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The following is the transcript of the talk I gave at Device Design Day last Friday.

You can download the PDF (885K), with all images and transcript, or look through it (and download the original Powerpoint) on Slideshare.

INFORMATION IS A MATERIAL

Good Morning! Thank you very much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.

ABOUT ME
First, let me tell you a bit about myself. Most of my professional career over the last 17 years has been spent as a consulting creative director, interaction designer, user researcher and user experience strategy consultant. I started doing Web design in the Jurassic era of the Web, the early 1990s--this is the logo of the first commercial website I designed in 1993. Since then I've worked with probably hundreds of web sites, and I've also helped a number of large electronics companies with their user experience issues.

I sat out the first dotcom crash writing a book based on the work I had been doing. It's a cookbook of user research methods.

And 2001 I co-founded a design and consulting company called Adaptive Path.

I left the Web behind in 2005 and founded a company with Tod E. Kurt called ThingM. We're a small ubiquitous computing company and we design, manufacture and sell ubicomp hardware.

"SMART THINGS"
This talk is based on a chapter from my upcoming book on ubiquitous computing user experience design. It's called "Smart Things" and it's published by Morgan Kaufmann. They have a couple of copies here.

This book is my attempt to create a framework for the different kinds of activities, and the products of those activities, involved in device design, and to create some useful constraints to help move the field forward. Language is a pretty effective way to create conceptual constraints, there's a strong undercurrent of defining terms in it. I try not to invent completely new terms, but to clarify how existing terms apply to the practice of designing ubiquitous computing user experiences, if for no other reason so that there's some shared terminology to use when describing what I do to stakeholders.

The book also has lots of illustrations, techniques and in-depth case studies of a number of commercial products, so don't worry, it's not all about words and concepts. This talk is largely from the wordy/conceptual side of it.

PEAK MHZ
I want to start by mentioning a curious phenomenon. If you any of you follow developments in microprocessors, you'll notice that the clock speed of today's new CPUs is basically the same as that of CPUs from five years ago. For those of us who used computers in the 80s and 90s, this is very confusing. We watched clock speeds go from 6MHz in 1983 to 3GHz in 2003. During that time, we became used to clock speeds as the measure of power and value in information processing.

But after 20 years during of a logarithmic increase that spanned 3 orders of magnitude, suddenly clock speed abruptly stopped going up in 2004. The industry went from exponential growth in clock speed to no growth, zero growth, in one season. It's like someone slammed the emergency brake.

I call this phenomenon Peak MHz.

Unlike oil, we're not literally running out of CPU clock cycles, but we are seeing a reevaluation of how we understand the value that computers provide, and this has resulted in a shift in the strategy of microprocessor makers. What happened in 2004 was, broadly speaking, that chip manufacturers saw that we were running out of uses for big, energy-hungry, hot processors, and they shifted the game. Since 2004 the competition has shifted from raw CPU to making smaller, cooler, cheaper chips that can do as much work as older chips, while using fewer resources.

Here's a slide from a talk Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel, gave last year. Notice that instead of talking about numbers going up, processor manufacturing has become all about pushing numbers down. Instead of competing on doing more with more, they are now competing on doing the same with less. Less power, smaller size, and lower cost.

One of the main effects of this shift is that in addition to pushing the price, size and energy consumption of the latest CPUs down, it also pushes the price of all previous processing technologies down along with it. For example, at the beginning of the Internet era we had the 486 as the state of the art and it cost $1500 in today's dollars. It's the processor that the Web was built for and with. Today, you can buy that same amount of processing power for 50 cents, and it uses only a fraction of the energy. That decrease in price is the same 3 orders of magnitude drop as the increase in speed to 2004. This is not a coincidence, because both are the product of the same underlying technological changes.

When a technology falls in price this much, it opens up enormous possibilities for new products, while creating fundamental changes in society as the new technologies displace established social systems and networks.
Steam engines, for example, lowered the price of harnessing energy by orders of magnitude...and the Industrial Revolution was born as people found all kinds of new uses for mechanical energy. Mechanization suddenly became an option for making and using things where it never existed, or was highly impractical.

