Monday 10 August 2015

FMP: Meaningful Design with IoT?- Carla Diana


Internet of Things, by Henry Holtzman's quote, used to be something with RFID tag inside them. IoT was meant to be objects that has some sort of digital shadow(RFID), and we have a database for everything to allow as to manipulate, share and short in a virtual environment. Yet this idea was originated in the 1990s. The meaning of internet of things has become something else in the recent years.

Right now internet of things might mean something that  actually have embedded processors in them and can achieve some form of communication. The interesting thing is, they did not anticipate to have that many device having a computing power, the anticipation was having cheap RFID tags, yet they did not get cheaper as quickly as microchips or processors. 

The interaction we have with IoT no longer remaining having to say "Here is what I'm doing and here is why I'm doing it, now help me" but assist us in a automatic and intuitive way.


There are a lot of expectation in the future of IoT, twitting banana? smart toilets? all short of possibilities, but why would you want a twitting banana anyway? what is the meaning hides within? How do we design a meaningful products for IoT? and how do we figure that out?

Carla said, a meaningful object of IoT, has the ability to turn things into knowing, because their connections to the internet.
(Hierarchy of Meaning)

The data is the rawest form of information, when a data is translated into a more organised language then it becomes information. And we take the information and translated it again into a more human form, we have knowledge. However, the wisdom is something that becomes to large for a single device to handle, it should require a larger system of serverise or psychology...etc to achieve a decent result. 

Carla organises these knowledge into three main frameworks: The knowledge about selves, knowledge about others and knowledge about the world.


What Carla has suggested about the meaningful design with IoT, in a simple term is to create a knowledge with the object and not just information. And it is something that ambient around us that provide us the knowledge instead of using computers and keyboards to visualise all the datas into something we read. its more of a physical approach to the matter instead of simple graphics and numbers. 

This is quite an interesting topic, I mean I often wonder that what exactly is meaningful design to us. the word "meaning" is extremely hard to define and usually only related and matters to individuals. But if we look in a much broader view, we could find some common in between those individuals and trying to conclude what cloud be a meaningful design. And Carla's point is actually pretty convincing in a way. By delivering knowledge to a user, and if the user care about this knowledge, then the device would be a meaningful design.

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