Research into RFID and the Internet of Things

The Memorable: Applying the Internet of Things to small communities
Shingleton, D., Sutherland, K.
Edinburgh College of Art

Burke, M., Hudson-Smith, A., Karpovich, A., O’Callaghan, S., Simpson, M., Speed, C., Barthel, R., Blundell, B., De Jode, M., Leder, K., Manohar, M., Lee, C., Macdonald, J.

Abstract
RFID, radio frequency identification, is a technology that is now rapidly being developed by corporations and governments who see the possibilities and advantages of managing large bodies of objects. By seamlessly embedding an RFID chip into an object, it is possible to assign it a unique identification, allowing databases of specific item/location/relationship information to be generated, providing for real-time identification and tracking over the course of its life from cradle to grave.

The use of RFID in conjunction with database technologies allows us to understand a truly ubiquitous network, an Internet of Things, which offers up new possibilities in which our environment becomes a conduit of information transfer between people to people, people to things, and things themselves. This generates a new perspective in the way we view and interact with the Internet. No longer are we outside this mass of information, curating its content in a web 2.0 model of tags, keywords and trackbacks, instead we share the network with objects capable of communicating what they are, and what is going on in the space around them; active members of society, contributing not only to the social web, but also the physical world.
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Glass and RFID Gallery Installation
Karlyn Sutherland and Duncan Shingleton

Proposed is a working concept for an installation which allows an audience to engage with memories and objects central to the identity of a particular community. Lybster, in Caithness, Scotland, was – prior to the decline of the fishing industry in the early twentieth century – famous for being the third biggest herring port in Scotland. Recent times have seen its reinvention as a centre of excellence in glassmaking; the richness of the local environment, community and culture has proved to be inspirational to the visiting artists, with much of the resulting work embodying experience, associations or attachments.

Object, memory and place has the ability to inspire creativity and it is this close relationship, which the work will investigate. The people of Lybster will be invited to donate objects that have a significant meaning and stories attached. This association of memory to object will be recorded through a variety of interactive media and these artefacts will then be passed onto a group of chosen artists. With minimal intervention or guidance, the artists are invited to create work which responses, represents and communicates their feeling towards the area and those artefacts they have selected.

All artists already have a connection with Lybster and its surrounding area, having spent time in residency at North Lands Creative Glass, and we hope the work will build upon this relationship, tying together landscape, people, and object. In this way the creative output of their work not only incubuses the residents of Lybster’s reflection of their surroundings, but also that of the outsider, intertwining their instinctive association with place and identity.

The work produced will then be shown as part of an interactive installation. The audience will be invited to handle the work produced, triggering the original memories that formed the work, projecting into the gallery space. The work will then be returned to Lybster and shown to the people who participated, allowing new associations and interpretation of the relationships that underpin the community, both on a local and national scale.

Duncan Shingleton
Edinburgh College of Art

Appadurai proposes that the circulation of commodities in social life can be summarised in the follow way.  ‘Economic exchange creates value.  Value is embodied in commodities that are exchanged.  Focusing on things that are exchanged, rather than simply on the forms or functions of exchange, makes it possible to argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics.’ (1986, p.3)   Since Marx and the early political economists, there has been little mystery about the relationship between politics and the production of commodities.  Economic models drive forward consumption, where goods follow the traditional teleology of cradle to grave.  This paper poses the question: what economies are created if memory, not politics, becomes the link between exchange and value?

Proust states that ‘consumer goods aren’t really consumed at all – but experienced, either in memory or right now, as key elements of identity itself’ (1927 cited in Kwint, et al., 1999, p.xiii).  In western traditions, objects serve memory in three main ways.  Firstly they furnish recollection; they constitute our picture of the past.  Secondly, objects stimulate remembering, not only through the deployed mnemonics of public monuments or mantelpiece souvenirs, but also by the serendipitous encounter bringing back experience which otherwise would have remained dormant, repressed or forgotten.  Thirdly, objects form records: analogues to living memory, storing information beyond individual experience (Kwint, et al., 1999, p.2).

It is clear that memories are intrinsically linked with objects; time and memory are embodied or encoded in our perception of everyday things.  Draaisma refers to memories as a ‘store of precious items’ (2000, p.2) and like objects they too have a lifetime, part of a persons own cradle to grave cycle.  The advancement of technology from development of writing surfaces, to photography and cinematography, Edison’s phonograph and now a days numerous ‘artificial’ memories assist us in ‘arming ourselves against the transience implicit in the mortality of memory’ (Draaisma, 2000, p.2) by recording what the eye and ear take in.

This paper examines whether the latest advancement of tagging technologies in the manufacturing process, designed to streamline economic supply chains, can unexpectedly become a new platform for memory storage and transform inert objects into vessels that allow for the imprint of experience to be shared over time.  Is this the moment where objects move beyond the material value to their owner, or the corporation that built them, and instead become desirable artefacts that challenge our ideas of value in this consumer society?

References

Appadurai, A., (1986). Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In  A. Appadurai, ed. The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ch. 1.

Kwint, M., Breward, C., Aynsley, J., (1999) Material Memories, Design and Evocation. Oxford: Berg

Draaisma, D., (2000) Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Object centered computing is set to have a profound technological change just as the switch from personal computers to the networked-centered computers was.  Personal computers dealt with the assumption that everything one needed was stored locally.  Networked computers built upon that, assuming everything one needed could be made universally accessible on the internet.  What sort of design interactions will emerge from the assumption that what you need, and with whom you wish to be connected to at the moment, is based on where you are and what is around you?

By having this ability to include anything to Marc Weisers view of anywhere, anytime, always-on communications we add another layer of technology to our environments, one that has the ability to deal with the notion of Place as well as Time and Space.

Malcolm McCullough notes that Places are defined less by unique locations, landscape, and communities than by the focusing of experiences and intention onto particular settings.  Whilst we can speak of the identity of a place, we must also admit identification with place. Place is as much about subjective insideness as objective boundaries.  Physical boundaries may just as easily be the cause or the effect of social and cultural memberships. Spaces lies outside the walls, or outside the social sphere, but the experiences of place, occur inside these seen and unseen boundaries.

Like architecture, interaction design affects how each of us inhabits the physical world.  The internet, and now the internet of things, presents a huge shift from a single home toward a cultural connection with multiple nonhome places.  As our environment offers the possibility for meaningful responses, new forms of interaction occur, and we create truly ubiquitous environments; now we can merge the physical word with the digital world, and our environment becomes a conduit of information transfer between people to people. people to things, and things themselves.

Baudrillard (1996) discuses the capacity for objects to invoke memories within us, that they complexity of this relationship between human on object connoting the ‘emotional value’ objects take on; ‘What gives houses of our childhood such depth and resonance in memory is clearly the complex structure of interiority, and the objects within it serve for us as boundary markers of the symbolic configuration known as home. In their anthropomorphism the objects that furnish it become household gods, spatial incarnations of the emotional bonds and the permanence of the family group’.   He terms these objects technemes, items which consider not only their technical function but also the ideas, values, and fetishes connected to them, and describes them as being in a ‘perpetual flight from technical structure towards their secondary meanings, from technological system towards a cultural system’.

Baudrillard (1996) romanticised that ‘We may dream of arriving at an exhaustive description of technemes and their semantic relations that would cover the entire world of objects, but this inevitably remain just that – a dream.’ However with the advent near-field communications, and a global database of things, it’s possible for us to create an interface that maps his view of objects and our memories.

Baudrillard, Jean (1996) The System of Objects (translated by Benedict, James), Verso London