A couple of years ago I was challenged to think about methods for understanding the long-term implications of climate-health interactions. I was asked by a colleague to sort out some methods that would help public health planners understand the complexity of climate-health relationships and transform them into priorities for action. Data from current health outcomes (e.g. malaria, dengue, malnutrition, heatstroke) can be rare, especially among health ministries that aren’t functioning as knowledge networks.  It is also common that methods supporting forecasting are viewed as impractical, confusing, and too complicated given that institutional systems are struggling to provide basic services – much less anticipation.  

Because data about the status and direction of health outcomes can be notably absent, we focused our attention on scenarios and the different methodologies. Scenarios are valuable for health and technology, in part, because they contain a certain narrative closure.  Clear winners and losers can emerge along with outcomes that measure conflict and contributions to the process.  On the flipside, that narrative certainty is a little too clean.  Real world interactions are messy.  However, the most importune implication is that scenarios make good design tools because they suggest future arrangements and demonstrate alternatives without interfering in current practice. Scenarios shift the context to an indefinite time in the future, an aliased set of actors, or a new place to make new propositions less personal.  This unbinds specific feelings of identity from new organizational arrangements and may leave participants free to experiment further.

Scenarios can be complicated to produce. They require focused study and time, and that seems too often in short supply.  Plus, you need hooks to get people engaged in finding and discovering the elements that ought to belong.  Scenarios should be plausible and internally consistent, but they also should be relevant to a broad range of stakeholders.  Some methods focus too narrowly on their own visions of the world, and can end up decidedly deterministic or expertly biased, as this critique of Royal Dutch Shell’s approach explains (opens pdf).  

Because the organization we were working with is committed to a open stakeholder process, we wanted a methodology that would accept diverse contributions and still be tied to one of the hallmarks of science: replicability.  So we kept some design criteria in mind while we explored:

Scalable

We wanted techniques that could allow us to look scenarios for specific contexts and regions, from hospital units to watersheds and beyond.

 

Participatory

Being able to use many perspectives was a definitive goal.  Not only are there differing accounts of actors and outcomes, participation does a much better job of revealing where goals might be in conflict in the system.  Participation is also critical for helping the results of the scenario process diffuse among different stockholder groups.

 

Translatable across domains

Public health and complex systems are increasing supported by people and things from a variety of disciplines.  We wanted insights from ethnographers to be as critical to the development of scenarios as live data streams of mechanical stress, if that’s what the scenario needed.  We also wanted the materials and insights generated by the process to be amenable to visual display, since many of the stakeholders may use different languages.  Visual formats also exploit the ambiguities of statements to reveal tensions that exist among interpretations.

 

Robust to diverse interpretations

Some of that tension is created when you get people from different backgrounds discussing what they think matters for interventions in particular health outcomes.  Different levels of expertise can expose the assumptions that people share.  The different elements of scenarios and how they emerge to affect long-term change often form the basis for many of this assumption.  Highlighting this ambiguity is critical later for negotiating strategies for action.

 

Accepting of qualitative and quantitative insight

Working across disciplines is critical.  One result of this is that the standards for evidence and data are different.  We also recognize that quantitative measurement provides a detailed description of the identity or behavior of system elements.  In particular, we wanted to be able to translate qualitative insights into format usable for compute modeling, simulation, and visualization.   

 

Fun and pleasurable

Despite many people’s paradoxical notion that fun things are bad for you, we see fun as enhanced participation.  When you forget that what you are doing is work, that’s a good thing. 

 

Readily usable and modular

Methods should move seamlessly between health outcomes and altogether different domains.  The process for malaria can be the same as heatstroke.  Understanding alternative energy futures may use the same process as malnutrition.  This enables practice and iteration.

As it turned out, scenarios techniques for climate-health interactions are not new, but they don’t deal well with uncertainty because they are explicitly aimed at extending interactions based on what the presence of domain knowledge and capable expertise.  How could you hope to understand possible priorities and act all while not knowing?  This was where we hoped to make a contribution.

Using Clamps to Build a Knowledge Network

Bob Johansen’s book, Get There Early outlines tools for dealing with dilemmas.  Dilemmas confound rationality-based problem solving because of the way they are structured (multiple stakeholders, goals, conflicts, and outcomes, diverse framings and interpretations) and because there is not a clear path to one or a few positive solutions.  Johansen outlines how Structure, Rules, Resources, Thresholds, Feedback, Memory, and Identity can be used as levers to help organizations attenuate themselves to the multi-textured shapes that dilemmas pose.  

