June 28, 2011 at 10:50 PM · Filed under art, boundary objects, futures, network entrepreneurship, proposals, technology
Welcome to the Haphazard Technology Generator (HTG)!!
All it takes is a click here on this link to help you manage risks and create new ones! Hit the refresh button on your browser to spin out even newer, more haphazard technologies.
Keep in mind that for maximum portability that you should reduce your three-word technology to a more simple three-letter acronym.
But how does it work?
The Haphazard Technology Generator recombines three simple elements to make new technologies:
- a place, location, time, or temporal boundary
- form, an object, or a capability
- a social action, or service
That’s it! Have fun! But please don’t crash the planet.
June 27, 2011 at 8:12 PM · Filed under cinema, community interaction design, narration, service design
Service design is the practice of translating insights from social research into enabling resources. Using tools from cognitive psychology, sociology, and behavioral economics, service design organizes the cognitive, social, and physical infrastructure to help people better serve each other. The goal of service design is to improve service outcomes, procedures, and communication by enabling highly coordinated cooperation among participants and stakeholders. Service design is different from, say, interaction design because instead of focusing on the narrative and form of specific forms of artifacts that users engage with, service design turns its attention to a range of artifacts and narratives all with the goal of organizational change to meet the needs of participants and users.
As the community of service design practice expands, tools are needed that will help people make sense of the formal elements and purposes of service design. Organization and classification are common practices within any emerging discipline. Service design is no different with its formative history marked by rich discussions over definitions, core practices and procedures, value to society, and relationships with other disciplines. Genre is one technique for managing the diversity of elements in service experiences. Meaning ‘type’ or ‘kind’, genre has a cognitive benefit that helps orient people towards the common bonds of a medium or work of art.
Service experiences are dematerialized, elusive, and open to different interpretations. A genre approach can provide techniques for understanding the impact of different service elements while adding perspective across different experiences and tactics. In doing so, a service genre approach should able to describe the formal elements and narrative structure of service experiences, enable comparisons and historical accounts, help us understand how services change over time, and further elucidate the link between service production and consumption.
An Approach to Genre
Drawing on literary theory and film criticism, genre can be applied to service experiences as a way of understanding existing patterns and identifying new ones. One of the most influential approaches to film genre was described by Rick Altman. Altman recognized that films are described semantically in terms of formal elements like costumes, locations, temporal setting, lighting, cinematography, sound, and props, and so on, while also being described as a syntax involving relationships of the story, plot, narrative structure, and interactions between formal elements. Altman described this as a semantic/syntactic approach to genre.
A common example of genre in film is the western, where semantic elements like a cowboy hat, horses, and gunfights provide the visual substrate for syntactic themes of conflict over honor and values, rebirth, and individual agency. Similarly, sci-fi genres use alien creatures, spacesuits, distant planets, and novel technologies to advance themes about humans and their environment, exploration and discovery, and the conflicts that arise between society and technology.
Altman’s Approach to Genre
Genre helps make sense of stabilizing, creative and disruptive processes in service experiences, and this can help us anticipate and generate new trends. Rick Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach resolved three contradictions that emerged when films were classified by existing genre definitions by highlighting the tension between semantic elements and syntactic themes. This approach demonstrated how semantic “things” and syntactic “arrangements” work together through conflict and synergies to generate emergent new genres and creative churning within existing ones.
Contradiction One: Classification of Form versus Structure
Altman identified the first contradiction as one that arises when films are organized by their formal elements, on one hand, and as canonical examples of a genre on the other. Genre classifications before Altman would pivot on a tautology where westerns, for example, were characterized by images of the American West from 1840-1900, or, alternatively, if taste and meaning made certain films more relevant than others for describing an overall generic structure. This contradiction is evident in a movie like Star Wars, which is a western based on its narrative themes, but because it takes place in space, it would be excluded from some lists of westerns.
Contradiction Two: Divergent Communities of Practice
The second contradiction is the difference in discourse between critics and consumers. On one hand, film interpretation by critics and industry channels sets out certain expectations of genre for audiences. However, audiences also construct their descriptions and uses, providing an entirely separate set of interpretations. The difference is what many would call an expert-layperson divergence, but this does not necessarily indicate superiority of one or another. It is specifically because of their different approaches and social relationships that each group is able to bring forth different sets of interpretations. The implication of this separation is that genre definitions are highly dependent on temporal interactions within groups, such as previous scholarship or significant local events, where historical processes influence the emergence and disappearance of narrative structure and formal elements.
