Technology, Innovation, Education

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Lift France 2011 conference. For me this was different than my usual conference experience. I have written before how Anglo-Saxon my perspective is, so to be at a conference where the majority of the audience is French was refreshing.

Although there was a track about learning, most of the conference approached the effects of digital technology on society from angles that were relatively new to me. In a pure learning conference, I am usually able to contextualize what I see immediately and do some real time reflecting. This time I had to stick to reporting on what I saw (all my #lift11 posts are listed here) and was forced to take a few days and reflect on what I had seen.

Below, in random order, an overview of what I would consider to be the big themes of the conference. Occasionally I will try to speculate on what these themes might mean for learning and for innovation.

Utilization of excess capacity empowered by collaborative platforms

Robin Chase gave the clearest explanation of this theme that many speakers kept referring back to:

Economic Logic of Using Access Capacity by Robin Chase

This world has large amounts of excess capacity that isn’t used. In the past, the transaction costs of sharing (or renting out) this capacity was too high to make it worthwhile. The Internet has facilitated the creation of collaborative platforms that lower these transaction costs and make trust explicit. Chase’s most simple example is the couch surfing idea and her Zipcar and Buzzcar businesses are examples of this too.

Entangled with the idea of sharing capacity is the idea of access being more important than ownership. This will likely come with a change in the models for consumption: from owning a product to consuming a service. The importance of access shows why it is important to pay attention to the (legal) battles being fought on patents, copyrights, trademarks and licenses.

I had some good discussions with colleagues about this topic. Many facilities, like desks in offices, are underused and it would be good to try and find ways of getting the percentage of utilization up. One problem we saw is how to deal with peak demand. Rick Marriner made the valid suggestion that transparency about the demand (e.g. knowing how many cars are booked in the near future) will actually feed back into the demand and thus flatten the peaks.

A quick question that any (part of an) organization should ask itself is which assets and resources have excess capacity because in the past transaction costs for sharing them across the organization were too high. Would it now be possible to create platforms that allow the use of this extra capacity?

Another question to which I currently do not have an answer is whether we can translate this story to cognitive capacity. Do we have excess cognitive capacity and would there be a way of sharing this? Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and the Wikipedia project seem to suggest we do. Can organizations capture this value?

Distributed, federated and networked systems

Robin Chase used the image below and explicitly said that we now finally realize that distributed networks are the right model to overcome the problems of centralized and decentralized systems.

From "On Distributed Communication Networks", Baran, 1962

I have to admit that the distinction between decentralized and distributed eludes me for now (I guess I should read Baran’s paper), but I did notice at Fosdem earlier this year that the open source world is urgently trying to create alternatives to big centralized services like Twitter and Facebook. Moglen talked about the Freedombox as a small local computer that would do all the tasks that the cloud would normally do, there is StatusNet, unhosted and even talk of distributed redundant file systems and wireless mesh networking.

Can large organizations learn from this? I always see a tension between the need for central governance, standardization and uniformity on the one hand and the local and specific requirements on the other hand. More and more systems are now designed to allow for central governance and the advantages of interoperability and integration, while at the same time providing configurability away from the center. Call it organized customization or maybe even federation. I truly believe you should think deeply about this whenever you are implementing (or designing!) large scale information systems.

Blurring the distinction between the real and the virtual worlds

Lift also had an exhibitors section titled “the lift experience“, mostly a place for multimedia art (imagine a goldfish in a bowl sat atop an electric wheelchair, a camera captured the direction the fish swam in and the wheelchair would then move in the same direction). There were quite a few projects using the Arduino and even more that used “hacked” Kinects to enable new types of interaction languages.

Photo by Rick Marriner

Most projects tried, in some way, to negotiate a new way of working between the virtual and the real (or should I call it the visceral). As soon as those boundaries disappear designers will have an increased ability to shape reality. One of the projects that I engaged with the most was the UrbanMusicalGame: a set of gyroscopes and accelerometers hidden in soft balls. By playing with these balls you could make beautiful music while using an iPhone app to change the settings (unfortunately the algorithms were not yet optimized for my juggling). This type of project is the vanguard of what we will see in the near term.

My Lift 11 wordcloud, made with Wordle

Philippe Lemoine and Roger Malina have been listening to the Lift sessions and will share their takeaways, and personal, highly subjective feedback on the conference in the last part of the event.

