Britain in 2010 as seen in 1990, London in 2030 as seen now

2010: Nigel Coates

“In 1990, the architect and designer Nigel Coates took a more whimsical view of the future, trusting in London’s capacity to mutate and treating prediction as a licence to fantasise. He foresaw dizzy roofwalks for wafting commuters, with weathershield blimps overhead to redistribute the rain, and prescribed a monorail for Oxford Street.”

2030 : Ian Sinclair

“There will be serious talk of bringing back a riverbus service for the Thames. There will be more white ghost-bicycles than any other kind, cycling being compulsory for those who want access to the National Health Service . Privileged lanes for VIP non-participants will have expanded and public lanes shrunk. Tickets will be at a premium for permanent show trials, inquiries into inquiries, after terrorist outrages and botched judicial executions. Film, television and other forms of electronic communication will happen on fingernail-size screens and be without content, other than re-runs of Dad’s Army. Locality won’t exist, the slab or vertical stack being the universal form. West Ham FC will debate a move into the part-demolished Olympic stadium. The late Ken Livingstone, in computer-generated form, fresh from his triumph in Celebrity Big Brother, will be re-elected as mayor.”

The Guardian

virtual worlds: a place to test models of voting, democracy, connecting & motivating

• Why playing in the virtual world has an awful lot to teach children | Technology | The Observer
  A virtual world is a tremendous leveller in terms of wealth, age, appearance, ethnicity and such like – a crucial fact for anyone who isn’t in the optimum social category of being, say, attractive and affluent and aged between 20 and 35. It’s also a place where “you” are composed entirely of your words and actions: something that breeds within and around many games an often extraordinarily complex network of conventions and debates that are integral to a community held together only by voluntary bonds. …..Neither playing Warcraft nor building a virtual polling booth in Second Life is likely to win many votes for a British political party in 2010, of course. And spending 24 hours a day in either environment is unlikely to do much for anyone’s conversational abilities. But it’s high time we began to understand games on their own terms, with all the potentials and dangers that entails: as arguably the most powerful models we have for connecting and motivating, and understanding those vast, disparate groups of people a digital age throws together.

A decade on since Human Genome mapped

“Ten years since scientists first mapped the human genome, the man who runs the Wellcome Trust Sir Mark Walport – which spends hundreds of million of pounds each year on medical research – thinks it is time to start thinking about how we use genetic information.”

Tomorrow, Eureka – Times Online’s Science column – will be taking an in-depth look at some of the businesses that have been launched on the back of the genetic advances of the past decade. In particular the resulting sustainability if the personal genome businesses that have made bucks form selling predictive risk analysis. The author of the piece states that it will “chart the very different ways in which the rival companies eg. 23andMe and the defunct Decode Me are trying to turn a profit, their different attitudes to data-sharing, privacy and medical supervision, and the implications their models will have for the future of personal genetics.”

An event to watch out for that is running in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust’s ‘identity‘ exhibition:

The National DNA Database on Trial
04 February 2010, 19.00 – 20.30

The Divorce Gene

• 2010: The Divorce Gene Explored | Psychology Today
  This research opens the door to medication to treat infidelity. If we improve the reward of vasopressin, then we increase the likelihood of faithful marriages. It also changes the valence of fidelity. If infidelity is a genetic variant, should physicians treat it like hypertension or diabetes? On the other hand, perhaps the infidelity gene is closely linked to the charisma gene, and as such, it is part of the package of seduction.

My Myers Briggs Test and The Microtrend Diary

ENFP

A few weeks back I was asked to fill in my own Myers Briggs questionnaire to enable me to find out about what personality type I am likely to be. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is “a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions”. These preferences were extrapolated from the typological theories originated by Carl Gustav Jung, as published in his 1921 book Psychological Types. He stated that there are four main functions of consciousness, two of them being perceiving functions: Sensation and Intuition and two being judging functions Thinking and Feeling that are then modified by two main attitude types: extraversion and introversion. Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers began generating the questionnaire during World War II, believing that knowledge of personality preferences would help women who were entering the industrial workforce for the first time identify the sort of war-time jobs where they would be “most comfortable and effective”.

The idea that a set of questions with certain weighting that ask me about how I deal with certain situations and turns that into a four-letter personality type has been something that has always bemused and slightly annoyed me. Whether self discovery questions in Cosmo magazine or psychometric questionnaires that get you certain jobs depending on the results have remained a constant aggravating mystery to me. Yet I felt this was a challenge for me to overcome my anger and have personal experience to criticise against. As a result of this questionnaire I am an ENFP: an innovator and inspirer…allegedly!

Quantifying the Unquantifiable

The idea of quantifying the unquantifiable; the fluid thoughts and emotions of our everyday lives has in recent times become more and more popular as algorithms in social media focused applications have enabled us all to  invest and share data and act as conceptual self-knowledge mirrors. Originally used in organizational management, social media has enabled a more personal approach to help evaluate ourselves. Indeed the rise in self-help and self-knowledge have become a huge business and created opportunities for organisations and individuals to offer more and more self-reflective tools that allow them to record, quantify, reflect and evaluate on their everyday lives; their thoughts, feelings, mental and physical health. 

