Pumping like a shadok

As the Shadok say: "Better to pump even if nothing happens than to risk something worse happening by not pumping".

Why do I blog this? The Shadok was a french animated TV series from the late 60s that involved rough and stupid bird-like characters. One of the most curious aspect of this species is their absurd, useless and endless pumping. Surely invisible to non-francophone people, the series was a very weird mise-en-scène of various situations, with a whole world/vocablary/history/etc (see on youtube).

What is interesting here is the fact that this series set some standards in french's behavior towards progress, innovation or the passage of time. Quotes and mottos coming form the Shadoks are very commonly used in technological developments and projects as programmers, designers engineers often refer to them to criticize design. It's almost invisible to people who do not know them but a bit pervasive in the culture.

Electrical friday

2 encounters on friday afternoon made me wondering whether I should really pay attention to this topic:

Where the first picture is a book about studies concerning social representations of "electricity", the second is about an exhibit about "what's behind the electric power plug"

What I think about now when looking a these two elements is this quote from Michel de Certeau in ""The Practice of Everyday Life":

"Many, often remarkable, works have sought to study the representations of a society, on the one hand, and its modes of behavior, on the other. Building on our knowledge of these social phenomena, it seems both possible and necessary to determine the use to which they are put by groups or individuals. For example, the analysis of the images broadcast by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television (behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer "makes" or "does" during this time and with these images. The same goes for the use of urban space, the products purchased in the supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers, and so on."

Why do I blog this? Electrical infrastructure and usage of electricity, an interesting topic for a cold sunday. The fact that I encountered these 2 elements on the same afternoon is definitely no coincidence, it's definitely that I have an interest towards a such topic. Should dig it in the future. Why de Certeau here? because it might be a starting point.

"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.

LIFT08 program released

We presented yesterday the current state of the program of LIFT08 in Geneva. As last year, we will have workshop on wednesday (Feb 6th) and talks/discussion on thursday/friday (Feb 7-8). We will announce other speakers soon, with some potential surprises. Current tracks and speakers:

• Internet in society -- With Jyri Engestrom (he just sold microblogging platform Jaiku to Google), Jonathan Cabiria (on virtual environments and social inclusions) and others
• User experience -- With two tech anthropologists, Younghee Jung (Nokia, Tokyo) and Genevieve Bell (Intel, Seattle) and UCI researcher Paul Dourish.
• Stories -- With serial entrepreneur Rafi Haladjian and others to be announced.
• A glimpse of Asia -- With Marc Laperrouza, a specialist of new tech in China, Heewon Kim, a Korean researcher on teens and social networks, and others.
• New Frontiers -- With "cyborg" Kevin Warwick, Henry Markram who's trying to simulate the functioning of brain cells, and Holm Friebe talking about new forms of cooperation and collaborative work.
• Gaming -- With Robin Hunicke (who worked on games for the Nintendo Wii) on gaming trends, and others.
• Web and entreprises -- With David Sadigh and David Marcus on how the web is reshuffling work practices.
• Foresight -- With future researchers Scott Smith (Changeist) and William Cockayne (Stanford) and Nokia designer Francesco Cara.

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."

Nintendo DS service

Also seen in the COEX Mall in Seoul, this "Nintendo DS Service Zone":

Use power adapters (lock it while shopping), screen cleaners among other tools. This service, often provided for cell phone now extended to the NDS. Compared to Laurent's experience of asking a screwdriver in a digital camera shop (in which employees said "no we cannot do that"), this sort of little booth/area to adjust your portable console is convenient and DYI.

About Intellectual Ventures

Some excerpts from an interview of Nathan Myhrvold (about his company Intellectual Ventures):

"What I decided to do was create the invention capital model. Making funding invention an investment. Imagine this. That there is an invention capital industry that raises billions of dollars a year to fund inventions, not startups. (...) we don’t create a company. We don’t ask for an idea. If you go to the venture capitalist, they expect you to come with an idea, a plan and a team. But if you go to them and say you don’t have an idea yet, they will say to come back when you have one (...) One of the things about my current business is that it will need to be ten years. We have a get rich slow scheme because it requires tremendous patience if you’re going to invest in really important research and invention. If you want to do really big stuff, you have to plan things that are some number of years away from reality. We plan for the closest something that is five years away from being a product. Some of that is pragmatic. Most of the engineers out there plan for the zero to three years range. That’s the nominal time. Obviously things slip and take longer than three years. Almost nobody works on stuff that is five years out. So if we work that way, it gives us a huge advantage. It lets us conceptualize things that are much more radical. The downside is that it may take you five years before anyone is interested."