Roger Malina

Roger Malina is convinced that neither technology or science have an inherent moral compass (the enlightenment has failed: we are still in a century of famines). We have built an unsustainable society and urgently need the help of the Arts and the Humanities. Sustainability is a cultural and social problem.

His first warning: beware of techno-philia (what is the title of this blog again?).

For him Lift 2011 France has foregrounded cultural appropriation and transformation as a key enabling factor, but we need to make a distinction between the “feel good” homeopathic solutions to the world’s problems versus systemic change. Roger does not believe that science and technology are driven by governments and big organizations. He calls “bullshit”: they are driven culturally, so look at the current youth.

He wants to remind us that curiosity has transformed from a Christian sin to a modern virtue.

Finally he wants to re-emphasize that innovation is situated: it is embodied, enacted, social and collective. This means he is very suspicious of large scale initiatives that try to institutionalize innovation (like the EU Innovation Futures project).

The Leonardo foundation is trying to cross-fertilize art, science and technology. We need more places like this in our society.

Philippe Lemoin speak in French and without slides. In good French tradition it takes him no effort to be very “intellectual” in his commentary on the conference. His conclusion: yes, we have to be radical!

The final themed session at Lift 11 France is about OPEN – What happens when barriers to innovation become drastically lower?. From the introduction:

The Internet has radically open innovation systems in digital products, content and services. Today, the same is happening to manufacturing, finance, urban services, even health care and life sciences. What will this new innovation landscape look like?

First up is Juliana Rotich from GlobalVoices. Her talk is about Ushahidi which builds democratizing technology and is powered by open source.

The true size of Africa

She starts her talk by showing how large Africa truly is. Ushahidi shares a heritage of openness with the Internet. Africa is getting connected fast and the costs of the connection keeps on dropping. Eventually this will change the rural landscape. Initially a lot of web 2.0 services where local copies of silicon valley services, but now we are starting to see services being developed for true local (check out iHub).

Mobile technology plays an important part. The coverage is getting better. In 2015 they expect to have 7.2 billion non smartphones and 1.3 billion smartphones in Africa. Mobile money is an innovation that is a third world first. More than 20% of Kenia’s GDP flows trough the mobile money system. It is transforming many (government) services: for example prepaying for electricity.

By making the tools open source, people can take the tools, use their own data and make it their own: it really lowers the barriers for people to use the technology. Ushahidi as a platform is now used for all kinds of use-cases that were never imagined. Crowdmap has pushed the number of Ushahidi implementations to over 15.000.

Of course there are challenges: the last mile stays difficult. Nothing is as big a showstopper as power black outs. She then goes on to critique Facebook as a walled garden for its lack of generativity. When there are closed walls around technology it becomes much harder to innovate (hear, hear!). So her advice is to bet on generativity and open source.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino has a talk titled Homesense project: agile and open innovation against all odds.

Homesense started with a blog post. She got a bit sick of the idea of the “smart” home. Every home is different. She thought it would be a good idea to give this new simple open technology to “normal” people without any specific interest in technology and let them use it in a creative commons way. She then went looking for people who were willing to get people to volunteer their home for experimentation. In the end they found 6 households in 4 countries.

The Homesense Kit

So what happened? People were given a “homesense kit” based around the Arduino. The households worked with technological experts to create things that were useful to them, like a robot that would tell you when you left the toilet seat up, or a little map that would show you were the shared bike-hubs around your house had bikes available, or something that would turn off the light when there was enough light around the house.

Then suddenly the project received a cease and desist letter from a large manufacturer who has a trademark on the word “Homesense”. Luckily, after some legal advice, they could go on. Now they’ve been invited by the MoMa to exhibit their project in the Talk to me exhibition.

Open innovation is hard to do when you are an organization. It is very hard to do when you are a big business. Smaller outfits can do this much cheaper and get the results shared much more quickly.

The last speaker in this session about openness is Gabriel Borges talking about two initiatives based on open innovation. He will show how peer production can be the main factor of innovation.

Brazil is now the 5th largest Internet audience with only 38% penetration. A new digital middle class is coming up in Brazil and they are the most intense social media users in the world. Portuguese is the second most spoken language in Twitter and Brazil is the 2nd largest Youtube audience in the world. Why is this the case? Brazilians are social by nature. A global average social media user in the world has 120 network friends, in Latin America this is 176 and Brazil this is 230 friends.

