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.
