My new quest – replacing QR codes with tartan

Center for Civic Media meetings start with an icebreaker question: you introduce yourself, and tell us whether you prefer pirates or ninjas, homemade or canned cranberry sauce. You offer your favorite protest chant or tell us what percent (“I am the 99%”) you identify with. Yesterday, on seeing two of Civic’s finest dressed in argyle, I asked people to propose a Civic Media dress code.

The suggestions were wide-ranging and included Jeff Warren’s suggestion of facial tattoos that serve as achievement badges, Nathan Matias’s proposed adoption of Madeline Albright’s “pin code” and Molly Sauter offered a suggestion for remixable, snarky t-shirts.

My favorite suggestion was Lorrie LeJeune’s proposal of a Civic media tartan. (Since Lorrie weaves and spins, as well as writes, edits, makes jewelry, builds guitars and plays mandolin, it’s possible she is weaving a Civic tartan right now.) It was widely observed that we needn’t select a single tartan – instead, we could create a set of tartans that functioned like QR codes, encoding information for anyone capable of comprehending the code.

I’m home sick today, feeling like the cold I’m fighting is perfectly justified given my travel and sleep schedule this fall. (Spontaneous human combustion would also likely have been an appropriate bodily response to the strains of this fall.) So I’ve had some time to think about how we might actually implement a Civic tartan code.

First, some quick comments on QR codes:

– They’re very cool. It’s wonderful that Densu Wave in 1994 figured out such a compact way to encode a surprisingly large amount of data into machine readable form. And there are certainly lots of clever ways to use them, not just for labeling auto parts, but for bridging between the real and digital worlds, tagging physical objects and spaces with unique identifiers and URLs. (See Civic’s Timenesia project for one cool way to use QR codes to tag reality.)

– They’re ugly as sin, and also something of a fashion statement. Commenting on posters from a recent Occupy rally, Sasha Constanza-Chock noted that QR codes on many of the posters and wondered – since most of the codes translate as URLs – whether it wouldn’t be easier simply to put the human-readable URLs on the posters instead. “It seems like the QR code primarily signifies you as the sort of person technologically sophisticated enough to be using QR codes”

There’s a certain charm to having codes that are machine-readable but not human readable, I guess – you can wear http://goatse.cx on your shirt and disturb anyone foolish enough to read the code with their phone. But I suspect fashion statements like haute couture bodices decorated with QR codes are the sort of idea with very little staying power.

– They’re killing kittens. As Scott Stratten explains in this helpful video, most QR codes are misused, and each time designers misuse them, a kitten dies. It’s time we think of the kittens.

Embedding data into physical spaces is a cool idea. But it would be great if we could do so in a way that’s pretty, and at least partially human readable.

Like tartans. Prior to the 19th century, tartans were associated with different regions of Scotland, colored using local dyes to local weaver’s preferences. After the publication of the (wholly fictional) Vestiarium Scoticum in 1842, tartans became associated with specific clans, and it became possible to identify members of some families by the particular tartan they wore. Military units and businesses have created specific tartans, as do most US states, and there are now between 7000 and 14,000 “registered” tartans available.

The Bay State tartan, my state’s official plaid. You may now understand why I prefer my clan tartan.

It’s pretty obvious from looking at a tartan that you’ve got the potential to store a great deal of information within the design of the pattern. The Bay State tartan features 24 stripes before repeating. Each can be a different width and color. With a couple dozen colors to choose from, and stripes ranging from one to 64 stitches, you’ve got 36,864 patterns, or slightly more than 15 bits of information. All well and good, but not enough information to encode a URL.

QR codes can include URLs stored as alphanumeric characters – the QR codes we see most often can support 35-77 alphanumeric characters. That’s a lot of data – ~8.9×10^108 possible combinations, which would require either really wide tartans, or very subtle color variations. The problem is more tractable if we try to represent a shortened URL, using a service like is.gd or bit.ly. Yes, this means our tartan scanner will need to detect color and stripe width, then consult bit.ly before using the domain name service to resolve our website… but remember, QR readers are using the DNS system to turn their codes into websites, in part because encoding IP addresses doesn’t work well anymore now that a site can support thousands of independent domains.

bit.ly produces URLs that look like this: http://bit.ly/t658ko – that URL leads to Center for Civic Media at http://civic.mit.edu. To slightly oversimplify, the service turns each URL it encounters into the next of a sequence of numbers. Rather than use decimal numbers, they use a base-62 system (0-9, A-Z, a-z), which allows them to represent almost 57 billion numbers with only six characters. 57 billion is vastly smaller than the total number of possible URLs, but in practical terms, it works because people haven’t used the service 57 billion times.

Now we just need something capable of producing 57 billion different tartans.

Enter Tartanmaker.com. This lovely online service allows you to design simple tartans to be used as backgrounds for your webpages. You can create three stripes of width from 1-10, using hexadecimal notation to specify colors. That gives you 167 million or so options per stripe (256^3 colors times 10 widths), or roughly 4.722 x 10^24 possible tartans. While that more than satisfies our information needs, most of those colors are going to be too subtle for the human eye to distinguish.

Turns out we can solve our problem using only websafe colors. With three stripes chosen from 216 websafe colors, we get almost 10 billion combinations. Tartanmaker offers us two other options – three thread widths (which basically scale the pattern) and two orientations (horizonal versus diagonal), which bring us up to over 59 billion combinations, just what we need to represent bit.ly URLs.

If we actually wanted to do this, we’d need a good algorithm to map bit.ly’s base-62 numbers to a combination of 3 thread sizes, 2 orientations, and three stripes, each of 216 colors and 10 widths. We might get very clever and figure out how to have tartans darken over time, using darker colors as we move through our list of unique identifiers. And we’d need Tartanmaker to offer an API so we could take an URL, call bit.ly, then call Tartanmaker and produce appropriate outputs. Finally, for this to actually be useful, we’d need to program a webcam to distinguish between color shades and stripe widths.

But it makes me deeply happy to know that Civic Media tartan could exist, and could lead an appropriately equipped smartphone to our site. And it makes me want to build a tartan translator, if only to figure out what URLs I’m advertising when I wear my flannel shirts.