You can see similarly transformative effects if you look at what happened when the price of extracting aluminum dropped by two orders of magnitude in the late 19the century, or when electric motors became significantly cheaper and smaller in the 1920s. When something becomes cheap, it quickly joins the toolkit of things we create our world with. It becomes a design material. Sometimes for better and other times for worse.

In the last five years cheap, small processors have drastically lowered the cost of taking information in, evaluating it, manipulating it, rearranging it, and acting on it. It is no longer unthinkable to have an everyday object use an embedded processor to take a small piece of information--say the temperature, or the orientation of a device, or your meeting schedule--and autonomously act on it to help the device do its job better. Information processing is now part of the set of options we can practically consider when designing just about any object.

In other words, information is quickly becoming a material to design with.

This capability of everyday objects to make autonomous decisions and act using arbitrary information is as deep an infrastructural change in our world as electrification, steam power, and mechanical printing. Maybe it's as big of a deal as bricks. Seriously, it's a huge change in how the world works, and we're just at the beginning of it.

PART 1: DESIGN PROPERTIES OF INFORMATION
If information is a design material, what are its material properties? Sure, at some level there are basic information theoretic properties such as bandwidth, noise and complexity, but those are the microscopic properties, the equivalent of basic nuclear forces in material science. They won't help us design a Tickle Me Elmo Extreme, which is a device that's only practical to make using cheap information as a material. What are the MACROSCOPIC properties of information that we can use to design with?

• Automatically sense the world

It can sense the world. There are thousands sensors that convert states of the world into electrical signals that can be manipulated as information. This also includes sensors that sense human intention. We call these "buttons", "levers", "knobs" and so on.

• Autonomously act on the world

Actuators, which is the generic term for anything that can make a physical change based on input, can be triggered based on information. Thus, information can be used to autonomously affect the world in a way that no previous material was capable of.

• Remember

Information can be used to knowledge about the state of the world and act on it later. This could be just a single piece of data, such as what a mechanical thermostat does when it stores the temperature you'd like to keep your house at, or something much more sophisticated, say, storing an image of everything you look at, which is what justin.tv was doing a couple of years ago.

• Repeat exactly

One of the most transformative qualities of information is that it can be duplicated exactly and transmitted flawlessly. This has already changed the music and video industry forever.

But it also means that device behavior can be replicated exactly. We've become acclimated to it, but--stepping back--the idea of near-exact replication in a world full of randomness and uncertainty is a pretty amazing thing, and is a core part of what makes working with information as a material so powerful.

• Create complex behavior

Information enables behavior that's orders of magnitude more complex than possible with just mechanics, at a fraction of the cost. This is a modern small airplane avionics system. It consists of a bunch of small fairly standard computers running special software.

Compare that to a traditional gyroscopic autopilot where every single component is unique, it does very little, and to change its behavior you have to completely reengineer it.

If you just thought, "Wait a minute. I know all this and, besides, Norbert Weiner covered this in Cybernetics in 1948." you're right. This is not new. We are intuitively familiar with these properties because we've been using computers for a long time. However, now it is more relevant than ever, because now these same qualities can be distributed throughout the environment in a way that's never been economically feasible before. Weiner was writing from the equivalent position of Leonardo Da Vinci, who could see that mechanized flight was possible, but it was not until four hundred years later that the technology, which included new manufacturing techniques, design techniques, and materials, such as aluminum, made widespread commercial flight practical.
We're now at a point where theory can become reality, and we're now in the position where we actually have to make it happen.

PART 2: USING INFORMATION AS A MATERIAL
So how does treating information as a material affect device design?

Object-oriented hardware
First, it changes the way that we think about hardware.

Because information can abstract knowledge, it makes it easier to reduce complexity, including the complexity of information technology itself.

