Open space for the indefinite

I've recently encountered two times this quote from Lewis Caroll taken in Alice in Wonderland:

'There is no use in trying', said Alice; 'one can't believe impossible things.' 'I dare say you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

Why do I blog this? One of the occurrence with it was in "After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (International Library of Sociology)" (John Law), where the author use it to stress the need to have "metaphors and images for what is impossible or barely possible, unthinkable or almost unthinkable." His claim is that it's important to open space for the indefinite.

This surely seems very abstract but the practice itself of such weird exercice is intriguing in terms of the implications for foresight. In a sense, it reminds of Donald Rumsfeld matrix of known/unknown.

Caring about the future

Going through the last articles of 2007 (in newspapers), I found this interesting "The World of Tomorrow" in the NYT (via the Dr. Fish mailing list). The article describes how on Jan. 1, 1908 (New Year’s Day one century ago), the New York World had a piece called "1808 - 1908 - 2008) about the past and the future of America (“What will the year 2008 bring us? What marvels of development await the youth of tomorrow?”). The NYT now tried to replicated this by "ruminating" at 2108. Interestingly, more than the predictions the following quote attracted my attention:

"The point of such predictions was not necessarily that they were accurate but that people cared enough about the future to bother thinking about it. Whether their visions turn out to be right or wrong, whether they are bleak or tongue-in-cheek, all are generous efforts to wonder about the lives of New Yorkers of 2108, as those New Yorkers of 1908 once wondered about ours"

Why do I blog this? Although the predictions are interesting, reading them without the few lines above is very important as it shows the purpose of foresight per se: not predicting but caring about the future.

Clark's laws

In "Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible", Arthur C. Clarke describes these 3 laws that are relevant wrt foresight research:

"

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

(...) As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there."

Why do I blog this? these very basic laws are interesting to understand Clarke's approach to writing science-fiction and what are the underlying traits of his prognostications. Although, it's sci-fi, there is a lot to learn from his novels and these quotes act as valuables rules for foresight research; the implications of each of them would be good to discuss.

Verne or Wells

As Jules Verne expressed it about H.G. Wells in "Invasion of the Sea":

"We do not proceed in the same manner. It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. . . I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannonball discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to the Mars [sic] in an airship which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. . . But show me this metal. Let him produce it."

Why do I blog this? both Vernes and Wells were great futurists hidden under their novelist stance. I found that quote interesting and it exemplified the different way they proceeded.

J.G. Ballard and empty swimming pools

Reading Ballard lately, I am always struck by his fascination with empty swimming pools. See for example in "Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown" (1967):

"Usually accompanied by Leonora Carrington, he visited the Mullard radio-observatory near Cambridge and the huge complex of early warning radar installations on the Suffolk coast. For some reason, empty swimming pools and multi-storey car parks exerted a particular fascination. All these he seems to have approached as the constituents of a mental breakdown which he might choose to recruit at a later date."

And much later in "Super Cannes":

"Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d'Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers."

Why do I blog this? this is related to some current train of thoughts about representations of the future.

Well, maybe it's not important at all, and spotting 2 references to empty swimming pool may seen weird. However, in the context of J.G Ballard's work, it makes sense and I find intriguing this sort of recurring representation of the future.

Why is that so? First because it may represent the future of a distopyan future one would fear. Second because an empty swimming pool is no longer used by humans, as if that facility was left for other inhabitants. What remains is the empty infrastructure, with its shape and emptiness. I am personally more interested in this second issue and what it tells about infrastructures.

