skuwiki

We went to the Whipple Museum a while back and I was struck afterwards by the numbering system. Made me wonder if there's a Dewey Decimal System for objects. I've still not found out if there is.

Then, the other day, I was reading on the Rattle blog about some work they've been doing with the Science Museum, building an ObjectWiki. It's a splendid thing, you can see how it provides the perfect framework for a slew of ideas and memories and images to be added to a particular thing in their collection.

It struck me that this would be a perfect unproduct idea; a way for a maker of things to help add value to the things after they've been bought. An easy way to add serviceness and community to an object.

Imagine if every product you owned had an associated wiki.

I'm imagining a unique page - maybe one per sku (which seems like the smallest practical unit of consumed stuff) - that allows people to add all the basic info you need to know but also pictures of their use of the thing, stories of it etc. And, presumably tagging and scraping would let the page build itself from the stuff that people scatter around the web. Wouldn't that be handy?

It's like there's an unrecorded moment in the life of an object - the time when it's actually being owned and used.

Before we buy it we can talk about it loads and there's a huge attentional focus on it, once it passes into history it gets collected, accessioned, notated and recorded. In the middle, during the actual lived life of the object, not so much.

The people who make those products aren't interested in that process until it's time to sell us another object. Once we've bought something we're mostly on our own with it until it's time for the researchers and archivists and museum-keepers to start thinking about what it all meant to us. They (the museum people) are thinking fascinating things about how to collect and share what they know about things.

Wouldn't it be nice if we (the makers and owners of things) could hand them some of the stories we tell about our things.

Or does it already exist somewhere and I've missed it?

Some of the practical things (specs, links to the latest drivers, service information) are currently done on wikipedia, but it tends to be encyclopedicly dry, and some of it is obviously done on review sites and blogs and the like, but that tends to be a bit of a nightmare to find/navigate.

And there are projects like ProductWiki and  Amapedia but they seem to be more about consumption than ownership. They're more about 'should I buy it?'

And there are fascinating thoughts based on barcodes but that's more to do with 'how was it made?'.

And Fiona was kind enough to point out Thinglink, which is close in a lot of ways, and a brilliant idea, but seems to be more about assertion of ownership rather than stories of living with the thing.

I'm thinking of something that's more about 'how do I make the most of it?', 'what's everyone else doing with it?' 'this is my life with this thing'. I'm after the human stuff, the memories, the associations, the stories, the material that ends up on fansites and curated by communities.

I guess there's no reason why all this stuff couldn't be aggregated in a single place, behind a single tag / identifier. It'd be like a sort of proto-spime. And there'd be nothing wrong with multiple tags and tagging systems as long as they knew about each other.

Wouldn't it be nice if the product page for some particular sku wasn't just an out of date features video, some driver updates and some broken links to extinct marketing campaigns, what if it reflected the lived life of the product, told by the people who'd bought it?

Annalee Newitz writes this in her essay in Evocative Objects: "Harvard professor of clinical psychiatry John Ratey says that because our brains link ideas together in memory, we are particularly well suited to the act of suffusing an object with emotional value." (here) It'd be nice if someone or something collected those suffusions.

Comments

[Suzanne]

There isn't a Dewey Decimal system for objects, unfortunately. There's a standard nomenclature (Chenhall's), but it isn't consistently used, and a separate nomenclature for art museums. Often, history museums use a trinomial system to number their objects: the year received, followed by the accession number, followed by the item number (ex. 2008.4529.207). However, this is specific to each museum and basically tells how the museum acquired the object, not any other information about it. The numbering systems are not at all interoperable.
It would be lovely to have a way to attach stories and community information to objects.

[Anne]

That sounds like a lovely idea. The book Taking Things Seriously http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Things-Seriously-Unexpected-Significance/dp/1568986904 was something like you suggest in your last paragraph. The personal stories of particular objects.

Oh and this is really pedantic but the Dewey Decimal System does have things in it, but not to the level of detail that you need. You could get it to electronic calculators for example and narrow it down by age and country but it wouldn't cover make and model. Easy to set up your own extensions though. If you ever have an opening for a museum of things cataloguer let me know.