I think this list is pretty right-on for at least three reasons. First, the metaphor of levers directly brings to mind the work of Donella Meadows, an environmental scientist concerned with sustainability.  Her work on leverage points for intervening in systems (pdf) is a great introduction and ordering of policy-based strategies and their efficacy for changing behavior.  Like Johansen, she articulates the role of rules and feedback in systems. Meadows goes on to explore ten other significant systems levers, ultimately tracing effectiveness to how we frame the “problem”.

Second, structure, feedback, memory, and identity point to second order, emergent characteristics.  Second order characteristics arise form the interactions of actors (e.g. people doing interesting things, wild coyotes, institutions, viruses), resources (e.g. coffee, water, land, low-interest loans, blood sugar), and their activities.  Kevin Kelly explores why we are seeing more impossible events taking place. He connects it to an emergence of second order behaviors made possible through the development of new actors, new infrastructure, and new rules.  Carl Simon, a Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, has studied the characteristics of complexity in biological and economic system and often differentiates complex behavior from simpler behavior by looking for heterogeneity, non-randomness, feedback, heterarchy, and emergence.  Eric Berlow’s still great TED talk demonstrates how taking the broad, messy, and networked of complexity can in fact allow us to isolate clear paths for action. 

The third reason I think Bob Johansen’s tuning levers are great is that they overlap with basic elements in game design.  This should come as no surprise for most people associated with IFTF.  

When I was working on the climate-health scenario methods, we faced a challenge of providing some sort of suitable structure for participants to embed meaningful insight into the scenarios.  Sometime over morning coffee in a Swiss cafe, we stumbled across Tracy Fullerton’s rubric for the formal elements of games.  These formal elements complement narrative elements and give rise to the more emergent properties of complex systems.  Goals, procedures, actors, rules, resources, boundaries, conflicts, and outcomes also have a great synergy; they are exactly the elements used by computer programmers to construct agent-based models of complex adaptive systems! 

Creating Relevance for Participation

So now we had a structural backbone for the kind of content we felt we needed to gather during a scenario development process.  We could ask participants to engage in brainstorming activities that accounted for the different elements of these climate-health systems, and we would provide them with support, examples, and heuristics for doing just that.  We also wanted to find a way to make the process fluid.  In the back of our minds we always wanted to bring elements of game mechanics into the project to help support decision fatigue.

I’m still not sure we’ve cracked it, mostly because we haven’t been able to implement the process yet.  However, we have looked at different forms of turn-based play with clear, articulated goals for the players, not unlike the LEARN, ACT, IMAGINE rubric that worked so well for Urgent Evoke missions.  

One of the challenges is that we are introducing concepts about systems dynamics at the same time as concepts about the elements of the systems.  This sets up a lot of material to get through in a short amount of time.  

We also want to introduce experiences of empathy for others into the play and practice of scenario building.  In order to generate robust scenarios, the goals of different actors represented need to be recognized and incorporated as valid contributions.  One of the common experiences of public health service delivery is that managers, practitioners, patients, and others all have different views of the system.  These occluded perspectives mean that they have a difficult time in finding ways to enhance the social and ecological resilience of infrastructure.  I think if we had our choice, we would use experiences of empathy to reinforce principles along the lines of those championed by Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom for designing long-enduring institutions.

Another significant outcome of clamps and elements for scenario development is that they clearly lend themselves to visual means of communication.  Boundaries, resources, timings, and rules are common opportunities for change. Precise and ambiguous definitions can take on increased relevance, especially when dealt with creatively. One of the functions of mapping and visualization is to demonstrate this inherent ambiguity, pointing to areas for finding common ground. When we try to represent them visually, we are forced to make choices about the precise meaning of those boundaries, and this can be a significant source of cognitive dissonance for participants.  But it’s exactly the form of dialogue that’s needed.  It sets the stage for tactical strategies when conflicts emerge.  Boundaries flow, and their meanings and borders can sometimes be adjusted to reach consensus or compromise.

Assembling Scenarios in Everyday Life

One of the questions designers (of scenarios, tools, artifacts, anything really) have to ask themselves is, “Where does this fit in everyday life?”  One of the most useful rubrics I’ve come across for design is Products and Practices: Selected Concepts from Science and Technology Studies and from Social Theories of Consumption and Practice. (sorry, paywall). The authors make a case for a social and infrastructure-based approach to design.  They identify acquisition (how we find it), scripting (how it shapes practice), appropriation (using it for something else), assembly (where we use it), normalization (sharing along with others), and finally practice (what activities it supports).  What is great about this list is that it helps designers imagine the contexts of use.  

