Smart people and future-fear

This was circulating last week: Edge's annual question What *should* we be worried about? by 150 of the world's "smartest people" and especially Motherboard's synthesis. 

I won't point out the obvious (e.g. about 80% of the list were male, who also seemed to have mainly Anglo-Saxon names) (ok - I just did point out the obvious)... nevertheless, it makes truly compelling reading. 

For fun, here is a word cloud of Motherboard's list 

and here is one including the names and titles/affiliations

'Science' and 'technology' loom large, unsurprisingly, and 'unable', but 'won'?

Anyway, I'm happy there were plenty of physicists and editors involved. 

Post-design scenarios 2

This post continues from the previous. I didn't mean to take such a long break between posts, but I've been blogging elsewhere, doing fieldwork abroad, teaching... and getting a little into winter hibernation mode. 

With these vignettes I was inspired by a Petterson & Boks paper that I found in one of the SCORE! network event Proceedings, which led me to Debra Lilley's work on designing behaviour. Since then, combining knowledge on product-service eco-efficiency with insight on user experience, consumer research on pro-environmental behaviours, and change management (and even transition management) has become standard in Design-for-Sustainability research and education. 

Also since writing this, I've been picking up small, intriguing signals related to the future of shopping malls: a site for the maker community in Cory Doctorow's novel Makers, documentation by photographers, turning malls into vegetable gardens, and 100 other uses for a dead mall. Combined with recent news about unsold consumer goods piling up in China, it'll be interesting to see if these developments are solely linked to the current financial crisis (which in itself is probably the 'new normal') or if we are really seeing a shift in consumerist values. 

There have also been signals about food security, such as this one about 3D printing meat, and mainstreaming of p2p initiatives that allow people to contribute time, money and/or skills to projects. Brickstarter for instance is just at the concept stage, but it seems to take the best of Kickstarter, Kiva and Timebanks in a nice package. 

And of course on the concept of knotworking, see the work by Yrjö Engeström. 
  

Scenario 3: The Pyramid

Pepi was daydreaming, wandering down his local superstore’s massive aisles, when he came to and wondered what he was doing there. Oh, yes, the new shipment of Shifting Wallpaper. The price was much higher than he expected, but still cheap enough not to be a sacrifice. He quickened his pace, as his CorClock was constantly measuring employee metrics and work performance – and he was measuring a big fat nothing at the moment. That could mean a warning and a pay dock, if he didn’t hurry.

Pepi is a specialist eco-scripter, meaning that he’s responsible for ‘scripting’ the physical and electronic controls that limit user behaviour. (This could mean, for example, a physical limit on how far you can press a lever, or a subtle semiotic design detail that worked psycho-physiologically to encourage or discourage a certain action.) His work used to entail much more eco-feedback and facilitation of ‘sustainable behaviour’. He was, in fact, so good at his job that people using his products wouldn’t even notice that their behaviour was being steered. Nowadays, though, he works mainly with military and big business contracts, usually involving resource control. In fact, some of his longer-term clients have hinted that his feedback mechanisms could be a little more ‘punitive’, especially in circumstances involving a breach of electricity rations. His work is starting to make him feel uncomfortable, but he finds himself with little choice.

Luckily he has a good circle of sympathetic friends down at the bar, where they get together nearly every evening for a joint and a pint and whatever else is on offer. As very few people are currently allowed to leave the country, the Travel Simulator has been a popular bar game, and despite his misgivings about his employer, he’s proud that the Simulator is one of its products. He knows the machine, like all of the company’s products, not only collects data on consumer preferences, but uses subliminal promotion techniques to push its wares, in ways that were once even seen as illegal. But – what the hey. If he didn’t work for The Cor, he’d have housing and health service supply problems like ol’ Smithy there, who insists on working on service design projects for a tiny company and therefore may not be able to send his kid to a proper school. 

Leaving the shopping-leisure complex, he strolled back to the office – which was a rather odd design of space, since the company had established his department in a former big box retail outlet in the sprawl of the suburbs, to be near employees’ homes. His team was also a bit odd, a range of extreme specialists who often worked with nanotechnological body organ design. With this current political focus on security, however, they had found themselves with Pepi in the consumer-infra unit, redesigning the eco-efficiency of nearly obsolete product-service systems such as home food- and space-cooling equipment. And whew! Were they bitter. Pepi tried to avoid them as much as was professionally possible. Maybe that’s why he was shopping this morning. Any excuse to get away from that office….

