On Heritage aims to offer and promote a rich discussion at the intersection of art, performance, and culture that expands the boundaries of HCI while broadening our understanding of how things of the past come to matter in the present.

Elisa Giaccardi, Editor
An Internet of Things
That Do Not Exist
Chris Speed

Edinburgh School of architecture and Landscape architecture | [e-mail]

 

find correlations between owners and applications. In a world that has relied upon a linear chain of supply and demand between manufacturer and consumer via high street shops, the Internet of Things has the potential to transform how we will treat objects, care about their origin, and use them to find other objects.

Everything will be searchable and findable, and, subsequently, the shopping experience may never be the same. The concept of throwing away objects may become a thing of the past as other people find new uses for old things.

May + June 2011

interactions

What are the implications of our relationship with physical artifacts as the technical and cultural phenomenon known as the Internet of Things begins to emerge? The term, coined in 1999, is attributed to the Auto-ID research group at MIT and was explored in depth by the International Telecommunication Union in a published report bearing the same name at the United Nations Internet summit in 2005. The term refers to the shift that is anticipated as society moves to a ubiquitous form of computing in which every device is on and connected in some way to the Internet [ 1].

The implications for the Internet of Things upon production and consumption are tremendous and will transform the ways in which people shop, store, and share products. The analog bar code that has for so long been a dumb, encrypted reference to a shop’s inventory system will be superseded by an open platform in which every object manufactured will be trackable from cradle to grave—from manufacturer to distributor, to potentially every single person who comes into contact with it following its purchase. Furthermore, every object that comes close to another object and is within range of a reader could also be logged on a database and used to

Spimes

In his text Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling introduced the term “spime” to describe an object that was more digital than actual:

“Spimes are manufactured objects
whose informational support is so over-
whelmingly extensive and rich that they
are regarded as material instantiations of
an immaterial system. Spimes begin and
end as data. They’re virtual objects first
and actual objects second” [ 2]
A mash-up of the words “space”
and “time,” spimes are objects that
are in contact with the Internet
all the time, constantly telling the
world where they are and what time
they are there, as though they are
new coordinates that will define how
we map reality. I describe them as
new because they synthesize loca-
tive, temporal, logistical, and social
data, unlike traditional forms of sci-
entific measurement that have tend-
ed to concentrate on one aspect of
the world: maps/space, clocks/time,
thermometers/temperature, etc.

Things That Are
Actually in the World
Much of what has so far been
hypothesized and funded for an