Tinker it now!

++ Thesis work of Pratt Institute graduate Alicia Gibb entitled New Media Art, Design and the Arduino Controller.

++ Post by Mark Pilgrim on the hopefully not-so-likely Tinkerer’s Sunset.

++ Freedom to Tinker site run by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life.

++ Swissnex SFOis a space, a service, and a platform for the exchange of knowledge and ideas in science, education, art, and innovation.

++ We were told Sorting Things Out was quite good by the lovely Elisabeth Goodman.

++ Massimo is in Savannah for IXD conference at the moment.

++ I’ll be attending the Lirec progress meeting at UEL first. Then I’ve been invited to speak at Lovebytes I Love Technology in Sheffield where I’ll be talking about the world of “making” as we now see it and the relationships to design, craft, business and innovation.

++ The week after I’ll be speaking at Experimental Objectsabout the impact of prototypes on design teaching. This seminar is organised by Lancaster University as part of the Experimental Society’s activities.

If you’re at any of these events, come and say hi!

We were very happy to take part in Are you ready for the Internet of Things with The Council, a one-day conference in Bruxelles last month. As part of it I ran a quick 3h workshop to kick-off some thoughts around Homesense and what it means designing for smart homes. I’ll spare you the images of post-it sessions but roughly the workshop ran in the following way:

0:00 Start of workshop and round the table introduction of participants. Each one talked about what makes their home “home” and some of the problems that they’d like to see resolved in their home.

0:30 Quick post-it session where we identified and mapped out objects (according to GS1 we are surrounded by 5K objects on average), people who interacted with us at home and spaces outside of the home.

0:45 Placed in more than random teams of 2 (we were around 14 in total) we had 20-30 minutes to brainstorm a scenario that would use the technologies we’re aware of in order to tie an object, a person and another space to our own home. We had to illustrate this and fill in a sheet of paper with a quick user scenario, a short description of the product/service and what would need to happen for it to exist if it wasn’t possible right now.

1:30 Every team presented to the others and received comments.

During the last hour, we discussed the possible challenges that emerged from the scenarios, as well as identifying some guidelines and overarching principles about designing in this way for a home context. It appeared that a top down approach was problematic for different reasons. Some of these findings included:

++ Building with a closed user scenarios is difficult. In a home, there are often more than one “user” and the question “would your wife and kids use this?” often resulted in a resounding no. Maybe this points to the fact that we keep designing for people like ourselves only, which in a home environment quickly becomes inappropriate.

++ The idea of home is a flexible one. Someone feels at home because of a number of often qualitative parameters. Home is also an environment where technological intrusion is kept to a perceived minimum even if wifi, sound systems and electronic objects are everywhere. They remain usually disconnected to each other and we seem to like it that way. We demand ubiquity in our work life but not necessarily at home. This could again be related to the various actors involved in the home.

++ There is a definite need to move beyond RFID as the only sentient technology we think of with smart homes. The need to filter out information is great but no one wants to commit to handling information at home in the same way as RSS feeds or Facebook updates. Noise versus signal ratio in our homes should be reduced as much as possible.

++ The number of actors involved in sharing information generated, gathered and produced by the home is hard to manage. Privacy is seen as something of utmost importance, even if the actors themselves reveal much of themselves and their activities online and through social media. The home is a perceived black box. This relates back to a lot of security and disclosure issues that might or might not be relevant but because of a lack of “killer app”. Because of this, it seems like non-negotiable criteria for design for now.

++ Marketing the value of a connected home will be very important. People don’t understand why this should be important right now and the internet of things will eventually invade the home and not just the city.

I really enjoyed leading this workshop and the participants were really engaged and wonderful to interact with. A great source of inspiration and thoughts for this project. More to come soon on the topic hopefully.

++ Lovely application of more flexible electronics in the context of pop-up books.

++ Project Infomania, a research project on RIFD and ubiquitous computing in the Netherlands.

++ Pics of the Creative Quarter event at the V&A this fall that introduced children to the creative industries through various workshops. Wish there could have been more hacking!

++ Decode exhibition at the V&A is now on Daniel and Brock went to the opening and will be reporting back shortly.

We’re very proud to announce that we’ll be running a series of workshops at the Victoria and Albert Museum in parallel with the Decode exhibition covering subject areas like Processing, Beginners Arduino, Toy hacking and Smart Clothing (ie Lilypad Arduino!) so sign up quick!

++ Kibu are accepting new artists in residence in Budapest. Sign up, they’re a lovely bunch!

++ Former IDIIers Cute Circuit have made a fabulous Galaxy Dress. _Lots_ of LEDs.

++ Pervasive and Advertising & Shopping conference in 2010 has an interesting programme.

** The problems with attending conferences you don’t quite fit into…is that you don’t quite fit in :) and organisers have a hard time being able to put a value on what you’re talking about because it might appear a little too far away from what people want to hear about. eComm was definitely like that and I got cut off 2 slides from the end of my talk which prevented me from making a point properly, so I thought I’d write about it here instead. **

If “The Internet of Things” is the answer, what is the question?

