March 04, 2012

The Transition Companion

We can do this the hard way or the easy way. The easy way is that you skip this post and buy the book now.

The hard way is that your reviewer attempts to describe a 320 page book whose contents have been shaped by the infinitely varied experiences of self-organising initiatives around the world. In these, thousands of people have explored one question over a five year period: “How do we make our community more resilient in uncertain times?”.

One of the many virtues of this awesome and joysome book is that the word “strategic” does not appear until page 272; a section on “policies” has to wait until page 281. It’s not that the book is hostile to high altitude thinking; on the contrary, its pages are scattered with philosophical asides on everything from Buddhist thinking and backcasting, to time banking and thermodynamics. But the rational and the abstract are given their proper, modest, place.

The book is filled with incredibly handy short texts about issues that confuse many of us. What, for example, are we to think of Community Supported Agriculture? Is it enough to sign up to a vegetable

box scheme - and find the resulting service inflexible and irritating? Maybe yes and maybe no, writes Hopkins. For him, our relationship with the people who grow our food should be shaped by four key principles (page 268): "shared risk; transparency; community benefits; and building resilience". Within that framework, the details are down to us.

There’s also an especially handy chart (page 253) about new career opportunities in a more localised economy. A wondrous array of new job titles ranges from hedgerow drink maker to compost manager - alongside more recognisable green jobs.

Another plus: The book will start more arguments than it resolves. One could run a summer school on the single chart (page 48) that asks: “What does ‘localisation’ mean?” It doesn’t mean self-sufficiency, writes Hopkinson, but it does mean “increased meeting of local needs through local production where possible (especially for food, energy and construction”. This will not please agribusiness, nor the the Real Estate Industrial Complex - but is otherwise uncontroversial. I also like the idea that “localisation does not mean insular communities” but does mean “a global network of communities organising their economies but sharing their experiences and advice...a global process of resilience-building in a range of settings”.

Other assertions in the chart are harder to swallow. For example, localization “does not mean the driving out of multinational businesses and other employers” and does mean “there may well be situations where collaborations with existing multinationals may be a skillful approach”. Well, maybe. Raging at multinationals may well be bad tactics, and a waste of energy, but the fact remains that MNCs are pre-programmed to grow to infinity in a finite world, and their CEOs are legally obliged, as well as incentivised, to follow an ecocidal path. How to do it may be hard - but they have to go.

Lower down that page is another provocation: “localization does not mean a population forced to toil in the fields” but does mean “finding new models for land access”. The trouble here is that the people most actively exploring “what land management might look like if based on an understanding of peak oil and cimate change” are hedge funds; they’ve bought 35m hectares of food producing land in poor countries in recent years. http://bit.ly/xvNVhF Transition’s enthusiasm for “learned optimism”, on these occasions, feels inadequate.

Such provocations are spice that liven the book up. Its greatest achievement is to document living examples of what systems thinking applied in everyday life can be like. Hopkins quotes Donella Meadows: “the sustainability revolution will be organic. It will arise from the visions, insights, experiences and actions of billions of people”.

As a movement, Transitiondoes not aspire to be wholly without structure. Two among those billions of people sent Hopkins and his tiny team in Totnes terrific suggestions for how Transition is (or should be) organized. Joanne Porouyow, of Transition Los Angeles, proposes the ‘ubbelliferae’ model, like the flowers of a fennel plant (below)

“Almost out of sight, a strong structure keeps the flowers supported, fed, and connected”. Scott McKeown of Transition Sebastopol, thinks of Transition as mycelium, a fine fungus that runs though undisturbed spoils ls in networks. The book is filled with such enchanting and insightful asides.

May copy of the book arrived with the CD of a new film, ‘In Transition 2.0’ which I hope to review shortly.

Some earlier Doors of Perception posts on Transition are here and here and here

Posted by John Thackara at 11:50 AM

October 31, 2011

Design and Health: Flipping The Pyramid

It's easy for two people to look at the same information - such as this chart (above) about health costs - and perceive totally different things. What I see is an out-of-control Medical Industrial Complex that's heading, Icarus-like, for collapse. What many designers see is a sea of opportunity - and boy do they want a piece of that action.

They are not alone. Many city-regions regions see the 'health space' as an opportunity for growth. In the Netherlands, for example, Groningen's Healthy Ageing Campus is billed as a "research and entrepreneurship zone" that will focus on healthcare, food & health, medical technology, and pharma.

In Eindhoven, too, a project called Brainport Health Innovation (BHI) will focus on "well-being for the elderly and chronically ill…while generating economic opportunities for the region".

The pattern is Europe-wide: an organization called Healthclusternet is encouraging all the EU's 27 member nations to develop "regional health systems and health innovation markets".

The promise of economic opportunity persuaded its sponsors to pay for last week's World Design Forum in Eindhoven on the theme of "Creating a Caring Society".

Eindhoven, home of Philips and the lightbulb, was recently voted "smartest region in the world" for its prowess as an innovator of high-value, technology-based products. A meeting to explore how this smartness might be applied to the global care market must have seemed a promising idea.

The only problem? Our discussion raised the possibility that a complex, doctor-intensive, technology-based approach may not be an affordable, or even necessary, ingredient of caring society.

My contrarian advice was that we need to grow care systems based on five per cent of the costs per person that we have now. This sounds like a fantasy, but is not. In Cuba, for example, where food, petrol and oil all have been scarce for of 50 years as a consequence of economic blockades, its citizens "achieve the same level of health for only 5% of the health care expenditure of Americans."

The use of Cuba as a benchmark is a hard sell at health industry events. Imagine my surprise in Eindhoven, then, when a Cuban-style strategy was advocated by someone with real financial clout. Roger van Boxtel, CEO of a big Dutch insurance company, Menzis, used this [admittedly hideous] upside-down pyramid to describe how his company plans to re-direct spending for its two million insured clients.

The tiny triangle on top of the right-hand pyramid - marked "soon" - represents pretty much the entirety of resources for today's Medical Industrial Complex. When I asked the head of a huge hospital, on the same panel, what he made of this startling transformation in resource allocation, his rueful reply was that "if he says so, that's the way things will go".

Menzis does not propose to do away with hospitals altogether. But it does intend to reduce costs radically by focusing common procedures at a small number of preferred suppliers. It will send all patients for hip replacement, for example, to one clinic, Maartsenkliniek, which already performs 700 hip operations a year.

Logically, it is hard to see why Menzis' inversion of the Follow-The-Money principle should stop at Dutch borders. An international patient visiting India can save 70 to 80 per cent on the average cost of similar procedure back home. Hip replacement surgery at the top rated hospital in India costs US$5,000 - including the cost of an FDA approved implant or prosthesis.

] Departure Lounge

Medical tourism to India is not the kind of patient journey that intrigues designers - or at least, not yet.

In Eindhoven, our jaws dropped at a gorgeous presentation, by Paul Priestman, of his Recovery Room of the future. Priestman drew on his expertise as designer of Lufthansa's first class cabin to argue that hospitals do not have to be clinical, inefficient and unwelcoming.

Lufthansa-quality recovery lounges in hospitals would of course be lovely - but they are unlikely to reduce the cost explosion in health. The cost to an airline for a ‘super first class’ model, with its 600 parts, can reach $160k [114k euros] per seat. When you consider that only five per cent of the world's population has flown on an airplane at all, let alone in first class, high-end Recovery Lounges look likely to remain a niche market.

To be fair, Priestman was adamant that design quality in hospitals does not have to be ruinously expensive. His firm has also designed 50,000 hotel rooms for a hotel chain within a much tighter budget per-bed than in a new hospital. But if Roger van Boxtel's cost-reducing strategy is where things are headed, the design opportunity concerns a radically different kind of patient journey.

] Care: the social space

A key principle of Cuba's system is that health and wellbeing are not something ‘delivered’, like a pizza, by distant suppliers. In Cuba's - and Menzis' - version of a caring society, value is created by mutually supportive relationships between people in a real-world context, away from big medical institutions. This is no small shift of emphasis; the 'delivery' metaphor is pervasive in the developed world's systems.

That said, Cuban-style 5% health is not about a u-turn back to a pre-scientific age. It's about focusing resources and creativity on the 95% of care that happens outside the medical system already, today. It’s about re-imagining the 'health space' as a social and ecological context which, like a garden, needs to be cared for - collaboratively.

] Dementia Challenge

Welcome signs of a care-as-ecosystem approach are emerging in the UK. The Department of Health and the Design Council are running a competition to rethink life with dementia. The stated objective of this 400,000 euro ($580k) challenge is "to get new solutions up and running and into the hands of the people who need them".

The UK project, dangling an economic carrot to encourage partipants, describes the baby boomer generation as "a large group of sophisticated consumers looking for products and services to support them in their later years". But the 16 service ideas shortlisted are relatively low-cost, low-tech and people-focused solutions that are unlikely to excite a red-blooded VC. They include online and physical tools for better collaborative care between relatives, friends, and professionals. A web-based service would help carers find part-time work, and people with dementia contribute to society. A service to facilitate daily journeys for people with dementia is envisaged. A volunteer network would locate and safely return people with dementia who wander is described. There's a website and peer-to-peer platform for carers to deal with diagnosis and planning.

The Design Council's shortlist does include the odd high-tech gizmo, such as a wristband for monitoring the location of people with dementia that includes 3D accelerometers and RFID. But the tech component overall is at the service of social innovation, not its driver.

The Design Council also promises entrants "100% ownership of the intellectual property rights to your idea". But even that remnant of old-paradigm care-as-business thinking is easily surmounted: Most the tech-enabled functions described in the shortlist already exist as open source applications in Pachube.

] Care co-ops

One of the main reasons industrial world health systems are unfit for purpose is that they under-value socially-created knowledge and socially-delivered support. This is why open source health, and learning how to create and grow care co-operatives and other forms of care collaboration is so important.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:17 PM

September 21, 2011

5% health: Catabolic collapse and peak fat in modern health systems, and what to do about them

I was emboldened, upon arriving at the Mayo Clinic 's Centre for Innovation last week, to learn that people with deep domain knowledge do not make the best innovators. I concluded that I was therefore well-qualified to warn one of the top academic medical centres in the world, each of whose 60,000 staff knows more about medicine than I do, about the risk of catabolic collapse in the US health system - and what to do about it.

[The 20 minute video of my talk is here. This text touches on:energy intensity in health systems; peak fat; 5% health in Cuba; the Quantified Self; Design grammars for health and care; doing what we know we need to do. It builds on the chapter on Conviviality in my book In the Bubble].

My core proposition at the Mayo event was that peak oil, and peak fat, are transforming the logic that currently shapes the global biomedical system. Firstly, because coming energy famines will render one of the world's most energy-intensive systems unsustainable. And second, because until the medical system addresses the causes of illness with the same brilliance with which it addresses the effects, the population will continue to get sicker.

] Energy intensity

The main Mayo Clinic building is a vast silver facility that shouts two things: authority, and energy intensity.

If one Googles health, and energy efficiency, most results are about hospital buildings and attempts to render them 'greener'. But hospital buildings are just one element within a distributed system that is both materially heavy and entropically complex.

For a start, most of the consumables within any hospital are oil-based - from analgesics and antihistamines, through heart valves, implants, and prosthetics, to ambulances and helicopters. But energy that you can measure, such as that used by buildings and suppositories - is only one part of the picture. A new technique called Systems Energy Assessment measures the total energy demand of businesses, such as health ones. Its developers have concluded that for every barrel of oil equivalent that's counted today - if they are counted at all - four times that number are consumed invisibly. And because they are neither perceived nor counted, no thought is given to their possible replacement. A recent UK study, for example, found that five per cent of all vehicle movements on British roads are health-related.

There is some discussion in the medical world about the consequences of the coming energy crunch but by all accounts these voices find it hard to be heard and finds it an uphill struggle to make an impact.

Loud alarms raised in other other complex organisations are being taken more seriously. Lloyds of London, for example, an epicentre of the global financial system, warned last year in a report called
Sustainable Energy Security that "an oil supply crunch is likely in the short-to-medium term”. And the US Army, hardly a hotbed of doomers and subversives, stated in its Joint Operating Environment [JOE] report that "by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear...we simply aren't going to replace this with renewables”.

The danger facing complex organisations such as the Mayo Clinic is that, by postponing consideration of energy issues, it risks catabolic collapse down the line. This is the situation, as described by John Michael Greer,in which by the time a system realises that its energy regime is not sustainable, the money energy and resources to do anything about it are no longer available.

] Peak fat

From catabolic collapse I moved on in my talk to peak fat.

I was perplexed at this fascinating conference by a weird imbalance. We heard several case studies about innovative ways to deal with consequences of the diabetes pandemic - a disease growing in the US by a terrifying 30% a year. The response of designers and doctors was an array of Personal Health Planning tools, "high-end wellness" services, superfoods, remote diagnostics, and more. But almost nothing was proposed, that I heard, about tackling the causes of this grim disease on a mass scale.

Looking online I then found this statement by the Centers for Disease Control [CDC]. The mission of tis Federal organisation is "to create the expertise, information, and tools that people and communities need to protect their health". On the subject of overweight and obesity, CDC's website explains that these killer conditions "result from an energy imbalance. Behavior and environment play a large role...these are the greatest areas for prevention and treatment actions”

This is surely a bizarre statement. "The environment" makes you fat? I was under the impression that fat makes you fat - and the correlation between the growth of fats in the food system, and the growth of obesity and diabetes in the population, is not hard to spot. Neither is it a secret that the producers and distributors of this killer fat are the junk food and soft drinks industries.

The medical system - from the CDC to the Transform conference - appears to be focused overwhelmingly on downstream phenomena. Medical researchers are working tirelessly to improve treatment protocols - the steps for treating particular ailments. Huge efforts are also being made to improve safety in hospitals , and to raise the quality of care you receive in them. But among all these projects, attempts to transform a food system, that is making hundreds of millions of people sick, are rare to invisible.

A speaker from Pepsico added to the cognitive dissonance. Dr Dondeena Bradley told the conference that she is "on a journey… to redefine what nutrition means" and that her employer is determined to "double its food-end healthier portfolio". I wanted to ask, "healthier than what?" - but was then distracted by her assertion that "we don't have enough land in the US for everyone to eat their five a day". I believe she probably meant to state "food system" rather than "land"; if not, she urgently needs a better map.

Even then, one has to ask if this is not a dead-end road. The only way for Pepsico to make money in the food industry is by processing food, and it is surely self-evident by now that processing, a.k.a. innovation - is bad for food. Over one third of the added sugars that Americans consume are from sweetened carbonated beverages such as Pepsi. Healthy food - fresh- from-the-field food, whole-until-the-kitchen food - loses quality with each 'value-adding' innovation process it is subjected to.

A more plausible proposal from a global business was made by IBM's Dr Paul Grundy. The conference responded enthusiastically to his Patient Centered Medical Home. Grundy is one of the world's leading experts on preventive medicine, so he did not come to peddle platitudes. His model integrates phone, e-mail and Web portals to enable one-on-one communication and collaboration between doctors and patients. Each occupant of the Home will enjoy an ongoing relationship with a doctor for continuous and comprehensive care and - the killer line - "we know that somebody who has a personal physician will cost us about a third less".

But a third less than what? The IBM scenario is enticing, but it suffers from two flaws. The first is cost. "A third less" will be welcome to those fortunate people who are employed, or in work, and are therefore insured. But it is likely to be unaffordable for the majority of the US population who need it most. Of course if IBM's share of the pie, and that of highly-paid doctors, were to be removed from the equation, the story would probably be different. But as it stands, the PCMH is for the top 5%, not the bottom 95%.

The bigger drawback, from me, is that the PCMH is about one-to-one connectedness through technology. The secret to health transformation surely lies in the social, embodied, eye-to-eye, breathing-the-same-air kind of connectivity that sustains healthy communities elsewhere in the world.

] 5% health already exists

In Cuba, for example, where food, petrol and oil all have been scarce for 50 years as a consequence of economic blockades, its citizens "achieve the same level of health for only 5% of the health care expenditure of Americans." (SCIENCE, 30 April 2010)

The reasons for this achievement are not magical. A key principle of the Cuban system is that physicians are based in neighbourhoods, not in clinics or hospitals. An estimated 97 per cent of medical care in Cuba is from neighbourhood-based family doctors and community health practitioners. Cuba has one family doctor per 180 inhabitants compared to one per 480 in the US.

Over in New Mexico, Community Health Workers in Project Echo are paid $10 an hour for their work in a highly effective campaign against common diseases such as hepatitis, asthma, and substance misuse. In some of the state's prisons, inmates, after a ten week training course, are proving highly effective health educators to their peers - and they are paid, if I understood the presentation correctly, nothing.

"Doctors", said one development professional at the conference, when describing a project in Africa, "are grossly overemphasised". This speaker told us how maternal deaths of women during childbirth had been reduced by a third following a training programme for traditional birth attendants. Experts, including doctors, had helped to set the training programme up, but most of the direct contact was among the same women as before.

Does one need to live in an impoverished or boycotted state in order to achieve 5% health? No. In Northern countries, too, 5% health care already exists - but for the most part invisibly, or at least uncounted. This is is because value is the so-called social economy is created by caring relationships between people, not by the provision of care by a supplier. Indeed seen through this lens, the vast majority of care takes place away from medical establishments or the presence of professionals.

An example that I gave at the conference concerns dementia care and the Alzheimer 100 project carried out as part of the UK Design Council's social innovation biennial Dott07.

700,000 British citizens suffer from dementia, and 3,000,000 people directly affected as family members and/or carers - and these numbers are expected to double every twenty years. How, people have started to ask, will the government care for them?

The answer is that it won't. It can't. Or at least, it cannot if the words 'care for' are interpreted to mean the complex, high-cost, energy-intensive and institutionally-focused kinds of medical care that are already bankrupting advanced countries. In Dott07, confronted by this realisation, we reframed the words 'care for' and asked, instead: “What practical actions would improve daily life for people with dementia and their carers?”. With that as our reference, we then worked over a two year period with a wide variety of citizens: people with dementia, carers, support and voluntary groups, researchers, doctors, nurses. We used a variety of approaches to determine what the needed practical actions might be at different stages of what we called 'patient journeys'.

From this process emerged a wide variety of anecdotal insights and also, crucially, a shared understanding of what, for people with dementia and their carers, were priorities. The two most pressing priorities for them were first, the awful experiences people have when they first discover they have a problem; and second, end of life experiences. These two issues were both more than twice as important as, for example, assistive technology, or communication campaigns to reduce stigma associated with the condition.

These insights, and understanding of priorities, enabled our project partners to identify a shortlist of service innovation opportunities: a care concierge; a buddy system; and an e-bay for time. The Dott project selected the development of a prototype dementia signposting service to enhance connectivity among existing support ecology. [Since then,this service has been adopted and developed nationally by the UK Alzheimers Society. And the Design Council has launched a new project called Living With Dementia.

The lesson from Cuba, New Mexico, and for that matter from the UK, is that as well as addressing causes rather than effects, community-based health and care is so massively cheaper than its mainstream alternative, and more effective in terms of overall health, that the time has surely come to regard the bottom of the pyramid as the top when it comes to healthcare innovation.

] 5% health by numbers

5% health is not about a u-turn back to a pre-scientific age. It's about reconfiguring the way patients, doctors and researchers relate to each other.

Transformation looks impossibly hard from inside today's official health systems. The prospect of radical change looks more doable outside the tent. Agile, networked knowledge-sharing thrives in the open open source movement, for example, whose vitality is sustained not by money, but by a shared sense of values. One can also look outside the tent in time, as well as place. Open source has much in common with medieval kinship communities . These too were sustained by a duty of care among extended networks of family relationship and reciprocal obligation.

The trick is to combine ancient cultural values with new tools. As an example: The mass polling of patients to determine what actually works among new - and old - approaches. Health geeks at the Mayo conference were confident that "patient-driven hypothesis generation" and "innovation through data liquidity" can achieve quickly what it now takes the academic publishing process years to achieve: put a possible solution out there; then find out from real people if, and how well, it works.

An organisation called Lybba http://www.lybba.org/work/, for example, is developing the platform for a a Collaborative Chronic Care network [C3N] [see also pic below].

C3N will combine social- and idea-networking functions, "remote wellness tools", and medical content. A website such as CureTogether, for example, is already able to ask 6,000 patients, who suffer from anxiety, what treatments work best for each of them. The aggregated results are fascinating: totally free remedies, such as "exercise" or "masturbation", are plotted on the same effectiveness versus cost chart along with commercial drug therapies. The anxious person gets to choose.

Information designer Hugh Dubberly and computer scientist Ian Eslick envisage a time when polling data will be combined with data visualisation and some kind of Facebook of health to help people make better choices about their health and behaviour.

The idea of self-made health data seems to have struck a chord. Among theQuantified Self crowd, for example, 'self-tracking' is growing fast; they use smart-phone apps and assorted custom-built devices to monitor patterns of food intake, sleep, fatigue, mood, and heart rate.

] Me meters - or we meters?

I confess to a slight prejudice against the word "self" here. We-meters, more than me-meters. would help us focus on the community more than the individual. Groups are a better compost for the growth of health alternatives. Too much emphasis on individual behaviour - for example, to eat less bad food - diverts attention to structural factors, beyond the individual's control - such as food deserts.

I may well be mis-representing self-trackers here; they talk as much about the aggregation of data, as about its collection. Besides, an exciting prospect is that crowd-sourcing will be used to create a wide range of resources for alternative health care networks as three basis of a radically decentralised health ecology. Allan Chochinov told us about the Open Prosthetics Project that is already producing useful innovations. Before energy famines begin to impact seriously, we need to finds new ways to produce and distribute the essentials of modern medicine, such as vaccines and antibiotics. There could be mass calls for proposals for ultra low-cost therapies, services, or devices; groups would bid online to meet that need.

] Design grammars for health and care

When we started work on Alzheimer100, we anticipated that the project would deliver a set of design methods and tools. These, we hoped, could be used to improve the experience of patients within the existing health system.