What happens when you mix all these ingredients? You can get things like Queremos with five guys organizing concert by disintermediating all the people that are normally between a band and the attendee. It works like this:

Another example is how they used WordPress to invite consumers to really help in designing a concept car. The Fiat Mio concept car had 17.000 consumers bringing in their 11.000 ideas in about 15 months. It is fundamentally changing the way that Fiat Brazil wants to work going forward.

What are the 3 key learnings from this?

1. A collaborative environment should never be based on anarchy. Leadership, stimulation, organization and ground rules are very necessary.
2. It doesn’t mean that everyone interested in your cause will feel thrilled to collaborate effectively. Make room for all interested people.
3. Even for the most collaborative cause, at the end, the motivation for any and every participant will be extremely individualist.

“Slow” seems to be the new black. I guess the slow food movement started it all. Now I am starting to see consultants for “slow learning” and there is a whole track at Lift 11 France about the topic titled Can we use technology to reclaim control over how we and our organizations manage time?. From the introduction:

Technologies make our lives and work faster, accelerate economic and social rhythms. They bring about constant sollicitations, infobesity, and the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure. Individuals as well as organizations are trying to regain control over time. How can we achieve this?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is futurist from the Silicon Valley who has developed a framework for Contemplative Computing about which he is talking.

The first thing Alex asks us to do is check our email. Do we hold our breath when we are checking our email? Almost every does do that, and barely anybody realizes that. It is an ancient subconscious system triggered by modern technology. It shows how problematic our relation to technology has become. Every innovation is followed by a shift in the cognitive skills we need to practice and shift in the way we learn.

There is a way out: contemplative computing. This sounds like an oxymoron in this day and age, but doesn’t have to be. This is something that you cannot consume or build, it something that you do. Four big ideas:

• Our relationships with technology/computers is incredibly deep. We are born cyborgs: always looking to extend our minds. The problem is that today’s technologies or badly designed and poorly used.
• Humans have always had to deal with distraction and lack of attention and contemplative practices seems to have emerged about three millennia ago.
• In order to change your extended mind, you have to understand how the digital world is trying to change you.
• You can redesign your extended mind. One way of doing this is to self-experiment. Buddha treated himself as a laboratory in which he experimented on his own mind. Self-experimentation is a reminder that only we ourselves have the ability to redesign our extended mind. Tinkering (make-culture) is also way to get a better understanding. Self-experimentation and tinkering are complementary strategies. Distractions become less appealing as the inherent pleasure of attention replace it. Developing a contemplative approach to computing is not easy and fast, it is slow.

One questions at the end of the talk: Can there be a thing like a contemplative organization?

The next speaker is Kris de Deckers who works at Low-Tech Magazine (an example of an article from the magazine is Automata: engineering for a post-oil world?). In his talk he looks at ecotech myths and lessons from the past and wants to show us the potential of past and often forgotten technologies for a future sustainable society. The history of technology hides lots of interesting solutions that can help us in the future. An example is the Timbrel vault which is a materials saving way of building that was recently discovered.

Kris contents that our current consensus that we can engineer our way out of the current ecological problems we are facing: green tech or eco-tech has a lot of problems. Nearly all of these technologies are still dependent on fossil fuels, especially in their creation. You also need a huge import of fossil fuel to keep a society running on renewable energy (think about batteries). Another problem is that energy-efficient technology does not save energy, it actually often leads to more energy consumption rather than less energy consumption. Citroën’s 2CV is as efficient as the smallest car made Citroën today. All the progress in efficiency in cars has gone into more speed, more weight, more power and more comfort.

Underlying this common view of high-tech sustainable society is the believe that we don’t have to change our lifestyle. He doesn’t beliefs this is actually possible. However this doesn’t mean we have to go back to the medieval ages.

Open Source Solar Energy Machine

Now onto thinking about energy production/storage rather than energy consumption. We can learn a lot from how energy was created and stored before the industrial revolution. Europe had hundreds of thousands of windmills where used for all kinds of energy consuming applications (more than 100 industrial processes). How did they solve the energy storage problem (in cases of no wind/sun being available)? One backup solution was to use animals, these were not very efficient and thus only used for critical industrial processes. Another solution is that they did not store energy, but that they stored work. In the middle ages this meant that the miller worked whenever there was wind (even on Sundays) and where there was no wind he didn’t work. We could apply the same “storage solution” to our modern technology. Storing work instead of energy eliminates the need for a backup infrastructure. This solution will create less production, but we have to realize that overproduction and overconsumption are big problems anyhow and this could be one way of solving it.

