DIY IOT
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Presented at the Internet of Things Europe 2010 in Brussels. Full talk and notes transcript here: http://tinkerlondon.com/now/2010/06/01/diy-iot/
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DIY IOT
Editor's Notes
- Hello, my name is Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. I run a design studio in London called Tinker and today I will talk briefly about the IOT landscape from a bottom-up and DIY perspective and how I think it fits into the broader conversations that we are having at this conference.
- IOT is already a reality for the RFID and microchip market, but consumer solutions are still a little bit of an alien concept. The Nabaztag was the first object that tried to take advantage of what makes everyday objects desirable and interesting to interact with. A rabbit whose ears you could wriggle around knowing that its twin’s ears would also move. I heard once their core target audience was families with divorced parents. Even if it were untrue, I’d like to think that this object allowed a level of communication in what is an often difficult time. If anything, other solutions should aim towards that level of engagement. Truth is since the Nabaztag, noone has really tried to approach the market of screen-less devices in the same way. We have iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, Android phones. Computers reduced to the size of our hand. Greedy and attention-seeking computers. Computers and applications designed by white men in their mid-thirties in California.
- We have RFID tokens of various shapes, offering us ways to interact with each other that are game based, points based, or networking based, not making themselves useful enough, but amusing accessories. We are at the moment, very much at a crunch time between living a rich digital life, full of friends, conversations, pictures, books, magazines. We have developed new vocabulary, new habits, we poke, we tweet, we Google, we download, upload, share, bookmark, lol, wink and more. Objects around us struggles to connect back. Industries around music and publishing struggle to keep up. Toy manufacturers don’t know how design for the time that we will play with objects and not screens (“age compression”). Books will become something old people will collect or young adults will collect as much as they now seek old cassette tapes. We’ve never been so nostalgic, so quickly. Cities are starting to be seen as a network of their own that we can design and play with as easily as we do with servers. Public open data is assumed part of any political landscape. Our physical selves however are very much connecting online. As we struggle with obesity, and long-term health problems, tracking our own health and well-being has become a new obsession. Track, share and compare could be how you would describe it. The Nike plus system encouraged people running to share their efforts with others. Wethings allows you to publish your weight online. Wefeelfine and moodstats was an early attempt at sharing how we’re doing. Personal informatics as Tom Coates and Matt Jones said in 2008 describes the new landscape of personal publishable data. These systems are still designed by white men in their mid-thirties in California for the most part. Or are they?
- Since 2005, there has also been a counter-culture growing of an IOT based on open source platforms and services that allow the bespoke development of products and niche market solutions. The reason they are interesting is not the number of users, it’s the general trend under which each of these services, products, infrastructures positions itself. Broadly defining it as DIY would be a mistake, the actors in this market often do not make things themselves, but they make the things that allow anyone to make, themselves.
- The poster-child for this revolution is a platform called Arduino. Born out of academia in Italy in 2005 by a group of 5 academics and students (Banzi, Martino, Igoe, Mellis, Cuartielles, Zambetti) it was primarily aimed at design students who had to learn the basics of electronics in a short amount of time with no technical knowledge. In the early days, it started slowly building momentum in design schools in Europe and NYC and became quite popular with new media artists. Since then, Arduino (which is the name of an Italian king and more importantly of the local bar where the group used to meet) has sold more than 150K units world-wide and has been used by the NASA, BBC, Nokia, Nike and more to build cheap flexible interactive projects that span across r&D research, marketing , product prototypes, art installations, museum installations, cheap medical devices, and more. It’s still made in the Italian Alps and now sold world-wide.
- The reasons why IOT came about with Arduino are quite obvious: it’s a cheap (20 euro) open source platform that allows you to program a chip and connect it to the real world, with no prior knowledge of electronics or coding. As an idea, this is incredibly powerful and has allowed a smooth transition between a one-off and a final product.
- Examples include: Catalog, Botanicalls, Kickbee.
- Examples include: Catalog, Botanicalls, Kickbee.
- Examples include: Catalog, Botanicalls, Kickbee.
- Picking up on the impact of this community, product companies are starting to develop business models on top of these bespoke prototypes. In 2007, Nicolas O’Leary who works at IBM connected a Current Cost meter (an energy meter) to Arduino and an Orb so that he could see at a glance what his energy consumption was like. A weeks ago, Current Cost announced the launch of the Bridge, a product both my studio and Pachube worked on, that allows users to publish their energy data to websites like Google power meter. This is an example of a smart company that saw their product the ENVI was being hacked by Arduino users, took cue from this and responded with an open mass consumption product. These are new ways of doing business and new ways of competing on the global market.
- Last month, we launched an open research project with EDF R&D around smart homes. We were tired of looking at really terrible ideas for the home that noone wanted to use. We decided that we would investigate, with both Arduino experts and totally non-tech households, what bits of smartness they wanted or could want to have in their home. If IOT at home wasn’t going to be designed in R&D departments, we would try it out in the open. Openly published and creative common licensed. This way of working, investigating, building IP, is a by-product of these new tools and this new landscape of IOT.
- I could also talk to you about wonderful things like the Makerbot, a small cheap fabbing machine that allows you to fabricate rapidly parts for initial product design. All the Arduino-compatible products that Sparkfun sell helping users gain new skills and knowledge and produce wonderful new product ideas. I think however that the thought I would like to leave you with is that there is no single solution provider in the world of IOT . Some of the players who will be part of your ecology, your competitors or your potential collaborators might be in school now, or unemployed, or weekend hackers or young entrepreneurs. They aren’t necessarily in large corporations and there lies a real opportunity in the next 2 days to make sure to build the platforms for everyone to engage in the discourse of what the IOT in 2020 will be like. Because everyone is building it whether we like it or not. Thank you. [email_address] tinkerlondon.com @tinkerlondon