In the event what emerged - for this writer at least - was a realisation that the transition to a 5% health system is less about tools and more about new ways of perceiving the situation. The late David Fielding, in his extraordinary book Lean Logic, calls these new ways of seeing 'grammars'. [page 379]. In that spirit, here follows a first attempt to describe some grammars for the transformation of health care:

a Shift the focus of attention upstream. Health and wellbeing are properties of a social and ecological context in which soil, plant, animal, and man are interconnected in diverse communities and situations. That context needs to be cared for and, if necessary, repaired.

b Health and wellbeing are not something you ‘deliver’, like a pizza. This is no small shift of emphasis. The 'delivery' metaphor is pervasive in today's system - as is the word 'industry'. But those words perpetuate the myth that health is something produced by one set of people [the professionals] for another [their customers].

c Focus on the existing metabolic energy of people - not on the about-to-be-problematic fossil-fuel energy n mainstream medical systems. The good news is that 95% of care happens outside the medical system already; think of those three million Brits people caring for people with dementia today. The raw materials for transformation are already in place.

d Time intensity is bad for bottom lines - but great for ecosystems. [Remember those dementia patients and their carers in Britain? They judged trust between people, built up by co-presence over time, to be twice as important as the ‘delivery’ of services by third party vendors].

e Stop talking about ‘intervening’ in communities.Think of this way: you don't intervene in a garden, you look after it. Care is more about breathing the same air than delivering the right solutions from afar.

f. The same goes for 'making an impact'. By what right do any of us presume to impact on someone else's situation? It sounds like a meteor. 5% health is more about being in an ecosystem, and enhancing existing social energy - than about having an impact on it from above. This is one of the secrets to Cuba's public health success. It has a lot of doctors [one for every 174 citizens, compared to one for every 600 in the UK] - but rather few of them hang out in clinics, or hospitals. Nearly all of them are based in a community.

] Doing what we know we need to do

The many designers present at the conference were thrilled, and rightly, that the Mayo Clinic has established a Centre for Innovation that has design thinking at its core. But there's a danger, amidst the euphoria, that priorities will get skewed.

Yes, good design can improve a patient's experience. Yes, there are many ways that interacting with a doctor, being in a medical facility, or communicating with a service remotely, can be improved. And yes, of course, there's good business to be done in the medical 'space'.

But given the imminence of post peak energy famine; given what we now know about the causes of ill health, such as peak fat; and given that 5% models already exist for effective health: are high-end medical systems really the best place to focus design's creative capacity?

Towards the end of the conference Rebecca Onie asked the key question: "why don't we do what we know we need to do?" in health care.

She's right. Most of the pieces for a profound transformation of the healthcare jigsaw are on the table. What's missing is an evocative source image with which to direct everyone's efforts where the greatest difference can be made. Could this be where designers can make a difference?

The challenge is not a shortage of ideas - crowd-sourced or otherwise. The challenge is a misallocation of resources. Out there in the world, we know what will make a huge difference: localised food systems, clean drinking water, training and resources for community health workers on the ground. ssential, life-saving interventions such as childhood immunization, safe pregnancy and delivery services for mothers, access to treatment for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

This is not to suggest that designers retrain as community health workers en masse. But one thing we could attend to, and now, is that missing source image for the 5% health jigsaw - the one in which communities are at the centre, in their own contexts, and health care experts and support services are located around the edge in a supporting role.

Mayo Clinic has the values to embrace this new picture and make it its own. It is also strong enough to begin growing a sequel system now, rather than waiting until the current one stops working. In the Center for Innovation, the Mayo already has a stepping stone to the solidarity economy in place. I can can absolutely imagine that the Mayo community, given a moment to reflect on what lies ahead, could move to a strategy of what the ecologist David Fleming in Lean Logic describes as "deconcentration" - a radical refocus of the clinical context away from hubs and towards local expertise and self-reliance in context.

COMMENTS: Comments are disabled on this blog as a result of persistent spam attacks. To contact the author please write to: john at thackara dot com

Posted by John Thackara at 05:27 PM

September 02, 2011

World Capital of Wellbeing

Along with 'sustainability', 'wellbeing' is one of those words that is worthy, but hard to sell. Few would disagree that we need more wellbeing and less wasteful consumption - but the word lacks a visceral edge. It conjours up images of a well-run camp-site, or retirement community. Good to have, but not a destination to fight for.

Full marks, then, are due to Aalto University in Helsinki. They have made wellbeing their spearhead project in next year's World Design Capital [WDC] festivities.

[I should disclose I was the guest of Aalto's Wellbeing team last week. I gave a kick-off talk for them on Wellbeing in the Age of Wicked Problems]

In order to bring the subject to life the Aalto team [pictured above] will commission twelve projects jointly with the cities of Helsinki, Espoo, Kauniainen and Lahti. Each project will address such real-world challenges as services to enhance a care home for elderly people; ways to improve the effectiveness of psychiatric care units; how to create smoke-free public environments.

These are early days. The 365 Wellbeing proect will inevitably seem abstract for some months while conversations are nurtured, and projects defined, in the various communities. The first service prototypes are unlikely to emerge before the second half of 2012.

In choosing wellbeing as its theme in WDC Aalto has positioned itself astride a bit of a fault line. It is dawning on some designers in Helsinki that this innocuous word has radical implications for mainstream, business-as-usual, design.

More focus on wellbeing means, for example, less focus on the highly-branded products, services and spectacles that comprise a big part of the design industry's traditional work. Behind its bland exterior [and that of it's equally bland-sounding cousin, happiness] is evidence that wellbeing can be a replacement for - not an additon to - traditional economic activity.

WDC, as a model, was not set up to to explore uncomfortable differences. It was set up to promote design as a good thing in-and-of-itself. This something-for-everyone approach to design festivals no longer makes sense. For example, eighty per cent of the environmental impact of products and services is determined at the design stage; and the great majority of the communications and branding that fuel the ecocidal consumer economy involves input from the design business. Why celebrate those?

If WDC 2012 marks the moment that we stop pretending that all design is marvelous, or even defensible, just because it is design, then great. If Aalto's designers and their city partners discover that wellbeing demands more creative innovation than they anticipated, and pens the way to a vast amount of new work, then better still.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:50 AM

November 02, 2010

Design steps to heaven

I recently visted Luzern, in Switzerland, for a workshop at thethe oldest art and design school in Switzerland, Hochschule Luzern.

My host, Andy Polaine had asked me to set students in the first semester of the MA Design a challenge.

The task I gave them was as follows: find a neglected asset somewhere in Luzern, and design a service to increase its value to the city.

As the workshop began, I assumed that some groups of students would focus on the city's new cultural centre [photo above]. Designed by Jean Novel, the building had taken twenty years to conceive and plan. With an overhanging roof 35m 100 feet) above the ground, the building had cost the city 130 million euros to build.

This was an iconic building with a capital "I". I thought it must surely have potential as the focus of some new kind of civic activity.

But then a strange thing happened. When I asked the students what they thought of their new centre, they pronounced it to be "quite nice" - and hastened on to tell me stories about other features of the city that they had found more engaging to work with.

The first joint winner was called 'Straight way to heaven'.

The team had identified a church as their neglected asset,and proposed to increase its value as a meeting place by opening it up to bouldering in the city.

The group did not expect the church authorities to be thrilled by their idea, but our jury found their service communication to be so engaging that they were made joint winners.

The second winning project in Luzern, Graveyard Alive, was especially enchanting. The group had discovered that the city's Friedhof Cemetary contained a lot of as-yet-unused space.

They came up with a sublime closed-loop service concept: offer people the opportunity to donate their bodies, once buried, as nutrients to save endangered plants and cultivate biodiversity.

The group had already talked with workers in the graveyard [in favour] and identified a leading Swiss seed bank ProSpecieRara to provide the seeds.

The next step is to sign up the first customers....

Bouldering in the City/Straight Way to Heaven was the work of: Christoph Gabathuler, Myriam Gämperli, Erika Frankhauser Schürch and Antonio Russo

Graveyard Alive was the work of: Nadine Bucher, Anete Melece and Dominik Büeler

Posted by John Thackara at 09:29 AM

June 17, 2010

Of apocalypse and forest gardens

Three hundred people came to South Devon in England for the fourth gathering of the Transition Network. They were a modest cross section of the many thousands of people now involved in 330 official Transition initiatives (up from 170 this time last year) and many more less formal groups around the world that are 'mulling over' their participation.

Rob Hopkins' reflection on the event is here. There are numerous blogs about the event here and short videos here and here and here.

As I learned when attending last year's event the transition model 'emboldens communities to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the eye' and addresses the question: 'for all those aspects of life that our community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how are we going to rebuild resilience in response to peak oil, and drastically reduce carbon emissions in response to climate change?'

Although the Transition movement prefers practical steps over abstract analysis, an apocalyptic tone was set on the first day by Stoneleigh's presentation on the financial crisis. In a clinical, even brutal, ninety minute presentation, the co-author of the Automatic Earth blog described the convergence of Peak Oil, and the 'collapse of global Ponzi finance', as 'a perfect storm of converging phenomena that threaten to sink our age of prosperity through wealth destruction, social discontent, and global conflict'.

Stoneleigh told us that the energy crisis and the financial crisis are feeding off each other, and that 'many pension fund assets will be worth pennies on the dollar as soon as extend and pretend can no longer be maintained and there is a serious price discovery event'. Describing the hydrocarbon epoch (the one we're in now) as a 'fleeting interlude in history', she went on to anticipate a 'net energy cliff' and an accompanying deflation - with house prices liable to to fall by 90 per cent.

Now I've followed Automatic Earth (among several other financial blogs) avidly for three years - and I well recall the visceral fear that this story provoked in me when I first read it. Although the financial crisis is abstract, being told one may soon lose all financial security is somehow more shocking than the also existential but even more abstract longer-term menace posed by peak oil and climate change.

Until now the Transition movement has focussed on, peak oil and climate change. For many people hearing Stoneleigh last weekend, her story was unexpected and shocking. A distressed woman in her fifties told me she was was distraught less about her own prospects, than by the fact that both her children had recently taken out large mortgages.

At the Transition gathering, the shock-and-awe of Stoneleigh's talk was followed by three days of supportive and nurturing encounters. A unique feature of Transition's culture is the careful attention it pays to the danger of burnout. A variety of emotional, psychological and spiritual support is available informally and formally - from co-counselling, to wild swimming.

But elsewhere on Stoneleigh's speaking tour many people leaving her talk will do so on their own. One has to question whether a couple of bullet points telling people to 'get out of debt' or 'connnect with your community' is an adequate way to help people deal with this kind of information.

(Later addition: Here is a short film in which Rob Hopkins and Peter Lipman talk about the Stoneleigh lecture.

] Woodland Walk

Luckily I was able next to join the Woodland Walk. Robin Walter, a Chartered Forester, took us up a hill to the top of a burial mound. 'I see trees as contributing a huge amount to Transition' said Robin, 'in the form of materials, fuel, biodiversity, watershed protection, flood mitigation, shelter from severe sun, rain and wind, urban shade and cooling, health benefits, fruits and nuts, forest gardens and agro-forestry, Forest Schools, beautiful places for recreation and amenity. It is also essential that trees are integrated in the wider landscape with farming systems, wildlife and people'.

There followed a discussion as we looked across the countryside for miles in every direction. We learned that that the UK's Forestry Commission has examined the potential of the UK's trees and woodlands to help the country mitigate and adapt to a changing climate. 

It transpired, in our mound-top seminar, that forests could meet 10 percent of UK energy needs according to some scenarios. The problem is that this would be accompanied by a return to monocultural industrialised forestry and the widespread of GM-enhanced and no doubt copyrighted trees. And how long would it be, someone asked, before we once again ran up against peak wood?

It is essential to focus on diversity, and use permaculture principles, our group's experts in holistic agro-forestry explained. The trend is away from nature 'reserves' to managing the 'holistic agro-ecological environment'.

Hedges can be used as rotational crops. Buildings can be made with logs rather than with sawn planks, as in Ladakh. Native trees can be used as herbal remedies and foods. Healthy communities and healthy ecosystems can follow our use and knowledge of woodland.

We moved from the burial mound to a 20 year old coppice. A hectare or two of trees can in principle yield enough energy for a household heating needs - but harvesting the wood can be hard work. Tree-hugging, we learned, on-site, is not an effort-free option.

But supposing one is ready to do the work, how does gain access to a forest? In Transitionland, an answer is never far away: Various groups are setting up Collective Land Action Networks, or CLANs. Citizens buy shares in the CLAN which buys plots from a few acres, to large farms with woodland.

One CLAN, called Lands Roots, plans to open up its plots to Community Supported Agriculture, community gatherings, seasonal celebrations, workshops and courses, including eco-building, green crafts, permaculture. Each share is £250 [euros 300].

] Open Money

I got back from the coppice in time to hear Peter North introduce his brand new book Local Money. Open Money is one of those subjects I've enthused about enthused about in print. But North has spent 14 years traveling the world - from Curitiba to Russia to Venezuela - to learn first-hand how different approaches actually work (or not).

North's book describes in practical ways how people have coped with financial armegeddon in the past. Following economic collapse across the world, communities have often created their own forms of money. Local Money shows how people manage to make it through even when official money disappears.

There's a database of local, open or complementary currencies here.

I pondered whether local money is necessarily hand-made and ultra-local? This being a Transition Towns gathering, I soon met a software designer, Matthew Slater, who is building customisable digital barter money platforms in Drupal. SELs (a European version of Local Economy Trading Scheme) are already being trialled in Belgium (5) France (2) Switzerland (2) and India.

Community Forge as the platform is called, is community currency trading software build on a social networking platform. This means thousands of software developers can set up similar sites, and many of them could easily modify the software. As a popular open source project, the code is very high quality and continually improving.

] Workshop on housing

I then joined a group that had ninety minutes to discuss housing: How to organize and use the space we've already got - and how, using what materials, to build new homes and refurbish 30 million (in the UK) existing ones.

(By now I had realised that the function of Trasition Town encounters is to alert people to the existence of different kinds of knowledge - not to 'solve' complex - and often unsolvable - challenges).

In this spirit, we discussed the need to distinguish between different kinds of co-housing, co-operative housing, and intentional communities. What's needed, we agreed, is an easy-to-understand 'palette' of shared housing models. In our group, a consensus emerged that small private spaces, with one's own front door, around a larger collective space containing shared facilities, seemed right - as is the case in many African villages and Chinese 'Hula" buildings.

Why do planners go on about the 'need' for more and more one person dwellings, someone asked? Why don't planners and policymakers make it easier to share resources, including space? Why indeed. Oil depletion means that these 'needs' are not a long-term option.

But questions of 'ownership' are powerful in the culture - not least because people value tradable assets. Besides, many local councils oppose 'studentification'.

On the plus side, we already have a lot of housing - but it needs to be insulated. Natural materials are not necessarily the greenest insulation choice, we are told. Modern forms of insulation are more efficient that hair from goats, sheep - or humans. Artifical high-tech foams might be energy intensive to make - but would they not be the best thing to spend our remaining energy on?

A cultural battle looms. The best solution is to cover the outside of every home in Britain with ten inches of foam.

A man from England's oldest intentional community told us about his hut made of straw bales, timber offcuts and second hand windows. Others praised the resource efficiency of favelas and shanty towns, where not even a nail is wasted.

'Hopelessly avant garde', said an expert in Saxon building techniques; he wanted Devon County Council's Mineral Planning Committee to reverse policies that undervalue rubblestone.

] Transition in France

I was keen to discover if the Transition model was being, or could be, developed in France, where I live. Twenty people came to a Transiton-France discussion.

It turned out that a number of early stage groups is active in France, and a francophone group in Montreal has built a omprehensive site

Exporting the Transition model in a box to France, or any other country, is not an option, we agreed. For one thing, the array of exiting sustainability and permaculture projects in France is extraordinarily rich. There are possibly more more websites, magazines and events about all things 'developpement durable' in France than in the UK.

On the ground, degrees of resilience already exist in parts of France without the existence of Transition initiatives. France has hundreds of thousands of active local associations; these are a form of social glue that Britain lacks.

The persistence of local food webs is another example. AMAPs (a French version of Community Supported Agriculture) are spreading fast. 'Monnaie locale' is being trialled in several places (see above). There is also a fast-growing debate about economic fundamentals in France in the 'Decroisasance' (De-Growth) movement.

So what are the gaps, that Transition-ness might fill?

What's missing, we concluded, are three things:First, a perceptual framework, a story, that links together peak oil and energy, climate change, and the prospect of a massive financial discontinuity.

Second, France would benefit from a more explicit means to connect together and leverage the multitude of stand-alone projects that are already there.

And third, the Transition model brings with it a degree of incusivity - of cultures, ages and backgrounds - that is uncommon in socially fragmented France.

A meeting of Transition France takes place in Trieves on 27 June.

] The governance of a global movement

The France session prompted me to join a discussion, convened by Gerd Wessling on the last morning, about 'national hubs'.

What forms of governance and organization are needed to help Transition initiatives do well in different countries? (Although the Transition movement is only four years old, some kind of national office has already been established in Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Italy, Netherlands , the USA, Canada, and Japan).

Ben Brangwyn, one of Transition's co-founders, explained that the purpose of Transition Network, its office in Devon, is to 'Inspire, Encourage, Connect, Support, and Train'. It is conceived as a support entity rather than a centre of power and control - still less as a centre that will 'deliver services' to local groups around the world.

The model assumes that support services will be co-created and draw on resources of the parts. The words 're-weaving' and 'connecting' cropped up thoughout our session.

But if the philosophy is one of decentralization and autonomy of local groups, Transition Network has remained responsible until now for determining which aspiring groups become official Transition initiatives. As with Wikipedia, and Open Source software, decentralisation and bottom-upness does not mean no rules at all.

'Translating' the Transition model for adjacent countries and cultures is in any case fraught with difficulty. In Spain, the very word 'Transition' is negatively associated with Franco - and local food, a central focus of the UK movement, denotes poverty and backwardness. In France and The Netherlands, the word 'collaboration' triggers negative memories of the war.

In Scotland, we learn, more people speak Hindi than speak Gaelic.

I was much impressed by the way Transition Scotland has addressed these dilemmas. Transition Support Scotland was set up (with modest Scottish Exzecutive funding) to assist the thirteen Transition initiatives, and many smaller projects; but the words 'national' and 'hub' do not appear in its communications.

What already works well as a scalable model is Transition Training. There are already 60-70 trainers in Germany, for example. We discussed whether the 'worker correspondent' model developed by the Bolsheviks, or the agricultural extension services deployed during the Depression years in the USA, could be a source of further refinement for Transition Training.

PERMACULTURE CONVERGENCE 3-5 September, Lambourne End, Essex
http://www.permaculture.org.uk

BIONEERS AT FINDHORN 30 October to 2 November
http://www.findhorn.org/bioneers

Posted by John Thackara at 09:14 AM

November 06, 2009

Tech push and social pull

I've been reading a special issue of Innovations called "Energy for Change: Creating Climate Solutions" which claims to be "as thorough a survey of energy and climate solutions as has yet been compiled". (I'm not putting a link here because the publisher - naughtily - has changed a contents page into an order page since I wrote about the journal in my newsletter. )

Although authored for the most part by eminent engineers, and published out of Tech Central - MIT - the collection is not wholly about technological solutions. Alongside optimistic papers on electric cars, carbon capture, and nuclear energy, there's also a paper by Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka and of Get America Working, entitled "Engage People, Not Things".

Drayton urges structural changes in the economy on the basis that "it makes no sense to subsidize the use of machines by keeping energy prices low while penalizing the use of labor through payroll taxes".

The collection also includes a trenchant critique of GDP as a measure of economic progress (by Felix Creutzig and Daniel Kammen). "If we keep on measuring an economy predominantly in terms of GDP, we may ignore the fact that its capital base is degrading quickly...as long as natural resources are underpriced, incentives favour the development of technologies that over-exploit them".

But although the scope of the Innovations special issue is broad, its world-view of energy futures is resolutely top-down. These are for the most part push solutions, and the idea of designing patterns of daily life that use less energy overall is given little attention.

A bottom-up, pull-based approach is exemplifed by a new publication out of th Transition Towns movement.

The Chief Executive of Taunton Deane Borough Council, in the UK, asked two transitioners, Chrissie Godfrey and Paul Birch, to work with the council on a series of workshops that would enable workers and elected officials to create their vision of the borough in 2026.

Each of the eleven workshops considered how leading a low carbon lifestyle over the next 17 years could impact on food and energy production, homes, transport, jobs, holidays and leisure. Participants were very mixed: Plumbers, planners, environmental health  officers and car park attendants mixed with senior strategy officers, carpenters, and tree surgeons.  

From that rich mix of backgrounds, skills, interests and political leanings emerged the resulting book, "Towards a resilient Taunton Deane" , that tells a surprisingly consistent story about what a resilient Taunton Deane might be like.

The energy section, for example, describes how, by 2026, "a radical overhaul of the planning system helped local communities to take energy generation into their own hands.  A surge in locally managed 
energy coops has made small scale community heating systems, solar and wind farming and  anaerobic digesters commonplace; solar panels are commonplace on homes, and mandatory on public buildings". However, the book goes on, "it is not just that the Borough is generating so much of its own energy, it is also that people are using far less".

My point here is not that high-tech push is bad, and bottom-up social pull is good. On the contrary: what's needed is more interaction, not less, between the tech-oriented world and the social one.

That said, the power relations have to change. I imagine a world filled with Transition Towns that are linked together in a network of trade routes. These trade routes will be new versions of the camel-bearing ones that predated railways and globalisation.

The merchants will offer a wide variety of (inter alia) energy solutions. But it will be for each Town (or cluster thereof) to decide which ones to choose.

Posted by John Thackara at 02:17 PM

July 29, 2009

From philanthrocapitalism to an eco-social economy

This scary hand smashing through the wall to get you is the logo of last month’s Insead conference on social entrepreneurship; its slogan was “Reaching For Impact”.

I’ve written critically here before about the assumptions that underly “design for development” - so I won’t repeat the whole argument. And as I said here we are all emerging economies now. So let’s just say that I’m troubled about the term “design for social impact” when the desired impact is on someone else’s turf, not on the designer’s own.

The language of Nesta’s new “Re-boot Britain” programme also strikes me as off-key: a complex society in transition is not best imagined as a faulty machine.

But both social impact, and rebooting, are thin-blooded when compared to the concept of “philanthrocapitalism” that’s celebrated in a new book. It chronicles a new generation of "social investors" that is using big-business-style strategies and “expects results and accountability to match”. The philanthrocapitalists, a web of wealthy, motivated donors who have “set out to change the world” include Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, George Soros, Angelina Jolie, and Bono, among others.

