OpenFutures, Citizen Science and the Co-Creation Landscape

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(See end of post for more info and diagrams)

A few months back I was involved in researching and writing a paper for Sense Worldwide entitled ‘The Spirit fo Co-Creation’ focusing on the way organisations and the public are collaborating to get things done in more provocative, democratic and relevant ways.   Some might say that this so called co-creation is a research & insight process to bring practitioners, individuals and stakeholders together. Others might say that it is a business model and can be the strategy to crowdsource production, knowledge and value. Some also might say design by committee can impact on the quality of truly provocative ideas.

What interests me the most is the fact that there are many examples of what co-creation can be and has been (from Open Source to Pro-Am) and in particular I became interested in how it can now be applied to the OpenFutures and Citizen Science arenas.

OpenFutures or ARGs (alternate reality gaming) could be one way to describe various approaches that IFTF have found to aggregate collective perspectives on futures related info. For example Signtific, an online open futures lab,  encourages individuals to report weak signals of future related changes in science and tech issues as well as participate in trial forecasting games. IFTF set up the platform in early 2009 to encourage an open approach to scanning and collating info online, which they then use to funnel into their own strategic recommendations and 10year scans.

Superstruct was another openfutures/ARG platform or as IFTF called it, ‘the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game’  that ran for 6 weeks in October 2008. By inviting people to play the game, they were asked to help chronicle the world of 2019–and imagine how problems we may face will be solved. In doing so IFTF’s 10 year horizon scanning unit could observe how people invented new ways to organize and augment collective human potential.

One more recent openfutures/ARG approach was set up by Stuart Candy (phd researcher at Hawaii Research Center for Future Studies) and Jake Dunagan (Research Director, Tech Horizons program at IFTF) entitled CoralCross. In order to open a dialogue about Hawaii’s pandemic preparedness and allocation priorities, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded CoralCross.org. To help encourage public dialogue and illicit input for decision-makers on Hawaii’s pandemic priorities, the Hawaii State Department of Heath commissioned  the Hawaii Research Center for Future Studies to produce the “playable scenario” on the island of Oahu. The ARG was so prescient that it had to be delayed in its implementation due to the actual global swine flu pandemic alert in May 2009. Other ARG/OpenFutures platforms set up by IFTF include World Without Oil, After Shock and Ruby’s Bequest.

Citizen Science is another way to crowdsource information via the help of others on a large-scale with the power of the internet. Some examples include the SETI@home project, a scientific experiment that invited the public to run a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Or Gwap, a set of games that train computers to “solve problems for humans all over the world”, by understanding users perceptions of tags. BirdPost is a website to post sightings of birds, along with mapping and rare bird alerts. FoldIt is a game that enables the public to contribute to important scientific research by testing proteins and how they fold. The Galaxy Zoo files contain images of almost a quarter of a million galaxies. In order to understand how these galaxies formed, they use the public to help to classify them according to their shapes.

You could say that the current co-creation landscape is broad and varied and can stretch and hence blur strict co-creation definition boundaries. As way to understand this landscape i began to create diagrams to help visualise how and what was going on . The diagrams below outline several different models of collaborative creation that have been employed to help develop products, services or knowledge.

Below each diagram you will find a link to an organisation/initiative that represents an example of collaborative creation of some sort:

MORE DIAGRAMS TO FOLLOW!!!

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1. Large corporations who engage with a community of advocates to co-create on an ongoing basis. (Lego Mindstorms)
2. Large corporations who call for agencies to submit ideas to then partner with or broker a deal. (P&G with NESTA)
3. Consultancies or agencies who set up and facilitate the whole co-creation project to act as a bridge between a network of collaborators and a corporation. (Sense Worldwide)
4. Large corporations who call for ideas by offering a one-off contest with prize money or a manufacturing run. (Muji Design Award)
5. Large corporations who outsource briefs to communities that are fostered online. (Innocentive, Kluster, Crowdspirit)
6. Large corporations that host an online platform where individuals submit ideas or requests based on the brand, which that business can then select for development. (Cuusoo with Muji)

links for 2009-11-04

• The Great Indoors
  The Great Indoors suggests a near future landscape of tarmac fields and breeze block villas populated by an enervated elite who never leave the house.