Why do I blog this? was trying to understand what Intellectual Ventures was doing after chatting about it with a friend. Intriguing company, curious model.

Live the future yesterday to invent it

Reading "Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design" by Bill Buxton, I ran across this part that I found relevant:

"in order to design a tool, we must make our best efforts to understand the larger social and physical context within which it is intended to function. Hutchins refers to such situated activities as "in the wild" in order to distinguish their real-world embodiment from some abstract laboratory manifestation that is as idealized as it is un-realistic. I call this process that expressly takes these types of considerations into account "design for the wild". (...) The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday

To adequately take the social and physical context into account in pursuing a design, we must experience some manifestation of it in those contexts (the wild) while still in the design cycle"

Why do I blog this? preparing some proposal I found this point very nicely expressed and may quote it. Buxton's phrasing interestingly exemplifies this important point. Besides, I quite like the Gibsonesque "The future is already here but it's just not evenly distributed" approach situated in time and mostly in the past.

Snippets from The Economist on tech failures

Some of the bits I was interested in, featured in last week edition of The Economist's technology quarterly:Radio silence, about what happened to RIFD, once hailed as a breakthrough that would revolutionise logistics:

" it was not surprising that RFID was widely regarded by many in technology as the “next big thing”. RFID was reassuringly coupled to the solid, real-world economy, rather than to dotcom intangibles such as “eyeballs” and “mindshare” (...) Despite such predictions, however, RFID has not lived up to expectations (...) What went wrong? Aside from the over-optimism common to many new technologies and the concerns of privacy activists, RFID did badly for two reasons. The first was that a veritable Babel of incompatible standards grew up. (...) And standards do not solve everything: RFID, like any other technology, is subject to the laws of physics. Metals and liquids can cause interference that prevents tags from being read properly in some situations. (...) It is not just technical concerns that have hindered the deployment of RFID. A more fundamental obstacle is the lack of a clear business case. "

Are you talking to me? is a short overview of where we stand regarding speech recognition applications. This excerpts stroke me as fascinating:

"“People have a lot of negative perceptions of speech technology, because the speech systems deployed first were pretty bad,” says Mr Hong. Mr Castro agrees. “There's a history of disappointment and failed expectations,” he says. When setting up his firm, he presented his idea to some venture capitalists. They were impressed by the technology but were put off by the term “voice recognition” which, like “artificial intelligence”, is associated with systems that have all too often failed to live up to their promises."

Why do I blog this? as usual, the E is a very compelling resource that describe why promises haven't been reached. It's interesting to see the parallels between different innovation that are presented in the tech quarterly, the common thread about failures and expectations. Besides, the article written by Bruno about Jan Chipchase and Stefana Broadbent is also very informative, describing some relevant cases about certain technologies are employed by beyond-occidental-white-users.

Think tank techniques

5 Big Biz Think Tank Techniques by Chris Penttila gives a quick overview of how larger companies are using innovation centers to encourage and implement new ideas.

"1. Combine ideas. Xerox Corporation looks for intersections between ideas and how they might merge. “Several ideas could get combined in a next-generation offering,” says Tom Kavassalis, vice president of strategy and alliances for the Xerox Innovation Group, which drives Xerox’s R&D-based innovation. 2. Think backwards. McDonald’s innovation team thinks in terms of “backcasting”—starting with an end product in mind and working back toward the basic idea in a way that’s practical from a cost and technology perspective. 3. Do rapidprototyping. McDonald’s puts ideas through rapid prototyping that can last as little as one day. “What we try to do is to get from the blackboard to 3-D as fast as we can,” says Koziol. 4. Create an internal incubation fund. Xerox sets aside funds that encourage employees to network and chase ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have a budget. “We’re interested in thinking of new ideas that are different from ones we’re currently funding,” Kavassalis says. 5. Take it online. Idea management software is automating the innovation proc-ess. “Everybody can contribute all the time,” says Anthony Warren, director of the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Penn State."

