Different under the surface

An interesting quote from "Halting State" (Charles Stross):

"We used to have sliderules and log tables, then calculators made them obsolete. Even though old folks can still do division and multiplication in their heads, we don't use that. We used to have maps, on paper. But these are all small things (...) The city look the same, but underneath its stony hide, nothing is quite the way it used to be. Somewhere along the lines we ripped its nervous systems and muscles out and replaced them with a different architecture. In a few years it'll run on quantum key exchange magic, and everything will have changed again. But our time-traveller - they won't know that. It looks like the 20th century"

Why do I blog this? I found intriguing this familiar-but-different depiction. The scene happens when 2 characters of the novel wander around Edinburgh in 2018 and discuss how it would look familiar to a time-traveller coming from the 50s and how it's only underneath the surface of buildings and infrastructures (as well as clothing style and presence of cell-phones) that things work very differently.

This is quite interesting as it seems to follow how innovation works (step by step most of the time) with disruptions under the surface of things.

About near-future SF

Back in the days, Regine's blog "We Make Money Not Art" was still called "near near future", a name I was really fascinated of, as it implied how the short term is on the verge of going something different, more curious with intriguing alternatives. The near future laboratory's rationale of course emerged partly from that logic. Recently, sci-fi writer Charles Stross posted a interesting text about what he means by "near future SF". His text is coincidentally very relevant to my fascination towards "near (near) future" design and foresight. Stross basically shows how "Near future SF is about how-to-get-there-from-here". See some excerpts I found relevant:

"near-future SF isn't SF set n years in the future. Rather, it's SF that connects to the reader's life: SF about times we, personally, can conceive of living through (barring illness or old age). It's SF that delivers a powerful message — this is where you are going. As such, it's almost the diametric opposite of a utopian work; utopias are an unattainable perfection, but good near-future SF strive for realism.

Orwell's 1984 wasn't written as near-future SF, even though he wrote it in 1948, a mere 36 years out: it explicitly posits a global dislocation, a nuclear war and a total upheaval, between the world inhabited by Orwell's readers and the world of Winston Smith. You can't get there from here, because it's a parable and a dystopian warning: the world of Ingsoc is not for you. In contrast, Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire is near-future SF (...) You're meant to think, "I could end up there" — that's the whole point of near-future SF."

He then distinguishes near future-SF from technothriller ("The high-tech stuff is window dressing") and the discussion in the comment section quite echoes some of the discussion we had at Design Engaged after Julian's presentation about science-fiction and design. Why do I blog this? sunday's thinking about the near near future, as well as recent discussion about this issue. Of course, this is related to my work as "near future-SF" is an interesting source of material for current design and foresight projects.

Science fiction and HCI/interaction design

Some quick pointers about the relationships between science-fiction and HCI/interaction design: Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies by Michael Schmitz surveys the different kind of interaction design sci-fi movies envisioned during the past decade. It also interestingly describes how the film technicians made prototype possible and legible.

Make It So: What Interaction Designers can Learn from Science Fiction Interfaces by Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel is a nice presentation from SxSW08 that looked at sci-fi material as well as industry future films to show design influences sci-fi and vice versa.

The upcoming paper by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell entitled "“Resistance is Futile”: Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing that investigates how ubiquitous computing is imagined and brought into alignment with science-fiction culture.

Julian Bleecker's presentation from Design Engaged and SHiFt 2008 also addressed that topic.

A list to be updated I hope.

Overmodern in the present

Marc Augé on space and place issues regarding subway practices in this interview:

"JPC: The subtitle of Non-lieux is "An introduction to an anthropology of the overmodern." What can you say about this phrase?

MA: The word "overmodern" is an attempt to suggest the logic of excess at work in our present-day modernity. There is first of all an excess of information, making us prisoners of the news--as if history had caught up with us in the form of news. Yesterday's news becomes history, already just barely perceptible. It ages even more rapidly than fashion, of which it is an accelerated form.

There is also an excess of space that paradoxically amounts to a shrinking of space: we now feel we live on a finite planet where all we can do is go around in circles. (Pascal's anguish is democratized, so to speak.)"

Why do I blog this? simply because this is one of the starting point for the Lift09 program. As Augé formulated, we're kind of stuck in present-prison, which made the future vanish as he also described in his latest book: "Où est passé l'avenir).

Where did the future go? Beyond robotic houses and 3d videophones, as well as deterministic mindset, are there any interesting changes under the glossy surface of iphone releases? That's what the Lift conference in 2009 will try to address.

From speculative meals to design

A one-day trip to Paris in the TGV gave me plenty of time to skim through Speculative visions and imaginary meals: Food and the environment in (post-apocalyptic) science fiction films by Jean P. Retzinger (Cultural Studies Vol. 22, Nos. 3-4, May-July 2008, pp. 369-390). The paper interestingly addresses how science fiction highlight dream and anxieties of the present, as particularly shown by the depiction of food. In an insightful content analysis, the authors describe how food scenes can be seen as witness of "popular perceptions about nature, technology, and humanity" or a "liminal cultural symbol".

