Designing for the Internet of Things

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f gure 5-1. i vitamins Lego calendar^1
Vitamins describes their Lego calendar as the following:
...a wall-mounted time planner, made entirely of Lego blocks, but if you
take a photo of it with a smartphone, all of the events and timings will
be magically synchronized to an online digital calendar.
Although the actual implementation (converting a photo of colored
bricks into Google calendar information) isn’t in the same technical
league as nanobots or mind-reading interfaces, this project is quite sig-
nificant in that it hints at a future in which the distinctions between
physical and digital are a relic of the past.
Imagine ordinary objects—even something as low-tech as Lego
bricks—augmented with digital properties. These objects could iden-
tify themselves, trace their history, and react to different configura-
tions. The possibilities are limitless. This is more than an “Internet of
Things,” passively collecting data; this is about physical objects catch-
ing up to digital capabilities. Or, this is about digital computing get-
ting out from behind glass. However you look at this, it’s taking all
that’s great about being able to pick up, grasp, squeeze, play with, spin,
1 http://www.lego-calendar.com