Why do I blog this? some elements to keep in mind and apply in our work processes. Foods for thoughts for LIFTLab.

Nabaztag sales figures

Quick note about Nabaztag, launched in 2005. I found some figures that might be of interest: 50,000 rabbits sold as of June 2006 (Source: Libération) 135,000 rabbits sold as of May 2007 (Source: Le Monde)

It's a pity the figures are only for France, but it gives an interesting picture of how this type of communication objects is sold. Sony sold 200,000 AIBOs worldwide (Source). And yes, I know it's like comparing apples and oranges but it gives a picture of the number of devices out there as well as how things evolve over time.

LEGO evolution

In the last issue of Escapist, there is a good piece about LEGO and games. It basically describes the different evolution and extension to the LEGO bricks. That part is interesting if you don't know what's up there but more relevant is the conclusion:

"To an extent, LEGO has always mirrored society. In the 1950s, the blocks were identical and interchangeable; in the '70s, you could buy mechanized kits to repurpose those blocks for many functions. Starting in the '90s, you could buy customized sets; now, there are online LEGO networks. We can imagine more innovation ahead, such as smart, networked, globally aware LEGOs with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking tags. (...) Inevitably, responding to the current zeitgeist, plastic building blocks will go open-source. The field of 3-D printers - "fabs" - is barreling along. In 10 years, maybe less, you'll have one on your desk, using Ldraw-based software to spit out LEGO-like knockoffs of your own design - thousands of them, for no more than the cost of the plastic.

Yet somehow The LEGO Group, given its high-tech savvy, will probably still make a fortune in brick-design licensing fees. Because LEGO has always mirrored society. Maybe once all those Mindstorms-trained robotics engineers grow up and get loose, it'll be the other way around."

Why do I blog this? the mirroring of the society is not very surprising (I guess marketing department take care of this) but it's intriguing to see how social and cultural changes are implemented in products such as toys. Besides, the 3d printing future seems curious and very well in line with LEGO's strategy.

The Economist on why you don't have a supa interconnected ubiquitous pervasive world right now

Some quotes from this week issue of The Economist, on ubiquitous computing (which I started bloggin here), I took them from various articles in the special issue. I find that they nicely exemplify common problems with ubiquitous computing and its slow user-adoption:

"Connecting machines requires giving up control to users, observes Tim Whittaker of Cambridge Consultants, which designs wireless systems. In fact, Orange M2M is criticised for trying to prevent customers from working with other operators. Thus even when mobile firms fall in love with M2M, the technology is suffocated by their embrace. Wireless innovation is more likely to come from smaller companies with a computing background. They are beginning to give machines eyes, ears and a voice. (...) Expectations were so high because much of the technology exists already. Yet it is being held back by non-technical factors: the lack of integration among different parts of the industry and the need for companies to change the way they operate. (...) Components from different firms may not work together (...) Mobile network coverage is inconsistent, so relying on just one operator is risky, and for movable things such as vending machines and cars, which may cross national borders, it is unthinkable. (...) The list goes on. Back-office software to manage the system has to work with existing corporate software. Someone has to take care of billing and managing the devices. And as everyone takes their cut, the expense grows. "It is a very long value-chain for people to bring this together," (...) But things have not gone as planned. In Japan, where much has been made of vending machines that accept payment via mobile phones, the vast majority are in fact unconnected. (...) Part of the reason is the sheer difficulty of getting all the relevant businesses together (...) Another question that inhibits take-up, even among those who are interested, is who should pay for the installation"

Why do I blog this? because it's the first time I read in a broader-audience journal (as opposed to tech journal or scientific publications) a so comprehensive and clear overview of the ubiquitous computing problems. The analyses in this special issue are spot-on the main shortcomings: technological messiness, different business models, different regulations, complex situations, etc.