Some excerpts I found interesting:

"Familiar foods serve as an anchor in an altered world (evoking both nostalgia and parody), whereas unfamiliar food may become one of the clearest measures of how far we have journeyed from the present. (...) In nearly every instance where food is prepared, shared, and eaten in science fiction films, it aids in what Vivian Sobchack (1988) describes as science fiction’s central theme: a ‘poetic mapping of social relations as they are created and changed by new technological modes of ‘‘being-in-the-world’’ ’ (...) The presence of food at the critical junctures in which the familiar and the strange, the past, present, and future all collide lends materiality to the answers being worked out on screen. (...) Science fiction food scenes help obscure, expose, perpetuate, and challenge the divisions of culture and nature. "

Lots of interesting examples ranging from futuristic food representing a nostalgia for a world that has been lost to unfamiliar meals (with shape or color betraying people's expectations) in "alienated" places. Why do I blog this? Well, although one might find weird that I take a look at food issues, the questions (as well as the methodology) described in this paper is relevant to whatever object you can find in science-fiction production and their resonance in design in general. In this case it's about food, but if you look at other artifacts (be it Marty McFly's shoes in Back to the Future or BG4's flying gear), it's definitely encounters with claims of what the author refers to as "past and present, nostalgia and progress, memory and desire, familiarity and difference (...) and the significance of these many issues and the choices made to satiate our needs and our desires.".

So what is the take-away here? as it seems, sci-fi movies, as exemplified by food scenes, explore moral aspects of production, consumption and object appropriation showing both constant design patterns (nostlgia from the past?) or unfamiliar/alienated depictions (fear from an uncertain present?).

Latour on Anthropomorphism

Read in "Aramis, or the Love of Technology" by Bruno Latour:

""Anthropomorphism purports to establish a list of the capabilities that define humans and that it can then project through metaphors onto other beings - whales, gorillas, robots, a Macintosh, an Aramis, chips or bugs. The word anthropomorphism always implies that such a projection remains inappropriate, as if it were clear to everyone that the actants on which feelings are projected were actually acting in terms of different competences. If we say that whales are ‘touching’, that a gorilla is ‘macho’, that robots are ‘intelligent’, that Macintosh computers are ‘user-friendly’, that Aramis has ‘the right’ to bump [etc.] ... , we are still supposing that ‘in reality’, of course, all this fauna remains brute and completely devoid of human feelings. Now, how could one describe what they are truly are, independently of any ‘projection’? By using another list taken from a different repertory that is projected surreptitiously onto the actants? For example, technomorphisms: the whale is an ‘automaton’, a simple ‘animal-machine’; the robot, too, is merely a simple machine. Man [sic] himself, after all, far from having feelings to project, is only a biochemical automaton. We give the impression, then, not that there are two lists, one of human capabilities and one of mechanical competencies, but that legitimate reductionism has taken place of inappropriate anthropomorphism. Underneath projections of feeling, in this view, there is matter. ...

But what can be said of the following projection: ‘The chips are bugged’? Here is a zoomorphism - bugs - projected onto a technology. Or this one: ‘The gorilla is obeying a simple stimulus-response’? Here a technobiologism - the creation of neurologists - is reprojected on to an animal. ...

... Let us [therefore] say that ... there is never any projection onto real behaviour, the capabilities to be distributed form an open and potentially infinite list, and that is better to speak of (x)-morphism instead of becoming indignant when humans are treated as nonhumans or vice versa. The human form is as unknown to us as the nonhuman"

Why do I blog this? some inspiring quote by (again, no surprise) Bruno Latour about the relation we have/built/construct with technical artifacts. Some elements certainly brought into the discussion during the preparation of LIFT Asia/. Besides, I'll post my notes about that book later on, there's a lot to draw for my project about "technological failures".

What's the 2000-year of today?

2000, 2001... all these famous years depicted in science-fiction and anticipatory media pieces were so pervasive that they shaped brandings lots of cultures (Peru above, France below). At certain times, 2000 evoked flying cars, neural connections or Mars colonization (and certainly not Y2k angst).

Fascinated by the use of these elements, it's often stunning to ask the question: What's the 2000-year of today?". If you read french, this is the topic addressed by Marc Augé in last book "Où est passé l'avenir?" (where is the future?) in which he describes how we're stuck in a sort of perpetual present.

Crafting stuff to engage people with the future

(Picture taken from Wired Magazine Artifacts from the Future)

Peter Morville at findability has a nice short overview of Stuart Candy's "guerilla futurist" research which takes the form of artifacts and experiences "from the future". He basically used "postcards from 02036 and plaques honoring those who suffered and died in the great pandemic of 02016". The point of this, is as follows:

"these exercises in ambient foresight and anticipatory democracy are intended to engage the public in creative thinking about possible and preferable futures.

By creating immersive experiences that provoke an emotional response and are difficult to ignore, futurists can elude the dryness that can be associated with the two-dimensional text and statistics of traditional scenario planning.

These experiments are also answers to a question at the heart of Stuart's research: how can we study human behavior in contexts that don't yet exist?

This question is clearly relevant to those of us in the design world as well. Our work requires both insight and foresight. Whether the design horizon is three months or five years, our deliverables bring imaginable futures to life."