Assumptions of future studies

I already mentioned how "Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, Knowledge (Human Science for a New Era, 1)" by Wendell Bell was a relevant reference about future studies/foresight. One of the book chapter deals with the assumptions of future studies:

"

1. Time is continuous, linear, unidirectional and irreversible (...) the continuum of time defines the past, present and future.
2. Not everything that will exist has existed or does exist. Thus the future may contain things that never existed before.
3. Futures thinking is essential for human action.
4. In making our way in the world, both individually and collectively, the most useful knowledge is "knowledge of the future". In making plans, exploring alternatives, choosing goals, and deciding how they ought to to act, humans have a need to know the future and how past and present causes will produce future effects.
5. The future is non-evidential and cannot be observed; therefore there are no facts about the future. Nonetheless (...) it is possible to have 'conjectural' knowledge.
6. The future is not totally predetermined. It is more or less open.
7. To a greater or lesser degree future outcomes can be influenced by individual and collective action.
8. The interdependence in the world invites a holistic perspective and a transdisciplinary approach both in the organization of knowledge for decision making and in social action.
9. Some futures are better than others

"

Why do I blog this? these assumptions give an interesting frame as they give rationales and directions for future studies. As the author mentions, it's a selection of them that he exemplifies in his book in more actionable ways.

The Economist about the future of futurology

Just found this article about "the future of futurology" in The World in 2008 of The Economist. It starts of by describing how the word “futurologist” has disappeared from the business and academic world, so has the so-called "futurology" discipline (although "there are still some hold-outs prophesying at the planetary level"). The new thing is rather about scenario-building and storytelling, which is not a surprise. What is interesting is the underlying reason proposed by the author:

"We can see now that the golden age of blockbuster futurology in the 1960s and 1970s was caused, not by the onset of profound technological and social change, but by the absence of it. The great determining technologies—electricity, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, even manned flight—were the products of a previous century, and their applications were well understood. The geopolitical fundamentals were stable, too, thanks to the cold war. Futurologists extrapolated the most obvious possibilities, with computers and nuclear weapons as their wild cards. The big difference today is that we assume our determining forces to be ones that 99% of us do not understand at all: genetic engineering, nanotechnology, climate change, clashing cultures and seemingly limitless computing power. When the popular sense of direction is baffled, there is no conventional wisdom for futurologists to appropriate or contradict."

The author also points out to some advices:

1. the next rule lays in thinking short term (“Microtrends”... "nanotrends")
2. " say you don’t know. Uncertainty looks smarter than ever before"
3. "for the budding futurist: get embedded in a particular industry, preferably something to do with computing or national security or global warming. All are fast-growing industries fascinated by uncertainty and with little use for generalists. Global warming, in particular, is making general-purpose futurology all but futile. When the best scientists in the field say openly that they can only guess at the long-term effects, how can a futurologist do better?"
4. "talk less, listen more. Thanks to the internet, every intelligent person can amass the sort of information that used to need travel, networking, research assistants, access to power"

Why do I blog this? quite interesting food for thought here, and I agree with the rules.

"The future is already there" and goldsmith

A very interesting corollary to William Gibson's assertion "the future is already there, it's jut not evenly distributed" is discussed by Bill Buxton in "Sketching User Experiences:

"we should not count on any deus ex machina. We should not expect any magic bullets. It is highly unlikely that there will be any technology that we don't know about today that will have a major impact on things over the next 10 to 20 years. (...) innovation is not primarily about alchemy. Rather than trying to make gold, it has far more to do with learning how to find it, mine it, refine it and then work it into something of value. If Gibson is right, then the innovator is likely best to trade in his or her alchemist's chemistry set for some prospecting tools, and learn about geology, mining, smelting, design, goldsmithing, sales and marketing, so to speak. (...) it is generally not the underlying technology itself, but its deployment and associated value proposition that brings us suprise and delight, as well as generated wealth for those who executed well on their insights"

Why do I blog this? I like the analogy with geology and digging stuff about things to come.