Scenario 4: The Wiki

Jolo awoke with a start. The food alarm had gone off, meaning that there would be a delivery of fresh food to the market at 7 am. If she ran, she might just get something… wonder what it is, vegetables? She hadn’t seen real meat, not to mention taste it, for quite a few years. Well, if she didn’t get anything fresh she’d just have to manage with the biochemical stuff. At least they were getting better with product development; textures had improved vastly over the last couple of years. And an even better development: the quality of the air had improved so much that few people bothered with facemasks anymore.

On the way to the market she checked her JobManager, where she could see her list of current clients, projects, and deadlines, as well as new projects in the network pipeline. She noticed that a previous client had specially requested her to work on a new edutainment platform; it fit in the JobManager Gantt, so she accepted it and refused the other work for today. The NGO app had, as always, a huge list of jobs as well… hmm, something interesting in South Africa. Modulising and code chunking Citizen Needs for a water management system. That wouldn’t take too long, and it would give her a few LETS points in the KnotWork system.

At the market, despite the swarms of people, things were calm and orderly. Jolo was rapt to receive three real carrots and two pea pods. The peas she ate immediately on the spot, even crunching down the pods. Heaven! There were heaps of people there she knew, and she spent a longer time socialising than she’d intended – but eventually she found her way to the subway heading for one of her client’s offices.

Once there she dealt with a few module problems – a few end-users were being a little over-ambitious with their orders and she needed to loop in a special component from another supplier. While she was contacting the suppliers’ inventories she checked the news feed. Oops! Prices of lithium were up again – that would definitely mean a lot of cancelled orders. There had been a boom in bio-based material development lately. She would have to make sure to pencil in a meeting with her buddy Ernest, a bioelectronic specialist, in order to get up to spec. Maybe he could lead a training session at her pro-craft guild sometime next month.

She finished up the module coding, sent a few quick messages to her favourite end-users, and clocked out. On to the next client – luckily in the next building….

Lilley, D., Bhamra, T., Lofthouse, V. (2006) “Towards sustainable use: An exploration of designing for behavioural change”, Design and semantics of form and movement DeSForM Conference Proceedings. 

Pettersen, I. N. & Boks, C. (2008). “User-centred Design Strategies for Sustainable Patterns of Consumption”, 2nd Conference of the Sustainable Consumption Research Exchange (SCORE!) Network “Sustainable Consumption and Production: Framework for Action”, 10 – 11 March 2008, Brussels, Belgium. Proceedings: Refereed Sessions I-II, Chapter 6, pp. 107-27.

Post-design scenarios

In 2008 I wrote four scenario vignettes based on a few interviews with designers and an analysis of consumption and behaviour patterns then called Pro-Am (Leadbeater & Miller 2004). 

My objective was to imagine future design jobs and future worlds in a post-industrial, post-materialist setting where today's issues related to consumption, the environment and natural resources, commodification of pleasure and well-being, political agency, work and employment play out to very different directions.  

I was inspired in part by a 2003 study carried out by Toni Ahlqvist for the Finnish Ministry of Education on technology and future employment that proposed new occupations we may see in the future, such as designers of body organs. The study was also described in a feature article in the Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's largest daily. (Ahlqvist 2003, as described in Ängeslevä 2003)

I had also just read The Long Emergency, which made me realize that collapse is indeed possible and we would be naïve to rule it out as if we were invulnerable for some reason. And I wanted to play with fiction and the power of storytelling.  

One of my interviewees, Australian designer Damien Melotte, supplied the term Growsumer to apply to people who "will 'Grow' their own products/systems/services from a[n] interactive and adaptable wave of intelligent components." 

I found this term immediately compelling and am using it still today - surprisingly it hasn't been coined by anyone else nor spread, to my knowledge. I say surprisingly because it seems increasingly apt: in this age of 'Collaborative Consumption' and 'We-Think' and 'Wikinomics' and the Maker Movement... I think people are ready for these intelligent components, but producers still seem to think we need everything wrapped up in a tidy, closed package. Or the profit and steady revenue attached to planned obsolescence is still too attractive to abandon for the unknown waters of modular, adaptable components. 