Why do I blog this? as a researcher in the field, I am both interested in the relationships between design and foresight as well as how to engage people (be it entrepreneurs, designers, researchers, "users", policy-makers) with the "future(s)". Artifacts such as the one crafted in the examples above are interesting way to achieve that and it serves what Candy calls "the interweaving of user experience strategy and futures studies".

(Images from Jason Tester at the IFTF)

Having visited the Institute For The Future several times, it echoes with what Jason Tester (former design student at Ivrea Institute of Design) termed "human-futures interaction". It emerged from the "prolific experimentation with formats for sharing our forecasts and processes for engaging groups in discussion of their implications"

"We're building maps in different structures to convey a future shaped by multiple interwoven trends, we're illustrating new possibilities with provocative artifacts-from-the-future and movies that give our forecasts an up-close, human perspective, and increasingly we're crafting experiences that immerse participants in future life or simulate important new behaviors and skills. (...) a larger framework is starting to emerge. (...) As a concrete example, there are two fundamental processes within human-computer interaction that I believe would advance human-future interaction—the important and linked ideas of user testing and rapid, iterative prototyping. "

This is very close to some recurring thinking at the near future laboratory as the possibility to prototypes and try out new things is at the core of the think/make design practice. It does not mean that the created artifacts should be evaluated to regular usability testing, but instead that it can be used to explore reactions, acceptations, détournement and re-appropriation or the probability for people to wish for other avenues, as well as simply engaging a conversation about alternatives for the future.

Ambivalence towards future and design

"The best way to invent the future is to predict it"John Perry Barlow - The Future of Prediction (2004), In Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, Sandra Ball-Rokeach (Eds). Technological Visions, p. 177.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" Alan Kay - Early meeting in 1971 of PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, folks and the Xerox planners

Why do I blog this? ruminating on the ambivalence of common quotes in the technology world. Quite enjoy how the two above intersect in a weird way when pit next to one another. While the first one is more about self-fulfilling prophecy the second is about our capacity (as human) to create our own future.

Taleb's "fooled by randomness"

Reading "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets" (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) in the midst of Peru was a pleasant thing. Basically, Taleb, a "post-trader" gives an interesting account of how human judgement is fallible, especially because we tend to fall in the apophenia trap. I particularly cherished the part about the author's habits concerning information gathering/data farming:

"My aim, as a pure amateur fleeing the boredom of business life, was merely to develop intuitions for these events - the sort of intuitions that amateurs build away from the overly detailed sophistication of the professional researcher. (...) When I see an investor monitoring his portfolio with live prices on his cellular telephone or his handheld, I smile and smile. (...) I reckon that I am not immune to such an emotional defect. But I deal with it by having no access to information, except in rare circumstances. Again, I prefer to read poetry. If an event is important enough, it will find its way to my ear. (...) This explains why I prefer not to read the newspaper (outside of the obituary), why I never chitchat about markets, and, when in a trading room, I frequent the mathematicians and the secretaries, not the traders. It explains why it is better to read the New yorker on Mondays than the Wall Street Journal every morning (from the standpoint of frequency, aside from the massive gap in intellectual class between the two publications). (...) Some so-called wise and rational persons often blame me for "ignoring" possible valuable information in the daily newspaper and refusing to discount the details of the noise as "short-term events." Some of my employers have blamed me for living on a different planet. My problem is that I am not rational and I am extremely prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture. I am aware of my need to ruminate on park benches and in cafés away from information, but I can only do so if I am somehow deprived of it."

I quite enjoyed the last part since it's exactly the reason why I walk around in cities or take so much trains: to have time to ruminate from different "information-filled" places: the internet, my apartment and newsstands+book-shops.

Moreover, his list of "bias" in foresight is also insightful. Although he applies it to trading, it definitely outreach this domain. Some of the bias:

• "When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single information took place. Our mind will interpret most events not with the preceding ones in mind, but the following ones. (...) The "hindsight" bias, the "I knew it along" effect. (...) A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
• Survivorship bias: we are trained to take advantage of the information that is lying in front of our eyes, ignoring the information we don't see (...) we tend to mistake one realization among all possible random histories as the most representation among all possible random histories as the most representative ones, forgetting that there may be others. In a nutshell, the survivorship bias implies that the highest performing realization will be the most visible. Why? Because the loser do not show up.
• Ergodicity: time will eliminate the annoying effect of randomness (...) under certain conditions, very long sample path would end up resembling each others.
• Prospect theory: looking at differences, not absolutes, and resetting to a specific reference point.
• Affect heuristic, risk-as-feeling theory: people react to concrete and visible risks, not abstract ones.
• Belief in the law of small numbers: inductive fallacies; jumping to general conclusions to quickly
• Overconfidence: risk-taking out of an underestimation of the odds
• Mistaking mean and median"

Also of great interest to me is the discussion about the importance of exceptions and outliers, which is also the topic of his second book:

"People in most fields outside of it do not have problems eliminating extreme values from their sample, when the difference in payoff between different outcomes is not significant, which is generally the case in education and medicine. A professor who computes the average of his students' grades removes the highest and lowest observations, which he would call outliers and takes the average of the remaining ones, without his being an unsound practice. A casual weather forecaster does the same with extreme temperature - an unusual occurrence might be deemed to skew over the results. (...) So people in finance borrow the technique an ignore the infrequent events, not noticing that the effect of a rare event can bankrupt a company. (...) As a skeptic, I reject a sole time series of the past as an indication of future performance; I need a lot more than data. My major reason is the rare events but I have plenty of others. (...) The problem is that we read too much into shallow recent history, with statements like "this has never happened before" but not from history in general (things that never happened before in one area tend to eventually happen)."

