The Way Things Go

RFID and NFC will both undoubtedly play a huge role in the field of Interaction Design in the coming years. The Institute of Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway have been carrying out some very interesting research in the field and have in turn come up with some very innovative applications utilising these Near Field Communications technologies. Their Touch initiative is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication, a technology that in short enables connections between mobile phones and physical things.

For their Nearness project they put together a nice short video in collaboration with BERG which illustrates some of the potential applications of these technologies.

Whilst watching the clip I was immediately reminded of the mind-blowing Honda Accord Cog Commercial which was made a number of years ago. You can watch the advert below.

The Touch group have obligingly acknowledged their influences and also included a mention of the art movie filmed by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss called ‘Der Lauf der Dinge’ or ‘The Way Things Go’. For their film they built a enormous, precarious structure 100 feet long out of common items. Using fire, water, gravity, and chemistry they created a mind-blowing chain reaction of physical and chemical interactions and precisely crafted chaos.

As a child I was fascinated by dominos and can recall watching with amazement those videos in which thousands of carefully placed pieces of plastic ran meandering paths on massive high-school gym floors. There is something hugely captivating about watching a chain of self-triggering events, and all of these movies use this technique to great effect.

From the world of art to the business of advertising and eventually arriving in the field of interaction design, the ‘visual chain of events’ device has been used to great effect. Lets see where it turns up next.