How I use s-curves

A definition of technology s-curves drawn from Clayton Christensen (in this paper):

"The technology S-curve has become a centerpiece in thinking about technology strategy. It represents an inductively derived theory of the potential for technological improvement, which suggests that the magnitude of improvement in the performance of a product or process occurring in a given period of time or resulting from a given amount of engineering effort differs as technologies become more mature. (...) It states that in a technology’s early stages, the rate of progress in performance is relatively slow. As the technology becomes better understood, controlled, and diffused, the rate of technological improvement increases . But the theory posits that in its mature stages, the technology will asymptotically approach a natural or physical limit, which requires that ever greater periods of time or inputs of engineering effort be expended to achieve increments of performance improvement. "

Why do I blog this? Given that I use this tool more and more often in talks, workshops and work, it's good to get back to the literature and understand it more thoroughly. In some work recently I mostly used it to describe evolution of certain technologies such as location-aware systems, 3D virtual worlds or mobile gaming. Generally, the point of is to describe a succession of waves starting from an idea as shown on the picture below. For instance, with the "location-awareness" idea, the first wave of mature products was navigation systems (quite often found in cars with garmin and tomtom devices), a second wave concerns place-based annotations systems or people finder (in that case, nothing's really mature in the same sense as the first wave). Besides, I am well aware of the limits of such curves but they offer a relevant way to discussion diffusion of innovation.

Mistakes in foresight

Reading "Manuel de prospective stratégique, tome 1 : Une indiscipline intellectuelle" (Michel Godet), there was an interesting chapter about the most frequent error when doing foresight. General causes are: 1) Forgetting change (over-estimation) and inertia (under-estimation). 2) "Announcement effect": some predictions only aim at influence the evolution of the phenomenon and then contribute to its realization 3) Too much information (noise), few strategic information 4) Inaccuracy of data and instability of models (one should always ask whether a small modification in input data will change the output) 5) Error of intrepretation 6) Epistemological obstacles (looking at the tip of the iceberg / or where the light is)

Specific causes: 1) Uncomplete vision (leave behind other variables, disruptions, new trends...) 2) Excluding qualitative variables (that cannot be quantified 3) Thinking variables have static relationships 4) Explaining everything by looking at the past 5) Single future 6) Excessive use of mathematical models (mathematical charlatanry) 7) Conformism to gurus

Foresight at Design2.0

To complete my notes on the LIFT07 workshop about foresight, there is a very dense and insightful podcast of Bill Cockayne's talk at Design2.0 (mp3, 15.41 Mb). In this talk, Bill explains that one of the challenge for take companies/student in engineering schools is to get people understand the bigger context, complexity and big systems. Bill started as a technologist and migrate as a technology-foresisght/strategy person. His point is to ask questions such as "where is it going?", "why is it going there?". This is not a matter of being a futurist, not about predicting anything but rather to work on "how do you think about this coming technology?" "how do you think about this coming social change?". Technology sometimes drive social change, does not, sometimes, maybe but the question is how do you know when?. It's not predictions, it's something that comes out of knowing where information comes from.

Beyond tools to design for today's future (ethnography, brainstorming prototypes) and those for going a little further (scenario planning), the point is to go much further: how do you critically assumptions and build models. Oddly enough this stuff is simple, using 3 tools he describes. My raw notes below:

3 tools: point of view questions, X-Y graphs (out to get there by telling stories, looking for triggers of change, think about to get there when we think about what want to be, being normative (design a better future), defensive (design for a future that is coming but we don't like it), how to prepare for that kind of things),

1) Simple rule: You won't get there from here

let's say you design a toothbrush, you observe current users so you're going design today for a year from now as you get out past 7 years that does not work, who are you going to observe? this is all a POV: get out there with

2) X-Y graph: a structured brainstorming tool Issues: A versus B. So discuss with your team: What would be the 2 most salient issue? issues being one on X and one on Y. So you have 4 endpoints. What would the salient issues that affect the questions we're asking in 20 years? It is going to be perception? a social issue? no tech change? Older people (with experience) are better doing this because they've seen change (they felt what is 5 years). After a whole day, you may have 10 good X/Ys. Good = something you learn over time and sth you feel intuitively. Tell stories when you're doing it, catchphrases, funny stories...

