Posts tagged IoT

The web has turned out to be just another communication tool to reflect the good and bad of society. No more, no less. The good in the world is still mostly shaped by governments, regulation, NGOs, the UN, the EU (GDPR), philanthropists and volunteer organisations. Throughout the two day conversation, I felt people were disappointed the web hadn’t been able to live up to its perceived almost-socialist-but-ultimately-neo-liberal promise. Many said they wanted to engage with governments more. Many talked about open data for cities. Mostly, it was unclear what exactly the web could do to address ISIS, sexism, racism, violence, addiction. Because it can’t. The web has become as useful or useless as people want it to be. No more, no less.

via https://medium.com/@iotwatch/the-tech-that-does-or-doesnt-matter-thoughts-after-cph150-e3e3f582334c

video link

Our Friends Electric is a short film exploring alternate forms and interactions for voice AI. The project was commissioned by Michelle Thorne and Jon Rogers from Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio. The film explores our developing relationship with voice activated AI assistants, and the future potential of these relationships through three fictional devices.

(via http://superflux.in/index.php/work/friends-electric/)

We at Changeist, along with a few associates, set up the Thingclash project about 18 months ago now, with the intention of starting a conversation around human values in the Internet of Things (IoT), and to provide tools to help make that conversation easier, more expansive, and more inclusive. We’d like to think we helped drive some of the public critical discussion around the IoT that is now happening more in the mainstream than it was two years ago. With a toolkit finally in place, we have run workshops at various scales, and focused on various specialist topics, over the past year or more. Now, to mark the return of Thingscon NL in Amsterdam, where we ran our first public workshop, we’re compiling the array of cards and exercises together to release as a single Creative Commons-licensed set of materials, available for download.

via https://medium.com/thingclash/run-your-own-thingclash-workshop-f6f70d016610

So what happens when you cross blockchains and internet of things? One outcome is buzzword overload. In the coLAB, we don’t like that very much. We like to make things tangible, and we learn what’s possible by building prototypes.So we built a proof of concept solar panel kit that automatically creates renewable energy certificates as it generates power. Why energy? What are renewable energy certificates? Let us explain.

via https://medium.com/ideo-colab/how-and-why-we-built-an-internet-connected-solar-panel–727d720d3803

Little Printer is a product of now. It is a product, a tangible thing, but is also a product, in the sense of a consequence, of contemporary culture. It humbly and accessibly exemplifies how physical and digital have merged to become one, to become hybrid objects, to demonstrate how objects might become networked, and how domestic objects might behave.

via https://medium.com/a-chair-in-a-room/little-printer-a-portrait-in-the-nude–4a5659ea731

The home of the future has a long history. In 1893, at the World’s Fair in Chicago, domestic science and home economics were presented on the global stage for the first time as academic disciplines, topics to be systematically considered and innovated upon. In 1933, the Chicago World’s Fair was themed “Century of Progress.” It had a whole exhibition called Homes of Tomorrow, advertised by a flyer touting “the home of the new era … a steel house you would want to live in,” one that’s “fireproof and sanitary.” The home itself was now fair game for innovation, and companies like Monsanto and General Motors started to get on board.

http://www.eater.com/2015/9/15/9326775/the-kitchen-of-the-future-has-failed-us

So the fact is that our experience of the world will increasingly come to reflect our experience of our computers and of the internet itself (not surprisingly, as it’ll be infused with both). Just as any user feels their computer to be a fairly unpredictable device full of programs they’ve never installed doing unknown things to which they’ve never agreed to benefit companies they’ve never heard of, inefficiently at best and actively malignant at worst (but how would you now?), cars, street lights, and even buildings will behave in the same vaguely suspicious way. Is your self-driving car deliberately slowing down to give priority to the higher-priced models? Is your green A/C really less efficient with a thermostat from a different company, or it’s just not trying as hard? And your tv is supposed to only use its camera to follow your gestural commands, but it’s a bit suspicious how it always offers Disney downloads when your children are sitting in front of it.

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/rinesi20150925

These three visions lead to radically different worlds.

If you think the Web is a way to CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS, then your job is to get the people and cats online, put a decent font on the knowledge, and then stand back and watch the magic happen.

If you think your job is to FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE, then the web is just the very beginning. There’s a lot of work left to do. Really you’re going to need sensors in every house, and it will help if everyone looks through special goggles, and if every refrigerator can talk to the Internet and confess its contents. You promise to hook up all this stuff up for us, and in return, we give you the full details of our private lives. And we don’t need to worry about people doing bad things with it, because your policy is for that not to happen.

And if you think that the purpose of the Internet is to BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN INVENTION, then your goal is total and complete revolution. Everything must go. The future needs to get here as fast as possible, because your biological clock is ticking!

The first group wants to CONNECT THE WORLD.
The second group wants to EAT THE WORLD.
And the third group wants to END THE WORLD.

These visions are not compatible.

http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

“This is the concept behind Uninvited Guests, a short film released last month by design firm Superflux. Commissioned by ThingTank, a research project focused on the design and business of the Internet of Things, the film offers cautionary musings on the future smart home. How will we coexist with the data-gathering, service-oriented objects supposedly designed to make our lives better? As Thomas’ smart bed incessantly relays messages to his phone, prompting him to get to sleep by 10PM, it’s impossible not to feel his frustration. You root for him as he struggles to win his life back, concocting ways to dupe the objects—and his children—into thinking he’s accomplishing his daily goals. Ultimately, however, it’s hard to celebrate his successes as a true triumph of human agency, as he’s now locked into leading a double life: the one he wants to live, and the one his objects demand of him.”

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/man-vs-smart-house-a-cautionary-tale

In spite of the political, economic, and ecological crisis of the last few years, the new social forms and categories that have emerged have failed to constitute themselves politically, and it’s hard to fathom what form change could take. In the absence of a collective horizon, the new (second) Industrial Revolution might not lead to the future but to the past, to a Victorian phantasmagoria of sorts, supplemented by consumer gadgetry and semiotic fetishism. A place akin to the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a sentient environment able to materialize all your dreams—but with a twist.

http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/tuned-to-a-dead-channel/

We were sold magic as the affordance of technology, from the term “automagic” on down, and we were sold this magic as the provision of personal agency – fifteen years ago I couldn’t move on the web for people talking about the internet as channel for emergent democracy, five years ago everyone couldn’t shut up about smartphones as the new computing paradigm that put the world in our hands.  And now we’re at the end of the current cycle and the five dark towers of big digital technology are reduced to bullshit squabbles.  I mean, sure, large ones, rolling across the world and throwing their shadows over us all.  But the sleight of hand is all over.  There’s a bit at the end of the tv series THE THICK OF IT, where spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, frequently self-described as “a practitioner of the dark arts,” says, in his final extremity, “Look at me.  I’m not pulling anything out of my magic hat.  The rabbits have fallen to pieces.  Their fucking heads are coming off and frightening the kids.”

http://morning.computer/2015/03/the-rabbits-have-fallen-to-pieces/

Kirkyan is a currently-theoretical “Thing” (PDF) related to both blogject (early example here by originator of the kirkyan concept) and spime. At the core, the concept revolves around the idea that the same data used to create a physical spime can be used to also create a virtual spime, and that the two can then be connected via the same ubiquitous computing network. Where spimes have a number of predefined limitations (e.g. “Cradle-to-cradle” life-spans), a kirkyan is inherently redundant and thus has additional capabilities. Furthermore, while the physical and the virtual are related and in constant networked contact, they are, to a significant degree, autonomous.

http://www.rebang.com/csven/Kirkyan.htm