Service designers identify and order goals in service systems. Service systems are a unit of analysis for an exchange of skills and capabilities which leads to the production of value in use (Vargo et al., 2008). Service systems are developed though the creation of value, where reinvention can transform the relationships of use and practice. Service systems are characteristically intangible, heterogeneous, simultaneous in production and consumption, non-perishable, and grounded in times and places that maintain their meaning and value (Kimbell, in prep).
One of the ways that designers understand service systems is by using a variety of approaches and concepts that isolate or concentrate focus on the relevant aspects of a system so they can drive experimentation and change. An example of this is a touchpoint, which means the aspects of the service are visible and come in contact with the users of that service (but see this discussion of its origins). You may have suspected that in a relationship of co-creation, touchpoints multiply quickly when production and consumption are linked since users are creators and vice versa. Another example that designers use is the line of visibility. This is similar to the touchpoint, and it describes what users see and experience in their relationships with a service system. It helps in rendering a system so that its processes and organizational structure are visible.
A draft diagram of a business process showing the line of visibility between the user and the organization dedicated to providing a service.
Because touchpoints and lines of visibility exist not only as tools but in practice, service experiences are tightly bound to tied to the production of narrative. Suspense in particular is a common experience for users when parts of a process, system, or set of relationships are hidden from view. Just imagine a time when you were the creator or recipient of a service. Much of your uncertainty or satisfaction was probably driven by what you knew or could expect about the outcome as well as the communication process that was taking place while the service was being delivered.
Richard Allen discusses suspense in his book about [Alfred] “Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony”. Allen cites Meir Sternberg’s distinction that, “suspense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future, a lack that involves a clash of hope and fear; whereas curiosity is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved, and as such it often involves and interest in information for its own sake.”
So when working in service design we should decide if we desire to create curiosity or suspense and design our process accordingly. Allen also incorporates Ian Cameron’s view that suspense is a “channeling of emotions”. Clearly emotions can be powerful, but how and why? In Allen’s analysis, suspense is something that happens in us as we are forced to take up the prospect of narrative outcomes that are contrary to the ones we desire. Suspense is constructed out of moral uncertainty, balancing our expectations with potential outcomes.
Allen discusses Hitchcock and develops descriptions of two types of suspense: pure and impure. Pure suspense is broad and objective, prolonged by tension, delay, and narration that is unrestricted, moving between vantage points and locations. It leads to an anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as the deadline looms. Arbitrary delays segment time and increase the tension because a bad outcome seems close at hand. Often, the audience sees a threat before the protagonist and surprise happens through the manipulation of time. The outcome almost always favor of the moral victory, especially in popular media.
Impure suspense on the other hand is local and subjective. It is developed from points of view that provide different sources of knowledge often through the eyes of the protagonists and antagonists, keeping the audience informed while the characters remain unwitting. Deadlines are set early on and acceleration commonly heightens the alert attentiveness of the spectators who are active participants in the construction of the suspense. Knowledge is not made by the director. It is made by the audience in cooperation with the information provided to the characters. All too often, the audiences senses the outcome before the characters do by filling in blanks sources of meaning that haven’t been provided. Impure suspense favors empathy for the character, as if we were living through them. The moral outcome is less certain and often unrealized.
In order to try to make the differences between pure suspense and impure suspense more tractable, I imagined what users in a service system might say if they were experience one or the other. The result is in the chart below, and it adapts these distinctions and starts to resolve how one might go about implementing different narrative objectives for a service system.
Pure suspense
Impure suspense
Locations
I move unrestricted between vantage points and locations.
I stay highly local and subjective.
Points of view
My perspective is omniscient and wide-ranging.
I tell everyone what is happening everywhere.
I get different sources of information through the eyes of the others.
I keep some people informed and others in the dark.
Time
My day is prolonged by tension and arbitrary delay.
Deadlines are set early in the day and acceleration commonly heightens my emotional state.
Emotional states
I have anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as a deadline looms.
I am alertly attentive, experiencing empathy for others.
Knowledge Production
The person in charge chooses and focuses attention on the priorities.
I cooperate with the information provided to learn what to do next.
