Iteration Three - Preparing for Tom Igoe

Next week Mr. Tom Igoe will be on campus to advance our knowledge in Physical Computing. It has been stressed that we need to present plans for what to do in the short time we have with Mr. Igoe. After Iteration One and Two of the major project we are supposed to have that plan, but that is maybe stretching the the realities a little.

I've had my talks with Timo on the progress of my project and plans for the workshop. I usually like to have a clearly defined goal and a useful purpose for my projects, but in this project i do not have that. After talking to Timo i have realized that it might not be a drawback. So for next week i would like to see if my angles of attack can be synthesized into a working demonstrator of "Use Qualities" (Löwgren and Stolterman), RFID and "The Internet of Things" (Bruce Sterling).



Plan A for the week is to create a setup like this:

Note that i plan to build two identical devices that will exchange information. This will enable me to experiment with communication between standalone objects and also experiment with several types of interaction around this situation (Object, Master Object and People). One thing i hope to achieve is a system that can test various qualities in user interaction with a system. By making the system generic i hope that the interaction will have a strong focus.

Apart from the actual electronics the task is about using this framework to create (in software and hardware) ways to motivate people into using it and give them reasonable results. By just using rfid tagged objects and light/sound feedback i will have a limited but hopefully big enough framework for working with the interactions.

References
This project by HC Gilje i found resembles what i want to do, but it focuses on hooking up RFID through Bluetooth with Max/MSP.

Then we have the book by Tom Igoe: "Making Things Talk" (Igoe, 2007) that describes several projects in this area. It is going to be useful and add to what knowledge we can squeeze out of him in just a week.

I will try to find more reference projects so that i can aim my effort a bit better. There are a lot of projects that involve RFID and Networking, but i have not found the projects that focus more on the qualities involved in interactions.

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