The project of philanthrocapitalism is not incoherent, and the way they work is often transparent and well organized. The Gates Foundation, for example, seems to bevery professionally run. My doubts concern the assumptions that underly the philanthrocapitalists' key aim, which is to provide capital to the large number of informal micro-enterprises that account for nearly half of GDP in low income countries (compared to just 13 percent in rich countries). The propositon is that low-income countries typically suffer from a "missing middle" in which “poor access to inputs” leaves “a massive economic gap in small and medium-sized enterprises.”

The "missing middle" is a real enough problem - but it won't, for me, best be filled by the imposition of a capital-intensive and growth-oriented economy – the economy, in other words, that we have now.

A new publication from The Young Foundation in the UK, Social Venturing, describes a different kind of economy – a social economy – that is more socially and informationally intensive than capital intensive.

Social ventures have a huge gap to fill. In the UK - admittedly an extreme case - state spending on public services is likely to shrink by a staggering 20-40 percent in the coming years as the bill for the financial bailout comes due.

In the coming social economy, the role of national governments in countries like the UK will unavoidably change, and radically - away from the point-to-mass delivery of centrally-produced and paid-for services: hospital operations, kilowatts of electricity, or welfare payments to those qualifying for them.

For a whole range of problems, the Young Foundation authors argue, this mass delivery model is ill-suited. “It finds it difficult to deal adequately with difference and complexity, or with conditions or situations that are difficult to routinise”.

The study of living systems suggests models of how a social economy will work, they write. But a social economy will still depend on some technology. Distributed networks will be used intensively. Relationships will be sustained by the intensive use of broadband, mobile and other means of communication.

But a social economy will be radically less resource-intensive than the one we have now. There is an emphasis on collaboration and on repeated interactions, on care and maintenance - rather than one-off consumption, commodified transactions, or too much focus on fixed assets.

A key ingredient in a social economy is “relational capital”. This is both the knowledge and trust built up between a venture and its users and suppliers, and the relationships between a venture and its staff and circle of volunteers.

Conventional accounting takes little account of this intangible capital, yet in all social ventures it is the foundation of their strength and of their distinctiveness.

For social ventures, writes Robin Murray, “there is rarely a steady state, rather the shaping and reshaping of a cloud”.

I know from long experience that shaping clouds can be demanding, and is best not done alone. A key role in the social economy will therefore be played by new kinds of places, platforms and organisations that enable people to connect and coordinate with each other more easily and convivially than is possible now.

These places are already being prepared, as is shown by the enthralling growth of The Hub. This remarkable social enterprise - a global community of people from every profession, background and culture – is creating places on four continents that enable access to space, resources, connections, knowledge, experience and investment.

In addition to places and platforms like The Hub, time and trust are also core values of a social economy. Relational capital grows slowly. It takes time for people to know and trust each other. This process cannot be rushed.

The centrality of time in a social economy raises hard questions about philanthrocapitalism and its “big-business-style strategies”. Time is seldom allowed for, let alone paid for, in an efficiency-minded corporation. One has to question whether a rules-based approach to organisation, with its its “demand for results”, and accountability to the centre, is best-suited to social venturing.

As Robin Murray puts it, “The distributed systems of a social economy handle complexity not by standardisation and simplification imposed from the centre, but by distributing complexity to the margins – to households and service users and in the workplace to the local managers and workers.

“Those at the margins have what those at the centre can never have – a knowledge of detail, the specificity of time, of place, of particular events".

All this is exciting stuff. But the social economy, as described in these publications, has one crucial limitation: it’s too human-centric.

A social economy, by definition, is an economy by and for human beings. It does not embrace the idea that looking after natural ecosystems, and the biosphere as a whole, needs to become the starting point, the raison d’etre, of sustainable economic activity.

With the coming of the social economy, many positive developments, that have been brewing for decades, begin to converge. But it is only half the story…

Danger and opportunity: crisis and the new social economy, by Robin Murray

Social venturing, by Robin Murray, Julie Caulier-Grice and Geoff Mulgan is published by The Young Foundation.

Posted by John Thackara at 02:08 PM | Comments (1)

May 08, 2009

Doctors with iPhones

I've been back from New York a week and I'm still mesmerised by the story of Hello Health. Tamara Giltsoff, a service designer, introduced me to this wondrous new outfit who are making it easy again to see the doctor.

The Hello Health website tells the story better than I can, so I'll quote it direct: “Once upon a time, going to your doctor was simple. You knew his first name, or perhaps just called him ‘Doc’. He lived just down the street and made house calls. And if you were sick, you would see him that day, because, well, you were sick.

"Then things started to change. Although medicine has made some amazing advances in keeping us healthy, we now have to contend with dietitians, insurance premiums, running shoes, deductibles, HMOs, OTC drugs, specialists, fat-free salad dressing, and therapists. Daunting, isn't it?"

The beauty of Hello Health is that the internet, and all things Web 2.0, are deployed to *increase* contact between patient and doctor. As Jay Parkinson, one of the doctors behind the service, explains, "I'm a housecall physician; I use the internet as a supplement to a primary visit".

The service has been created principally for people who are working, but uninsured. It replaces the common experience in which one would go to a walk-in clinic and sit waiting for three hours before seeing a doctor for five minutes. Often, one would never see that doctor again.

Hello Health combines the virtues of the old-fashioned neighbourhood doctor with new tech platforms. “We love technology, the Internet, and especially our iPhones”, says Parkinson; “You can talk to us like you're talking to a friend: through emails, texts, phone calls, instant messages, or face-to-face conversations". It also helps that Hello Health doctors are close by, living and working in the neighborhood.

The patient accesses the service through a Facebook-like interface whereon she can make appointments and answer pre-consultation questions. Thereafter, everything is available online. Myca the platform that supports the whole thing, shows evidence of some great interaction design: it looks great and is clearly easy to use. (I would like to know more about this design story, please).

For years and years, top-down, doctor-centric, technology-focused projects have wasted scandalous amounts of money to achieve pretty much nothing. In the UK's National Health Service alone, billions of euros (the published figure is two, the likely total is 15 billion or much more) have been spent in endless attempts to centralise patient medical records. These projects failed because turf-wars between professionals and managers in different parts of the country remained unresolved, and because vast bloated systems were commissioned by technology-bewitched politicians from huge consulting firms.

A similar phenomenon persists in Obama's USA. Obama has said he will appropriate $20 billion dollars to the health care industry to encourage widespread adoption of electronic medical records. "While this sounds like a phenomenal idea, it’s not" says Parkinsion. "This is about as good an idea as throwing money at advancing the technology found in the Commodore 64". His blog includes this clunky example of what Big Medicine currently asks doctors to use:

It's a ghastly sight, indeed, compared to the HelloHealth interface.

Hello Health is like a sunny spring morning after the long dark winter of official attempts to reform health systems.

But the root cause of these colossal failures was that the special interest groups who owned the projects neither knew nor cared about the quality of relationships between doctors and patients.

In Hello Health, so far as one can see, the quality of that relationship is the main motivator of the people involved.

There remain some legal issues to be resolved to do with online diagnoses. But as an example of social innovation in practice, the whole thing is inspiring. To cap it all, Hello Health’s principal communication platform is a video on YouTube

Posted by John Thackara at 07:52 PM | Comments (1)

May 03, 2009

With the iBorg in New York

The May edition of Doors of Perception Report (our monthly email newsletter) is now available
here

Posted by John Thackara at 07:34 PM

April 17, 2009

Velowala: ternary thinking in practice

Naomi Klein writes in today's Guardian that "hope alone won't save the world. It's time to hope less, and demand more".

I'm not sure. I find Klein's piece enervating. Will demanding things from mainstream politicians like Obama be more productive than waiting hopefully for them to save us? I don't think so.

My mood is lightened by John Michael Greer. He suggests that the time may be ripe to change the question. "Oversimplifying reality into two rigid categories is probably the most pervasive source of failed thinking in the modern world", he writes. "Rather than limit ourselves to a choice between two unpromising alternatives - “capitalism” and “socialism” - why not look at different frameworks, such as distributism.

Distributism. Right. Having paused to find out what distributism is, or was I return to find Greer writing about another novelty: the Druid notion of ternary thinking. "The basic practice is that when you encounter any classification of the world into two and only two sides (we call this a binary), think of a third option that isn't simply a compromise between them. With practice you get very good at noticing the blind spots that make binary thinking seem to make sense. Yes, you can then go on to look for a fourth, fifth, etc.!"

So I need to practice ternary thinking. Well, it's market day here in Ganges so my first practice session will be to ponder, as I transit between the cheese stall and the bread stall, how much our market is embryonic of a "distributist" economy - and what might be added to make it more so.

My first stop in looking for ideas will be Velowala. One of my all-time favourite websites, I now realize that Velowala is an amazing source of ideas for budding distributist entrepreneurs:

Posted by John Thackara at 07:49 AM | Comments (2)

March 16, 2009

Collaborative Services: Social Innovation and Design for Sustainability

"What is a sustainable lifestyle? What will our daily lives become if we agree to change some of our routines? How do we reduce our environmental impact without lowering our living standards?" A new book, edited by Francois Jegou and Ezio Manzini (with a chapter by me in it) attempts to answer some of these questions. Collaborative Services: Social Innovation and Design for Sustainability suggests a variety of scenarios: Car-sharing on demand, micro-leasing system for tools between neighbours, shared sewing studio, home restaurant, delivery service between users who exchange goods… The scenarios looks at how these kinds of daily life activities could be performed by structured services that rely on a greater collaboration of individuals amongst themselves.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:16 PM

March 15, 2009

Mr Green Collar Jobs goes to the White House

Van Jones, the founder of Green For All who I met last month in Los Angeles has been appointed Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the Obama White House.

Working with the Council on Environmental Quality, Jones will help to shape the new Administration’s energy and climate initiatives with a specific interest in improvements and opportunities for vulnerable communities.

Green aspects of Obama's recovery package will put billions of dollars on the table to repair the economy and restore its environment. Jones' job, in his words, is to "ensure those dollars travel the long way from the signing ceremony, through various levels of government, to get to communities across America. There are a thousand ways that folks from disadvantaged communities could be left out and left behind".

I'm not aware of anyone in Europe who explicitly connects green innovation with work for disadvantaged communities to the extent that Jones has done. Proof that the organisation he founded, Green For All, is more inclusive than many environmental groups is that has grown in just 14 months to become a national organization with 32 staff members, a multi-million dollar annual budget, and an online network of 70,000 people.

I was concerned, when I first heard Jones refer to "green collar jobs", that his idea was retrain an army of unemployed auto workers to retrofit expensive solar panels to poor peoples' roofs. But the Green For All site lists a lot of urban food and community development activities as well. And as Jones himself cautions,"the green economy cannot be built with solar sweat shops and Wal-Mart wind farms".

Green For All's most notable achievement was to secure $500 million from the federal government to support green job training programs across the country. These funds were an important part of President Obama's Recovery and Reinvestment Act ”To be successful, the green justice forces need to be able to work from the bottom-up and the top-down” Jones states today. “Now we will be much better able to - on both fronts”.

Jones is succeeded as CEO of Green for All by Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:05 AM | Comments (1)

March 04, 2009

The innovator next door

McKinsey&co has published a book called What Matters. It contains "answers to ten big questions, whose answers will shape our collective future". I conributed a short text called "The innovator next door" . I know the title sounds rather like A Little House On The Prairie - especially compared to some of the grand ideas espoused by other contributors - but I'm trying to carve out a market as an expert in the re-localisation space. If you want to help me in this quest - or would relish an opportunity to put the boot in to my parochialism - please post a comment on their blog: it will demonstrate that I am not alone in McKinseyland.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:30 AM

December 03, 2008

From mega, to micro: What You Can Do With the City

The atmosphere at last week's Megacities conference in Delft was subdued. I don't suppose my own talk, which ploughed a similar path to the Debt, Diesel and Dämmerung narrative I mentioned yesterday, helped lighten the mood very much.

Spirits were low because it is becoming clear that mega solutions of any kind - whether or not they are desirable - will be extremely hard to sell, let alone launch, for the forseeable future. Given that our host venue, TU Delft, is Europe's degree zero for mega-solutions, glum faces were to be expected.

So it was especially cheering when, the next day, Martien de Vletter (its Dutch co-publisher) gave me the brand new catalogue of an inspiring exhibition has just opened at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Actions: What You Can Do With the City.

The show features 99 actions that have the potential to trigger positive change in contemporary cities. The seemingly common activities, that feature walking, playing, recycling, and gardening, show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city - and challenge fellow residents to participate.

The project website includes projects by a diverse group of "human motors of change". They include architects, engineers, university professors, students, children, pastors, artists, skateboarders, cyclists, root eaters, pedestrians, municipal employees.

The 99 actions touch on the production of food, and possibilities of urban agriculture; the creation of public spaces to strengthen community interactions; recycling of abandoned buildings for new purposes; the use of the urban fabric as a terrain for play such as soccer, climbing, skateboarding, or parkour; alternate uses of roads for walking, or of rail lines as park space.

Actions is curated by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini, with Lev Bratishenko, Meredith Carruthers, Daria Der Kaloustian, and Peter Sealy. The catalogue, which I warmly commend, contains case studies and short texts on most of the featured interventions.

Posted by John Thackara at 12:22 PM

October 10, 2008

Redemption

I'm sorry, but if I hear one more "expert" on the box describe the financial crisis as "psychological" I'm going to barf. I also heard a French commentator today blame "the redemption factor" - which sounds biblical, but apparently refers to the price being put on that huge red chunk of the pyramid (see story above) which seems to represent eight hundred times global GDP.

Norrie C at The Guardian explains that what's unwinding is "the mathematically flawed system of debt-based, fiat, Fractional Reserve Banking which is predicated on indefinite exponential growth. That is growth in debt, population, industrial activity, consumption of energy, consumption of raw materials, production of waste, production of pollution, destruction of the biosphere".

Continuous, relentless exponential growth of the above list is simply not possible indefinitely - and the end of indefinitely is what seems to be happening now.

The fiscal model is fatally flawed, Norrie explains, because "you need a relentless, geometric increase in debt for there to be enough money in the money supply to pay back all the capital and interest when only the capital was ever created. The debt-based Fractional Reserve Banking system is killing itself, our savings and our planet".

This is a disgrace, and somebody should do something about it.

But personally I've made a killing out of the crisis this week. On Monday, in Brighton, Andre Viljoen gave me my first Lewes Pound:

This new complementary currency is designed to encourage demand for local goods and services and thereby to help build resilience to the rising costs of energy, transport and food.

It's intended to be used alongside pounds Sterling - but I couldn't help noticing that LPs are selling at a healthy premium on eBay:

In other words, my global holdings in complementary currencies (one Lewes Pound) have gone up fourteen times in a single week.

I've only got one Lewes Pound, and I'm hanging on to it. Or will someone out there will make me a good offer? What shall we say: a kilo of gold for it?

Posted by John Thackara at 08:21 AM

September 30, 2008

Design for social impact

I was critical, at the time it was announced, of a plan by the Rockerfeller Foundation to convene a meeting about Design for Development. Their starting point was “to bring together the world’s best designers with people and organizations that work on the world’s most important and complex problems” – an objective that struck me as being too designer-centric, and too uncritical of the notion of “development”.

A report of the meeting (at the Foundation's gorgeous-looking Bellagio Center) has now been published - and I have to say that my misgivings persist. The project has acquired a macho new title - “Design for Social Impact” - and there are repeated references to “the social sector” as if society, in all its complexity, is best understood as a market for design services. (The language used here reminds me of time I heard a senior person from Cisco talk about “the sustainability space”.) It is also assumed throughout the report that ‘the social sector’ contains only NGOs – whereas, for a lot of critics, NGOs are as much a part of the development problem as they will be part of any solution.

Most uncomfortable of all, for me, is that nowhere in the report can I find one single mention of the lessons design might learn from other cultures.

I'm going on about this because an eminent participant told me the meeting would "influence how hundreds of millions of dollars of aid money are spent." It's fine for designers to discuss these things, but candidly I don't think a single dollar should be spent helping designers make a "social impact" on places and cultures they know very little about.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:44 PM | Comments (4)

September 16, 2008

Work/Life balance

In January, as I do every year, I resolved to balance work and life in a more mature way. It's now September 16th, and....well, we're not quite there yet.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:19 PM | Comments (1)

March 08, 2008

Dott 07 wrap event

Before we close the doors at Dott 07 for the last time, the final Dott 07 Explorers Club will take place in Newcastle on Wednesday 12 March. We will look back at Dott projects and discuss: what did we learn? and what happens next? We'll have updates from the community design projects, including news from the Eco Design Challenge. There will be a special session on Our Cyborg Future? We'll also debate what design schools are doing (or not) for sustainability. The evening will close with a debate on future opportunities for design innovation as North East England makes the transiton to a one planet economy. News on the next Dott (somewhere else in the UK) will also be announced. This is your last chance to enjoy (with us) the fabulous space of the Robert Stephenson Centre. Spaces are limited due to fire regulations so you need to book your place. To do this please email susan.lowthian@dott07.com with Explorers Club in the subject line. See you there!

Posted by John Thackara at 02:57 PM

October 21, 2007

Why our design festival has no things in it

The house is cold, someone keeps turning the lights off, and the greywater toilet is blocked again.

As a way of life, sustainabilty often sounds grim. The media don't help: they tell us we have to consume our way to redemption. The shopping pages are filled with hideous hessian bags; and ads that used to be placed by double-glazing cowboys now feature wind turbines, and solar roofs.

Adding mental discomfort to the mix, politicians scold our bad behaviour as if we were children dropping litter. And preachy environmentalists expect us to feel guilty when we fail to embrace their hair-shirted future with joy.

Could one planet living be made desirable, better than what we have now? I think it can, and I have evidence to prove it. For the last 23 months Designs of the time (Dott 07) has explored what life in a sustainable region (North East England) could be like, and how design can help us get there.

The results of our efforts are on show at the Dott 07 Festival, on the banks of the River Tyne in Gateshead, which opened last week (and ends on 29 October). [Dott 07 is a project of the Design Council and the regional development agency One North East. Doors of Perception was responsible forprogramme direction].

Although Dott 07 is a design event, it is not filled with shiny products. The Festival's main exhibits are not things, but people - people who've been busy exploring practical ways to live better, more modern lives with less stuff.

One example is the UK’s biggest urban farming project in Middlesbrough. Three weeks ago, 8,000 citizens celebrated a bountiful harvest of fruit and vegetables grown in municipal flower beds, allotments, roadside verges, and skips, all over town. 2,500 people at the Middlesbrough celebration ate a town meal based on recipes created by pro and am chefs in communal kitchens.

The main contribution of designers was to make visible, and connect together, people, knowledge, and resources that for the most part were already there. An "Edible Middlesbrough" map, on show at the Dott Festval, was commissioned by the town as an action plan for the years ahead. Uniquely for a development plan, the map highlights flows of food rather than rivers of traffic.

The Dott Festival also features Year 8 students re-designing an aspect of their school. A year ago, more than 80 schools in the region responded when Dott 07 posed them two questions: "how big is your school's carbon footprint?"; and, "what design steps would it smaller?".

Partcipating students had to find ways to measure resource flows in their school: how much water is used, how waste is dealt with, how pupils get to school, where their food comes from. These numbers, represented in 3d graphics, gave them insight into how their school was performing as a system.

Phase 2 was to design ways to make these systems more efficient. The students had help from professional designers and architects, but many turned out to know as much about the issues as the experts - and some students went out and talked to local businesses in a kind of reverse education process.

Another Dott 07 project, called Move Me, looked for ways to improve transport provision in Scremerston, a small rural community in Northumberland. The idea was to identify un-met transport needs and then design ways to use exsting public and private transport resources in a radically more efficient way to help people to get around.

At one level, Move Me was about ride-sharing, which is not such new ideas. But ride-sharing - in common with all schemes to share resources and time - is bedevilled by issues of trust and security: how do you ensure that the stranger sharing your commute to work is not a psycopath?

The breakthrough, in Move Me, was the realisation that, when a sharing service is co-designed by the ctizens who will use it, many of these trust and security issues can be resolved without major effort.

Less stuff, more people. The patterns of daily life emerging from Dott 07 rely more on social solidarity than on fancy buildings, or shiny objects. The contribution of design is to make it easier for people to help and support each other in ways that bring material benefit in the immediate term.

A Dott project called Low Carb Lane, for example, looked for ways to make being energy efficient affordable for poorer people, not just a lifestyle choice for the well-to-do. Our homes are responsible for one third of total greenhouse gas emissions, and small changes can have a big impact. But for people on low incomes, investing thousands of pounds on insulation, new boilers, or solar panels, is simply not an option.

The solution developed by Dott's designers, live|work, is a financial service called SaverBox. A package of energy-saving measures, such as loft and cavity wall insulation, make someone's home cheaper to run, and greener - but the occupier does not have to make a large up-front investment. Instead, each month, the household pays off the cost of the insulation at a rate less than the energy savings that are generated by the insulation. The SaverBox scheme can be replicated nationwide using the existing structure of Credit Unions.

A less stuff more people spirit informs another Low Carb Lane outcome, the proposed NorthEast Energy Service Co-operative, or NESCO. NESCO is the prototype of a not-for-profit energy utility: it would work for the benefit of its members by putting them in control of their energy use, encourage energy efficiency, and make energy payment processes transparent.

Dott 07 projects have addressed basic aspects of daily life: food, schools, transport, energy. The idea is not to dream up global solutions to the challenge of one planet living but, on the contrary, to provide practical benefits for real people in a specific situations.

The tools, methods, models and services developed for one context during Dott are available to be adapted, scaled up, and multiplied by others. Whenever small steps taken by Dott 07 look like succeeding, even in part, others can quickly follow suit - only better, and faster.

