64. Credit card

Many have claimed lately that designers should design services rather than products, to alleviate our increasingly contaminated planet. Some felt that way too back in mid 20th century, when the first credit cards appeared. They began as charge accounts offered by individual stores. The Diner’s Club offered the first credit card that could be used at multiple locations in 1950: issued to only two hundred customers, it was accepted at twenty-seven restaurants in New York City. Today, credit cards such as Visa or MasterCard are networks of financial institutions, and credit card companies are unscrupulous macro empires that base their businesses on building debt in their customers. Few people stop to consider such predatory practices when they rely on the convenience of handing out a piece of plastic to pay for most anything, most anywhere in the world. I have to admit, that is quite a service. The future of this macro-service? In their quest for having customers spend more and more, credit card companies will have to be increasingly creative in their reward offers. Some claim the next big thing will be to reward their customers with gifts of virtual currency such as Second Life’s Linden dollars (in 2006, $100 million worth of transactions flowed through the virtual world of Second Life, and that amount is only increasing). The material future? Perhaps not as ambitious and far more predictable: same shape and size, different materials, such as metal sheet, instead of plastic.

63. ColorCode

Another readable symbol, this time in full color. ColorCode is the next generation of code. A ColorCode is a small multicolor square that allows you to go places, that is, through the lens of your cell phone camera. Say you see a poster for an intriguing movie. In the corner, a small multicolor icon. You point your mobile phone at it. The camera in your phone reads the ColorCode symbol printed on the poster. The ColorCode contains information provided by a server. The server then sends data to your phone in the form of content, perhaps a movie trailer, MP3 or image files, etc. This all happens instantly, in a zip. Bar codes reinvent themselves quickly these days, but scanning is slowly becoming obsolete. Taking out your cell phone and focusing your camera on a small splotch of color at the corner of a magazine article, or a TV program, to access up-to-the-minute information or media content is the way in Japan and Korea these days, and will probably be in the rest of the world soon. So it claims the ColorZip company website: its home page is surprisingly dull and under-designed, and offers just three links: Korea, Japan and South East Asia. That is the geography of ColorCodes so far. ColorCodes can be designed, breaking away with the tyranny of the black and white lines of standard bar codes or the duotone circularity of ShotCodes: customization of individual experiences through the lens of a mobile phone.

62. ShotCode

Two U.S. students –Silver and Woodland- invented the barcode in 1948. Their first barcode was called bull’s eye because it was a series of black and white concentric circles. They were granted a patent in 1952. The barcode system made it to the commercial arena in the 1960s and by the 1980s it had become widespread worldwide (the barcodes of variable black and white bars as we know them today did not appear until the 1990s). Forty years from invention to ubiquitousness. In 1999, a particularly innovative version of the barcode returned to the system’s initial circularity: ShotCode is a circular sequence of black and white blocks that represent an Internet address. They are designed to be read by mobile phone cameras. ShotCodes differ from matrix barcodes in that they do not store data; instead, they store a number. This number is linked to a server that holds information regarding an Internet website which the reading device can connect to in order to download said data. Users download ShotCode software on their camera phones and then use their mobile phone cameras to scan the circular symbols; the software recognizes the server and identifies the right Internet address. The compelling logo-like graphic of ShotCodes takes the barcode system to the realm of personal mobility and flexible networks. It also takes it to a more whimsical realm beyond the strict inventory-like uses associated with the red-beam scanners one can find in supermarkets and distribution centers.

61. RFID tag

Radio Frequency IDentification technology (RFID) is not new, but it is quickly finding new applications. An RFID tag has a small microchip with radio antennas that carry a small amount of data and have a unique identification number. The tag transmits the ID number, via radio signals, to the RFID reader, which needs to be in the vicinity of the tag. The reader is linked to a computer with a database; that is how the information is stored. In principle, RFID tags can be attached to anything –objects, animals, places, people- and some readers are so powerful that make the transmitted information accessible from all over the world via Internet. To give a macabre example of the use of these devices, Wal Mart is planning introducing RFID tags in all its supermarket products in order to precisely trace customers’ routes through the shop, as well as their shopping habits, so that special personal offers can be made to customers with a specific profile in real time. There are less Orwellian applications of this technology in passports, public transportation payment systems, libraries or human implants -certain nightclubs embed RFID tags in their VIPs’ hands so that the process of paying for drinks is reduced to the wave of a hand. Any technology has the capacity of morphing into the sublime or the irrelevant. In the case of RFID tags, the irrelevance of most of their present applications reminds us of the shrinking value of individual privacy.