you tag ( broadcast ON yourself )

By: Hulya Aktun
Thesis Advisor: Alison Cornyn
Submitted to: Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Professional Studies at New York University, May 2009
ABSTRACT

You Tag is a proposal and a prototype for a participatory art/design experiment that explores frivolous and self-expressive applications of RFID tagging and Near Field Communication Technologies. It is an unmediated channel through which participants can broadcast their artwork ON their personal belongings and other city objects by digitally tagging the most precious private property of other busy city dwellers: the cell phone. You Tag consists of smart stickers embedded with RFID tags that link to collections of artwork that reside remotely in a database. If a cell phone with an RFID reader comes into close proximity to one of these stickers, the associated artwork will appear on the cell phone screen. This project draws on street art and graffiti and introduces a mobile and situational aspect, in hopes to use art and technology as an intervention into our daily routines in a society based on puritanical values and work ethics.

In terms of its collection, representation, viral distribution and participation model, the serendipitous interaction mode enabled by the proposed technology and the type of media content, You Tag encourages free play and activism around issues coerced by society and repressed by other mechanisms. Could design aim for more than productivity and efficiency? Could the Internet of Things enable new media distribution and publishing methods? What types of interactions and culture would be produced by the anonymous and situational exchange enabled by this technology?

This paper includes an overview of the You Tag concept and its components, detailed information on the
architecture of the system and its entities, the interaction model behind the platform, the overall user experience and possible scenarios, a survey of relevant projects using similar technologies, the proposed technology and its current test applications, discussion of the working prototype of the platform with initial content collected under an open-ended curatorial model, and finally the challenges to completing functional implementation as well as future scenarios.

Keywords
RFID, Near Field Communication, cell phone as artistic platform, media distribution, interaction design research, collective and participatory storytelling, non-linear narrative, smart objects, tagging, street art, mobile art, situation, subversion, play.

I. INTRODUCTION

I.A. OVERVIEW OF PLATFORM

You Tag exists on various platforms with several different entry points to each. The project’s flow and process consists of several stages that intertwine with one another and are not clearly distinguishable. These stages involve the collection and storage of media content from initial contributors and other participants in later stages; the distribution, sharing and representation of artworks in physical and digital formats.


Figure 1 : You Tag flow diagram

I.B. OVERVIEW OF COMPONENTS OF PLATFORM

You Tag requires four major components for its existence: stickers packs that contain smart stickers, a cell phone with an RFID reader and internet connection, a collection of artworks that reside on a database and a situation without which none of the rest would come to reveal anything.

Sticker packs:

Sticker packs are episodic: they are periodically released and distributed around the city and each episode has an open-ended theme. The packs contain a collection of stickers that link to artwork around this theme. These initial packs of collections are the results of collaborations with contributor organizations/groups relevant to the theme.

Each sticker pack contains several stickers, information about themselves, their content and You Tag project in general. The last RFID embedded sticker in each pack is not associated with any artwork so that the recipient can use it to create and contribute their own media content to the larger storytelling experience.

Figure 2: Concept Diagram (overview of components)

Smart Stickers:

Stickers are smart because they are embedded with RFID tags that link to remotely stored content on a database. Once a cell phone with an RFID reader (or any RFID reader enabled device) comes into close proximity with a sticker, one can access the relevant content. Stickers can be placed on fixed objects in the city such as doors, turnstiles, billboards, etc. or on mobile objects such as a purse, a laptop, a skateboard, a keychain, a wallet, etc. You Tag encourages mobile object usage, as this does not add to the visual litter in the urban environment and damage the public space.

The database that hosts the collection of artworks:

The artworks reside on a website. The website hosts information about the project, the collection of artworks available for view, as well as a simple form for those who would like to participate in the project by uploading their artwork and associating it with their sticker. Collection of artworks are not archived; they are updated with the release of each episode. Future iterations might include a function for ordering of a toolkit that would include detailed instructions on how one can make their own stickers and unlimited access to all episodes and user-generated content. This toolkit might also be a smart object that will let the owner if new updates or contributions
have been made to the collection.

Cell phone with an RFID reader and internet connection:

In order to view any of the artworks, a cell phone with an RFID reader and wi-fi connection is required. Some cell phones with RFID readers are commercially available. There are also supplemental gadgets that turn every cell phone into an RFID reader.

The situation:

Central to the project is a situation. Without this event, no other component of the platform would come together to reveal anything. It is the absence and presence of these situations that realizes You Tag.
A situation in You Tag’s case is the close encounter of a smart sticker with an RFID enabled cell phone.

Others:

Other components that play a part in the system are people who have created works in the database, curiosity or a willingness to stop one’s paranoia and divert one’s mission from point A to point B for a minute or two.

II. DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS OF THE COMPONENTS AND THE FIRST PROTOTYPE

II.A. FIRST STICKER PACK AND ITS CONTENTS

Sticker packs are quasi-starting points; the results of the first part of the Collection stage (inital curated content.) They are periodically released as episodes with an open-ended theme and are distributed around the city for free. Each pack contains information on the episode it belongs to, links to the collaborators and contributors of the content and several stickers that link to content on the database, which can be viewed (ideally) on a cell phone or on a computer.

