Since launching BlinkM in February, I've been focused on the potential design uses of LED lighting. This years' Milan Furniture Fair (aka Milan Design Week, since it's branched out significantly beyond furniture to design of all kinds of consumer products for everyday life) was a good place to survey what consumer product companies think of LED lighting as a way of adding value to their products. The short answer is: not much. Since I was there last in 2006, the industry is still more-or-less in a steady state. As I felt in 2004 when I wrote my Smart Furniture Manifesto, the potential of using information processing as a design material is still largely untapped. LEDs are the most basic form of digital information display, and if they're not being used, it shows that the environment isn't embracing the possibilities of smart furniture.

Will it, ever, or will companies making niche products like gaming chairs move to making everyday products like dining room tables and office cubicle systems? In other words, will appliance and consumer electronics makers become furniture maker and take over the furniture industry? Since those industries are, in some ways, equally as conservative and slow-moving as the furniture industry, it's hard to say, but it points to some interesting possibilities.

Let me start with the three things I thought were most interesting.

Interactive projects

Flos' cubo

Flos, the lighting company, launched a wireless remote control cube called, cleverly, cubo. Depending on what side is up, it selects a lighting setting. You program it by turning the lights that speak whatever wireless standard they're using (I asked if it was Bluetooth, they said it was not) to some setting and it associates that setting with the cube face. I think it's a bit large and the colors are meaningless to anyone but the programmer, and you could do the same thing with a remote control with 6 buttons in a much smaller form factor, but they're clearly trying to do some magic here and I wish them luck.

Pega Design's Between On & Off series ironic objects

PEGA Design is a Taiwanese company that did a series of interactive objects they grouped into a collection called Between On & Off. The objects aren't particularly useful, they're more iconic and playful, but they're interactive and Pega uses LEDs for most of the interactivity.
The JustDrawIt! light control lets you use a dry erase marker to draw a lighting schedule on a bar (probably with some kind of IR LED/light sensor combination). The TechTap is a faucet that pours data into an LED-filled "milk bottle." I think it's a whimsical way to show how you can show data transfer between physical objects that let you carry data from one spot to another (I think; I only kinda get it). Embrace is a bedside reading light shaped like a book that dims and brightens based on how much it's opened, is also nice.

Jean Louis Frechin and Uros Petrevski's Interfaces

Jean Louis Frechin and Uros Petrevski showed a bunch of interactive objects grouped into a show called Interfaces: Connected Objects. The include the WanetLight, a chandelier that's a 5x5x5 cube of white LEDs that lets people create different light shapes in the chandelier (and maybe reacts to people's movements? I can't tell from the documentation). The WaSnake, which shows SMS text messages crawling across a curvy shelf (I think an RSS feed to news headlines would be more interesting). The WaDoor, a door of electroluminescent pixels. WaPix YJMM is a pair of digital picture frames where one image slides from one picture frame to the other automatically.

I like these objects a lot for their lyricism and although I've seen variations of these ideas in other formats, it's nice to see designers exploring the space.

Noninteractive projects

• Storage lighting
• "Water" lighting
• Appliance lighting

Storage lighting

There were a bunch of pieces that used strips of white LED light inside cabinets and drawers to light up the contents, presumably how the light inside a fridge lights up the food.

"Water" lighting

The bathroom design section had more colored lights, almost always cycling through all of the colors. The effect is nice, but it's not clear what the point is.

There was also white light inside shower stalls, which holds some amount of promise.

This is a faucet with an LED lighting ring.

Appliance lighting

Many companies are putting LEDs in stoves, another extreme environment, which is also interesting for that (if not for how they're actually incorporated). They typically put the lights in between the inner and outer shell, so that the resin of the LEDs isn't directly exposed to the heat, which must have taken some amount of engineering.

Elica, the fancy kitchen hood/purifer people have a whole range of ridiculous hoods, many of which use LEDs. Again, I'm not sure of the point, but at least the rest of the design is also decorative, showing that LEDs can be part of the decoration mix.

Here's another hood that uses LEDs to communicate more:

In general, the steps that are being taken are baby steps, and the applications are still primarily decorative (certainly for anything but white light). It's interesting to watch the evolution of smart furniture from all sides of the process of designing furniture because, ironically, Microsoft's Surface table, arguably the first major technology player's entry into the furniture market, was nowhere to be seen in Milan.

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Luxist reports on a new service to help track the provenance of wine. When Tod and I were at NextFest we spoke to some folks at Hitachi who had contemplated using their RFID technology to do the same thing, but just recently two new services have come online that are designed to track wine by the bottle (the other is Great Wall of Wine, a Chinese merchant, who are using RFIDs to stop counterfeit wine).

This seems to be an unnecessarily narrow use of the technology. Counterfeit wine is a problem, but (in my understanding) it's primarily it's a problem with a few very old, very expensive bottles. Old wine is not going to have RFID stickers on it, and if one is applied in such a was as to not damage the expensive bottle, it'll probably be easily moved to another bottle. Moreover, the business plan (as I understand it) is dependent on Metcalfe's Law network effects to work. In other words, it becomes useful if lots of wine has the stickers (the old "if only you have a fax machine, then faxing isn't a useful technology" argument), but initially very little wine is going to have stickers on it. For systems like that to be successful, the technology needs to be useful to just a single user. That's exactly the situation where a rich information shadow becomes valuable, and if you excuse the self-promotion, that's why we made WineM focused on the richness of wine's information shadow rather than just a single application. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the business model. Maybe the people who really need these systems are not end consumers, but dealers, distributors and regulators. Regardless, between these projects, Smartcorq and the Queen's ISETAN experiment, it looks like wine and RFID are going to be mated at some point in the very near future. The question is whether the power of all of the information about the wine will be exposed to end users (to everyone's great benefit, in my opinion) or whether the technology will remain stuck in the realms of logistics and security.