About Metcalfe's law

I sometimes use the Metcalfe Law in my work to describe how communication systems (mobile phones application, location-based services, etc.) have a value only if there is a critical mass of users. Being the only local boob with a fax machine does not allow you to go beyond showing off, it's actually like having one shoe. First formulated by Robert Metcalfe wrt to Ethernet, Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system(N2). It's then interesting to dig that stuff and see why very serious folks in IEEE Spectrum are pondering that argument. They actually critique how this "law" has been turned into a mantra during the Internet Boom (and now with the Web2.0 frenziness) and mostly focus on the correctness of its definition that sits in between linear and exponential growth:

"If Metcalfe's mathematics were right, how can the law be wrong? Metcalfe was correct that the value of a network grows faster than its size in linear terms; the question is, how much faster? If there are n members on a network, Metcalfe said the value grows quadratically as the number of members grows.

We propose, instead, that the value of a network of size n grows in proportion to n log(n)."

(Taken from here)

But more importantly:

"The fundamental flaw underlying both Metcalfe's and Reed's laws is in the assignment of equal value to all connections or all groups. (...) In general, connections are not all used with the same intensity. In fact, in large networks, such as the Internet, with millions and millions of potential connections between individuals, most are not used at all. So assigning equal value to all of them is not justified"

Why do I blog this? it's interesting to understand how such law can be criticized. I actually do think the cluster metaphor is still valid but one should be cautious about how to employ it (and take the limits they describe into account). Should there be a commonsensical use of that law and a more mathematical one (the latter.... to make quantitative forecast... which I am not into)?

Near Future Laboratory interview

Julian posted on the near future laboratory website the translation from an interview we gave to Digicult, an italian magazine about digital culture. The interview deals with the near future laboratory's existence (" an opportunity in a design and research practice that operates between traditional long-term academic research studies and short-term commercial product development"), rationale ("a positive reaction to the difficulties of engaging in creative, insightful, fun and innovative work with fewer of the constraints we have found in academia and in the normal commercial world") and some current projects.

Why do I blog this? tracking the near future laboratory conversations!

"The Jetsons" as a touchstone for the future

In a WSJ article, Jason Fry how he feels like George Jetson with all the technologies that we have around (cell phone, TiVo, etc). He interestingly describes what was interesting in that TV series:

"Then there was another influence, one that makes space opera sound like real opera. That, of course, was "The Jetsons" -- the Hanna- Barbera show featuring flying cars, robot maids, and Space Needle apartment buildings filled with Rube Goldberg labor-saving devices. I doubt the creators of "The Jetsons" ever imagined how they'd influence kids growing up in the 1970s. (...) Why such an influence for a show that was basically "The Flintstones" in aerial houses? (...) The only reason "The Jetsons" is a touchstone for the future instead of just childhood nostalgia is that it was "about" the future -- which was bound to arrive because, well, that's what the future does. (...) "The Jetsons," on the other hand, is pretty close to a sure thing, conversationally. (...) The other thing about the future is it tends to arrive slowly -- so slowly that often we don't notice how thoroughly things are changing."

And then relates to today's situation:

"I may not have a ticket to a moonbase quite yet, but if you could send me back to the 70s to tell my nine-year-old self what's coming, he'd be thrilled. To him, for all intents and purposes I am George Jetson.

What technological milestones have taken place during your lifetime? What do you take for granted that your nine-year-old self would have never believed possible? And what do you think the future holds? "

Why do I blog this? pure interest in (past) representation of the future and how it unfolded afterwards. Cultural artifacts like TV series are part of that ecosystem. And it's crazy how today the word "jetsons" is employed in discourse about the future (newspaper articles, futurists conference, designers' discussion and even academic papers).

This notion of a "touchstone" for the future is important, the normative representation of "what could be" at that time is the benchmark towards which one evaluate what we have today ("where's my 3D video phone that I could use in my flying car?").

