Social Objects: Designing Social Affordances to Material Artifacts

Adding online services to physical objects is changing the way we interact with our environment. In this talk I will describe ways to tag ordinary objects with online resources and provide conceptual tools for analyzing their social effects. I'll talk about a few different scenarios, including objects as:

• experience triggers: touching an object to play a song or video, or show an image or start a game
• conversation sites: objects as virtual billboards and fridge doors
• origin revealers: objects that tell who made them; when, where, and how
• social networking platforms: objects that enable their beholder to connect with other people