of NFC depends on the usability of mobile payments and ticketing. As interaction designers we of course argue that the success hinges on good design of this experience and recent news suggests that there is little to recommend mobile payments unless they offer some useful new features (see Place and product based collaborative filtering).

So it’s good to see work that explores the details of the transaction interface (see our design brief). This video shows “A mobile payment demo using Welcome’s NFC applet integrated with a payment application in a mobile phone.”:

More detail at Aneace Haddad’s weblog.

It’s great to see that the transaction is very fast and there is at least basic audible feedback at the point of touching. It’s also interesting to note the integration of a paper receipt into the process. While a mobile wallet can provide payment history and receipts, the paper receipt builds trust in the transaction and its value should not be overlooked.

Compare and contrast to other NFC demo videos, what kinds of interactions are working here? Does anyone else notice that NFC interactions that rely heavily on the screen seem awkward?

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Connected products

Timo — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:46:08 +0000

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

RFID may begin to enable cheap – even disposable – products that have identities and connections to a network. What are the opportunities for integrating services, infrastructure, community and online brands into physical objects?

In the longer-term, how does the economics, form and function of physical products change when every product is a service or touchpoint? What might we call this new class of service-object?

What role might the mobile phone play in this infrastructure? Future products that are too cheap, simple or small to offer screens or buttons might use the NFC mobile phone as a rich interface and a network connection. This may enable a class of devices that don’t have input or output themselves, but still offer rich interactions or interfaces.

This project should investigate the early opportunities of having identities and interactions in cheap and ubiquitous physical products.

References

Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling. “The future will see a new kind of object – we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable – that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable.”

Space, Place and Things, New Rules of Tenancy within the Internet of Things. :I am trying to create what I think is an important connect-the-dots game between Internet of Things euphoria, Internet of Things dystopia and a pragmatic set of “design patterns” so that this stuff becomes legible to the “doers”.”

Neopets. Virtual pets with physical counterparts, see also Digital pets.

Build a bear. “Every Build-A-Bear Workshop® furry friend you make is stuffed with a barcode.”

Barcode Battler. “The game used barcodes to create a character for the player to use. Not all barcodes worked as players, instead some represented enemies or powerups. As well as the barcodes provided with the game itself, players were encouraged to find their own barcodes from everyday products.” See also Barcode games

Skannerz. “a series of electronic toys made by Radica Games that use barcode technology to create an interactive battle game that resembles Digimon.”

Hyperscan. “At least initially, HyperScan can fairly be described as a cross between trading card games (TCGs) and video games. It’s the first game system to use RFID technology.”

Talsmann: Using products to introduce cross-country skiing as a spare time activity in China. RFID-enabled products to introduce online information and community.

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Local applications and services

Timo — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:04:46 +0000

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

One of the most important features of NFC is that it only works at a very short range. This ties our interactions to particular places or objects, and forces us to design applications or services that work on a local level. With internet development we have become accustomed to designing applications that service a global, disembodied set of users. The return to the local that is suggested by NFC technology is a very interesting challenge and potentially disruptive to design practice.

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

If a service can reliably know that a user has been in a certain place, what does that information enable? What is the value of being physically present for an interaction to take place? What services are specific to the home, to the office, to public or private transport, to a specific public space or to a particular shop?

This project should consider detailed interactions between the mobile phone, services and local contexts. The project should use field studies and scenario design processes to explore services in the context of everyday objects and places. How might existing signage, advertising and urban interfaces be complemented with local interactions?

References

Attention Please!. “To explore the notion of presence, aura, and attention there is a very creative angle to be explored; “how can something attract attention?” As we are also using fixed capability RFID technology”

NFC presence. “Now I can just touch one of these tags with my phone, and a few seconds later (some delays are involved with starting the Java midlet and connecting to GPRS) the little box on the right changes to show my location. Voila: NFC-powered presence.”

Location-based service. An area full of interaction design clichés: “One example of a location-based service might be to allow the subscriber to find the nearest business of a certain type, such as an Italian restaurant.”

NFC completes Smart Posters standard. “Smart Posters are much more important to the NFC than a mechanism for giving away a few tones or setting up networking. Smart Posters have been promoted as the mechanism by which network operators can make money out of NFC.”

Touchable services, local interactions. “Students 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.”

