Spimes are objects that know how to talk to eachother. The concept was coined and refined by Bruce Sterling on his blog, Beyond the Beyond. Sterling first imagined spimes as an extension of RFID tags, where a physical organization of things could be representative of an also intangible web of things. This notion of spimes was later revised in Bruce Sterling's 2005 book, Shaping Things, published by the MIT Press.
An excerpt from Bruce Sterling's Shaping things,
"I would date the dawn of SPIMES to 2004, when the United States Department of Defense suddenly demanded that it's thousands of suppliers attach Radio Frequency ID tags, or 'arphids,' to military supplies. If this innovation turns out to be of genuine military advantage, and if it also spreads widely in commercial inventory systems, then a major transition will likely be at hand."
External Links[]
- MIT.edu MIT | Shaping Things, the book
- Boingboing.com Boingboing | Bruce Sterling's design future manifesto: viva spime!