On Tuesday evening I had the pleasure of meeting up with some fellow UM alums during an information session for the Ross Business School. I didn’t graduate with an MBA; I did my MFA in the School of Art & Design. Nonetheless, I was welcomed and had the opportunity to share my perspectives on what makes Michigan different from other universities and experiences. Actually, I think it is becoming increasingly relevant that students in art and design connect with business students and vice versa.
The highlight of the evening was a lecture by Venkat Ramaswamy, Hallman Fellow of Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. During his visit to India he was launching his new book, “The Power of Co-Creation”, and he gave a very nice explanation of co-creation to the audience of prospective MBAs and Alums.
For me, the lecture was especially timely. I have been diving deep into the theory and practice of service design for the last eight months. My goal is to use knowledge of complex systems and dematerialized practices as options for thinking, teaching, and solving problems that can benefit from the engagement of multiple stakeholders. Some of these problems range from the provision of water resources, delivery of health services, discovery of patterns in public health, the maintenance and design of infrastructure, or even how learning is measured and fed back into teaching and course content.
Prof. Ramaswamy’s talk focused on examples that demonstrated co-creation as a paradigm for value creation. He provided a sample of instances where the design of platforms focuses on interactions between enterprise providers (supply chain, enterprise planning, customer relationship) on one hand – and stakeholders on the other. The key part of the value creation lies in the assembly of a platform through which the process of engagement and co-creation can take place. In this way, engagement happens first, enterprise second.
Seoul OASIS co-creation & planning includes the use of images to illustrate the suggestions.
Seoul OASIS co-creation & planning includes the use of images to illustrate the suggestions.
Venkat’s first example came from civic planning in Seoul, South Korea. OASIS is a platform for engagement with public services. It facilitates citizen engagement with the city council using a combination of online, video, and face-to-face platforms. To make it an effective platform, complaints are not allowed – only suggestions. The facilitators also ask/keep the suggestions limited to the goals that have already been determined. So the question civic participants have to ask themselves is, “How do we achieve our goals?”
Civic Participation in Seoul OASIS
Civic Participation in Seoul OASIS
The participation process begin with (1) suggestions which get tagged by the participants. The tags allow people to start structured (2) discussions of the ideas. About 12% then get taken for (3) off-line examinations. Eventually there are (4) Seoul OASIS meetings which are filmed live and where stakeholders and civic service providers get to interact. Finally, a handful of suggestions make it to (5) implementation where the project gets documented along with benchmarks and other accountability checks.
Delhi-Traffic-Police-get-social
Another great example for India is how the Delhi Traffic Police have been using Facebook as a platform for accountability and peer pressure on Delhi’s citizens to follow the rules. In some cases, the platform has even allowed citizens to establish some accountability on the part of the police as well.
Caja Navarra (Spain) is pioneering civic banking using engagement platforms to make an impact in the social sector. It shows customers how much it makes from their savings and provides them with the ability to choose from an array of eight or so recipients of their social contributions. The recipient organizations are further pushed to present how they use the money as a result of the participation. The benefits also feed back to the bank’s ability to attract new customers. By providing “gift cards” with preset amounts, new participants can log on and get involved with their donations. Meanwhile, the bank is then able to show potential customers how their money would be used by Caja Navarra as opposed to the customer’s current bank.
The Gameful Leaderboard
The Gameful Leaderboard
All of this reminded me of some other platforms that tie emerging enterprises with potential stakeholders. Kickstarter is a new platform for ideas that need capital to get their projects off the ground. Anyone can contribute, and it only depends on the project’s ability to pitch their idea – and maybe some well-placed social capital (here’s some tips on managing a kickstarter project). One hugely successful project pitch that was launched is Gameful (exceeding their funding goal by over 3000%). It’s an online Secret HQ for gamers and game developers who want to help change the world and make our real lives better. The project’s developers did a really nice thing in pitching the project. They set of levels of giving, that mimicked some game tropes like secret entry points and awards.
Co-creation and service design are largely about the engagement that happens in the development of product and service offerings. Later as we ate dinner, I asked Prof. Ramaswamy what it might mean to go beyond products and services. What would happen, for example, if co-creation impacted the evolution of the core business model and plan? Eric Beinhocker explores some of the conditions for how this might happen in his book, The Origin of Wealth. One of the central themes of the book revolves around how businesses themselves are a form of design. The design of businesses encompasses how to understand the market and connected institutions, product and service offerings, operations, marketing and sales, strategy, and the organization itself. If, as Beinhocker argues, business designs evolve over time through differentiation, selection, and amplification, then it stands to reason that co-creative platforms for engagement can distribute that work as well as just the product and service offerings. The only question is where will it happen?
Sketch of Electricity Consumption Time for Smart Meter
CSTEP has embarked on testing of smart meters for electricity consumption. This yields a ton of data, with measurements of each of three phases being taken at 5 sec intervals. I did some sketches of those data and how they might be integrated into a timepiece showing time, electricity consumption, and phase.
Three colors indicate each of the three phases.
