News

Mobiles and the urban poor - Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling’s talk at LIFT Asia, about how the poor are moving to cities, using mobile technologies to access services like payment, was impressive.

But what made it simply brilliant was his discussion on how the future collapse of North Korea will present South Korea with a challenge of enormous proportions, and how mobile technology and mobile payment can be part of the solution:

“When you are working on cell phones, when you are working on the web, when you are working on electronic money and payment systems, you need to think: What if my user is a North-Korean? How would I do this differently if I knew my user was from Pyongyang, that his regime had collapsed, that his economy had collapsed, he was completely bewildered, and he had never seen a cell phone or a computer in his life, and I intended to make him a productive and happy fellow citizen in ten years, what kind of technology would I give that person, what kind of trading system, economic system?”

According to LIFT organiser Laurent Haug he moved a large part of the audience, leaving a strange silence in the room as they came out for the break.

The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tales of the networked city - Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield, head of design director at Nokia, talks about the emotional aspects of living in a networked city. What happena when the choices of action in the city are not only physical, but also influenced by an invisible overlay of networked information?

Yet these concepts are not at all the same, and share only superficial similarities.

Case in point is this article from Marketing Daily. Some excerpts:

Combining [qualitative and ethnographic] research, data analytics and sales engagement is a proven approach to building actionable personae that informs hyper-targeting and hyper-messaging for optimal campaign results. [...]

The best marketers listen to what audiences think and feel about the brand’s products and services. Smart brands collect and use this learning to build brand promises that are both different from competitors and optimally relevant to the customers they want to attract. [...]

A radically customer-centric approach helps identify the likely highest yielding channels through better understanding how customers collect information about competitive products and services. [...]

The best technology marketers understand that radical customer-centricity results in more efficient, effective, revenue-generating marketing campaigns.

It is a distressing article that doesn’t contain a word about the value of the products and services themselves.

Frankly I am appalled that this old and dated premise - first you develop a product, then you market it - is still so much alive.

User-centred design is just about the opposite: first you understand the “market”, then you develop the product or service based on this understanding. If you do it that way, the actual “marketing” becomes a piece of cake, as products and services are conceived from end-user needs to begin with.

They also launched a public consultation on the policy and private sector responses to these opportunities, in order to prepare an upcoming Communication on the Internet of Things. This document will propose a policy approach addressing the whole range of political and technological issues related to the move from RFID and sensing technologies to the Internet of Things. It will focus especially on architectures, control of critical infrastructures, emerging applications, security, privacy and data protection, spectrum management, regulations and standards, broader socio-economic aspects.

A working paper on the Internet of Things accompanies the consultation by outlining the early challenges of this important development.

And to make sure you got the importance of it all: the French have even organised a ministerial conference on it all.

(via Bruce Sterling)

(via European Centre for the Experience Economy)

Unfortunately many of us have a problem with reading Hubert’s posts, because they are written in French.

So I decided to translate at least one of them, on a topic I like, so you can savour Hubert’s work, and get in touch with him the next time you visit France.

Stefan Agamanolis, the director of Distance Lab brought us a different look on new technologies during the third edition of the Dutch conference Picnic. Out of place, therefore necessarily interesting.

Stefan Agamanolis, the former director of human connectedness research group at the meanwhile defunct Media Lab Europe, is nowadays director of the Distance Lab, a research lab that aims to investigate the limitations of distance in an age of communications and permanent connection, whether they are in in learning, health, relationships, culture, and other domains.

Slow Food is a movement born out of a reaction to Fast Food - available everywhere at any moment: global, efficient, tolerable, generic, robotic, sole, modern, fast. Slow Food on the other hand proposes other values for nutrition such as pleasure, quality, local, health, the importance of taking the time to eat, atmosphere, personalisation, initimity, humanity, community, tradition… Agamonolis is inspired by this movement, particularly as it is applied to information technology. He explains that the mobile phone is a little bit like Fast Food, useful for all types of communication, but perhaps too constrained to give depth to these. What might “slow” communication look like? Which doesn’t mean a communication that is not fast, but one that puts other values at its core than speed and efficiency, which are so basic in our technologies today?