In our scenario construction process we had to identify where this process existed along with a range of other activities that needed to be carried out by participants.  This assembly meant that our process had to connect to other activities in a meaningful way.

The current processes and guidelines for conducting Vulnerability and Adaptation assessments in vulnerable regions hinge on their level of stakeholder involvement.  Some processes are top-down, others bottom-up, and others a mix of expertise and engagement.  

One way to assemble scenarios into these processes is to:

1) Define the scope and focus which usually means identifying the health outcome of interest.

2) Work out a baseline for which information may not exist. This is where defining system elements can be helpful for laying out current distributions and burdens, strategies for coping, early prioritization of “drivers”, and the interactions between elements that affect their dynamics.

3) From this point on, forecasts can be made about future trends and conditions. For example, what happens if boundaries change? How about if an actor appears or disappears?

4) Once forecasts are made, the task is to frame and narrate the interactions as scenarios. This is a great opportunity to develop the scenario through the eyes of others. Games, agent-based models, visualizations, and mapping can demonstrate change over time and the differences in scales affected while uncovering an array of interesting and unexpected interactions.

5) Isolation and sequencing asks participants to step back from what they produced, to look at the areas of concern, and to select the most relevant links between scenario elements. By focusing attention on these links, the next task is to order the steps they will need to affect change by listing priorities for action.

6) Package and disseminate the scenarios and the priorities for broad communication and feedback.

7) Use the feedback and resulting statements to assess how the scenario process and how it enabled participants to identify and act on the priorities they generated.

As you can see, it’s a richly-textured process, highly-amenable for visual communication, and ripe for engagement. I think one of the most important functions is the ability to expand the number of elements that matter to long-term change.  One of the key decisions that participants have to make is to ask whether a resource, boundary, conflict, actor, rule, or procedure matters or makes a difference to the health outcome of interest.  Here Gregory Bateson’s statement about information as, “a difference that makes a difference” looms large.  More on that in the future.

Signals from Noise

One of the key endeavors of public health, infrastructure, and technology is the attempt to identify signals in noisy environments.  Signals are utilized in biology to communicate across chemical gradients, metabolic networks, neuronal synapses, visual spectra, haptic musculature, individual displays of affection, and as invitation for cooperation across groups and societies.  Technological systems stimulate behavior in new and exciting ways, but they can also script and normalize actions that may limit our abilities to find success. 

The biggest challenges in generating signals for any medium is to make them relevant enough to transcend noise and competition from similar signals elsewhere.  Synergistic timing with the individuals or groups receiving them is critical – as this will help them become meaningful in helping receivers revise their previous beliefs or come to new conclusions.

John Snow’s well-know map showing cholera cases in the London epidemic of 1854 clustering around the Broad Street well was an early success in distinguishing signals from noise using visualization and tight clamps that link actors (cholera, people, wells), boundaries (streets, houses), resources (water), and procedures (washing, drinking). These interactions clearly led to an understanding of a health outcome, and the relationships, once linked, could be used to forecast future scenarios.  

PETLAB and the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center have been collaborating to help illuminate different, contradictory signals, that may become confusing to recipients during a weather-based crisis.  This game supports better decision-making to manage the damage of incorrect flooding predictions. 

Before the Storm is another game from the Parsons/Climate Centre collaboration that introduces forecasting to new audiences and uses the scenarios produced to help identify what the participants feel would be the most relevant and practical stapes to take during a flooding emergency.  

Climate Health Impact – a simulation based game designed to give biology students a better understanding of the health impacts of climate change.  It does do a great job of representing standard practices worldwide that contribute to the understanding and management of emerging vectors.  What I like here is the attention to new actors and their relationships with policy measures, research processes, and geography.  There’s a lot of detail about disease specifics as well, but narratively, it does reinforce a fairly top-down perspective. 

Agent-based models sometimes very effective for examining conflict among different actors.  This paper by [img_assist|nid=3955|title=Hailegiorgis et al. models a human-environment interaction|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=199|height=104]Hailegiorgis et al. models a human-environment interaction (pdf) and demonstrates how cyclical rainfall can reveal a pattern of punctuated conflict.  The pattern suggests that durable mechanisms for cooperation (e.g. clear boundaries, enforceable rules, mechanisms for redress, nested institutions) will be needed to traverse environmental change if the communities are going to maintain their resilience. 

