Tinker it now!

++ 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.

++ 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.

++ Nice BBC Technology article on the growth of open source. They’ve also written about whether programming skills will become essential on the market and covered the latest Dorkbot event.

++ Dave Mellis, main software developer on the Arduino team, gave a talk at Reboot11 a design conference in Copenhagen last week on “Making money from open source hardware”. He was kind enough to mention Tinker.it! in his talk as well!

++ Violet, founders of the Nabaztag rabbit are coming out soon with Dal:dal a sort of ambiant web connected orb, not unlike the one from Ambient devices.

++ TInker.it!’s frequent collaborator John Nussey has just completed a series of multitouch tables for London College of Fashion end of year show. It’s on till end of July, go check it out if you’re around Oxford Circus.

Went to the ever so popular and sweaty Royal College of Art Final show and thought the Design Products course in particular had some fabulous work. Worth seeing for yourself:

- Trace of Time project by Il-Gu Cha
- Beautiful Musical typewriter project (I had wanted to make that for so long!) called “Typing the Sound” by Fabien Capello.
- Beautiful and poetic windmill hooked up to an oldmechanical knitting machine by Merel Karhof
- Really interesting fabrics and furniture by Giles Miller.
- Wonderful interface and mobile project about fruit-bearing trees in London landscape by Vahakn Matossian.
- Finally an absolute must-see was the installation by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez in a small corner with nature-inspired glass capsules filled with blue ink dripping on a paper landscape depending on the level of activity around it.

Lots to see and now that the private view is over, you might possibly even manage to breathe! It’s on till the 6th, so go West and see it all…

We’re very happy to announce a really lovely collaboration with the very popular dConstruct conference in Brighton on September 2nd in running a really intense one day Master Class on the “Internet of Things”, going beyond the theory and getting programmers and web developers to actually learn the hard skills they will want to use to build the devices and environments of the future.

In this one day, we’ve merged the knowledge you might acquire from 4 of our traditional workshops: Beginners Arduino, RFID, Xbee and Ethernet and Arduino with some inspirational material thrown in the mix as I’ve been thinking and speaking about the Internet of Things for a number of years now. All materials will be provided for you to take home.

We’re also super excited to have Matt Biddulph come and teach the second half of the day dedicated to Ethernet and Arduino. Matt came in to run a 2 day workshop last year and great things came out of it.

Have a look at the schedule. Tickets go on sale on June 22nd.

Hope you’ll join us!

It seems that the energy monitoring stuff has been taking off lately so I thought I’d collate all the projects we know about this space here:

++ Future Currents project by the design council in 2005 around home energy efficiency (disclaimer: I worked on this)

++ Holmes is the software interface that goes with the very stylish Wattson home energy monitor designed by DIY Kyoto.

++ Nicholas O’Leary from IBM monitors his energy use with an Orb and got it to talk to the MQTT protocol.

++ Richard Parker built a gaz meter connected to Arduino and posted up the documentation (very thorough).

++ Pachube has of course been the platform of choice for publishing and sharing energy consumption data.

++ Adrian McEwen from the Bubblino project also built a mains power meter using a Lava lamp.

++ OpenSpime has become Widetag which as a “social energy meter”.

++ Open Energy Monitor project by Trystan Lea

We’ve had the very great pleasure of finishing a lovely piece of work for St Paul’s School for Boys for their 500th anniversary last weekend. Their very prestigious establishment has several technology departments who work on electronics, motors, and other great design and technology related projects. We were asked to come up with an installation that would communicate the power of all these technologies and the internet to a crowd mainly composed of parents, students and benefactors of the school. Thus the Centograph was born.

The Centograph is a physical representation of virtual information, uses today’s technologies to encourage viewers to reflect on the past.

When you enter a search term into the computer, Centograph queries the Google News Archive for a list of related news articles over the past 100 years. The archive returns a timeline of articles sorted according to date. The bars on the graph then change height to display a histogram of the relative number of news articles for each decade.

This allows you to view the ‘shape’ of the past century in relation to different topics—from progression in computing technology to times of war and peace to changing sources of energy, to name a few possibilities.

We additionally hooked up all searches made to Twitter which produced a really interesting feed.

This installation is now a permanent asset to the ICT department of St Paul’s so if you go and visit, be sure to try it out!

VIDEO COMING SOON!

++ We’ve very sorry to see the guys from Physical Interaction Lab have closed shop :(((

++ Fabulous geek and maker videos with Fat Man and Circuit Girl.

++ Interesting new lighting product from Lumiblade

++ Nice use of materials like wax and lighting by Parsons student Myriam Aboukhater.

++ On the Personal Informatics end of the spectrum, Christian Nold is launching his book called Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self

“Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers,
cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to
explore the political, social and cultural implications of visulising intimate biometric data and
emotional experiences using technology.”

++ David Hayward’s addressable milk bottles kinda reminds me of the classic Droog milk bottle chandelier, but with a twist.

++ Watch 11 year old kids learning about Arduino through stuffed toys!

++ Beautiful actuators-based sculptures by Choe U Ram. Check out the videos.

++ Interesting conference called I Realise in Torino this June that includes a whole track called “I Move & Interact”.

++ Tweenbots is the brainchild of ITP student Kacie Kinzer and I’m totally in love with it.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.