Pre-Internet of Things Objects ID
Posted: November 4th, 2011 | 1 Comment »One of the current obsession consists in observing the meta-data given to things in the physical world. They’re generally used to give an ID to a certain artifact (in order to performance maintenance acts) or its status. Some examples recently encountered:
Power plugs at London Heathrow:
Extension chord at the local design school:
Switch at Lift Conference offices:
Why do I blog this? I use this as an example in talks/courses about innovation to show that so-called “breakthrough” (such as the Internet of Things) should be pondered… and the evolution of technology is a:
- A slow movement: the idea of giving an ID to objects is not coming out from the blue, it existed before the IoT,
- Technology is not the only underlying factor here: the “social” (here: a decision between a group of people to name artifacts to keep track of their status) and the “technological” (here: the thing itself as well as meta-data systems/reading devices) are closely intertwined.
Nice! Reminds me of hydrant marker plates, especially the Swiss or German ones (e.g. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinweisschilder_zu_Stra%C3%9Feneinbauten). They’re not exactly IDs but still a sort of textual meta data and also a resource locator in the very sense of the word.