Reality Check
I’m getting a bit more sure about the general boundaries of my research and work. I believe that the triadic relationship between people, smart objects and the net might be the most interesting trail to follow at the current moment. This is, because it seems to me that there’s the possibility of conceiving objects which have kind of a double nature. They are physical but also have one foot in the virtual realm. They know something about where they are, what they are and what they are being expected of. As Bruce Sterling points out, even a bottle of wine has this double nature already since it contains a barcode which connects it to a whole world of information processing and its different representations and accounts. But without anything else, it remains rather passive unless a person acts on it, e.g. scanning the code in the shop or typing in the manufacturer’s website at home.
A next step would be to let the object act. I used context-consciousness earlier, but I found out that context-awareness is a term coined by Ted Selker and Anind Dey. While they were researching about stand-alone objects that have a certain flexibility in respect to their situation, the networking-aspect might allow us to go even further in terms of how objects change in relation to a situation because they can utilize both other objects and the net.
What’s striking to me is that something which is in between can not only wrangle and transmit information about the reality which is surrounding it but would also be shaped by the net, thus truly mediate between the physical and the virtual.
The first basic example that comes to mind would be a real-life Google AdSense. A screen or other display that sits on the table and listens to what is surrounding it. It knows what it is (an ad), it knows where it is (in a café in berlin for instance) and it is smart in the way that it can listen to people’s conversations. It doesn’t have to know or understand anything itself, because the net knows better. Google looks at the words that people speak, puts them into context and finds the sites/products/events tagged with the fitting keywords. Then, the backflow of information would enable the little object or screen to change itself and adapt to the situation around it.
What’s nice about this is that it puts the contextual background in a very important position, which also relates to my initial thoughts about cultural customization. Since things are often being dropped into context as Jussi pointed out, it would be exactly this context which continously shapes them.