What you want to look for is whitespots = possibilities, you can make a difference here either no one is going there because is difficult or it is an opportunity how might we put something there? a toy, a computer, a social change

3) Then you start building scenarios, like design but way far out, 20 years ahead what if have 3-5 stories? what would the world be out there? the most important things about these lines: no changes, lots of changes, one big sweeping change...

tell a story in 5' and then spend the rest of the afternoon going backwards, tell me what had to happen all along the way, tell me when it had to happen, give me a timeframe, the trigger, the driver, when does something has to happen is very critical as you being to go backward, you realize what has to happen (before a product occur, need of having another tech, so another guy has to invent this tech)

As you begin to go further out in time, you have a much harder time to say how close your change drivers are going to be. Then assume that all the decisions you make are too pessimistic and far out. In near term, assume that everything you say is too slow

Long term changes tend to have trigger than is not necessarily in the center of where the change is occurring when economics are changing is not that because a person stood up and said "Wall Street is going into that directions" it's more that you watch the housing data, you watch the number of kids that are how many kids are being born, breastfed,... and then you ask where is another change coming further off and how is it going to be its impacts?

The questions were quite interesting. One of the person asked what is the biggest mistake made by companies. Bill argues that most big companies forgot that research existed for two reasons: invent new things and spend a lot of money obtaining patents, the other is to have a bunch of guy who sit around, doing this kind of things he presented in the afternoon, drinking their coffee. Another issue is the fact that None of us read enough, none of us talk to smart people enough.

"Read methodologies and then read WSJ, E, NYT, CSM... daily because you needs to start getting a feel of where data comes from. You may be watching very closely where your products are going to be but something is changing in an area you never even thought but that could infect it, that could be an opportunity. READ MORE

These publications have the broadest range of readers they have op-eds. Get a broad view of business, social, economics, random technology stuff. Take the biggest daily newspaper that don't focus on news, more like the economist, that look for the analysis, context, why this happened, why A did X... Over time you build up and ability, look for different views, it's not a bias you're looking for, but a a different viewpoint"

Why do I blog this? great food for thoughts, methods and ideas about how to structure what I am doing in something more formalized. Besides, the question of "data" in foresight, addressed in the talk, is of great interest to me.

Building a discourse about design and foresight

Currently completing my PhD program (thesis defense is next week), it gave me the occasion of looking back and think about what interest me. My original background is cognitive sciences (with a strong emphasis on psychology, psycholinguistics and what the french calls ergonomie) and the PhD will be in computer sciences/human computer interaction. In most of my work, I have been confronted to multidisciplinary/interdisciplinarity (even in my undergraduate studies). It took me a while to understand that my interest less laid in pure cognitive science research (for example the investigation of processes such as intersubjectivity, and its relation to technologies) but rather about the potential effects of technologies on human behavior and cognitive process. In a sense this is a more applied goal, and it led me to take into account diverse theories or methods. Of course, this is challenging since mixing oil and water is often troublesome in academia. Given that my research object is embedded in space (technology goes out of the box with ubicomp) and social (technology is deployed in multi-user applications), there was indeed a need to expand from pure cogsci methods and including methods and theories from other disciplines. The most important issues regarding my work for that matter were the never-ending qualitative versus quantitative methods confrontation (I stand in-between using a combination of both, depending on the purpose) AND the situated versus mentalist approach (to put it shortly: is cognition about mind's representation? or is it situated in context?). So, this was a kind of struggle in my phd research.

However, things do not end here. Working in parallel of my PhD as a consultant/user experience researcher for some companies (IT, videogames), I had to keep up with some demands/expectations that are often much more applied... and bound to how this research would affect NPD/design or foresight (the sort of project I work on). Hence, there was a need to have a discourse about these 2 issues: design and foresight. No matter that I was interested in both, it was not that easy to understand how the research results/methods can be turned into material for designers or foresight scenarios. SO, three years of talking with designers, developers, organizing design/foresight workshops, conferences helped a bit but I am still not clear about it (I mean I don't even know how to draw something on paper).

