NEW DESIGN FUTURES WITH RFID CHIPS
Pioneering research group Touch is reformatting our understanding of RFID chips and breaking creative boundaries in
Touch, a research group based a the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, have been up to some interesting tricks with RFID chips. Working at the interface of object design and innovative tech applications the group has been investigating the possibilities of near field communication, a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things.
The interdisciplinary team have collaborated to share specialist knowledge in industrial design, prototyping and software to explore the ways in which RFID chips embedded in physical objects (from children's toys to wooden bowls) can facilitate new interactions between users and the products that make up their daily experience.
Having stumbled across the group's work online we got in touch with project leader, Timo Arnell, to find out more. He gives his thoughts on the project so far below.
Radio Frequency IDentification (or RFID) is a humble technology that is slowly emerging into our everyday lives. They're already in Oyster cards (travel passes), passports, drivers licences and hotel keys. RFID appears mundane, affecting us in small ways, touching in and out of the metro, opening a hotel room door, tracking a parcel from DHL. But RFID is a creeping infestation, there are over 4 billion RFIDs in the world, and the technology sprawls silently into new areas of everyday life. RFID fields are weird, flirtatious, pregnant with interaction, unknowable and to some people sinister.
Touch is a three year research project led by Timo Arnall that investigates this complex and sometimes controversial technology through interaction and product design. Timo approached the design studio BERG to explore the technology from new perspectives by designing playful, creative toys, concepting new kinds of services, to engaging with the discussion concerning invisibility and ubiquity of wireless interfaces that can track our everyday activities.
The focus has been on visualising the nature of the technology through speculative design work, and the project has mainly used film, motion graphics and new techniques of 'video diagramming' to communicate to an online audience. How do you design interactions for something invisible? The work intends to help designers who work with the technology to understand it as a material; offer playful handles for writers and futurists to describe and frame the space and for the public to form mental models that are more vivid and explorative than just Oyster cards or 'digital wallets'.
There has been constant refinement of the production techniques not only to convey designed objects and their surroundings evocatively, but also the invisible layers of interchange and interaction that are increasingly both digital and physical. It turns out that contemporary cinematic techniques such as motion tracking, match moving and the integration of video with 3D motion graphics are ideal tools for visualising, prototyping and communicating about ubiquitous technology.
BERG and Touch have built rigs, props and techniques to prod, examine and dissect the immaterial - revealing properties in radio chips buried-deep-within or just plain omitted from manufacturers engineering data sheets. This process can reveal both useful material for designers to work into new products and services, but also the kind of quietly poetic moments that capture the imagination of an audience.
It is vitally important as designers working with new technology to create these moments. Arthur C. Clarke defined magic as 'sufficiently-advanced technology'. Creating a glimpse of a possible future that is sufficiently-advanced creates a demand that manufacturers and makers like ourselves will have to satisfy. It's good to set that bar.
It's also vitally important to make these visions from possible futures in order to create debate and criticism of the technology before it arrives fully-formed. The more resonant we can make this future evidence, the better the dialogue between designers and the public about technologies like RFID will be.