Embedded processors make it possible to create an abstraction layer around basic sensing, processing and actuation components to creates building blocks that are meaningful in human terms, rather than just electronic terms. Each block is an atom of functionality that has a CPU and communicates with other blocks over a network. This is the start of object-oriented hardware. What you see here are mostly all prototypes that make it easier to demonstrate this idea, but this is already how many modern devices are constructed. A modern digital device is already more like a small network of interacting components than a monolithic product of a single ground-up engineering process.

From an interaction design standpoint, object oriented hardware means that rather than starting from basic principles of electronics, you get to focus more on what experience you're trying to create, rather than which capacitor to use. Most designers don't smelt their own iron to make things out of steel, or grow their own hardwood trees to make things out of wood. Similarly, object-oriented hardware turns information from a raw material into a design material.

ThingM, my company, makes a set of such atoms of information processing that emit light. Our BlinkM line of smart LED products makes it very easy to put controllable RGB light into arbitrary locations with no electronics knowledge or color theory. Pick some up today at fine electronics retailers worldwide.

OK, end of sales pitch.

Smart things
So what's made with these atoms?
On the next larger scale, we will see new personal tools. Today we have digital pedometers, Internet connected bathroom scales, networked parking meters, and cars that don't stall, but there will be many more. Pick nearly any object, add information to it, and you get a new object. My favorite example of this the adidas_1 shoe, which was put out 5 years ago and then almost immediately discontinued. It has a pressure sensor that it uses to estimate the qualities of the surface being run on an adjusts the heel in between strides to optimize the resiliency regardless of what surface you're running on. The buttons adjusts how it responds.
For me it represents how a small amount of information, carefully deployed can profoundly change an object.

Information as decoration
We will see information used as a decorative material, because just as you can use wood to hold up a house or make a sculpture with it, so information can be used to create incredibly beautiful, profound esthetic experiences. It has already revolutionized music and cinema, but treating it as a permanent material, rather than a medium, creates fantastic new opportunities.

Intelligent environments
When taken all together, all of these changes mean that at a large scale, our environment is growing increasingly information-based on a fractal level. Small information devices make large information devices that combine to form environment-sized devices made with information as a core material.

This is the big change that we're going to see happen in the world very soon.

PART 3: APPLIANCES AND TERMINALS
I want to shift gears a bit and talk about two kinds of devices that I believe are important to distinguish in terms of how they use information as a material. These are two different classes of object that are actually made with the same material.

Two kinds of devices
One class consists of narrow-function devices whose value is primarily in the effect that they create locally. They are made with information to help them to do a small set of specific things much better than similar devices made without information. I call these devices appliances.

The second is the set of general-purpose computing devices are designed to do many things, and they have a wide variety of sensors to maximize the breadth of potential functionality, and much of their value comes from the remote services they provide access to, rather than their local technical capabilities. I call them terminals, because they evoke the tight relationship early terminals had with mainframes. In a sense, terminals are all the same object, but one which comes in a wide variety of sizes.

Both appliances and terminals are made of the same materials, and they have fundamentally identical capabilities, which tends to be confusing. If you know the old Slashdot refrain about Beowulf clusters made from random Linux-based devices, that's a joke about how any device that runs Linux can be used as a general purpose compute platform. Yes, technically that's true, but in the era of cheap processing, it's no longer interesting. It's like joking that you can make an airplane out of melted soda cans because they're both made of aluminum. Yeah. So?

The key difference between the two classes of devices is of course the user experience they create, and that's where the design difference has to come in. If you try to make a terminal experience into an appliance experience, you break its core values as a terminal, and vice versa.

So when starting a project you can ask yourself: am I designing an experience that's more appliance-like or a terminal-like?

Appliances, terminals and networks
Probably the key consideration is how your device is going to work with a network.

Appliance + network = The Internet of Things
As a narrow function device whose primary user value is local, appliances do one of two things over a network: they provide telemetry, or they serve as interfaces for a single, simple data feed.