Figure 3 - distributed sticker packs

II.A.1. DIGITAL CONTENT AND FIRST COLLECTION

For the prototype, the first episode in the series is called ‘free play.’
Subject: the collective subconscious and the repressed childlike-nature of the city and hypermodern society at large.

Contributors: Skatistan, kids aged 7-12 from Kabul, Afghanistan

We have chosen to live in a culture based on protestant work ethics, where there is a clear binary distinction between work and play; a deterministic culture that believes the advance of humanity lies solely in industrial and technological progress. In the field of design, we aim for maximum productivity but we never stop to ask: Do these resulting efficient systems add to our leisure time to allow us a more ludic life experience, or do they save us just enough time to stick in yet another quick work task? Play and the irrational are not very welcome unless they are highly systematized or experienced in the form of dehumanizing games where we have missions that need to be fulfilled on the way from point A to point B; no drifting, no reverie. Can play and the geist of childhood survive under these circumstances?

An extreme visual trope that illustrates a positive answer to this question is of the kids who keep playing despite the harshest conditions, kids who reclaim spaces damaged by war and global conflict as their ‘play place.’ Kids from Kabul, Afghanistan have depicted what play, skating and life means to them in drawings for the first prototype. What if these drawings and other images of play and childhood haunted the city dweller, fused into her life in unexpected situations?..

The memes of a ‘global village’ or each of us being a node on a ‘giant connected network’ are arrogant and utopian at best. Most issues and people are underrepresented and have weaker connections, if connected at all. Could new media’s role be to connect those who are not, to those who are ‘connected?’ Could this type of publishing and media distribution be applied to encourage active political and cultural engagement? To create awareness of underrepresented populations in the network and foster real opportunities for them?

II.A.2. PHYSICAL CONTENTS OF STICKER PACK

Figure 4: contents of pack

Once a person finds a pack and looks through it, she can find out about the platform, the stickers, their content and how to make one of her own and contribute to the experience. At this point,
* she can go to the website or view the content if she has a cell phone with an RFID reader;
* she can grab the pack, keep the stickers, give it to her friends, stick it here and there;
* create her own media and use the empty sticker to broadcast her content.

II.B. WEBSITE / DATABASE

The website is not designed to exist as the central part of the platform. It merely allows participation and functions as a database. There are three things one can do on the website: learn about the project, view other works and upload the content s/he created. Some screenshots below illustrate the pages where you can accomplish these activities:

Figure 5 : website screenshots

Uploading a file is very simple. The contributor has to change the file name to the unique ID on the sticker. Once the file is uploaded, she will get confirmation that her media is ready for broadcast; in other words, the file and the sticker have been associated. The website for the prototype currently accepts only images; however, this could be extended to other media formats in the future.

II.C. STICKERS

Stickers are tags for collection content. They serve as a link between people who have a story and those who have time to “listen…” Stickers have been used as a form of self expression in various ways in the past. They can be found in abundance in the history of pop culture; on personal belongings such as people’s backpacks, notebooks, etc. as a form of self-expression. They are also a widely practiced form of street art.

Figure 6 : sticker / cell phone interaction diagram

Whenever there is a passer-by with an RFID cell phone, the embedded passive RFID tag in the sticker is activated. Once the tag is activated, the owner of the cell phone gets the content delivered to her cell phone and can choose to view the work and information about where it came from, go to the website, send it to others, etc. The interaction is meant to be intrusive rather than user-centered. Intrusive, in this case, still does not mean pushing content the user did not choose to get but rather that the first step in the interaction is not initiated by the user if she has chosen to leave the tag detection on her phone on. The content informs the user that it is there. Then, the user can choose to accept or decline it.

The stickers turn every object they are placed on into a smart object. They can be proudly displayed or hidden away. RFID tags do not need to be visible in order to be detected. In You Tag’s case, tagging is not about identity. We live in a time when everybody is already famous. Tags do not stand for people but rather ideas and the collective action of people with similar ideals and interests. The icon is reappropriated from existing icons and signage and is reminiscent of graffiti, broadcasting, wireless, RFID tags, activism, danger fields. It represents what might be a collective of artworks that exist on an unmediated channel.

The example sticker from the first prototype has an RFID tag in it. On the front, it has the logo and a unique ID that corresponds to a single artwork. There are two types of stickers: those that belong to the initial collection and those that belong to whoever finds it. Depending on the type, the stickers will have relevant information and instructions on their backs.

Figure 7 : (left) front side of prototype sticker, (middle and right) back sides of prototype stickers

II.D. SITUATIONS

II.D.1. DISTRIBUTION METHODS

The stickers, consequently, the media content, can be distributed in two ways: on fixed or mobile objects.

Fixed objects
It is predicted that the following machines and devices will be Near Field Communication (see Technical Research for definition) enabled in the near future (1).

* Mobile phones
* Turnstiles
* Parking meters
* Check-out cash registers
* ATMs
* Office, house and garage doors
* Personal computers
* Product packaging
* Posters, street signs, bus stops, local points of interest (with NFCreadable
tags only)

Therefore, one tip for broadcast in fixed tagging is to place the stickers near city objects that will be NFC enabled to increase chances of tagging the cell phones because it is more likely that people will have their tag detection preferences set to ‘on’ around these areas to have utilized these services.

