Silje writes:

“Pling Plong is a media player for stories and sounds, placed inside a pillow. It is designed for the home environment and is meant to stimulate children’s imagination and interest for books. Its low-tech appearance in form, material and its simple functions makes the pillow seem magical. The fact that you can lay your head on it makes the toy very calming and it is meant for relaxing play alone.”

Pling Plong is a simple but carefully crafted product, where everything from the textures of the fabric, to the graspability of the audiobook tokens to the sound design and audio levels have been explored and refined.

A video shows Silje’s experiments with characterful faces for the pillow, showing some of the exploration of different metaphors for RFID that are important aspects of making contactless interaction understandable and playful.

Pling Plong has been receiving a lot of attention online recently, being picked up by Trendhunter, Coolgadgetconcept, Yankodesign, Crecebebe, Talk2myshirt, Techviva, Ubergizmo, Weirdgizmos and more.

Some comments:

“The “low-tech appearance” should be given some stormy applause, because toys nowadays have nothing to do with the idea of play and having a good time.”

“We had our share on interactive pillow coverage like illuminated pillows or sound pillows but the Pling Plong pillow created by Silje Softing sticks out by it’s playful use of ’soft’ low tech to give an twist to the story telling for small children.”

“I hope that this will soon make its way to market and finally to our homes. I don’t have any kids but I’ll surely love a pillow that can sing to me!”

“Hurry up Silje Softing and find someone to manufacture this already! It could be the next big thing this holiday season.”

Silje’s weblog documents some of the making process, there are more photos of Pling Plong and a gallery making pictures here.

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This video shows some of the student’s process, starting with a conceptual session where ideas were sketched on paper and enacted through props. A process of making followed in the wood, plastics and clay workshops where the products took shape. Finally the products are presented as experience prototypes.

Le Chef by Marius and Bilal. A product designed for the kitchen that ‘licks’ various ingredients and suggests recipes.

Poke a pig by Kjetil and Erik. A wooden pig that plays different sounds to different types of attention: a hand for petting, an apple for feeding, etc.

Star pillows by Elisa and Ane. Explored soft materials and audiovisual content for relaxing.

Musicology by Ingrid and Silje. Explored modular shapes and objects for playing playlists from last.fm.

Mood cup by Miray and Ruben. Personalised (or customisable) cups that play back different playlists from last.fm.

Musicframes by Astrid and Stine. A wall of photos each linked to a music file that has personal meaning connected to the photo.

The farm by Karin and Brynjar. An ‘Interactive storytelling space for children’ where animals crossing a river trigger sounds or audiobook content.

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Last week Interaction Design students at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design participated in a Touch workshop where the brief was to design a playful, exploratory or characterful RFID interface. The emphasis of this workshop was on exploring the relationship between digital interaction through RFID and the material properties of physical objects.

The brief

This week we will be working with a technology called Radio Frequency IDentification or RFID. RFID is exciting for industrial and interaction designers because it is a cheap and simple technology that allows us to build quite advanced gestural and tangible interfaces. When an RFID tag is in the range of an RFID reader (usually about 10cm) it communicates a tiny amount of information, a simple short code that lets the computer know that it is present. This is usually used to identify an object, person or animal, for instance to open a door, to find the owner of a lost pet, to pay for a ticket, or to know if a product that is passing out of a shop door has been paid for.

RFID tags are tiny, fairly cheap and don’t require a battery. They can be embedded inside all sorts of materials easily and without much effort. RFID readers are also small and flat, enabling them to be embedded easily below surfaces such as wood, concrete or plastics. The only physical limitations are metal and water, which absorb radio signals and stop RFID systems from working effectively.

Designing playful RFID

You will design a physical interface that involves a reader, a few tags and a Tikitag application.

Industrial and interaction designer’s haven’t been working with RFID for very long. So RFID systems are usually dull and lifeless, with ordinary plastic or paper tags and flat plastic readers. There needs to be more experimentation with the physical aspects of RFID interfaces in applications such as toys, appliances and domestic interfaces. There may be great playful applications of the technology that have not yet been explored.

