App for ‘friending’ companion objects — ‘master signifiers’ for consumer products.

Imagining and app I would use for personal “inventory management”.

Note: this story is part 2 of 2. Part 1 is “<S> ⌿ X: Adorno’s notion of non-identity and digital re-presentation of (companion) products”

Looking further into the ways in which people use, or could use, digital media to re-present and maintain their material self (human-object/nonhuman relations), I started to imagine a digital tool (like a smartphone app) that I would use for personal “inventory management”.

I’ve never found an app with enough flexibility to manage different categories of stuff, including different kinds of interaction with in-app product profile (e.g. buying, selling, sharing, making collections). Still, I feel the need to maintain a continuous and better overview of the things I live with.

So I built a mock-up of the app I would want as a way to think through what my ideal personal inventory app would look like, and to better understand real world constraints in terms of developing the features I and others may want to use.

In a way, I wanted to explore a kind of mediation that would enable me to care for my material self, as well as things that might need, or indeed deserve, a certain kind of attention and care. To quote an inspiring thinker, Isabelle Stengers, who notes in her contribution to a remarkable ensemble of essays (2010):

“one way or another we do know that nonhumans have an existence of their own, an existence that demands to be addressed and that may impose on us duties and obligations” (Stengers 2010:3).

While Stengers refers to more than the material nonhumans found across various categories of consumer goods, these goods do impose on us duties and obligations, such as responsible resource and waste management. Further, we may be better equipped to commit and respond to such duties and obligations through new forms of mediation.

Following Stengers, and other thinkers who’ve contributed to more-than-human political theory, such as Sarah Whatmore, it turns out that I think about my personal possessions much more like nonhuman social entities or companions than, say, inventory or stock. From this perspective, it seems to me that a key problem surrounding ways to inventory or ‘connect with’ personal possessions has to do with the lack of one persistent or primary product profile online (which I like to call a ‘3PO’ — see e.g. image on the left in Figure 1 and 2 below).

Moreover, it seems reasonable to assume that the liquidity of goods, especially secondhand goods, is suboptimal as a result of asymmetric knowledge of and access to a single primary signifier around which manufacturers, sellers, and buyers could coordinate and help answer questions, like: Who has what I need? Where is it? What’s the price?

Figure 1: Mock-ups I’ve built with InVision Studio. While the mock-up is speculative, I’ve tried to stay within the realm of something that could be done with contemporary technology, rather than designing something that would work in some distant sci-fi future, when some kind of more direct neural bit-to-meat/brain interface could enable instant recall of every single piece of inventory in one’s household.

Figure 2: A primary product profile online (3PO) with key features: Like, Add to inventory, List for sale, Save, See sellers. Images from the left: Purchase / checkout; List of sellers; 3PO; Inventory (example of my inventory); Collections (such as clothes, kitchenware, shared collections with kids clothes).

To me, every consumer product should be associated with more than an array of computational signifiers like UPC, GTIN (Global Trade Item Number), ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), or QR codes.

While these signifiers are great for supply chain logistics, they are not well-suited for everyday life — like when I want to have a look at my inventory for a weekend hike, family roadtrip, share or offload things through some kind of new and other hopefully ‘good relation’ (Liboiron 2021), which I currently think of as relations characterised by ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 2017) understood as “everyday responsible maintenance” (2017). That is, in the words of science and technologies scholar María Puig de la Bellacasa; an “ethico-political commitment to neglected things, and the affective remaking of relationships with our objects” (2017). To me, this involves having the presence of mind to recognise that everything we do with our companion objects is part of the maintenance of possible worlds at the expense of others. The question is, are we living with our objects in ways that make and maintain the kind of world(s) we want to live in? And, is contemporary ecommerce and digital media conducive to shaping good relations with matters of care?

I think there is a critical issue at the core of ecommerce today: showcasing the same products online via separate somewhat siloed websites and URLs while merchants have to deal with somewhat arduous and costly inventory management and checkout systems via Amazon, Shopify, or Google for Retail in order to reach people in today online infrastructure.

From my perspective, the result of scattered information about scattered products is a counterintuitive problem: products do not lack representation, they are overrepresented and lack better or ‘good’ representation, and this issue is self-perpetuating as people take issue with poor product information online (as I’m doing here) and therefore seek to provide better information, establish information symmetry, or benefit from asymmetric information, etc.

I believe in the utility of asymmetric information distribution — like having a center of excellence for “X”, or a go-to resource like Wikipedia for generic but reliable information about “Y”; A personal website or Linkedin profile for a person’s professional information; Reddit for “diving into anything”, or Quora for asking about and getting answers about anything.

Today, we need a go-to single and equally accessible access point for learning about and buying products we need and care about: we need what I call a “primary product profile online” (3PO) — through which people can learn about a product, read reviews, add to wishlist, determine product availability, and price based on centralised information about disparate product and vendor information (location, inventory volume and prices per unit, condition, and more).

As noted towards the end of part 1 of this story, >55% of people (n=20K) surveyed by Google/Magid Advisors search for a product on Google and then go to Youtube to learn about the product. So people, including myself, often use Google to search for products and Google almost provides a 3PO via Google Shopping. However, as a user of the search engine, I can interact in very few ways with the product profiles on Google shopping. On Google Shopping and most online stores, it seems that care is expressed primarily through the click of a buy button. To the extent that I can save product profiles to various collections, these collections are not very user-friendly and optimised for convenient access to or sharing of information about the objects I like, live with, and might want to share or sell. Further, I don’t think Facebook Marketplace, eBay or other online marketplaces provide the kind of interactive product profiles I have in mind.

I think we need what I have called 3POs, “primary product profile online”, much like a social media profile, but for products. What we might call a “master-signifier”, borrowing a term from Jacques Lacan. For Lacan the master signifier only refers to itself in contrast to simple ‘signifiers’ (e.g. URLs, JPEGs, SKUs, UPCs, or ASINs etc.) that refer to something else, like a LEGO set, Nike shoes or an Apple product (more about this in part 1 of this story).

3POs would not really be “master-signifiers” in a Lacanian sense though. Rather, they would be aggregates of signifiers (images/JPEGS, names/UPC/SKU, videos/MPEG etc) that refer to a particular consumer product, thus making a 3PO a potential conduit for finding every (‘relevant’ and ‘trustworthy’) instance of an object online. The GOAT marketplace actually does a pretty good job on sneakers, both displaying new and used options for a particular product, and an option to list products I “want” or “own” via the same product profile (like one of my favourites: the Nike Zoom Fly SP ‘Flight Jacket’).

While GOAT is great, a new company called Rye (which I have no connection with), has a mission that is more directly aligned with what I’m after and believe the world needs: “an open+free network that holds the collection of all products” (Rye co-founder and CEO Arjun Bhargava quoted on Twitter by Sriram Krishnan).

What I’m interested in, and curious about, is a more tangible digital mirror of my “material self” (that is, a mirror of the things that enable me to be who I want to be and do what I like to do). I use social media to mirror and support my “social self” (me, my friends and professional connections). In my view, then, it is germane and not farfetched to have something similar — like an object-oriented social network — for caring for my material self and the everyday companion objects I live with.