The Future of Scenarios

What do scenarios look like when the are disseminated and opened up for engagement?  I think they look closer to everyday life.  To understand the impacts of alternative scenarios we have to look at out interpersonal relationships – at the things that are one or two degrees removed.  How will climate-health interaction affect our pets, our sex lives, how we eat dinner, getting to and from work, and our expectations when we encounter each other on the street?  I think the genre of climate-health scenarios and perhaps all scenarios is not one of horror, western drama, or even fantastical sci-fi; it has to be more subtle, more internally embedded in social values and individual goals.  It’s melodrama about how we live and how we live it everyday.  That’s the real scary, far-out stuff.  

Swiss artist Matthieu Cherubini was kind enough to share some his thoughts and process behind the social bot rep.licants.  

rep.licants.org is a service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users.

The experience of an enhanced virtual self as users are invited to install a bot on ther favorite social network account and become a replicant.  Provided with “virtual prothesis for the social media introvert”, people who use the service have started to uncover what it means to automate social interactions.

GH: You are an artist! Why did you start working on rep.licants?  Is it similar to your other work?

MC: rep.licants is the work that I did for my master thesis. During my studies, I developed an interest about the way most of people are using social networks but also the differences in between someone real identity and his digital one. I do not have a big experience about creating personal projects, I began seriously to do it during the past 2 years, so previous to rep.licants I did two other “serious” personal projects and they were related to this thematic aswell. One The Pursuit of Happiness is about hacking into Facebook account of random users in order to steal their private messages for seeing what they were looking for on this social-network. The second one Afghan War Diary is about linking data coming from Counter Strikes servers and Wikileaks and displaying the result on Google Earth.

Back to rep.licants – when I began to think about a project for my master thesis, I really wanted to work on those two thematics (mix in between digital and real identity and a kind of study about how users are using social networks). With the aim to raise discussions about those two thematics.

 

GH: What was the process like for you?  

MC: At first I just had the idea about creating a webservice where people could subscribe on it and mix themselves with a robot. But I really didn’t know where I was going exactly. So I began the project as an experiment.

The first step was to study what people could do on Facebook (I began with Facebook only) and how a bot could reproduce those same actions by linking himself to other services that its user is using or by getting new informations on other sources. 

[img_assist|nid=3969|title=|desc=This schema roughly demonstrates how the bot is working.|link=node|align=left|width=400|height=142]

After I programmed a version of the bot, according to this previous study, with few functions and I asked to some of my teachers, tutors and classmates if they wanted to be volunteers for this experiment…I had 3 volunteers who did the experiment for like 4 months. I was asking them weekly what the bot was doing, if they were feeling the bot was lacking of something important, …  During this 4 months I redesigned a bot for Facebook by taking into account the feedbacks of my three volunteers.

In same time I also decided to do a version of the bot on Twitter and the process was almost the same as Facebook.

 

GH: What have people’s responses been?  Have Facebook or Twitter responded at all?

MC: The responses has been very mixed some are over negatives and some are very positive ! I’m happy about that because it’s very interesting: the negative responses are mainly from people who were thinking rep.licants is a real and serious webservice which is giving for free performant bots who are able to almost perfectly replicate the user. And if they are expecting that I understand their disappointment because my bot is far from being performant ! Some were negatives because people were thinking it is kind of scary asking a bot to manage your own digital identity so they rejected the idea.

For the positive responses it’s mainly people who understood that rep.licants is not about giving performant bots but is more like an experiment (and also a kind of critics about how most of the users are using social networks) where users can mix themselves with a bot and see what is happening. Because even if my bots are crap they can be, sometimes, surprising.

But I was kind of surprised that so many people would really expect to have a real bot to manage their social networks account.

Twitter never responded and Facebook responded by banning, three times already, my Facebook applications which is managing and running all the Facebook’s bots.

 

GH: How do people use it?  Have there been any interesting stories of how people have used rep.licants?  