Solar energy is often talked about in the context of generating electricity, but it can also be used directly as it gives and endless source of heat energy. We now have concentrated solar power. If you use it to create electricity it is only effective in the desert, but if you use it directly you can use it in areas with less sun too. Unlike solar panels and wind turbines this technology can actually be used to produce itself.

Finally Anna Meroni is a designer speaking about Feeding Milano, a human platform to regain the meaning of slowness. Her project tries to marry the idea of conviviality to the city as a whole. Currently in Milan they eat very little of all that is produced agriculturally just a few kilometers south of the city. Feeding Milan tries to change this (to me it is seems very similar to La Ruche Qui Dit Oui that we saw yesterday).

Conviviality in this case is challenging the industrial system through collaboration and trust. One practical outcome is a farmer’s market where people can come and eat and do workshops. They also have an idea-sharing stall that tries to decrease the time between an idea coming up and the implementation of the idea. Another things they have done is creating a pilot for farmer’s boxes on a subscription model. The word for this is a “design supported community” in which the technology has disappeared.

She finished the talk with a quote from Illich (it seems to be a trend to finish your presentation with a quote today!): “The capacity to promote autonomy is a fundamental characteristic of a convivial tool”. (Note to self, I really have to get to reading Tools for conviviality which has been lying around my living room for ages now).

The WORK/LEARN track at Lift 11 is subtitled: Transforming the way we work, innovate and learn. From the introduction:

What will the XXIst-century organization look like: A network, a nebula, or a process-based system where everything is standardized and measured? How can these two cultures, these two ways of producing and of innovating, work together? And, since education seems to have changed far less than most of society, how can we prepare for a world where we all learn continuously and ubiquitously?

Geoff Mulgan is Chief Executive at Nesta, a funding body for science, and talks about Openness and collective intelligence, its prospects and its challenges.

According to him people have different perspectives on networks. People predicted networks would lead to big brother states and corporations and fascistic organizations, whereas other said it would flatten hierarchies. The truth is, networks do both. We need to learn how to navigate the balance of openness and closure.

He thinks we will need to develop three different strategies to do the following:

• Stop the abuses of networked technology
• Infect and embrace the hierarchies
• Grow the new

Who shows the example of Who Owns My Neighbourhood and Sutton Bookshare. He is interested in depth rather than breadth in relationships. Another project he is involved with is the Action for Happiness website, giving people science based advice on how to be happy:

Next he focuses on some methodological solutions to make progress in solving the problems mentioned above. One is social innovation camps, another is I do ideas where you people can get a grant not by filling in a grant request form, but by posting a video.

He uses some Hegelian thinking to frame the problem. If “Hierarchy” is the “Thesis” and “Open Networks” are the “Antithesis”, then what is the “Synthesis”? There are testing out the model by means of a Global Innovation Academy with pilots in many countries.

He leaves us with his advice on what we need. We need fast and slow, we need always on, but also often off and we need open as well as closed. He doesn’t have the answer on how to do these things and realizes we are in a time of heavy experimentation.

Edial Dekker is the CEO of Gidsy a marketplace for authentic experiences. He is of Hack de Overheid (Hack the government) fame. His talk is titled Trusted networks and the rise of the micro-entrepreneur.

According to Edial we are in trouble: we are in the slowest economic recovery since the 30s, we will run out of natural resources and we are at peak globalization. He sees all kinds of initiatives that are trying to tackle these problems from the bottom up and are getting a lot of traction. Examples are The School of Life or How to Homestead, a community that tries to help you become self-sufficient, or the Betahaus a very successful makers-lab in Berlin. He could give endless examples of empowering technologies allowing people to share resources in a different way.

He aligns his argument with Robin Chase, where these new collaborative platform are very scalable and capable of making use of the excess capacity. He quotes Kevin Kelly who says that “Access is better than ownership”:

Currently he is raising money for his start up. The question that always comes up from investors is: “How big is your market?”. He didn’t really know how to answer that question. So he asked his advisers at Etsy who told him that when they started there was no market for handmade items. They created a market that wasn’t there before. Jyri Engeström invented the concept of “Social objects” to describe this.