Figure 8 : scenarios for distribution of stickers on fixed objects

Mobile objects

When placed on mobile objects, such as things we carry with us every day - keychains, wallets, accessories, etc., the content can be on the move. Carrying the media on oneself would inevitably lead to more situational exchanges.

Figure 9 : scenarios for distribution of stickers on mobile personal belongings

For the mobile case, successful broadcast depends on how much one can get into people’s personal space because the cell phone and the sticker need to be in close proximity to each other (20-30cm) for the data exchange to occur; however, this is not as hard or uncommon as it might sound in a crowded urban environment - as illustrated in this photograph by Gregory Bull.

Intrusive? It is one of the questions this project hopes to raise.

Figure 10 : invasion of personal space illustration

II.D.2. INTERACTION MODES

There are three interaction modes enabled by this technology for you tag’s purposes: inquiry, surprise or intrusion (depending on one’s perspective) and sharing.

Inquiry
In the inquiry mode, the person has to know about the project, the stickers or the medium and also has to be willing to approach the sticker to pull the information - provided that the sticker is visibly placed. This mode is not the target mode and the type of interaction You Tag is hoping to achieve the most, as You Tag’s concept is more about surprises and situations. Also, this mode is not encouraged unless the public or private property owner supports the content and media as such.

Figure 11 : a man approaching the sticker to pull information from a sticker on a bookshop door.

Sharing
Sharing is an interaction mode that becomes as easy as dragging from one cell phone and dropping onto another with this technology. Therefore, once a cell phone is tagged, the media has the potential to become viral and can be distributed indefinitely since no one can really regulate what messages people are sending to each other on a cell phone, at least not as of yet.
Figure 12 : Two NFC enabled phones exchanging data (2).

Surprise or intrusion ?
Imagine you are at a bus stup next to a lady and there is a sticker on your skateboard, which is in close proximity to the lady’s purse that has a cell phone in it. The lady has just used the smart map at the bus stop and did not turn off the tag detection on her phone. Her cell phone will read the tag on your skateboard. She will receive a prompt that asks her whether she wants to access the available content or not. Her phone is tagged.

Figure 12 : Illustration of a situational tagging at a bus stop.

This surprise mode is what You Tag strives for. The person is neither aware of You Tag nor of the person carrying the mobile tag. Most of the concern raised through draft presentations and discussions of this project so far was about the lack of user-centered design in the case of the surprise mode. The information is pushed; therefore, the interaction is considered intrusive by most people. “Users” are harassed by what might be this unwanted information, alert or messages. However, intrusiveness is a part of what this project’s content is all about. It is a wake up call. We cannot request this information unless we are aware of it and the target audience of this project are those of us who have supressed this information. The artworks and information in this case is analogous to our subconscious that surfaces without our consent sometimes. Furthermore, this project is willing to ask: since when did art or self expression become “user-centered” and participants and people who experience artworks become “users?” Another point that addresses this concern is that, unless a person has not chosen to leave tag detection on, on her cell phone; there is no pushing of information.

III. SIMILAR PROJECTS AND TECHNOLOGIES

Tagging physical objects around the city is not a new concept. There has been much recent interest in location awareness, mapping, social networking and smart objects that utilize the idea and technology for tagging physical objects in our immediate environment. In the past couple of years, there have been several projects implemented around this idea using technology or not, ranging from mapping/storytelling/archiving experiences to city-wide games. Most, if not all, past and current projects that use similar Wi-Fi technologies explore location based, service-oriented cases. This project differs in terms of its proposed technology, application field, content, media distribution and interaction models. You Tag explores a more expressive, ludic, volatile and situational approach through the application of Near Field Communication and RFID technologies.

III.A. TAGGING THE CITY

III.A.1. LOCATION VERSUS SITUATION

It is not the first time that people have tried to tag the city nor is it the first time they tried to do it with stickers. Yellow Arrow project is one example:

“ Participants place uniquely-coded Yellow Arrow stickers to draw attention to different locations and objects - a favorite view of the city, an odd fire hydrant, the local bar. By sending an SMS from a mobile phone to the Yellow Arrow number beginning with the arrow’s unique code, Yellow Arrow authors connect a story to the location where they place their sticker. Messages range from short poetic fragments to personal stories to game-like prompts to action. When another person encounters the Yellow Arrow, he or she sends its code to the Yellow Arrow number and immediately receives the message on their mobile phone. The website yellowarrow.net extends this location based exchange, by allowing participants to annotate their arrows with photos and maps in the online gallery of Yellow Arrows placed throughout the world (3).”

You Tag is different than this and other types of locative-narrative projects because it is not location aware, it is situation-aware. It is not about particular spaces or times and a memory attached to those but rather immediacy and multiplicity thereof. This project and other similar locative-narrative projects place a layer between a person and the city and take away from the feeling of actually being there and experiencing the spot subjectively at that particular point in time.

III.A.2. SIMILAR TECHNOLOGIES

Similar tagging projects have utilized different types of technologies such as visual barcodes, QR codes and BlueTooth ad-hoc networks.

