Negative space of things: a practice-based research approach to understand the role of objects in the Internet of Things
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Date
27/11/2018Author
Shingleton, Duncan James
Metadata
Abstract
This is a practice-based research thesis situated in the research context of the ‘Internet of Things’, and
critiques contemporary theoretical discourse related to the 21st century turn of connecting everyday
objects to the World Wide Web. In the last decade we have seen the ‘Internet of Things’ articulated
predominately through three commercial design fictions, each a response to the shift towards
pervasive”, “ubiquitous” (Weiser 1991), or “context-ware” (Schilit, 1994) computing; where we inhabit
spaces with objects capable of sensing, recording and relaying data about themselves and
their environments. Through reflecting upon these existing design fictions, through a new combination
of theories and practice-based research that embodies them, this thesis proposes a recovery to
understanding the role of objects in the ‘Internet of Things’, which this author believes has been lost
since its conception in the mid 2000s.
In 2000, HP Labs presented Cooltown, which addressed what HP identified as the ‘convergence of
Web technology, wireless networks, and portable client devices provides’. Cooltown’s primary discourse
was to provide ‘new design opportunities for computer/communications systems, through an
infrastructure to support "web presence" for people, places and things.’ (Anders 1998; Barton &
Kindberg 2002). IBM’s Smarter Planet followed this in 2008 and shifted importance from the act of
connecting objects to understanding the value of data as it flows between these objects in a network
(Castells 1996; Sterling 2005; Latour 2005). Finally, Cisco presented The Internet of Everything in 2012
and moved the argument on one stage further, identifying that the importance of connected objects lies
in the sum of their communication across silos of networks, where data can provide potential insight
from which you can improve services (Bleecker 2006).
Despite these design and theoretical fictions, the affordances of the Internet of Things first proposed in
the mid 2000s has regressed from data to product, driven largely by unchanged discourse argued by
those designers at its conception and also the enticement of being the next Google acquisition; instead
of pigeons reporting on the environmental conditions of a city (Da Costa 2006), we have thermostats
controllable from your smartphone (www.scottishpower.co.uk/connect).
Therefore the aim of this thesis is to re-examine the initial potential of the Internet of Things, which is
tested through a series of design interventions as research for art and design, (produced as part of my
EPSRC funded doctoral studies on the Tales of Things and Electronic Memory research project and
also whilst employed as a research assistant on two EPSRC funded research programmes of work Sixth
Sense Transport, and The Connected High Street), to understand how we use data to allow an
alternative discourse to emerge in order to recover the role of a networked object, rather than producing
prototypical systems.
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