This model of change gives governments a clearer task, too. They can stop hectoring us about personal behaviour change and concentrate, instead, on removing obstacles to change and creating incentives for the mass social innovation that wll be the basis for a sustainable society and economy.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:59 AM

April 24, 2007

How to live well - but lighter

For three years now Doors has been involved in a Europe-wide project called EMUDE (it stands for "Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions". That's European research for you!). A network of design schools, acting as 'antennas', has collected examples of social innovation in a wide variety of contexts. Many of these seem to be more resource-efficient than conventional ways of organising daily life. The photograph above, for example, is community-supported agriculture in practice. Town dwellers don't just buy direct from local producers; they also help with the planting and harvesting.

Yes, such examples are on the edge of the known world for many urbanites. Our propositon is that these fringe examples may be the harbinger of wider scale social transformation to come. You may judge for yourself how representative these signs are in Creative Communities, the book of Emude, that has just been published. Edited by Anna Meroni and a team at Milan Polytechnic, Creative Communities is available to download. (It's a heavy file, but worth the wait).

Most of the people and institutions involved in EMUDE are also connected informally to an ongoing project called Sustainable Everyday. François Jégou was the co-producer with Ezio Manzini of an exhibition by the same name that has featured twice at Doors events in India.

The picture that emerges is of a ‘multi-local city…a city in the shape of a network of places endowed with totally new characteristics” - in particular, a tendency towards new models of sustainable urban living: "solidarity purchase groups", "community based agriculture", "urban vegetable gardens" and so on.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:23 AM

April 15, 2007

How the rich get ... greener

I was looking for some data about the environmental impact of aviation and came across some good news! A website for us super-rich green folk called Helium lists luxury travel and real estate companies that promote eco-friendly travel. "You can spend over a $1,000 per night and sleep comfortably in the knowledge that you're not trashing the environment" says Helium. The picture, for example, shows the ultra-luxury fly-fishing destination Papoose Creek where they "plant ten new trees for every guest that visits". We can fly there in the G4 (common people would call it a Gulfstream 400 ) with an easy conscience, too. With the help of TerraPass, Helium calculated the cost to offset carbon dioxide emissions when flying in a private jet. "We were surprised to find it costs less than 1% of the flying cost per hour to fly carbon neutral. We reviewed ten popular jets in four categories and found the cost to fly carbon neutral ranges from $7 to $60 an hour — a minuscule amount when flying private costs $2,000 to $13,000 an hour. For less than $10,000, you can offset 200 hours in a Falcon 2000, a 10-seat jet that costs more than $25 million".

Posted by John Thackara at 06:54 PM

February 18, 2007

An angel called Pradsa

Are you shaping the tools or techniques that help other people shape their world? There is no job description for what you do. You mix dedication to social change, confidence with people and organisations, and technical knowledge or skills. You are part of a growing number of committed
people using innovation and ICT to help others work on social and political issues. PRADSA (Practical Design for Social Action) is running a series of workshops around the UK to share best practice amongst people with your hybrid interests and skills.If you are working, however informally, in this area please contact Catherine, by email at:
C.M.Parkinson@lboro.ac.uk.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:56 PM

November 16, 2006

Recombinant innovation

"As 18-month-old Alexander Barham was wheeled into intensive care, his survival depended on the expertise of the medical specialists all around him and, in no small part, on the split-second precision of the Ferrari Formula One motor racing team". A gripping story in the Telegraph describes how a major restructuring of the patient handover procedure resulted from the input of the F1 pit technicians. Surgeons at a London childrens hospital became aware of the similarities between the handover disciplines from theatre to intensive care and what they saw in the pit of a Formula One racing team. Their complex and life-critical process involves coupling a bewilderment of tubes to drug supply, ventilation and monitoring equipment above the young patient's head. The story describes how Ferrari's race technical director Nigel Stepney helped the hospital team improve the procedure. Stepney comments in the story: "It takes a long time to establish a (pit) team. We have twenty-odd people working together for four to six years to get a routine which lasts little more than four seconds. They work round the clock, every day, with ever-changing personnel, so what they need is a formula to work to."

I heard about this story from Lynne Maher, who leads the Innovation Practice programme at the National Health Service Institute for Innovation and Improvement. We share a fascination with the transfer of solutions from one context to another. Many designers these days are inspired by biomimicry to avoid re-inventing wheels that nature has already invented. But the transfer of practical knowledge from one man-made domain to another remains an under-exploited source of innovation for designers. Projects like Anil Gupta's Honeybee Network inspired us at the first Doors East back in 2000, but there's a lot more creative scavenging to be done out there. If you have your own favourite example, please share it with us.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:57 AM

October 19, 2006

The "social purpose space"

Having just read Heat (see below) I arrived in a sober mood in Beijing for what people said was the first social innovation conference.

Gerard Lemos, in his welcome, reminded us of our moral duty to be optimistic. Thereafter, forty five lectures made for a gruelling programme, but things do look brighter at the event's conclusion.

The Beijing conference confirmed that although we have a lot to do, we are not starting from scratch. Social innovation is all around us. There is vast opportunity for us to amplify, improve and accelerate a transition to new ways of living which is already under way.

Several Chinese speakers combined remarkable candour about their own situation with a disinclination to cast blame at the West. One referred to his country's irresponsible exploitation of resources for short-term benefits.

He was too polite to add that countries like the UK have contributed 15% of total emissions now present in the atmosphere. The main way we have 'improved' is by outsourcing a lot of pollution to countries like China. The resource efficiency per head of citizens in the West is in any case dreadful. According to the New Scientist (quoted by Matt Prescott ) the ecological footprint of the average American has increased in the last ten years by the same amount as the entire footprint of the average Chinese citizen.

It makes one cringe to recall the sanctimonious complaints about development in China and India still made by some Western environmentalists.

But back to the plus side. The social purpose space that we discussed in Beijing is a huge business opportunity. Health, care, learning - and climate reduction - already represent 30 per cent of most economies.

Redesigning them to be equitable, and sustainable, seems a daunting task. But how how fast will things move, pondered Ezio Manzini, when a billion entrepreneurial Chinese with mobile phones turn their attention to this market?

This is not a hypothetical development. Senior Chinese policy makers told us that they are looking to develop a “fundamental transformation of our economic growth model”. Others talked of a "campaign for a new countryside".

Geoff Mulgan, joint organiser of the conference, and co-author of Social Silicon Valleys, agreed that profound transformations are under way. "Transformations in concepts, theory and language are leading to new new social models, and new ways to create value", he said.

Some of these new models are combinations of elements drawn from different times and cultures. The Open University, for example, drew on experiments in 1950s Russia, and ideas about distance learning developed years later in the US.

Today, too, we need to scavenge widely in other cultures and eras.

My own contribution was to argue that social innovation and technology innovation are not discrete domains. We need to reframe social innovation as the driver of technology innovation, not as an alternative.

This can be a win:win realignment. A lot of technology innovation is driven by imaginary futures. These wished-for futures are often culturally impoverished; many predictions made for technology are wildly optimistic; and many of the unexpected rebound effects of technology-push can be devastating.

Social innovation, by contrast, is driven by practical, step-by-step responses to real and present needs. Reality checks (does this work?) are a real-time feature of the social innovation process.

Huge savings will be made saved when proposals for technology research are passed first first through a filter of social need.

I also explained what we hope to achieve with Designs of the time (Dott 07). In the context of China, Dott 07 has a teeny footprint. The North East of England is one of 250 regions in Europe, and these sit beside more than 500 cities in China which have populations of a million or more.

But we live in age of tipping points. It was evident in Beijing that many of our fellow regions and cities are asking the same question - “how do we want to live?” - and taking actions to answer it.

There is enormous potential to share and adapt new approaches to issues we all face, such as resource allocation. We can help each other figure out how to design services and infrastructures that will be delivered by multiple partners. And new business models are bound to emerge from new and unexpected quarters.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:38 AM

October 03, 2006

Creative class fights back

Two steps forward, one step back. In 2003 I gave a lecture called The Post-Spectacular City at a conference in Amsterdam. I argued that today’s “creative class”, having optimised the society of the spectacle, will be remembered for leaving behind narcissistic but meaningless cities. The talk was later included in a book called Creativity and the City that was published by the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi). So, did my devastating critique change the course of urban design and development? Well, not exactly. A new show celebrating The Spectacular City has just opened at....the NAi.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:34 PM

September 03, 2006

Service as a journey

Is service design the next big thing after e-everything? If the recent surge in books and conferences is a guide, service design is at least a meme – if not yet a mania.

The trouble is, it can’t possibly be new. Seventy percent of the UK economy is ‘services’, for goodness sake, so someone must have designed them. Service designers look foolish when they claim to be inventing a new profession.

What’s new is an interest in existing public services as potential subjects of re-design. “All service organisations need to find new ways of connecting intimately with their users and customers” say Sophia Parker and Joe Heapy, in a new booklet. They’ve written down a set of service design principles that offer "fresh approaches to organisations seeking to close the gap what they do, and what people want and need”.

Do such virtuous organisations exist? The Italians have a great word – “managerialita” – for the obsession with process and targets that so mesmerise politicians and officials. I recently started working with the UK public sector for the first time in thirteen years. The application to what is basically a cultural project (Dott 07) of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), evaluation protocols, and risk assessment has been, to be frank, bizarre. The fact that everyone around me finds this stuff to be normal is almost as scary as the stuff itself.

Worse is to come. New Labour has swallowed whole and undigested the notion of a ‘self-service’ economy - and its bastard offspring, 'e-govenment' - that have been peddled by old-paradigm business professors and ICT firms like Microsoft. “Government will take swift advantage of new technologies as they emerge” trills a Cabinet Office paper on “transformational government”.”Over the next decade, the principal preferred channels for the delivery of transactional services will be the internet, telephone and mobile…”.

Mark these words: “Preferred” means peferred by government and its ICT suppliers, not by normal people. In countless surveys at least 80 percent of citizens say they prefer to communicate with human beings, not with machines.

If the future is about how citizens and service staff can work together and help each other, as Parker and Heapy propose, then the clunky, automated, expensive and top-down e-government threatened by Bill and Tony will be an obstacle to that future, not a support.

The authors interviewed 50 organisations for the book. They sought out organisations "that seek to close the gap between what they do, and what people want and need”. Their conclusion: successful services are rooted in “empathy, support, and dialogue”. “Spreadsheets are no substitute for people” sthey write; “It is not commodified products or services that we want, it is support”.

The book sets itself a tough challenge: persuading the bean counters and control freaks in government that empathy, support, and dialogue are meaningful indicators of success. Mindful that New Labour is usually impressed by business, most of the book’s exemplars are private providers of health, money, food, and communications - firms like BUPA, first direct, Pret a Manger, Tesco, Orange. Performance metrics exist – in the form of stock price - for these private firms. For example, investors received a 52 percent higher return over five years from shares in companies that make high investment in training.

Parker and Heapy propose a fresh set of building blocks that they hope will enlighten policy makers to new possibilities for change. They write about the 'touchpoints', 'journeys', 'channels', 'service environments' and 'architectures' of a service. These items, they propose, can be thought of as things to be re-designed.

But a new kind of design. As the book says, “As customers of an airline, we are more likely to remember something about the brand from our interactions with cabin staff than we are from looking at the design work on the tailfin.”

The mistake would be to imagine that designers shoud take it upon themselves to lead public service reform, unasked. Empathy, listening and co-creation are more important than abstract ‘creativity’ and from-the-front leadership. These qualities do not receive much emphasis in design education, nor in the business models of the design industry. Both need to evolve.

This is a well-written, insightful and important text. I just hope its impact is not diminshed by the arcane title. I can imagine more exciting destinations than a ‘journey to the interface’. And being ‘connected to reform’ is hardly a turn–on. Ghastly buzzwords also intrude from time to time in a generally clear narrative. What on earth is “channel migration” for example?

Right at the end of the book I realised that this insider language may have been left in the book as bait to entice its intended readership. A concluding Agenda of Action is addressed, by name, to The Treasury, The Cabinet Office, ‘Delivery Departments’ (which I think means ministries), The Audit Commission, Local Authorities, and service delivery organisations. If the mention of channel migration turns this bunch on to service design, then these rare crime against language may turn out to have been justified.

A better if more vulgar title would have been: “Six Secrets of Successful Service”. A large commercial publisher should commission the authors to write a best-seller based on this excellent and important pamphlet.

The journey to the interface: how public service design can connect users to reform. By Sophia Parker and Joe Heapy. Demos, London, 2006.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:49 AM

June 14, 2006

Slow design seminar

The way of thinking and acting that Slow Food proposes goes well beyond food and food systems. The idea of “slow” brings tradition to life, and links the quality perceived in products with the social and environmental quality of their production, and places of origin. An international seminar on the design implications of the Slow Model takes place in Milan on Friday 6 October. Supported by the Slow Food Movement, the University of Gastronomic Sciences, the Istituto Europeo di Design and Domus Academy, its Scientific Committee includes Giulio Ceppi, Ezio Manzini and Anna Meroni. For information contact Giulia Simeone: dis@polimi.it

Posted by John Thackara at 03:38 PM

April 22, 2006

Chat about Aspen

Sorry 'bout the silence this last week,; I've been on the road. Still am, but Allan Cholnikov has started a discussion about what we are trying to achive with the Aspen Design Summit here. You don't have to register or sign in, and you can choose to receive email for newly posted messages. Just click the Subscribe button when you get there.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:41 PM

April 03, 2006

Worker correspondents

More and more companies are using so-called "design ethnographers" to help them develop products in real-life situations (rather than in design studios). This has sparked debate about the ethics of using other peoples' daily lives as raw material for product development. But is design ethnography new? At Doors 8 in New Delhi, Alok Nandi reminded us that debates about the ethics of documentary film-making have been going on for 40 years. And in his book Philosophizing the Everyday John Roberts writes that so-called 'worker correspondents' were important during the 1920s in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany. Worker-correspondents collated materials on issues affecting their workplace and other aspects of everyday life. Their work was celebrated by Leon Trotsky in a celebrated 1924 text called "The Worker Correspondent and its Cultural Role". And courses on how to be a worker-correspondent are run by Marxist organisations to this day.

Posted by John Thackara at 02:39 PM

March 25, 2006

Hi, Protein!

Warm congratulations to one of our favourite and most respected newsletter-website things, Ninfomania aka Protein° Feed aka Protein° Supplement. Today, Protein celebrates it's 300th issue, having first been published in September 1997 to 14 people. It is now enjoyed by an international audience of over 9,000 select subscribers. Go there, subscribe, push them to 10k as a birthday treat!

Posted by John Thackara at 09:53 AM

December 31, 2005

Active welfare in Helsinki

Emude, a consortium of design schools and research institutions - and Doors - has spent the last two years years looking at social innovation among creative communities in different parts of Europe. Having observed the emergence of what we call “active welfare” in many of these situations, we realise that new kinds of social infrastructure are needed to support it. A meeting in Helsinki, on Friday 10 February, probably at UIAH, will develop this idea. Details will be in our February newsletter and on this blog, but you might want to book your flight ahead of that to get a good price. Oh, and if you're celebrtating the new year tonight, have a great evening. And see you in 2006.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:02 PM | Comments (1)

November 07, 2005

Ethics, Inc

Only in America: ethics has become a business. In the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, passed in 2002 in the wake of financial scandals such as Enron and Tyco, a lot of companies are struggling to cope with the complexities of compliance. As James Hyatt writes in BusinessEthics.com "corporations are rushing to learn ethics virtually overnight and, as they do so, a vast new industry of consultants and suppliers has emerged. The ethics industry has been born.” Hyatt reports that at Goldman Sachs, CEO Hank Paulson will moderate 20 forums this year on ethics; the bank’s entire staff of managing directors is required to attend. Citigroup is adding annual ethics training for all 300,000 employees. And The New York Times has signed a multi-year agreement with LRN, a Los Angeles-based firm, to provide a legal and ethics education program. LRN's CEO, Dov Seidman, says his business has at least doubled in the last two years. Growth is also rapid at EthicsPoint which provides ethics online: the firm builds integrated web and telephony systems "seen by stakeholders as a safe reporting mechanism...(that also provides) automated and accurate distribution". At Lubrizol, a specialty chemicals company, two people work on ethics part-time; they help with such tasks as posting ethics guidelines in seven languages, and overseeing 27 regional ethics leaders around the world whom employees can contact with questions. It looks to me as a niche market for mobile-enabled, location-specific, friction-free ethics is opening up: Who will join me in launching 0800_Be_Good?

Posted by John Thackara at 11:33 AM

August 11, 2005

Hungry and lonely

Is the collective intelligence of the web overrated? A couple of nights ago, 18 people turned up for dinner. We pushed three tables together and sat together around an irregular rectangle. It felt, to me at least, as if the shape and dimensions of the ad-hoc table did little to foster social interaction. So yesterday I spent two hours failing to find a website that would tell me the the optimal shape and size of a dining table for 12-18 people. Googling design + table + size + social first yielded TableTop2006. This interaction design workshop in Australia is all about Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems; the website mentions augmented reality, user interface technologies, multi-modal interactions, computer supported collaborative work, and information visualisation - but it makes no mention of food. A description of dining tables in the Roman Empire proved diverting, but did not answer my boring questions about size and shape. The nearest I got was Guidelines For Choosing The Size And Shape Of Dining Tables. But that text-only site contains no drawings or room layouts - and I would have to import the author, a cabinetmaker (also, curiously, from Australia) to benefit from his tacit knowledge. Surely someone can do better? The answer seems to be oval - but what sort of oval?

.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:30 AM | Comments (1)

June 14, 2005

Authorship and design

An argument about authorship has once again overshadowed discussion of what matters about design. No sooner had Design Council director Hilary Cottam won the 2005 Design Museum Designer of the Year award, than an article by Deyan Sudjic in The Observer reported that an architect is furious about the award, and that a head teacher has described it as "a victory of spin over substance". It's a great shame if people close to the story are upset, because the award to Cottam signals a shift away from the obsession with celebrity and authorship that so often renders discussion of design tedious. As director of the experimental RED team at the Design Council, Cottam has been working to redefine the role of design in daily life, starting with health and citizenship. Her work, which is always collaborative, involves the use of design to re-engineer the ways schools, prisons and public institutions - and the people who use them - relate to each other. The Design Museum's award website includes this prominent statement from Cottam: "All the projects are developed by a team which includes designers, other professionals from a range of disciplines, front-line workers and members of the public who, with me, are challenged through the design process to abandon their initial preconceptions and co-create something new and beautiful that works".

Posted by John Thackara at 04:13 PM | Comments (2)

June 07, 2005

Of politics and Pimms

A Pimms-enhanced party at Demos, in London, was held to launch a new strategy for the organization called Building Everyday Democracy. According to the think tank's director, Tom Bentley, “politics is fighting a losing battle against forms of theatre and spectacle that are more entertaining, and forms of conversation and social exchange that are more meaningful to citizens. Without more direct citizen participation, the legitimacy of our political institutions will continue to decline”. Democracy, for Bentley, should be understood as “part of a capacity for self-organsation” - and his pamphlet describes numerous neighbourhood-based models and institutions as infrastructures of distributed democracy. The Demos project is interesting, and timely, but somehow lacks cultural fizz. At the end of the nineteenth century, the promise of speed and simultaneity, amplified in popular and scientific culture, drove modernity along. The opportunity, now, to “build local democracy” feels a good deal less mesmerizing. The same goes for the "everyday design" we pay attention to in Doors: there's always a danger of being worthy but dull. A cultural- aesthetic transformation will also be needed if political renewal is to have a chance.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:05 PM

March 14, 2005

Edda scissorhands

A wondferful profile by Lynn Barber in Sundays's (UK) Observer features the career of 'The Scissor Sister' or 'human Google' Edda Tasiemka who, after 55 years, is selling her amazing cuttings library and retiring. 'Whizzy management types are fond of telling us that nowadays you can find everything on the internet' writes Barber, 'but actually it is rare to find any newspaper stories over five years old or any magazine articles at all, whereas one quick phone call to an elderly German widow in the suburbs can provide precisely what you need. Almost every profile writer and biographer I know uses Tasiemka, and everyone who uses her raves about her'. Barber's story reminded me of the time I went to a meeting of librarians at MIT a few years ago. Even since Vannevar Bush had proposed his ideas about 'memex' in 1945, old-style librarians had been told repeatedly that they faced extinction. And yet, in 2000, with the internet in full swing, they discovered that their human-only information retrieval and recombination skills had become more valuable than ever. It's a lesson we will discuss at Doors in the session on how best to share design knowledge.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:17 AM | Comments (1)

February 11, 2005

Markets for "slivers of time"

Online auctions are booming. The phenomenon has been been labelled the 'march of the micro-sellers'. But could sites like eBay, with its 105 million users, be harbingers of a more important transformation, when individuals start to exchange time and services online? Wingham Rowan in the UK is developing the technical and institutional infrastructure for Neighbourhood e-Markets (NEMs) in which anyone can directly sell their time, around other commitments in their life, with total control and all the information they need about localised patterns of demand/supply and pricing for the kind of work or services they wish to offer. "These are hugely complex transactions" says Rowan; "they can now be made effortless, ultra-low overhead and consistently safe - but it takes much more sophisticated technology than Internet marketplaces based on bulletin boards or auctions require. Each 'slivers of time' marketplace must absorb issues including availability, contactability, reliability, price construction, potential agency involvement, protection of all parties, legal compliance, alignment of localised supply/demand, post transaction administration and restructuring of failed transactions". It seems that NEMs does all of this, but the participation of government is needed to seed this kind of economic activity and create a legal framework that enables its full potential.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:04 AM

January 04, 2005

Project Clinics at Doors 8

A core element will be Project Clinics (on the Wednesday and Friday). In these clinics, experts gathered together for Doors will evaluate real world projects and, we hope, help teams refocus their work in light of the lessons learned in the rest of the event.

We organised a similar event in Amsterdam in November and have incorporated the lessons learned then in the format for Delhi.

Here is how Project Clinics will work at Doors 8. The sessions are organised into blocks of time, each one containing:
- theme for block introduced (5 minutes)
- two project presentations (10 minutes)
- Q+A with presenter + plenary discussion (15 minutes)
- Experts Round Table (60-75 minutes)
- Plenary Report (2 minute per table)

For each case study, a Project Leader makes a 10 minute presentation that addresses a list of questions:
1) Why? = the main question being asked by the project
2) Who are the actors/partners?
3) Where? (the locality or situaton)
4) What are the desired outcomes/results of the project?
5) When (timeframe)?
6) HOW can the Round Table help? What are problem, challenge or dilemma does the project face, that the assembled experts can help with?