The reason why I mention this is that I am especially interested in the role of exceptions, outliers in design as I already discussed here. Why do I blog this? Quite liked the book, both for the content and the way the author describes his thoughts with this grecosyrian/mediterranean who went to anglo/french board school and university, which makes it a tad poetic in terms of references and examples. Certainnly a good reference about foresight and some elements to draw concerning thinking habits.

"Future overwhelmed"

Starting with a discussion of Disney's Tomorrowland, Joel Garreau has a good piece in the Washington Post concerning how americans feel very little connection to the future anymore. Unlike the past, especially in the 50s (till the 80s), he describes how people are "future overwhelmed" using the term employed by Danny Hillis. According to Garreau, Disney's Tomorrowland seems to be a reassuring future aspiration as its "focus is on what doesn't change": ranging from intact nuclear family to "vigorous grandparents" and "the sound of crickets". Garreau examines why this is not the future we have in the research pipeline and what the disconnection between this representation of the future and current research says about us. Some excerpts:

"The '60s and '70s were not good to the original Disney vision of the future. The Vietnam War, the assassinations, the revolt against anything square, the idea that big corporate computers only served to mangle individuality and imagination, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women's movement -- all challenged the notion that every day, in every way, things were getting better and better.

Even more profoundly, the 2,000-year-old idea of the inevitability of "progress" was taking holes beneath the waterline. As Robert Nisbet notes in "History of the Idea of Progress," across every ideology, people stopped believing one or more of the major premises that were its underpinnings -- that reason alone, and the scientific method, was inherently worthy of faith; that economic and technological flowering was unquestionably worthwhile; that Western civilization was noble and even superior to its alternatives. The theme of the Jimmy Carter years was "malaise." (...) The damage to the idea of a benevolent future, however, had been done. The punk rock Sex Pistols, in their anthem "God Save the Queen," sang: "No future for you no future for me/No future no future for you." (...) Sometimes it takes guts, trying to dazzle people with the current future. (...) "It's much harder to astound people today, " says Marty Sklar, the former principal creative executive of Walt Disney Imagineering, who in 2001 was named a "Disney Legend" for his work going all the way back to Walt's era in the '50s. "They see the speed of change all around them.""

And the best part is certainly these quotes from Danny Hillis:

""Americans feel very little connection to the future anymore," says Danny Hillis. (...) "It was very surprising to me, getting to the future, that nobody was all that interested. Things just started to happen so fast, we were overwhelmed. (...) "We are future overwhelmed. I don't think people try to imagine the year 2050 the way we imagined 2001 in 1960. Because they can't imagine it. Because technology is happening so fast, we can't extrapolate. And if they do, it's not a very positive thing to imagine. It's about a lot of the unwanted side effects catching up to us -- like global ecological disaster. The future views are kind of negative. "What I think it says is that we are nostalgic for a time when we believed in the future. People miss the future. There's a yearning for it. Disney does know what people want. People want to feel some connectedness to the future. The way Disney delivers that is to reach back in time a little bit to the past when they did feel connected. "It's a bit of a cop-out. There was a time when the future was streamlined jet cars. Rather than create a new sense of the future, they say, 'Ah, remember when we believed that the future was streamlined jet cars?' It's a feeling of connection to the future, rather than connection to the future."

Why do I blog this? still gathering stuff about failed and deflated futures for my project.

Arguments for foresight

Last thursday/friday, I was in Brittany for an seminar called "Imagine 2015", the annual gathering of companies from the Media and Network companies from there (France Telecom/Orange, Alcatel-Lucent, Thomson, Philips, etc.). The point of such event is to discuss the future of networks and what it means for these organizations in terms of foresight, change and (of course) possible new products/services. I was invited as an expert (a "witness" as they call it) to present various things related to my work (user experience research results, foresight issues that I find interesting and work practices related to the use of digital tools). Thanks for Jean-Noel and Christiane for the invitation. Instead of giving a summary of the event, I am more interested here in the process and how people answers the questions we addressed. The starting points were (sort-of): "according to you what interesting thing will we see from now to 2015?" and since they are focused on networks: "what does network allow? what are the implications of networks?"