Annotate space by Andrea Moed. “A project to develop experiential forms of journalism and nonfiction storytelling for use at specific locations. Stories are presented through text, images and audio files that participants can download from the Web to their handheld computers and take with them to the place of interest.” Link and PDF

A list of Spatial annotation projects at elasticspace.

Redström, J., Dahlberg, P., Ljungstrand, P., and Holmquist, L.E. (1999), Designing for Local Interaction, In Proceedings of MANSE ‘99, Springer Verlag. “Much development of information technology has been about reducing the importance of distances and user location. Still, many important activities and events are of local nature, for instance serendipitous face-to-face communication. In order to support such communication, as well as other examples of local interaction, we have developed three prototypes all based on wireless short-range communication.” Link and PDF

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Alternative RFID infrastructures

Timo — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:30:50 +0000

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

The landscape of RFID technology is focused on surveillance, efficiency and control. The near-future possibility of RFID implants, identity cards and passports is focused on the ability to efficiently and accurately identify people. The rush to replace barcodes with RFID is pushed by a desire to have more control and efficiency in supply chains and to reduce the risk of counterfeiting. Much of which ignores the human perspective and the imposition of this new technology is running into trouble as it begins to cross paths with public opinion, perception and protest.

But new infrastructures can certainly be designed to support useful, private, secure, bottom-up, ad-hoc and people-to-people interactions, not just transactions controlled by banks, transport systems and governments. There are open identity systems that should allow RFID to be used in a way that gains people’s trust, that allows individual control over its use.

This project should look at the issue of trust and technological innovation and adoption. It should take RFID or NFC as a case study and look at the various viewpoints that are taking control of the emerging debate. Without going into technical solutions the project could look at people-based or social scenarios around sharing, trust, privacy and perceived security in various defined contexts.

References

Rob van Kranenburg at How I learned to love RFID. “It is naive to say that RFID tags do not contain information, and thus cannot be linked to individuals: that disregards the whole history of data mining. Transparency is important, individuals should certainly have access to the information that their tags carry. This view has been fuelled by the Nokia phone that reads and writes tags.”

Matt Ward, Rob van Kranenburg, Gaynor Backhouse. RFID: Frequency, standards, adoption and innovation. PDF

Why Technical Breakthroughs Fail: A History of Public Concern with Emerging Technologies. “In the face of various public concerns, some of these technical breakthroughs have been successful while many others have been unsuccessful. This white paper examines five cases of technical launches that have taken place during the last fifteen years.”

Public Policy: Understanding Public Opinion. “As the Centre prepares to launch its EPC network it is therefore important to anticipate how the public will perceive this new technology, to anticipate any concerns and to explore ways in which the network can be improved, in order to ensure consumer’s confidence.”

Spychips: how RFID will compromise privacy, security, freedom

Privacy-Enhancing Radio Frequency Identification Tag: Implementation of the Clipped Tag. “The privacy-protecting tag, called the “Clipped Tag” has been suggested by IBM as an additional consumer privacy mechanism. The clipped tag puts the option of privacy protection in the hands of the consumer. It provides a visible means of enhancing privacy protection by allowing the transformation of a long-range tag into a proximity tag that still may be read, but only at short range – less than a few inches or centimeters. This enables later use of the tag for returns or recalls.” PDF

Smart and Secure RFID tags “The philosophy of the RFIDsec tag is that all users can read and access the part of the tags information that is authorised for their specific use, and nothing else. Strong encryption, even on passive tags, ensures that the levels of access are not jeopardised. The Access Management software ensures simple and secure user control. Hence it is possible to have data on tag. The RFIDsec tag can even operate in Silent Mode, thus eliminating concerns about leaking information and consumer privacy.” Link

See also references for RFID and the everyday

Read more about these design briefs.

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RFID and the everyday

Timo — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:36:26 +0000

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

Many of us have experienced RFID as a way of paying for tickets on public transport or gaining access to places. But are there other ways in which RFID, through things, places and behaviour, may become part of everyday experience?

RFID chips are cheap and tiny, they can be embedded in just about anything, lasting forever without a battery. But in most situations RFIDs are also extremely limited in range, capacity and susceptible to being broken and hacked. This is the cheap and dirty end of ubiquitous technology.