Future research interview

An interview of foresight research Wendel Bell by himself offers interesting elemeents (although the idea of a robotic interviewer is a bit lame). It was actually published in 2005 in the Journal of Futures Studies 10(2) (November 2005): pp. 113-124. Some excerpts:

"Prediction—or whatever euphemism a futurist may use, such as projection, forecast, foresight, prophecy, or prospective—necessarily enters into what a futurist does. In fact, it is one of the defining features of futures studies. In contemplating the future, we imagine alternative possible futures and we try to assess which futures would be most probable under a variety of conditions, including alternative actions that people might take. We try to answer the "what if" question. For example, what could or would happen if people did this, or that, or something else? But—and this is important—we seldom predict a single future. (...) I am not suggesting that futurists have all the right solutions. But they have been asking the right questions. For example: What can we humans do to create societies that will be sustainable into the far future? What are the conditions under which all people everywhere can have sufficient water and food, modern sanitation, good health, freedom, personal security, and community support? (...) Some answers come from the futurist program of investigating the facts of the past and the present and, based on them, making speculative and imaginative, but presumptively true, assertions about possible and probable futures. Answers come, too, from judging these futures by some scale of values, and assessing their relative desirability. They come also from communication among people about these assessments of the desirability of alternative futures and letting people’s voices be heard by decision-makers. Answers come, as I said before, from gaining foresight into the true consequences of our actions. They come, also, from understanding that all people ought to be included in our community of concern, realizing that our own beliefs may be wrong, and showing tolerance toward the beliefs of others"

Why do I blog this? even though the notion of "futurist/m" seems a bit passé and awkward (long-range design, future research, foresight research sounds better), there are some pertinent things here, a good introduction for his book.

Gibson on futurism

Yet another interesting interview of William Gibson! Some excerpts I found pertinent:

"The slot in culture that I'm most closely associated with is one in which charlatans declare that they know the future. My job is to sit near that slot and when people approach me I say: 'Only charlatans say they really know the future.' I sit near the tent where they give out bullshit and offer people a different sort of dialogue. My role is to raise questions. (...) Virtual reality was one of our most recent experiences of a future that didn't happen. The one before that would have been interactive television, on which millions of dollars were spent. Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted it at all. But the Internet wasn't here yet, and people were saying, it would great if people could go back and forth with media, but it turns out the medium they wanted to do it with is one that presents the world, rather than a bunch of entertainment -- the Internet. (...) One of the things that I've found through whatever loosey goosey reading of human history I've managed through my life, is that very little is really new. (...) The present zeitgeist, now, is only one news cycle long. Something could happen tomorrow that would throw everything into a cocked hat"

Why do I blog this? some interesting points here and I actually prefer reading what a sci-fi writer says, as opposed to weird futurists.

Deliberately misleading ideas

As described by Bob Johansen in his book about foresight, Herman Kahn interestingly use this disclaimer in his reports: "some of the ideas in this report are deliberately misleading in order to provoke thought". I like that sort of angle, very close to the near future laboratory spin; not so much of the "Misleading" thing but rather about the oblique strategy it leads to. It's maybe more "niche" or "provocative" in our case.

Data for Foresight Research

"Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, Knowledge (Human Science for a New Era, 1)" by Wendell Bell is one the best book I've read in the last couple of months. It's definitely the bible of foresight research with some extensive discussion of future research epistemology, introduction to research methods, a detailed description of assumptions and examples of work. I won't comment on the whole thing but will maybe grab and comment some part of the book in different blogposts. There are some really good stuff there, so I need to take notes.

Bell's discussion about the not-factual existence and research about the future is interesting and lead him to describe phenomena that aid the scientific delineating of alternative descriptions and assessments of the future:

"

1. Present images of the futures and expectations for the future that people hold, that is, their conceptions of the possible.
2. People's belief about the most likely future, that is, their subjective probabilities concerning the chances of particular futures occurring.
3. The goals, values, and attitudes people hold; the preferences they use to evaluate alternative images of the future, that is, people's hopes and fears.
4. Present intentions of people to act
5. Obligations and commitments that people have to others (...) knowing those responsibilities can help futurists anticipate future behaviors of the people involved.
6. Knowledge of the past: Tradition (memories of the past, legends and customs, highly valued patterns of behavior), the use of trend analysis, the restatement of scientific explanations into a predictive form, analogy, past images of the future
7. Knowledge of the present: we can view the present as containing at least two ways of exploring the future: (a) the design perspective (some things that now exist or are developing can be expected to continue in the future and have implications for shaping the future), (b) present possibilities for the future.

