Tonight I had an interesting debate with Julian about the notion of ‘objects that blog’ (he calls them blogject), that is to say artifacts that would upload their story up to web. Thy would report the history of interactions the object had with people. It’s something very intriguing and close to Bruce Sterling’s idea of spime. Julian wrote an insightful post about it. This is part of a project he’s carrying out for his seminar on Location-Based Mobile Media.

The only example I found is not really a blog but it’s a lamp which can show a history of persons who have entered a specific room; this history can be queried from the lamp’s web page.. It’s called the Aula lamp and the description can be found in this document about the whole Aula Cooltown project.

Talking about it with Alex Pang from the IFTF, he advised me to check the work of Phoebe Sengers from Cornell Unversity. For instance this project is somehow close to the idea of an ‘object that thinks’ in the sense that it’s a ubiquitous computing system that monitors a home’s emotional climate and provides open-ended feedback about it to users:

The Home Health system, a collaboration with Bill Gaver and Michael Golembewski at the Royal College of Art, London, will be a ubiquitous computing system that monitors a home’s emotional climate and provides open-ended feedback about it to users. Everyday household objects are wired with sensors. The resulting sensor data is used to develop a model of the current emotional climate of the people living in the home. Once a day, the user receives a list of suggestions from the system of emotional issues that s/he might wish to consider.
(…)
being open to interpretation and also reflecting accurately the current emotional state of the home as represented by the sensors.

Why do I blog this? to keep trace of these thoughts, since I find this blogject tremendously exciting!

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