My original fascination came when I stumbled across Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar’s “We Feel Fine” project: An algorithm that collects around 20,000 feelings per day as expressed by the blogging community and splices up the feelings according to demographic information about the author of each feeling (age, gender, geographical location, and local weather conditions). It then presents these findings in a series of playful interfaces, each of which paints a different picture of human emotion.  Other applications/products/questionnaires have crunched this kind of qualitative, touchy feely soft data to allow you to see how good you are in bed, a rolling history of your sex life, your daily mundane activities calculated into graphical visualizations, psychological phenomena translated into quantifiable scales or your daily tweeted interests simply autoplotted into a diary format. The artist and designer Lucy Kimbell has also been investigating the evaluation cultures in management, technology and the arts; her performance/service: Free Evaluation Service is one example. And more recently Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly set up the Quantified Self program to enable self-quantifiers to meet and compare and analyse their own methods and processes of evaluation.

The Microtrend Diary: a Personal Futures Thought Experiment

The Microtrend Diary is kept in its own monthly slipcase

This initial interest in quantifying the absurdity of our feelings inspired me to consider how we might use these psychometric approaches to create personal futures services. What if you could create a self-reflective  diary that made use of our everyday thoughts to provoke us in such a way that you are able to change your future actions. As a thought experiment I devised ‘The Microtrend Diary’ during my final year on the MA Design  Interactions course in 2007 and have made a recent 2nd prototype. I am currently looking to develop this further with some initial user testing and then publish a small batch for distribution.

Daily self-fulfilling prophecy questions.

Inspired by the abundance of self-help books, self-discovery personality tests and psychometric questionnaires, the Microtrend Diary is a mirror of your daily actions and emotions that reveal provocative ways to alter your future actions. This personalised diary, is printed to order based on a set of preliminary personality questions. As the owner makes a daily record of their actions, a unique set of provocative aide memoirs are revealed under a perforated flap that suggest changing your behaviour in certain ways for the following day.

A perforated seal is torn open to reveal the daily self-fulfilling prophecy questions.

My Happiness Scale

Other pages in the diary include the hourly ‘happiness’ chart, ‘what will this day be?’ join the dots exercise, ‘crowdsourcing you future’ postcards to send to friends and a weekly ‘hopes & fears for the future’ scatter graph. After each week the diary owner is asked to plot their hopes and fear for the coming week and after each month these thoughts are plotted against a time series analysis graph identifying historical trends and pointers for the future. The self-fulfilling prophecy diary is printed weekly and each week is stored in it’s own dedicated monthly box.

Crowdsourcing Your Future: Two postcards sent to friends to plot their ideas of your own future against a timeline and a future history.

A self-addressed Futures History postcard sent to a friend and with the obligation to be returned a year later.

Futures Timeline Postcard sent to a friend with a blank timeline in order to be filled in and returned to sender.

More Future of Work Links

• Alan De Botton: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work @ The RSA in April

 

• The Bottom Line: What is it that makes a productive office workplace?

OpenFutures, Citizen Science and the Co-Creation Landscape

1. 2.

(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 and others might call it open innovation and encourages organisations to finally share their knowledge for the benefit of all.

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.

One of the most exciting and groundbreaking approaches to citizenscience for me is George Church’s Personal Genome project; who have been recruiting volunteers who are willing to share their genome sequence and many types of personal information with the research community and the general public over the pat few years and 23andme’s recent ‘Research Revolution’; A voting platform on their site asking the public to vote on which disease the 23andme  predicitve risk gene testing research company should be targeting next.

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!!!

3.4.

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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)

 

The Future of Work & Enforced Happiness

On the left is lauren mccarthy’s wearable conditioning device that detects if you’re smiling and provides pain feedback if you’re not. (thanks for the link Milly Harris) It is the first in her series of ‘Tools for Improved Social Inter-Acting.’ and reminded me of an article i found a while back from the Mainichi Daily News.  In this article it discusses how employees at the Keihin Electric Express Railway in Japan will soon be subjected to computerised “smile checks” before clocking in for work each morning:

“The device analyzes the facial characteristics of a person, including eye movements, lip curves and wrinkles, and rates a smile on a scale between 0 and 100 percent using a camera and computer. For those with low scores, advice like ‘You still look too serious,’ or ‘Lift up your mouth corners,’ will be displayed on the screen.Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will check their smiles with Smile Scan before starting work each day. They will print out and carry around an image of their best smile in an attempt to remember it.”

Social conditioning devices such as these are products to ensure standards of service etiquette are kept, a form of social engineering that that encourages an ideal of how we should all live in particular how we should act in the workplace..so

What is The Future of Workplace?…

So if this is not that much of a surprise in the workplace in Japan, what devices could exist in the UK  to quantify and measure employees?

• Will there be a way to measure  how much we are actually ‘listening to the boss’ device?
• A measuring unit that calculates your culture of fear stress levels in work whenever someone speaks to you in the office?
• Or what if there was a visual indicator of fluffy business nonsense that was being added to the atmosphere in the office during the day?

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)