The meeting then breaks up into groups of about eight people each, sitting around two metres wide tables (labelled A, B, C, D etc). Everyone is allocated to a table in advance (so you don't have to choose). Each table has a facilitator (briefed in advance) who gets people to introduce themselves, leads discussion, and makes sure that someone takes notes and a final presentation is prepared. The table meets for 60-75 minutes and then the Plenary reconvenes for another round.

We will focus the project Clinics at Doors 8 on design efforts and innovative solutions emerging from South Asia. We anticipate that leading design schools and universities, NGOs, communities and independent innovators will bring projects to the clinics - and that they will leave them in better shape!

Posted by John Thackara at 08:57 AM

December 20, 2004

Uxorious design

Speaking of glossaries, I found another one in a British report about People Centered Design (PCD). This glossary, which is much shorter than the CHI one I mention below, runs briskly from AHRB (Arts and Humanities Research Board) to UX. The latter stands here for User Experience - although UX also reminds my married scrabble-playing self of the word uxorious, or excessively submissive or devoted to one's wife. Based on encounters with interesting design firms in the US - SonicRim, Smart, Jump, IDEO, Cheskin and Adaptive Path, as well as in-house design teams for BMW, Volvo, Nike, Microsoft and Intel - the report, Innovation Through People-Centred Design, says that people in their social context, rather than task-centered users, should be considered a fundamental source of innovation. Reality and that insight, sadly, are not close together: design firms found it difficult to sell PCD work to clients, the report says. This, one has to say, is hardly surprising: most of the potential clients mentioned are big tech companies. Expecting them to put people first is like expecting a fox to put hens first. I also fear the authors are in for a disappointment when they conclude, 'We urge all UK technology companies to promote a people-centered culture throughout their organisations'. Yes, People Centered Design is the way of the future, even for tech firms - but it will take more than advocacy to push the transition along. For people to come out on top, human beings will have to be redefined as an asset, rather than a cost, in the economy, and flesh-eating tech companies will have to be forcibly evolved into docile, load-carrying herbivores. I‘m sure HP and Intel, who are sponsoring Doors 8, are comfortable with that picture of their future....

Posted by John Thackara at 11:01 AM

December 09, 2004

All together now

There's renewed interest in ensemble theatre as a form of organisation. A meeting of theatre directors and producers in the UK last month opened with this quote from Joan Littlewood, in 1961: 'I do not believe in the supremacy of the director, designer, actor - or even of the writer. It is through collaboration that the knockabout art of the theatre survives and kicks. No one mind or imagination can foresee what a play will become. Only a company of artists can reflect the genius of a people in a complex day and age'. (Thanks for that to Tony Graham, Artistic Director of the Unicorn Theatre in London). Agenda item for Delhi: ensemble interaction design and/or agile architecture.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:40 AM

December 04, 2004

Civil Communities of Practice

Back to the soft stuff. "Might social problems that communities confront be structured as the kind of knowledge creation and/or problem solving that the open source software community has found new ways to solve?". So asks Pekka Himanen (author of "The Hacker Ethic") and colleagues in a recent report. An essential component of such an approach would be an OS-style referee process through which different ideas, corrections,and improvements are integrated. The report suggests that the tools and governance principles of the open source software community could, in some modified form, yield new approaches to community organization and problem solving. The design question raised is this: What incentives and design principles will facilitate the development of Civil Communities of Practice? [Jerome A. Feldman, Pekka Himanen, Olli Leppänen, and Steven Weber, 2004. Open Innovation Networks: New Approaches to Community Organization and Problem Solving. Helsinki:Finnish National Fund for Research and Development ]

Posted by John Thackara at 05:56 PM | Comments (2)

November 26, 2004

How much does a project cost?

What is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a design research project? If we knew, we'd probably make more realistic budgets for things like co-ordination, and communication, that often don't get paid for, even though we do the work. Or else, if we knew the true time costs, but could not get them included in the budget, then maybe we wouldn't do the project. One reason the IT boom has flattened out is that TCOs for information systems have been found to be far higher than big customers at first realised. Rishab Gosh, in a paper for First Monday, quotes these TCO numbers:
- Licence fees 5-10%
- Hardware and software costs 15-40%:
- Maintenance, integration, support and training 60-85 %
Gosh makes the point that free software is a skills enabling platform; it is far cheaper, and it is more adaptable to local needs than proprietary software. But the TCO issue has wider ramifications. One of the key lessons to emerge from our Project Leaders' Round Table last wekend was that co-ordination, which has many facets, is a key success factor: if it's not done properly, or is treated as an extra, projects (and the people involved) usually suffer. Here in The Netherlands we're being squeezed on this issue as I write: bean counters from Berenschot, a consulting firm, have advised the government to stop funding 150 "support organisations" (including Doors) and give all their money to "production".

Posted by John Thackara at 09:58 AM

November 02, 2004

Health as service design at Doors 8

Will health systems bankrupt the west, drive medical staff to despair, and dissatify their users in perpetuity? The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (Nesta), together with the Health Modernisation Agency, both from the UK, are supporting a series of projects to do with service design for health care, whose results will be presented at Doors 8. Hugo Manassei, Creative Pioneer Programme Director at Nesta, and Lynne Maher, Head of Innovation Strategy at the National Health Service, are briefing a team that includes designers Indri Tulusan, Deborah Szebeko, Nicola Koller, Suzi Winstanley & Harriet Harriss. More on this later.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:21 AM

October 06, 2004

DOGME DAYS

This won't be news to film buffs but I'm interested in the lessons for design projects. The Danish film cooperative Dogme have developed an interesting model of work. Co-founders von Trier and Vinterberg developed a set of ten rules that a Dogme film must conform to. These rules, referred to as the Vow of Chastity, are as follows:

1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).
3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The final picture must be transferred to the Academy 35mm film, with an aspect ratio of 4:3, that is, not widescreen. (Originally, the requirement was that the film had to be shot on Academy 35mm film, but the rule was relaxed to allow low-budget productions.)
10. The director must not be credited.

see www.dogme95.dk and
en.wikipedia.org/

Posted by John Thackara at 12:51 PM | Comments (1)

October 05, 2004

Open Welfare

Hilary Cottam is hoping to join us in New Delhi. She and Charles Leadbeater are writing a paper on "open welfare". They observe: "The open model is not a traditional service delivery model. It relies on mass participation ion creation of the service. The boundary between users and producers is blurred. Broad and widespread participation is enabled by the design of a platform or shared space in which people can share ideas, and communicate. This requires simple systems of codification and rules for assessing the value of a contribution. These communities produce or publish the code or tools for self help which are widely diustributed ; they include mechanisms for constant feedback and review. The basic principles can be described as: "share the goal; share the work; share the results".
Hilary Cottam and Charles Leadbeater. Open Welfare,: designs on the public good. London, Design Council, 2004.
see: www.designcouncil.org/blog/red

Posted by John Thackara at 11:39 AM

November 12, 2003

The thermodynamics of cooperation

(This is the text of my closing keynote talk at the European Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Helsinki, 18 September, 2003.)

A few years back, I arrived in New York to meet my daughter Kate for a vacation. She seemed her normal sunny self but, as we chatted in the lobby of her mother's hotel, we noticed a lump behind her ear. It did not hurt, Kate said, but we resolved to see a doctor just to check.

It was a weekend, there was no house doctor on call, so we were advised to go to the emergency room of St Vincent's Hospital a few blocks away. A gothic scene awaited us. There were armed guards on the door. Drunks and junkies lolled on the benches of the waiting room. A half-naked lunatic was running around. And most of the staff in the large gloomy space wore bright pink face masks. Kate, who was six at the time, watched this all with great interest. Her parents were pertified.

We were seen rather promptly by a nurse, and then by a doctor who took one look at Kate's bump and said she had to be admitted. Within an hour she was in a children's ward on an intravenous feed of antibiotics. She had mastoiditis, an infection of the bone behind the ear.

So began 17 days of hell. Increasingly stronger drugs, and then combinations of them, did not work. Kate's temperature soared into the 100s and stayed there. The mastoiditis begat bacterial meningitis. It looked - and was - very bad indeed.

And the doctors were unsure what to do. Quite soon, two different teams had become involved, pediatrics and surgery. The pediatricians wanted to stick with the drugs; the surgeons said drugs would never do it, and wanted to operate.

The doctors examined Kate a lot. They would look at her charts. Someone would lay a hand gently on her head. In her room, they were gentle and respectful, but out in the corridor, and back in the staff room, they would argue, constantly. They would pore over crumpled printouts from online research someone had done earlier. They would look at at the endless test results. Boy, did they argue.

For us, as parents, these arguments added to our terror. In Britain, senior hospital doctors, and especially the god-like consultants, barely speak to
parents, let alone share their doubts with them. At St Vincent's, we were involved in every twist and turn of their perplexity and worry.

In the event, the drugs never worked, Kate got weaker, and the decision was made to operate. It took eight hours - a team of twelve around a hole in Kate's head that was less than two inches wide. But it worked, they saved her life, and I had had a crash course on collaboration, knowledge work, and the body that I do not recommend to anyone else.

So what did I learn? The first thing Kate's story taught me was that the flesh and blood of the doctors and nurses is just as important as Kate's flesh and blood. In the formal language of work and knowledge design, actionable medical knowledge is embodied. Having formal knowledge in your head is not the same as having it in your finger tips. Doctoring is a physical and fleshy thing.

This raises the first of three design issues I will discuss today. How do we design work that enhances tacit and embodied knowledge, rather than pretending that they do not exist, or do not matter?

The second lesson I learned is this: the where of medical intervention and care is important. Situations matter, because it is in physical situations that the continuous conversations that comprise care, take place.

The design question that follows from this is: how do we improve the capacity of situations to support these kinds of inter-personal interactions?

The third thing I learned at Saint Vincent’s is this: the meaning of a task plays a critical role in the way it gets done. Otherwise stated: matters of life and death foster great collaboration.

Antoine Saint Exupery put this simple point more memorably. "Don’t teach men how to build a boat. Teach them to yearn for the wide and open sea."

Antoine’s wise advice raises a third design question. Are we sure that the design attention we give to tools for community and collaboration – the 'we-ware' - is in balance? Or do we need to think more about the 'why?' issues of collaboration?

1 EMBODIMENT

Embodiment is a big problem for the 'information society' as a project. Maybe that’s why we don’t talk about it very much.

But we can no longer evade an inconvenient fact: most of what we perceive and experience in the world comes not from conscious observation, but from a continuous process of unconscious scanning.

As Tor Norretranders explains, in his book, 'The User Illusion': "Subliminal perception, perception that occurs without conscious awareness, is not an anomaly, but the norm. Most of what we experience we can never tell each other about – with or without information technology – because we are not even aware of it."

As organisms active in the world, we process perhaps 14 billion bits of information per second. But the bandwidth of consciousness is only about eighteen bits. This means we have conscious access to about a millionth of the information we daily use to survive.

The 'information society' is based on that teeny little one-millionth of data that we know consciously.

For the philosopherJohn Gray, the upshot of neuroscientific research like this is that, "We are not embrained phantoms, encased in mortal flesh. We filter and select from the the massive flows of input from our senses are so that our lives can flow more easily.

"Cybernauts seek to to make the thin trickle of consciousness - our shallowest sensation – everlasting," says Gray. "But being embodied is our nature as earth-born creatures."

John Christopher Jones has also warned about the dangers that come with the disproportionate attention we pay to digital communication. "Computers are so good at the manipulation of symbols - a thousand times better than robots are, even today, at the manipulation of objects – that we are all under pressure to reduce all human knowledge and experience to symbolic form."

Remember Robert Reich? In his best-seller, 'The Work Of Nations', Reich predicted that we would all become“symbolic analysts”. The concept was so successful that Reich ended up as Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of Labour!

I accept that 'computer-supported collaborative work', is a symptom, not the cause, of our tendency to undervalue the knowledge, and experience, that we human beings have by virtue of having bodies.

Besides, the design lesson I draw from the importance of embodiment is not that face-to-face is the only communication that counts. That would be dumb.

Low bandwidth can deliver high-value communication. The telephone, after all, changed everything – much of it for the better.

But, as designers, we must nonetheless guard against those who promote virtuality – and the myth of disembodied communities - for the wrong reasons.

I called this talk, 'the thermodynamics of networked collaboration.' I chose the title because of some alarming meetings I had with policy makers. Out there, in the real world of budget-making and vote-getting, the promise of disembodiment, of virtuality, is attractive for simple reasons. People think it will save money.

Automated, disembodied communications are attractive for the same reasons that e-learning is attractive. Organizations without organizers are like educational establishments without teachers. They save a ton of money.

Only, they don’t work – or at least, not optimally. Human beings are social creatures. Our networks and communities need the time, energy, presence, and participation of real people, to flourish.

That’s why I talk about thermodynamics. Human systems need inputs of human energy to do well. Everything else - the internet, agents, wireless, knowledge-mining - is contingent. They’re support, not the thing itself.

So, when designing systems, services, infrastructures - and work itself - we should ask whether our design actions will enable or disable human agency.

Embodiment is a killer app. Whatever it is that we design, it's better if we design people in, not out.

2 SITUATIONS

The second thing I learned at Saint Vincent’s Hospital is that the situations matter a lot.

'My' discovery proved to have been made a long time before. Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago - in 'Airs, Waters, Places' - that, in order to understand the disorders in any subject, we must study its environment. "Treatment of the inner requires treatment of the outer," said the sage. "The greater part of the soul lies outside the body".

Biologists have also known this for ages. Biologists describe as 'choronomic' the influence on a process of its geographic or regional environment. Choronomy adds value.

So how are we to improve the situations in which our all-important people-to-people interactions take place? What kinds of knowledge do we need to bring to bear to do that?

Designers and architects should be able to help here. After all, they’ve been designing spaces and places for thousands of years.

Unfortunately, the mainstream of architecture – including most of the big-name designers - has lost the plot. They’re designing spaces as spectacles, not spaces that foster interaction and encounter.

Concert and exhibition halls, tourist resorts, sport stadiums, shoppping malls and cafes, all are designed as places for us to buy things, not for social interaction.

Raoul Vaneigem complained about this back in 1957, when he founded the The Situationist International. "The whole of life presents itslf as an immense accumulation of spectacles," said the Situationsist Manifesto. "All that was once lived, has become mere representation".

More recently, the spanish economist Manuel Castells wrote about the networked economy as the "space of flows" - a brilliant metaphor that helps us understand one way in which our world is becoming a hybrid of real and virtual space.

Unfortunately, the 'flows' metaphor has prompted architects to design squidgy and undulating buildings which are interesting (on first sight) to look at – but rarely foster better interaction. Often, they do the the opposite.

When new multimedia technologies and internet first appeared, there was excited talk of 'parallel worlds' and escape into a 'virtual reality'. Now the fuss has died down and here we still are - in the same old bodies on the same old planet. Things have changed - but in subtle and more interesting ways. Now the real and the virtual, the artificial and natural, the mental and material, co-exist.

So what are the design qualities we need to make this new hybridity work?

Now here’s a thing. I don’t know!

I don’t have the answers to this question.

I just know that it's an important question.

But I’m reassured by St Exupery’s insight. If the destination is attractive enough, we’ll find a way to get there.

We have the tools – hybrid space. The question remains, how do we want to use it?

For me, the best description of the destination is by Ivan Illich. Illich said, 35 years ago, that we need to:
"Give back to people the capacity to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships."
"Re-frame institutions (such as medicine, or work, or education) as a support service in this transition – not its substitute."
and
"Recover the ability for mutual self-care and learning, helped by – but not centered on - the use of modern technology."

The theologian Martin Buber also saw things clearly. For him, the essential qualities that describe a healthy situation are ones that enable encounter, dialogue, and community.

Now you may well object that theologians do not make ideal clients. But Ivan Illich and Martin Buber anticipated what our wisest designers today have also discovered.

John Carroll, for example, in his wonderful book 'Making Use', says of design in today’s complex world that, "its ultimate objective and approach have to be discovered, not specified."

Carroll criticises the traditional engineering approach in which, to get some kind of grip on complexity, the information to be considered is filtered, and overall task is 'decomposed' into manageable chunks.These chunks are put into a neat to-do list with deadlines, responsibilities and costs attached.

It’s a completely understandable and impressive approach. For a bridge, or a chemical plant, or even the shell of a new hospital, it works just about fine. But not with people-centered systems, says Carroll.

Decomposition is not only applied to hard things like nuts and bolts. If you look at the proceedings of the CHI (Computer Human Interaction)conference, there’s a thesaurus that lists - and attempts to explain - 137 terms that crop up in the papers selected for the event.

The thesaurus runs from agents, to work analysis. It includes subjects like augmented reality, cognitive models, ethnography, help desks, input devices, metaphors, predictive interfaces, story-telling, tactile inputs, and usability engineering.

As I said, 137 entries. CHI is for the good guys - human-centered designers who care about people – but their knowledge-base is fragmented and specialised – and becoming more so, year by year. If you look at the proceedings for an information systems conference, the thesaurus can be tens of pages long.

Someone told me that "research and practice hardly seem to speak to each other." This is madness.

'The situation' is not where you do the design. It is the design.

3 MEANING

George Orwell could not imagine a society, whether a happy or a miserable one, without managers, designers and supervisors who, "jointly wrote the script for others to follow."

In Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, many aspects of which have duly come to pass, designers staged the performances, put the lines in actors' mouths, and fired, or locked in dungeons, "everyone who would improvise their own texts."

John Grey, in a book you should read called 'Straw Dogs', describes our dilemma this way: "We are in a new kind of uncertainty: not knowing the ends, rather than not knowing the means."

Ivan Illich, 35 years ago, introduced us to the idea of 'counter-productivity' in the institutions and systems upon which our society depends. Beyond certain thresholds of development, said Illich, institutions would become an obstacle to the objectives they are meant to serve.

Illich, like Orwell, was pretty accurate.

Medical systems render us anxious, but out of control.

Education gets automated, and fosters stupidity.

There’s so much transportation, that it’s hard to get around.

There is so much communication, that it’s hard to see, or hear, or think.

What these trends have in common that people are no longer helped, in illich's words, " to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships in daily life."

I mentioned the Manuel Castells’ metaphor of our age as "the space of flows." This evocative metaphor also explains the changing nature of work in the new economy. We look at lot at the means, but not enough at the ends.

During the 1990s, new-economy rhetoric promised a rosy future. Rather than salarymen and women, or wage slaves, we would be self-employed 'portfolio workers'. We would be 'actors', 'builders', 'jugglers', 'stage managers of our own lives.' Our every working moment would be filled with challenging projects, and boundless creativity.

Above all, we would be Free. Free of bosses. Free of command-and-control bureaucracy. They would be swept away by a tide of self-organizing groups.

The reality of net work, for most of us, turns out to be as near as dammit the exact opposite of those rosy promises. A huge gulf separates the rhetorics of the information society, from the logic, and hence realities, of the way it actually works.

Reality check: we are not living in an information society but in an information market. In this market, three powerful economic forces - downsizing, globalization, and acceleration – have all been socially disadvantageous to most of us.

Jobs, for one thing, are disappearing. The idea of a 'steady job' is no longer a reliable prospect for tens of millions of young adults. They face a future in which they will labour at short-term tasks – 'projects' – and change employer or client frequently.Their work will be fragmented and atomised. They will suffer a steady loss of economic power. They will exist as monads in 'spot markets' for 'human resources.'

Yesterday (at the conference in Helsinki) I heard someone say, "the field of work and communities is still quite new."

Colleagues, that is palpable nonsense. The importance of community may be new in computer science research. But, outside this little box, philosophers and social scientists have studed people and relationships and communities since more or less forever.

And they have some interesting things to teach us. "We work not just to produce," said Eugene Delacroix, "but to give value to time." That alone undermines the theories of efficiency that drive the design of many information systems.

But let me also quote three relatively recent observations. The evolutionary biologist S L Washburton has written that "most of human evolution took place before the advent of agriculture, when men lived in small groups, on a face-to-face basis. As a result (says Washburton) human biology has evolved as an adaptive mechanism to conditions that have largely ceased to exist. Man evolved to feel strongly about a few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time - and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him."

My second quotation is from Yochai Benkler, a professor of law at New York University. In a paper called 'Linux and the Nature of the Firm,' Benkler argues that the eternal necessities of life are reasserting themselves in such phenomena as the evolution of free software. Benkler argues that free software is just one - although the most visible - example of a much broader social phenomenon. "We are seeing the emergence of a new mode of production," he says. "Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects. The design lesson is this. In order to re-design work, we need to keep fundamental questions of human existence always in mind."

For Charles Hampden Turner, too, "We overlook the extent to which needed appications give meaning and zest to our work. Without shared purposes, and moral meanings, we risk drifting into a culture of self-absorption and narcissism."

In Japan they call this call the nemawashi factor. Originally a horticultural word that means 'to turn the roots', prior to replanting – or, by implication, 'laying the groundwork' - nemawashi has come to mean the process by which groups in Japan develop the shared understanding without which nothing much gets done.

Too much of the design we now do suffers from a nemawashi-deficit. Fixated on abstractions and tools, we lose touch with the connections between people in the world, and the values we have in common, that provide the meanings that impel us to work.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:51 PM

September 22, 2003

The thermodynamics of cooperation

This is the text of my closing keynote talk at the European Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Helsinki, 18 September, 2003.

A few years back, I arrived in New York to meet my daughter Kate for a vacation. She seemed her normal sunny self but, as we chatted in the lobby of her mother's hotel, we noticed a lump behind her ear. It did not hurt, Kate said, but we resolved to see a doctor just to check.

It was a weekend, there was no house doctor on call, so we were advised to go to the emergency room of St Vincent's Hospital a few blocks away. A gothic scene awaited us. There were armed guards on the door. Drunks and junkies lolled on the benches of the waiting room. A half-naked lunatic was running around. And most of the staff in the large gloomy space wore bright pink face masks. Kate, who was six at the time, watched this all with great interest. Her parents were pertified.

We were seen rather promptly by a nurse, and then by a doctor who took one look at Kate's bump and said she had to be admitted. Within an hour she was in a children's ward on an intravenous feed of antibiotics. She had mastoiditis, an infection of the bone behind the ear.

