This project explores the design opportunities in objects that seem to have inner lives through their expressive behavior.

As Piaget and others have noted, people tend to imagine that inanimate objects are alive – why not leverage this to create more interesting, playful, expressive, desirable, and useful systems?

Creating apparent intentionality for objects offers the potential for fitting more easily into the narrative of daily life, as well as making it easier for people to understand the sometimes complex function and role of digital systems in our lives.

The research would be conducted in summer 2011, in Philip van Allen’s New Ecology of Things Lab (NETLab) at Art Center’s Media Design Program. Professor van Allen will work with Nokia Research staff, as well as engaging select graduate Media Design Program and upper term undergraduate Product Design students to explore the potentials of Object Animism. The project team will create a series of experiments and design speculations that investigate the roles that animism might play, both in how the objects perform their “behind the scenes” tasks, as well as how they express themselves through sound, kinetic motion, and visual displays.

A range of contexts will be selected for the work, such as sensing and reporting, simple affordances for complex tasks, and subtle communication. The project will use and further develop the NETLab Toolkit rapid prototyping system.

And the doubters are right, for those of us who want a cool, small, OS X laptop thing, the iPad does not hit the mark (of course, as the iPad matures it will get many of these things – the inevitable 4.0 release of the iPhone OS will likely address the multitasking and app organization issues. And maybe Adobe and Apple will finally make nice for the Flash plug-in. And the 2011 version will have a camera etc.).

But people who want a better laptop aren’t the target audience for the iPad. Just like people who wanted a better Blackberry weren’t the target audience for the original iPhone. And people who wanted a green-washed sports-car were not the target audience for the Prius. Guess what? These products were a success anyway, because they met a new need and found a new audience.

So what is the iPad? Well, that remains to be seen. It will evolve in the next year as developers turn the iPad into a range of completely new things that, once they exist, will be essential for many people. To start all this off, Apple gives us the basic foundation and a decent value proposition:

• Read rich media books/magazines/newspapers
• Comfortably browse the web
• Use interactive textbooks and other learning material
• Work with personal media (photos, music, video)
• Play games
• Shift low-intensity computer stuff off the computer (email, todo lists, calendars, presentations, note taking, etc.)
• And as an add-on value, provide an admittedly compromised level of computer substitution for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. so we don’t always have to drag around a laptop.

That alone is a pretty good deal for $500. But what will come, and will likely make the iPad a major success, is a range of new apps that turn the iPad into an incredible device for doing more specific kinds of activities. For example, recording a song – it can be a complete recording system and tangible interface with faders, knobs, transport controls, etc. Or as remote control for your house and entertainment system. Or as a painting canvas. Or as a device that sits next to, and is an adjunct to your computer - wacom tablet, todo list, email, application switcher, etc. Or to organize your genealogy. Or to do scrapbooking (really, this could sell a millions units alone). Or plan a trip. Or evaluate X-Rays at your patient’s bedside… You get the idea.

I call these devices Slabs. The iPad, iPhone, Andriod, etc. are generic platforms that, via an app, turn into a product. And a 10″ Slab with multi-touch surface can be a lot of different products.

More to come in the following days on my thoughts about SLABS, SOFTDUCTS, and BESPOKE OBJECTS.

This project was aided by the help of my graduate students Jonathan Jarvis, and Parker Kuncl.

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