"

Why do I blog this? As the author explains, no one of these "yields easily to measurement and interpretations" since they are, after all, subjective phenomena but they can have objective manifestation that can be observed and from which they can be inferred. This is exactly the point why I am interested in these "sources".. More specifically, two reasons why I am blogging this (1) because I am interested in what constitutes "data" in foresight research, (2) because I am preparing a course about design+foresight I will be giving in 2008 (possibly at different places, the school and for a master in interaction design in France).

Andy Clark's on annexing technology

"Some fear . . . a loathsome “post-human” future. They predict a kind of technologically incubated mind-rot, leading to loss of identity, loss of control, overload, dependence, invasion of privacy, isolation, and the ultimate rejection of the body. And we do need to be cautious, for to recognise the deeply transformative nature of our biotechnological unions is at once to see that not all such unions will be for the better. But if I am right – if it is our basic human nature to annex, exploit, and incorporate nonbiological stuff deep into our mental profiles – then the question is not whether we go that route, but in what ways we actively sculpt and shape it. By seeing ourselves as we truly are, we increase the chances that our future biotechnological unions will be good ones. "

In Clark, A. 2003. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Mind, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Why video telephones never...

Forbes had a good bunch of articles about the future lately. Among them, the on about why video telephones never took off (even though they have been pushed on the public for more than 40 years) is quite interesting. The author, Neil Steinberg describes some reasons ranging from bad phone service, need for big bandwidth and need to have people with the device as well ("To invest in a PicturePhone for yourself was about as useful as buying one shoe," notes technology writer Jonathan Margolis). What is interesting there is how Steinberg highlight the problem of "futurism" in this context:

"Futurism has a tendency to take the products of today and merely extrapolate them. Thus TV becomes 3-D TV, cars become flying cars and telephones become video telephones. Sometimes it takes the sanity of the marketplace to dash cold water on those technological projections. We were all going to take our nutrition in pills until someone realized that preparing and consuming food was one of the primary joys of life, and no one wants to swallow food pills. (...) future marvels of the past--food pills, jet packs, flying cars and, yes, video telephones--have an inertia that reality doesn't seem to be able to completely thwart. They manage to be both old and repudiated, yet somehow retain their cachet as attractive potential future wonders. Video phones remain a real possibility--if they wish, people placing phone calls over the Internet can already see each other using Webcams. It's easy to imagine this becoming standard practice.

Or not. Because no matter how cheap and easy pervasive computer technology makes video telephones, they still bump up against one central issue: whether people will want to see and be seen by those they communicate with. "People did not want to comb their hair to answer the telephone," said Lucky in an interview with Bill Moyers. Of course that could change, too, and wouldn't it be ironic if the breakthrough to popular video telephony ended up not being any technological advance, but a shift in human vanity. Once we stop combing our hair when we go out, then we'll finally embrace video telephones. "

Why do I blog this? critical foresight is about exactly this: understanding the reasons WHY something did happened or not happened, hence I always like reading about this sort of story. To some extent, "failed futurism" is one of my favorite topic.

