I left my job at Lunar Energy last month and August has been about recharging – some holidays with family and also wandering London a bit catching up with folks, seeing some art/design, and generally regenerative flaneur-y.

Yesterday, for instance, was off to lunch with my talented friends at the industrial design firm Approach Studio in Hackney.

This entailed getting the overground, and in doing so found something wonderful at Brockley Station.

Placed along the platform were “InfoTotems” (at least that’s what they were called on the back of them). Sturdy, about 1.5m high and with – crucially in the bright SE London sunlight of August – easily-readable low-power E-Ink screens.

They seemed to function as very simple but effective dynamic way-finding, nudging me down the platform to where it predicted I’d find a less-busy carriage.

Wonderfully, when I did so, I got this message on the next InfoTotem.

Nothing more than that – no extraneous information, just something very simple, reassuring and useful.

It felt really appropriate and thoughtful.

Not overreaching, over promising , overloading with *everything* else this thing could possible do as a software-controlled surface.

Very nice, TfL folks.

I’m going to try to do a bit more poking on the provenance of this work, and where it might be heading, as I find it really delightful.

So far, I think the HW itself might be this from a small UK company called Melford Technologies .

It made me recall one of my favourite BERG projects I worked on, “The Journey” which was for Dentsu London – looking at ways to augment the realities of a train journey with light touch digital interventions on media surfaces along the timeline of the experience.

Place-based reassurance: E-Ink magnetic-backed dynamic signage. Still from “The Journey” work with BERG for Dentsu London

I think what I like about the InfoTotems – is that instead of a singular product doing a thing on the platform, it’s treated as a spatial experience between the HW surfaces, and as a result it feels like a service inhabiting the place, rather than just the product.

Without that overloading I was referring to, what else could they do?

Obviously this example of nudging me down the platform to a less-busy carriage is based on telemetry it’s received from the arriving train.

Could there be more that conveys the spirit of the place – observations or useful nuggets – that are connected to where you are temporarily, but where the totems sit more permanently.

In “The Journey” there’s a lovely short bit where Jack is travelling through the UK countryside and looks at a ticket that has been printed for him, a kind of low-res augmented reality.

It’s a prompt for him to look out the window to notice something, knowing where he’s sitting and what time he’s going to go past a landmark.

Could low-powered edge AI start do something akin to this? To build out context or connections between observations made about the surroundings?

We’ve all seen signs that count – for example ‘water bottles filled’ or ‘bike riders using this route today’ – but an edge AI could perhaps do something more lyrical, or again use the multiple positioned screens along the platform to tell a more serialised, unique story.

Maybe something like Matt W’s Poem/1 e-ink clock – with industrial design from Approach Studio, coincidentally!

Maybe it has a memory of place, a journal. It would need some delicate, sensitive, playful non-creepy design – as well as technological underpinnings ie. Privacy preserving sensing and edge-AI.

I recall Matt Webb also working with Hoxton Analytics who were pursuing stuff in this space to create non-invasive sensing of things like traffic and footfall in commercial space.

In terms of edge AI that starts to relate to the spatial world, I’m tracking the work of friends who have started Archetype.ai to look at just that. I need to delve not it and understand it more.

Perhaps it would then also need something like the work that Patrick Keenan and others did back at Sidewalk Labs to create a typology of sensing in public places.

Of course the danger is once we start covering it in these icons of disclosure, and doing more and more mysterious things with our totems, we lose the calm ‘just enough internet’ approach that I love so much about this current iteration.

Maybe they’re just right as they are – and I should listen to them…