This kind of simple, but highly relevant, data communication is what forms the core of the Internet of Things. In this approach appliances communicate with other appliances and people to create highly focused user experiences that connect physical products to each other in highly efficient, deliberately predetermined ways. Each device becomes more valuable because it is made with information, but only in one specific way.

For example, you can check on the status of your Amazon order because hundreds of devices, hundreds of appliances, are being used to track nearly every single atom Amazon is responsible for. Right now they're using barcodes. Soon these will become RFIDs and after that they'll be active devices, like the FedEx Sensaware smart tag, which has a bunch of sensors, a GPS and the equivalent of a phone in it for sending data about where a package is and what conditions it's traveling in.

Terminal + Network = Service Avatar
In the case of terminals, adding networked data has a different effect.

One of the core values of terminals is that they can make the same information accessible through a variety of devices. This has the effect of shifting value from the device, which is a generic container, to the information it carries. The terminal becomes a temporary representation of whatever information-based services it provides access to. It becomes the physical manifestations, what I call the avatar, of the service it represents. It is not the service itself, but people sees "through" it to the service it represents.

For example, I have every expectation that I should be able to pause a movie on one terminal running Netflix and then upause it on another. Why not? It's just a hole in space, a short-term manifestation of a single service I have subscribed to. The value is in the service, not the frame around it.

The design of terminals then is then a challenge to create the most transparent window, and the device design challenge is not in the device, but primarily in the design of the service it's going to create access to.

ALL DESIGN IS A NEGOTIATION WITH MATERIALS
I feel that these are the kinds of questions we're going to have to ask, and the kinds of relationships we're going to have to examine as we extract device design from the hodgepodge of design techniques that still treat hardware, software and service design as separate entities.

Working with information as a material becomes a negotiation with this combination of technologies treated as a single thing. New materials create both possibilities and problems. We didn't get our flying cars, but nor did we didn't have to fight atomic hydroplaning Soviet battleships.

The most important thing is to engage with the material as a single material that you work with, as a unified set of ideas, rather than separate things that are divided and abdicated to others. If you are here, you create technology. This means that it's your responsibility to understand the properties of information, explore its capabilities, and build tools that make it easier to do the right thing with information than to do the wrong thing. It is our responsibility as designers to do this exploration much more than it is Intel's, or LG's or the government's. They're just mining the raw ore. We're the ones who decide what to make with it.

Thank you!

I was doing some writing for my upcoming Device Design Day talk and started to make a list of two common kinds of smart things that I've been seeing out in the world. For lack of better terminology, I'm calling these appliances and terminals. I haven't yet processed all of these ideas, but here is an initial stab at distinguishing two major classes of smart thing.

	Appliances	Terminals
Most functionality is	Local	Remote
Technical capabilities	Narrow. Technology is only included if it supports core purpose.	Broad. Many possible sensors and actuators are included in case they're needed by a service.
Effectiveness	High. They're very good at the small number of things they do.	Low. They're OK at many things.
Interface complexity	Low. A narrow vision means the interface is relatively straightforward.	High. The general-purpose nature of the devices means that the burden of efficacy is on the interface design.
A group of them that is interoperating is called...	An ensemble	A service
A single member of the group is called...	An instrument	An avatar
Barriers to interoperability	High. Unless they're designed to work together from the start	Theoretically low: they're designed to be avatars of the same service. In practice: high. Cross-avatar UX is still at an infancy.
Distinguished from each other by	Specific function	Size
Strength of links between linked devices	Low. Connecting appliances that aren't designed to be connected is difficult.	High. In theory. Theoretically service avatars should easily communicate, but that's not often the case in practice.
Examples	Digital pedometers, Internet connected bathroom scales, networked parking meters, cars, Nike+iPod, cameras.	smart phones, netbooks, laptops, connected TVs

This is Part 6 of a pre-print draft of Chapter 6 from Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design, my upcoming book. (Part 1) (Part 2) The final book will be different and this is no substitute for it, but it's a taste of what the book is about.

