Hustle bustle does not live in this small town of northwest Italy, where much of the populace heads for the “hills” and the “sea” in the summer — actually Lake Sirio, which is a couple miles outside of town and just shy of the Alps. And in the winter, they take to the streets for a wild, weeklong carnival that has them donning historical costumes and throwing oranges at each other from horse-drawn wagons.
And that makes it all the more strange and wonderful that this is home base for a research project whose goal is to re-examine time in the 21st Century — and to give some of it back to us.
Namely: that chunk we spend waiting for the bus, train, doctor, cable TV man, furniture delivery man and even the washing machine to turn off, among myriad other annoying things.
The project is called fluidtime. It’s being conducted at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, the only institution in the world devoted exclusively to the study of interaction design (See What’s that? inside). And it’s about the creation of an electronic service that would deliver real-time information to people concerning the ordinary events and appointments of their daily lives.
Like: When Mr. Repairman is really going to arrive at your house today, instead of that “between noon and 4 p.m.” nonsense. Or, when the next bus is really going to show up at your stop. Or even, when your 2 p.m. doctor’s appointment is really going to happen.
The beauty is in the delivery of this breaking news. It would come to us personally — and even joyfully — via the screens on our Internet-connected cell phones or wristwatches (which might feature playful images to convey time-critical information) or via specially designed ambient objects for the home.
Consider “Walking Shoes,” one of the more ambient, ambient objects developed for this project.
An electric appliance and kinetic object rolled into one, it looks like a small wooden table for holding three pairs of shoes. But when your shoes start tapping atop one of its built-in platforms, that table becomes the voice of fluidtime. The movement — a result of complex technology buried inside the table and out in cyberspace — signals your bus is approaching. The faster your shoes move, the faster you need to move.
Making the most of your time
“Fluidtime doesn’t reduce the waiting time. It doesn’t make things faster,” says a soft-spoken but passionate interaction designer named Michael Kieslinger. He first developed the concept for fluidtime three years ago while working on his master’s thesis at the Royal College of Art in London.
But what fluidtime does is give you back that waiting time beforehand, so that “you decide how to use this extra time you’ve got in the most comfortable way,” Kieslinger says. “It helps you have flow during the day.”
These days, things are flowing nicely for the Austrian-born Kieslinger, 33. He now leads a team of international designers and researchers on refining the fluidtime concept with the hope of seeing it become reality.
Kieslinger is not the only one chasing real-time these days.
Around the globe, live-update information is being harnessed to improve efficiency in the business world and quality of life for Average Folks.
The technology involved is not “science fiction,” as Kieslinger puts it. It exists and, in many cases, has for years.
What’s new and what makes real-time real pertinent now is how high-tech companies and other people working in and with high electronics are creatively combining and linking the technology to make inanimate objects and systems — such as buses and washing machines and pallets of merchandise destined for retail stores — able to be tracked at all times.
And with the addition of wireless networks and Internet-connected mobile devices, these objects — given a few computers in between — now can be made to “talk” to the human world and tell us valuable time-based information. Like: when that bus is going to come rolling down our street.
In fact, transit systems have been some of the first and most visible devotees of real-time.
In a number of cities in Europe and Japan, the mass-transit organizations started electronically tracking vehicles years ago and then feeding information to riders about when the next bus or train will arrive via LED screens at their stops.
Throughout the Seattle metropolitan area, commuters can get that information while still at home drinking their morning juice.
The MyBus transit information system (developed by a team of engineers at the University of Washington at Seattle) allows riders to go online via Net-connected cell phones, PDAs or PCs and tap into a refined “prediction” of when the next bus will arrive at their stop.
The prediction uses an algorithm developed by those techy-engineers that combines schedule database information with real-time data — and has proven to be 99 percent accurate within a two-minute window.
And in a very different application of real-time, IBM Global Services and USA Technologies have Web-enabled some 9,000 washers and dryers for college dormitories in the U.S.
The Web access primarily is meant to allow students to pay for their laundry electronically and to let operators monitor the performance of their machines online. But the technology also lets students visit a Web site from their rooms to find out when a machine is available. And then when their own wash is done spinning, the system tells them so via e-mail, pager or cell phone call.
Fluidtime differs from all this in its sheer ambition.
Kieslinger envisions a real-time service (perhaps we pay for it on a monthly basis from our Internet provider or cell phone service) that encompasses a huge network of information — all of the above and then some.
Doctors’ offices would feed dynamic schedule information into the fluidtime server. So would courier services, repair services, etc., and even ski resorts, from which Kieslinger would like to get up-to-the-minute information about lift lines. That way, he and his fellow snow enthusiasts could glance at their net-connected wristwatches as they are slaloming down a slope and know which lines are shortest down at the bottom.
Of course, creating such a network would mean a standard digital language would have to be established. And that gives critics and skeptics of fluidtime plenty of fodder.