He finished by giving some tips:

• Make your product as human as possible (Rob Kalin of Etsy)
• It start with chips and end with trust (Kevin Kelly)
• Unmute the web (Alex & Eric from Soundcloud)
• Don’t solve problems, pursue opportunities

The final speaker in this track is the Finnish Ville Keränen, a “geek and learning designer” at Monkey Business (check out their site, the tag line is “More action. More chaos. More mistakes. More learning.”). He must be the best branded speaker of the event, taking his sun-glassed banana everywhere and wearing yellow pants. His talk has the title: From Team Academy to the future: Building organizations for humans.

He first asks us to get up and give each other a “tender and dynamic greeting”.

For Ville it is all about people, courage and fun and well-being. He feels we are sometimes a bit too serious in the way we work. He quotes Tom Peters who said “I would have done some real cool stuff, but my boss didn’t allow me”. He then shows a quite incredible youtube video in which a Finnish ice hockey player show exactly the right behaviors you need:

Some key concepts from the team academy: you enter the academy and start a company with a team of people on day one (even without a business idea). There are no simulations, only real projects. There are no lectures, but there is lots of dialog. There are no teachers, but team coaches instead. There are no exams, only team companies. There are no grades, but real clients. One of the goals is to make a trip around the world with the money you have made (if you made enough money).

There are few learning principles behind the team academy. Learners learn what they want to learn (constructivism). Learning is always situational and contextual. Learning is social and happens in a community. I believe that in my company we are relatively good at the second principle, but have a lot to learn about the first and third principles.

Team Academy is now expanding rapidly. Their challenges are currently how to lead a global network, how to think big and how to expand to domains outside of business? One thing that they are doing well is capturing the excess capacity of their students.

Philine Warnke works at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI). Her talk is titled: The futures of innovation and innovation policies and she is at Lift France 11 because of the Innovation Futures (INFU) program. From the introduction:

Innovation is changing in many ways. New meanings, new actors, new models, new motivations and new targets are emerging. In the academic discourse attempts to conceptualize these changes abound. Notions like open innovation, distributed innovation, user innovation, social innovation, relational innovation, frugal innovation, design driven innovation, local innovation are hotly debated in management and academic circles alike. While innovation is adopted as a core element in more and more policy realms, “Innovation Policy” is increasingly aiming at addressing societal needs instead of funding key technologies with a view on competitiveness alone. In my talk I will reflect upon possible “innovation policy futures” in the light of these developments. In particular I will discuss the need for establishing enabling platforms for “collective experimentation”.

Warnke assumes we as an audience know about the new models for innovation (i.e. open innovation, disruptive innovation, etc.), instead she will focus on the implications this will have for innovation policy. Foresight is all about having structured futures dialogs through we can discover the potential of the present. Thinking about the future can make you see the present in a different light.

The project has taken a couple of different steps. See this PDF for some more information about those. First you look for signals, then you structure them through clustering and amplifying by thinking about transfer, generalization and radicalization. INFU has created about twenty innovation visions explained on this video:

They then created some “nodes of change” and created mini-panels to discuss these nodes (something similar to the workshop we did yesterday). Several of the mini-panels pointed to completely different economic frameworks in which innovation will be embedded.

This means there are some implications for innovation policy. We will go beyond the usual innovation suspects, the focus on high- and key-tech, disciplinary excellence, the need for global breakthrough and growth and competitiveness, and we will go towards “Innovation Campsite” and an infrastructure for distributed experimental collaborative innovation. So this will not only change our priorities, but will also require new instruments.

Warnke is recently seeing a shift towards mission oriented schemes (grand challenges, moon shots, etc.), away from key technologies. There is also a shift to social innovation and systemic eco-innovation and there is a slow alignment with other policy realms. But at the same time there is still this focus on competitiveness and growth dominant drivers and global breakthroughs.

Her idea for a way forward is what she calls “Collective Experimentation”, a non-linear co-evolution of technology and society. The rationale for this is that modulation of messy innovation trajectories are only possible by experimenting local, context-specific solutions around the nexus of variation and selection. This will have a lot of challenges:

• You need to be open for different outcomes without upfront objectives. This is hard in the current funding models.
• You have to be open for new actors, can’t have a fixed consortium from the start.
• You have to be open for local diversity, nothing will be best for all settings.
• We need to start taking socio-technical approaches. Usually only technology gets the funding.
• There needs to be a tolerance for messy innovation journeys.
• Quality of life will need to become an orientation.
• We need to integrate a debate about values for which there is usually no space.
• Combining freedom and structure will be very difficult.