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Over the years there have been many projects that use mobile phones to associate physical objects with their information shadows (YellowArrow, QR Code, ScanLife, etc.). There have also been many projects that use phones in social setting as a way for people to find out about the people around them (Nokia Sensor, Dodgeball, etc.), usually with the promise of dating. None have been particularly successful, in either category (though I gather that QR Coded stuff is pretty common in Japan).

Now comes a company that's trying to combine the two unsuccessful ideas to make one successful one. Wickd is betting that there will be enough people who want to snap shotcode barcodes on t-shirts to find out about someone, and that there will be enough people who wants to wear those (kinda expensive, kinda plain) t-shirts to create a critical mass of urban singles willing to pay for the privilege to make their business model work. I'm pretty dubious of the underlying interaction model (it's more related to first person shooters--where you run up to a target, fire your weapon while they're not looking, and run away--than dating, where you get close, interact face-to-face and ideally stay close), but for me it's another example that people are the most popular object to unify with its information shadow. Having information about the people with you at brunch or at a conference (which is where an adult version of Disney Clickables could be very valuable), and having your intersection in physical space mapped to social networking space opens up huge possibilities for maintaining your social network.

All of these projects point to the inevitability of that unification, it's just that no one has found the right vehicle to move the penetration of the technology to the appropriate place on the Metcalfe's Law curve.

Oh, and two final words of advice to the Wickd people: Hanky Code. Think about it. ;-)

[UPDATE: Several people suggested I should be more clear about why I think that this is a questionable idea. OK, here it is: I think that no woman in her right mind wants to wear a shirt that gives random people behind her back personal information. It's not the quality of the information or the content, it's the coupling of that with anonymity and immediate physical presence.]

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When I was kid growing up in suburban Detroit, I always knew that there was a salt mine in the center of downtown. There aren't many mines in the middle of urban areas, but one of the many strange things about Detroit is that it had one, or has one, since it's probably still down there, even though it's been closed for 20 years. I think I was sick and missed the 6th grade field trip that would have been the one chance I ever had to see it, but I saw all the big salt crystals that the other kids brought back from it and knew that the trip to the salt mine (like snowmobile safety classes) was one of the key moments of many Michigan children's childhoods.

What I didn't realize was how the salt mine's operations are actually an interesting example of the kind of negotiation that happen between industry, landowners and city governments when trying to provide a city service based on a low-cost commodity resource. When telling the story to Molly the other day (based on this article), I realized that there are similarities between negotiating the mineral rites for salt and negotiating technology access for municipal Wifi, or any other kind of pervasive technological service. See, radio waves are kind of like minerals in that they don't care about property lines. The pattern of extracting salt in Detroit looks a lot like the pattern of Wifi access nodes. Compare the map above to the one for Spokane, WA:

I don't know if the similarity stops at the look of the maps, or goes deeper into how services that don't stop at property lines work in general, but I think it's an interesting analogy.

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There are two projects I've become aware of recently that represent the explicit linking of physical objects to their information shadows, both in children's products. This kind of thing has existed before, but its prevalence seems to be on the rise.

The first (found by Liz) is WebKinz which are plush toys that each have a unique code on their tag that brings up a unique play space that's just for that specific toy (randomly generated of course). The idea is "Beanie Babies meets NeoPets meets Cabbage Patch Kids" and although I think the execution of the concept leaves much to be desired (why buy furniture for your toy basset's online "room"?), it's an interesting example of how toy companies are merging offline and online conceptual play spaces in a very direct way.

The second is Disney's Clickables, which I learned about from CNET's Matter/Antimatter blog.

Clickables that we are launching in connection to our new Disney Fairies virtual world. It's a way for kids to take their online world experience into the real world. The core of it is a magical bracelet. By simply clicking their bracelets together, girls become friends in the online environment.

From the press release:

“The future of toys is about connecting online and offline play,” said Chris Heatherly, vice president of technology and innovation, Disney Consumer Products. “Kids and tweens are quickly embracing virtual worlds and, while there are several Internet-related toys in the market today, the play ends when the computer gets shut down. With our new line of Disney Fairies toys featuring Clickables technology, we're bringing the fun of social networking, collecting, and trading into the real world so that girls can extend the fun of the enchanting online world of Pixie Hollow to school, the park, or wherever they may be.”

This system of course owes a lot to Ruth Kikin-Gil's Buddy Beads project in terms of its use of jewelry to communicate social relationship between BFFs, but it also explicitly links the online world to the physical world using magic as a metaphor. It's not surprising that it's coming from Disney thematically, but what's interesting to me is how much Disney is investing in it. This is a sizable product rollout, which typically means that they have done enough research to believe that it'll be successful on their terms, which typically means hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers. It's a project, and a genre, to watch.

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