Next time you pass a postbox, remember to text it “hello”
Experts predict that very soon, the majority of internet traffic will be generated by objects talking to each other, not humans. So what would an Internet of Things feel like in the real world?
That’s the question explored by Hello Lamp Post, a playful experiment in city design and social connectivity that turns street furniture into friends. First launched in Bristol in 2013 as an entry in the inaugural Playable Cities award (which it won), its creators want to highlight, in a playful way, how the web can influence urban design.
“We were interested in how a city can be like a diary, helping people relive their memories”
“We were interested in how a city can be like a diary, helping people relive their memories,” explains Hill, co-founder (with Ben Barker) of PAN Studio, which realised the project with help from Tom Armitage and Georgyi Galik. “That crossed over with another observation, that across the city there are bits of street furniture — lamp posts, bus stops, bollards, grates, parking meters — that all have unique reference codes on them, for maintenance records. Those two ideas came together into a system for people to have conversations with street furniture.”
All someone has to do to take part in Hello Lamp Post is text the thing they pass in the street — and the object will ask a question in return. “They might ask a question like ‘what’s your earliest memory of this space?’ and someone might say ‘it’s where i met my girlfriend’, or another person might say ‘it’s where i take my kids to play’, and the second person would see what the first person said, and you’d get sharing of stories.” Over time, memories build up, and the objects stay curious about the things around them — a post box might ask if there’s still a car parked next to it, for example, or a bus stop might ask someone if they’re going to the same destination as someone earlier was.
Bristol’s trial saw more than 27,000 messages sent to and from more than 1,500 objects. Hill says that they quickly found that there were two kinds of people who took part — those who took part like they were “Pokemon players”, trying to “catch” as many objects as possible, while others tended to stick to one or two objects and text them over and over again.
“We expected a lot of people to break the system, try to hack it or break it, but none of those things happened — which was a disappointment in a way!”
“We expected a lot of people to break the system, try to hack it or break it, but none of those things happened — which was a disappointment in a way! And a lot of people assumed that we were somehow involved in the utilities they were talking to, so we had people ranting to post boxes about the Post Office and waiting in queues or whatever. There were also billboards they could talk to, and one of the questions was ‘if you could have anything written on me, what would it be?’, and the answers were stuff like be ‘excellent to each other’. That was a nice surprise.”
And now Hello Lamp Post has gone abroad — first to the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, in February, and then to Tokyo in April for the major Art Night festival, in association with the British Council. “It was crazy — we were getting messages all through the night,” says Hill. “We wrote in Japanese and English, so depending on how you said hello it would affect what language the objects spoke in. We had two thousand messages over a couple days.”
“We weren’t sure how it would work — Bristol and Austin have similar reputations for being a little bit weird and left field, whereas Tokyo is weird in its own completely off the chart way, so we didn’t know how people would treat it.” Everyone can go online and use the Hello Lamp Post site to check what people have been saying via different objects across all three cities — and it could become more, Hill thinks. Hello Lamp Post offers a very British combination of quirk and design intelligence. In the future, it’s likely that everything — from towns to toasters to trousers — will be connected to the web, in the so-called “Internet of Things”.
“We hope we’re highlighting potential futures in a playful way. There won’t be talking furniture in our cities in 20 years’ time, but the city will be connected in new ways, and what does that mean? What are the futures of the cities that we live in? It’s a playful project, but it’s also a starting point for people to think about the kind of cities they want to live in in the future.”
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