A new platform has just been launched in beta. It is called Imagination for people, a collaborative platform dedicated to social innovation. The projects listed on the platform have to be for the public good, they have to be disruptive (so a “worldwide first”) and it needs to be able to scale.

We were presented with eight different ideas in this vein:

• La Ruche qui dit Oui a way to disintermediate wholesalers and supermarkets from the farmer client relationship by creating “hives” of consumers that pool their demand.
• Mocaplab does motion capture services. He is talking about using motion capture to create a tool to record, play and edit the natural language of many deaf people: sign language. This is a challenge because you need to capture the motion of not only the fingers and hands, but also the face and eye movements. I find this completely fascinating. One thing I wonder about though is what standard you would use to digitise the language, how else will you be able to synthesize the language.

FiveFive

• Fivefive, “the emotional experience”, is an attempt to create sensitive and emotional devices that enhance the way people communicate over the Internet. Our current interface devices don’t allow us to create real presence remotely. It is an object that looks like a pebble, that will produce light when you touch it. You would use it in pairs. It will add an extra dimension to your communications and might actually create a new type of language.
• A project by the Digital Empowerment Foundation to bring digital technology to weaver communities in India. This allows them to get more value out of the total chain that profits from their work. They have four problems: Not enough money to buy raw materials, not enough skills to design the clothes, no way to find a market to retail their products and a younger generation that doesn’t belief you can earn a living with weaving. The digital technology helps them capturing and storing designs and contains an ecommerce website helping sell the weaves. Each aspect is organized in self-help groups, so that there is a sense of ownership and sustainability.
• Exposition au Danger Psychologique is an (art) project by Emmanuel Germond aiming to prevent psychological harm from just not talking to each other anymore. Currently there is a online form where you can rate your own exposure to psychological danger, which will then allow for preventative measures and treatments (like extra-marital sex or a D-tox box). Check out the EPD Observatory to learn more.
• Neen or Non-verbal Emotional Experience of Notification. He used the metaphor of a door to create new forms of presence (“open doors for close communication”). This short video summarizes the main theme of the project.

• A project that creates a new definition of “health” for a new generation of digital native patients. It consists of multiple smaller on the edges between the social sphere, the physical sphere and the cognitive sphere. Read more here.
• Eli Commins has developed the Breaking project. Commins tells the story of how he followed an Iranian young man on Twitter who wasn’t at all interested in the electoral process going on there. As the electoral process continued the young man slowly started to become an activitist. Commins then decided to get together a diverse set of testimonies from Iran and try and find a way to visualize this on stage.

One theme at Lift France 2011 is Care. It is introduced as follows:

From patient networks to personal genomics, from the quest for autonomy and well-being to do-it-yourself bio, new technologies and new business models are getting ready to transform the world of healthcare. Are the players ready?

First up is Paul Wicks a research scientist at PatiensLikeMe](http://www.patientslikeme.com/). His talk is titled Putting patients at the center of healthcare; disruption in medicine, research, business, and drug safety.

Initially we got things wrong on the Internet. We thought it was about information, but have now learned that it is about really easy group formation (Wicks must have gotten this from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody). This has been very disruptive for certain type of industries (e.g. the travel agent). One of the professions that has not been disintermediated yet is the medical profession. The point of PatientsLikeMe is to for patients to share their health information in order to learn from others like them and then use that information to discuss treatment options with their health care team.

One radical idea that they have is to give back the data in such a way that people can do their own data analysis (e.g. comparing effectiveness of certain types of medicine for a medical problem correlated with chance of side-effects). They try to be scientifically rigorous in the way that the data is used and make sure that all articles are open access. 23andMe is doing something similar with their 23andWe research.

This is not without problems, mainly around privacy. Wicks suggest we might need a phenotypic non-discrimination act for people who are willing to share their data for the greater good. Based on questions by the facilitor I now realize that PatientsLikeMe is actually quite a commercial venture and earns its money by selling the data to 3rd parties.

Jonathan Kuniholm lost an arm in a war, came back and started a PhD studying prosthetics. He created the open prosthetics project. He started his talk saying that he is wearing an arm that was patented in 1912 with a hook that was developed in the fifties and that the whole arm contains no motors. Imagine if the technology that we use would progress in a similarly slow pace: terrible. The problem is the small market size (only six other amputees are on PatientsLikeMe for example) leading to relatively small research budgets. We have a multiple market failures here. There is no lack of ideas, they are actually rampant. But very often they are design exercises without any practical purpose.

