the invisible tag
2008.03.05 - 16:03
the underground / metro ticket in lisbon was surprisingly made out of paper.
i made a mistake of inserting the ticket into the card slot, which was obviously for something else. despite the language barrier, a local guy tried to explain to me how to make the ticket work - i had no clue that it was in fact a RFID based ticket till then. a closer inspection revealed a really tiny bulge on the card - without the support of the graphics printed on the paper. the reader part also lacked the visual cue. perhaps there is a different approach in educating the public about the new technology - or this has matured in lisbon so long that the phase for the public education has long passed. in japan - there have been very elaborate efforts to make people understand the concept of, or at least learn how to use the touchless public transportation cards, like the easily memorable character, life-sized advertisements, and widely distributed instruction manuals.
[…] April 16, 2008 · No Comments I got a nice link the other day towards misunderstandings of how to use the portuguese rfid-card. Being used to certain types of material in relation to RFID-cards its easy to understand how this can be misinturpreted. Haptic readability can of course throw you off if not designed after conventions you’re used to. The post can be found here. […]