The New Negroponte Switch: Translating Services into Products and Vise Versa

Earlier this year at our New York Conference, Kevin Slavin of Area/Code shared with us a presentation entitled “This Platform Called Everyday Life” about how technologies are breathing life and infusing intelligence into the physical objects around us. Expanding on this idea, Matt Jones of Dopplr explains how, increasingly, tangible products are interfacing intangible services, and conversely how intangible services are replacing products.

In explaining the product service interchange, Jones highlights projects in which data is collected from interactions with services that are then translated into physical totems, or what he terms “attention anchors” that serve as a representation the services provided. A good example of this is Dopplr which generates a “Personal Annual Report” from your recorded travels in PDF form which you can then print and share.

Elaborating on this concept, Brendan Dawes of MagneticNorth creates a luggage tag from the information fed to him from Dopplr.

On the service to product front, Jones highlights how services such as ZipCar and Rome-N-Bike are replacing the need for personally owned tangible products. Follow the link below to see the engagingly cerebral presentation in full.

Magical Nihilism: “My talk from Frontiers of Interaction, Rome 2009″

[via Influx Insights]