You must design the physical relationship between the tag, the reader and the resulting action. Your objects must be finished with quality and material choices that match the intended use and context of the application (such as waterproof plastics for the bathroom or turned wood for the coffeetable).

Methods

You will each choose a different application from our list of Tikitag applications. Sketch out ten ways in which the tags and the reader in that application should look, feel and behave. What kind of approach is most suitable? Should it be characterful, understated, loud? What other kinds of objects should it reference? List out the kind of materials that would be suitable for such an application.

Design one set of tags and a reader for your application. Think about size, shape, durability, surface texture, and the relationship between the reader and the tag. How do the objects relate to each other? How do the objects and the reader fit together? What metaphors and associations can you draw upon, are they like keys, do they encourage swiping, caressing, tickling? How will a user manipulate the objects? Will they have to place them in certain positions or sequences to achieve different results?

References

Bowl: Token based media for children

Designing with RFID

RFID peripherals

RFID and unique physical form

Images of touch interfaces

Previous ‘Touch’ student prototypes

Qubi – Tangible colour game

Hairfid

Storytelling pillow

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This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions is having its summer exhibition at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The students have been focusing on designing interactions with RFID technology. This years exhibition includes games, token-based media, transactions, wayshowing, a story-telling pillow, ‘twittering’ things and more.

The exhibition is a part of AHO Works.

• 9-12 June 2008 09:00-18:00 in the AHO library (map)
• Official opening 11 June 17:00
• @ Underskog
• Tangible Interactions course blog

• AHO Interaction design Flickr group

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Previously Sniff won AHO’s prize for Design for all, and has been included as one of Dagbladet’s trends for 2008.

Here is the feedback from the jury, in Norwegian:

“Sniff er et veldig morsomt spill som inkluderer alle. Det er lett å forstå, og stiller krav til barna uten å kreve forkunnskaper eller stigmatisere. Bruk av RFID-teknologi, som sender ut et signal og skaper kommunikasjon mellom kosedyret og figurene, gjør spillet til en innovasjon på sitt område.

“Tilgang til forskjellige brikker med ulike lyder og funksjoner, gir spillet imponerende mange variasjonsmuligheter. Det fins også RFID-klistremerker, som man kan gjemme rundt i huset og lage enda en ny lek med. Sniff er rett og slett en kjempegod idé, som på en nyskapende måte tar i bruk ny og spennende teknologi.”

“Utformingen er tydelig rettet mot barn, men spillet kan utmerket godt brukes av alle mennesker i alle aldersgrupper. Det egner seg svært godt som en døråpner mellom mennesker når språkbarrierer eller fysiske begrensninger hindrer dem i å kommunisere.”

If you want to try out Sniff for yourself, the exhibition will be open from 27 March until 27 April at DogA in Oslo. The Bowl project will also be exhibited.

If you like Sniff you will be happy to hear that Sara Johansson and the Touch project are developing Sniff 2.0 that includes a revised physical design, new feedback and interactional possibilities.

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For the second year we are teaching an MA interaction design course called Tangible Interactions that is driven by the Touch project at AHO. Last year the course was largely successful both for students and for our research interests. It resulted in such projects as Sniff and The Bubbles of Radio.

This year we are building on our experience and creating both a better formal framework and a more focused environment for industrial, product and interaction design with RFID. The course plan can be downloaded here.

For the framework we have created a course compendium that introduces themes from ubiquitous, mobile and tangible computing as well as products and methods. Practically we have taken the RFID platforms from last year and are using them to get the students into interactive prototyping at a much earlier stage. We are also lucky enough to have Einar Sneve Martinussen working on Touch, and he is supporting much of the practical and theoretical side of the course alongside Mosse Sjaastad.

For the first four weeks the students received four short design briefs that explored both the context of mobile, ubiquitous and tangible computing and the detail of with interactions with RFID. This has created great momentum and resulted in various vocabularies, material explorations, evidence and paper prototypes amongst other things.

The students now start a major project based on the Touch design briefs, where they work through a number of iterations in research, ideation, concepting, sketching, prototyping and evaluating.

