Thinglink seminar at USC School of Cinematic Arts

Thanks to Scott Fisher, I had the pleasure of visiting the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, where I gave a presentation on the originating idea of Thinglink, the invisible tail, and demoed the new site.

Here's the abstract of the talk:

 "This presentation explores how tagging physical objects with personal stories can make them work as agents of social networking on the Internet. Thinglink is a free product code and an online catalog of design products that enables design enthusiasts to share photos and personal references of products with their friends. These photos and references link back to the catalog forming a dialogue between designers, manufacturers and their products in the various real life settings. The presentation includes practical examples of creating ID stickers for artifacts and claiming a product in the Thinglink database."

With alumni like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, USC is one of the most prestigious film schools around. Scott has put their powerful financial backing to work and created some amazing things: for instance, the seminar room walls were projection surfaces. When turned on it was as if the entire room had been wrapped around with one continuous giant screen where students juxtaposed my presentation with a live chat backchannel and relevant snippets from the web.

I really enjoyed the lively discussion afterwards. Thank you so much everyone who contributed!

Comments

[Jyri]

Here's a photo from the talk.