I personally need to work up the skills to be able to take advantage of what Arduino and Raspberry Pi could allow me to do - but every day there are more and more literate and competent people who want to do things not offered on 'the market'.     

Co-configuration, here we come. 

The first scenario is called The Vessel. 

Paol slowly pulled his consciousness out of meditation, and took a long, luxurious stretch. It was time to start his day.

Like almost everyone he knew, he worked for the government. His department was small – the local Department of Mental Welfare – and he worked mainly with service touchpoints to make them more efficient, satisfactory, and enjoyable for the citizens who use them. Much of his work revolved around generational differences: i.e. age-based cultural and physiological differences that could act as an obstacle to or opportunity for better communication and service provision. He often acted as a liaison between the Client Service officers, the focus group clients, and the implementers, and therefore was in somewhat a position of power in terms of suggesting new service offerings or axing obsolete ones. His findings were then incorporated into the region-wide persona system for the benefit of his counterparts in other districts. The personas were useful, as in general people differed very little from district to district, and had little to say themselves about what kinds of services and solutions they wanted. Paol had to be a bit of a detective in both observing and interviewing clients, in order to be able to intuit what would make a better and more pleasant service system.   

There was not much room for promotion in his small office, but finding a better job would likely involve moving, as there were limits to how far one could live from one’s job. He had also spent time considering the aesthetics and comfort of his flat; it was calm and restful, and near the mountain parks where he often went hiking. No – he’d stick with this job a while longer.

Besides, last time he’d been hiking he’d met someone interesting…. She was doing scouting work for her next Restorative Design project – a rather large and multidisciplinary Regenerative Earthwork initiative in the village on the mountainside. Erosion was the most obvious problem, but there were some complex ecosystem issues that needed to be simulated before any decisions could be made.

With that in mind, Paol jumped on his bicycle and cycled to his workplace. There would be a lot to do today with the health care provision system being reorganized….

Scenario 2: The Tapestry 

Ellen awoke just before her alarm went off. Good – that noise was so irritating. She gave the alarm clock a quick wind-up before heading to the kitchen to make espresso. A piece of fruit, some yogurt, and she was off. Her street was already abuzz – the greengrocers rolling out their awnings, the appliance repairmen and the furniture restorers gossiping on the corner, the cafés setting out their chairs on the pavement. She was already looking forward to lunch.

Her client this month was a Third Sector operator, as usual – her brief was to work with the lifecycle metrics of a communal laundry system for the Frant district. In fact, she was the only DD expert on this project – Design Durability – which meant that she also had to work with all those fiddly emotional, commitment issues alongside the normal LCA work. How do you encourage passionate lifetime commitment to a laundry system? It meant face-time with the end-users, that’s for sure. And there was that great Longevity project done at the university last year – she would have to read through those results and see what was applicable. Oh – not to mention incorporating the working elements of the old system! Hmm, maybe she wouldn’t be able to have a leisurely lunch after all. 

She sent a quick message to her friend who was working at the university, asking him to send her a copy of the Longevity report. It got her thinking about the Frant residents, who were affectionately nicknamed the Growsumer Collective. While the nickname referred to the residents’ vast knowledge of functional plants and ancient agronomy techniques, Growsumers as a social trend seemed to be growing. These were the people who were able to stitch together, to ‘grow’, their own products and services. More and more players were picking up on this trend and were supplying smart components or adaptive platforms to facilitate this problem-solving and need-addressing buzz. At first activities revolved around entertainment and leisure solutions, but lately projects had been dealing with the basic needs of food, health, clothing and shelter, often in conjunction with the public sector. It was certainly a development to monitor.     

Her brisk twenty-minute walk meanwhile had led her straight to the Frant neighbourhood, and she was welcomed straightaway by one of the residents with a steaming cup of hot chicory….

Ängeslevä, P. (2003). “Uljaat uudet ammatit” (“Brave New Professions”), Helsingin Sanomat daily newspaper, Sunday 12 October 2003. 

Leadbeater, C., & Miller, P. (2004). The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts are Changing our Society and Economy. London: Demos.