Recently, I tried to clear up my mind about this and the crux issue here is the constant shifting between research and design (or foresight, sorry for putting both in the same bag here but it applies to both). The balance between research that can be reductionist (very focused problem studied, limits in generalizing or time-consuming) and design that needs a global perspective is fundamental. The other day,I had a fruitful discussion with a friend working on consumer insight projects for a big company. Coming from a cognitive science background as this friend, I was interested in his thoughts concerning how he shifted from psychology to management of innovation/design of near-future products/strategy.

I asked him about "turning points" or moments that changed his perspective. He mentioned two highlights. The first one was the paradigm shift in cognitive science in the late 80s when the notion of distributed cognition (Dcog) appeared. Dcog basically posited that cognition was rather a systemic phenomenon that concerned individuals, objects as well as the environment and not only the individual's brain with mental representation. To him, this is an important shift because once we accept the idea that cognition/problem solving/decisions are not an individual process, it's easier to bring social, cultural and organizational issues to the table.

The second highlight he described me is when he use to work for a user experience company that conducted international studies, he figure out that the added value not only laid in those studies but also in the cumulative knowledge they could draw out of them: the trend that emerged, the intrinsical motivation people had for using certain technologies, the moment innovation appeared. This helped him change the way he apprehended the evolution of innovations and made him question the fact that they can follows long s-curves.

Why do I blog this? random thoughts on a rainy sunday afternoon about what I am doing. This is not very structured but I am still trying to organize my thoughts about UX/design/foresight and how I handle that. I guess this is a complex problem that can be addressed by talking with people working on design/foresight/innovation. What impresses me is observing how individual's history helps to understand how certain elements encountered shape each others' perspective.

The picture simply exemplify the idea that conducting design/foresight projects need a constant change of focus between micro and macro perspectives. This reflects the sort of concern I am interested in by taking into account very focused perspectives (user interface, user experience, cognitive processes) and broader issues (socio-cultural elements, organizational constraints...).

Designing to care of the messes

A good read in the ACM Ubiquity: What if the experts are wrong by Denise Caruso. It's about how societies prepare themselves to be wrong when creating innovations that can have have important consequences on the world. Some excerpts:

"long-term stewardship" of man-made hazards; that is, how a society prepares to take care of the messes it has made that it can't get rid of, generations into the future. (...) To think that other people might suffer as a result of their actions is not part of the expert's world, or it gets pushed away in the drive to deploy the technology," said La Porte. "But what are the consequences if it turns out that all the things they believed in are wrong? That's really hard. And most technical people can't talk about this. What they do is theology to them, not science.

<center

Why do I blog this? even though this article addresses tech such as nuclear power and DNA manipulation, the author has a good point about designing new elements/artifacts (given the messiness of the world). And it leads to two questions: is it about designing to avoid future messes or designing in a way that this inherent mess could be taken care of?.

(the picture is a shot I've taken last week end: remnants from a restaurant that is refurbished)

PARC's research

Yesterday in the NYT, a pertinent article about PARC strategy. It basically describes PARC's path to move from being a in-house research lab to a subsidiary form. The article shows on-going projects but more interestingly critiques the fact that PARC is a "lab of missed opportunities":

Early in the decade, a struggling Xerox Corporation was trying to sell off a stake in its Palo Alto Research Center, which it could no longer afford to support. But with the technology bubble bursting, the price that investors were willing to pay for a piece of PARC, as the center is known, kept going down.

So in 2002, Xerox switched to Plan B: it spun off the center into an independent subsidiary and sought to prove that it could sustain itself by licensing technology and forming partnerships with outside companies. On Friday, PARC is announcing a deal that underscores that strategy. It is licensing a broad portfolio of patents and technology

“There’s no way anyone can top what they did in the past in terms of dramatic research developments,” said the futurist Paul Saffo, a fellow at the Institute for the Future. But Mr. Saffo praised PARC for finding a business model that has allowed it to survive at a time when many research groups at American corporations are being cut.

“This is an organization that has done well at keeping researchers, and spinning out a steady stream of little products,” Mr. Saffo said. “PARC has been a very quiet success.”

Currently... LIFT07

I am currently participating in LIFT07 (as a co-organizer). Great speakers, cool audience. This year I chose to take no notes and try to do a write-up afterwards only with what my brain cells would have retained.