about custo scan a custo tag
items created on the first kiosk items on the second kiosk


Custo is a kiosk for fostering and documenting the relationships between people and things



Table of Contents

the kiosk
the tagging ritual
tags
some pleasing types of tags
maintenance art
custodisco
scuttlebutt
free sha voca do
future
history
thanks




The thesis is that items with a documented history are less likely to meet an untimely end of life. Custo exists to encourage greater care of the material things.




click for a bigger (25mb) gif



The custo kiosk allows users to design their own custom fabric or sticker tags to affix to items. A common component of a tag is the owner's contact info in case the item is lost. A QR code is printed on the tag with a unique item ID. Using the kiosk or a Scuttlebutt client anyone can update stories, history and meta-data about the item using this unique ID.

~


Say you're walking down the road and you see a sweater laying in the mud. Normally your gut might tell you to just leave it to rot or throw it out, but you pick it up. It turns out there's a tag in it. You scan the QR code and 50 years of stories appear on-screen: photos of previous owners in foreign countries, details of times it was mended. Scrolling back you see the photos of the person who originally knit it. Suddenly this sweater feels important to return to its owner or wash and continue to record stories of.





the kiosk

This project is intentionally developed as a public infrastructural kiosk. Kiosks, like phone booths, vending machines, or the haves/needs kiosk in the book Always Coming Home democratize access to technology. The interaction is more embodied, you have to physically go to the machine. It's shared, like the public library. It is an elegant way of computing.

The kiosk is equiped with:


the tagging ritual

A burning candle helps create a grounding moment to meditate (menditate) on the relationship with one's object. Affixing a tag to an item acknowledges this relationship and forges a kind of spiritual agreement with the item. You're saying, 'I am a custodian, I am your custodian, I will take care of you'. Items and people live a long time and we both take care of eachother while we're alive. This acknowledges that oft-forgot reality.





tags


There are tags on objects all around us. When considering a tag it's important to be critical of the motives of the creators by asking:


I don't care who made a thing, I don't need to see the logo on the thing. I want the logo of the person who's maintaining it. ... I want to know who is preventing this thing from ending up in a landfill, not who designed it to.
--@trav@sunbeam.city July 9, 2023


some pleasing types of tags


Names in clothing! Robb gave me his shirt.



Institutional chairs.



My house from 1914



the stickers a bike shop adds to a bike when they fix it up.



ex-libris



perhaps highway maintenance could be seen as an externality of the automobile industry though I do like how these tags uplift maintenance workers.



I also apprecitae these maintenance workers tags on Amtrak cars


Other interesting tags/systems:




maintenance art

custo is intended as a piece of Maintenance Art. The idea of Maintenance Art was coined by Merle Lederman Ukeles, seen here involved in her work Touch Sanitation,

The multifaceted performance included Handshake and Thanking Ritual, in which Ukeles shook the hand of all 8,500 Sanitation employees, saying to each "Thank you for keeping New York City alive."
—the Sanitation Foundation

a screenshot from the film The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal

I am generally of the perspective that graffitti removal is destruction of art however I adore the film's half-joke thesis that graffiti removal workers are artists doing their own art. And from the perspective of the steward of an infrastructural object, the object has suffered damage and needs repair.
compare the graffiti removal to Celia Pym's sweater and my backpack.



custo

The word custodisco (custodire) is the verb form of the word custodian in Italian, "I watch something with care, so that it does not suffer damage and is kept intact." This is where custo gets its name. The 3 o's in the custo logo are instructions on how to pronounce it (coosto, not cUSto), a vague reference to Object-oriented ontology, and a diagram showing how custo is peer-to-peer, thus avoiding a middle-man.

Scuttlebutt

The characteristics I sought in creating a collections management and tagging system were:
Appealing aesthetics are achieved by allowing the user to draw their own tags with a stylus. Custo becomes a tool of artistic expression.

Uplifting maintenance is achieved with instruction in the maintenance ritual during the custo workshop.

Independent & resilient are achieved with Scuttlebutt.


a screenshot from the Patchwork Scuttlebutt client


Secure Scuttlebutt is a decentralized social network that doesn't rely on the internet and resiliently stores information on many computers all over the world. By utilizing Scuttlebutt, custo is able to generate unique IDs for each item, independent of any central authority, for free. Technically each item tagged with custo is an NFT as ownership/stewardship of an item may be cryptographically verified.

The first Custo kiosk is on Scuttlebutt at: 
@FEvUwv3A721fT0DWzANJqPa48iD57xv/ZnfQvKxPd2g=.ed25519
The second kiosk is on Scuttlebutt at: 
@apIwMs+ElLT6h4d9nUqqFSWUXAHII1d+Wz9SopR26Lo=.ed25519

ssb on the web

I have setup an instance of ssb-viewer which allows Scuttlebutt posts to be viewed on the web. There is technically an ssb pub behind that ssb-viewer instance but it's hops are set to 1 and it only follows Custo kiosks.

Ssb-viewer, in conjunction with this QR scanning page, allows anyone to scan the QR on a custo tag and view the item informaton online. But the continued existence of my personal ssb-viewer instance is tenuous and unreliable! It will likely not stay online forever, at least at that address. And it doesn't allow people to post stories about their item. I encourage everyone to setup a Scuttlebutt account oneself and contribute to the Scuttlebutt ecosystem.




free sha voca do

Some items in the free sha voca do free store are being tagged with an experimental custo tag which asks that whoever takes possession of this item does not sell it for money or destroy it. This license is intended to be perpetual for the life of the item for any future stewards, thus removing the item from capitalism. It also indicates the item's passing through the free store.

Free store tems are being posted by (or ownership assigned to) this Scuttlebutt account: 
@cpie7fpNg7u1ybjsju+iNJ5/HXxSEXc9wvjPLFlF2fw=.ed25519



future

The ability to manage large collections of items is on the roadmap

I will be expanding on the custo project as part of the Vermont Certificate of Public Librarianship that I am enrolled in.

I'd like to add multi-lingual support to the kiosk

I need to make a small command-line tool for cryptographically giving your item to another Scuttlebutt user.





history


first presentation of the project at SFBOT





thanks!!!!



Inquiries please write to maintenance@cust.ooo

The code is open source by request

This is a project by trav!!!