Visual barcodes

Visual barcodes are physical tags that use a two dimensional barcode image with an embedded URL. In order to retrieve the information the tag is linking to, one has to download an application on his/her cellphone which decodes the visual image into a URL. Then, the tag can be scanned by taking a picture of it with a cell phone camera so that the cell phone’s browser can be automatically directed to that URL. Examples of such projects from different areas might be Semacode - social networking, Semapedia- information retrieval, ShotCode - interactive advertising model, QR-Kill - gaming (4,5,6).

Although, these tags might be very effective as solutions to service-oriented, locative or gaming applications, they do not work for You Tag’s purposes because the visual tags need to be in sight. The advantage of the RFID tags over these visual tags is the fact that they can be hidden; the person who receives the content on their cell phone does not need to know about their existence. In fact, for the surprise mode to occur, the person who receives the content should not know about the existence of the tag. Visual and QR codes are great for information pulling, not for encounters (7).

Bluetooth
Bluetooth communication protocol requires a handshake process: inquiry, pairing and authentication;
consequently, it requires human input and rigorous registration and negotiation processes. For instance, in order to join a Bluetooth ad-hoc network, one has to have to register and join. Therefore, you need to know about the services before you come across them in physical space. Although it has been more than ten years since its introduction, it still has not become ubiquitous due to these reasons and others. It also requires power and the communication distances can range up to 100m. Although Bluetooth is not the perfect choice for You Tag, the proposed interaction modes for You Tag would be well achieved if Near Field Communication were used to enhance Bluetooth communication by initiating it in a faster and more intuitive way (8).

IV. TECHNICAL RESEARCH AND PROPOSED TECHNOLOGY FOR YOU TAG

You Tag explores expressive, ludic and frivolous applications of RFID tagging and Near Field Communication Technology. This section does not cover the technologies in detail; however, it provides a brief overview of the technological elements as they relate to the project. This thesis project is more about the applications of the technology and the interaction models it might allow us to build on; in particular, the ‘surprise’ mode.

IV.A. RFID AND NFC DEFINITON

Radio Frequency Identification tags

RFID tag is an object that can be implemented in a product to allow access to remotely stored and retrieved data about the product. They can be passive or active. In You Tag’s case, they are passive; thus, they do not need to be powered. The passive tags are activated by the RFID-reader (in this case, a cell phone) as the reader comes into close proximity of the tag. The sizes of RFID tags vary. One quality that makes RFID tags suitable for this project is that they do not need to be seen to be activated. RFID tags come in different types.

Near Field Communication
NFC is a short range wireless protocol evolving from RFID. It works using magnetic field induction and operates within the unlicensed 13.56MHz band, compatible with most RFID tags. Its effective range is at most 20cm or so, and data transfers are possible at most 424kbits/s. NFC can also be used to enhance Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

The major difference between RFID and NFC is that NFC is bidirectional rather than unidirectional/read only. It allows for read/write communication, such as peer-to-peer sharing. NFC-enabled gadgets can work both as a reader and a tag. This functionality would make the distribution of media content of the You Tag project very viral. However, it does not deem NFC a necessary or required technology for the project. The reason why NFC is the proposed technology for this project lies more on the fact that NFC enables the desired interaction to be intuitive and extremely fast. Communication set-up latency of NFC is hundreds of milliseconds. It only takes a split second for an NFC reader and tag to recognize each other and communicate.

For instance, if an RFID tagged sticker is in close proximity of an NFC-enabled phone (surprise mode), the person with the phone would get an alert and could accept immediately. Only a few seconds are needed for this particular transaction. After that, even if the sticker in close proximity moves away from the NFC-enabled phone, the interaction can still continue because from this point on, the cell phone owner will request for the content over wifi/GPRS from the server (10).

IV.B. CURRENT APPLICATIONS

Current applications, pilot projects and test cases of NFC applications and RFID are all service-based. All of these explorations are about retrieving additional information about a smart object. You Tag explores a more ludic, nonlocative application. Some pilot projects and test cases are listed below:

Green Touch Project is a project in collaboration with the Touch Project at the Oslo School of Architecture. It is an interactive exhibition that allows visitors to explore design objects on display and get more information about them (11).

Smart Touch explores the use of touch-based user interaction for mobile services for various community services in the city of Oulu, Finland (12).

Other applications focus on services such as e-ticketing, payments, service discovery, maps, interactive
advertising, etc. It is predicted that many different sectors can benefit from this technology. The following excerpt on how this technology is predicted to make our lives better is from the NFC Forum:

“ We all walk past billboards and posters advertising products, but how often do we remember to act on our interest? By adding NFC-compatible “tags” to posters and magazine advertisements, we can read the tags with an NFC-enabled phone and immediately act - before we forget (13).”

You Tag is an experiment to see if these systems can be de-valued.

An example of a real-world test application is by SoftBank, a smart movie poster of the movie Wall-E. An NFC enabled phone can retrieve movie trailers and related information via the RFID tagged poster (14). Smart poster is a common native application installed in NFC-enabled phones that are commercially available today and its functionality and medium are exactly the same as You Tag’s. See next section for details.

