Presentation given at Piemonte Share Festival, Torino, Italy — http://www.toshare.it/eng/about

1. A Manifesto for Networked Objects
Julian Bleecker
Near Future Laboratory
Networked Objects
Share Festival
March 15, 2008

2. Here Is What I Want To Share With You Today..

3. As More Smart, Mobile, Sensing “Things” Are Attached
to the Internet, Their Presence and Participation and
Agency (Ability To Create Action) Can Be Felt In Our
Online Lives

4. If the Social Web (the Internet of Social Beings) Greatly
Impacted Our Social Lives, How Will An “Internet of
Things” Be Felt Across Our Lived Experiences?

5. 1st Life and 2nd Life Are Being Joined Together In
Intriguing Ways

6. Curious New Practices Of “Making Things” Are
Evolving That Are Encouraging Exciting New
Networked Objects

7. How Do I Know This?
My Own Peculiar Interpretation Of “Weak Signals”
From The Near Future..

8. What would the social web look like when more and
more network connected quot;thingsquot; participate in this
web of social activity?

9. Would It Be “The Internet Of Things?”
What is the internet of things? Where did this notion come from and how has it
been adapted and extended?

10. ITU Report on The Internet of Things
The ITU Report: “The Internet of Things” energizes conversations about what a
world of networked things might be. The ITU report takes it from the perspective
of its audience — large communications companies. So, The Internet of Things
takes on a perspective of new kinds of services that have a distinctly commercial
orientation, largely around using RFID to “tag” objects, such as manufacturing
parts or packages being shipped, so as to obtain operational efficiencies of an
economic kind.

11. The ITU Internet of Things Vision
The “operational efficiency” form of the Internet of Things. By knowing where
objects are in the physical world new logistics have emerged that create more
efficient business practices; but that efficiency can be harnessed in others ways
based on the fact that blogjects can be manipulated as to their routes and
locations.

12. The Internet of Things Means Lots of Things
The Internet of Things conceptually is also taken up in other ways. “Shaping
Things” by Bruce Sterling, the Thing Link project by Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, and “A
Manifesto for Networked Objects” by Julian Bleecker, amongst other projects and
thought-pieces. Ultimately, what ties all these considerations are what it means
when objects and things are able to be represented uniquely both in 1st life and
2nd life. Are the worlds we want (or deserve) when this kind of object / thing
tagging occurs?

13. The Internet of Things?
It’s Not About The Internet As An Instrument.
It’s The Potential For Meaningful Social Interactions
It’s not about the network

14. The Internet of Things?
It’s About Capturing 1st Life Activity To Create
Meaningful Networked, Digital Experiences
Beyond The Desktop
It’s about physical, embodied interactions that take account of the wide range of
possibilities offered by physical space

15. The “Blogject” Internet of Things
“A Manifesto for Networked Objects” http://research.techkwondo.com/blog/
julian/185

16. Blogjects are
(objects that “blog”)
Expressions of relationships between 1st life (“physical”, “normal”, “human”) and
2nd life worlds (“electronic”, “online”, “digital”) can take many forms, and one
cannot anticipate what will happen.

17. Blogjects are
Objects that use digital networks (like the Internet) to
disseminate content from 1st life (the physical world).
Expressions of relationships between 1st life (“physical”, “normal”, “human”) and
2nd life worlds (“electronic”, “online”, “digital”) can take many forms, and one
cannot anticipate what will happen.

18. Blogjects are
Objects that circulate meaning, incite conversations,
establish points of view on things that matter.
Expressions of relationships between 1st life (“physical”, “normal”, “human”) and
2nd life worlds (“electronic”, “online”, “digital”) can take many forms, and one
cannot anticipate what will happen.

19. What Happens?
Networked Objects Get To Become Social
When you network “things” they become social actors, only because the network
(Internet) is already a social place. They will get taken up and participate with the
kind of first-class agency any other sort of entity might have. They are not
human social actors, but social actors nonetheless. This is not new — things with
social agency — but it is new in the context of the new networked world.
So..then what? What sort of world will we inhabit with networked social actors
that are things?

20. Blogject Prehistory: Inter-species Social Interactions
There is a pre-history to inter-species social formations, such as the canary used
by coal miners to give them early warning signals about dangerous conditions in
the mines. Even more, if we consider animism and the role of other species in
creating meanings about the world.

21. Weak Signals: Blogjects Participate in the Social Web
Sony AIBO blogs its daily life, allowing affinity relationships between the dogs
and their owners and friends. Jurrasic era of blogjects — more to come.

22. Weak Signals: Blogjects Creating A Reconfigured View
Of Our 1st Life World
Beatriz Da Costa, Electrical Engineering & Studio Art Professor, UC Irvine.
Blogging pigeon outfitted with a small backpack that allows the birds to send
data to their blog about their location and the micro-local environmental
conditions where they are flying.

23. New Interaction Partners: Critter Cams Bridge 1st Life
Critters to 2nd Life Audiences
Critter Cams are cameras attached to creatures allowing us to see from their
perspective their world. This insight can lead to a different understanding about
animals. Through these critter cams, they become interaction partners, as they
participate with us in sharing meaning about parts of the world we normally do
not consider, or understand.

24. Preemptive Media’s AIR (Area’s Immediate Readings)

25. Preemptive Media’s AIR (Area’s Immediate Readings)

27. Blogjects: Geography, Paths & Routes

28. geospatial traces: blogjects exist in the physical world
objects have a physical manifestation and occupy space, spatial characteristics
include knowing where they are going

29. blogjects know where they’ve been
knowing where they’ve been / history — histories of individual aircraft/
equipment

30. blogjects know where they are
“In Transit” by Amy Balkin — San Francisco cab traces. Visualizations of objects
and things moving in physical space. If things can tell us where they are, we can
obtain different perspectives on how physical space is occupied that can yield
fresh insights, possibly with important consequences that shape decisions about
how we behave in physical space.