Expectations
I can explicitly identify a threat.
I am frequently surprised.
I sense an outcome before others.
I fill in blanks with sources of meaning that haven’t been provided.
Moral outcome?
I favor the best outcome – like what happens in popular media.
The best outcome is less certain and often unrealized.
References:
Vargo, S. L., Maglio, P. P., & Akaka, M. A. (2008). On value and value co-creation: A service systems and service logic perspective. European Management Journal, 26(3), 145-152. doi:10.1016/j.emj.2008.04.003
In the 1930s, evolutionary geneticist Sewall Wright pulled together research strands in the biology of inbreeding, the genetics of coat color in guinea pigs, statistical methods (including path analysis), and mathematics that codified the changes in gene frequencies in populations as a result of natural selection, mutation, and migration.
His resulting description of these threads set the stage for qualitatively different perspective on the evolutionary process. Wright described his perspective as a “shifting balance” model of evolutionary change, and it highlighted the role of small populations in the transitions between periods of high and low fitness. This pattern, which followed from his use of the term “drift”, describes the fluctuations of gene frequencies that result from the random sampling of small populations. This random sampling comes from mating in small populations that, because of chance, produces small deviations from the numbers of genes originally represented in the population.
Wright’s Shifting Balance perspective coincided with his introduction of the adaptive landscape as a term to describe the space in which random fluctuations of gene frequencies in small populations could push the populations away from adaptive peaks or periods in which they were reproductively successful, and which would in turn allow natural selection to push them towards new adaptive peaks – areas of differential reproductive success.
Though Wright’s perspective on evolution is controversial (in a generative way), the perspectives and tools that emerged from his ideas have endured. For example, Wright’s work preceded algorithmic approaches to optimization problems in mathematics, networks (traveling salesman), metallurgy (simulated annealing), and artificial intelligence – to name a few
The process of Shifting Balance is described as a series of three dynamic phases:
Phase 1, the exploratory phase, the action of small groups explores new combinations. Most stay on the suboptimal fitness peak (reasonably successful), but some get caught in adaptive valleys (unsuccessful).
In Phase 2, selection causes the groups that are in the adaptive valleys to move toward new, higher-fitness peaks.
Finally, in phase 3, groups at higher fitness peaks send off migrants helping other groups move to higher fitness peaks.
Phase 1: The Exploratory Phase
Phase 2: The Selection Phase
Phase 3: The Migration Phase
While Wright’s process was intended for population genetic systems, an increasing convergence between social processes, cognitive psychology, technology, ecology, and creative practice suggests that the concepts apply well to the exploratory, form-finding processes that precede the design and production of materials and services. The implementation of the Shifting Balance process as a analog for social and creative strategy is useful for the production of highly original and robust creative solutions – or, at least it’s a testable hypothesis.
For some, analogies between biological and social processes are difficult to comprehend. However, the design of services and interactions is dependent on the ordering and reordering of processes, materials, people, and ideas. Combinations and recombinations of these things, when developed thoroughly and communicated, can impact the delivery and relational aspects of individuals working in cooperation or separately.
We could envision this process as a sort of charette (period of intense design in collaborative groups) activity where:
The exploratory phase initiates adaptive schema (creative combinations) which are driven by the interactions, specializations, and diverse perspectives of small groups;
Intergroup selection resulting from evaluation, the inherent heterogeneity among groups, and intended service platforms begins the iterative process of amplification of good combinations;
Export and translation of valuable forms/schema to other groups in order to test them against different problems, social contexts for cooperation, and consumptive patterns.
The immediate benefit of this strategy is the demonstration of expertise in practice, the role of discourse, and the chance events that can drive innovation. Participants from different disciplines will have to opportunity to observe and engage in creative problem solving within highly diverse communities. Here the focus is on collaborative ideation followed by problem-solving across disciplinary and expertise-based boundaries and ultimately an exercise in cooperative translation, storytelling, and communication.