Given that I participate in other seminars in the same vein (some pretty focused on a clear goal, like Lyon 2013, some other more speculative such as Cinum), I always find relevant to observe what are the arguments employed by the experts (and the crowd) to answers foresight questions ("what do you think will happen from now to 20XX?"). I've tried to make a raw-and-not-exhaustive list here of what I observe as being used:

1. personal experience (expert) and of course naive personal experience (when people are not expert but rely on something they've lived)
2. statistics about people, environmental issues.
3. use of the long term/now perspective because as Paul Saffo points out in his Long Now talk, "We tend to over-estimate the speed of short-term adoption and under-estimate the diffusion of the technology"
4. bring history to the table: especially the greeks, the egyptian and the roman
5. the use of abstract metaphor coming from fields such as thermodynamics (entropy employed as a metaphor for chaos, disorder or dissipation of energy) or biology (the other day Thierry Gaudin talked about apoptotis: form of programmed cell death caused by a lack of information transfer).
6. the use of sociological or psychological models, concepts and sometimes controversial universals.
7. imagination, be it about novels from the past or sci-fi
8. to be continued

Why do I blog this? preparing a course about foresight and innovation, I am listing the "sources" for foresight analysis. The notion of data to draw scenarios for the future is something I am always been intrigued about. Feel free to add things to the list, which is definitely not exhaustive.

What I find interesting is to confront the types of arguments described in the literature and those employed in seminar/conferences, not really to evaluate which are more powerful to persuade others, rather to understand which emerge spontaneously.

design+future+optimism

In the last issue of ACM interactions, Richard Seymour has this good piece entitled "Optimistic futurism" in which he articulates an interesting vision of design+foresight. After discussing how a wave of relevant innovation stopped around the 70s ("what the hell happened to the future") people realized that the future dystopia represented in pop-culture may happen (although people though it couldn't possibly happen): "shrinking ozone layers, global warming, airplanes into buildings, rising fuel costs etc." The good point of the articles comes when Seymour states that "It's something we all need to see" (visualize the future!) and the role of designers in this, as in this excerpt:

"Designers cannot be, by definition, pessimists. It just doesn't go with the job. We're supposed to be defining the future, aren't we? (...) There's nothing on the planet that can't be made just that bit better (rather than just that bit different). But before you do it, you need to have an idea of where you want all this to go eventually, a vision of the future, with a set of stepping stones to let you get from the now into the future in an effective and efficient way. " (...) that's what we should be doing: leading the way by visualizing and articulating achievable futures that get us out of this hole.

I'm pretty sure the folks at Apple don't call themselves optimistic futurists, but that's exactly what they are. My favorite Steve Jobs one-liner is: "It's not the consumer's job to know about the future; that's my job." And he's absolutely right.

Jurassic corporations need to learn from the mammals. The secret of the "next big thing" isn't lurking inside the consumer's head, waiting to be liberated by some well-paid focus group. It's inside the heads of the dreamers, the futurists, the utopians."

Why do I blog this? some good thoughts here about the design+foresight issue and how both are connected through this notion "optimism", which correspond to a direction given to the future.

Also, the "beyond-focus-groups" design stance is important as shown by the quote from Steve Jobs; I guess some people may mistake it with a "don't pay attention to the user" but I don't think it's contradictory with having a user-centered approach by any means. It just reinforces the role of designers, who can him/herself base the work on informed opinions/educated guesses about people's life/motivations/desires/needs through field observation.

Paul Saffo's Long Now talk

Paul Saffo's talk at the Long Now Foundation (MP3 here) is a very good overview of foresight research heuristics/rules of thumbs/methods. Some notes:

• "Hunt of Bin Laden, experts agree, Al Qaeda leader is dead or alive" is a great forecast because it accurately captures the uncertainty of the moment. The biggest mistake is to be more certain than what the fact suggest, especially today, at this very uncertain moment in time (where indicators are going in different directions). As Peter Schwarz says: "The difference between a good forecast and reality is...a good forecast has to be believable and internally consistent"
• The job is not about predicting but rather mapping the “cone of uncertainty” on a subject. And, uncertainty means opportunity. It's a cone shape for commonsensical reasons and because uncertainty expands as you project further into the future. The important thing is to find edges: Where might they happen? There you should look for wild-cards to define the boundaries and science-fiction can be a good candidate for that matter (as well as bad press about the future).
• Change is not linear and very slow and most big technological changes take 20 years to develop ("new technologies take 20 years to have an overnight success"). This means that you need good backsight, BUT because evolution is slow, you still have time even if you miss an early indicator.
• Look then for early indicators ("prodromes" or "prodroma": an early symptom or leading indicator) as claimed by William Gibson's observation that the "future is already here, it's just not unevenly distributed". Look for indicators and things that don’t fit.
• We tend to over-estimate the speed of short-term adoption and under-estimate the diffusion of the technology ("Never mistake a clear view for a short distance"). In addition, things aren’t accelerating and every society has always complained that things were getting faster, even in the 16th century ("every generation thinks things are accelerating").
• Look at failures and cherish them (Preferably other people’s). Silicon Valley has been built on the ashes of failure. Look also for people who failed in a company and went starting their own.
• Prove yourself wrong: look for indicators that proves what you say BUT also weak signals that prove it wrong
• "Be indifferent. Don’t confuse the desired with the likely"
• Know when not to make a forecast
• The problem for forecasters is not of being wrong, it about persuading people to act on forecasts.

