For this assignment I chose to read the research article “An Upcycled IoT: Building tomorrow’s IoT out of today’s household possessions” by Kristin Williams, Jessica Hammer, and Scott Hudson (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3466872). In this paper, the authors expand on the idea of ubiquitous computing by taking an alternate look at the internet of things (IoT). Currently, adopting the IoT involves replacing household objects with new, internet-connected objects. That comes with costs, such as the monetary cost of replacing the items, the social cost of getting rid of things that may hold sentimental value, and the disruption of existing routines. The authors propose adapting computing capabilities to existing possessions, which will be augmented with internet connectivity and related IoT services, rather than replacing the possessions altogether. The groundwork they provide for an upcycled IoT is the the IoT Codex: a booklet of low-cost, lightweight, battery-free sensors and interaction patterns that can be stuck to items to link them with the network. The booklet also comes with simple instructions on how to get started using the stickers. This concept is similar to the PaperID project by Disney research that Scott talked about in his Colloquium presentation, because it uses RFID technology to augment objects with computational capabilities.
Some benefits discussed in the article are the fact that these stickers give families a great deal of control over how to upgrade items around their homes, and they are more secure than IoT items with cameras or microphones, as RFID sensing techniques do not carry immediately recognizable information.
In the IoT codex, there is a logging button, which simply logs every time the button is pressed, and can be useful for a wide range of applications (has the cat been fed today? Set up a button to log when you feed the cat. A speaker will chime to indicate the button was pressed.) The other sticker types, in order of increasing complexity, are toggle, list, dial, and wrapper. These, either individually or in combination, could allow people to do things like control lights, music, or temperature around their home depending on a number of circumstances (touching a button, moving an object, or even just sitting in a chair), add items to a shopping list with the press of a button or if a certain spot is empty, and many other more creative things. In combination with computational fabrication, this ability to augment ordinary items to IoT items has unimaginable numbers of potential applications, considering people can interact directly with the objects or design objects to interact with each other in interesting ways.