There is enough social scientific research to at least point to the benefit of diverse groups, although it would be worthwhile to have a better handle on an ideal number – i.e. what counts as a small population. Plus, how do we go about choosing? What is the process of selection…or should we instead be saying, “What is the process of attachment?” And finally, are there specific patterns of translation or dissemination that we should aim for? For if migrants endowed with the most successful schema do disperse and link up with others, they have an opportunity to cooperate and raise the capacity the other groups elsewhere. But through which mechanisms to we initiate and implement these processes?
There are a few other ideas that seem uniquely coupled to the Phases of Shifting Balance. An example is the goal of participation as a unique form of empowerment in community planning exercises. One particular model of participatory engagement provided by Conde et al. (2004) is used in the context of climate change planning (below).
The Landscape of Participation
This example shows transitional categories in participation. When viewed through a model of culture which emphasizes process over characteristics, these are skills acquisition categories that indicate differences with an impact on fitness – i.e. reproductive success.
Each category represents a different level of engagement, a level that itself suggests a tighter relationship between participants and the tools of participation or cooperation.
Informative participation is an exchange of information, which may or may not be meaningful.
Consultation requires that participants begin asking questions as well as providing information.
Functional engagement means that different participants identify and agree to share goals, thus ordering their actions in accordance with each other.
Interaction means the initiation of feedback, where signals and shifts in the participation is met with responsiveness and dialog with the others.
Self-motivated participation is demonstrated by the points at which processes are acquired and reorganized by the participants themselves.
Migration ultimately expands the instances of participation which have been successful, sharing them with other communities, and finding cooperative allies elsewhere.
References:
Conde, C., Lonsdale, K., Nyong, A., & Aguilar, I. (2004). Engaging stakeholders in the adaptation process. Adaptation policy frameworks for climate change: Developing strategies, policies and measures, 47–66.
Wright, S. (1977) Evolution and the Genetics of Populations. Vol. 3: Experimental Results and Evolutionary Deductions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world. Via RSA
Most of what I liked about the GROCS lab at the University of Michigan Media Union was how the activities of various groups, classes and projects were in an open, shared space. Mix that with some movable furniture and a close proximity to other resources in the Media Union and it made for a good space to come up with ideas, share them and work them out with each other.
Ok, the pic isn’t great but you get the idea. This is “The Cube” at the MIT Media Lab. I visited the Lifelong Kindergarten group there and saw how their close proximity to tools, shared workspaces, and each other facilitated their work in progress. I really liked how the space was large with high ceilings, that it was a mess of projects, and that there was a table where lab members would work individually with a tacit sociality.
See-through walls at the Center for Complex Networks Research allow behavior to be observed while keeping conversations in common areas from interrupting focus. Shared offices help maintain an additional level of cohesion among lab mates.
The common space at the Center for Complex Networks Research allows for group interaction, impromptu exchanges, and reception of visitors. Lunch, printing, library, and coffee all converge near conference rooms and shared offices.
A group of researchers made up of advanced students from the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) and the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DAIICT) set out to learn about ethnographic practice and to experience the places and people that may have something to add to our understanding of how the technology fits (or doesn’t fit) with their everyday life. Their goal was to identify how user context could affect the landscape of educational technology…or at least that’s how they started out.
Playpower is a initiative to support affordable, effective, and fun learning games. The project is starting with an existing $10 TV-computer as a platform for learning games in the developing world.
The video below introduces the Playpower Foundation’s mission.
Working on a set of social research practices means getting to know or getting NOT to know (depending on how you look at it) the places and practices of the people who can potentially create something valuable from changes to the exiting technology and it uses.
We held a summary and feedback session at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy after their first week of training and observation. They shared their process of ethnographic research gathered feedback to develop it further and begin to implement more observations on a wider scale.
The research team gave a great introduction of their process with some initial results. What followed was a fantastic discussion among approximately 15-20 staff and researchers at CSTEP as well as visitors and the Playpower team.
Many themes began to emerge, and it became clear that the exciting thing about the Playpower project was more than its concept of low cost computing. Instead, I think it raises as many questions as it answers and engages its audience with problems about the role of technology in education and everyday life.
We explored multiple themes in more or less detail, but overall the session was a fantastic success and good model for how to bring about discussions that relate social science, technology, economics, and education in exciting ways.