MC: For what I know and after some questions/feedbacks received by users, I would say that some people use the bot:

a. Just as an experiment, they want to see what the bot can do and if the bot can really improve their virtual social influences. Or users experimenting how long they could keep a bot on their account without their friends noticing it’s runt by a bot.

b. I saw few time inside my database which stores informations about the users that some of them have a twitter name like “renthouseUSA”, so I guess they are using rep.licants for getting a presence on social networks without managing anything and as a commercial goal.

c. This is a feedback that I had a lot of time and it is the reason why I am using rep.licants on my own twitter account: If you are precise with the keywords that you give to the bot, it will sometimes find very interesting content related to your interest. My bot made me discover a lot of interesting things, by posting them on Twitter, that I wouldn’t never find without him. New informations are coming so fast and in so big quantities that it becomes really difficult to deal with that. For example just on Twitter I follow 80 persons (which is not a lot) all of those persons that I follow is because I know that they might tweet interesting stuffs related to my interests. But I have maybe 10 of those 80 followers who are tweeting quiet a lot (maybe 1-2 tweet per hour) and as I check my twitter feed only one time per day I sometimes loose more than one hour to find interesting tweets in the amount of tweets that my 80 persons posted. And this is only for Twitter ! I really think that we need more and more personal robots for filtering information for us. And this is a very positive point I found about having a bot that I could never imagine when I was beginning my project.

 

[img_assist|nid=3970|title=|desc=|link=url|url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/rep_licants_org|align=right|width=300|height=461]

GH: Have there been any interesting disasters or failures in the interactions as a result?  Or any surprising bugs?

MC: One surprising bugs was when the Twitter’s bots began to speak to themselves. It’s maybe boring for some users to see their own account speak to itself one time per day but when I discovered the bug I found it very funny. So I decided to keep that bug !

I do not know if it is a disaster or failures but sometimes I really felt bad for some people who were having nonsense discussion with a bot without knowing it is one. There is a collection about this kind of discussions on the Bot’s Diary.

 

GH: My own experience with rep.licants revealed to me an aesthetic of antagonism.  What does an aesthetics of antagonism mean to you?

MC: I’m not sure but maybe something which is hostile in my project ? Or maybe the way the bots are running ? As they are very buggy, they do a lot of things which could be opposite. One time they could find a content which is absolutely match to the user but the next one is absolutely opposite of what the user is or like.

One of the things I’ve discovered during my own use of a rep.licants Twitter bot is that it likes to retweet messages I’ve exchanged with an acquaintance – sometimes even the same mmessage more than once.  This has a somewhat awkward effect of bringing attention to that interaction when it wasn’t really warranted.

Around the same time Matthieu and I conducted the interview, this video of a chatbot having a conversation with itself went viral – perhaps in part because the conversation immediately turned towards more existentialist questions and responses.  The conversation was recorded at the Cornell Creative Machines Lab, where the faculty are researching how to make helper bots. 

The best part of the video happens when one chatbot implores that he is not a robot – but rather a unicorn. How the bot determined that is not widely known, but it does invoke an important visual element and narrative theme from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – where the main character Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) has dreams of unicorns. The character of Gaff (played by Edward james Olmos) is also seen making origami unicorns – an apparent reference to his knowledge that Deckard is replicant.

The questions that rep.licants poses are deep human and social ones – laced with uncertainties about the kinds of interactions we count as normal and the responsibilities we owe to ourselves and each other.  Seeing these bots carry out conversations with themselves and with human counterparts (much less other non-human counterparts) allows us to take tradition social and technological research into a different territory – asking not only what it means to be human – but also what it means to be non-human.

We had a little show and tell at IFTF on Friday where we all brought in examples of good things to read.

I wanted to bring Indian blogs that I like a lot. But I also thought I needed more than my own finds – ones that focused on design, technology, art and/or culture. Because it was late in San Francisco, I was overlapping significantly with the daylight part of India’s diurnal cycle. Who better to ask where the good content was than some trusted colleagues from the subcontinent?

It turned out to be a little more difficult than I expected. I got a handful of good responses when I posted it on my twitter feed – maybe 35% of all those I asked. Some replies were more relevant for what I was looking for: well organized, thoughtful commentary, minimal ads, a clear editorial focus, and, above all, unabashedly Indian.

However, a few replies also cited how difficult it was to think of blogs or magazines – from a specifically Indian context. I’m not sure why it’s so difficult. Perhaps much of Indian culture is derivative in one way or another and that we often run into conflicts when we cite what is “purely” Indian (I’m gonna get in trouble for this last sentence . Or maybe the blogs are just difficult to find, in a different language, or just not cool enough.

