Internet of Bananas

The Internet of Bananas (IoB) is a critical design project in which people around the globe will build simple sensors to measure the colour of a banana and the temperature and humidity of the air around it for an entire week. During the project, researchers, tinkerers and activists around the Globe will create their own “augmented bananas” and track them during their lifetime, until they are rotten. The data collected by the sensors will then be visualised online (on Adafruit IO), where each participant will showcase the information of their individual banana and will be able to access a World map of the entire Internet of Bananas.

The Banana Jam

The IoB network will be online in The Banana Jam, from 5th to 12th June 2021. On the first day of the Jam we will have an online Kick Starting Meeting, where all participants will introduce themselves, and connect their bananas to the sensors at the same time. During the rest of the week, the sensors will monitor the changes in color, temperature and humidity of the bananas and share the data online on IoB’s network page.

On the last day of the Jam, participants will disconnect their bananas and meet for an online debriefing, where they will discuss their experiences and make plans for possible future collaborations and new projects.

Objectives

The Internet of Bananas is a playful response both to the hunger for data that seems to characterize these discourses and to the poor and untrustworthy implementations that are proposed by companies internationally. In particular, IoB has three main objectives:

  1. Be Critical - IoB is a critical design project poking fun at the "Internet of Things" paradigm for its ideological love for data. This does not mean we are "against" IoT, but we wish to propose a critical approach to it that goes beyond the equation data = value;
  2. Take charge - IoB is a project of electronic literacy and citizen sensing. We believe that the democratisation of the sensory processes will produce data that are both more reliable and more meaningful. Despite its playful spirit, IoB aims to teach the participants how to assemble and code simple sensors and how to display and share the data collected on Adafruit IO. After the Internet of Bananas, participants will be free to use the sensors they built for whatever purpose they like, collecting and sharing sensor data as they wish.
  3. Connect - IoB aims to build an international network of people interested in critical design, citizen sensing and playful technologies.

For the Installation Guide, material list, and code, check our GitHub account.

Visit our Instagram account @internetofbananas.

If you want to know more information about the project, please write to internetofbananas@gmail.com.

The Iob project is developed by Artur Cordeiro and Mattia Thibault.

Fortaleza / Tampere, 2021.