The IoT Codex: a Book of Programmable Stickers for Authoring and Composing Embedded Computing Applications

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) promises to enhance everyday objects with computing, but rarely enables directly authoring or composing that behavior. Lightweight IoT approaches attach identifiers (e.g., RFID tags) to objects to enable networked services. Typically these tags are passive, and so, depend on activity recognition and predefined context. This limits interaction to invoking predetermined behavior. Instead, this work presents The IoT Codex: a lightweight approach to customizing everyday objects with IoT by enabling interactive attachable IDs (aIDs) to compose software-supported behavior in situ. This work contributes 1) paper engineering techniques to construct aIDs that embody state, and 2) a tangible, end user programming (EUP) language for customizing IoT within symbolic and idiosyncratic contexts. Here, we provide preliminary validation of our approach with an empirically informed design space, sample applications, and a small co-design workshop. In doing so, we offer preliminary evidence for tangible, end user programming to enable meaningful control over IoT services.