The students have weblogs again this year: Alice, Christer, Fan Fan, Gudmund, Gunnar, Ingrid, Knut, Kyrre, Marianne, Martin, Natacha and Silje.

More photos in the AHO interaction design pool at Flickr.

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Sara Johansson is tipped at number 19 with her Sniff project also featured in Making Things Talk.

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

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

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

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

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

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The range includes ‘ampoule’ tags for embedding in animals, or under human skin, wristbands, tough plastic ‘pills’, CD labels, palette labels, outdoor labels, sticker-backed tags, various key fobs, playing cards, credit cards and pedagogic clear tags.

One of our students, Einar, has started making standard RFID reading modules using mini Arduino’s and the tiny ID12 reader, which is becoming the standard way for students to explore low-frequency RFID systems alongside the Phidget USB reader.

This gave the possibility of measuring the read-ranges of the 30 or so tags that we have. So now we have a good idea of the relative ranges of each size and kind of tag, which is very useful as we start to design all sorts of interactions around them. We are looking forward to seeing what opportunities emerge as the students explore the intricate details of RFID interactions, and the material possibilities for RFID form factors.

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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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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/01/talsmann/feed 4 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/01/touchable-services-art-server http://www.nearfield.org/2007/01/touchable-services-art-server#comments Mon, 22 Jan 2007 13:15:46 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/01/touchable-services-art-server

  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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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/01/touchable-services-art-server/feed 2 http://www.nearfield.org/2007/01/touchable-services-underskog http://www.nearfield.org/2007/01/touchable-services-underskog#comments Mon, 22 Jan 2007 12:43:55 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2007/01/touchable-services-underskog

  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.

  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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  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2007/01/touchable-services-underskog/feed 1 http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/rfid-in-parkour-urban-orienteering http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/rfid-in-parkour-urban-orienteering#comments Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:47:14 +0000 Timo http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/rfid-in-parkour-urban-orienteering First year industrial design students at AHO recently looked at training and fitness equipment. The course encouraged students to look at the interaction design aspects of training, and to include innovative interfaces in their physical designs.

  Theo Tveteras based his project around around the experience of Parkour in a project called urban orienteering.

  

  He designed a system that would allow users to set up tracks in urban space, in parks, in the forest or in any freeform space. His system contained of 3 parts: a base station, some roaming discs, and a wearable clip. The base station acts as the focal hub of the system, where users can set up timers, see the best lap-times, and store the rest of the equipment. A number of small discs are placed around the area, each of which contains an RFID reader/writer. The traceur wears a small RFID that clips onto their wrist, shoe or other part of their body.

  

  Mockup of the base-station in place

  The experience would involve finding the best route through the discs, and setting up timed competitions around the same route. Different routes could be set up with different difficulty levels. The idea here is to have a base-line: a track through which all participants have to complete, but beyond that each participant can add their own style, techniques and such. Apart from some scenarios and bodystorming, the project didn’t explore the experience in great depth. The project would benefit from looking at the shared experience in this kind of activity, and how it may be made more accessible, enjoyable or extreme.

  

  Display of timing information

  

  Simple scenarios show that the basic interaction works

  Although this project focused on physical design issues and largely overlooked technological aspects, the technology seems realistic and feasible. RFIDs strapped to buildings, or re-writeable RFIDs strapped to parts of the body are ideal locations for storing little bits of timing data, all of which can be put to good use in this kind of activity. The traditional downsides of RFID such as limited range, small capacity, and lack of visibility can be used to great effect in urban space. Perhaps a “cheap and dirty” technology like RFID more closely matches the ‘grain’ of urban space than other, high-end technologies.

  See more student projects.

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  1. More RFID-based products A Dutch company, Swinxs is developing a physical RFID-based console......
  2. Playful RFID This is a design brief, one of many themes that......
  3. RFID and physical social networks Poken is offering a physical networking platform, with physical, RFID-based......
  ]]> http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/rfid-in-parkour-urban-orienteering/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.

  Related things:

  1. Touchable services: local interactions In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at......
  2. Touchable services: Art Server In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at......
  3. Bowl: Token-based media for children In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in......
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