Questions and themes for further follow-up:
1. What is the role of ethnographic researchers in relationship to the design process and the Playpower project more generally? That is, how do perspectives gained “on-the-ground” compete with held assumptions about the project and its implementation?
2. How do we move from perspectives of technology as a solution questions about peoples’ goals and aspirations? That is, are we working on the Playpower technology as a panacea for educational constraints rather than understanding how family and individual wants and needs articulate their own technology (or otherwise) solutions?
3. Understanding context means that we may need to do some questionnaire redesign – to understand more than just the landscape afforded by people’s lifestyles and incomes towards an understanding of how practice and purpose shape socio-technical interactions.
4. How can the conclusions and assumptions held by programmers and designers be refined? Put another way, do designers or researchers feel free, comfortable, or motivated to redress cultural biases and modes? Also, how is the distinction between game design and development articulated?
5. Does ethnographic research inform through techniques beyond the interview-questionaire-film? What are additional techniques for research?
6. What are the values that Playpower is proposing, advocating, or nominating? For example, are fantasizing, empathy, or transitions in behavior and practice something the project aims to make durable in its presentation and game design? What about the game or software content? How do these values translate into design – e.g. process or pattern knowledge as bird’s eye views and 2nd order perspectives.
7. Can film and cinema provide media and narrative precedents for games and instruction?
8. Did they buy (the original keyboard/game sets) because they are educational? Or for other purposes?
9. Are there game paradigms to move beyond the screen and into interaction and engagement with the real world.
It’s not often that unfunded proposals make their way into disinfecting daylight. Sometimes you try again, and sometimes you just let them waste away among the dusty electrons of your hard drive.
I don’t know which category this one falls into, but I do feel it’s worth sharing and making public. Perhaps someone will even comment with improvements. I can only hope.
In any case, this proposal was dependent on a constellation of partnerships (and funding) to make the project move forward–at least from my perspective. Sometime a little cash can help develop needed projects and spur collaboration. This was a submission to the Knight News Challenge which is supposed to announce its winners sometime in mid-June. Since I know I’m already out of the running, there isn’t really a compelling reason not to share—but please tell me if there is!!!
envirocasting logo
Anyhow, here is most of it—-minus some names to protect the innocent—–except one: this logo was created by Zack Denfeld, and we’ve used it on a variety of projects. For more, you should visit his launchpad.
Describe your project:
Envirocasting adapts global weather information to the cultural and operational needs of local [international disaster preparedness organization] branch offices and communities, supporting their risk assessment and preparedness needs. A wealth of information exists to support disaster preparedness, but a gap exists between the design of information services and their local use-contexts, limiting widespread use and effectiveness. The benefits of these information services are clear to local decision makers, and they are anxious to put the tools and news sources into practice.
However, exposure to digital news platforms is low, and the capacity to use them in decision making contexts is minimal as a result of this disconnect between design and use.
Envirocasting takes a design anthropology approach to inform the design, distribution, and acquisition of digital weather information services to local decision makers. Design anthropology seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human. Using this approach, local patterns of information consumption and culture related to futures, information design, and technological metaphors can be identified, allowing for the design of appropriate services. Design principles as well as specific, local use-applications will aid in the distribution and assessment of weather forecast efficacy. Thus, weather news for risk assessment can flow more precipitously to decision makers, allowing them to coordinate the disaster preparedness efforts more quickly and strategically.
Simulation games for local communities will support learning and the application of information services in context. This provides use-case memories of the future and practice in managing uncertainty with minimal risk.
How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
Envirocasting aims to localize climate information by making it simple, non-technical, clear, easy to use, and as meaningful as possible. Maps are relevant when their colors, numbers, icons, and scales are relevant and supported by culture and context. Information that connects with specific actions can be used confidently in planning and decision making. Specific use-cases communicated by local communities will drive the development process and will help weave the digital media fabric with aesthetics, narratives, and metaphors. Games support critical thinking and social play to help decision makers and communities explore the dynamics of news and information-based decisions for climate-related disaster preparedness.