Earlier chapters in this series: Chapter 3, Chapter 1

Citations to references can be found here.

Chapter 6: Information shadows

Part 6: WineM, an example of design with information shadow

Figure 6-10. ThingM's WineM smart wine rack (Photo by Tod E. Kurt)

In 2007, my company, ThingM, used these ideas to design a smart wine rack (Figure 6-10). It was created to demonstrate one endpoint of a service based on wine information shadows. Every bottle of wine in it has an RFID tag (Figure 6-4), with an RFID reader in every cell of the rack. The rack, in turn, connects to an online information shadow service. This service aggregates wine information from the Internet and all of the racks that are connected to it. [Footnote: As this was a proof of concept, we implemented only bare-bones functionality and worked with a wine data aggregator (Inertia Beverage) to verify that we could get appropriate information in a production environment.]

When someone associates an RFID with a specific wine bottle, the service would connect it to all of the other wines of the same type. Many wine management services can already analyze a wine collection and recommend wines resembling those in the collection. Our service went one step further: every bottle could serve as a subscription to a data feed from the winery and to a social network of enthusiasts with similar interests. A winery could have a sale for existing owners, or recent drinkers, of its wines. Then, every rack that contained a bottle of that wine would get a message, and light up the wine in a specific color, or send a text message that said "your 2004 Domaine Roger Perrin Chateauneuf-du-Pape has mail!"

WineM is an experiment to understand how the potential of information shadows can be expressed in a good user experience. It is designed to keep the user experience focused on the experience of choosing and drinking wine. It minimizes the presence of a full-purpose computer while still providing the full power of Internet information exchange.

Figure 6-11. WineM control panel (prototyped on a Nokia 770 tablet)

For example, the interface is a faceted classification browser (Figure 6-12). Every click adds another constraint to the search set and lights up the appropriate bottles in the rack. Thus, it's possible to organize the wine not just by year or grape, but also by current market price or number of bottles in stock (or all of the above).

Hallmarks took the difficult process of identifying the manufacturer of a given piece of flatware by its style and instead made it a matter of matching a small stamp to pictures in a catalogue. Similarly, this kind of information exploration would have been very difficult with a traditional wine rack. However, once the bottles had their information shadows stitched to them using RFIDs and a simple database connected to the massive amounts of wine information online, it was relatively easy.

Next month: Chapter 8, Service Avatars

This is Part 5 of a pre-print draft of Chapter 6 from Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design, my upcoming book. (Part 1) (Part 2) The final book will be different and this is no substitute for it, but it's a taste of what the book is about.

Earlier chapters in this series: Chapter 3, Chapter 1

Citations to references can be found here.

Chapter 6: Information shadows

Part 5: Design with Information Shadows

Designing with information shadows means using devices, such as RFIDs, that may have specific, limited functionality and capabilities. However, as with the FedEx example, designing with information shadows often requires global service design. Information shadow user experience design must simultaneously consider (1) what happens when every object is automatically tracked and (2) how to associate those objects with all available digital information about them.

A systematic approach to user experience design can reduce the possibility vertigo of multiplying two such nearly infinite sets. Despite the speed and novelty of changing technologies, people's underlying needs and desires change slowly. What has changed is that a new powerful tool is now available to address those needs.

The use of information shadows is still in its infancy, but several interesting design properties of information shadows have emerged:

• They simplify the design of certain kinds of devices.
• They allow designers to treat dedicated devices like physical embodiments of Web services and create mashups.
• They allow mass customization of experiences without mass customization of objects.
• They allow devices to be self-disclosing for disposal and recycling.
• They blur the line between devices and services.
• They create novel, pleasurable, entertaining experiences.

These are described in more detail below.

