Touchable Services - Task Description

Background
Near Field Communication (NFC) will soon make it possible to connect the physical world to digital services. At the moment the mobile industry is thinking only about payment and ticketing, but there is a wide range of applications and services that could take advantage of this technology for other purposes.

Task
This task is about contextual research and conceptual design of services using the mobile phone as an interface to the physical world. We will work on ideas for services that combine digital information with the physical world.
The simplicity of NFC emerges from the fact that it works only at a short range, and this ties it to particular places or objects. What applications and services need to be usefully tied to specific places and objects? What kind of interaction are good for interacting between objects and our personal devices? How might existing signage, advertising and urban interfaces be complemented with local interaction?

Process
Choose a particular place or activity to observe, and base your ideas and concepts around that. You could for example choose a cafe,and work on ideas around the choosing, buying and consumption of food. Or choose a library and work around the finding and borrowing of books. It will be very helpful to spend time doing user research, in particular observation of everyday activity.

Deliverables
Find appropriate ways to explain your concept, particularly the user-experience. Use scenarios, videos, or some kind of experience prototypes to do this. Simple documentation of your user-research (photos, videos, diaries, etc.) should be produced. See www.nearfiled.org for write-ups of last years projects.

Equipment
We have Nokia RFID phones and as many RFID tags as you need to test out ideas and scenarios. We also have a collection of indoor, outdoor, card-based and people-based tags for you to use.