Victor Scardigli: the meaning/direction of technique

It's often when reading obscure and never translated european writers that I find the most intriguing ideas, especially when it comes to foresight and innovation. The book "Les sens de la Technique" by Victor Scardigli is no exception to this; the title is a sort of pun since "sens" in french means both "meaning" and "direction". Thus you can read the title as "The Meaning of Technique" or "Where Technique is heading", which reveals the ambivalence of technical innovation. What's intriguing here is that the author, for once, do not distinguish "techniques" and "technologies", rather taking techniques as a whole that encompass vaccines or ICTs. Above all, the book is above the gap between the expectations our societies put into innovation AND the weak consequences of the first change we can notice. After inventions and R&D processes, innovation is expected by some (especially the inventors) to diffuse in society and "impact it" (for best or for worse). Different rationales are at stake here since engineers or biologists expect Sciences to serve Progress, the reciprocal adaption of human beings and techniques and hence measure the "social impact" of their invention. On the other hands, social scientists often more convinced by the prominence of human causalities are more skeptical and think that new techniques are only tools to modify the course of time based on their own objectives.

The author then addresses how techniques and their usage evolve over time, for which he describes 3 phases in his "diffusion model" using a raft of interesting examples that I won't describe here:

1. Phase 1: The "time of prophecy and fantasy" (enthusiastic or terrifying) where revolutions are predicted and technique is "inserted socially" (right after invention and R&D). It's mostly the time of positivists and the moment where imaginary symbols are constituted. The less objective fact you have, the more imaginary you get, so irrational thoughts are important here. Prophecies (or social actors who promote them) attempt to create a connection between 3 elements: the new technical object, human desire and expectations/fear of the time being. This leads to imaginary representations that you can find in the discourse of companies promoting the innovation, surveys or advertising/media messages. For Scardigli, there are of course constant imaginary issues: power on constraints (liberty of slavery), knowledge, fear of death, social justice, social bounds, economical wealth and global solidarity. There is therefore a discourse around the hopes and fears linked to these issues which are recurring in history. What happen is that fantasy, scientific knowledge and actions are intertwined and even the weakest signal is turned into an excessive hope or fear. Prophecies become necessities and then self-justificated.
2. Phase 2: The "delusion phase" that suggest how the expected technological revolution does not lead to a social revolution. Positivists' prominence is obscured by skeptical voices who raise the gap between forecasts and realizations/effects. They also reveal how "techniques" themselves are not sufficient to change "society". To some extent, observers realize that science only make progress... in science. It's of course the time where "users/people" enter the scene and begin employing the technique. These small actors transform, invent new uses, hack or tweak the innovation. This appropriation and reinvention of daily life leads to a third phase.
3. Phase 3: "the side-effect phase": 30 or 40 years after, the real diffusion of the technique is effective and some social and more long term consequences appear but often different from the one expected at first (new social form, new forms of cultures or human activities). He cites an example of a sort of bulletin-board system in the 80s in French that was expected to revive surburbian communities. What happened is that technology vanished (the state program was stopped) but it allowed people to gather, meet and create "mediating" organizations that survived. In the end, the collective imaginary of progress from the 1st phase is articulated with the strategy of actors who promote the innovation. Social change appear as a side-effect of the technical innovation, not because of it. The introduction of the innovation acts as a "analyser" revealing problems, social dynamic, aspirations, needs and above all as an alibi for new forms of sociality. And at the end of the road, it's end-users themselves who give sense to techniques by integrating to their daily life/culture.

Also Scardigli raises the importance of the socio-cultural context of innovation, who often fail without it. He exemplify this with a description of "mediating" persons who are social actors who can promote technologies and make people understand how it will be of interest for their purposes/life. In addition, there is of course a compromise between the Ideal of the project and the economic/user realism. If what happen in the 3rd phase is different than what was expected in the first one, it's because big actors (States, companies) are struggling with each others with different visions BUT also because small actors (users!) modify, change, tweak or slow down the unfolding of these innovation.

Finally, in his conclusion, he discusses some lessons about progress and innovation:

• Human beings build their own history, sometimes by designing new techniques but often with other means (e.g. organizational). And it's not these techniques that will change or social and daily life.
• These innovation effort are always carried out over and over, as a sort of Sisyphean curse because new techniques have to articulate both Science (who likes to "discover") and social demand for a better world. Unfortunately, harmonious encounters between both is very rare and needs and innovation are scarcely matching. Technical inventions are always the fruit of a culture and inventors, engineers or users all share the will to have a better world so they try, like Sisyphe.
• Social appropriation is always slower than technical innovation. 5-10 years are needed to go from the fantasy phase to find a niche of users. 10 or 20 years are then needed so that the innovation is entirely appropriated in daily life.

