The Internet of Things live at Oxfam now!

A project that first saw the light of day at FutureEverything in 2010 has now launched at 10 Oxfam shops across Manchester. Oxfam Shelflife allows people to leave behind and access memories and stories on donated items, bringing the "internet of things' to a thrift store near you.

Way back in May 2010 when the 3GS was all the rage, the Whitworth Park Oxfam shop on Oxford Road, Manchester let a group of researcher / artists from the Tales of Things research project capture audio stories about items that people were donating. A week later 50 or so of these stories were attached to the physical "things' via a QR and RFID tag, so that when the Oxfam shop opened its doors during the FutureEverything festival delegates and shoppers could pop in to the shop and listen to memories attached to the donated goods and of course buy them. The project was entitled RememberMe and it captured a lot of attention as a model for an Internet of Old Things.

Four months later when Emma Joy the Oxfam Area Manager was doing the accounts for her shops she noticed a spike in sales at the Oxford road shop during an odd week in May. Keen to follow this up she contacted the Tales of Things team and talked about the potential impact that this may have on how Oxfam handle donated items. After a number of conversations over technology and storytelling, the project has now mutated into Oxfam Shelflife, an Oxfam platform for receiving memories on to donated items.

Piloting in 10 Oxfam shops across the Manchester area between now and the end of April you can download the Oxfam Shelflife iPhone app and use tags in the stores to both read the story of a donated item or even better tell a story onto an object that you would like to donate. So if you're in the Manchester area or just passing through please check out the shops that are running the pilot here. And thanks to Future Everything for helping getting the ball rolling. More information on the project is available here and a blog post from last years about the conceptual background to the project is available here.