Tag Archives: totem

Remember Me & RememberUs – TOTeM

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Following the success of RememberMe’s debut incarnation at FutureEverything 2010, TOTeM and Oxfam are joining forces to roll out the project an Internet of Old things nationally. To celebrate, RememberUs hits the Northern Quarter, hijacking Oxfam Emporium and Oxfam Originals on Oldham Street.

This time the team has set up two shops that act as supernatural portals to the Internet of Things. ‘Let go’ of the memories of your favourite things by attaching YouTube or Audioboo clips on to objects in the Oxfam Emporium, and moments later in the Oxfam Originals shop just down the street, people will ‘pick up’ your memory when it is re-associated with another ‘thing’ that they choose buy.

FutureEverything 2011

Remember Me & LettingGo/PickingUp submitted to FutureEverything

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Following the success of Remember Me’s debut incarnation at FutureEverything 2010, TOTeM and Oxfam are joining forces to roll out the project an Internet of Old things nationally. To celebrate, LettingGo/PickingUp
hits the Northern Quarter, hijacking Oxfam Emporium and Oxfam Originals on Oldham Street.

This time the team has set up two shops that act as supernatural portals to the Internet of Things. ‘Let go’ of the memories of your favourite things by attaching YouTube or Audioboo clips on to objects in the Oxfam Emporium, and moments later in the Oxfam Originals shop just down the street, people will ‘Pick up’ your memory when it is re-associated with another ‘thing’ that they choose buy.

The RememberMe and LettingGo/PickingUp project is powered by TOTeM tagging technology and uses the www.talesofthings.com website to allow anybody to attach a memory to a thing, and receive a unique printable tag that they can attach to the object.

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.

Paper submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tagging: Overcoming the Public Fear of Tagging Culture.

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

Abstract

Many people associate tagging with negative situations, for example, to track “criminals” or to track journeys and locations. RFID and other forms of near field tagging are being adopted for logistical purposes by commercial industries and governments alike and the UK public remain fearful of the implications of a tagging culture. This paper reflects upon the extent of “tagging culture” fears and identifies them as a significant problem that is preventing widespread public acceptance of the technology and hampering its social, economic and technical benefits.

As a form of recovery for this dire situation, the authors present information concerning an EPSRC project that uses a fresh tactic to encourage the public to actively use tagging technologies themselves and to reap the benefits. TOTeM (Tales of Things and Electronic Memory) is a three-year funded pan-UK project that focuses on the archiving of people’s memories associated with specific objects. Through the technical development of simple interfaces aimed at the home user, people are encouraged to tell a story about an object, to record the associated memory and to ‘tag’ their object in a unique way that will always associate their memory with their artefact.
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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.