Rough notes for Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova — Networked objects and the new ecology of things

Any­thing can have meaning.

Sources

• Inter­net of things report by ITU
• Shap­ing things — Ster­ling, “spimes”
• Thinglink
• Man­i­festo of net­worked objects

Num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions. ITU report: phi­los­o­phy relat­ed to biz effi­cien­cy, what about social dimension?

Blog­jects Does the thing itself par­tic­i­pate in con­tent cir­cu­la­tion? E.g.: AIBO blog plat­form, indi­ca­tor of how an instru­ment can engage in social web. 

Geospa­tial traces E.g.: Flight aware, see air­plane tra­jec­to­ries. Inter­est­ing thing is how bod­ies become dig­i­tal man­i­fes­ta­tions, the oth­er way around is excit­ing too. Occu­py­ing the world in a more sus­tain­able way.

Show­ing where objects are. Cur­rent­ly this stuff comes from mil­i­tary or art world. They also know where they’ve been. 

Tail num­ber is like thinglink for planes. CIA ter­ror planes — plane-spot­ters — unmarked planes. 

If objects start blog­ging we might get new insights in how the world works.

Blog­jects know their ori­gin. E.g.: “How is stufff made”

Blog­jects have agency, they can trig­ger actions and shape social prac­tice. E.g.: TripSense. Track­ing dri­ving habits. Pro­vides access to how he moved about SF. Impact he had on envi­ron­ment. How many trips he made. Insight on how he could be more eco-friendly.

Blog­jects pro­vide for new logistics.

So what?

It’s not just about tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and inter­fac­ing of objects. It’s about the social dimension.

This is part of a glob­al trend, things being part of a larg­er ecology.

Cre­at­ing leg­i­bil­i­ty and transparency

Blog­ging pigeon. GSM back­pack. Nice because it ele­vates the pigeon and is very low-tech.

Send­ing pur­chased objects to MySpace. 

Estab­lish­ing rela­tion­ships between phys­i­cal and vir­tu­al worlds. Bar­codes, tags, stick­ers, etc. Nabaz­tag. Weak sig­nals > blogjects.

Mov­ing ahead 

• series of work­shops to design blogjects
• online and offline discourse
• cat­a­logu­ing and track blogjects

Their ques­tions

• how to go from biz effi­cien­cy to social sustainability?
• are blog­jects up to the challenge?
• are social beings pre­pared to inter­act with blogjects?

Our ques­tions Q Maybe it’s like objects turn­ing them more into nature in the sense that bthey talkj back and are not part of us. A We’re cohab­it­ing with our artefacts. 

Q Are objects now doing ethnog­ra­phy of us? A Com­pa­nies are inter­est­ed in that idea, even beyond ethnog­ra­phy, usage track­ing. Is that s’thing we want?

http://reboot.dk/wiki/Networkedobjectsandthenewecol­o­gyof_things