Still working my way through the first volume of MEME. One reason I keep sharing things from the ’90s is that I’m continually impressed by how often it’s taken ten years for ideas to gain traction or see real implementation.
Today, it’s spimes.
Spimes live in the space between software and hardware — physical objects with a digital history. Sometimes this means ‘intelligent agents’, or things like refrigerators that make grocery lists. Sometimes it means the object contains information about itself, like credit cards or RFID tags. Sometimes it means other things entirely.
The week I met with Nicholas Negroponte, the Media Lab announced a new research consortium called Things That Think. TTT hopes to embed “intelligence” into everyday objects, like clothes, appliances, etc. to make them more useful and helpful to people. It is part of Negroponte’s lifelong work on what he called the “man-machine symbiosis” in 01968. So, without further delay, here is Negroponte.
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NN: I don’t happen to think door knobs will become conscious or have their own volition in the sense that my pet bull-dog does. But on the other hand, it’s certainly — the sum of intelligent behavior is definitely going to produce much more intelligent environments. There’s no question about that. … I hate to keep using the example of doorknobs, but it is so understandable that a doorknob can be a better doorknob if it could see and listen and recognize who’s at the door. If it could, its ‘doorknobness would be better’. But also on occasions, doorknobs would have to do other things because the doorknob happens to be in the right place at the right time.
Here, the idea seems to be that we can make life easier with objects that can use external information. One form of this concept is X10 and other home automation technology.
Now let’s look at a different approach.
The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.
Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.
They are searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects.
So what would it be like to encounter a spime in your future real life? How if you know if you stumbled over one in the street? Scott Klinker, a teacher at the Cranbrook design school, envisions it as something like this:
Scenario: You buy a Spime with a credit card. Your account info is embedded in the transaction, including a special email address set up for your Spimes. After the purchase, a link is sent to you with customer support, relevant product data, history of ownership, geographies, manufacturing origins, ingredients, recipes for customization, and bluebook value. The spime is able to update its data in your database (via radio-frequency ID), to inform you of required service calls, with appropriate links to service centers. This removes guesswork and streamlines recycling.
Today, most consumers know little or nothing about their possessions. They might know the brand, because brand awareness has been forced on them for years, at great expense, by massive product advertising. A Spime, by contrast, is an object that can link to and swiftly reveal most everything about itself. It might as well do this, since Google is perfectly capable of telling you everything anyway.
These ideas seem like they would mesh well with the cradle-to-cradle movement, which is concerned with being sure that the things we make can be cleanly and easily unmade. The ability to look at a complete list of the chemicals that have gone into the construction of various cellphones would allow for choosing one that has reduced environmental impact. It also would help with determining the sunk energy cost of, say, building a new home versus remodeling an old one.
Although these ideas are interesting, they’re not much good until somebody actually implements them. And so:
So I’ve been thinking about how I can continue to projectise this product. And how this bag can have a 10-year + story. So I’m trying to add spimeiness to it and to use internet stuff as a memory aid for this thing. So, I’ve created a unique URL for it at thinglink, in the spirit of the skuwiki idea. And I’ve built a tumblblog for it at HMDbag.tumblr.com. That tumblr extracts things from flickr and delicious that I’ve tagged appropriately, so it’s sort of self-generating. I imagine telling the story of the life of the bag that way, keeping it as a project not a product.
But what would be really nice would be if it could tell its own story more. Generate its own data. I could attach an RFID tag, but I’m not quite sure what would ever read it. I guess ideally it would have it’s own GPS logging stick sewn in. Or something. The good thing though, about a 10-year + project is that you don’t have to have it all sorted at the begining. When GPS tracking chips are cheap, robust and powered by eating lint I can just chuck one on.
Spimes are almost certainly more useful in the long term, because a use-once scenario doesn’t really allow for or need all the information the concept implies.
High-quality, long-haul goods are the better choice anyhow, regardless of whether they take the spime approach or not. But if you’re going to treat purchases as investments, why not get that little extra out of it?