Agamanolis evoked several projects in his presentation that his lab is working on, such as the IsoPhone concept by the artists James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, who propose a type of communication without any possibility for distraction. The people involved jumped into a pool and wear helmets that allow them to communicate while floating. It is an immersion that concentrates hearing by creating a particular environment, that for some might seem weird, yet offers a real pause in the way we communicate. Stefan Agamanolis also referred to another another project – Mutsugoto, conceived by Tomoko Hayashi (video) : a space for intimate communications, with the bedroom as an interface, allowing people to be connected over a distance, by exchanging thoughts and touch through light interfaces.

To Agamanolis, our devices could also be inspired by tradition, in a reaction to the quest for modernity and technological sportswear, as explored by the project Solar Vintage: a collection of embroidery, fans, and other home fabrics. “Slow” communications could also help us to conserve the shape, as it is so well done in the Remote Impact project - that allows for punches and hits over distance - ou Jogging over a distance - that allows one to share a moment of jogging with a remote friend (as we have shown earlier).

On 13 November, Distance Labs organise a day on Slow Technology that should emphasise the value of displacement all away into Scotland. The presentation by Stefan Agamanolis left some people in doubt about the services envisioned. However by conceiving another way of imagining technology, Agamanolis provided a different insight and physicality to the variety of relations we have with each other, which our regular electronic tools and interfaces often disregard.

Hubert, please keep up this energy and commitment. There are very few people doing this in French, and you are doing it better than anyone. You have a big supporter.

The article reviews presentations by Adam Greenfield (Head of Design Direction, Nokia and keynote speaker), Ruud Ruissaard (Informaat), Chris Fahey (Behavior), Eric Reiss, James Kalbach (Lexis-Nexis), Joe Lamantia (Media Catalyst), Peter Van Dijck and John Ferrara, as well as Victor’s own.

Posting such articles is always a difficult call to make, and I am the first to admit that I don’t always make it right.

Putting People First is a blog with news about what is happening in the field, and is widely read therefore. It is also a blog run by someone who is part of the experience design community - rather than a neutral observer - and managed by an experience design company that depends on that community.

When reporting controversy, I have to make a judgement call on whether the controversy is intellectually valid or weak, and make a decision on whether to publish it or not. Usually I am able to make these decisions correctly - the 2,500 posts so far have led to very few complaints - but on a few occassions I did made mistakes.

Re-posting the negative Adam Greenfield review was such a mistake, as it was an intellectually weak piece, and didn’t do justice to Adam’s work.

Unfortunately once something is published, it is out there. So it doesn’t make sense now to remove the post. Hence this further reflection, which is also an apology to Adam.

Putting People First is and remains a work in progress, done largely in my free time. I can only ask to let me know - as Adam did - when you feel wronged by what is written, because that is the only way for me to improve this online resource.

Making Love is Eskil Steenberg (Quel Solaar)’s take on a multi-player story adventure. Imagine seeing your favourite game inside a steam sauna. Beautifully rendered images provide an evocative and foggy background to players building and destructing their neighbourhoods. Social actions result in social pressures and player alliances. Do you want to be known for the destruction of a neighbourhood?

What will the networked city feel to its users? Adam Greenfield started his exploration of the Long Here and the Big Now by questioning new modes of place-making where new conditions of choice and actions are no longer physical but reduced to screen-based interactions. Information visualisation add a new digital sense of time extension to our live experiences in providing historical awareness and multiple views — a new parallelism of time. How can information about cities and patterns of use be visualised in ways to enable local awareness, on demand access and collective actions? Adam challenged the audience to design cities responding to the behaviour of its residents and other users in real time in moving form browsing urbanism to act upon it.

Tracking our world - A discussion brought together researchers exploring new ways to measure, visualise and make sense of changing environmental contexts to guide professional and governmental practices.