Sci-fi futures on hiatus

"What happened to the science-fiction future?" by Katherine Mangu-Ward is a very good piece from Reason. The article is about sci-fi futures that never happened, technological innovation and user's pragmatism. Some excerpt I liked:

"Fanciful futurist visions can obscure all the neat stuff we’ve accumulated, once-wild innovations that are far cooler and more functional than jetpacks. (Microwave ovens, anyone?) They also make it easy to forget that the ultimate responsibility for choosing which technologies fill our lives lies with us, the ordinary consumers, more than any rocket scientists. (...) Small boys everywhere will always doodle Ferraris with wings when they’re bored in class, but the actual lived “future” is not something that leaps off an engineer’s drawing board or from a novelist’s visions. It emerges from complex, unpredictable interactions between visionary inspiration, technological limits, and consumers’ insistent pragmatism. (...) In another recent book, The Shock of the Old (Oxford University Press), the British historian David Edgerton posits that technological innovations don’t matter as much as we think they do. We tend to consider scientific and engineering breakthroughs themselves as the important thing, he says, when what really matters is how we fit them into our lives. Edgerton disparages our high hopes for each new innovation as “futurism,” a disease that led us to believe in a new world birthed by engineers, where electricity would be “too cheap to meter,”"

Why do I blog this I definitely like this topic, and working as a UX researcher in a tech school makes really buying the things that are described here. The article gives intriguing examples (skyscrapers, jetpacks, roads-that-must-roll and underwater dwellings) about techno-push futures that have troubles finding their way to users acceptance... and it's not because there is a tech breakthrough that a product is there, acceptable, usable and successful. The last bit about the role of science-fiction is also interesting considering the recent books/short stories by Bruce Sterling or William Gibson:

"we—shouldn’t read science fiction to get a sneak peak at as-yet-unseen innovative technologies. Rather than as a blueprint for what should happen, we should read it to imagine the ways humanity will figure out how to use whatever shows up, or to tweak the impressive tech that’s already lying around."

Ubiquitous computing normative future and sci-fi

Stone, A.R. (1991). Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? In Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): 81-118. An excerpt I like from this paper:

"Neuromancer reached the hackers who had been radicalized by George Lucas's powerful cinematic evocation of humanity and technology infinitely extended, and it reached the technologically literate and socially disaffected who were searching for social forms that could transform the fragmented anomie that characterized life in Silicon Valley and all electronic industrial ghettos. In a single stroke, Gibson's powerful vision provided for them the imaginal public sphere and refigured discursive community that established the grounding for the possibility of a new kind of social interaction. As with Paul and Virginia in the time of Napoleon and Dupont de Nemours, Neuromancer in the time of Reagan and DARPA is a massive intertextual presence not only in other literary productions of the 1980s, but in technical publications, conference topics, hardware design, and scientific and technological discourses in the large."

Why do I blog this? avidly reading some material about the relationship between media/culture and their possible influence on technological development. In my talk about the user experience of ubiquitous computing (and how it fails most of the time), I often quote the problem of how sci-fi has created a normative future of what should be the tech future. This quote nicely exemplifies this issue by describing how a novel such as Neuromancer can be think of a common ground for engineers and designers. One can see these novels as sort of anchors to point what the future will be.

Talk at SK Telecom

Wednesday started with a talk with Julian at SK Telecom in the Technology Innovation Planning Team, a sort of foresight/innovation group. Our presentation can be found here (.pdf, 15.5Mb).

The point of the meeting was to discuss the near future laboratory methodologies and projects. We spent 2 hours talking, exchanging about foresight methods, trend analysis and how it's difficult to have a rigorous scientific methodology. Our point was that we aimed at mixing wide-analysis of social, cognitive and cultural trends to inspire sketching and prototyping + testing. Prototypes are not the end per se but a way to try and gain some understanding about tech uses and innovation. A sort of bricolage way to inspect the near future. We insisted on this aspect that we did focus not on tomorrow's design nor long term-range foresight but 3-4 years ahead.

The presentation also included past project description such as the blogject workshop serie (See the report here and there), insisting on some concrete outcomes and how we appreciated that the meme spread and lead some attendants to design their own projects (see Blinks and Buttons for example).

Present projects we described revolved around the "new interaction rituals" (going beyond current I/O in pervasive computing) and the "new interaction partners" (letting pets participating in video games and the social web).

Thanks JongChae Oh for the invitation!