“It’s like developing a new currency . . . to get this standardization,” says Chicagoan Joanna Barth, who was recruited to work on the fluidtime team for a few months last year.
Barth, who is back in Chicago and working as a consultant, caught the attention of the folks at Ivrea with her work at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Barth was part of a project that investigated solutions to traffic congestion that focused on information technology and incentive programs, rather than more infrastructure.
No more computer screens!
Although Barth considers the massiveness of the fluidtime concept and, namely, that common protocol, to be its greatest “challenge,” she also sees a simple, uncommon beauty in the “aesthetics” of fluidtime.
Kieslinger and his team aren’t satisfied with merely bringing live-update information to time-pressed folks. They also want to have fun with this — and for users to have fun.
“If you are bringing this kind of information into the home, the last thing you want to bring is another [computer] screen,” says Crispin Jones, a London-based artist and interaction designer who joined the fluidtime team for several months this year. He helped create joyful objects that would interface with people.
Like: the Walking Shoes table with sole and soul.
“There was one guy who had it in his office [in Turin]. What he really loved was the acoustic quality. It makes this click-clack noise,” says Kieslinger, recounting one of the two test runs that fluidtime made in the real world this spring.
This particular tester took the table to his office and turned it “on” at the end of the workday, before he needed immediate information about his bus. He liked the tapping noise of the shoes. It mentally put him into the “rhythm of the bus flow.”
Turin (a large Italian city about 35 miles from Ivrea) offered the fluidtime team a perfect testing spot.
The transit authority here recently installed personal computers on its buses and trams to track the position of those vehicles, which transport 20,000 commuters each day. That information is then sent via radio signal to the computer at Turin’s command control.
For the techno-wizards on the fluidtime team, this was real-time information ready and waiting to be mined. The team set up its own server in Ivrea to tap into that database and fetch bus-specific information for five private citizens/testers.
Each tester got either a net-connected mobile device (a cell phone or a jury-rigged wristwatch) or ambient object (like Walking Shoes) to bring them the information pronto.
Instead of showing straight time data, the screen on the wristwatch (actually a mobile phone with a wristband) displayed images of little buses driving down a road past time markers. Another interface featured an animated character that told how far a bus was.
Wash time
For a separate trial in Ivrea, where 50 students and teachers tested fluidtime related to their use of a communal washing machine in the basement of the institute, the fluidtime team created an ambient object called Wash&Turn.
A boxlike object that hangs from the wall, it features a middle piece that turns when someone downstairs starts doing her laundry. And when the washing machine turns off, a lid on top of Wash&Turn opens and blue ribbons come popping out.
“Visually, it’s really surprising,” says Kieslinger, who likewise was surprised at how differently testers used fluidtime.
For one woman in Turin, it “reduced the stress” of missing her bus and gave her the “feeling of being in control.”
And for another tester, the devices and objects were what counted most. They were his gadget-toys.
Kieslinger makes it clear that as a researcher, it is not his role to turn fluidtime into a commercial product. Instead, he hopes to inspire interest on the part of product producers as well as other “real companies” that might want to partner with the team in Ivrea.
For now, Kieslinger has posted his project on the Internet (www.fluidtime.net). And he’s planning to attend industrial design and interaction design conferences to present fluidtime to anyone who will listen.
Says the futurist: “I want to make people aware that there is this great chance to live time in a different way.”
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What’s that?
A few definitions are in order:
– Interaction design: Think industrial design for computer geeks — and you have the essence of interaction design. It’s a hot, young discipline that’s being added to the curricula of design schools around the globe.
The mission of interaction designers (and their source of endless joy and tinkering) is to create products, systems and environments that interact with the human world in increasingly personal ways. And, yes, all the technology imaginable — and then some — is involved in doing this.
– Interaction Design Institute Ivrea: A graduate program and research lab in Ivrea, Italy, approximately 35 miles northeast of Turin. It is the only institution in the world devoted entirely to the study of interaction design — and particularly, on how lovely that rendezvous can be between man and computers.
The institute opened two years ago and is not an accredited school. Instead, it offers post-graduate students the opportunity to explore interaction design, and gives researchers the chance to collaborate on future-concept projects.
Much of its funding comes from Telecom Italia (Italy’s phone company), which recently absorbed the Olivetti company, the institute’s other major patron.
Ivrea is Olivetti’s hometown, which explains why the institute makes its home here and in a former Olivetti research center.
– Clever bricks, Flight dream: two projects that were developed at the institute. Clever bricks are programmable brick walls that respond to human touch or movement in a variety of ways, including turning colors. Clever bricks could be used as a graceful way-finding method for people in nursing homes or hospitals.
Flight dream is a wearable, lightweight shawl that simulates the feeling of flying when the wearer moves her arms. Just for the thrill of it.
— Karen Klages