Information shadows simplify devices

When an object no longer has to display all of the human-readable metadata needed by users, its design can be simpler. The labels on bags of chocolate chips only have room for one or two recipe suggestions. Now, the chocolate chips can have their own cookbook, and the label only to point to it. Similarly, devices can be simplified down to the single thing they do best. You might want to use a pedometer to track miles walked each day for a week. The pedometer interface can be quite minimal if devices—such as a mobile phone—can access that pedometer's information shadow. The pedometer itself just needs a power button, status indicator, and walking progress display. Other devices—with larger screens and more computing power—can focus on helping users make sense of information about their exercise plans.

Physical/Network mashups

Ubicomp mashups attempt to move computation off the desktop and integrate it with the artifacts of everyday life. They extend beyond the Web and combine the functionality of both software and hardware components. (Hartmann et al, 2008)

Many Web-based services have published API (application programming interfaces) that allow other services to use their information and computational capabilities in novel ways. Google Maps, the classic of the genre, allows developers to layer information over map images that Google provides. Physical/network mashups create novel experiences that merge the power of simple, lightweight devices with the power of existing Web services.

Figure 6-9. Tweet-a-watt (Fried, 2009)

Fried and Torrone's 2009 Tweet-a-Watt project (Figure 6-9) is one such mashup. It posts electricity use to Twitter, using the same API that's normally carries people's Twitter posts about their own activities. But Twitter can easily broadcast information about devices, making hour-by-hour updates about energy use accessible to humans and readable by software.

Ubicomp device user experience designers can hook up information about objects to data sources on the Internet using the same APIs and protocols used by web site mashups. [Footnote: Bleecker (2005) takes it further, and defines the term blogject to describe devices that act like people on the Internet. They can blog, they can post to Twitter, they can reply to human conversation. For Bleecker, "blogjects become first-class a-list producers of conversations in the same way that human bloggers do—by starting, maintaining and being critical attractors in conversations around topics that have relevance and meaning to others who have a stake in that discussion."] These physical/network mashups build on existing web design methods and provide a familiar set of web concepts to describe how physical objects and online information can interact.

Mass customization

The digital information shadow associated with an object is much easier to change at whim than that object's physical form. Mass customization of experiences gets much easier when the majority of the customization happens digitally. For example, the WebKinz toy line (See Chapter 7) connects toys that physically differ only slightly (like Cabbage Patch dolls of an earlier generation), but have rich online personalities.

Conversely, merging information shadows with rapid manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing allows for the instantiation of data in a physical, purchased object. Materialise, a Belgian 3D printing firm, sells a line of intricate designer lamps for the high-end furniture market (under the .MGX brand). Each lamp is individually printed. When first introduced, every lamp came with a disk containing a CAD file describing how to recreate that lamp. It's the lamp's DNA and part of its information shadow. Since Materialise keeps copies of the files, the lamps are, in effect, immortal: if a lamp is broken, they can print another one. Each lamp can be unique, or replicated as often as a buyer wants.

What happens to "mass production" when an object's physical form is based on a unique digital file? In a sense, we can now go back to a pre-Industrial Revolution era of unique objects. But now the uniqueness stems not from the imperfections and unpredictability of hand craft processes, but from a manufactured object’s relationship with its informational shadow.

Smart disposal and recycling

Because information shadows can contain any kind of information, they can contain instructions for how to dispose of the object they shadow. [Footnote: I first heard this idea in a lecture by Bruce Sterling. In Sterling (1999) he writes "Smart garbage doesn't fester in darkness, ignorance and denial. It becomes a resource."] They can self-disclose not just what information they collect and use (as per Greenfield, 2006), but how to fix, disassembled and recycle them.

For example, information about the materials from which the object is made can be mashed up with a database of municipal recycling rules to generate instructions for how to locally recycle the object. San Francisco—where I live—has an advanced recycling program that automatically distinguishes between many materials. However, I still don't know if I can put a steel car part, Styrofoam or shoes with a "recycle" logo on the sole in my plastic recycling bin. The rules of what is acceptable, and how to prepare it, change regularly. An information shadow mashup linked to each object could clarify that question instantly, directing me to take my esoteric recyclable to a specific location or to treat it in a specific way.

