Tag Archives: internet of things

Paper Submitted to ISEA 2011

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Object Geography: The Internet of Things
Duncan Shingleton
Download: Object Geography: The Internet of Things

The emerging phenomenon known as the Internet of Things (IOT) refers to the technical and cultural shift anticipated as society moves towards a ubiquitous form of computing that facilitates the connection of everyday objects and devices to all kinds of networks. The analog bar code that has for so long been a dumb, encrypted reference to a shop’s inventory system will be superseded by an open platform in which every object manufactured will be traceable from producer to distributor, and potentially every single person who comes into contact with it following its purchase. Furthermore, every object that comes close to another object and is within range of a reader could also be logged on a database and used to find correlations between owners and applications.

The Internet of Things creates a link between concrete objects and abstract data, producing a hybrid of physical and electronic spaces that enables communication and interaction between people and things, and things themselves. It is an all-encompassing framework to reflect on and design towards more digital connectivity, a system that is local and global, accessible in real-time from any location. Through item based tagging and identification, the Internet of Things will take ubiquitous computing – anytime and anywhere communications – to the next step in networking: ‘anything communications’. However the Internet of Things is at risk of simply becoming a platform whose primary benefit is to offer improved indexing and tracking of manufactured consumer goods from cradle to grave. Therefore this paper aims to re-contextualize the Internet of Things, and explore theory relating to the attachment of data to an object, and as a result the role objects might have in our networks.
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Abstract submitted to Fibreculture

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Emergent Network
Duncan Shingleton

The emerging phenomenon known as the Internet of Things refers to the technical and cultural shift anticipated as society moves towards a ubiquitous form of computing that facilitates the connection of everyday objects and devices to all kinds of networks. The Internet of Things creates a link between concrete objects and abstract data, producing a hybrid of physical and electronic spaces, which enables communication and interaction between people and things, and things themselves. However the Internet of Things, resulting through the convergence of identification and location technologies, is at risk of simply becoming a platform whose primary benefit is to offer improved indexing and tracking of manufactured consumer goods from cradle to grave; through manufacturer to distributor, to potentially every single person who comes in to contact with it following its purchase.

Through the combination of theory relating to Ubiquitous Computing, Human Geography, Actor-Network Theory, Semiotics and Emergence, the author aims to re-contextualise the Internet of Things, arguing how objects endowed with informational shadows can create a new layer of complex relationships that were previously not visible in our networks. Networks will be constructed, destructed and transformed by the pattern of interactions represented by how people to people, people to things, and things themselves are interconnected. As objects are treated like code, the messages they encode will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed, allowing the Internet of things to provide the meta-data that enables clusters of data to self-organize. The Internet of Things will be the central warehouse and marketplace for all our patterns of mediated behaviour, and instead of those patterns being restricted to the invisible gaze of corporations, people will be able to tap into that pool themselves to create communal maps of all the data online. The data we wish to access will be assembled via the web out of an unthinkable number of isolated decisions created by agents both human and non human.

Abstract submitted to ISEA 2011

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Object Geography: The Internet of Things
Duncan Shingleton

The emerging phenomenon known as the Internet of Things refers to the technical and cultural shift anticipated as society moves towards a ubiquitous form of computing that facilitates the connection of everyday objects and devices to all kinds of networks. The Internet of Things creates a link between concrete objects and abstract data, producing a hybrid of physical and electronic spaces, which enables communication and interaction between people and things, and things themselves. However the Internet of Things, resulting through the convergence of identification and location technologies, is at risk of simply becoming a platform whose primary benefit is to offer improved indexing and tracking of manufactured consumer goods from cradle to grave; through manufacturer to distributor, to potentially every single person who comes in to contact with it following its purchase.

Through the combination of digital art practice and theory relating to Human Geography and Actor-Network Theory, the author aims to re-contextualise the Internet of Things, arguing how objects endowed with informational shadows could create a new layer of complex relationships that were previously not visible in our networks. This in turn could allow us to rethink our understanding of the structure and agency of a network, by examining the pattern of interactions represented by how people to people, people to things, and things themselves are connected to one another. Networking objects means we could possibly gain new insights into how we make places, how we organize space and society, how we interact with each other in places and across space and time, and how we make sense of others and ourselves in our locality, region, and world. The Internet of Things may well provide a possible framework that not only allows human agents, but also object agents to play constructive as well as destructive and transformative roles in the social production of space.

MPhil/Phd Transfer Report submitted for Examination

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Geography of the Internet of Things:
Objects as agents in the social production of space

The field of human geography focuses on ‘how we make places, how we organize space and society, how we interact with each other in places and across space, and how we make sense of others and ourselves in our locality, region, and world’. In the study of human geography we are constantly reminded of how people shape their world and of how people and places vary across time and space. Places are constantly changing and people are responsible for these changes. People create cultures, values, aesthetics, politics, economics and more, and each of these affects and shapes places (Fouberg, et al. 2010).