IV.C NATIVE APPLICATIONS ON NFC PHONES AND POSSIBILITIES OF SUBVERSION

Current NFC enabled phones have native applications installed for interactive advertising, information services, content download, entertainment services, etc. You Tag’s model is identical to the Smart Poster application built into these phones. For the purposes of this thesis project, ‘Smart Poster’ application is discussed here because although it differs in concept, its mechanism is identical to You Tag’s functionality and is very illustrative of the concept: A user approaches a movie poster with an embedded RFID tag. The phone detects the presence of the tag and the user, upon touching the poster, is directed to web links or downloads content related to the movie such as a movie trailer:

“Smart Posters, as already introduced in chapter 2.4, can be used as advertising elements such as signs or billboards that incorporate a passive NFC tag containing information. The data can be extracted by touching the tag with a NFC-enabled handset that initiates data exchange between the tag and the device. The tag can initiate a phone call, send an SMS message or open an application that provides a graphical user interface to the tag information content. And in case the required application does not exist in the phone, the tag can even direct the phone browser to a download page where the user can acquire the necessary software. A smart poster can be located for example in a public transport station (bus, railway, etc.) where it can be used for downloading timetables and other information or buying a ticket using a ticketing application provided by the transportation company that can be downloaded to the phone from the Internet. In this case the smart poster provides added usability to the system as the users touches the tag that provides information or redirects the user to a Web site instead of the users reading and typing the URL to the browser themselves (15).“

The paragraph above is another reason why this technology is suitable for You Tag. The great advantage is that, unlike QR codes, the proposed interaction of You Tag might not require the download of additional applications as explained above. This is a major distinction between this and prior applications; it opens up possibilities for surpriseful interactions.

In the prototype case for You Tag, the code was built on examples and the interaction was simulated. However, this does not guarantee that it will work on all phones and it was not tested on an actual NFC enabled phone. It is based on spoofing and phishing over existing applications provided that specified tags are used.

IV.D. SIMILAR RFID TAGGING PROJECTS

During my research, I have come across a couple of projects that use (or propose to use in the future) RFID tagging and NFC technologies. Links to those projects with a brief description are provided below:
Duesto Sentient Graffiti currently uses QR codes. Graffiti in the title of the project name does not refer to the original meaning of the word; however, this project proposes to use RFID tags and NFC in the future and discusses its advantages over QR codes (16).

A project that I was rather excited to come across is Tagging the City by the Ludic Society. This project uses RFID tags to tag the city with meaningless or misleading information associated with the tags in order to “de-price the networked world of marked things.” Altough I consider You Tag extremely close in terms of the concept of depricing the near future “spimey” world, taking part in this game is hard. One has to inject writable RFID tags and have a toolkit including an RFID sniffer (17). You Tag builds on existing platforms and does not require additional effort.

IV.E. TECHNICAL FLOWCHART AND SPECIFICATIONS

As a city dweller comes into close proximity of an RFID tagged sticker, the following interaction occurs: A tag ID is read by the RFID reader/NFC-enabled phone. The phone, in turn, sends an HTTP request to the server with the ID number of the tag. Each file is associated with a unique sticker/RFID tag, in the form of ‘tagIDnumber.fileextension (ex. 1500EDFE56SC.jpg). The server pulls the file associated with the particular tag ID and sends it back to the phone. This interaction requires that the phone has a wifi connection or a data plan installed. This requirement does not pose any concerns to the implementation of this project because the target audience - the busy city dweller - is probably on his iPhone or Blackberry that comes with such data plans. Also, it can safely be assumed that, by the time this project is actualized and RFID enabled phones are commonly adopted, the data plans will be much cheaper and mostly unlimited to allow for such transactions. Another option to consider for those who do not have these requirements would be to send a request via SMS to get the content delivered to their cell phones.

Figure 13 : Technical flowchart

Tag Types

There are different types of RFID tags. Type of Tag used in You Tag is a Type 1 tag suggested by Innovision. It has a memory that can store up to 58 characters. A URL with the Tag ID can be supplied in these 58 characters. The tag is read only and passive; therefore, requires no power. All of these properties make RFID tags the perfect choice. The qualities of Type 1 tag as summarized by the table from an Innovision white paper for the smart poster application are exactly the same for You Tag’s concerns:

Figure 14 : RFID Tag Types (18)

Tag Detection

NFC enabled phones allow the user to set preferences for tag detection to ‘on’ or ‘off.’ Although this might actually be an obstacle to the You Tag project; it is a way to block the extreme intrusiveness of the alerts. An example from the NFC-enabled Nokia 6131 below:

Figure 14 : Tag Detection Preferences (19)

For further information on Near Field Communication, NFC-enabled phones, the development environment, standards and other resources, NFC Forum is a good place to start. This paper is not concerned about a coverage of Near Field Communication technology in depth but rather its relevant frivolous application to the project at hand.

V. CONCLUSION

Obstacles to implementation

The implementation of this project as a whole is a near future scenario in certain aspects. My goal for this thesis was to explore scenarios and build an interaction model for a self-expressive application of RFID tagging and NFC technologies. The stickers and the website are up and running, which means the Collection, Distribution and Participation stages of the project can start. However, there are only a few NFC-enabled phones that are commercially in use right now. Therefore, the audience is a small few. This does not constitute an obstacle to implementation of this project, neither is it considered a metric of success. For now, the artworks and the collection are ghosts and they will ‘become’ soon when the technology is adopted. That is the reason why the project’s tagline is You Tag, before they do.

Success?

