Unleashing the spimes

One of the most memorable books I ever laid my hands on was Bruce Sterling’s 02005 Shaping Things. It is both a history of created objects and a vision for what they could become. Reading Shaping Things is like waking up in a world where ecological gurus, design students, and electronics engineers banged heads one night at a global unconference, decided that progress is possible, and then set out to enable said progress via an awesome revolution of global positioning satellites, sticky juice bottles, and garbage cans.

Despite the fact that Shaping Things is, in the macro sense, a mind-blowing book, I had doubts about how seriously I should pay attention to the micro-level details of Sterling’s ideas. He suggests that radio-frequency identification technology is a crucial way of making people more aware of the past, present, and future of their things. Sterling offered a name for context-aware, information-aware objects: spimes. I was sold on the big idea, but ambivalent (and probably just plain ignorant) on the details.

Now, Tom Coates from Yahoo! is pushing Fire Eagle, some sort of tool for making the web “respond to your location” and helping “you to discover more about the world around you.” (I am not a developer, so bear with me.) If you watch his speech at ETech in San Diego, he might have you believe that Yahoo! is bringing about something like what Sterling described in Shaping Things. I had no idea that the idea of the spime had become popular enough to be bandied about at mainstream tech conferences.

Is it just me, or is this an exciting time to be alive?

Photos by Jyri Engestrom and Ed Schipul