Objects already play a unique role in our social networks and have strong ties to identity and memory (Draaisma 2000; Henare et al. 2007; Hoskins 1998; Kwint et al. 1999; Miller 2008; Turkle 2007), space (Baudrillard 1996; Bollas 2009) and value (Appadurai 1986). Within all of these contexts a human agent is required to locate the object within a network and imbue or interpret any agency it might have. Through new technologies being introduced as part of the development in the manufacturing of objects, we can begin to see a technological framework that offers a potential for objects to express their own agency (relating to both Actor-Network Theory and Networked Objects) and become a significant actor in a network.

The thesis will focus on how the technological and cultural shift in ubiquitous computing, known as the Internet of Things, will change our understanding of an object’s role in the composition of a network. Through examining the Internet of Things in combination with Actor-Network Theory and Human Geography, this author will argue how objects that have data shadows will contribute to the social, economic and environmental production of space.

The main research question is:

To what extent can the technological and cultural shift in ubiquitous computing, known as the Internet of Things, provide new insights into how objects that have informational shadows can contribute to the social production of space?

In a more detailed way, the research will also answer the following sub questions:

• How can actors be identified and viewed in the field of the Internet of Things?
• What affect will an Internet of Things have on the structure, agency and pattern of a network?
• If the Internet of Things means a network can be understood as being constructed by people and objects, how does the Internet of Things affect the production of time-space and place?
• How does the Internet of Things allow objects to aid human interpretation of social relationships, and allow objects to produce emergent interpretations of their own?

Download: Transfer Report

RememberMe presented at FutureEverything 2010

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12 May – 15 May 2010, Oxfam, Manchester

The RememberMe artwork is a collaborative project with the Oxfam shop, near Contact Theatre. Leading up to FutureEverything, a research assistant will be based in the shop and recording brief stories about the donated objects into a microphone: where they acquired it, the memories attached and any associated stories. This audio clip will be linked to an RFID tag and QR code.

During FutureEeverything all tagged items will then join the shop’s stock. Customers, including conference delegates, will be invited to use our bespoke RFID readers, or their own smart phone to browse artifacts, displayed amongst the many thousands of other objects.

Once triggered, RememberMe labeled objects, will replay the story through speakers located in the shop, evoking ghosts of the past. Tagged objects will be in the public domain for purchase by other members of the community. Our iPhone and Android apps will allow them to access the story for years to come.

FutureEverything delegates are encouraged to bring something to the conference to donate to Oxfam, and to record a story with it.

The project is developed by the TOTeM project, a UKRC Digital Economy funded project to explore the social potential of the Internet of Things.

Visit: RememberMe, FutureEverything 2010
Watch: Video of RememberMe at FutureEverything

Short Paper submitted to Web Studies Congress 2010

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

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.

Object Centered Computing and Architecture

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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.

A Memory Object’s Implications on Identity

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Geser (2002) theorises that the deliberate linkage of the physical world with the virtual world through RFID tags and sensors, will lead to a further “permeability” between the public and private contexts expanding traditional physical spaces, through the creation of “virtual communication” spaces. As we become part of the global network, we are no longer alone and instead we share our daily lives with smart objects, capable of contributing information our environment in the same way we do, and participating in the conversations that were previously off-limits to them.  ‘As communications between people, clothes, pens, furniture and applications increase, human beings will have fewer and fewer tedious routine tasks, with computing and processing occurring unnoticed in the background’ (Bohn 2004).  Does this mean that RFID is simply to be viewed as another sousveillance technology?  As the enabling technologies become more widespread and pervasive, the principle of requesting individual consent every time a person enters into contact with a new data-collecting device becomes outdated and unrealistic.  ‘This data collection facilitates personal identification, but at the same time makes it difficult for individuals control the blurring boundary between the public and private spheres, and to determine who can access his/her private sphere and under what conditions’ (Stalder 2002).

Immersed in a ubiquitous environment saturated with RFID tags and readers, do humans and objects simply become blank fields in a database, waiting to be filled in? ‘RFID is a strange space’, since it’s use will lead to three results: ‘there will be no more public space; there will be no more memory loss and there will be no more people, just dataclouds’. Kranenburg, Rob van (Mediamatic conference 2006)

Geser, H (2002) Sociology of the Mobile Phone, Zurich: University of Zurich

Stalder, Felix (2002) “The voiding of Privacy”, Sociological Research Online, Vol 7, No 2 [online] Available http://felix.openflows.com/html/FS_Voiding_of_privacy.pdf [date accessed: 23 September 2009]

Bohn J, Coroama V, Langheinrich M, Mattern F & Rohs M (2004) Social, Economic and Ethical Implications of Ambient Intelligence and Ubiquitous Computing, Institute for Pervasive Computing, ETH: Zurich

Objects as Memory Artifacts

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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