  Sustained by a diet of uncensored electronic stimulation and takeaway meals provided by swarms of delivery vans and staffed by armies of low paid immigrant labour. Information seeps out through the walls of the house itself, avoiding any requirement for direct physical interaction.

  (tags: architecture Tomas_Klassnik obsession hermit)

links for 2009-11-03

• Interview with Bill Cockayne – Director Stanford Centre for Critical Foresight » IdeaPort : strategic innovation, foresight, and futures thinking.
  I recently got in touch with Bill Cockayne at Stanford. The conversation was wide and varied – as you’d expect – and among other things we discussed the Shell Technology Futures work I’d done with Innovaro. As he lectures at Stanford on foresight and innovation, I was interested in his perspective on some of the issues that I had encountered with various organisations.
  (tags: foresight innovation stanford Bill_Cockayne)

links for 2009-10-29

• What’s your place in the brave new future? – Times Online
  Saffo has spent the past two decades staring into his crystal ball and seeing just these sorts of contrasts. Once director of the Institute for the Future think tank, he now teaches at Stanford University, alma mater to the founders of Google and many of the technology world’s hottest stars.
• Field Research Can Be Rough, but It’s the Only Way to Design for the Developing World | Design & Innovation | Fast Company
  Entrepreneurs are increasingly turning their eyes to developing markets–because if you can provide places like Africa with products that are vital to the population, you can ignite economic and social development and profit at the same time. Everybody wins.But how do you design a product that the developing world needs? Artefact, a Seattle-based design consultancy, specializes in that problem. Tomorrow they’ll be holding an online seminar at My Design Shop about what they’ve learned, and the detailed steps involved in planning overseas field research.
• things magazine: an online journal about objects and meanings
  This collection of Chernikov imagery – the famous Architectural Fantasies from 1925 – can be found at the Iakov Chernikov International Foundation (via Coudal). Even in the 1920s, just before the Five Year Plans kicked in, the forms proposed bore little relation to the real needs of culture, industry or society in general, being simply extravagant, elaborate, quasi-abstract compositions that delighted in visual drama and form. Architecture as Cubist or Futurist painting. What’s perverse is how influential these images have become, to the point where architectural culture has allowed itself to be twisted and turned so that the aesthetic first described by Chernikov could actually come to pass in physical form.

What is the future of education?

• Organizing University Learning: Moving Beyond the Course to Micro-labs | Kyle Mathews :: Dreams With In

University learning is centered on the course. A pattern for learning familiar to any current or past student. Students and teacher meet 1-3 times per week for 8-12 weeks. There’s lectures, readings, papers, projects, quizzes, and tests. This, by and large, is an adequate pattern for many learning purposes. But no rational person would suggest this is the only workable solution or even what’s best, or even adequate, for all purposes.MicroLabs: Micro-labs are small learning communities centered around answering a question, not mastering standardized content/skillsMicro-labs are a proposed university course architecture which supports and incorporates “web 2.0″ informal learning principles, enabling students to entirely create their own curriculum with the goal of contributing all objects created by learning back to a learning community of practice, and an Internet audience. This course design seeks to harness both the student’s natural (intrinsic) desire to learn and the ease of access to knowledge created by advances in communication technologies.

links for 2009-10-21

• Accelerating Future » Yale Daily News on SS09: “Fear the Singularity”
  So, a negative review of the Summit has finally been posted, by Maxwell Barbakow and Jacob Albert at the Yale Daily News, the student paper.
  Reading the beginning of the article, it seems as if Max and Jacob were prodded into going by an associate or something, because they show that they have no clue about the entire topic, and are negatively predisposed to it from the starting line. This is demonstrated by the quote:Though they seemed incomprehensible at the time, we came to a better understanding of the attendees’ motives for schlepping from various parts of the country to New York, once we got a better grasp of the tenets behind the Singularity.

