BUY COLIN FIRTH'S SUIT

Buy Colin Firth’s suit and he’ll tell you all about it

Lesley Ciarula TaylorStaff Reporter

The dress discovered at a charity shop not only belonged to Annie Lennox. It came with a video, attached to the tag, of Lennox talking about where she wore it. A three-year British research project to combine scannable, digital QR codes and memories has hit on a stunning success with its most recent collaboration with the charity Oxfam. “People donate hoping it will go somewhere else that’s good,” said project principal investigator Chris Speed. “There is a history to things.” Two dozen celebrities donated items, including a suit from actor Colin Firth, dresses from model Kate Moss and actress Scarlett Johansson, and a gala gown from Lennox, to this year’s Oxfam-run pop-up shop inside London department store Selfridges in April. As the stuff arrived, staff captured stories and videos to embed into QR codes attached to tags on the items. Buy the duds, get the personal story. Oxfam had approached the $2.25 million Tales of Things and Electronic Memory project after a successful small-scale charity shop sale called RememberMe in Manchester, England, in 2010, Speed said. It was a shift into the commercial world that he found unexpected but full of potential. “A lot of scanning is about the price or about advertising right now,” Speed told the Star. “This is a breakthrough in that you can retrieve memories of an object as opposed to what the organizations want you to know. You can scan an old shoe and hear its story.” Tales of Things is a collaboration among universities in Edinburgh, London, Dundee, Brunel and Salford. Since it began in August, 2010, the project has been helping people make QR codes and posting their stories on its website from around the world about their objects, pets and memories. Thanks to the Oxfam Curiosity Shop success, the project plans to spread TOTEM to all 750 Oxfam shops in Britain in the next year. And, slowly, other enterprises are latching on. Environmentally conscious U.S. coffee company Shoffee attaches a TOTEM QR tag to its bags of beans with a message, “Hi, I packed these coffee beans.” And a London company has installed QR codes on 4,000 Norwegian bus shelters where people can find out when the next bus arrives. “What is fascinating is what else people are using it for. Someone had left two mittens and someone else took a picture of them and posted it,” said Speed. Arts and heritage councils are also adopting the project’s ideas, he said. “I think they know that the thing isn’t as important as the attachment to a person. It’s the same reason we all take photographs on holiday or we hold on to things in our house which are connected to family and friends.” In her video for the Oxfam charity sale, Lennox holds up her chartreuse beaded dress and describes how she wore it to a 90th birthday party for South African leader Nelson Mandela in London’s Hyde Park. “If you buy it and wear it, that’s what you can tell your friends,” she says. And have airtight proof to go with it.