How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)
Envirocasting innovates by translating connections between design and use. When local conditions refract the design and dissemination of information from distant or multiple sources, innovation is an inherent byproduct. Envirocasting is designed with the mind in mind, understanding cultural legacies that influence the recognition of uncertainty and metaphors. It bridges experience, play, and interactions, creating memories of the future. The project identifies appropriate implementations of open-source digital information services and defines a set of prescriptive resources for innovating across disaster risk contexts and cultural processes based on abstractions and lessons from six local communities in three countries.
What unmet need does your proposal answer?
A fact-finding mission conducted surveys, interviews, meetings and workshops over two-month periods in 2008 and 2009.
Explicit unmet needs include:
An Increase in the Accessibility and User-Friendliness of Climate Information Products
New Products to Fill Information Gaps for Needs–Starting with Improved Flood Forecasting Tools
Training in the Use of Climate Tools and How Climate Information Could Trigger Action Such as:
Learning to access and interpret climate information tools.
Learning how to monitor seasonal forecasts in conjunction with medium and short-term forecasts.
Understanding how to take gradated actions.
Channels of communication and decision-making to receive and take action based on time-sensitive climate information.
And don’t take my word for it:
What will you have changed by the end of your project?
More-Measurable outcomes:
Prototypes that adapt weather information services to local use-contexts.
Documents that communicate design processes for cross-cultural communication.
Heuristics or ‘rules-of-thumb’ for the design of climate information services for risk assessment.
Country and local use-context reports that document specific patterns of information acquisition and behavior.
Relevance of climate information for local decision-makers.
Ability to align information with decision and action.
A folktaxonomy of climate information and categories for creating a cultural consensus model (CCM) to realize translations in cognition and practice among cultural contexts.
An index of context-specific actions and the values associated with them.
Less-measurable outcomes:
Perception of the design process and innovation pathways for news and information about climate-driven risks.
The relationship between information providers, researchers, designers, policy makers, and implementing offices providing the opportunity for continued support, training and dialogue necessary to realize the potential benefits of using climate information.
Channels of communication between information providers and decision makers and between decision makers and community constituents (incl. digital information services).
The scope of the implementing organizations to conduct cross-cultural research and information adaptation projects.
How will you measure progress and ultimately success?
The uses of weather and hazard preparedness information can be measured using surveys, interviews, meetings and workshops and compared to current estimates of use and use cases, but those data are useful differently for different people including the decision-makers, their constituents, their supporting agencies, and funders of this project. Thus, we intend to cast progress in varied terms for the different stakeholders and partners.
Some of these guiding questions include:
What are the iterations, changes, and improvements to existing systems?
What does the trajectory of individual decision-maker’s tasks or questioning look like?
How do other elements of the media ecology change and what stakeholders are invoked or leveraged in the process?
Success, on the other hand, is more elusive. Disasters are sporadic and may not always afford a direct link between information effectiveness and risk reduction. However, existing case studies show that these types of information, when combined with specific actions, can lead to significant reductions in both the vulnerability and negative effects of a disaster such as flooding. The key to assessment it to engage in a continual processes where we value choices and transitions in practice. The design of this project take into account the high-stakes involved in the decision-making and information uses by providing opportunities for both high stakes (post-hazard) and low stakes (simulation-games) assessment.
Do you see any risk in the development of your project?
The biggest risk at present is that the organizations listed do not have a history of working together (this is indicated by the generic names rather than their proper ones), but this is also where the opportunity exists. The leadership (particularly of the larger orgs) is wary of their participation in the project without first-hand knowledge of all partners and/or certain funding. This conversation is ongoing at the time of this application and continues to develop. If the proposal moves through to the next round, we should at that point be able to name each of the partners in more specific terms.
Supply-side risks (design-mediated)
Inability to generate meaning either through lack of empathy or translation of needs to designers
Research products are not absorbed and implemented during the design processes because they are non-normative, unclear for direct application, left uncommunicated, or other
Partner coalition denatures from lack of shared goals or mental models
Emphasis on technological development or information diversification over use-context and user needs
Existing insights, stakeholders, and methods are unknown or unengaged
Irrelevance, inability, or non-linkage of digital mediums and meaningful information services
Cultural heterogenetiy too great for scaling of appropriate information services
Ability and capacity of project managers to recognize and adapt to other sources of risk
Expertise of project partners is missing or unleveraged
Translation of local use-contexts into primary research is distorted or biased
Demand-side risks (user-mediated)
Low frequency acquisition of technology platforms, information services, and/or symbolic systems
Scripting of use and application to local decision making is unclear
Appropriation for local use-cases is nonexistent
Assembly does not fit into the local context of everyday life
Cannot be integrated into normal practices, culture, and concerns
Practice with information and platform is sparse
What is your marketing plan? How will people learn about what you are doing?