So began 17 days of hell. Increasingly stronger drugs, and then combinations of them, did not work. Kate's temperature soared into the 100s and stayed there. The mastoiditis begat bacterial meningitis. It looked - and was - very bad indeed.

And the doctors were unsure what to do. Quite soon, two different teams had become involved, pediatrics and surgery. The pediatricians wanted to stick with the drugs; the surgeons said drugs would never do it, and wanted to operate.

The doctors examined Kate a lot. They would look at her charts. Someone would lay a hand gently on her head. In her room, they were gentle and respectful, but out in the corridor, and back in the staff room, they would argue, constantly. They would pore over crumpled printouts from online research someone had done earlier. They would look at at the endless test results. Boy, did they argue.

For us, as parents, these arguments added to our terror. In Britain, senior hospital doctors, and especially the god-like consultants, barely speak to
parents, let alone share their doubts with them. At St Vincent's, we were involved in every twist and turn of their perplexity and worry.

In the event, the drugs never worked, Kate got weaker, and the decision was made to operate. It took eight hours - a team of twelve around a hole in Kate's head that was less than two inches wide. But it worked, they saved her life, and I had had a crash course on collaboration, knowledge work, and the body that I do not recommend to anyone else.

So what did I learn? The first thing Kate's story taught me was that the flesh and blood of the doctors and nurses is just as important as Kate's flesh and blood. In the formal language of work and knowledge design, actionable medical knowledge is embodied. Having formal knowledge in your head is not the same as having it in your finger tips. Doctoring is a physical and fleshy thing.

This raises the first of three design issues I will discuss today. How do we design work that enhances tacit and embodied knowledge, rather than pretending that they do not exist, or do not matter?

The second lesson I learned is this: the where of medical intervention and care is important. Situations matter, because it is in physical situations that the continuous conversations that comprise care, take place.

The design question that follows from this is: how do we improve the capacity of situations to support these kinds of inter-personal interactions?

The third thing I learned at Saint Vincent’s is this: the meaning of a task plays a critical role in the way it gets done. Otherwise stated: matters of life and death foster great collaboration.

Antoine Saint Exupery put this simple point more memorably. "Don’t teach men how to build a boat. Teach them to yearn for the wide and open sea."

Antoine’s wise advice raises a third design question. Are we sure that the design attention we give to tools for community and collaboration – the 'we-ware' - is in balance? Or do we need to think more about the 'why?' issues of collaboration?

1 EMBODIMENT

Embodiment is a big problem for the 'information society' as a project. Maybe that’s why we don’t talk about it very much.

But we can no longer evade an inconvenient fact: most of what we perceive and experience in the world comes not from conscious observation, but from a continuous process of unconscious scanning.

As Tor Norretranders explains, in his book, 'The User Illusion': "Subliminal perception, perception that occurs without conscious awareness, is not an anomaly, but the norm. Most of what we experience we can never tell each other about – with or without information technology – because we are not even aware of it."

As organisms active in the world, we process perhaps 14 billion bits of information per second. But the bandwidth of consciousness is only about eighteen bits. This means we have conscious access to about a millionth of the information we daily use to survive.

The 'information society' is based on that teeny little one-millionth of data that we know consciously.

For the philosopherJohn Gray, the upshot of neuroscientific research like this is that, "We are not embrained phantoms, encased in mortal flesh. We filter and select from the the massive flows of input from our senses are so that our lives can flow more easily.

"Cybernauts seek to to make the thin trickle of consciousness - our shallowest sensation – everlasting," says Gray. "But being embodied is our nature as earth-born creatures."

John Christopher Jones has also warned about the dangers that come with the disproportionate attention we pay to digital communication. "Computers are so good at the manipulation of symbols - a thousand times better than robots are, even today, at the manipulation of objects – that we are all under pressure to reduce all human knowledge and experience to symbolic form."

Remember Robert Reich? In his best-seller, 'The Work Of Nations', Reich predicted that we would all become“symbolic analysts”. The concept was so successful that Reich ended up as Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of Labour!

I accept that 'computer-supported collaborative work', is a symptom, not the cause, of our tendency to undervalue the knowledge, and experience, that we human beings have by virtue of having bodies.

Besides, the design lesson I draw from the importance of embodiment is not that face-to-face is the only communication that counts. That would be dumb.

Low bandwidth can deliver high-value communication. The telephone, after all, changed everything – much of it for the better.

But, as designers, we must nonetheless guard against those who promote virtuality – and the myth of disembodied communities - for the wrong reasons.

I called this talk, 'the thermodynamics of networked collaboration.' I chose the title because of some alarming meetings I had with policy makers. Out there, in the real world of budget-making and vote-getting, the promise of disembodiment, of virtuality, is attractive for simple reasons. People think it will save money.

Automated, disembodied communications are attractive for the same reasons that e-learning is attractive. Organizations without organizers are like educational establishments without teachers. They save a ton of money.

Only, they don’t work – or at least, not optimally. Human beings are social creatures. Our networks and communities need the time, energy, presence, and participation of real people, to flourish.

That’s why I talk about thermodynamics. Human systems need inputs of human energy to do well. Everything else - the internet, agents, wireless, knowledge-mining - is contingent. They’re support, not the thing itself.

So, when designing systems, services, infrastructures - and work itself - we should ask whether our design actions will enable or disable human agency.

Embodiment is a killer app. Whatever it is that we design, it's better if we design people in, not out.

2 SITUATIONS

The second thing I learned at Saint Vincent’s Hospital is that the situations matter a lot.

'My' discovery proved to have been made a long time before. Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago - in 'Airs, Waters, Places' - that, in order to understand the disorders in any subject, we must study its environment. "Treatment of the inner requires treatment of the outer," said the sage. "The greater part of the soul lies outside the body".

Biologists have also known this for ages. Biologists describe as 'choronomic' the influence on a process of its geographic or regional environment. Choronomy adds value.

So how are we to improve the situations in which our all-important people-to-people interactions take place? What kinds of knowledge do we need to bring to bear to do that?

Designers and architects should be able to help here. After all, they’ve been designing spaces and places for thousands of years.

Unfortunately, the mainstream of architecture – including most of the big-name designers - has lost the plot. They’re designing spaces as spectacles, not spaces that foster interaction and encounter.

Concert and exhibition halls, tourist resorts, sport stadiums, shoppping malls and cafes, all are designed as places for us to buy things, not for social interaction.

Raoul Vaneigem complained about this back in 1957, when he founded the The Situationist International. "The whole of life presents itslf as an immense accumulation of spectacles," said the Situationsist Manifesto. "All that was once lived, has become mere representation".

More recently, the spanish economist Manuel Castells wrote about the networked economy as the "space of flows" - a brilliant metaphor that helps us understand one way in which our world is becoming a hybrid of real and virtual space.

Unfortunately, the 'flows' metaphor has prompted architects to design squidgy and undulating buildings which are interesting (on first sight) to look at – but rarely foster better interaction. Often, they do the the opposite.

When new multimedia technologies and internet first appeared, there was excited talk of 'parallel worlds' and escape into a 'virtual reality'. Now the fuss has died down and here we still are - in the same old bodies on the same old planet. Things have changed - but in subtle and more interesting ways. Now the real and the virtual, the artificial and natural, the mental and material, co-exist.

So what are the design qualities we need to make this new hybridity work?

Now here’s a thing. I don’t know!

I don’t have the answers to this question.

I just know that it's an important question.

But I’m reassured by St Exupery’s insight. If the destination is attractive enough, we’ll find a way to get there.

We have the tools – hybrid space. The question remains, how do we want to use it?

For me, the best description of the destination is by Ivan Illich. Illich said, 35 years ago, that we need to:
"Give back to people the capacity to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships."
"Re-frame institutions (such as medicine, or work, or education) as a support service in this transition – not its substitute."
and
"Recover the ability for mutual self-care and learning, helped by – but not centered on - the use of modern technology."

The theologian Martin Buber also saw things clearly. For him, the essential qualities that describe a healthy situation are ones that enable encounter, dialogue, and community.

Now you may well object that theologians do not make ideal clients. But Ivan Illich and Martin Buber anticipated what our wisest designers today have also discovered.

John Carroll, for example, in his wonderful book 'Making Use', says of design in today’s complex world that, "its ultimate objective and approach have to be discovered, not specified."

Carroll criticises the traditional engineering approach in which, to get some kind of grip on complexity, the information to be considered is filtered, and overall task is 'decomposed' into manageable chunks.These chunks are put into a neat to-do list with deadlines, responsibilities and costs attached.

It’s a completely understandable and impressive approach. For a bridge, or a chemical plant, or even the shell of a new hospital, it works just about fine. But not with people-centered systems, says Carroll.

Decomposition is not only applied to hard things like nuts and bolts. If you look at the proceedings of the CHI (Computer Human Interaction)conference, there’s a thesaurus that lists - and attempts to explain - 137 terms that crop up in the papers selected for the event.

The thesaurus runs from agents, to work analysis. It includes subjects like augmented reality, cognitive models, ethnography, help desks, input devices, metaphors, predictive interfaces, story-telling, tactile inputs, and usability engineering.

As I said, 137 entries. CHI is for the good guys - human-centered designers who care about people – but their knowledge-base is fragmented and specialised – and becoming more so, year by year. If you look at the proceedings for an information systems conference, the thesaurus can be tens of pages long.

Someone told me that "research and practice hardly seem to speak to each other." This is madness.

'The situation' is not where you do the design. It is the design.

3 MEANING

George Orwell could not imagine a society, whether a happy or a miserable one, without managers, designers and supervisors who, "jointly wrote the script for others to follow."

In Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, many aspects of which have duly come to pass, designers staged the performances, put the lines in actors' mouths, and fired, or locked in dungeons, "everyone who would improvise their own texts."

John Grey, in a book you should read called 'Straw Dogs', describes our dilemma this way: "We are in a new kind of uncertainty: not knowing the ends, rather than not knowing the means."

Ivan Illich, 35 years ago, introduced us to the idea of 'counter-productivity' in the institutions and systems upon which our society depends. Beyond certain thresholds of development, said Illich, institutions would become an obstacle to the objectives they are meant to serve.

Illich, like Orwell, was pretty accurate.

Medical systems render us anxious, but out of control.

Education gets automated, and fosters stupidity.

There’s so much transportation, that it’s hard to get around.

There is so much communication, that it’s hard to see, or hear, or think.

What these trends have in common that people are no longer helped, in illich's words, " to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships in daily life."

I mentioned the Manuel Castells’ metaphor of our age as "the space of flows." This evocative metaphor also explains the changing nature of work in the new economy. We look at lot at the means, but not enough at the ends.

During the 1990s, new-economy rhetoric promised a rosy future. Rather than salarymen and women, or wage slaves, we would be self-employed 'portfolio workers'. We would be 'actors', 'builders', 'jugglers', 'stage managers of our own lives.' Our every working moment would be filled with challenging projects, and boundless creativity.

Above all, we would be Free. Free of bosses. Free of command-and-control bureaucracy. They would be swept away by a tide of self-organizing groups.

The reality of net work, for most of us, turns out to be as near as dammit the exact opposite of those rosy promises. A huge gulf separates the rhetorics of the information society, from the logic, and hence realities, of the way it actually works.

Reality check: we are not living in an information society but in an information market. In this market, three powerful economic forces - downsizing, globalization, and acceleration – have all been socially disadvantageous to most of us.

Jobs, for one thing, are disappearing. The idea of a 'steady job' is no longer a reliable prospect for tens of millions of young adults. They face a future in which they will labour at short-term tasks – 'projects' – and change employer or client frequently.Their work will be fragmented and atomised. They will suffer a steady loss of economic power. They will exist as monads in 'spot markets' for 'human resources.'

Yesterday (at the conference in Helsinki) I heard someone say, "the field of work and communities is still quite new."

Colleagues, that is palpable nonsense. The importance of community may be new in computer science research. But, outside this little box, philosophers and social scientists have studed people and relationships and communities since more or less forever.

And they have some interesting things to teach us. "We work not just to produce," said Eugene Delacroix, "but to give value to time." That alone undermines the theories of efficiency that drive the design of many information systems.

But let me also quote three relatively recent observations. The evolutionary biologist S L Washburton has written that "most of human evolution took place before the advent of agriculture, when men lived in small groups, on a face-to-face basis. As a result (says Washburton) human biology has evolved as an adaptive mechanism to conditions that have largely ceased to exist. Man evolved to feel strongly about a few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time - and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him."

My second quotation is from Yochai Benkler, a professor of law at New York University. In a paper called 'Linux and the Nature of the Firm,' Benkler argues that the eternal necessities of life are reasserting themselves in such phenomena as the evolution of free software. Benkler argues that free software is just one - although the most visible - example of a much broader social phenomenon. "We are seeing the emergence of a new mode of production," he says. "Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects. The design lesson is this. In order to re-design work, we need to keep fundamental questions of human existence always in mind."

For Charles Hampden Turner, too, "We overlook the extent to which needed appications give meaning and zest to our work. Without shared purposes, and moral meanings, we risk drifting into a culture of self-absorption and narcissism."

In Japan they call this call the nemawashi factor. Originally a horticultural word that means 'to turn the roots', prior to replanting – or, by implication, 'laying the groundwork' - nemawashi has come to mean the process by which groups in Japan develop the shared understanding without which nothing much gets done.

Too much of the design we now do suffers from a nemawashi-deficit. Fixated on abstractions and tools, we lose touch with the connections between people in the world, and the values we have in common, that provide the meanings that impel us to work.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:01 PM

November 12, 2002

Does your design research exist?

An internet sage once said that a web page never accessed does not really exist. Does the same logic apply to your design research? If nobody 'gets it', when you present your results, has anything been achieved?

Over recent months, I have seen years of work by design researchers almost wasted because they did not communicate well. Here are a couple of stories about such near-disasters, plus 15 highly-opinionated tips for design research presentations at the end.

In Amsterdam, in February, I attended the seventh bi-annual exhibition of Young Designers and Industry, The show’s sub-title - "the unknown meets the unknown" – turned horribly true. Thirteen European companies, ranging from Heineken to Forbo Linoleum, had given research projects to groups of talented young designers from all over Europe. Their task was "to conceive of new concepts for products, services or strategies of the future". A fascinating brief, good partnerships, plenty of time. How could they fail?

Here is how. The exhibition and presentation in this five month project took place in a splendid and theatrical loft in Amsterdam docklands. On entering, I was confronted by 13 mini-exhibitions, in bays down each side of the space. These exhibits were impossible to interpret or understand. Numbers were stuck on columns - but nothing told the visitor what these numbers referred to. Each bay contained jumbles of posters and objects - but there were no titles or captions to help the visitor understand what these jumbles were about. Groovy-looking young people hung about; but it was not clear whether they were visitors, exhibitors, or just lived there.

I asked each person in turn, I hope in a friendly way: "what am I looking at here?" "to what question is this project an answer?" and "what lessons did you learn from this project?". After two hours I realised that, once again in this excellent series, some great work had been done. In one project, websites and wireless devices were used to help Dutch citizens find nature - which is often hidden away here. Noffit Yelloz, in another fine project, developed an elegant structure to hold potted plants vertically inside a stairwell for Europe’s largest plant distributor, www.waterdrinker.nl. A third team worked with Forbo Linoleum to produce terrific lamps and bowls. But I had to find all this out for myself. Nobody framed the event for people like me walking in literally from the cold. Many of the men and women in suits for whom the whole event was staged clearly had no idea what to make of it.

A few weeks after Young Designers and Industry, I found myself at HomeTech, in Berlin, an enormous trade fair for domestic appliances. Whirlpool Europe, who have a dynamic new design director, Richard Eisermann, had worked with design futurist Francesco Morace on a major lifestyle trends study. This inspired Whirlpool’s centrepiece at the trade fair, a beautifully produced exhibition of design prototypes called "Project F" in which large glass cases contained intriguing and well-executed.... objects. But it was utterly unclear what we were looking at - or why. I happened to tour the exhibit with a British design journalist who has eight million appliance-buying readers back in London. She walked right past the Project F exhibits with barely a glance; "what are they?" she asked - without stopping. These objects, I later discovered, were the results of months of investigation, by talented design professionals from several countries, into fabric care futures. Upon reading Whirlpoolls interesting book, which I discovered in a dark corner, I learned that the objects were "an open exploration of the washing process and the new relationship between products, spaces, and humans". (The book is available from ray_isted@email.whirlpool.com)

Both Young Designers and Whirpool forgot to put themselves into the shoes of their audience. They focussed on what they had to say, at the expense of asking: what will it take, in this noisy and crowded environment, to engage a passing stranger's curiosity and interest?

JT’s TIPS FOR POTENT PRESENTATIONS
It’s awful to see such interesting work head, unnoticed, for obscurity – so here are fifteen tips for presentations which I reckon apply equally both in a small presentation, such as a research crit in a university, or in a large, noisy, distracting trade event, like HomeTech.

Tip 1 Design the way you will present and publish your results at the beginning of your project, not at the end.

Tip 2 Budget generously for publishing results.I reckon the ideal is 30 per cent of the total, including people costs - but hardly anybody allocates that much. A budget for publishing results below ten percent means you don't care if anyone outside your project ever knows what you achieved.

Tip 3 Assume I know nothing. NOTHING! The first two minutes – of my visit, or of your presentation - should answer the following questions that are rattling around in my addled mind:
"Where am I, and why am I here?"
"Who are these people?"
"What’s in it for me?"
"To what question is this story an answer?"

Tip 4 Always answer that last question! State, explicitly, the insight, discovery or invention you have made, that you are giving me to take away.

Tip 5 Kill your darlings. You will always have more things to tell me than time to do so - so tell me less. Never try to cram everything you know into a limited time by speaking fast, or in bullet point-ese. Inform about the things you have to leave out of your verbal presentation in a handout. If you make a good presentation, I will probably read it later. if you’ve bored or confused me, I won’t bother.

Tip 6 Avoid using the words "we are very interested in....". I don't care what you are interested in. I care what I am interested in.

Tip 7 Only tell me about your process or methodology if the process or methodology is the valuable thing I am going to take away. Otherwise stated: don't tell me how you got there, tell me what you found when you got there.

Tip 8 Reassure me you have thoroughly scoped the territory, and that you are not about to tell me something 500 peoople already investigated.

Tip 9 Never, ever, present for more time than you promise to in the programme. If that’s ten minutes, do it in ten – not a second more.

Tip 10 For every minute you propose to present, allow one hour of preparation. For a ten minute presentation, in other words, you need to plan in ten hours of preparation before the Big Day. (I was taught this unlikely-sounding rule by Carol Harding Roots, who trains the Doors team how to present. She’s right).

Tip 11 Never rely on designed objects or media to tell your story on their own - whether they be posters, prototypes, videos, computer simulations, or exhibits. Real people, properly briefed - and ideally you, yourself - are far more interesting and effective than the glossiest poster or video in the world.

Tip 12 Don’t commission a special video for a public exhibition: they add noise, and hardly anyone watches them. If you have a big budget, spend the money hiring a celebrity chef to cook exhausted visitors delicious snacks - as Gaggenau did at HomeTech.

Tip 13 Treat PR consultants politely but with the utmost suspicion. They almost never get it, whatever it is – but will act as if they do. If your company insists you use a PR team, use them as support - but never give them complete control over your communications.

Tip 14 At the end of your presentation, or my visit, find a way to make sure we stay in touch - for example by saying, "may I call you next week?" or, "may I put you on our mailing list?". (And don’t put my visiting card in a large goldfish bowl with all the others: study it with respect and awe, and then put it in carefully in your wallet.).

Tip 15 Get help. There's no logical reason why a good designer or researcher should be a good presenter or communicator. Many great writers became great thanks to dedicated editors behind the scenes. Get an editor to finish your text. Pay a trainer to teach you how you to present.

Tip 16 Send me more tips. You surely know better tips than these (or disagree vehemently with mine) - so send your comments in to . I'll put the best ones online here, and credit you. I particularly want to add the names of books, sites and people that have helped you become a better presenter or exhibitor. Let's put an end, together, to failed research presentations.

Useful contacts:
The Doors team recommends Carole Harding Roots at Executive Presentations in London. Carole comments that it’s "better to look ahead and prepare than look back and regret.Good speakers create a spark to ignite the fuel of anticipation; they capitalise on their platform presence; they look the part; they stand and move with ease; they sound the part chr@executivepresentation.com

A good book on the subject is Getting Started In Speaking, Training or Consulting by Robert Bly (John Wiley paperback, 2001). Bly’s site, www.bly.com, contains a small arsenal of tools and services.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:07 PM

October 12, 2002

Design-recast: the world as spread-sheet

A lecture given to the Design Recast conference organised (by Jouke Kleerebezem) at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.

Trying to get a grip on design is rather like trying to grab hold of a shoal of herring. Orca whales do this by blowing upside-down funnels of air bubbles from underneath the shoal - somewhat like a martini glass - and then gulp the whole lot down in one go as the shoal swirls helplessly round. After the last couple of days, I can't decide whether I feel like a herring, or the whale...

Architecture and design have to change faster if they are to be effective, or even meaningful, in today’s context. We have filled the world with complex systems and technologies - on top of the natural ones that were already here, and social-cultural systems that have evolved over thousands of years. We live in world of human, natural, and industrial systems whose complex interactions are hard to comprehend. These systems are, by their nature, invisible - so we lack the clear mental models that we might otherwise use to make sense of the bigger picture. The design of Large Technical Systems, pervasive software, and the inaptly named 'ambient intelligence', is an almost unimaginably complex process. To be effective in such a context, design needs to be renewed, and transformed. But in what ways? And how?

In recent years we were told that these systems were 'out of control' - too complex to understand, let alone to shape, or re-direct. But 'out of control' is an ideology, not a fact. In architecture, in particular, this ideology fostered a kind of cultural autism, an absorption in self-centered subjective activity, accompanied by a marked withdrawal from reality.

But there is something we can do. It's called design: the "first signal of human intention".

If you look at the mainstream of architecture, the prospects for change look bleak. Many design professionals have retreated into denial and narcissism. Their projects deal mainly with appearances, and are fashioned to enhance the celebrity of their creators. More insidious are those designers who have adopted the language of complexity and networks – only to become craven servants of what Manuel Castells calls "The Automaton" or Alasdair Grey, in Lanark, "The Machine".