Similarly, complex items, such as consumer electronics or robotic toys, are difficult to recycle because they require too much disassembly and contain unknown materials. For the municipality, these objects' information shadows could contain disassembly instructions and complete materials lists. With more information, city systems could know what do to with old toys besides sending them to the dump.

Information shadows enable new kinds of services

Note: See Chapter 8 for a more general examination of this topic.

By giving objects unique identifiers, shadows allow those objects to become the subjects of services that track them and interact with them. Everyday objects can become subscription services. [Footnote: Again Sterling got here first. In Sterling (2001) he describes a furniture subscription system that creates one-off customized furniture on demand.]

In the days before the breakup of AT&T, Americans didn't own their own telephones. They leased them from the phone company. Although "Ma Bell" limited the range of phone choices, the phone company was required to repair broken equipment. The company could arrange update the whole system systematically and thoroughly, whenever it wanted. Though not ideal, the system had its benefits. It was also nearly impossible to replicate without the resources of an enormous company like AT&T. Information shadows could facilitate similar—but not so resource-intensive—for many other kinds of products and consumers.

For example, a shoe company could sell sustainable shoes by subscription. The shoe easily disassembles, yet is sturdy and comfortable. Buying the shoe means buying into a subscription for that shoe. As one part wears out, or as fashions change, the shoe can be disassembled, and mailed to a central warehouse, which mails back a replacement part. The shoe's information shadow says exactly which replacement it requires.

More directly, unique item-level identification allows for services that determine authenticity and trace provenance. In some parts of Africa, 30% of pharmaceuticals are counterfeit. mPedigree is using unique identifiers, printed under a scratch-off material, to identify authentic drugs (Schenker, 2008). Sending the number by text message to a trusted central location checks the authenticity—and then the expiration date—of the pharmaceutical. If the identification number is valid and the medicine's shelf-life has not expired, the system sends back another text message with a simple affirmation. Similarly, a purchaser can use the information shadow of a grocery item to trace its progress back to the farm where it was made and verify whether their farming practices are sustainable and humane. Similarly, an expensive designer handbag can be quickly authenticated.

The service possibilities of information shadows are enormous.

Entertainment

Once an object is identifiable and trackable, it can become a token in a game. One of the earliest such games was "Where's George?" (wheresgeorge.com), which traces the passage of one dollar bills across the world using the bills' serial numbers. Many people find it fascinating to see where the bill they're holding had been and where bills they entered into the system have gone.

That is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. Mediamatic, a technology design organization, challenged a group of designers at the PICNIC 08 conference in Amsterdam to create social games using RFID tags that every conference participant was given (Mediamatic, 2008). After a week of hacking, the 30 people in the workshop had created ten functioning games (Table 6-1).

Table 6-1. Games developed usink ikTag RFID tags in a week of hacking by groups at the PICNIC 08 conference. The text is from a flyer printed by Mediamatic, the organizer of the hacking week.

• ikRun. Run from the conference to the PICNIC Club and record your fastest time and finishing photo. Scan your ikTag at the start next to the E-Art dome, scan again to finish and win!
• Friend Drink Station. Free drinks for new friends! Mediamatic offers a free drink and a new friendship in the network. Just swipe your ikTag and push the button.
• Department. Use the ikTag to see what the Department of Information Security & Privacy knows about you. The DISP is buying privacy and selling security.
• ikCam. Swipe your ikTag to add your portrait to your profile. Or gather up to 20 friends with ikTags and make shapshots!
• Breathalyzer. Use the ikTag, blow into the straw and test your alcohol intake. The outcome will be published on your profile. Compare your drinking skills with others at PICNIC.
• ikWin! Use your ikTag to challenge someone in a battle for Google ranking. Two scissor lifts will go up, the more hits, the higher you go.
• Mobile Massage Couch. Sit down on the two seater with a new friend, use your ikTag to get a free massage. You can win bonus time as a gift from the crowd.
• DuckRace. 2 players start their race cars with their ikTag. The race track is based on your profile and network. The audience will influence your race car with their ikTag.
• Breedrs. Drop your ikTag in the Breedrs Pond and see it evolve into a creature, with DNA based on your profile. Is this love or war?
• Vbird. Contact the Vbird with your ikTag, help it fly, meet new friends and find the interactive film in your profile.