31. Nuisance Luggage Re-routes Its Human
Luggage and humans are assigned to each other when they travel on airlines.
The luggage and human must remain together. In one case, a human was re-
routed when its luggage went on a different airplane, so that the two stayed
together. Telling instance of how things can assert their agency and assert
themselves by changing the paths we travel.

32. Blogjects: Assertive, Shaping Our Behavior, Revealing
and Providing Insights Into Hidden, Invisible Data

33. Blogjects: Shaping Individual & Group Behavior

34. Tripsense is a reporting system that allows one to volunteer information about
one’s driving data and obtain tabulations of this data. Can this kind of
information change one’s driving behavior in positive ways?

35. Tripwire
Tripwire (Tad Hirsch) Tripwire is a site-specific installation responding to the
unique relationship between the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport
and downtown San Jose, CA. Custom-built sensors hidden inside coconuts are
hung from trees at several public locations to monitor noise produced by
overflying aircraft. Detection of excessive aircraft noise triggers automated
telephone calls to the airport's complaint line on behalf of the city's residents
and wildlife. Documentation of noise incidents is archived for later analysis
Turning a coconut into the sense “agent” is a clever way to make the sensor have
more affinity to the surroundings and make it less cold and mechanical — more
something one might more easily consider a participant in figuring out what’s
going on in the world.

36. Watson
Closes the loop between energy consumption and conservation habits

37. Blogjects: They Connect 1st Life and 2nd Life Worlds

38. Tags Join Real World Data To Data Networks

39. “Touch” Techniques Like RFID Link Physical Objects
To Digital Networks

40. Twitcher
Twitcher / Nokia (Matt Jones) / Tom Hume / bluetooth for friend-to-friend play,
proximity interactions. When two bluetooth phones come near each other, the
game introduces a fleeting experience — a bird lands on the Twitcher grassland
and you must be the first to photograph it before it flies away.

41. Feeding Yoshi
Feeding Yoshi uses wifi access points as “touchpoints” for game mechanics,
rather than merely as ways to get on the network. Turns AP’s into places that
represent certain features of a game. “Seamful Design” (Chalmers, et. al.,
University of Glasgow)

42. Creative Game Semantics Subtly Join 1st Life & 2nd Life
Resetti emerges from beneath “Animal Crossing”, a Nintendo DS game, that
creates an ambient link between 1st life and 2nd life by matching time — the
game clock is identical to the current time of day, so the game environment
expresses this. Resetti — a mole — will surface when you have shut down the
game without safely saving the game state. He berates you terribly, so that you
will be sure never again to shut the game down without saving. It is interesting
how the game integrates a 1st life action (shutdown) into the narrative frame of
the game, rather than showing a didactic warning screen that disrupts the game
experience unnecessarily.

45. Blind Camera — Handmade Blogject
Blind Camera (Sascha Pohflepp) wrangles 2nd life media sharing in an almost
literal, 1st life instantiation, revealing a unique take on a the very fun social
practice of sharing photographs by bridging a 1st life thing (camera) and 2nd life
protocols (rss feeds of digital images and their meta data). http://
www.blinksandbuttons.net/buttons_en.html

46. “Sketching” Your Own Blogjects
...A Different Kind of Manufacturing Process
Making our own stuff — what does it mean, how do you do
it?
There is a sense that the ability to make our own electronic/
digital/computational “stuff” is not just fun, but has some
larger purpose that’s related to impulses of DIY sensibilities.
Making your own devices has a implicit cultural and political
message. That is, we can be “productive consumers” as Ruth
described yesterday. We can produce the things we need or
enjoy or desire based on our own principles, ethics, senses

47. New Practices: Materializing Your Ideas For Networked
Objects
Making Physical Things That Join 1st Life & 2nd Life
We can create impacts and implications by creating our own stuff — the tools are
available and easily accessible, as is the knowledge and the conversations about
who is doing what, and how they are doing it.

48. “Weak Signals” From The Near Future
Peter Lunenfeldʼs WYMIWYM notion

49. DIY Hardware Today
Feels Like Web Software Did 10 Years Ago
Soon It Will Be Routine, Like Setting Up Your Own Blog
Peter Lunenfeldʼs WYMIWYM notion

50. What Does It Look Like Now?
“Productive Consumers” Making Our Own Objects
I could be up here 10 years ago, explaining what HTML is, or what it is to set up your own
website.

51. Sketching — Materializing Ideas

52. A Toolchain For Materializing Ideas
Model Idea In CAD

53. A Toolchain For Materializing Ideas
Small Scale Outsourced Production
China, <$90/1000 sq. cm. of circuit boards, 7 days

54. A Toolchain For Materializing Ideas
Receive Manufactured Raw Materials

55. A Toolchain For Materializing Ideas
Receive Manufactured Raw Materials

56. A Toolchain For Materializing Ideas
Backyard Assembly

57. A Toolchain For Materializing Ideas
Test and Reliability

58. A Toolchain For Materializing Ideas
Model Idea In CAD

59. Press “Print”

60. A Toolchain For Materializing Ideas
Final Assembly

61. A Toolchain For Materializing Ideas
Final Final

62. Being done, and refining is a rewarding part of the process of making your own devices.

63. Thank You.