I’ve been thinking around this subject for a number of years now and I thought I’d try out another meme: The Internet of Stuff. I think the first expression is starting to sound dated and things have changed since I first encountered the phrase circa 2007 that are making me want a new terminology:

- Things is a term we mostly associate with an inanimate object, something we might have at home, in our kitchen or bedroom, something that’s part of our domestic life more often than not. I saw the reaction to the term in a class at Domus Academy when I was teaching there last month. Domesticity has somehow shaped our idea of what a “thing” is supposed to be and maybe that’s too restrictive. I would like to have intelligence, or sentient capability outside the home. I think the term “stuff” can be a little more of a grey area and include the clothes we wear, the park benches we sit on, the services we use.

- We don’t often include our selves and our devices in the “internet of things” and we think about a system that is in isolation to the current technologies that we use. Something for the future. I think that, as Tom and Matt pointed out, we have developed the ability to track ourselves and use our devices to do so, so why shouldn’t that be part of the equation as well. We can be stuff too in other words. Our devices, things and ourselves should be in direct or indirect communication through the Cloud and those things can be Arduino-enabled, RFID enabled, sensors or actuator enabled or passively recognised with semacodes or other low-tech tools.

Moving forward in this space there is tremendous opportunity for flexible systems where we talk to each other directly, through our things, or our devices talk to us through other devices, etc… Flexible systems mean flexible infrastructures on top of large networks, whether they are radio, cell phone, wifi, 3G, wimax, xbee… and that’s why the large tecos should pay attention. Innovation that happens at an initial small scale of a few Arduinos in a space can then start flooding the network with tiny whispers and conversations between myself, my watch, my bathtub, my mom’s cell phone, her chair and everything else in the middle. The tiny chatter of these systems will have to be funneled and managed somehow so that we can expect the same “stability” as the rest of the basic services. Building a business model around that will be another matter entirely and something that the providers will have to figure out hand in hand with the designers of the services.

We’ve just come back from an all hands innovation workshop we ran in Paris last week (should be able to share some of what we did soon) and thought I’d give you an update of where we’ll be in the next few months:

This weekend, Brock Craft will be speaking at LUGRadio Live 2009 in Wolverhampton.

Next week, I’ll be speaking at eComm Europe in Amsterdam while Daniel Soltis will be speaking at Playful 09 in London.

On November 3rd, Massimo will be visiting lecturer at CIID in Copenhagen and will give an open lecture on the Internet of things. On the 6th to the 8th I’ll then be at Post-Flux in Bruxelles.

On December 4th Tinker.it! is co-organising LIFT@Home: Are you ready for the Internet of Things? in Bruxelles and I’ll be there while Daniel speaks at NESTA’s Open Hardware Conference.

Busy busy bees…we’re also working on a strange project that will go Live in November, so watch this space!

Dropped by an evening debate/panel called “Hacking Design : Folly, theft, or a new democratic dawn?” at the RSA. The event was chaired by Scott Burnham, author of a very interesting RSA Design & Society pamphlet on design-hacking that is tantamount to a design hacking manifesto. As an opener, postmodern fashionista Otto van Busch gave an entertaining and amusing overview of how he’s been taking the hacking and DIY culture to the fashion industry. He suggested that hacking culture can be instrumental in overcoming the stranglehold that Fashion Titans have on the industry by getting people to re-envision their relationships to ready-to-wear and cast off clothing (for starters). Karl Lagerfeld, watch out! The large number of fashion students in the audience seemed pretty convinced.

Less convinced were some of the other panel members, including Colin McDowell, fashion editor of The Sunday Times, Paul Thompson, Rector of the Royal College of Art and David Godber, an automotive designer and deputy CEO of the Design Council. Colin argued that design for the masses doesn’t necessarily lead to good design, anything you’d like, or want to buy. The reason for we pay for good design is that someone – probably a design professional – has thought long and hard about creatively solving a design problem. Think Eames Chair, Philippe Starck Jucier, Western Electric Type 500 Telephone. More alarmingly, think Boeing 747, a point I raised in the Q&A. I’m all for hacking but an airplane is not something I want to be hacked.

Actually, I think there’s a place for both: big “D” Design and hacking/DIY/democratised design. The key issue is the social context of the design activity. The Internet has made the Making and Hacking and Open Source communities possible – democratising design activity by easing communication and community building. And tools like Arduino have extended open source to hardware. With more people working on design creativity, more people are learning what’s possible and what design creativity entails. Big “D” Designers and agencies are learning from this activity too, and integrating into their work. We use our innovation workshops to jumpstart this process. Most of the team are in France right now doing this for one of our clients. Feedback has been pretty good. I think it’ll be getting better…

I was invited to speak at Handheld Learning 2009 conference right next to the Barbican. It was heavily focused on education and the ecologies that surround it, in short, really interesting. I was part of the “Creativity and Innovation” strand and talked about the possible inspiration to those education professionals, teachers, buyers of the Arduino platform and how people learn outside of traditional models. Unfortunately I had to dash back to the office as we’re quite busy preparing for a workshop in France next week (one of the problems with local conferences really). Wish I had stayed longer….