These games represent a completely new genre of play, one that mixes physical objects (like scissor lifts, couches and breathalyzers) with online information (profiles and Google ranks) and computation. The possibilities implicit in this one week exercise are fascinating and exciting. They imply that information shadows can touch all aspects of everyday life.

Tomorrow: Chapter 3, Part 6: WineM

This is Part 4 of a pre-print draft of Chapter 6 from Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design, my upcoming book. (Part 1) (Part 2) The final book will be different and this is no substitute for it, but it's a taste of what the book is about.

Earlier chapters in this series: Chapter 3, Chapter 1

Citations to references can be found here.

Chapter 6: Information shadows

Part 4: The Internet of Things

The Center's mission is to create an "Internet of Things" that will: merge the centuries old "network of atoms" (the production, distribution, sale, use & disposal of products) with the "network of bits" (the Internet).

- Kevin Ashton, executive director of the MIT Auto-ID Center, 1999

The concept of information shadows is intertwined with the "The Internet of Things," a term coined by the staff of the MIT Auto-Id Center in 1999. The familiar Internet of bits is of course still made of things, but these things are primarily computational devices (routers, modems, etc.) whose purpose is to store, manipulate, and transmit data. These things generate the form of the Internet, not its content. People experience the Internet, however, through its content. This content, for now, exists for most people only through general-purpose digital devices such as laptops and mobile phones. [Footnote: Even specialized net-aware devices (Game consoles, ATMs, home security systems, etc.) are clearly presented as digital products whose connection to an electronic network does not come as a surprise.]

In 1999, MIT Auto-Id Center's vision was that non-electronic things should also have digital identities. The Center's main focused was automatic identification [Footnote: Leading to a number of visionary proposals for how such identification would work (Brock, 2001-1, 2001-2, etc.).], rather than the digital social life such identification creates for things. Information shadows, however, enable more symmetrical experiences than just identifying non-digital objects, as economically and socially powerful as that is. The Internet of Things has by now taken on a broader meaning. It describes the collection of all objects with information shadows, whether those objects' relationship to the Internet is asymmetrical (as in the case of identification and tracking) or symmetrical.

Figure 6-8. FedEx SenseAware (Courtesy FedEx)

The possibilities created by feedback between an object and its information shadow are immense. A shipped object can conceal its actual destination, only revealing the next step in its path to a shipper and dynamically adjusting its route if diverted. It can validate its authenticity and refuse to function if the person holding it is unauthorized, with the list stored in its information shadow. A FedEx's SenseAware smart tag (Figure 6-8), for example, reports not just the location of its package, but also the environmental conditions of its transfer. As it travels, it adds its location, temperature, pressure, humidity, and whether (and when) its box has been opened to its information shadow. In a more speculative scenario, a SenseAware-equipped box could theoretically reroute itself if storage conditions were likely to have caused its contents to spoil. [Footnote: FedEx does not currently offer this service. This scenario is speculative only.]

Despite its roots in shipping, an Internet of Things could use information shadows in a wide variety of ways. A motorcycle could have a strain gauge built into its chain, and store both the status of the chain, and the specifications for a replacement, in its information shadow. When the chain was stretched to the point where it needed replacement (an important part of motorcycle maintenance that can lead to very dangerous conditions if not performed), the motorcycle could log that state in its information shadow. This, in turn, could trigger an alert on the motorcycle owners' phone and on the motorcycle's dashboard. The repair shop could interrogate the motorcycle for the kind of chain last used and the chain performance characteristics indicated based on sensor data taken since the last replacement.

Tomorrow: Chapter 3, Part 5: Design with Information Shadows