The relationship between the possessions we value and the narratives behind them is unmistakable – the snow globe from Niagara Falls, our faded Gap T-Shirt from two summers ago. Current technologies of connection, and enterprises that take advantage of them, surface this idea in new ways — but they also suggest the many different kinds of stories, information and data that objects can, or will, tell us. The research shows that goods that have an attached story sell faster than those without. Can we say, “once upon a time….”
Ask anybody about the most meaningful object he owns, and you’re sure to get a story — this old trunk belonged to Grandpa, we bought that tacky coffee mug on our honeymoon, and so on. The relationship between the possessions we value and the narratives behind them is unmistakable. Current technologies of connection, and enterprises that take advantage of them, surface this idea in new ways — but they also suggest the many different kinds of stories, information and data that objects can, or will, tell us.
A project called Totem, financed by a grant from the Research Councils U.K., concentrates on the narratives of thing-owners. The basic concept is that users can write up (or record) the story of, say, a chess trophy or a silver bracelet and upload it to TalesofThings.com. Slap on a sticker with a newfangled bar code, and anybody with a properly equipped smartphone can scan the object and learn that the trophy was won in a 2007 tournament in Paris and that the bracelet was a gift purchased in Lisbon. In May, Totem researchers worked with an Oxfam thrift store in Manchester, recording stories by stuff-donors, for a spinoff project called RememberMe. Shoppers could hear short back stories for about 60 pieces of secondhand merchandise. The used goods with stories were swiftly snapped up, says Chris Speed, who teaches at the Edinburgh College of Art and is the principal researcher at Totem: “You pick up these banal objects, and if it has a story, as soon as you hear it, it becomes something far richer.”
A second outfit, called Itizen, based in Minneapolis, also uses a tell-and-tag approach. Dori Graff, whose background is in marketing, and her co-founders became interested in how brands were using new forms of bar codes and the like in various creative ways and also noticed that, in their personal lives, they were doing more sharing and swapping of clothes and other items. So why not match that up with the tracking technology? “Our big superlofty goal would be to influence a shift in how people view their possessions,” Graff says, because a thing’s story makes it more valuable and less disposable.
Most Itizen stories are still, like Totem’s tales, more like anecdotes than real narratives. But some Itizen users have been employing the service to tell stories of object creation — a clothing designer, a bike messenger-bag maker and others are attaching to things the story of how they were made or by whom. The ArtCrank Poster Show in Portland, Ore., next month, for instance, will have Itizen tags on the various bicycle-themed artworks sold there. The next narrative twist would be, more or less, a customer buying the thing.
A third entrant in the object-story field, StickyBits, distributed 300,000 of its custom tags at a technology conference earlier this year, assuming that people would put them on particularly meaningful or interesting possessions. But its app can also be used to link content to an existing bar code. “People were scanning Coke cans and jars of peanut butter or A.1. steak sauce,” says Seth Goldstein, a StickyBits founder. Goldstein theorizes that the motive was the same “microboredom” that inclines users of mobile check-in apps to announce that they’ve arrived at Chili’s — except that users could broadcast not just where they were but also what objects were around them. Some do use StickyBits to communicate something specific to people they know, but many essentially use it as a media platform. Not surprisingly, StickyBits has begun to work with the likes of PepsiCo Inc. and Campbell’s to devise promotional campaigns that take place via bar code.
Under that scenario, things are being linked to a story not so much in the form of narrative as of cumulative data. The continuum moves even further in the direction of raw information when you consider what tech experts call the “Internet of things” — more and more stuff produced with sensors and tags and emitting readable data. ReadWriteWeb pointed out that the number of objects (digital picture frames, GPS devices) added to the networks of AT&T and Verizon in the previous quarter was greater than the number of new human subscribers. Imagine, the site suggested, future bulletins on your Facebook feed like “Your toaster is using more electricity than it should be.” We appear to be inching toward a concept advanced in 2004 by the writer Bruce Sterling, who hypothesized objects he called “spimes” — embedded with technologies that carry, collect and communicate data — becoming “the protagonist of a documented process.”
As more objects have more to say, the question becomes what we want to hear, and from what. Which brings me back to this old trunk I have that belonged to my grandfather. He died before I could know him, so there is much about the thing I will never learn. Still, I have carted it around the country for more than 20 years and consider it one of my most (personally) valuable possessions. That’s not despite its muteness, but because of it. Sometimes the best narratives about objects are the ones we can only imagine.
Source - NYT
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