The conduits for marketing are, in many respects, already in place. The organizational structure and extent of [intl. disaster preparedness agency] branch offices will facilitate branding and distribution using existing networks of community organization, tactical planning, and response offices. Though the value of the services should be self-evident in the design and cognitive acquisition of the services, the goal is to help users to practice using and applying these information services. We also recognize that aesthetic values can elevate the recognition of value and the maintenance of that value through everyday use. Thus, arriving at these values will be a principle objective for all participants.
In order to increase domain knowledge, the outcomes can be shared among the participants, their centers, and via professional and interest networks including the design research community which actively engages with similar project goals. Because some of the project partners include university centers, schools and research organizations, the outcomes will be shared with emerging professionals including graduate students and visiting fellows.
Tactically, the marketing plan for simulation game-based training is slightly more difficult because it requires additional preparation, training, and presentation. Nonetheless, with a bit of effort, these games will reinforce the marketing strategy for the primary goal of adapting weather information using the same local community branch office network structure. We also expect to develop videos that demonstrate our process as well as the use and value of the informations service under construction. But ultimately, the best marketing will be the effectiveness of the adaptation process.
Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant? If it is to be self-sustainable, what’s the plan for making that happen?
Envirocasting is the application of a process to translate meaning across cultural contexts with relevance for local concerns. We do not view it as an experimental process so much and an underutilized one. Luckily, there are many resources, case studies, and additional expertise to draw from in the process. Our goal is to assemble them and to draw the pieces together into relevant platforms and prototypes for weather information services.
The project will accomplish this goal as a one-time research project that will publicly document its methods and outcomes as guides so that they can be applied in new use-contexts and for wider information arrays. We fully expect that the different project partners will continue to apply the work and experience in varied ways after the initial project, although they may carry it out to their own ends.
Our method for fostering rhizomatic-like dissemination of the results (and thus, sustainability) is to link with additional strategic partners whose networks span varied social groups, languages, use-contexts, and concerns. Furthermore, the acquisition and integration of the research (as well as the information services it supports) can be broadly advocated from a policy perspective because successes arise from its application and benefit in specific, local communities. The overall plan for sustainability is to demonstrate that these information service platforms reduce risk by enabling decisive action before pending hazards become disasters. If this is demonstrated, sustainability will ensue, even if not in the form described in this proposal.
Disasters are a combination of cognitive, social, infrastructure, and ecological failures. Preparation in each system helps to create buffers to provide resilience within each system that can in turn translate to resilience in each of the other systems. Thus, trends, impacts and the frequency of disasters are often amplified by the interactions between different social domains, resource bases, and locations.
riskTable
Key requirements for recognizing trends in disasters include being able to:
differentiate between high frequency trends and low frequency trends (partly because cognitive biases inhibit objective estimation),
the potential for changes in their relative frequencies and path dependency (low frequency becoming high and vice versa),
the cumulative impacts at different temporal and spatial scales of interaction, and
the emergence of threshold effects where small impacts can have big effects.
The rise in frequency of natural disasters is being compounded by population growth (especially in urban, coastal, and low-lying areas) and increased vulnerability because of interactions among resources and risks (see table 1 for examples). Many natural phenomena tend to be recurrent. For example, diseases re-emergence in and out or areas and population, sometimes in cycles, while often borne from social-ecological network differentiation (Janssen et al., 2006). These recurrences can affect the same regions and populations again and again–either out of geographic, genetic, or behavioral specificity. Impacted populations have narrow opportunities (if at all) to restore livelihoods and coping mechanisms between events. This can accelerate chronic vulnerability.