What kinds of interfaces or identities could everyday things have? How might identifiable objects affect our social relationships and how might people hack or subvert these affects? What kinds of needs and desires exist around everyday things and how might these change?

Some possibilities that have been explored in the past include household objects as interfaces, urban screens that display custom media or tokens or gifts that contain personal information (see references).

Your process may involve field work, observations, material or personal object studies and interviews. You might want to create a series of scenarios around everyday behaviour from these studies that others could build upon.

References

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda.

Publications by Rich Ling. Lots of research into the use of mobile technology from a sociologists perspective, with a particular focus on Norwegian culture.

Institute For The Future on RFID Downloadable PDFs on the future of RFID in everyday life.

Galloway, Anne. 2004. Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing
and the City. Cultural Studies, Volume 18, Numbers 2-3, pp. 384-408. Link

Mobilities in everyday life and On the persistence of the everyday. Anne Galloway.

33 Ways RFID Has Invaded Your Life Lots of current and near-future uses for RFID.

Cool, Surprising and just Plain Scary: 51 Futuristic Uses for RFID A good list of current and near-future uses of RFID, read through the list to get beyond the interaction design clichés.

What is the problem?. Good reasons why many might not want RFID in everyday life.

Frequently asked questions about NFC Mentions of everyday activities, mainly transactions, in this document from the NFC Forum.

Greenfield, Adam. Everyware. The dawning age of ubiquitous computing., 2006.

Feldman, A. Tapia, E.M. Sadi, S. Maes, P. Schmandt, C. ReachMedia: on-the-move interaction with everyday objects. Ambient Intelligence Group, MIT Media Lab., Cambridge, MA, USA. PDF

Carvey, A., Gouldstone, J., Vedurumudi, P., Whiton, A., and Ishii, H. 2006. Rubber shark as user interface. In CHI ‘06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 – 27, 2006). CHI ‘06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 634-639. PDF

Kindberg, T., Barton, J., Morgan, J., Becker, G., Caswell, D., Debaty, P., Gopal, G., Frid, M., Krishnan, V., Morris, H., Schettino, J., Serra, B., and Spasojevic, M. 2002. People, places, things: web presence for the real world. Mob. Netw. Appl. 7, 5 (Oct. 2002), 365-376. Link

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Talsmann

Timo — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:45:28 +0000

In the diploma project Talsmann: Using products to introduce cross-country skiing as a spare time activity in China, Birger Løype looked at cross-cultural translations of products and activities. After a wide-ranging study of cross-country skiing in China, Birger used mobile phones and near field communication to propose a service that integrates information, products and physical places.

The project had two overall intentions:

To explore how the design process can be used to integrate activities and products based on one cultural value system into a society with a different cultural value system.

To create a case study to visualise how the process impacts a product. Cross country skiing and its associated products were chosen as the activity.
Process

In Norway there is a long tradition of cross country skiing. Skiing was a necessary skill to survive in everyday life hundreds of years ago. During the 19th century skiing became part of the Norwegian national identity. It has since become a popular spare time activity. Based on this tradition some of the best ski equipment brands are located in Norway such as Swix, Madshus and Rottefella.

Cross-country skiing is not a well known activity in China. A month of field work was conducted in ski resorts around Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdo, China to uncover more about skiing activities. The output of this research informed the resulting product development, and can be summarised like this:
Collectivism is one of the most important cultural values in China. For cross country skiing there’s a desire to belong to a group and to get information from people they can identify with.
A Chinese skier’s primary motivation is the feeling of adventure and as a way of expressing identity. These differences in motivation create different demands for associated products.

Ski wax is the biggest difficulty for a beginner: basic information about all aspects connected to ski wax is needed.
‘Talsmann’ concept

The result of this project is a conceptual Swix service where all Swix products are the first touch points to the service. Through an RFID tag embedded within products the user get access to instructions and user-driven forums where people have described their experiences with videos, images and words.

One of the biggest barriers to taking up cross country skiing is ski-waxing: which can make the difference between enjoyment and frustration. The conventional wax thermometer was redesigned to include an RFID tag as well as the usual temperature and wax recommendations. These would be placed at ski resorts where users can share recomendations for wax according to different temperatures, conditions and routes.

Track markings would also act as touch points to the service.