Exulting in forces ‘too big for us to control’, this second group has taken it upon themselves to amplify, to accelerate, the powerful forces unleashed by neo-liberal values (or the lack of them) and new technology. These designers don’t just go with the flow, they speed it up. The result is the glorification of fast cities, of extra large cities, and of 24-hour cities - a big interest in fast trains, and in high-end shopping - but little attention to social quality, learning, innovation, or sustainability.

Things are not much better in communication design. We do not know how to design communication. We know how to design messages, yes: the world is awash in print and ads and packaging and e-trash and spam. But these are all one-way messages, the output of a point-to-mass mentality that lies behind the brand intrusion and semiotic pollution that despoil our perceptual landscape. I’ll return to this issue later; right now I want to focus on two missing communication flows that need to be designed: social communication, and ecological communication.

That sad picture, for me, is the empty half of the bottle. But the bottle of design innovation is half-full - and rising. Profound change in design is already underway. Being bottom-up, and outside in, these changes are barely visible on the official radars of architecture - its media, schools, and professional bodies. But these changes are real.

I will focus on two axes in this transformation of the design process. The first axis concerns the understanding and perception of processes that shape today’s shifting urban conditions. The second axis is about modes of intervention - exploring new kinds of design moves in which we are blind to the precise outcome of particular actions - but militant promoters of the core values I mentioned above: social quality, learning, innovation, and sustainability.

Design for legibility

The emerging model of architectural and urban design incorporates what we know about the behaviour of biological organisms, the geometry and information processing systems of the brain, and the morphology of information networks. In order to do things differently, we first need to see things differently. We need to re-connect with the systems and processes on which we depend. We need to understand them, in order to look after them.

Many affective representations of complex phenomena have been developed in recent times. Physicists have illustrated quarks. Biologists have mapped the genome. Doctors have described immune systems in the body, and among communities. Network designers have mapped communication flows between continents, and in buildings. Managers have charted the locations of expertise in their organizations. So far, these representations have been used, by specialists, as objects of research – not as the basis for real-time design. That is now changing. Real-time representations are becoming viable design tools.

Representations of energy flows, for example, are now achievable. And a priority. All our design processes should aspire to reduce the ecological footprint of a city. Man and nature share the same resources for building and living. An ecological approach will drastically reduce construction energy and materials costs, and allow most buildings in use to export energy rather than consume it. Natural ecosystems have complex biological structures: they recycle their materials, permit change and adaptation, and make efficient use of ambient energy. Real-time representations of energy performance can help us move closer to that model in the artificial world.

I emphasize that I am not talking about simulations, here, but about real-time representations.

We should also visualize connectivity. Many of us here, I am sure, enjoy charts that map the number of people connected to the Internet, or the flows of bits from one continent to another. They make really sexy infographics. But I am not just talking about information as spectacle, or as porn. An active intervention in the architecture of connectivity means mapping communication flows in order to optimise them. We need to understand overlapping webs of suppliers, customers, competitors, adults, and children – to identify communication blockages and then to fix the 'plumbing' where flows don't work.

We also need to investigate change processes at a ground level. In a recent issue of Hunch, edited by my friend Jennifer Sigler at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, I lauded a project called Wild City which mapped the interactions between non-regulated processes (street traders) and existing city fabrics (the green market, or a department store). I’m not convinced that the researchers' initial research hypothesis was proved: they set out “to point out the undiscovered potentials of specific locations” - but, for me, that was not the main point. The Wild City project delivered new notational tools for perceiving ‘actors’ and ‘forces’ that previously did not figure - to use a fusty architectural term - in urban design notation.

A further design challenge would render more of these process representations visceral. Maurice Merleau Ponty, an early critic of blueprint thinking in architecture and design, said that we need to move beyond “high altitude thinking... towards a closer engagement with the world made flesh". And Luis Fernandez-Galiano, in his remarkable book Fire and memory, argues that we need to shift our perceptions “from the eye to the skin” - to develop not just an understanding but also a feeling of how complex urban flows and processes work.

Architects are not famous for being in touch with their feelings, so I do not anticipate fast progress on this particular front.

Sense-and-respond design

Evolution operates without prior knowledge of what is to come - that is, without design. But culture does not. The purpose of systems literacy in design is not to watch from outside. It is to enable action. We need to develop a shared vision of what we need to do, together, and how. We need to re-discover intentionality and learn, once we can read them, how to shape emergent urban and industrial processes.

A first step is learning how to think backwards from a desired outcome. To identify the things that need fixing, and to foster creativity in the search for new questions, we need to become expert at a process called ‘back-casting’ .We learned a lot about this technique during the 1990s at the Vormgevingsinstituut in Amsterdam. The trick is to develop scenarios of everyday life in the not-too-distant future: for example, a city in which 90 per cent of food is eaten within 50km of where it is produced; or a community in which fifty per cent of the teaching in a local school is done by people living in the area; or a health system based on peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing among hospitals, doctors, and citizens, enabled by the web. [The best book I know on such scenarios, by the way, is David Siegel's Futurize your enterprise. Our own book Presence: new media and older people is also pretty good].

We put these scenarios into workshops with professionals from mixed backgrounds, and asked them to work the consequences through backwards from then, to now. On that ‘backwards’ road, we developed the capacity to spot opportunities at the juncture between physical and virtual networks, and to imagine relationships and connections where none existed before (in much the same way that processes were visualised in Wild City).

Back casting and scenarios are neither fantasies, nor a new variety of theoretical onanism. Design scenarios are about the real world. We need to use as design tools, as the basis for real-world interventions to ‘steer’ complex urban transformations. Scenarios can help us connect an understanding of urban genetics with real-time actions to nudge ‘self’ organising systems in a desired direction.

[I should mention that design scenarios are quite different from autonomous or so-called intelligent design tools, such as genetic algorithms and cellular automata. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has shown that it is feasible to design self-generating code that can plot the lines of complex shapes, such as a boat hull. It was once thought that ‘intelligent’, generative design tools might help architects design the processes or codes, the ‘rules of the game’ or ‘shape grammars’, by which forms are generated, rather than the end product itself in detail. Researchers continue to look for ways to harness the formidable power of computers to do prototyping, modelling, testing and evaluation, thus compressing the time and space needed for products to evolve. For researchers like John Fraser this means designing the overall system: “you design the rules, rather than the actual individual stylistic detail of the product”.

But neither shape-generating algorithms, nor self-replicating software viruses, are appropriate for the continuous intervention in continuously evolving urban systems – for three reasons. First, because urban processes are not shapes. Second, because self-replicating software does not allow for sense-and-respond feedback. Third, because intelligent design tools are just that: tools. They can and do exist independently of the physical and social context without which a sense-and-respond design process is impossible.

In biology, they describe as choronomic, the influence on a process of geographic or regional environment. Choronomy adds value; a lack of context destroys it.

The irony is that while city and building designers have been flirting with semi-autonomous, evolutionary design processes, the most advanced software designers, who call themselves 'extreme programmers', are headed in the opposite direction – back towards human-steered design. Extreme programmers prefer to do it, than watch it. They have come to value individuals, and interactions among them, over abstract processes and tools. They find it more important to engage directly with working software, than to labour at the design of self-organizing systems. These principles are the basis of a new movement in software called The Agile Alliance.

As designers, we all need to be Agile. Our best intentions – for social quality, for sustainability, for learning, for play - will remain just that - intentions - until we complete the transition from designing on the world to designing in the world.

Natural, human and industrial systems are all around us – they are not below, outside, or above us. In design, if we are to take this new subject-object relationship seriously, we need to shift from a concern with objects and appearances, towards a focus on enhanced perceptions of complex processes - and their continuous optimisation.

We need to think of ‘world’ as a verb, not as a noun. We need to think of rowing the boat, not just of drawing it.

The transformation from designing for people, to designing with people, will not be easy. Anyone using a system - responding to it, interacting with it, feeding back into it - changes it. Complex technical systems – be they physical, or virtual, or both - are shaped, continuously, by all the people who use them. Think of Netscape, or Napster. In the world as a verb, it won't work to treat people as users, or consumers or viewers. We need to think of people - of ourselves - as actors.

As designers, our role is evolving from shaping, to steering; from being the ‘authors’ of a finished work, into facilitators who help people act more intelligently, in a more design-minded way, in the systems they live in.

Our business models in design also have to change. The idea of a self-contained design project – of 'signing off', when a design is finished - makes no sense in a world whose systems don’t stop changing. Design’s project-based business model is like a water company that delivers a bucket of water to your door and pronounces its mission accomplished. We need to evolve new business models for design - models that enable design to operate as a continuous service, not as manufacturing process.

One scenario, which we are discussing next week at a workshop on new business models in Ivrea, is a design economy based on service contracts, such as those used by big management consultancy firms.

Someone told me that every lecture should end with an answer to the question: what do I do with this information on Monday morning, when I go back to work? It's a reasonable question, but I can't answer it directly. Italo Calvino, however, tells a wonderful story - so I'll tell you his.” Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later, the drawing was not begun.” I need another five years,” said Chuang-tzu.The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect ever seen”.

For Calvino, literature was a search for knowledge.” My work as a writer", he said, has, from the beginning, aimed at tracing the lightning flashes of mental circuits that capture and link points distant from each other in space and time”. Might we not think of design in a similar way?

Maastricht April 2002

Posted by John Thackara at 08:59 PM

January 22, 2002

Why is interaction design important?

Over the previous two years I had been helping Interaction Design Institute Ivrea develop its teaching and research programmes. One outcome was the following statement, which was written collaboratively with Gillian Crampton Smith’s team in Ivrea.

* Interaction design determines how people interact with computers and communications. This is an issue of profound economic and cultural importance.
* Interaction design determines the value of a communication service to its users, and the quality of experience they have when using it.
* Computers and networks are transforming every aspect of our lives. As networks converge, almost everything we use, or do, involves some kind of interaction. There are interactions between us and the system, or between one object and another. Interaction design shapes the kind of experience we have when this takes place.
* The world is already filled with twelve computer chips for every man, woman and child on the planet. By the time today’s five-year-olds leave school, their world will contain thousands of chips for every human being alive. In a world of such complexity, interaction design will influence the kind of life she lives.
* Compared to physical products, communication services are experiences, not things. Interaction design deals with immaterial processes, and with services that adapt to an individual’s needs and preferences. This is a completely new kind of design.
* Interaction design also reveals the new business models that are needed to deliver these services and experiences.
* Very few universities and design schools in the whole world specialise in this vital subject. Interaction Ivrea is in a position to drive innovation, and shape the agenda, for this key question of our age.

We also put these slogans all around the building for its opening in 2000:
* Collaborative innovation: shaping technology with the people who use it.
* From the era of devices, to the era of service and flow
* Interacting with all our senses - at home, at work, on the move.
* Between an airport, and a monastery - a hub as well as a hive
* A connected community - linking people, places and ideas.
* A new approach to innovation
* For the convergence of culture, technology and business
* Stimulate debate. Provoke reaction. Change agendas.
* Combining the depths of the old economy, with the energy of the new.
* In the tradition of Olivetti, with the strengths of Italy

Communication services of tomorrow
Designing new ways to connect – with family, friends, lovers, and colleagues. Adding new qualities to the communication services we know today. Creating new value through richer and more variedforms of interaction.

Interaction qualities
Interactions when you hear, and taste, and see, and touch, and feel. Interactions when smart technology is everywhere – but not in your face. Interactions that are playful, intuitive, and moving, surprising, and fun. Interactions of quality.

People and their culture
From the worship of technology, to a culture of community and communication. From a fetish for devices, to an aesthetic of service and flow. From a focus on needs, to services that delight and inspire. That are closer to poetry, than to plumbing.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:40 PM

April 22, 2001

File sharing the future

Infodrome, a one-day conference for the top civil servants of The Netherlands held in The Hague this month (April 2001).
Infodrome is a think-tank set up by the Dutch cabinet to analyse the consequences of information and communications technologies (ICTs) for government and its agencies. Its task is to expose policy makers to possible future scenarios, and thereby to enrich the policy-making - and public money-spending - process.

Charles Leadbeater, an advisor to Tony Blair and a keynote speaker at the Infodrome conference - pronounced it an 'incredibly grown-up process'. For his part, Leadbeater made an incisive case for the need to focus on institutional innovation - and not just on technology - if governments are to succeed in their role as joint stewards (with citizens) of the public domain, physical and informational infrastructure, learning, health care and so on. The consensus at Infodrome seemed to be that, although governments have to re-think what they do, and how, they are needed more than ever in a world changing profoundly and at increasing speed. Yes, we could listen to the propagandists of the new economy, and leave it all to the market and to corporations - but that would be the gloomier of the futures among the utopian and distopian visions discussed at Infodrome.

The story below is the text of John Thackara's presentation at Infodrome, on 11 April 2001.

You often hear talk, at this kind of meeting, about 'cultural barriers to innovation'. Innovation is not just about technology, experts like to say: innovation also means changing the way people think, and behave.

This argument is used frequently about learning. We know that everyone has to become a lifelong learner. The way to achieve this, it is said, is by making the Internet a gigantic distribution system for knowledge. Knowledge for all - a bit like water. The only obstacle to this rosy scenario, goes the argument, is that people are not ready, or able, to be filled up with knowledge in this way, like a bucket under a tap. Therefore, people have got to change.

This is the wrong way to think about learning and the Internet. People are not a 'problem' to be solved. The real barriers to innovation are institutional: our teaching concepts, our professional associations, the business models of publishers and media companies, and countless incompatible technical standards.

My talk this morning is about a key aspect of this picture: file-sharing, and peer-to-peer knowledge exchange over the net. File-sharing is a good example of the people being ready, and the technology being available and working well - but where institutional barriers are holding us back.

Now, file-sharing is one of those subjects that far more people talk about, than actually do. So first, a quick check: hands up who has heard of Napster? Now, who actually uses Napster - or Freenet, or Gnutella - on a regular basis?

As I would have expected: for every 100 people who have heard about the subject, five per cent, at most, have had direct experience! I include myself as a non-user, by the way - but I have friends who show me around!

(The following section accompanies a demo of Napster). So let's look at what this file sharing story is about. Once you start the programme, it connects automatically to the Napster server, which maintains an index of everybody's collection - or at least, everybody who is connected at that moment.

You type in your search keyword. You can limit your search by choosing line speed, in this case a minimum of 'T1': this means you are looking for this music only on computers that have a fast connection, so that your download time will be shorter. You hit the search key, and out pops the window with the results. You can sort this list in various ways, as with response time.

Then you pick your song. You double click it - and up pops a box called transfer manager. At this moment, a song on somebody else’s computer is being copied onto the hard disk of your own computer. Whilst the transfer is under way, you can already go to your download folder and listen to the file, even before it has fully arrived. By the time this song is safely parked on your hard disk, it is automatically made available for other people to copy from you.

But the exchange of music files is just one aspect of the file-sharing phenomenon. Just as important: the system connects you with other people out there - not just with a catalogue of songs of the kind you might find on a publisher's website.

If you search among the so-called 'channels', the window lists different genres: pop, oldies, rap, jazz, techno, rave, hiphop. You name it - there can be a hundred or more on a busy day when a lot of people are connected (to Napster). Each channel - or folder - is inhabited by a particular interest group. When you open one of these folders, you find a list of nicknames representing real people who have put their own music collections online, ready for you to copy.

You can check their line speed, which is important if you care about the speed of downloading. I usually go straight for the T3 group. Today, I'm lucky because "Mr Guggenheimer" is here, whose collection intrigues me; it happens to be on a speedy T3 line. I am interested in what he has to offer, so I peek into his library, his personal collection of songs and . . . oh wow . . . great stuff! Now I decide to bookmark him into my hotlist so I can find him again, so I hit the 'add to hotlist' button. My hotlist is the list of people that have interesting songs and that I might want to look up again. I check if he indeed has ended up in my hotlist, and there he is. I can check his speed again, in case I forgot.

Now I decide to send him a message. At his end, my message to him will pop up in a little window. And he might decide to reply. I should warn you that, content-wise, it can be a bit adolescent out there. File-sharing is a marvel of communication - but the contents can be less than marvellous!

I decide to download one of his songs now, and will proceed as with a normal download, like I showed you before. The transfer manager will pop up and you can listen to the song while you download.

Systems such as Napster enable you to communicate not only with a machine but, if you so wish, with another human being who seems interesting because their tastes overlap with yours.

This is where the cultural energy of file-sharing comes from. It's the essence of peer-to-peer - or "P2P". You search indirectly, by comparing tastes - but then you connect with that person directly. You learn from and with each other.

There are various kinds of P2P systems. Napster is just one. But in its very short life - less than two years of existence - Napster alone has attracted nearly 40 million committed and enthusiastic users. That's far more people than watch most so-called 'mass' media.

Just like email, and just like the mobile phone, the 'killer application' here is connectivity and sharing among people. That is the cultural driver ofP2P.

Most recent attention has focused on the implications of file-sharing for music. And music is a 40 billion dollar business. But recorded music is only one kind of intellectual property. Words are another - there's an 'open content' movement on the Internet.

Images are IP, too. I met some artists in Montpellier two days ago, who are building an open artwork network (Domaine Public, an idea of Eric Watier, info: cebra@club-internet.fr).

And you may well have heard about the Free Software movement and the concept of 'Open Source' and open standards. With Linux, thousands of people work on each others' code, continuously - massive testing and peer review that private companies, however huge, cannot afford. Linux is never finished. Its response time to change is incredibly short, thanks to countless people working on it on a daily basis.

Open Source is not just a regulatory issue: it lies at the the heart of the relationship between ICT and organisational structure.

Let me remind you how we shared intellectual property up until now. In the beginning was the Word - and it was free. Language enabled us to tell each other stories, an effective way to share knowledge and experience that has worked well for 20,000 years - and still does. Then came writing and, with it, the possibility to transfer knowledge from one person to another indirectly. Four hundred years ago, with printing, we industrialized writing, learned out how to embody knowledge in an object, and, with the invention of copyright, created the publishing industry. First came books; a bit later, with sound and image recording, we added records and CDs; more recently still, we added software to the list.

So file sharing raises fundamental questions about the distribution methods - and the business models that underpin them - for all kinds of intellectual property. The old model was simple: the publisher packages knowledge, and we buy the packages - books, CDs, whatever. This model worked perfectly for 400 years or so. It was only with the rise of file sharing that this cosy system came into question. File sharing disrupts this simple and deeply rooted model of publishing. This is why we have the law suits and rhetoric surrounding Napster.

It's terribly important to filter out the screams of anguish from vested interests, as they contemplate extinction, from the potential of file sharing in a learning-based society. We confront a world whose complexity is growing at an exponential rate. As you will hear repeatedly today, computing and connectivity are pervading products, buildings, our bodies, nature.

You're probably sick of hearing all those e-words: e-learning, e-health, e-governance. But if you thought nothing was changing, thenyou would not be here today. We are in the middle of a profound transformation in which everything around us, and in us, is being networked. The way we will cope is by learning from each other - continuously, collaboratively, and without friction.

During the Iron Age, it took one hundred years for knowledge about smelting to cross the world. But we simply don't have 100 years to learn how to live in a world of infinite connectivity. We have to learn in ways that are direct, collaborative, continuous. The good news is that two of three necessary conditions for this kind of learning have been met.

Condition one is cultural. We have the will. Human beings have an innate desire to learn, to connect with others, and to share. I already told you about the 38 million Napster users. Did you know, too, that more people take part in voluntary continuing education each year than the combined number of people who go to sports events, and take air flights? 'Peer-to-peer' file sharing is not an algorithm, it's human nature.

Condition two is technological: We have the technological means to support radical, ubiquitous file sharing in the form of the Internet, peer-to-peer networking, and the file-sharing techniques of the kind I just showed you. Ian Clark, the 25-year-old Irishman who designed Freenet, said: "It's a way to de-commercialise information, period". File sharing, which fosters continuity and collaboration in learning, combines technical and cultural forces.

Condition three is institutional - and that's where we do face obstacles. This is also where you, as policymakers come in: there's plenty of work for you to do!

The first institutional barrier is the variety of attempts to privatise information - people who try to privatise algorithms, genetic data, or natural organisms. This one is a real snake: we have to kill it.

A related obstacle is the commodity model of publishing I mentioned just now. We need to be firm, but perhaps more humane than with the privatisers of discoveries, in helping publishing change its business model from the commodification, to the facilitation, of learning.

A third institutional barrier: technical standards that make it harder for systems to operate together - rather than easier, as we need.

These are the 'cultural barriers' to a learning society that need to be removed. I do not know how to get rid of them. I have no blueprint for a transition from a culture of learning that is corporate, to one that is collaborative. I do not know how to foster a culture of learning based on free exchange of knowledge, Open Source software, and its learning equivalents.

What I do know - and here I will conclude - is two things. First, learning is not a 'problem' that will be solved by technology. Neither is learning a problem of human nature, which we somehow have to change. On the contrary, we want to learn, and we have the technical means to do so in new ways. The only obstacles are institutional.

And that brings me to the second thing I know: "Where there's a will, there's a way".

Posted by John Thackara at 05:39 PM | Comments (2)

January 22, 2000

Design and elders: The Presence project

Imagine a world where every second European adult is over fifty years old. And where two-thirds of disposable consumer income is held by this age-group. By 2020 this will be a reality. There will be huge demand for services that enable older people to live independently in their own communities as they age. But although it is potentially huge - health care alone represents nearly eight per cent of Europe's GDP - few people or companies understand this emerging market. There is no category in the DOW index for services in which elderly people communicate and care for each other using new information tools and services; investors and entrepreneurs seem blind to the potential of new markets fuelled by the changing lifestyles and considerable financial resources of many elderly people. (I wrote this chapter for an American Centre for Design book, but I do not recall ever seeing a copy).

Introduction
Imagine a world where every second European adult is over fifty years old. And where two-thirds of disposable consumer income is held by this age-group. By 2020 this will be a reality. There will be huge demand for services that enable older people to live independently in their own communities as they age. But although it is potentially huge - health care alone represents nearly eight per cent of Europe's GDP - few people or companies understand this emerging market. There is no category in the DOW index for services in which elderly people communicate and care for each other using new information tools and services; investors and entrepreneurs seem blind to the potential of new markets fuelled by the changing lifestyles and considerable financial resources of many elderly people.