This experiment was a design exercise for me to overcome the paralysis and inaction I sometimes experience when I imagine the applications of near future technologies and how predictable, deterministic and oppressive things could become with the Internet of Things. I realized the worst possible outcome for myself would be to remain inactive. I have decided, rather, to use design and technologies to subvert what might be some predicted usages that scare me. You Tag is my design as critique in this sense.

Furthermore, the project’s goal is not technical achievement but rather to illustrate the possibility of a conceptual intervention, by means of art and technology, into our robotic daily routines that we hardly ever question. This experiment is only one way to explore this technology in a self-expressive, situation-aware way to overcome the boredom of predictability and to encourage play and activism by means of the serendipitous interaction mode allowed by the combination of mobile devices and the internet of things.

This project is successful, if it is able to raise conversations or discussion, whether in theory or practice, around the following topics regarding the design process and the ways we live:

- What is tag litter? Do we really want to tag everything?

- Can RFID tagging and internet of things provide a platform for media distribution on an unmediated, unregulated channel anonymously? If so, what kind of a culture would be produced?

- Is there an alternative to the space and time paradigm (the spime) ?..

Future considerations for this platform include the observation and documentation of participation and production of content by contributors and the addition of an environment where other people can participate and collaborate in discussion and further development of such media distribution techniques.

VI. REFERENCES

(1) http://www.tiresias.org/research/guidelines/nfc.htm
(2) http://www.nokia.com/A41229033
(3) http://yellowarrow.net/v3/about.html
(4) http://semacode.com/
(5) http://www.shotcode.com/home
(6) http://www.qrcode.es/?p=209&language=en
(7) http://www.denso-wave.com/qrcode/aboutqr-e.html
(8) http://ntrg.cs.tcd.ie/undergrad/4ba2.05/group3/index.html
(9) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID
(10) http://www.nfc-forum.org
(11) http://ullamaaria.typepad.com/hobbyprincess/2007/10/green-touch-at-.html
(12) http://ttuki.vtt.fi/smarttouch/www/?info=intro
(13) http://www.nfc-forum.org/resources/faqs#better
(14) http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/09/softbank-mobile-testing-smart-movie-posters/
(15) Physical Browsing with NFC Technology, VTT Tiedotteita – Research Notes, August 2007, www.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/
tiedotteet/2007/T2400.pdf
(16) http://www.smartlab.deusto.es/dsg/
(17) http://www.ludic-society.net/tagged/
(18) Near Field Communication in the real world – part II, Using the right NFC tag type for the right NFC
application, Innovision Research & Technology plc.
(19) Nokia 6131 NFC Technical product description, http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/
b4849578-9382-4e6e-b1c5-a1d28d754564/Nokia_6131_NFC_Technical_Product_Description.html

Gambling meets online tv.
Watch and gamble with your friends on the plot of a live TV show online.

CONCEPT

SOME UX DOCUMENTATION

Heuristics and reviews

Early Wireframe Sketches

Page-level wireframes
(click on image below to download pdf)

User journey with mock-ups

User journey and some tasks explained with wireframes/mock-ups:

User walk-through and demo:
(Click on the image below to watch the video >>>>>>)

CONCEPT:

Cellfish is an easily accessible, location-sensitive, free social music application, designed as an add-on for iTunes mobile. It allows us to exchange music listening experiences in public places; discover, share, rate and communicate music in the simplest way possible.

Could our music tastes be an icebreaker? Instead of algorithmic searches, can we discover music through each other? Are we really strangers? Cellfish would like to assume that we are way beyond our paranoia of stalking strangers and that public spaces in the city can be reclaimed as places to socialize and meet others. Music is under surveillance, with good intentions.

How? Bluetooth ad-hoc wifi network and accessible mobile devices. The example is an iPhone in this case but the idea could be developed for any mobile platform.

UX DOCUMENTATION

Heuristics
some reviews here.

User Research
Besides going through existing research, we have performed in depth online interviews with people from different backgrounds, ages and income. Only thing they had in common was that they were all comfortable with new tech and were music lovers as was required by the brief.

a summary of user research results

Through our interviews and heuristic evaluations of existing social music services, we identified needs and what people were looking forward to experience. These responses guided our concept development process and helped us develop some personas.

Personas

examples

Example wireframe and flowchart, dynamic elements, overlays …

MOCK-UPS, THE JOURNEY and FUNCTIONALITY

1. Download and launch the application.

2. Join a music network started by any other user in your physical proximity. The ad-hoc networks available will appear as a list for you to choose from.

3. When you join a network, you can see which song each person is currently listening to, in the same network.

DISCOVERY:

Clicking on a user’s icon will give you some profile information
on that person, along with the rest of his/her playlist.

RATING:
You can preview any song on the network/playlists
and let others know that you like a particular song.

RECOMMENDATION:
You can search your playlist and recommend a song
to another user on the basis of what they liked.

SHARING:
You can request from or feed songs to other users.
The song will be available to listen once it is downloaded to your phone.

And, you can, alternatively, at any moment, get up off your seat and meet these people since they are in your immediate surroundings and you have access to their location and pictures (if they chose to be available.) Cellfish was an experiment in encouraging real time conversations in our immediate urban environment by using the virtual networks ONLY as an interface.

In collaboration with Theresa Ling, Drew Burrows and Victoria Biddle.

