Spimes and the Internet of Things

Novelist-cum-design-critic Bruce Sterling has said in his book Shaping Things (and elsewhere) that interaction designers will be creating and working with a type of object that he calls a spime. Spimes are networked, context-aware, self-monitoring, self-documenting, uniquely identified objects that exude data about themselves and their environments. Spimes reveal every piece of metadata (their location, their owner, the date they were made, usage patterns, and so on) about themselves. They can be tracked through space (the “sp-” part of the term) and time (the “-ime” part) throughout their entire lifecycles, from their prototypes to their eventual destruction.

These spimes will likely have self-identifiers and networking capabilities that allow them to communicate. Using sensors and wireless technology, they will communicate with each other and the Internet like a swarm. Spimes, and other objects similarly enabled, will be able to be located and have information added to them, such as “These are my shoes.”