Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Thingfrastructure and Design
Of late I've been scouring the interwebs for ways to jump into the vast, nebulous topic of the "Internet of Things" and thanks a tweet by Nick Bilton of the New York Times and The Times Research & Development Lab, I was pointed to a fantastic presentation by Matt Jones, founder of Dopplr, formerly director of UX design at Nokia, and now at Schulze & Webb.
The talk was given at the Frontiers of Interaction conference in Rome this past week, and Jones has noted that his presentation was "primarily about the territory of “the Internet of Things” moving from one of academic and technological investigation to one of commercial design practice, and what that might mean for designers working therein."
As a relative neophyte to the subject, to me this talk struck a balance between introducing some fundamental concepts of the field while at the same time outlining the opportunities and challenges developers will face in designing for what Jones calls the 'Thingfrastructure' - "designs of media, service and product that are resilient, and self-sustaining as far as possible."
Making human/non-human interactions more meaningful while designing our way out of cycles of planned obsolescence are lofty aspirations, and given the brevity of his presentation, Jones offers little in the way of concrete steps to be taken to realize these ambitions. We are, however, treated to a taste of the future of design, wherein creators design, "from the start so that as far as possible, every thing in the system radiates infrastructure and service to every other thing."
We've already seen products like the Chumby and the Ambient Orb, which have the capacity for passively transmitting information to humans. What I'm really excited for though is what Jones is pointing to -- a world in which information exchange goes in two directions. In this coming world our interactions with machines tend more towards what Bruno Latour describes in We Have Never Been Modern -- a seamless network of human and non-human actors informing and influencing each others' behaviors.
I highly recommend taking a look at the slide show from the talk, or if you've got the time you can watch a video of the presentation. Also, if you have any suggested reading for me, I'd love to hear some ideas about where I can read more about the topics covered by Jones.