In his graduation thesis entitled "Social RFID, at the Utrecht School of the Arts, Patrick Plaggenborg interestingly explores what an "Internet FOR Things" mean, differentiated from the so-called "Internet of Things". The document can be downloaded here.
The goal of the project is to explore supply chain RFID infrastructure to form a public platform and "reveal the invisible emotions in things" so that "people are stimulated to look at objects differently", especially those seemingly worthless objects.
More than the project itself, I was intrigued by the "internet for things" notion and its implication that Patrick defines as follows:
"A world with all objects being tagged and uniquely identified is still not very close, but we can think of scenarios and applications for it. The infrastructure will be rolled out slowly, starting with the bigger and more expensive items. In the mean time designers can speed up this process with Thinglinks and their own RFID tags to create test beds for their own interest. Using this infrastructure, small applications will take off as forerunners to a world where digital interaction with every day objects will be common. This is not the ‘Internet Of Things’, where objects connect to create smart environments and where they collect and exchanging data with sensors. This is about the ‘Internet For Things’""
Why do I blog this? What I find intriguing here is the parallel wave of design research concerning the Internet of Things which seems to me far beyond the current vector pursued by lots of research labs in the domain. Combined with blogjects, thinglinks and relevant interfaces there is a strong potential for these ideas.
To some extent, I am curious about how the new Nokia research lab in Lausanne is interested in this sort of explorations.