It also seems a lot of blogs don’t maintain momentum – as if they aren’t “serious” enough to be sanctioned. I was super bummed not to see much from the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) or even from Srishti for that matter. I guess new media isn’t supposed to be linkable from home institutions (but please correct me if I’m wrong).

Then again, maybe it’s not allowed. You’d be surprised how many social disincentives as leveraged at people just trying to share good ideas, insights, and sensemaking (#justmyexperience). But that’s changing – I hope.

In any case, here’s a first go, and this list is fantastic.

What are your favorites? I’d be especially down for some Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, or other links too. Post ‘em in the comments if you like – and better yet – tell me why I’m wrong. Enjoy!

http://issuu.com/wkdelhi/docs
Portland Ad Agency Weiden and Kennedy opened an office in Delhi. This is their culture mag. Really well-done, visually-compelling, and curiously out of the mainstream – but then I guess that where the advertising peeps always play.

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/
I’ve been really impressed with the quality of articles coming from caravan. Timely topics (the first I ever read was about UIDwallas) and good layout.

http://www.randomspecific.com/
A killer visual culture and design research-based collection. Smart commentary and vibrant, reality-based images permeate the senses.

http://praja.in
Want to know what’s happening in the mobility and public transport scene in Bangalore? This is transport politics writ large. Great levels of participation.

http://designpublic.in/
A series of conversations about design and innovation in the public interest – by the good peeps at CKS.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/
It seems a bunch of massive media outlets are learning to pay attention to India.

http://masalachaionline.blogspot.com/
Desi graphic design.

http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/
Respected NID Prof. M P Ranjan on design thinking, design research, and some massive issues in sustainability and inclusion.

http://www.hobnook.com/
TBD

http://www.sarai.net/
Old school, super school, the source for critical thinking about cities, new media, art, and culture

http://poolmagazine.wordpress.com/
Looks like Tiger Beat – for the Indian design caste.

http://helterskelter.in/
chaos and control. like it.

http://www.openthemagazine.com/
Bordering on info overload, but the writing looks promising.

http://www.designwala.org/
Arch + design for developing world.

http://www.medianama.com/
Tech and business details.

A nice one from last summer in Maui..

1 med or lg lilikoi (passion fruit) (cut, compost the husk)
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp ginger
3/4 C saki
1/4 C soy sauce
1 T orange, pinapple, or raspberry marmalade or jam

This is a talk I gave at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) for their Masters of Fine Arts program in Collaborative Design (MFACD). In the talk I outlined how I would respond to so-called wicked problems using the tools and practices of an academic program in collaborative design.

The more interesting thing to come out of the talk for me was a brief introduction to the concept of a coefficient of art in the context of indirect reciprocity for cooperation in and among groups (see pg 4).

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:

1. a place, location, time, or temporal boundary
2. form, an object, or a capability
3. a social action, or service

That’s it! Have fun! But please don’t crash the planet.

I recently visited Stanford University’s school of design.  They have put a lot of effort into uncovering how infrastructure affects collaborative spaces for design use and practice, or rather, what design groups need to really succeed.  Click the image for a pdf (1mb) of insights they turned into enabling resources for collaborative and design activities.

Thanks to Scott Witthoft for his great tour! There’s also an article here from FastCompany outlining heuristics for generating better collaborative infrastructure.

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.

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

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.

1. I have a commitment to quality.
2. I know what my job and/or role is, and
3. 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!

The CDC’s done a really smart thing. They lied. They created an entirely “unscientific” risk to respond to a completely “scientific” human bias.  The CDC provided an emergency management and disaster preparedness plan in case of a Zombie Apocalypse. This says two things to me: 1) the CDC is serious enough in its priorities to ignore the boundary work that usually goes on in science organizations that tries to keep culture and science separate, and 2) they understand that human bias often impedes our ability to prepare for more “rational” risks.

So I would call this a media coup – especially if (as I suspect) there was a huge spike in visits to their site since the story crashed the server.  I’m sure it helped that some people are actually predicting a zombie apocalypse this weekend.

What I like about this is the acknowledgment that people are interested in fiction at least as much as they are in reality. As a scientist or policy maker in disaster management, it’s worth recognizing that people aren’t going to respond or think a certain way just because it makes the most rational sense.  Zombies may make more sense because they tap into deeper fears and hopes and long-held narratives that are embedded in our cultural fabric.

post-normal science

Using zombies to carry the more important message of preparedness – and the specific steps to take – is way more important than the reality of a zombie apocalypse. Then again, better safe than sorry!

Evolutionary biologists take note!