Early one Sunday morning, Mark walks to the newsagent for his paper. He almost literally trips over a metal street bollard that has been uprooted from somewhere and dumped a couple of doors down from his house. He scans the bollard with the RFID reader in his phone and learns that the problem has already been reported to the council. Mark rolls the bollard to the side of the pavement and with a tap adds this street fault’s progress RSS feed to his phone’s reader so he can make sure it gets fixed soon. The problem was reported by a neighbour of Mark’s who has waived his privacy and allowed his name to appear on the fault report. Later that day, Mark meets his neighbour and they discuss various incidents of vandalism which they think might be related to drinkers from a local pub. The neighbour invites Mark to a Neighbourhood Watch meeting and sends the event details to his phone, which Mark then forwards to another couple of neighbours. Two weeks later the police representative at the Neighbourhood Watch meeting agrees to increase pro-active patrols around the pub area at weekends. They’re also pleased to see (with a couple of taps on a phone) that the bollard has been cemented back in place. With another tap, Mark rates this transaction as “positive” on the council’s feedback system.
Posts Tagged: rfid
10
Mar 09
Technosocial scenarios for Sutton: 1: The library
Susan is a bookworm and regular library user. She filters the RSS feed of new acquisitions at her local library for the names of authors which she likes and reads it on her phone. One morning a new book by one of her favourite authors appears on the list. She reserves it with a single tap. At lunchtime she walks to the library and picks the book off the shelf. Susan scans the book’s RFID tag with her phone and with another tap she checks it out. (Anyone can check out or renew any item with an RFID-enabled phone but they must use the library’s own scanners to check things back in.) Her phone also shows two local events: the first for the library’s book club and the second for a reading by that author at a nearby bookshop in two months’ time. She adds the book reading to her calendar with a single tap. Two months later, Susan’s openly-licenced, tagged and geotagged photos of the author that she takes at the book signing appear automatically within minutes on the book club’s website, with a credit to her, a link back to her own profile page on the photo sharing website and a link to the author’s page on the local library’s website. Nearly all his books are out.