Patrick Plaggenborg

The emotional value of an object can lie in experiences with that object, or intensive use of it. Perhaps the object was a precious gift or it reminds you of pleasant or unpleasant times. Crafted objects can be selfreflecting, and souvenirs can remind you of a location.

In this project the emotional stories are narrowed down to childhood nostalgia. The objects used are a Fisher-Price roller skate, a stuffed animal, a plastic military tank and a handcrafted puppet. Because these items were collected in The Netherlands, they might be emotional to only Dutch.

To test this hypothesis the objects would have to be presented to people from different countries. To find people not in a hurry or not going somewhere a good place to look is a park or a square. People there would be relaxing and not be bothering too much by a few questions. The ideal place to meet people from a lot of different nationalities would be a tourist hot spot. I found a perfect combination of the two in Union Square, San Francisco.

There was a chance that people would not recognise the objects at all. Their emotional stories would be geographically bound. However it was very interesting to see nearly everybody coorporating recognising the objects. Interesting stories were captured. The story-telling people came from Canada, the US, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Spain, Germany, Russia, France, Scotland and England. Together this created an interesting mixture of emotions, with some emotions being country specific, and others being global.

It seemed like the perfect place to interview people, but unfortunately it also had a downside. The sound quality of the recordings is pretty low because of constant traffic and construction background sounds. Nevertheless the great emotional and international stories weigh easily up against this loss of quality.

Last weekend (23rd and 24th of June 2006) another Dorkbot was held in Nieuwpoorttheater in Ghent. Dorkbot is a global festival with “People doing strange things with electricity.” ‘De Ambassade’ (the embassy) is a place in Nieuwpoorttheater where artists and students collectively research the relation between art, society and the balance of power. This time an ‘RFID embassy’ was set up as a research project by the collective nMn (naarstige Media nijverheid).

Friday night’s theme was RFID. I was invited to do a lecture on my experiences in my research project on RFID. I especially talked about the evolution I found in the way RFID is applied. My presentation “Evolving RFID Devices” can be downloaded here:
Presentation Dorkbot Gent 23rd of June 2006.pdf

That same night Rob van Kranenburg spoke about ‘RFID and Pervasive Computing”. An interesting lecture on the consequences of RFID and the way it is entering our lives. He was followed by Melanie Rieback of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, creator of the RFID virus. She’s researching the privacy issues involved with RFID from the context of Computer Science. Although she did mention the virus, a great deal of her talk was about her RFID Guardian, a mobile device protecting your privacy. Later that night Tilman Runge and Christopher Hirschmann were supposed to talk about their RFID Zapper. Unfortunately their presentation was cancelled that night. nMe itself built the RFIDude: a robot driving around the room autonomous. Visitors were handed out RFID badges with their hobbies associated to them. A built in reader allowed the robot to scan people’s badges and show their relationship with other people on a big screen.

It was an interesting night, with interesting talks. Later that night some lively conversations arose. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the next night, missing out on the RFID zapper and the other interesting projects like Johannes Taelman’s DIY touch screen. A nice day in Ghent with lovely weather slightly made up for that.

Although I expected an audience focused on RFID I was positively surprised that uninitiated people came by, interested in learning about this new technology. Also my compliments for the organisation. Some photographs were made. If I can get hold of some of them they might show up here later.

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As I’m proceeding on my research I’m getting quite deep into the matter. The possibilities I create with my project tell the story of a future scenario. In this project RFID is a technique being used, but more important, it’s also the subject of this story.

The Story Tool I create is enabling users to add their own stories to objects of their choice. These stories form a second dimension. My goal is to place those user stories in the same context of all objects being tagged by RFID. This way these stories strengthen my project and make the scenario more interesting to people unaware of RFID.

Download the PDF document by clicking on the image below:

An update of my Project Description. The PDF document can be downloaded here:
Project Description.pdf

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Because I know some Java but I’m not a Java expert a very important decision factor in chosing the platform is my ability to actually realize the programming work. I created a flow chart to give an overview of what would have to be possible in the system I want to create.

Have a look at it here, or click the image to download the PDF file.

The last couple of days I’ve been looking into the platform possibilities of my project. I have several options, although not all of them are just as good. I’m really looking for a mobile device because that would emphasize the freedom of the user.

In a perfect world that would be a user’s cellphone with embedded RFID/NFC reader and a nice and big screen that would be able to show a goodlooking and user friendly user interface. Add on top of that a camera and microphone. At the moment there are no cellphones with such specifications. What are the options?

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Yesterday I had to present my project for the Mock Exam comity. I’m creating a tool enabling users to associate their own narrative to objects. I want to provide people adhesive RFID tags that can be stuck on anything you like. You would then be able to tell your story by adding pictures, video’s or sound. On the EMMA project market I will show a room with different objects that have a narrative associated to them.

The comity was very positive but did tell me to improve the relation between the content of the narratives and the infrastructure (RFID). In other words, try to create narratives in the context of RFID and privacy invasion. The main reason for this was that most people, when hearing about RFID, will not be able to look further than privacy invasion. Let’s see how I can use this feedback and keep the whole project in a positive perspective.

I passed, so I’m in production fase. All the research on RFID has taken quite some time of the total exegesis. I’m not behind on schedule but it does mean I have to put extra time on production right now. My thesis is well under way though.

What’s left for me to do?

• Find the right platform (hardware/software) for my product
• Improve the relation between the content of the narrative and the infrastructure (RFID)
• Build infrastructure (User Interface, database)
• Create photo/video/audio for narratives
• Build object room
• Finish thesis