Contradiction Three: Degree of User-Focus
In the third contradiction, Altman described relationships to genre as either ritual or ideological, or bottom-up and top-down, respectively. The ritual approach to genre centers on the audience whose use of film genre is an indicator of their preferences and beliefs. Participation through film spectatorship is an act of authorship by the audience, and their expectations and desires are reinforced in the process of consumption. In ritual, genre is created by the audience. The ideological approach views genre as an organized attempt of business and political interests to shape discourse and use-practice. In contrast to the ritual approach, the ideological approach would focus on Hollywood’s interest in scripting audience behavior to serve its own preferences, rather than responding to social pressure from “below”.
In service design, these three conflicts are evident to varying degrees. However, classification based on form and/or structure is often more a question of good versus bad outcomes, processes, and communication. This often depends on how well the experience was able to bridge divergent communities of practice and focus on the needs of the users.
June 9, 2011 at 2:07 AM · Filed under boundary objects, complex systems, cybernetics, design ecology, futures, games, heterarchy, interdisciplinary, maps, narration, network entrepreneurship, teaching and learning, technology, visualization
The Institute for the Future’s (IFTF) 2010 Map of the Decade is part of their annual Ten-Year Forecast which uses foresight and scenario planning to help organizations navigate change. Entitled “The Future is a High-Resolution Game”, the research materials demonstrate the re-emergence of games as a systematic process for positive change.
Map of the Future
IFTF uses a variety of strategies to help groups understand and interpret macro-level trends across several functional areas including carbon, water, power, cities, and identity. The long term goal is to use these sensemaking activities to meet diverse economic, technological, social, political, and ecological challenges. For organizations it is often the case that the interpretation and implementation can be difficult to connect. As foresight and sensemaking tactics become better honed to organizations of different sizes, structures, and cultures, so will the tools that help dedicated individuals in organizations recognize emerging landscapes AND translate those insights into priorities.
One key in making these translations is the ability to connect macro level processes to micro level behaviors – and everything in between. IFTF took a different tactic towards games as a tool for their 2010 map of the decade, and I think it helps move us in that direction of positive change.
IFTF has been at the forefront of what some call gamification – the systematic use of game mechanics for the development of positive psychology, practice, action, and cooperative dynamics. As IFTF’s Director of Game Development describes, games are put together with a goal, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation. So it’s pretty easy to see how game mechanics can connect with operational challenges such as problem solving, productivity, and personal growth within organizations.
Critics argue that in most organizations and real-world situations things are pretty fuzzy, conflicted, and confusing. Agreeing on goals, rules, feedback systems, and participation can be difficult obstacles to begin with. But I think that is why games are tools that help us move in positive directions. We don’t often want to spend too much of our time arguing over goals; we’d rather just get on with it, play/work hard, and feel good about what we accomplish.
Th polling organization Gallup conducts surveys among employees every year across thousands of organizations worldwide asking hundreds of questions. THREE of those questions where employees responded positively turn out to be the largest human factors for organizations that are successful.
- I have a commitment to quality.
- I know what my job and/or role is, and
- I trust my leadership.
Organizations are set up to accomplish a wide array of highly-complex tasks. No one person can keep track of everything. So in order to get things done, people have to simplify their overall cognitive load. They have to eliminate many conflicts and sources of confusion to deal with what they know and how it relates to new challenges. Game mechanics (goals, rules, feedback, participation) can be vectors for the above three factors, and more importantly they systematize them within organizational processes – something good human resource departments struggle to do everyday.
Think about it. I trust my leadership so I don’t always need to reevaluate the goals. Check. I know what my role is so the rules are clear. Check. I have a commitment to quality which means that I show up to participate and when I get feedback I self-correct to improve what I’m doing. Check.
I think the differences there have a lot to do with focus – of setting priorities and knowing what to spend one’s time on – especially when things go awry. We often get distracted, but even when we don’t human, social, and technological systems are always out of sync. Sometimes they connect and we may even experience periods of intense connectivity, creativity, and productivity. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi calls these bursts. So I suppose one of the benefits of the scenario platform IFTF uses is its ability to concentrate social interactions to achieve these bursts. We always need some latent time to process, connect, and search further. Maybe that’s why IFTF does the Map just once a year 
One element of IFTF’s Map of the Decade is “The Happiness Kit”. It’s a platform for helping people ruminate on the kinds of transitions that could lead to more happiness in the world. There are a few standard tools of the foresight practice included like writing headlines from the future to identifying events that might shape or be shaped by the trends. There are also points where participants can identify new services, communities, and practices.