Reasons for some failed futures

Being interested in technological failures, I read "Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived" by Daniel H. Wilson. Some excerpts that I found interesting, related to causes of failures:

"Jetpack: "the development of the jetpack effectively ceased the day Wendell Moore passed away, and there are plenty of reasons why. As it turns out, the government frowns on the notion of everyday people equipped with jetpacks and the ensuing midair collisions, air range, and transformation of drunk drivers into inebriated human torpedoes. Worse yet, jeptacks are nearly useless in military applications - a soldier strapped to a jetpack is a sitting duck"

Moving sidewalk: "a few litigious pedestrians have spoiled it for the rest of us with their skull-cracking falls and attendant lawsuits"

Self-steering cars: "Obstacles abound, but without a broader understanding of the world, a robot car cannot tell the difference between a harmless clump of grass and a farmers' market. Negative obstacles, such as holes in the ground, are particularly difficult for robot cars to identify. Navigation is also more difficult in cities, where tall buildings and bridges can block crucial GPS signals and soft, delicate targets (called pedestrians) abound."

Flying car: "Merely providing the vehicles is not enough, however; if everyday people are to use them, scientists must know how to track thousands of these car-planes. And knowing is half of the battle. Collision-deterring navigation systems are key to transforming highways into skyways. Regular people just can't be trusted"

Hoverboard: "They may be perfect for cruising over flat surfaces like water, ice, or a well-manicured lawn. but they are dangerously inept on city streets".

Why do I blog this? currently collecting material about technological failures and failed (micro-)visions of the future for a project.

Manufacturing matters in the 21st century

Near-Future Laboratory colleague Julian Bleecker wrote an important piece about manufacturing (as part of the Share Festival Catalog 2008):

"First, we’re not talking about manufacturing (...) Manufacturing evokes cavernous, cold, awesomely huge assembly lines with scales all out of proportion to the experiences of mere mortals. (...) If anything, we’re talking about a kind of materialization of ideas. Slick connections between an your imagination, a circuit board and a 3D printer. It’s artful for its scale and personalization. Small-scale, passionate, individual ideas made material. (...) The sad consequences of manufacturing’s scale is that it defaults to the least common denominator. (...) True customization means materializing one’s own designs, one’s own imagination. This is where we begin. (...) What makes it worth talking about is that it is the power of creation that manufacturing is able to achieve, but done at an entirely different scale - quicker, cheaper, individually, with fewer intermediaries and fewer incumberances. (...) The “manufacturing process” is a kind of extended sketching activity. Ideas are first expressed informally, perhaps with a simple “wouldn’t it be cool if..?” question at a moment of inspiration."

And why this is important to interaction design:

"these expressive objects form their interactivity around physical actions that may include the Nabaztag’s articulating rabbit-like ears, or Clocky the coy alarm clocks that roll away when you try to hit the snooze button, or Maywa Denki’s punch-drunk dancing BitMan character. These are distinct kinds of digital objects that mix physical space, digital technology and design. (...) The weak signals suggest kinds of design-art-technology that are growing tired of the screen. (...) What is emerging is an ability to make your own stuff - not just “skinning” your mobile or modding an MP3 player. Materializing ideas is about making your own - “whatever” - unanticipated, unknow, visionary, expressive things. It is not a manufacturing process"

Why do I blog this? some important points here about why manufacturing is important, what is is and what does that mean for human practices. This is relevant at a time where hardware fabrication and manufacturing has been left over to south asian countries and that we should not give away our effort to build concrete things (and do only so called "virtual" building).

Foresight session at LIFT08

Still a struggle to find time to blog my notes from the LIFT08 conference. Here are some notes from the session about foresight. Scott Smith As defined by his complany tagline, Scott talked about "seeing change differently" or how to help people to see change more clearly. He defined foresight as "keeping your mind and your eyes aware of the periphery as well as what is in the immediately linear future, as there is always something that could disrupt your path". Following William Gibons's quote that the "future is already here but it's not evenly distributed", Scott then described how the future is hidden in little places or pockets we are not always aware of and insisted on the important of qualitative data (over quantitative extrapolations). Hence the importance of ethnographical approaches. He insisted on a set of tips to adopt a qualitative foresight approach: (1) be aware of what's going on around you, (2) scan, collect, organize, (3) look for patterns and deep currents, (4), understand the role of values, (5) have a view, but not an ideology (and be ready to step outside your boundaries), (6), stay grounded, (7), be prepared to leave behind the artifacts of your experience.

Francesco Cara Francesco works at Nokia, he's design strategist and basically described the sort of approach to innovation he favors. He started by insisting on the notion of ecosystem and complex systems drawn from Piaget that shaped his vision hereafter. Looking at the evolution of mobile communication, he showed how the ecosystem got more complex over time: from GSM phone units (closed by regulators, carriers, manufacturers) to WAP-based phone with more capabilities to exchange "with the outside" and finally a third stage with new services that tap into the Internet (maps, email...) and new entrants (Google, Apple). To do so, he actually used visualization from a project conducted at our EPFL lab called "Mapping the Digital World, Visualizing the fundamental structure of the digital world in mobile devices . This last stage forms a sort of "cloud" of services that is so complex that our way to interact with it are totally different. But the problem is the one of the interface: how to interact with this complex ecosystem?