[John]

Since there is a consumption aspect to what you describe as ownership, this would also be the ideal repository for people to append their learning and fill in the inevitable gaps in the instructions/manual/user experience.

Ongoing product testing at no expense to the company - why wouldn't they set this up?

[Andrew]

Love the idea. Could you key it by EANs/barcodes? I bet most phones could be made to read barcodes with a bit of work...

(That'd be a cool toy. Scan something in your shop with your iPhone, get the received wisdom back.)

[Trevira]

There's certainly a thriving body of work studying material culture and consumption in academia, using approaches developed from anthropology and ethnography. About the meanings that people attach to objects and how they use them in ways often unanticipated by the original producers. The Social Life of Things is worth seeking out if this interests you:
http://www.appadurai.com/publications_social.htm

Your post made me think about Moo cards (just got a new set of business cards today, hooray!) - they have flickr groups and a flourishing international swapping/trading culture, and as a business they are totally engaged in what happens to their products after they ship them.

[Walter]

I love the idea of owner/curators . The notion of consumers being curators of the products they own is important. It's one of those "big ideas" you can see it playing out in sites like ThinkWiki...
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki

... and briskoda ( an unofficial online community of skoda owners) ...

http://briskoda.net/

Looking at my own consuming habits, I have a tendency to fetishise products before I buy them, actively seeking out unofficial communities of similarly fetishistic owners. Sites like thinkwiki and briskoda have tipped the balance for me in my choice of computer and car. My wife on the other hand just visits a couple of car showrooms over a day or two and takes a couple of test drives before buying a car - madness ;-)

[kim]

Richard Pope at MOO was doing some work on a barcode-based wiki for objects as a little side project
http://www.sicamp.org/?page_id=21
It might be worth having a chat to him about it? I know we talked about implementing SKU Barcode scanning so you could, for instance, check the ethics / carbon footprint of products in the supermarket.

I think the long-lifecycle aspect of this idea is interesting. Good semantic data would be interesting there, for instance, encouraging people to add purchace and failure dates to white goods to track obsolesence rates, whilst ensuring that's held as accessable data to allow the statistics to be abstraced out.

But also, the idea of an evolving folk instruction manual is interesting - a place where hacks and alternate uses can naturally aggregate. A good technical example would be the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 - the device was extended and extensively hacked, so accumulated additional functions over its lifespan.

I'm interested to see the comment about MOO cards as a digital-physical bridge. We talked a lot about finding ways of attaching each card back to a digital location that would allow the relationship between card, content, giver and reciever to become explicit, but never had time to develop it very far.

[Mike Laurie]

This is a really fascinating idea. There's clearly lots of places to go where you can get information about objects but this is all from people wanting you to buy the object from them e.g. Kelkoo, eBay etc. I love the idea that people would go on and write about how their Mont Blonc Boheme Pen and their own little stories and experiences with it. I could write an essay about my Roberts Digital Radio.

SKUs are okay for FMCG goods but what about classic cars? Should a British racing green e-type Jag categorised as the same object as a black one that rolled off the production line two years later? I suppose the writers decide.

I think it's worth some time for sure.

[Trevira]

Just read about this project 'The Everyday Life of Objects' on the Material World blog:

http://blogs.nyu.edu/projects/materialworld/2008/07/the_everyday_life_of_objects_1.html

Unfortunately you need to download a 326MB program to enjoy it . . .

[Dave]

More than objects is the idea of experience, that the relationship between two entities is fundamentally different when they have direct experience of each other (whether people or objects). I explored this in my tagtracker project (at http://dev.davemee.com/#tagtracker ) a few years back, connecting virtual representations of objects to their original signifiers. Interestingly, I never considered the idea of stereotypes, of annotating a 'class' of objects (such as 'all the Billy shelf units from Ikea', rather than just 'my Billy shelf unit'). Thanks for the trigger!

[Mike pepper]

Lovely idea. I'm planning on opening a bike shop sometime before I die and was trying to think of something better than just taking a polaroid of the new owner and their new bike. How perfect..a hand-made wiki for every hand-made bike.

It reminds me of how I bought an old merc a while back and the previous two owners had fastidiously noted the service history in a lovely little blue book, complete with little personal comments along the way. How cool to have much richer version of that to enjoy.