The Internet of Things: Pink Jumpers and Hungarian Eggs in Digital Spaces

The aim of this paper is to present an overview of two case studies, the RememberMe and RememberUs digital art installations created by the Tales of Things and Electronic Memory (TOTeM) research group, during the Future Everything Festivals 2010 and 2011. Ethnographic research methodologies were employed in both studies to interpret the impact on retail consumers who actively engaged with objects that contain qualitative information. The RememberMe exhibition connected personal audio recordings to items that had been donated to Oxfam in Manchester, UK. Memories associated with donated objects were recorded by previous owners and attached to the items prior to reselling, either by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags or Quick Read (QR) code labels. The RememberUS exhibition emphasised the importance of the information rather than the object, utilising dummy objects as a vessel for holding memories. Customers were observed spending more time interacting with tagged items and searching for further tagged items in the store, allowing a greater understanding of the journey the objects had taken. From the retailer viewpoint: customers were more likely to buy tagged objects, increasing sales revenue. The study was designed to encourage future stories to be added to the items using the same tags.