Link to actual proposal

Below are earlier sketches submitted for class…

EXHIBITION ABSTRACT
Abstract

For this project, we proposed an exhibition/installation of an energy generating playground that educates children about urgent issues of sustainability and renewable energy in a playful way.

Our vision is to create a space within locations, such as transportation hubs, that empowers people to realize the potential of their individual actions. Using playground components engineered to harness the kinetic energy of play, unique low-power displays are run in-part on the energy generated, providing educational interfaces for the components and the entire installation. Our energy harvesting playground will draw very clear, linear connections between physical action and its potential output. Through simple, fun, and collaborative interaction, people will be encouraged to learn about sustainable energy solutions through play.

The key message of this experience is that individual actions collectively result in big solutions. We are expanding beyond “being green” to empowering people to consider the relevance of their actions. We consider “being green” to be the first step. Being empowered allows one to consider “what’s next?” In this installation, we seek to promote the notion that the future is positive, expansive, and fun when we collaboratively seek a solution.

Description of installation: The energy harvesting playground is an installation with physical and multimedia interactive components. It will have activity targeted at three levels of engagement on the user interface side: small children ages 3-6; older children 7 and up; young adults and adults. Users interacting with playground elements will generate energy which is pooled to activate educational interfaces. The entire playground will function as a collaborative effort in energy making. The classic playground icons will instantly signal to visitors of all ages the essence of our space and how to interact with it. However, once visitors start interacting with the installation, what they discover though their experience will enrich their understanding of sustainability and how we can at least make up for what we need to consume.

EXAMPLE PROTOTYPE: SEE-SAW
Focusing on culture/language aspect of universality and appealing to senses of touch, balance and vision, we designed an educational toy with a very simple interface that could teach kids about sustainability and energy through play!

Rather than a didactic educational interface, we tried to design something that was fun and could spark curiosity around associations formed between kids’ actions and reactions of the interface.

In collaboration with Theresa Ling.

Here is a quick demonstration of the see-saw interface.

This project was a prototype for an animation that is controlled by real time data of weather conditions. It tries to simulate, in abstract form, a bird flock’s migration behaviour over a long period of time, to create an ever-changing canvas. The visualization focuses on movement that is affected by real time environmental factors.

Click on the image below to watch some sample videos.
These videos are patterns of movement that would be formed by birds, with different network topologies. Every time a node turns red for a second, it means that it has received information from the environment and passes that on through its movement to other nodes on the network. The lines are movement trajectories.

The data is for Santa Cruz:

wind speed : N@14km/hr
temp : 14 C
humidity: 45%
conditions: sunny

Protocol and mapping
The data (environmental factors) and how they correspond to the nodes on the abstract network of birds consists of:

• wind direction and wind speed = speed, direction, position of nodes on canvas
• humidity, temperature and windspeed = distance between nodes/proximity and flight altitude for background images
• harsh weather conditions - survival of nodes

Factors affecting the birds’ movements

• state of self : birds have the inherent behaviour of flying south and staying together.
• state of nearest neighbors: different node weights, push and pull, sending information to each other about locations, flight and motion.
• state of environment: weather conditions affect one or every bird.

Swarms are based less on exchanging data through channels than continual modification of action, motion and movement through affective local states.

Over time, nodes with weakest connections will die under bad weather conditions and create different topologies.

OTHER EXERCISES

EXPLORING PROTOCOLS
Using strokeweight received from one node to determine sound fragment beginnings and ends. Applet records sound input from microphone and breaks it down to unrecognizable fragments.
applet xml

EXPLORING DISTANCE AND BETWEENNESS CENTRALITY -
Exercise 2 - Important nodes removed
When I removed the top three nodes, the network ceased to exist since the topology was highly centralized. If vanitas as a concept did not exist and the top three nodes did not have direct links to each other, ‘death’ and ‘macabre’ become the nodes with highest betweenness centrality.

EXPLORING DISTANCE -
Exercise 1 // applet xml
Perceived vs. calculated nodes with highest betweenness centrality - of a small network of “vanitas” on Wikipedia
Blue nodes stand for calculated & yellow nodes for perceived highest betweenness centralities.

EXPLORING CENTRALITY

Connections of In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki:
most connected nodes // applet xml

EXPLORING TOPOLOGIES

distributed // applet xml

decentralized
(Edges = Strokes) && (Nodes = Where strokes connect) // applet xml

Words are networks of multiple centralized networks with one or more hubs in each letter that is connected to another…

EXPLORING WEIGHTED GRAPHS
I picked 100 random songs from my playlist for each decade from 1960-2010 and looked for songs of love (or songs that have love in their titles.) The weighted graph shows the distribution of these songs over time…

Based on the theory of the dérive, I tried to propose a new way of collective urban narrative; drifting through people’s private spaces with the technological tool at hand, all the while questioning how concepts of trust, privacy & inside/outside are constructed in the urban environment.