Through these touch points the user get access to a geographically dependent forum. By using the multimedia features of modern phones, the user will also find information about wax through a service where Swix gives advices about what wax to use and how to wax the skis. This could be triggered by the first touch points of the products.

Birger’s project shows some strong near-future trends. The first is the increasing levels of brand involvement through the integration of service, infrastructure and community into physical products. This will become more important as the cost of simple technologies like RFID reduces; allowing cheap – even disposable – products to have identities and connections to a network. Distributing physical products may become more like distributing service touchpoints.

The project also shows the longer-term potential of integrating service infrastructures into physical spaces. Although it was driven by a desire to create physical ‘products’, the project covered many of the steps towards creating situated software that affect people’s behaviour and activities in public places. It seems sporting activities could be a good starting point for the design of place-based services, and this is an area that needs more attention from an interaction design perspective.

See more student projects.
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Touchable services: Art Server

Timo — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 13:15:46 +0000

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.

Anna Daniell, Castilnano Simoons, Stig Skjelvik and Christopher Svendsen looked at new commercial models for artists and galleries, and the social sharing or artwork.

Stig Skjelvik explains:

‘For most people art is expensive. You have only the possibility to look at it in a gallery, buy a poster, or find a picture on the internet. But what if we can make a system that makes it possible to se the art, and then send it home, or even more interesting, to send it to a friend, loved ones or family.’

In their prototype, the students placed RFIDs alongside artefacts at a gallery. When touched with an NFC phone, an image of the artwork was sent to a digital picture frame in another place.

The prototype was very simple and loaded URLs from the phone that prompted changes on a standard web-page. This was just enough to test out the interactions between users at the gallery and in the home context, which proved to be interesting and engaging. The system reinforced a strong connection between the two users, and the appearance of new images created the sense of a ‘gift’.

This project is particularly interesting in its realisation: all the elements of the service were prototyped, from the gallery interface through the web server application through to the industrial design of a digital LCD frame. Quickly prototyping all elements of the system in this way allowed them to test the service in context: in a gallery and in the home. This allowed the students to really get a handle on the experiential side of the prototypes.

Artwork by Anna Daniell. More detail at Stig’s weblog.

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Touchable services: Underskog

Timo — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 12:43:55 +0000

Anette Andersen and Jørn Knutsen worked with the web service Underskog (the undergrowth). Underskog is infamous in Norway as one of the first social networking services, it offers event calendaring, collaborative weblogs, discussions and is invite only. It is shining example of situated software.

In their analysis, the students listed the strengths and weaknesses of the online service. Underskog is really good at handling the time before an event. It answers many of the questions that arise: Is anyone I know planning going? What does it cost? What do other people think of the place? Where do I get tickets? Where exactly is it? What kind of people are coming? I want to let other people know I’m going.

What Underskog currently is not good at is the time during an event: Are any of my friends here? Where are all my friends? He should be here by now? I’m bored, what else is going on? I want to let my friends know I’m here.

They designed a simple system that would log users into venues by touching a tag in the venue. Users would then rate events by touching a happy or sad face. The use of RFID-tags placed around arenas and events would allow for very quick ‘swipes’ or ‘touches’ to indicate presence and ratings, this is particularly important in a context where interacting with a screen may be socially inappropriate.

Through the use of scenarios the students demonstrated the usage of such a system. The mobile interface told you how many of your contacts were there, and also if your contacts were somewhere else. It also sent information back to Underskog.no where information would appear on a map.

Being a one week project, they did not look into detail what the advantages of this system may be over other forms of communication like SMS or simple mobile internet. But what is particularly interesting about this service is that the RFID tags can be placed by anybody on any venue, becoming a parasite of existing infrastructures much like Underskog itself. The service is potentially totally user-driven, and doesn’t require venues to sign up to the service in order for it to be useful.

See more at Jørn’s weblog.

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Place and product-based collaborative filtering

Timo — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 08:42:53 +0000

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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Touchable services: local interactions

Timo — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:44:06 +0000

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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RFID in Seoul: High-end smartcards

Timo — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:20:11 +0000

The contactless ticketing and payment system of choice in Seoul is called T-Money. Seoul was the first city to use Mifare standard smartcards in 1996. Although retail payment doesn’t seem to have taken off as much as in Japan or Hong Kong, T-Money is fairly ubiquitous and can be used on all public transport, a few vending machines and selected retailers.

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?

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