the internet of things | Are you ready for the Internet of Things?

The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID Cities across the world are about to enter the next phase of their development. A near invisible network of radio frequency identification tags (RFID) is being deployed on almost every type of consumer item. These tiny, traceable chips, which can be scanned wirelessly, are being produced in their billions and are capable of being connected to the internet in an instant. This so-called ‘Ambient intelligence’ promises to createa global network of physical objects every bit as pervasive and ubiquitous as the worldwide web itself. Read more	What is it? The Internet of Things; imagine a world where everything can be both analogue and digitally approached - reformulates our relationship with objects – things- as well as the objects themselves. Any object that carries an RFID tag relates not only to you, but also through being read by a RFID reader nearby, to other objects, relations or values in a database. In this world, you are no longer alone, anywhere. It holds dangers, but it also holds promises. Read more	RFID, where are we in its development? RFID technology is at a crucial point, in terms of standards and policies, regulations and deployment and services. As technology becomes ever more deeply embedded in everyday life and the experienced economies, it can no longer see design as a front-end tool, nor as a social and cultural issues as a sphere that has to mold itself around new technologies. On the contrary, as we see so clearly with RFID one has to hardcode these issues into the systems architecture and see them not as problems, not as drawbacks but as challenges to overcome at all levels of a successful introduction of new technologies. We need to move to debate further from this seemingly deadlocked polarised state it appears we are at now. Read more
RFID Security and Privacy Lounge The RFID Security and Privacy Lounge references "technical works related to security and privacy in RFID systems published in journals, conference proceedings, technical reports, thesis, eprints, and books."Read more	James Early says: "We need proactive engagement." The urgency for still very progressively conscious people all over the world to engage/invade and influence these "third-space" surveillance and trend-setting communication technologies towards transformative democratic, and just life-sustaining "prosthesis" of our minds and spirits is pressing. Read more	Automatic blogging during media viewing Send in by Isaac Mao: "A method, system and apparatus provide for automatic blogging of media viewing using an enhanced remote controller having networking capabilities that support social networking and blogging."Read more
The Mobile City Martijn de Waal & Michiel de Lange have started a special project on The Mobile City weblog in which they review new books on urban culture and new media.Read more	Everyware The age of ubiquitous computing is here: a computing without computers, where information processing has diffused into everyday life, and virtually disappeared from view. What does this mean to those of us who will be encountering it? How will it transform our lives? And how will we learn to make wise decisions about something so hard to see?Read more	Where does all the trash go? From the New York Times: "Karin Landsberg, 42, a self-described “eco-geek” in Seattle, was so curious that she invited researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into her home last month to fish 12 items out of her garbage and recycling bins — a can of beans, a compact fluorescent light bulb — and tag them with small electronic tracking devices. Her trash is now on its journey to the place where it goes to die or be reborn.Read more
Ambient Connectivity In his lecture Taking Internet connectivity to the next stage Bob Frankston says: "The Internet was designed as a solution to the pragmatic problem of exchanging messages between two end points without depending on any particular services in the middle. The result has been a phenomenon that has had a major effect on society. We've been able to focus on the problems we are trying to solve without being mired in the details of merely exchange the bits. Read more	Cities and Computers: Their Architecture In Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium, Forrest Warthman and Martin Morf talk about: "City architecture and computer architecture have many similarities in their form and function--how they are physically built, how their parts connect, and how these connected parts operate. Read more	Netless keywords: permission-less, net-less, parasitic network, off-line data-sharing, city-net, WAN, othernet, decentralized, node-network, sneakernet, sensor-network, grassroots-network, wirelessRead more
Sentient Rotterdam Workshop with Mark Shepard & The Mobile City Nov 6th Computing has left the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city. Information processing is increasingly embedded in the material fabric of everyday urban space. We approach an age of urban information systems capable of sensing and responding to events and activities transpiring around them. Read more	Interface Fantasy, A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology, by André Nusselder Cyberspace is first and foremost a mental space. Therefore we need to take a psychological approach to understand our experiences in it. In Interface Fantasy, André Nusselder uses the core psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to examine our relationship to computers and digital technology. Lacanian psychoanalysis considers fantasy to be an indispensable "screen" for our interaction with the outside world; Nusselder argues that, at the mental level, computer screens and other human-computer interfaces incorporate this function of fantasy: they mediate the real and the virtual.Read more	Percussa to launch AudioCubes workshops for audiovisual artists AudioCubes designer Bert Schiettecatte will be hosting a series of one day workshops at his private workspace, for a select number of artists, starting November 10th 2009. The workshops are titled "Audio Cubes: Tangible Interface for Audiovisual Creation" and are about exploring the possibilities of tangible interfaces for audiovisual artwork, in particular in sound design, music composition and live performance. Read more

Joy Tang

Joy Tang is the Founder of oneVillage Foundation, a global nonprofit organization using innovative approach to deliver the power of technology and information to people in the developing countries, giving them valuable tools for building better lives. She is active in sustainable education and development, promotion of indigenous culture heritage, creation of ecotourism as social enterprise and designing appropriate information and communication technology (ICT) devices and solutions to facilitate collaboration and learning.

Technology and Agency

Gill Wildman

Gill is a Director at Plot, and has been quietly exploring the softer side of the Internet Of Things, through research, film making, designing and developing and facilitating workshop interventions with industry. This includes an interactionary in 2005 around the affordances of RFID, a workshop for companies "The Elephant in the Room: Bringing Innovation into RFID Applications, presenting RFID in supporting everyday life situations. In 2006, she took her film, Everyday Intelligence, to the annual RFID industry forum to provoke discussion about how people then felt about these technologies, what they wanted, and most importantly, what they didn't. Since 2008, she has been working on a joint Plot and BDH project as a part of the Sandbox Media initiative. Here she has been exploring the delicate challenge of being able to support people being happy using pervasive media.

Plot

Jonah Brucker-Cohen

Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist, and Ph.D. candidate as an HEA MMRP (Multimedia Research Programme) fellow in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is an adjunct assistant professor of communications at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). He worked as an R&D OpenLab Fellow at Eyebeam in NYC from 2006/7. From 2001-4 he was a Research Fellow in the Human Connectedness Group at Media Lab Europe. He received his Masters from ITP in 1999 and was an Interval Research Fellow from 1999-2001. His work and thesis focuses on the theme of "Deconstructing Networks" which includes projects that attempt to critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience.

Scrapyard Challenges

User login