MEDIA AND DOCUMENTATION

Here’s a link to the slide documentation of a small part of the performance with simple map and photos. (Keep clicking on the photo to advance.)

background and references

“… The dérive was an attempt to change the meaning of the city through changing the way it is inhabited. And this struggle was conducted, not in the name of a new cognitive map, but in order to construct a more concrete collective space, a space whose potentialities remained open-ended for all participants in the ‘ludic constructive’ narrative of urban terrain …
… The dérive as a pedestrian speech act is a reinstatement of the “use value of space” in a society that privileges the “exchange value of space …
… The dérive takes place in a space that is imposed by capitalism in the form of urban planning …
… These maps would allow their users to ‘again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion”…”

Situationist Space, Thomas F. McDonough

earlier experiments/failures: starting the drift from my home…
I knocked on people’s doors. The drift did not last long.

Conclusions and future iterations
What if someone picked up where I left off? could we have a documented narrative of our drift through private spaces? how private is anything anyway? how much do we trust each other? what are you willing to show of yourself to others? can we deconstruct all walls, windows and doors like this? can we pretend they are not there?
I will pick this project up again some day.

Credits
It all started when I met this city creature and observed how it flies from one window pane to another with no obvious reason or direction:

Concept:
Cities are constructed. In this we mean not just through bricks and steel and glass, but also image and sound and light and movement and…people. Both media and architecture are implicated in this construction of urban life; indeed, both are as integral to cities as people themselves. Architecture has always been a form of media; in contemporary urban culture, media is increasingly an architecture for urban living.

This project uses media and architecture to construct a “city” from the ground up, or, rather, from the sky down. It materializes a city seemingly out of nowhere and out of context, using form (that is, architecture) and media (here, light) to shape a space. The concept suggest a city exploded into components, both as material (tangible structures) and as media (a screen blown out into luminescent pixels. Humans are present within it and they move through it, bringing it to life in the present.

Scenario:
500 translucent cubes of varying sizes and colors are outfitted with LED matrixes.

The cubes are rigged with parachutes and dropped from cargo planes a mile over Fresh Kills Park on Staten Island. A wide-open section of the park–approximately a square mile area–is thus “seeded” with these cubes, which drift down and land in a random arrangement. Some cubes cluster, others land in isolation, others land on top of other cubes, some hug small hills, some may not even maintain an upright position. The drop is conducted at night: the lights glowing through the translucent colored material create a vision of colored stars floating to earth.

Dotting the landscape, the cubes glow, creating space through their form and through the light they emit. People are invited to visit the site in the evening, to walk along the paths created by the cubes, sit on the cubes, rest and talk along the way. Smaller cubes might even be moved around at whim to reconfigure the space. The presence of people animates the space, making it come alive. The site becomes a kind of city-media space, one that has fallen from the sky, but which only breathes through the people who inhabit it.

Location:
Fresh Kills Park (West Park), Staten Island.

The Fresh Kills Park Project is focused on transforming the former Fresh Kills Landfill on the Arthur Kill waterfront of Staten Island into a new public park over the next 30 years.

At 2,200 acres - almost three times the size of Central Park - New York’s Fresh Kills Park will be one of the most ambitious public works projects in the world, combining state of the art ecological restoration techniques with extraordinary settings for recreation, public art, and facilities for many sports and programs that are unusual in the city. In fact, the stage is already set for this impressive site to become a park. While nearly forty-five percent of the site was once used for landfilling operations, the remainder of the site is currently composed of wetlands, open waterways, and unfilled lowland areas. The tops of the landfill mounds themselves offer spectacular vistas of the expansive site, as well as views of downtown Manhattan.

Designed by landscape architects Field Operations, five distinct sub-areas within Fresh Kills will be defined by their physical attributes and the desires expressed by the public.

Plans for the West Park include a 9/11 Recovery Effort Earthwork Monument, picnic stations and recreation areas, bird overlooks, woodland trails, hilltop meadows and kite flying, as well as an area designated for alternative energy demonstrations.

Interactive map of the Fresh Kills Park Project
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/fkl/fkl2.shtml

Life:
The installation would live for approximately 6-12 weeks during the summer months.

Materials/components:
- 500 Custom-Fabricated transparent boxes with one removable panel: 24″, 36″ and 48″ cubes. The cubes will be made of Nature Works corn-based biodegradable or compostable polymer. The resin provides clarity similar to polystyrene, and exhibits tensile strength and modulus comparable to hydrocarbon-based thermoplastics. Like polyester, this polymer resists grease and oil, provides heat sealability at temperatures equivalent to polyolefin sealant resins.
- LED matrixes and placed within each cube.
- Parachutes/Rigging Materials

Budget:

Partner Organizations/Bureaucratic Infrastructure:
NYC Parks & Recreation Dept.
NYC Dept. Of Environmental Protection
NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs
NYC & Company (city tourism agency)
Federal Aviation Administration
Borough of Staten Island

An interactive and engaging overall experience of 97 Orchard St for those who know about it already, those who stumbled upon it and those who might never have access to the building, through a 3D tactile interactive scale model of the building with renewable original content that will be installed at the visiting center.

A bird flock’s migration and swarming behaviour is simulated, to create an ever-changing canvas, a visual narrative affected by real environmental data, such as wind speed, direction, humidity, etc. according to where the birds would really be at any given time. This information would be delivered to the network of birds on screen that would constantly change their movement and background accordingly.

I have tried a couple of algorithms for the animation and tried to find places where I could get all the data. However, this project will probably never be completed or realized. I have not come across, in my research so far, a reliable database with the information I am looking for.