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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

The Memory Economy: Revaluing everyday objects

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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 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

Objects as Devices for Memory Storage

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Can smarty objects transfer the agency of memory storage away from the person and instead, in an automated process of continual information capture and storage, provide a new memory repository that supports, relieves and occasionally replaces natural memory?

Draaisma (2000) provides us with a metaphor of memory as objects, referring to memories as a‘store of precious items’.  Like objects they too have a lifetime, part of a persons own cradle to grave cycle, where death erases memory in but a moment.  The advancement of technology has assisted us in ‘arming ourselves against the transience implicit in the mortality of memory by developing artificial memories’ (Daaisma 2000).  The development of writing surfaces, from clay or wax tablets, to parchment and vellum, and later on paper, provided the oldest of memory aids, not only accommodating natural language but also drawings of all kinds.  Photography allowed for images to be directly recorded and the invention of cinematography meant moving images could also be captured.  The preservation of sound became a reality through Edison’s phonograph, and now a days numerous ‘artificial’ memories from MP3, DVD and computer memories are available to record what the eye and ear take in.  ‘Image and sound are transportable in space and time, they are repeatable, reproducible, on a scale that seem inconceivable a century ago… our views of the operation of memory are fuelled by the procedures and techniques we have invented for the preservation and reproduction of information (Draaisma 2000).

However the Internet of Things not only has the capacity to serve as an interface for human memory storage, it can store the memory of the object itself.  Sterling (2005) terms these objects Spimes, made possible through the convergence of emerging technologies, related to both the manufacturing process for consumer goods, and through identification and location technologies.  Technologies that allow us track the entire existence of an object, from before it was made (its virtual representation), through its manufacture, its ownership history, its physical location, until its eventual obsolescence and breaking-down back into raw material to be used for new instantiations of objects.  These objects when recorded can be archived and searched for, as databases of specific item/location/relationship information which track the lifetime of an object through space and time are generated.

Draaisma, Douwe (2000) Metaphors of Memory, Cambridge University Press,  Cambridge

Sterling, Bruce (2005) Shaping Things, Cambridge: MIT Press

PhD Studentship

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I have been successful in my application for the TOTeM studentship at the Edinburgh College of Art, and I’m in the very fortunate position of receiving funding from the EPSRC for the 3 year full time PhD, which I will start in September.

ECA Studentship Research Proposal

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Research proposals are invited from applicants who have an interest in undertaking a practice-based PhD to examine to focus upon the implications of memory objects on architectural design. The research programme will establish theoretical and practical methodologies for the consideration of new spaces in the context of TOTeM.

I have submitted an application for the PhD studentship at the Edinburgh College of Art.  The research context directly relates to my undergraduate studies, and means I would be working alongside my former final year project supervisor Chris Speed.

Based upon the experiences gained over the course of my degree I’d like to extend my enquiry into architectural, social and environmental questions, and research the emerging space where objects move beyond inert items, into artefacts that have the genuine ability to be unique not only in their own right, but also to the people who own and cohabit with them.