In science and technology sociologist Bruno Latour’s book Reassembling the Social, he looks specifically at groups, actions, objects, and facts as sources of uncertainty in the emergence of new technologies or innovation paradigms. These highly social elements tend to reveal themselves when controversies emerge. They help shape our future when, for example, a nuclear plant melts down and new groups, objects or facts insert themselves into society. Most recently at the Fukushima nuclear plant, it was formerly an established fact that the leaked radiation was 10% of Chernobyl disaster. Now as a society we are learning much more about nuclear radiation leakage models and their diversity when it is revealed that two different groups used two different models. The fact has been revised to 20%. We also know much more now about the safety mechanisms at nuclear facilities, especially the roles of strange monsters like emergency generators, vents, and containment vessels. Groups we never really paid attention to, methods of establishing facts, and objects with strange names all the sudden appear as important factors for how we think about the future. Kits like the IFTF Happiness Kit help us by working through some of them before they emerge from other events.
The kit also works to identify the actors involved in these transitions – as well as the distribution of those that are happy and those that are not. Understanding the distribution and abundance of elements in a system is important when we consider that rare things may become more prevalent and ubiquitous things sometimes disappear. William Gibson is famously quoted, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” As we consider technological diffusion, development, and knowledge-networking, one of the questions we have to ask is how the future can be more evenly distributed. I’m not sure I know the answer, but I think that getting more explicit about the social-technological-ecological networks that individuals live in can help. This graph of system elements in a rural farmer’s immediate grasp might be one step towards understanding, for example, the diffusion of organic farming methods and how they interlink with new sources of income and time for alternative activities.
Overall the thing I like the best about the map of the decade is its ability to use foresight methods while leaving open space for individual interpretations. Some scenario techniques can lead to overarching narratives which create sources of bias. In IFTF’s platform, it appears that participants are encouraged to apply the trends to their immediate organizations and processes (although I cannot be sure since I’m reading the product and not the use-context). My sense is that it’s more of a constructionist approach than the methods used by Royal Dutch Shell or the Global Business Network (for a critique see: Wright 2004; pdf) which define opposing axes and use those for story generation. The way IFTF does it is to throw out a variety of results, new ideas, patterns, and processes – allowing users to pick and choose where to apply them. It’s a more humble approach (if I may say so) that stems from the simple proposition that we can’t really predict what is going to happen and neither can we take everything into account. The point is attenuate our mental models towards things that we think will matter – so that when they become relevant – we notice them.
Still I think there are opportunities to bring greater resolution and hence greater relevance to the process. While the Map of the Future helps deal with actors and events, I think it gets less explicit in areas that matter a lot. More important than who or what is why. The goals that actors have lays out different sets of procedures for attaining those goals. So it’s important to demonstrate how goals and the ways that actors achieve those goals converge on other elements. For example, resources and boundaries are areas that can undergo rapid restructuring or remain relatively stable over time. Helping people make explicit predictions about the direction and magnitude of these changes is helpful for understand the complex dynamics of interacting systems.
Similarly, rules, conflicts, and the outcomes of conflicts are specific pivot points for change. What helps us navigate change well is being able to understand the implications on all side of those transformations. Whiles rules, conflicts, and outcomes are somewhat embedded in the IFTF process, how can we support thinking about how they would change and what changes they would bring in turn to the procedures or boundaries shared by different actors?
I think these additional elements can be added to these types of foresight exercises with little additional cost. And they yield a huge benefit of allowing the results and products of foresight exercises – namely the knowledge generated – to be transferred to the engineers that develop computational simulations. Actors, Goals, Procedures, Boundaries, Rules, Resources, Conflicts and Outcomes are all the basics of putting together agent-based simulation models that allow us to look at the interactions and assumptions of our exercises and turn it into sustained practice.
After all, wouldn’t it be really cool if the Future WAS a High Resolution Game?
You can find the Institute for the Future’s Research Materials in their online library. Plus it has really good graphic design — yea!