(Picture taken by Bruno Giussani)

Francesco showed the different approaches adopted by companies such as Blacberry (specialized: email), chaotic interface with various ways to use services (Sony Ericcson), desktop-based (Apple iPhone) or portal-based (Windows). He then advocated for "fresh" innovation. And why is this in a foresight session? Francesco's point is that sometimes innovation does not lie in observing the past or looking for weak signals but rather to develop brand new approach and create new metaphor (that can of course be based on analogical reasoning, taken from other domains). His claim was not that the stuff presented by Scott is wrong but rather that innovation if a combination of both and it all boils down to the level of granularity in the data you need to inform design.

Bill Cockayne Bill started off by making a strong point that what he talks about is not "futurism" but "foresight" and the role it plays in the innovation process. What he means is rather how to inform the building of something that is 1-2 product life cycle away. Depending on the products (car: 10 years+, nokia: closer), what happen is generally 1st product cycle (made now), 2nd product cycles (strategized now) and what happen for the 3rd product cycles?

Bill focuses on where you kind of start the whole process. He explained how the ideas he presents has been developed as Stanford. For instant, they adopted the ambiguity curve as a way to decribe the process. It's used by Prof. Leifer at Stanford and it's inspired by work from MIT+Buckminster Fuller. The ambiguity curve is not explicitly referenced but it shows how the situation evolves. At the beginning, you have ideas (beginning of a problem) with a vast ambiguity ("but we have to live in it"). All the way to shipping a product you retain ambiguity but there are different stages:

The thing is that people are having a problem to figure out where to fit in this process, to be aware of one's strength or how to maximize them. What is design, what is foresight? How to connect d+f? The problem between r+d= people from research why what they give to developers is shipped and people from development never visit the researcher's office because they have work to do today. And there are same issues with foresight and design. However, there are no breaks between r and f or between r and d, eventually you have to ship products! There are 3(+1) stages: (0), wallow (what Scott described: looking for the future, not ready to start the projects, be aware and intuitive, scan/look/analyze data), (1) foresight (prepare and sense), (2) research (form and analyze) and (3) design (integrate, develop)

What is important here is the notion of roles, which was developed afterwards. I strongly recommend here to have a look at at the impressive work done by Michele Perras, who recreated the images form Bill's slides. For example the one that shows the different types of roles (see also Bill's discussion of the role on her blog which nicely covers the topic in greater details):

(Re-created by Michele Perras)

Bill then described what roles can fit with what part of the process and along the ambiguity curve. He also presented what sort of process takes place: informal/formal/corporate.

His last advice was to know yourself, and what role you can play: 1) if you wanna be an expert, please remain an expert; stay at school kids, focusing on what you're good at 2) t-person: learn another language, something complementary (take a design degree if you're en business expert), vast need for this people 3) break your breadth, take a new expertise 4) come talk to people like scott, francesco, bill and read widely

Why is that important? why did he talk about roles and not tools to predict the future? Because change is constant, which means that new opportunities appear constantly and "we love opportunities because that's where innovation comes from" and knowing where you excel at will help you to know who you are and make you more comfortable in the change environment and help you tell other people where you're good at.

Notes about foresight/environmental scanning

Some notes from Michele Bowman's podcast entitled "The Role of Ethnofutures and Environmental Scanning":

"2 things to keep in mind: "Any truly useful idea about the futures should first seem to be ridiculous.": The idea that airplanes would carry people, the fall of the berlin wall, paying bottled water

"not all change is created equal": The general consensus in the business world is that change happens really, in fact this is not the case at all. There are all sorts of degress of change: - environmental change, demographic change: takes decade to be felt - evolutionary change: rising of women in the workforce... incremental... almost predictable timeframe - faster furious change: the cost of sequencing the genetic alphabet that dropped

Environmental scanning is the understanding the dynamic of change, where and when, how fast? how slow? a collection, interpretation about trends and emerging issues And it needs to be external: "I don't know who discovered water but it wasn't a fish" because challenges will come form external environment

Roles of scanning - as a decision-making capacity - organizational learning, increasing the sensitivity to change"

Why do I blog this? curiosity towards different methods about foresight research, lots of resonance with the LIFT08 session about this theme.

Embracing innovation

In this NYT piece called "The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It?", G. Pascal Zachary deals with interesting issues regarding innovation. Some excerpts:

"Even today, when adding video to a phone is a trivial cost, consumers may rebel. Video-conferencing often remains an activity forced on people by their employers. Resistance to technology is an omnipresent risk for every innovator. Even a device as fabulously freeing as the personal computer struck some people as an abomination (...) Adaptable humans usually trade one technology for another, rather than reject any and all. To be accepted, innovations must deliver benefits — enough benefits to make change worthwhile. (...) FOR technological innovators, the cash register can ring either way. They may achieve a smash-hit breakthrough, or simply make a slight improvement in a technology that humans already feel comfortable with. Most innovators no longer even try to predict human reactions to their creations. Henry Kressel, a partner at Warburg Pincus and a co-author of “Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations Are Changing the World,” says, “You throw technologies into the market and see what sticks.” The hope is that passionate “early adopters” will blaze a path toward mass acceptance of a new technology. Yet the truth is that no one can tell in advance which innovations people will adapt to and which will become the next example of the Picturephone."

Why do I blog this? some general-and-controversial thoughts about tech/usage foresight.