Roaming Objects

2016 - present

With the advent of “sharing economy” services everyday objects such as household items, domestic electronics, and even vehicles may be easily shared among people, in other words they roam from one borrower to another. Once shared, the object creates a unique experience with a borrower that often could be described with a story. This unique experience not only forms personal attachments with the object itself, but also may spark curiosity about previous ownership of the shared artifact, hence provoke social speculation about its previous shared experience. Checkout cards in library books is a good example of contemplations about previous encounters of a borrowed object. Building on a “checkout card” metaphor we introduce Roaming Objects (RO) — everyday physical artifacts augmented with digital histories in the form of pictures, videos, geolocation information, comments and ratings encoded by their borrowers. We embedded a digital tag into a roaming object in order to allow borrowers to capture their experience with an object and to inquiry a story behind a material artifact.