the onject-oriented world

Yesterday found me working up ideas for the "gloves off" post, typing fragmentary notes to expand on later. I was thinking about the idea of reading the digital representations of physical things by touching them, which led me to wondering about affordances that would communicate whether an object was 'live', meaning that it would have an accessible digital story to tell.

As fate would have it, I hit 'n' instead of 'b' and thus quite accidentally coined the oddly appropriate word "onject". Thinking this was too good to be true, I googled it. Amazingly, every citation that came back was either a one-key-displaced typo for "object", or more rarely for "inject". So it looks like this post will be the authoritative source of the new ubicomp term, "onject".

'on jekt : n. A tangible physical entity or object which also has a digital information representation, and which possesses the ability to communicate this digital representation to a person or another entity.

Heh.