Governments, too, are stuck in a negative mind-set: they fear that social, welfare, and health-care costs are going to escalate alarmingly, and are uncertain how best to react. As a result, perhaps the greatest of human achievements - the addition of 25 or more years to the average European lifespan in the space of three generations - is all too often see as a problem, and not an opportunity. Presence (www.presencweb.org)is a two-year programme that brings together an international group of researchers to begin to fill this gap.

Social computing
These design and business issues converge in the concept of 'social computing' - a theme which informs an important European Union programme called i3 (it stands for Intelligent Information Interfaces www.i3net.org) - of which Presence is a part. i3confronts the question: 'how may we use design to develop new forms of public and personal media in order to meet new social needs?'. Twenty five i3 projects, with an aggregare value by now of 100 million euro (about $100 million) involve industrial companies, design groups, social research and human factors specialists, and real communities, all over Europe. Presence is a two-year programme that brings together an international group of researchers designers and industrial partners from Norway, Italy, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. There are eight partner organisations, and more than 25 people are actively involved with this project.

Beginning in 1997, the project team set out to challenge stereotypes of older people as a predominantly frail, needy and disabled; their investigations focussed instead on the positive possibilities of ageing - even to see elders as knowledge assets. To reinforce this positive bias, the team decided on day one to work with groups of real people in their own communities, instead of taking the more conventional approach of generating ‘user profiles’ based on statistical and therefore abstract information.

Three ‘test-sites’ were chosen, each with its own individual characteristics and cultural roots. One was in Oslo, an affluent neighbourhood of more highly educated people who work with computers and are learning to get onto the Internet. A second community was an inner city area in Amsterdam called the Bijlmer; people from over 92 different countries live there. The Bijlmer is perceived by many Dutch people to be a ghetto, a really bad neighbourhood although, s we shall see, the people who live there see it differently. The third test-site was Peccioli in Italy, a small rural village. Between them the three communities cover the European spectrum - from North to South, urban to rural, from native to immigrant, from rich to poor, and from the extended family to fragmented family structures. The diversity to be found in just three test-sites was almost literally infinite.

Mapping communication flows
Combining traditional research techniques with new design and user-driven methods, which I describe below, the Presence team set out first to map the way communications flowed in the three communities. These ’maps’ did not just focus on so-called ‘purposive’ communication - letters to the bank, calling a taxi, a town-hall meeting - but also embraced all kinds of social and cultural communications - the many ways people build relationships, articulate their needs and fears, and interact informally with friends, family, carers, officials and so on. The dynamic of the project was top focus on the people themselves, their needs, their habits, their frustrations, their daily life. Information was also collected on demographics, how many people lived in the communities, how much money they had, and so on; but the soft, qualitative stuff proved more inspirational for the designers, when their turn came.

This first phase strongly reinforced our team’s intuition that older people want to be more ‘present’ in their communities, to sustain active fulfilling and independent lives; to develop new communication skills; to increase their involvement in the local community; and thereby to develop a fresh sense of purpose, self-esteem and belonging. Apart from this emerging insight into what it is like to be old in Europe today, the early Presence investigations into communication patterns identified blockages and dysfunctions into the communication contexts of elderly people: these blockages or gaps became a list of service and product opportunities for people of all ages.

Psychogeography
Researchers also used maps to explore the psycho geography of each territory - what designer Bill Gaver called the "emotional typology" of the local sites. On a map of the Bijlmer people were asked people to put red yellow and green stickers to indicate where they felt afraid, cautious or safe in, respectively. On another map people in Oslo were asked to mark where in the library they go daydream, where they go and be comfortable, or where they would like to go and can't. In Peccioli the citizens were asked, where would the landmarks be? - and thy were given stickers of New York, everything from the statue of Liberty to a junkie on the street shooting drugs. And they had to ‘map’ these images onto a small Tuscan village.

This was a complex, messy, interactive process. Presence researchers worked in short cycles: talked with people, developed some ideas, showed these ideas to the people, got feedback, changed ideas, talked with the people again. They used conventional research methods, such as focus groups and questionnaires, but also developed new methods: maps that were annotated; postcards with questions on them were people wrote stories about themselves; photo albums of their own lives with hand-written stories about that.

Sidsel Bjornby, a social scientist who worked with the elderly people in Oslo, organised a series of so-called ‘dreams and dreads’ workshops. Recalls Bjornby: "we wanted to go deeply into how they felt for themselves in the future. At first we went through technology trends, discussing research from Norwegian Telecom; right then we found they were very
eager listeners to these trends and were not at all as afraid of the subject (technology) as we thought they might be". A second workshop on social trends was also surprising. Here you had a group of elderly people who live in the most affluent part of Oslo, all professional people, and fairly well off, and they regretted the social consequences of economic developments in Norway: people had become more remote from each other, and were not so concerned about each other as they used to be. There was talk of it being a (socially) colder society. and people were afraid technology might exacerbate these negative trends.

After each discussion, the participants in the discussions were asked to go home and write postcards from ‘ten years in the future to somebody living now’. Some sent text, others drew images. Sidsel Bjornby recalls one imaginary postcard to a grandchild that said: "I enjoyed so much being present at your birthday party even though could not be present in person because I was sick at home. I could hear you play the piano and I could see everybody sitting around the table and all my relatives being happy. Thankyou". This same lady also wrote postcards expressing concern about the future. " She was worried that she would go into a nursing home and would have nobody to talk to because all the ones with any brain would be sitting in the Internet room and nobody would come and visit her", recalls Bjornby.
" This simple device (postcards) taught us that elderly people can be a lot more open and creative in expressing their concerns and dreams about the future than we give them credit for". Sidsel Bjorneby is ruefully aware now that the role of researcher and researchee are fluid: "one of our people said how interesting it had been to learn how young designers think!".

Researchers at the other sites also used story-telling to get deeper into the social context. Danielle van Diemen, who led research in Amsterdam’s Bijlmer district, organised three-weekly sessions for a group of 25 people from Dutch, Caribbean and Indonesian descent. "We tried role playing and acting-out as a way to help people make a step from what is, to what could be", recalls van Diemen, "and in particular to to communicate a part of their lives
which are hard to express in language". The group therefore used visual tools, too, to express images, ideas, and memories; these in turn stimulated further role
playing and acting out - with or without designers being present. They formulated slogans which expressed their opinions, fears and thoughts. As a result, Danielle was able to gather information about a community which many other researchers have found extremely difficult to engage with. She concludes: " I have discovered just how hard it is just to
imagine yourself being old. Maybe you can't imagine it - which in itself is a strong message for designers. Don’t ever assume you know what people want".

So too in Peccioli, in Italy, where research co-ordinator Cecilia Laschi concludes that the experience of being old is itself changing rapidly. "Being elderly now is very different from the elderly just a few years ago; and so our results - you have catch them before they change". And this was in Peccioli, a small rural village, 20 per cent of whose citizens are over 65. Overall educational levels in Peccioli are low. It is also rather isolated: it is a rural area with no public transportation to the village centre, which adversely affects the social connectedness of people living there. The dominant social relationships are within the families, or with neighbours, who also provide assistance when needed. Using the cultural probes developed by the designers, and more traditional techniques, Laschi’s group finally prioritised three areas of possible communication need: sociability; the maintenance of knowledge and experience; and the need for assistance.

Cecilia Laschi recalls her pleasure and surprise at the receptiveness of elders in Peccioli to new communication concepts - as long as they could be deemed to be useful, and usable. Laschi emphasies that elderly people interpreted ‘useful’ in broad ways. "Inspirational design concepts were as well received as those that were more narrowly functional" she recalls; "they were not especially motivated by scenarios about practical personal assistance in case of disability, or something like that; they were just as enthusiastic about ways to know what their relatives are doing at any time". (Someone told Laschi proudly that a big proportion of mobile phone sales in Italy are by mothers for their sons....)

These processes generated an enormous amount of feedback. In the case of the cultural probes, designers Tony Dunne and Bill Gaver received 600 maps, postcards, photographs, and other items. The team distributed disposable cameras with the packages, repackaged to fit into the rest of the probe materials, with requests on the back ranging from "show us the picture of what you will wear today" or "what you will carry in your bag?" to "take a picture of something ugly, something beautiful, something interesting, something boring". The designers asked people to use a final three shots for things they would like to show us to let us know more about. The postcards, the maps, all the items could be self addressed and stamped so they could be returned to the designers separately. Returning from field trips to the various sites Gaver’s postman was dismayed to find he had to deliver huge amounts of mail.

From feedback to feed forward
The next stage was to develop a new round design concepts in response to the most recentfeedback. One design team, led by Elena Pacenti at Domus Academy, Milan, developed design concepts based on the notion of emotional communication. Recalls Pacenti: "the elderly we met were mostly active people, socially engaged, and all of them with good relationships with their family and friends. Our main objective and the objective of our work was to reinforce such relationships with the elderly and the local communities and with their families and friends. We explored new communication languages, new social media and new collaboration spaces".

The Domus team organised its next round of scenarios into three concept areas: sociability, knowledge and experience, and assistance. Among several sociability scenarios were a talking television which allows older people to find out who among their friends is watching the same programme as them, and to exchange audio, video and written messages about the programme in real time. An active portrait would help elderly people participate in their grandchildren's’ lives, even if they do not see them often. (The portrait - some kind of display - shows still pictures of the child at school, playing with friends and so on. The child’s image superimposed on the screen changes in response to what he or she is feeling. The older person can use the device to exchange audio or video messages with the child). A related concept is called active cameo; similar to the active portrait idea, it is worn as a pin or a necklace, and becomes warm when the child wishes to send ‘warm feelings’ to the grandparent. An idea called hot house enables people to ‘decorate’ the house with traces of loved ones; coloured circles appear periodically on walls and surfaces to display messages sent by grandchildren - with graphic maps showing where they are at the time. A scenario called eye on the town allows older people to ‘sample’ - through a smart television interface - what is going on in the town’s busiest bars, streets and squares; one variation - talk about it - enables the elderly Epson to talk with a friend about what they have both seen or heard.

The knowledge and experience scenarios focussed on the idea of elderly people as valuable knowledge assets. In memory traces so-called ‘soul panels’ are attached to the noticeboards of public buildings such as churches or community centres. These panels display information about events that happened there in the past. Older people write, edit and maintain these information feeds. A related system called Can I help you? allows tourists to contact elderly people with specific local knowledge from a central information point via videophone and ask them questions directly.

Among the many product concepts developed by the Italian team, one in particular - developed as part of as third group on the theme of ‘assistance’, an called Nonnogotchi - caught everyone’s imagination. This Tamagotchi-like system is based on two wireless but directly connected devices: the grandchild has Nonno, and the grandparent Gotchi. The system enables the grandchild to remind a grandparent when to take their pills or measure their blood pressure. The Nonno bleeps when it is time to take a pill; the child sends a message to a screen in the old person’s house, or activates a buzzer on the Gotchi, to remind them it is time to take the pill. Each devices monitors traffic between the two so that if, for example, Grandpa is silent for a while, the grandchild’s device will mention this - and the child can make contact to make sure grandpa is ok and, in one scenario, send a suggestion that he goes out for a walk. The Nonnogotchi has already been prototyped and tested among the Peccioli and Oslo communities and from the feed back received the concept is being refined further.

Beating the Bijlmer blues
Meanwhile in the Bijlmer, designers Tony Dunne and Bill Gaver - both tutors at the Royal College of Art in London - were discovering that although the place has a bad reputation in the Netherlands, people who live there are proud of the place and lead rich and fulfilling social lives. Having arrived to solve short term problems such as day-to-day security, the designers shifted focus to communication concepts that would challenge negative images of the Bijlmer held by people who pass by it every day.

Over the next few months there emerged uses of electronic technology to provide a new facade or interface with the Bijlmer that would engage car users and train passengers passing by the area. One idea was a roadside projection system with photographs developed in local photo shops in real time to provide glimpses of every day life. Another idea was to project a home-made (in the Bijlmer) soap opera. In another concept, image scanners are used at home by elders and other inhabitants to capture and project images and words on so-called ‘slogan furniture’ sited in outdoor areas.

Radioscapes
On a parallel track, Dunne and Gaver developed a concept called ‘radioscapes’ in Peccioli, the small Tuscan village - sounds captured from different locations in the beautiful countryside and fed back into the community by radio. "We came up with the idea of ‘social transmitters’ that might allow a kind of chat space to develop", recalls Dunne; "these transmitters might be distributed in the countryside - perhaps attached to animals to allow them to enjoy the sounds of the local countryside. The original idea was to hang these transmitters around the necks of cows - until it transpired that the cows of the designers’ fantasy were in Holland: they only had chickens in Peccioli. "The idea was that having been lost for days, everyone's favourite chicken was broadcasting again" said Gaver defiantly, having scaled down the needed devices. Finally, one of the local people prompted the designers to make the radio feeds available to tourists passing through the area: they might be able to pull into a lay-by and hear - on their car radios - locally-broadcast birdsongs, half-audible chat in the village square, the sounds of someone making wine. Gaver and Dunne later came up with an extraordinary computer interface for their radioscape idea,

Design revolution
Presence is an example of a revolution that is transforming the way our products, systems and cities can be designed. Both public and private sector organisations are discovering ways to deliver more value in their services by involving user communities directly and early in their development. The concept of user involvement is not that new, of course: telecommunication and software companies routinely give prototype or 'alpha' products to thousands of users during the development process. Indeed, most large-scale computer or communication systems are never 'finished' - they are customised by their users continuously, working with the supplier's engineers and designers. But this approach is normally only found in high-end, software-only services. Gillian Crampton Smith, professor of interaction design at the Royal College of Art, reflected later: "in traditional user research, you see what peoples’ problems are, then you propose ways to solve them. But this entails mapping solutions to whatever already exists. In Presence, we were looking for opportunities, rather than solutions". The key element in the Presence: elderly people were actively involved - along with designers, social researchers, and companies - from the start. Recalls Bill Gaver: "from the very outset of the project we wanted to explore a design centred approach, different from the more usual system of user-centred or technology driven approaches. We wanted to direct the conversation towards ideas or concepts that the elderly people might not have expected. Part of our strategy was actually to embrace subjectivity, provocation, ambiguity - and it seemed to work".

But turning consumers into producers is easier said than done. One lesson learned in Presence: approaching citizens in a patronising way will quickly turn them off. Unless a project team is motivated by the desire to empower people - not to ‘help’ them -these real-time, real-world' interactions will not succeed. Designing with, rather than for, elderly people raises other difficult process issues. Project leaders have to run research, development, and interaction with citizens, in parallel, rather than in linear sequence — the equivalent of parallel processing in computer software and, for that matter, in the human brain. This approach to innovation also raises difficult questions about current business models: who pays whom, for what, when 'consumers' add value to a system by being part of its development? The lesson from Presence is that in the information age, innovation is about re-inventing value - not simply adding value to existing service or product concepts.

Hybrid worlds
Presence has also raises important issues to do with the design of so-called 'hybrid worlds'. When new multimedia technologies and internet first appeared, there was excited talk of 'parallel worlds' and escape into a 'virtual reality'. Now the fuss has died down and we are still here- in the same old bodies, on the same old planet. Except that things are changing - in subtle ways - as information and communication systems permeate more and more of our everyday lives. Technologies may be converging - but information devices are dispersing and embedding themselves in our environments. As computing migrates from those ugly boxes on our desks, and suffuses everything around us, a new relationship is emerging between the real and the virtual, the artificial and natural, the mental and material. Presence confronted designers with wholly new questions about the qualities we need to make the new hybridity work.

One of the over-arching themes in all i3 projects is ‘territory as interface’ -not just looking at interfaces based on personal computers, but also at much broader ways of interacting with information and networks of information. Most of the Presence scenarios turned out to be hybrids between real space and digital space. Scenarios for mediated conversations in Peccioli, for example, between grandparents and their grandchildren, were a hybrid type of space with physical devices (for example, the Nonnogotchi) and digital communications. Such scenarios are at first sight about designing physical places, physical products for people to use in their everyday lives. But these are all overlaid with information and networks of information - a mixture of hardware and software, multifaceted design of devices and services and new kinds of social interactions enabled by media. Roger Coleman, director of another UK partner in Presence, DesignAge, and co-ordinator of the European Design for Ageing Network, draws a parallel with architecture: "we know that the way you design buildings affects the relationships people have within them. The way they relate to each other, and the shape of physical space, affects the shape of relationships. And I think information has the same kind of potential in reverse. That’s why we didn't just transfer qualities of the physical world into the digital world; we overlapped one with the other". This opened up a new dimension of design, says Coleman, "the aesthetics of relationships. Relationships mediated by the things we design are really quite different; we knew that from our history of using telephones - but the internet adds another, rather strange, dimension that we are only beginning to understand".

Strange relations
Another strange proposal was to stop treating elderly people like sick children and to start treating them as knowledge assets - to exploit systematically their experience and connections. Marco Susani, director of the Domus Academy research centre in Milan, was militantly opposed to sentimentalism about elders: "Old people know things, they have experience - we need that", said Susani. "Looked at this way, projects to enhance the connectivity of elderly people via internet become an investment, not a welfare cost". All designers need stimulation and feedback: Susani’s idea is that users can be ‘antennas’ to help designers understand what's happening out there in the real world. "We developed a reciprocal fascination with each other, a kind of courtship", reflects Susani of the Presence team’s interactions with the various elderly partners in the project "I am not allowed to say flirting, because they told me in English it is not so correct, but anyway a kind of seduction between two kinds of actors - one pulling on a certain side - that "what if?" side - and the other pulling on, not so much the other side, but being a contrary element. That created energy.".

Gillian Crampton Smith, professor at the Royal College of Art in London, is excited by what she seeds as a new kind of design, "design that does not expect a brief, that has time to react and interact, a design that steers, that anticipates, that grabs opportunities, that has
dialogue with the people who are going to use it. It means design with different attitude, which is fast and visionary, design that doesn't plan the future, but simulates possibilities, and delivers "what if?" more than the "what is that?".

Future Presence
There’s a lot of money to be made in all this. The potential market is huge for systems and services to do with care and welfare, the memory of communities, the way that different ethnic or cultural groups might communicate with each other or with tourists or incoming businesses. But how to get the innovation and investment ball rolling?

One way is for governments to take the lead: they, after all, have most to gain. Recent studies (Diego) suggest showing that if you increase the connectivity of all people in a community - never mind just elderly people - so that they can help out and look after each other better, it reduces the cost burden on the health service, the welfare service, and all of the rest of
it, which are all very expensive. National governments are probably too slow and disconnected from local contexts to be pioneers here; a better vanguard group is probably among ambitious city managers for whom social quality is one of the assets they use in promoting themselves in world-wide city v city competition. A European network of ‘tele-cities’ is interested in taking Presence to a next stage.

Private companies are also beginning to see the potential of social computing. Kay Hofmeester, project manager of Presence, has been leading the search for new industrial partners. "When we show Nonnogotchi to drug companies, or to people running privatised welfare services, they usually are quick to come up with new scenarios of their own which we had not thought of. But it’s still not obvious to any of us exactly what kind of business model will pay for it - the development costs, the infrastructure, the running costs. Do the users pay, does the state pay, does the city pay or some combination of those?". Hofmeester adds: " if we had our life over again - or to put it another way, for the next stage of the project - we would like to bring in business people at the start along with service providers, technology developers, city managers and so on. Only two years down the track we have some great concepts here - but if we can take them one step further and make a business out of it, that's when you accelerate the process".

The process is the product
How can we make people the subject - not the object - of innovation? This was the key question in the Presence project. A consensus emerged that using multiple methodologies - in a tactical way, according to need and circumstance - is the right approach. Research results are relatively worthless until they are disseminated to - and acted upon by - third parties, preferably in a real-world context. This is literally new territory for most designers. The name ‘cultural probes’, for example, was chosen to suggest that they are despatched into an alien environment, returning hints and signs which must be interpreted from afar. Boys, boys, this is the city outside your door we’re talking about here!

Pro-active design scenarios can anticipate or discover 'needs' that people did not know they had, or were unable to articulate clearly on their own. And the role of a 'cultural probe' is to test either for gaps, or for patterns - to identify needs or functions that other forms of research had not unearthed; or to make connections between ideas that users had not themselves associated with each other. The aesthetic quality of research tools matters a lot: people are more likely to be engaged by a well-designed bag of tricks than by some endless questionnaire

Another success factor in research of this kind is time: time to understand a community; time to get to know individuals within it; time to conduct research at a speed that does not threaten people; and time to reflect on results

"It's less important that a method is scientifically sound, than that it be effective" said Elena Pacenti. She recalls a story from another i3 project, Maypole, which is about children and intra-family communications. "At one point a group of children in Vienna were given instant cameras and asked to take photographs of their daily routines and media behaviours, and to make the photographs up into story boards. One of the children's’ well-meaning teachers could not believe that designers would want such messy presentations, and re-arranged the photographs in neat straight lines, thereby destroying a lot of the meaning that had been given to them". Someone else noted that hand-drawn pictures, however rough, usually have more immediacy and resonance than professionally executed artwork. Experts from other disciplines attending Presence often said how pleasantly surprised they were by the apparently chaotic arrays of snapshots, multiple views of communities, the mixture of paper, stickies, video screens. In working with ‘real people’ designers are going to have to overcome a reputation for obsessive tidiness and a preoccupation with straight lines. Now where could that idea have come from?

"Simulate to stimulate" summarises Marco Susani. "Observing and involving users in innovation is not a science, which has a pretence towards neutrality. On the contrary, in our approach, you need to have bias to provoke and stimulate a reaction and this start the conversation. Once that starts, we are often amazed by how creative people become"
Pleaded Tony Dunne towards the end of 1999: "involve users as soon as possible, but above all please let us always make the experience fun".

[Box/graphic]
Hard and soft - the dialectics of design research
HARD SOFT
user -- person
consumer -- producer
control -- emerge
care -- enable
author -- character
facts -- feelings
distance -- presence
objective -- immersive
inform -- inspire
describe -- simulate
suggest -- discuss
gaps -- patterns
record -- reflect
understand -- involve
feedback -- feed forward
useful -- desirable
normal -- absurd
adaptive -- generative
objects -- events
form -- context
think -- do

Posted by John Thackara at 05:13 PM