• Stan Williams, director of the HP Information and Quantum Sytems Lab, described his labs intention to measure CeNSE - the Central Nervous System for the Earth (Fortune article | Bruce Sterling blog post) - via a variety of nanotechnology sensor systems. Imagine one trillion nanoscale sensors and actuators will need the equivalent of 1000 internets, creating huge demand for computing power but also providing energy efficiency.
• Professor Euro Beinat showcased the effect of using people, their movement and activities as sensors in the CurrentCity.org project. Their Amsterdam visualisation explored the human agglomeration and activities across the city using aggregated and anonymous mobile phone location data.
• Eco Map is a Cisco collaboration with three cities worldwide - Seoul, Amsterdam and San Francisco - to demonstrate the impact of real-time individual activities in aggregated views of our cities to foster individual and governmental actions. Explore the UV heat loss of your roof at night to inform insulation requirements or understand the solar capacity of the same roof and get installation advice. Wolfgang Wagner, Cisco, and Jared Blumenfeld, San Francisco, prototype how to use complex public data sets to inform individual desires for greener ways to live, work and play.

Bruno Giussani introduced the four finalists of the Picnic Challenge 08 to make a measurable impact on the reduction of carboemissions. Over 280 participants proposed their ideas competing for an award of 500,000 Euro funded by the Dutch Postcode Lottery.

The four finalists were:

• RouteRank, who designed a web tool to find best travel routes for time, distance and environmental impact in one single view;
• Smart Screen consists of a thermo-responsive, shape memory window screen to reflect sun rays and reduce air conditioning costs;
• VerandaSolar are easy mountable and affordable solar screens for self installation to reduce your energy bills, empowering millions of small scale users to make a larger impact;
• Greensulate, the Picnic Challenge 08 winner, engineered an organic, structural insulation panel made from local agricultural by-products.

The Design as a Collaborative Process session brought together Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, and Younghee Jung, senior design manager at Nokia, to document new creative and participatory design processes.

Bill showcased The Rockefeller Foundation and IDEO initiative Design for Social Impact, the Designers Accord and Shinichi Takemura’s Tangible Earth project. Each project guides its users to action - from design processes and methods, to codes of professional conduct, to understanding the global impact of local actions in an empathic information visualisation. To discover anew why globes changed world views over the last five hundred years, check out the Tangible Earth Demo Movie.

Younghee spoke about the choices and burdens of living with intimate technology - showcasing the results of participants in Mumbai, Rio and Acara designing mobile phones. They showed how diverse subjective views of what technology could be, how not to patronise usage patterns and how emotional touchpoints and usage patterns are formed.

What happens when we pay attention? - Ethan Zuckermann, a co-founder of Global Voices, described in his talk Surprising Africa a range of social actions resulting in increased media attention. He challenged the audience to stop thinking about Africa in terms of aid, but to understand the changing political climate influenced by bloggers and citizen activists, the current infrastructure developments (community media, mobile banking, malls, etc), and the innovation capabilities of local research institutions.

For more Picnic reporting, check also Bruno Giussani, Hubert Guillaud (writing extensively and excellently in French), Ethan Zuckerman, Ernst-Jan Pfauth and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and Smart Mobs.

Jan Chipchase of Nokia explores convergence, connectivity and dis-connectivity in a new and smartly written essay titled “A Little Switch With a Big Impact“, pointing out four trends that will ensure the practice and willingness to disconnect evolves.

“In time the design, language and social norms for connecting, dis-connecting and re-connecting will have reached the point where switch becomes the primary interface to our digital selves.

Of course by then it will called something else, will do something else such as appropriately syncing with everything else that matters to you and your stakeholders. Think of a world where everything is by default on, where the “record” and “capture” button is replaced by “pause”. And then re-imagine the Airplane Mode.”

Read essay

Last year Cass Sunstein produced a revised version of his book Republic.com, titled — with crushing inevitability — Republic.com 2.0. In it, he critiqued the impact of the net on democratic discourse and public spaces. His dystopia is one where we all subscribe to the Daily Me, a filter that presents us only with the worldview of people we agree with. What we gain in (temporary) contentedness we lose in critical appraisal and debate — with potentially dire political and social consequences.

I think there are three sets of reasons why Sunstein’s dystopia will not come about:

1. Filtering and recommender systems will always be imperfect; they’ll never be as good as their evangelists would have you believe.
2. Even if perfect filtering did work, people wouldn’t like it; they’d quickly get ‘perfect’ fatigue.
3. If people did liked perfect filtering, we wouldn’t need the blogs that Sunstein argues are the medium of ‘echo chamber’ opinion: if all you ever have to say is ‘me too’ in chorus with your like-minded peers, the whole point of blogging (self-casting) disappears.

Read full story

(via FutureLab)