It would be great if prosthetics could use the innovative solutions that are developed in other industries. Unfortunately licensing agreements and patents often get in the way. Designing for larger markets also would not really work. Another option is using user participation and social collaboration. He then showed a lot of examples of “make” culture and 3D printing and how people are trying to use these type of technologies (not really successfully) for prosthetics. He is now starting a company, StumpWorks, owned by amputees to build the things they want to build.

A "chap watching his own body's performance"

Tobie Kerridge is based in the interaction research studio at Goldsmiths in London. His talk is titled Debating Biotechnology – Speculative Design as Public Engagement. He is doing a project called material beliefs. From the website of the project:

Material Beliefs takes emerging biomedical and cybernetic technology out of labs and into public spaces. The project focuses on technologies which blur the boundaries between our bodies and materials, and how design as a tool for public engagement can be used to stimulate discussion about the value of these forms of hybridity. [..] The lab becomes a site for collaboration between scientists and engineers, designers, social scientists and members of the public. Alongside existing research activity such as collecting experimental data, writing academic papers and funding proposals, the collaborations lead to a parallel set of outcomes including interviews, brainstorming, drawing, photography, filming and discussion.

Transforming abandoned oil platforms into ocean mini cities

The first true theme of the conference is Urban, who needs to become smart in tomorrow’s cities. From the introduction:

We want cities to become greener, safer, more competitive, more inclusive, more vibrant or easier to move in. To achieve that takes more than great engineering and determined leadership, yet this is what most models of “smart cities” are built around. It requires trust and collaboration, the deliberate sharing of urban (hardware, software, informational) resources, open innovation ecosystems, empowerment policies… How will we achieve smart and open cities that could be livable?

Saskia Sassen is talking about The future of smart cities. Her research question is how much of the new technologies are truly urbanised. The cities is not just the materialities, it also is the people, the practices, etc. This means that the city can “talk back” and there is a notion “cityness”.

What would it mean to do open source urbanism? What would it mean if we start to think of the city as the hacker? Incompleteness is her foundational image for the future of the city because the concepts of the user don’t align with the concepts of the engineer.

I thought it was unfortunate that Sassen did not develop her thoughts further than these large broad philosophical strokes. This was in stark contract with the next speaker: Adam Greenfield runs a shop in New York called Urbanscale. His talk is titled: On public objects: connected things and civic responsibilities in the networked city. He prefers the term “network city” over “smart city”).

He is inspired by Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city. In our current networked city we have become an instrumented population. There is a strong spread of locative and declarative media. Increasingly we live among declarative objects (see Tom Armitage’s project of the talking Tower bridge).

We are surrounded by objects that can process information and “speak” to us leading to new modes of surveillance based on information gathering objects. What might it mean to speak of our right to the networked city. Maybe we need a new theory of public objects to help us think about them?

Greenberg show examples of a couple of technologies that are used in urban settings to get at a “taxonomy of effects” and a first start at thinking about the morality of objects:

• Välkky traffic sensors are non objectionable: there is local collection with a local effect and a clear public good.
• The Nikon advertisement that is “paparazzi billboard” is mildly disruptive: there is local collection and local effect, but there is no public good and slight disruption.
• The Acure touchscreen vending unit is gathering information about you and tries to discern your age and your gender and then present you with the right proposition. This is a prescriptive and normative non-urban technology. This is local collection with global effect and no public good: the data is analysed and used to change the propositions.
• Quividi (“he who watches”) VidiReports video analytics suite is a technology that records people as they pass by billboards and tracks their attention. Vidireports is leeching value of the cityscape. This technology is predictive and prospectively normative. Greenfield is actively trying to influence government to legislate against this type of technology.

Greenfield then gives a definition of the public objects. They should be designed in such a way that they are open and easily available. This has some problems: we are enormously increasing the “attack surface”. We also don’t have the etiquettes and protocols of precedence and deconfliction. But the aspirations are big though: among other things it could be a physical manifestation of the public sphere.

Next up was Alain Renk talking about Unlimited cities. He talked in French which was simultaneously translated. This setup made it very hard for me to both pay attention to the talk and blog. According to him we are confronted by a trend of standardisation of urban environment and it is very difficult to develop “urbadiversity”.

Robin Chase gave an incredibly inspiring talk about people-(em)powered platforms.