Personal Futures inside The Art of the Long View

 

I recently came upon a 2nd hand copy of Peter Schwartz’s seminal scenario planning  book ‘The Art of the Long View’ and came upon an inscription. “January 1994, Dear Mary, Jim and Thomas, To help make your futures even more super and satisfying, Love Dad”

It gave me an idea about how we create weak future affects everytime we give someone a gift or a card, we directly affect how we think someone should live their ‘personal futures’. What if we collected those and rated their impact over time. Would there be a scale of affect that could enable different affects to be measured?….umm to be continued

links for 2009-10-19

• Twins hold key to unravelling maths gene | Science | The Observer
  By analysing the test results of 6,000 twins, they were able to see clear genetic factors emerging for both numerical skills and reading ability. They compared test results for seven-year-old identical twins, who share the same DNA, with the results from non-identical twins, who only share 50 per cent of their DNA, to assess how much was down to genes. Yulia Kovas, who led the investigation, said: ‘Our work shows that there is a substantial genetic overlap between maths and reading, but also between maths and general intelligence.
• The GFF : About Us
  GFF is a strategic futures think tank formed in September 2006 by futurists Rohit Talwar and David Smith. GFF works with clients to develop critical, powerful insights and pragmatic responses to the trends and forces shaping the future.
• BÜRO FÜR TRANSFER Beratungs- und Projektmanagementbüro
  BÜRO FÜR TRANSFER works in the field of creative industries – that is arts, music, media, design and architecture. As a consulting and project management agency, we support art institutions, creative entrepreneurs and companies with our expertise in the development, communication and organization of creative content.
• Shapeshifters.net
  Shapeshifters is a knowledge agency for the global creative community. We help people all over the world to locate resources needed to turn ideas into reality. Be sure that everything you require to be a successful creator does exist already. Finding the best signal in the noise is a different story.
• Could birth control pills alter mate choices?
  Birth con­trol pills may al­ter wom­en’s abil­i­ties to choose, com­pete for and re­tain mates, a new re­port suggests.
• Slooh: Control Big Telescopes Around the World in Your PJs – Slooh – Gizmodo
  Used by astronomers for years, Slooh is an online service that lets people control space telescopes around the world and take images in real time. They’ve now launched a novice version for you and me.

Self on Dahl

Will Self discusses Roald Dahl, my favourite author whom i used to meet in the shoe shop at my home village of Great Missenden, and the release of the Fantastic Mr Fox. The stop frame animation film by Wes Anderson with the voices of Geroge Clooney, Bill Murry and Meryl Streep.

Via Guardian

Objects/Colours inspire Fictional Storytelling

• 100 Colors, 100 Writings, 100 Days: Observatory: Design Observer
  Every day for one hundred days (from October 30, 2008 to February 6, 2009) I picked a paint chip out of a bag and responded to it with a short writing. I have selected my favorite forty, titling each writing with the number of the day it was written (out of 100) and the name of the color from that day’s paint chip. This project was generated in Michael Bierut’s 100 Day Workshop at the Yale School of Art.
• About the Significant Objects project
  A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay! The project’s curators purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales. A participating writer is paired with an object. He or she then writes a fictional story, in any style or voice, about the object. Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a “significant” object! Each significant object is listed for sale on eBay. The s.o. is pictured, but instead of a factual description the s.o.’s newly written fictional story is used. However, care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax eBay customers. (Doing so would void our test.) The author’s byline will appear with his or her story. The winning bidder is mailed the significant object, along with a printout of the object’s fictional story. Net proceeds from the sale are given to the respective author. Authors retain all rights to their stories.