Time is mapped by seconds (colored), minutes (grey), and hours (grey).
On the left, a linear scale shows the variation in consumption.
The Distribution of Intellectual Property Claims on the Human Genome. Source Data: Jensen and Murray (2005) Intellectual Property Landscape of the Human Genome. Science 310:239.
Click on the image for a Processing animation of patent locations.
Approximately one quarter of human genes are protected by intellectual property regulations. Little information about the number and distribution of gene patents is available in a manner empowering to members of the public. Existing gene patent resources rely almost exclusively on verbal search strategies for access in contrast to visual interfaces that promote exploration and discovery. This can be traced to the relative immateriality of genes which cannot be seen and whose effects are experienced through a web of medical, environmental, and social constructors.
One solution to this problem is to create a visual map of patent claims in the human genome. By representing the location, number, functional, and patent characteristics of genes, such a map could provide immediate visual access and cues for further investigation. Maps are created through the contributions of multiple constituencies and exist as objects for discussion, reflection, and mediation. Using patent data from the human genome developed by Jensen and Murray (Science 310: (2005) p239-240), we have started this project as a series of creative sketches. CAMBIA continues to update these data in accordance with current information.
Genes involved in human health, disease, and drug discovery tend to be heavily patented. A map would provide reasonably accessible information to non-specialists and help to scaffold conversations surrounding these issues. It is helps to document regions of positive selection, where specific genes are being disproportionately valued, by social and technological actors operating on human and non-human life processes.
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.
After ManU went up 2-0 against Arsenal I started browsing and commenting on the submissions to this year’s Digital Media and Learning Competition that the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC run each year.
Some observations:
Lots of games and game-like labs in the mix.
Art/Sci is now officially mainstream.
Climate and Sustainability are BIG social issue themes in the sci/tech proposals.
Lots of brands in the mix (Exploratorium, National Park Service, xlabs, Media Lab, Eyebeam, etc)
But after culling through them for an hour and a half, I think I got a good sampling of the 800 or so submissions to the Learning Labs track. Here are a few that seemed interesting, relevant and promising….to things I’m interested in..
Here is a new visualization of the cell cycle using a combination of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), Flash, and database-driven graphics. This new version from Chris Landau and Jamie Cope’s nformation design demonstrates the yeast cell cycle in 3D cycle stages along with educational information about the process.
Try zooming in and see changes in the nucleus as the cycle progresses.
Yeast Cell Nucleus During Metaphase
This project started as a collaboration at the University of Michigan with Anuj Kumar’s lab in the Life Sciences Institute and first led to the OrganelleView project.
Screenshot of one of the mapunity community interfaces.
Last week I visited the Mapunity folks who are building projects at NSRCEL in the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. They are a really great, super-keen group dedicated to building IT solutions for the purposes of development…often using geographic systems as a segue to action. I think they are most well-known for their work on the Bangalore Traffic Information System, which, if you’ve visited Bangalore recently, you know how bad the traffic is here.
The Mapunity folks are creating tools for users to make their own maps for whatever purpose they choose. The ones I like the most are these, dealing with innovation in rural parts of India. Here is where local, user based solutions to problems like disease control in cumin crops or remedies for animal wounds can be mapped to particular areas and described.
After starting out with introductions (you can see participant profiles at the ECHO site above), we surveyed a range of digital history genres from archives, exhibits, and teaching sites, to online communities and journals.
Later in the afternoon on Thursday, we looked at a very cool organizing tool for gathering online sources. Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] “is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.” It’s going to be huge for my work which often involves collecting movie citations or references that I know–but don’t have entered into Endnote.
At the end of the day we perused javascript for building behaviors into websites. It’s always great to get any expert detailing their strategies. Jeremy Boggs gave a great rundown and suggested some good books. Jeremy is writing his dissertation on the history of CSS. Nice.
Today, Friday, we’ve launched into looking into some of the available tools for doing digital history…things like blogs, timelines, archives, wikis, feeds and so on.
The collaborative work of graduate student Gabriel Harp and Chris Landau (MFA ’06) on the Organelle View project was published in the January issue of Nucleic Acids Research.
“The project makes a gigantic leap in the distribution of biological data–moving it beyond the conventional representations of names and numbers to embrace the visual and organismal aspects of cellular and molecular forms”, says Harp.
“Organelle View is a scientific visualization application allowing users to dynamically generate a visual interpretation of data from Organelle DB. Organelle View presents a searchable interface with a three-dimensional representation of an archetypical cell. Rather than representing organelles and subcellular structures by text, Organelle View offers an artist’s rendering of a cell and its major organelles. At present, we have chosen a budding yeast cell (S.cerevisiae) as the model for Organelle View, largely because protein localization has been studied quite extensively in yeast; future versions of Organelle View will incorporate additional cell types from other organisms.”
(Wiwatwattana, N., Landau, C.M., Cope, G.J., Harp, G.A., & Kumar, A. (2007). Organelle DB: an updated resource of eukaryotic protein localization and function. Nucleic Acids Research, 35, D810-D814.)
