http://www.ecolocogifts.com/page/1
Just watched an interesting little film by Annie Leonard, a green activist, who is concerned with the rate at and manner in which we consume all kinds of stuff. Of course projects like TOTeM could change the way we think about and relate to things, if only in a small way… Annie’s website and blog can be found here.
Real Tomato, Matt Brown
The TOTeM researchers have been looking at some interesting uses of RFID these 2 projects explore unusual ways of using the technology:
http://realtomato.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-project.html Making an RFID reader into a portable record player
http://www.personalrosettastone.com/ Creating digital links to gravestones!
Perhaps these projects could combine with a loved one’s favourite tunes playing whilst at their graveside!
We are now gearing up towards our launch of our new website at the end of March and in the meantime have been looking for possible collaborations. TOTeM will soon be looking to tag people’s objects offering a new way of recording people’s memories. We hope that this will have benefits for cultural organisations, dementia centres, oral history projects and businesses to name just a few.
Had a very good meeting with a new group called Glasgow Lives who will be setting up an oral history project in Shettleston in the East End of Glasgow. Shettleston is an area with high unemployment and records in poor health but it was once the site for heavy industry and thus has seen many changes over the years. There remains a strong sense of community spirit in the area however and the people now want to take control and record memories of the local area before they are lost. TOTeM is working towards creating a partnership with this group to offer a new way of recording oral history so we will keep you up to date with developments of this as things progress.
If you work for a museum or reminiscence group and would like to get involved with TOTeM then please do get in touch. You can email me at jane.macdonald@eca.ac.uk
Image from http://www.culture24.org.uk/teachers/art72081
Catching young people’s interest in the stories behind museum objects can be difficult. Curators have tried to make exhibitions more exciting and interactive; now they’re starting to encourage children to curate and share their own collections. One such initiative is Caboodle, a fun website created by Culture24 and a range of collaborating museums. Under a number of subject headings – arty, toys, nature, people, treasures, random – young people can categorise and showcase photos of objects and collections they like or care about, many of which they’ve made themselves. Each object contains a short note. There are pictures of animals, flowers, rubbers, frogs, nice tops, places in Brighton, of shiny things, even of puddles in the woods… And children’s things feature as highly and importantly on the website as the ‘re-packaged’ objects presented by partner museums (check out the Storrington’s chocolate ice-skates!).
In a similar vein, the Wallace Collection has opened its doors to a group of pupils from St. Vincent’s Catholic School who have reimagined the meanings and significance behind individual treasures. Their exhibition, ‘Shhh… it’s a Secret’, starts today and runs until the 28th of March, 2010.
It’s a great time for collecting, and for talking about things!
New Microsoft photo tagging app for iPhone and Android.
Nothing outrageously different to QR codes or tagging and the TOTeM prototypes do the same. But its more evidence of the creep of the printed tag…
http://mashable.com/2010/02/01/microsofts-tag/
“Paper publications have a problem: they want to link to the Internet, but in order to reach the destination, the reader must type the link into his browser manually, which is slow and awkward.
Microsoft now offers a solution, called Tag. It’s essentially a barcode – an optical machine-readable representation of data – and it lets paper magazines create visual links to content which can be “opened” simply by pointing your smartphone’s camera at them. In today’s world of iPhones, iPads, Nexus Ones and other smart mobile gadgetry, this actually makes more sense than forcing the reader/user to type in a link, no matter how short.”
The Univeristy of Salford is now recruting for the final member of the TOTeM team. If you would like to find out more about this post based in Salford for 2 years then visit http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AAN608/research-fellow-/
The TOTeM team have landed after taking part in the “Design in the Digital World” networking event at the Delfina in London on Tuesday night. The event was run for the Digital Economy project’s funded by the Research Councils UK. This brought together the 7 projects from the original Sandpit event that TOTeM attended a year ago. It was a great opportunity to have representatives from the 5 institutions of the TOTeM team together talking about the different dimensions of the project from design, social, business through to architecture and technology issues.
The day started with me catching up on the previous week’s events in Oxford which the TOTeM Investigators attended. The Oxford event was an opportunity for all teams from the Sandpit to meet again and exchange ideas. However the Delfina event was aimed at showcasing each of our projects to a wider audience and attendees included funders from the EPSRC, advisors, academics and leaders in industry. Each project was given a plasma screen to show a “trailer” for their research to encourage attendees to linger a little longer at each stall to give us time to pounce on them and tell them how fantastic our project is! Although it was more the case that attendees approached us wanting to find out more about TOTeM so after spending the past 5 months engrossed in our own work it was refreshing to be able to discuss our findings with a new audience and see what questions arose.
This was a good chance to find out about all of the other projects involved as well of course with some really interesting pieces of research being shown. Some already having carried out case studies such as the VoiceYourView project which set up telephones in a local library where participants could speak about their concerns and this data was then turned into text form to produce a graphical illustrations of people’s views http://www.voiceyourview.org/..
One of the highlights of the night was being able to show the TOTeM technology working for the first time thanks to the team at CASA who had made a Bluetooth RFID reader which enabled an object to talk to the viewer after being placed on the reader and linking to a Youtube video. Our iPhone application also proved popular for reading QR codes although you will have to wait until the Spring before this is released to the public, so do check back here for updates.
New oral history project in Salford area run by Informal Adult Learning. Interestingly this project utilises social media and you can record your history via a range of mediums such as film, audio etc.
http://www.new-mornings.co.uk/
Ralph picked up on this interesting project from 2006 which shares very similar ideas to the TOTeM project but instead looks at the “emotional” histories behind generic objects that people may have shared memories of:
This is a lovely project and thanks to Andy Burnett for highlighting it…
Basically individual writers are teamed up with a schlock’y object – something apparently low in value. The theory of the project is that if the object is sold on eBay with story written by the writer then it will increase in value. Its a beautifully simple idea and one that seems to work!
So far our project is beginning to reveal a spectrum of interesting approaches to ‘tagging’ an object with a story. Its clear from our studies that in asking for a ‘tale’ there are many different results – some factual, some embellished, some simply an extended form of data!
The Understanding Continumm spreings to mind and Shedroff’s use of it in developing his own take of Experience Design:
http://www.nathan.com/thoughts/unified/unified.pdf
