Heavyset

The above video was put together by the good people at Touch – a project based out of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design that is focused on technology that connects mobile devices to real-world objects (Near-Field Communication). The video is intended to illustrate the quiet omnipresence of wireless signals in the spaces that surround us.

From Timo Arnall of Touch:

Right now I am sitting near fourteen objects sending and receiving radio signals, from Oyster cards to mobile phones and wireless routers in a multitude of overlapping and competing fields. Here we are creating communicative material that uses dashed-line abstractions to visualise the presence of wireless technologies in the everyday environment. What if we could see every field produced by an Oyster card or NFC enabled mobile phone?

as in:

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Also found at Touch, this note from Mike Kuniavsky, who presented notes on subscription-based services at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference a few weeks ago:

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.

That last paragraph is worth re-reading a few times. What Mike is describing is nothing short of a fundamental rethinking of our relationship with objects. Fascinating stuff. Below is his presentation from the conference.

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As exciting as the idea purported by Mike, I think, is the idea that objects might, through the devices, read and respond to our own metadata; that we leave our own imprints on intelligent objects, just as they do on us. Welcome to read/write.

Related posts:

1. The Contextual City
2. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations
3. It’s More Fun to Compute
4. Imagineering Customer Service
5. Data Talks, Data Walks