Tinker it now!

In the past year or so we’ve been encouraging our clients to see the use of RFID cards in a more creative light and being in London allows us to take advantage of the ubiquitous Oyster card as a tool for creative interactions in public contexts. Even if its uses are still heavily associated with security (passport IDs) and logistics (you’ll remember the traditional strip inside of a CD), RFID is a really interesting technology to build on and the drop in unit price (you can get away with about 60p per card these days) means that they can be made for bespoke projects and be disposed of or re-purposed in interesting ways.

For YCN Live! last year, guests had received an RFID card with their invitation that allowed them through the door. Once inside, they were able to “tag” portfolio pieces from the 90 designers showcased that evening. A few days after the event, visitors would receive an email with some additional information and links to the portfolios of the works they had tagged. Think of it as outsourcing your memory of interesting pieces of content to a later date, allowing you to truly enjoy yourself and the bubbly on the evening itself.

The Oyster card is an interesting platform to build into interactive exhibitions. Very closely guarded in terms of technology, it’s also closely associated in people’s minds to money, data and security. We simply see it as a convenient way to get random numbers that make sense from a technology perspective but from an experience point of view it can appear unique. Basically each card has it’s own unique number which can be read with a simple RFID reader. What you decide to do with that number can go from simply triggering something, waking it up, or randomly affecting a visual, a display, a light.

For example: Snowflakes was designed so that people in our building would generate their own unique snowflake and be able to see the last person’s design. Knowing that each person has a unique number means the snowflakes can be generated differently every time.

The same principle was applied to Arup’s Force Field installation we were asked to work on. Allowing people from outside and inside the building to use their Oyster card to trigger a simple yet random colour choice made it more responsive and appealing to passer-bys. The experience of discovering what lies behind a simple everyday object can become a great way to engage people.

Beyond simply choosing to alter an existing design or parameter in a random way, using a card can also simply visualise a choice that’s been made by a user. Daniel Soltis, our interaction designer who is quite keen on games and game design built a lovely Photo-booth game for the Free Art Giveaway event in London last fall. Users were able to see their faces inside of a bubble and use their Oyster card when they wanted the picture to be taken. A camera would then take a few pictures of the visitor and add it to a growing pile of bubbles from other visitors. The color of the bubbles if they were similar, would make them pop and move down the screen, not unlike the classic game of Tetris. Here the card acts as a way to say “now please” and nothing more while adding a little playfulness to the final result.

There are really more to RFID than identity and I really feel that its all about levels of disclosure and action you can give a user with those cards or tags that makes or breaks an interaction. The more information you give someone, the more surprise, curiosity and emotion will be generated and you’ll make sure to get everyone to interact with a creative piece of work beyond what they first see or perceive.