Objectifier

The Objectifier was designed by Bjørn Karmann a student at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. It was designed to empower “people to train objects in their daily environment to respond to their unique behaviors.” One example of this that was gave in a video, was of a user training the objectifier to turn on a light when it recognized the cover of a book and turn off the light when it no longer recognized the cover of a book.

Connection

One thing I want to point out is the need for an app to train the device. While simple, a user would need to take snapshots of the environment so that the device recognized on and off states. While this does give a user an understanding of how a model could be trained with a yes or no state, I begin to wonder how such a device could become a training device for how that photo/sound recording is decoded and then used to differentiate future states.

Bjørn notes that the “purpose of this concept is to empower even my grandmother to program or just play with technology.” Is that enough? Or should projects be aiming to go beyond programming and more to an understanding of that programming.