Media Evolution

Joakim Formo is Senior Researcher at the User Experience Lab at the research department of the global telecommunications company Ericsson. The text is taken from our publication “Internet of Things”, about how the media industries can benefit from a network of connected things. Also watch Joakims presentation at last years The Conference.

Have you tried to surf the Internet of Things? Have you seen the new user interface they made for it? Me neither. Or perhaps we have but didn’t realise it?

We have had ’things’ for ages, and recently almost everyone have gotten used to the Internet, but it’s a bit difficult to pinpoint exactly what they become when mixed together. Not to mention how to actually use it? Would you ”browse” it? Will there be ”apps”?

There is a built-in pedagogical design challenge in the Internet of Things. At Ericsson’s User Experience Lab we interviewed people about their understanding of networked technology and found that most people seem to have a very weak understanding of the “networkedness” of networked devices, meaning the invisible intangible interrelationships between everything that is networked.

Understanding with design

It seems like people understand the concept of “the network” as something that is a medium for many a-to-b connections and this is why they didn’t have any intuitive feeling for the network as a structure of simultaneous many-to-many interconnections. This puts the whole point, it’s relevance, meaning and potential value of an Internet of Things in a mental blind spot for the big masses of “normal” internet and things users.

How can we then make people “get” the Internet of Things, from a user perspective? To make them see beyond all the single connections and give them a natural understanding of the sum of all the interconnections, i.e. the Network as such. Not to mention that they should also intuitively understand how to use it.

We got the idea that the key could be to substitute the mental model of the network as connections with a mental model borrowed from social networking. Sociality as a core metaphor for the user interaction could solve the problem since social relations is something that virtually all humans have an intuitive understanding of, and thus could be a way to make users naturally aware of the ”networkedness” itself.

Social web of things.

Social Web of Things

So we designed and built something that basically is a social network for connected objects and we called it the Social Web of Things. We tested it on people in different parts of the world and listened to what they said about it. What we found was that it really did help them to ”see” the network, intuitively and in a much more holistic way.

Immediately and almost without any explanation it became apparent to people that many very different things would be able to literally talk to each other, and to cooperate in order to for example be more cost efficient and energy aware. The key seems to be using the familiar and very human notion of ”friendship” rather than the much more technical ”connection”. Presenting the Internet of Things as if it is a social network proved to be very effective for making people understand the ”networkedness” which we believe is the true power of an Internet of Things.

Dennis Rosinder, CEO of Magisty, which help companies to make contemporary technology useful. The text is taken from our publication “Internet of Things”, about how the media industries can benefit from a network of connected things.

It often takes time for new technologies to become a natural part of daily life. Players like IBM and Ericsson create the premises for technology within the Internet of Things. But how can smaller players take advantage of the technology for which the large companies are laying the foundation?

We are the ones—service providers, media companies and innovators—who will play a major role in developing the true benefits, making the new technology useful and valuable.

The idea of how “everything” in the future could be connected is staggering in terms of both public benefit and commercial benefit. We are still decades behind Hollywood’s futuristic scenarios, and we need to start somewhere, but where? The IoT, all things interconnected, needs to be accomplished gradually in order to achieve a healthy development.

Start with what we’ve got

But do we really need to start from scratch? One idea is to start with what is available in our immediate environment. Cities contain tremendous amounts of data that are stored for statistical purposes, as well as the type of data collected in real time by various sensors located all over the city.

A typical example of how this openness can be used is www.dataSF.org – an initiative from the city of San Francisco a few years ago. They made the majority of public data available to the citizens, including data and information on tourism, transportation, police, parking, politics, the environment, civic studies, history, business, etc. Private individuals and companies could then develop web and mobile services for the benefit of citizens, businesses and visitors. Accessibility combined with people’s mobile internet presence made it possible to achieve a completely new level of civic engagement and belonging. From that point new types of commercial, cultural and tourism services had the potential to be created.

Media and the Internet of Things

It is not hard to imagine the incredible possibilities that can arise when creative urban minds have access to all this data. Perhaps curious businesspeople might reveal the city’s historical data archive and then involve the movie and gaming industry to create a historical experience through the city streets?

And wouldn’t it be great to be able to see, as soon as you enter the city limits, exactly which car park has a vacant place close to your final destination? What if the artists created an LED art project from the city’s energy flows, or what would it sound like if a composer created street music from the traffic light signals at the base station?

So my question is: which Swedish municipal commissioner will be the first to walk in Armstrong’s footsteps: one small step for man, a huge leap for mankind?

When the traffic lights have their say. Photo by * eyedeaz, CC BY-NC-SA

David Cuartielles founded Arduino five years ago together with an international team and is a researcher at Malmö University. The text is taken from our publication “Internet of Things”, about how the media industries can benefit from a network of connected things.

Back in the 80’s, scientists imagined a world where we would be surrounded by a multiplicity of computers. Nowadays, any home appliance is using microcontrollers more powerful than some of the first personal computers. There are so many computers surrounding us, that if all of them had a screen and a keyboard, it would be impossible for us to interact with them.

The Internet of Things (IoT) adds one extra degree of complexity to this equation. It brings to our attention that those computers are not living in isolation, they talk to other computers through the internet. Connecting to the net opens up for a world of possibilities where products and services come in bundles offering functionalities we never dreamed of.

The IoT deals with simplifying the way we generate and consume information that is sensitive to be shared online. The issue is then how to create objects that will help designers thinking about new devices.

An open source hardware platform

Arduino is an open platform with a whole series of documentation that allows doing just that: creating new connected devices that will serve or collect data in ways that are more meaningful to us. It addresses the fact that you don’t need to be an engineer to envision a new product.

In 2005 our platform was used by industrial designers to implement visions of future devices. Back then we didn’t ambition it to leave the university labs or to be used by a broader audience.

Nowadays it can be found at retail stores like Radioshack in the US or Kjell & Co in Sweden. It is manufactured by tens of thousands each month. Students use it when bringing their ideas to life, hobbyist spend time building new concepts out of them, engineers study its development at universities, companies like Apple ask for cv’s of people with ”Arduino knowledge”. It is being cloned at a ratio of one copy for each original board.

Use around the world

We are crafting collaborations with companies dedicated to the internet as a business model. In May 2011, Google launched their accessory development kit based on one of the Arduino designs. In February 2012 Telefonica announced Arduino’s official M2M (machine-to-machine) board to allow the ”long tail” of the communication business building connected objects including reasonable data-plans attached to them.

Arduino has grown beyond expectations and we keep on getting amazed by projects like the one of Sebastian, a 14 year old Chilean teen that managed to get over 30.000 followers on Twitter thanks to an Arduino machine he designed that would post a message when detecting an earthquake. Arduino is a tool to bring us a little closer to a more connected world.