Key trends discussed and communicated in the literature relate sea levels, temperature, precipitation, resilience, and extreme events to climate change (Prasad et al, 2009). While these are specifically the result of abiotic processes, other, underemphasized, social trends emerge that are important for managing coping strategies–especially where cities are concerned. These trends include:
Cultural Preferences: This is perhaps the least understood of any emerging trend, and we don’t know much about how the various components of this trend are distributed at any given moment. Cultural preferences includes things like how new skills, uses, and behaviors are acquired, the ways they are arranged in everyday life to fill particular needs, how existing artifacts or concepts are appropriated, and what it takes for small, limited sets of practices to widen and become normalized in larger populations. As a trend, many human systems are moving towards knowledge networking which will accelerate normalization. Less frequent are the hybrid ways of creating new coping strategies that build on other unrelated themes or needs. As a result it is pretty easy for most disaster management and preparedness disciplines to dismiss it as a leading component of interest.
Uncertainty and Risk Diversification: As the intensity of experience and practices with technologies, the environment, and human population increases, uncertainty and the recognition of risk becomes more evident. This is to say that we tend to project more uncertainty and develop a larger number of risks as our knowledge of the environment widens. Thus, while there are real and significant increases in the number of risks, the increase and perceived impact is also a function of our own cultural sources of knowledge production and risk assessment. This in no way delegitimizes the risk of climate driven disaster. It only adds a unique dimension to our reception and relationship with them.
Urbanization: In 2008, the global population became equally distributed between rural settlements and cities. This trend will continue for a variety of reasons including individuals’ search for economic agency in cities. It highlights a broader pattern of preferential attachment–a social phenomenon in which people (agents) tend to want to join up with other agents that have multiple connections, either to other people, things, or places. It also signals a significant perceptual shift in our understanding of ecology and its anthropogenic impacts–away from systems where humans are seen externally to one in which the landscape is unequivocally ‘disturbed’ and redistributed (Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008).
Ecosystem Service Disruption: Healthy ecosystems are a keystone of resilience. They buffer vulnerable populations from the impacts of disasters by maintaining critical life support services such as soil for agriculture, water filtration and sequestration, nutrient cycling, organic waste recycling, gas exchange + air pollution mitigation, and the ambient commons (McCullough, in prep) which support the awareness of a continuum between culture and infrastructure.
ad hoc Solutioning: In India, the Hindi term Jugaad describes technologies that are patchworks of on-hand materials to fix and make due with what is convenient and ‘affordable’. They build (no pun intended) on an ease of use and innovative skill in the context of personal or collective economic agency. They can insert sustainability using biodegradable, local, and available materials–deemphasizing systems of manufacturing while emphasizing individualism and craft. However, jugaad may also substitute expectations for semantics, trading durability for extended (or distended) service relationships in the absence of independently verifiable standards. The impact of this behavioral tactic with artifacts is that technologies can have a low threshold for failure because they depend on service and labor for continued maintenance. When the services become otherwise compromised, the artifacts create further risks.
Occupation of High Disturbance and/or Diversity Landscapes: Along with trends in urbanization and ecosystem services, people tend to locate in regions where resources are abundant and that tend to support a large amount of diversity. One of the main ecological predictors of biological diversity is the ongoing process of disturbance, which continuously opens up new niches and creates genetic diversity across populations. This points to the presence of large urban settlements in areas prone to disturbance and potential disasters either from earthquakes, flooding, cyclone, tsunami, or wildfire, for example.
Now what do these trends mean for emerging health risks in the context of climate change?
References:
Ellis, E. C., & Ramankutty, N. (2008). Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 6(8), 439–447.
Janssen, M. A., Ö. Bodin, J. M. Anderies, T. Elmqvist, H. Ernstson, R. R. J. McAllister, P. Olsson, and P. Ryan. 2006. Toward a network perspective on the resilience of social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 11(1): 15. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art15/
Prasad, N., F. Ranghieri, F. Shah, Z. Trohanis, E. Kessler, and R. Sinha. 2009. Climate resilient cities : a primer on reducing vulnerabilities to disasters. Washington (DC) : World Bank Group Info Shop. ISBN 978-0-8213-7766-6