Some examples of people-(em)powered platforms are meetup and Etsy, Waze, Airbnb or Couchsurfing. This stuf is powerful: Intercontinental built 4400 hotels in 60 years, whereas Couchsurfing has 1.2m “couches” in 8 years (twice the volume of Intercontinental).

The economics are sustainable: I put my excess capacity into a common platform. This can grow very fast (low financial risk) because now the common platforms are completely scalable. This is a much more efficient use of resources. It is a dematerialisation: so more service than asset and it is focused and collaborative consumption. Put another way: ownership will not be the higher status consumption.

Chase has now started buzzcar (they have an app), a way for people to share their cars. It uses a collectively built infrastructure that is collaboratively financed where end users gain financially. Doing it like this she doesn’t have to wait for government or private companies, instead she has “auto-preneurs” putting their cars into the system. See here for a video explaining the concept. This way one well-used shared car can be used by 30-50 people. Some of these people will sell their car so one well-used shared car equals about 15-20 cars and can save 40-60 parking spaces.

This type of collaboratively built infrastructure will create the people’s city. Rather than having centralized or decentralized systems you now get distributed robust and resilient systems. We can finally have a future where there is scale without the homogenisation that this would usually bring.

The final talk is by Frédéric Mazzella. He has created a new way of carpooling and talked about how car-pooling can help forecast car traffic. Covoiturage.fr has 1.2 million members. By using people’s intentions of where they want to go when, they can forecast traffic (he showed a nice visualisation of this).

Joëlle Liberman (Égérie Research) and François Jégou (Strategic Design Scenarios) are hosting a session titled Innovaton Futures, Innovating within innovation challenges. This workshop is based on an European project titled Innovation Futureswhich is a foresight exercise on emerging patterns of innovation. From their introduction:

How is innovation changing and which challenges innovation will have to face in the coming future? INFU (www.innovation-futures.org) is an on-going European research project focusing futures of innovation, scanning weak signals of change in the current innovation landscape, extrapolating new patterns, discussing emerging visions, scenarios and implications for policy and practices.

At the start of the workshop we were put into pairs and given a “weak signal” that they have identified. Mine was: CoWorking Houses as Creative Hubs: “More and more of the nomadic knowledge workers from the creative class join CoWorking spaces. CoWorking houses offer an easy, flexible and budget workspace combining workspace with a creativty hub. One question to ask about these weak signals is what would happen if they would turn into mainstream which of course begged the question whether maybe in the future mainstream is that there is no mainstream anymore. Next up we were asked to imagine being at a board meeting of the Innovation Agency in 2036 (25 years from now). The agency is facing a couple of challenges and has to find a solution to these. Our table had to think about the following:

Thinking about the waste challenge

“Waste based innovation has taken off in the 00′s and a complete new range of new products definitions and production processes based on reuse of existing components instead of rough materials. The world waste stock exchange market is working very well, even too well inducing a perverse increasing demand for waste materials. The Innovation Agency is asked to propose solutions to avoid this bias.” ‘

Our initial thoughts were around whether this would be a problem that the market can solve itself or whether this would require some governmental intervention to solve. Could there be a tertiary market around waste credits to counter this? Should we require companies to deal with their waste locally, avoiding worldwide trade in waste materials?

I proposed that the cause of the problem seems to be that the consumer has been educated to appreciate recycled products. This signal for whether something is “good” is not working anymore and we should have an alternative. The obvious thing to do is to take more effects of a product into account when you decide to buy something: look at the total cost of ownership over the use-life of the product. Philippe Méda suggested that one way of doing this would be to focus on making sure that products have longer lifecycles. How do we know whether it is better to drive a very old but wasteful car, versus buying a new one with its environmental costs of production? Somebody suggested that maybe the idea of ownership is the problem and wasteful in itself. Instead of ownership you will start licensing/renting products. Proposing an alternative model to ownership based on sharing. Hopefully the current transaction costs for sharing will be made small enough in 25 years for this to be easier than it is today!

Each group had to present their ideas. Unfortunately this drained the energy out of the room. It seemed like each table had had a good discussion, but these discussions didn’t translate well to a presentation to the whole group. No deep discussions after each presentation. I do hope the output of each group will be digitised in some way and made available (the presenters promised it a link will be published here).

The one question I have after this workshop is about the methodology itself. I think there is a lot of potential in imagining yourself in a board meeting somewhere in the future, but not all the potential came out at this workshop. How could this be improved?