Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is CEO and co-founder of Tinker London. Initially trained as a product and interaction designer in Canada and Italy, she worked in the space of digital strategy and online communities with clients like Blast Radius, Jaiku, and Thinglink. She then worked with Shift6, the research and innovation arm of Blyk. Since 2007, she has been at Tinker London, a design studio that has now done work with clients like BBC, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and The Guardian.

Many in this space are eyeing the internet of things as the “next big thing.” Ericsson Labs envisions 50 billion connections by 2020. How much of this do you think will apply to consumer facing applications?

The concept of the Internet of Things has been kicking around for 10 years or more, but there's now a real ramp up. More smart consumer devices are screenless and make the concept of IOT more consumer-facing by engaging with children and families (see: Nabaztag, Poken). This will increase market demand for the technologies that support such multi-platform, physical objects that connect to our digital lives. IOT is slowly being pulled out of the very dry and functional world of smart logistics (very much illustrated by the latest McKinsey report) and into everyday devices which consumers will want to interact with in real ways. The technologies that IOT is built on will diversify away from just RFID and reach out into new markets and support the development of low powered chipsets, connection protocols like Xbee and more. It's going to be really exciting.

In your talk at Mobile Monday Amsterdam (The next 5 years of the Internet of Things), you categorized the internet of things as being either top down or bottom up. Could you explain what you mean by this?

The two sides of IOT are: top down infrastructure and bespoke networked objects. RFID tags and the logistics infrastructure that were applied to retail security and stock tracking were implemented at large scale and over the course of many decades. At the moment, we're seeing regular consumers building their own smart infrastructures for their homes, their bikes, to track pollution levels, and sound levels using tools like their iPhones, Processing, Arduino, and other platforms. This is a change from a top down deployment, but instead is piggybacking on top of those large systems, using WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID travel cards and more to solve problems on a much smaller scale. This doesn't mean that those ideas and solutions won't eventually scale up massively, but right now the market for them has stayed quite niche. I think the next few years will see those ideas develop into small businesses and mass market products. It's also the model of innovation that saw the development of the first computers. From garages to offices.

While they are nowhere near being as flexible as Arduino, it seems that companies like Stickybits and Violet are trying to design bottom up platforms with usability in mind. Are there other companies that you are aware of that are thinking about UX for ubiquitous computing in this way?

The fun thing about the landscape of IOT at the moment is that these services have been around for a while in different iterations. Stickybits, one could argue, was what Thinglink was trying to be back in 2005. Violet, with its recent acquisition, might change a little but is still supporting the Nabaztag rabbit it seems. Both are trying to bring to life an idea that a business idea can live on by creating a platform, but the killer app is what's needed I think. In the case of Arduino, its the massive uptake in the arts and design communities that have helped it become such an icon. If Violet and Stickybits want to survive in that space, the killer app has to be there and they have to work with their users and designers quite closely. Arduino was developed by the Arduino team who were responding to a need in education for a cheaper, easier and more open platform to experiment with electronics. So they had their beta testers right in front of them as the students of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and ITP.

McKinsey recently released a report on the internet of things; in it they categorized applications by ‘information and analysis’ and ‘automation and control.’ Do you think that there is an obvious way to categorize what is possible using the internet of things? If so, what would they be?

That report is really interesting because apart from the examples in the world of health, it's pretty much all about smarter logistics systems which are already in place. I think we're only scratching the surface of what will be possible and categories in the world of entertainment, PR, and home will emerge pretty quickly.

What role do you see mobile phones taking on in this ecosystem of networked objects?

Mobile phones, especially smartphones, have become very much an extension of our lives. The exciting thing for me is if they start to become nodes of communication between ourselves and our everyday objects and bespoke object. This is very much in line with the world of Personal Informatics advocated by Tom Coates and Matt Jones. Mobile phones will just be a given way to interact with the world, either through NFC (near fields communications) capability or through extensions like the ones we're seeing on the iPhone (see: Square).

Can you tell us about your work for Sony Ericsson?

We worked with Dare to extend the print and ad campaign for Sony Ericsson's Satio launch. We built a bespoke inflation grid that allowed anyone using the hashtag #pumpt on Twitter to send a message out to that grid to inflate a Space Hopper. That campaign won the "Campaign of the Month" award on New Media Age and was really the first time that Twitter had been used in that context over such a long period of time (2 weeks live streaming 24h a day).

With technology, we are extending ourselves and our actions. You described this in the example of a wife turning on the lights at home, and a husband being notified remotely via cell phone. How do you think these little things will shape us, culture, and the human condition?

I think this is an area that will radically change our relationships to the built world. We're already seeing this with the iPhone and people's expectations that every screen should be a touch screen. There's great potential there for new behaviors to emerge that build up new habits and new signals to others. In 2005, I designed The Good Night Lamp which was a family of lamps that would allow you to indicate that you're at home to the loved ones you'd given smaller versions of that lamp to. Switching on a lamp is a simple behaviour but a powerful one in the right context. IOT is about revealing those interaction possibilities without necessarily being glued to a screen.

Finally, how do we tell stories using the internet of things?

I think we'll always try to tell stories or even lie with the tools that are given to us. Whether its because those stories change or our coping mechanisms change, we'll always have something to share with others, whether its around how much we weigh, what we listen to or where we go.