Changeism

Glitched Out

2012-04-23T18:41:09Z

When I was a teen, several of my closest neighborhood friends and I would spend most of our nights and weekends futzing around and experimenting with the new computing equipment that found its way into our lives—poking, building, programming, breaking. Our early hacking victims ranged from the cable boxes, introduced into our homes in the late 1970s, to the early tabletop PCs our school was generous enough to give us access to, as well as DIY computer kits and video game units. We’d learned to abuse technology when we’d started kicking the arcade consoles at the local rink with our skate-clad feet, trying to induce a glitch into the game, get a replay, or just administer a revenge beating on the object that had consumed all of our hard-earned quarters.

At school, we figured out how to get the dot matrix printer to cough up juvenile attempts at ASCII pr0n. At home, having become bored with its 8-bit taunting, we starting sticking screwdrivers into my Atari console. We shook and jimmied the video connectors, hoping to induce a video glitch into an otherwise unsatisfying round of Defender or Pitfall, while Devo’s “Peekaboo,” complete with the rotating vector graphic of the band’s trademark spinning flowerpot hat, looped on MTV in the background. We spent days working out how to use shape tables on my friend’s new Apple II to duplicate that rotating hat, applying our combined math skills in ways our Algebra teacher could never have imagined at the time. (It’s worth noting that “Peekabo” was itself the platform for an epic, early-days media glitch now only faintly remembered by Devo fans, but one which would easily make many a Tumblr list today.) When the movie Tron came out, we were first in line, and laughed at what we thought was a ridiculous mashup of power politics and video games. Video games were great, but for us, they were an escape from the politics we heard at the dinner table.

Graphic from 1982 live Devo show.Fast forward almost exactly 30 years and here I sit, staring at a dozen open browser tabs containing explorations, interpretations, rebuttals, wayfinding, prebuttals, and philosophical essays on the so-called New Aesthetic. Begun as a Tumblr blog to capture and somehow catalog various bits of visual glitch culture, this observational movement samples, among other things, machine vision, screenshots of oddly juxtaposed celebrity tweets, accidental pixellation, disturbances in the StreetView sphere and other echoed artifacts of digital reproduction. Even a protest flyer I found locally made it on the blog (not placed by me). As the blog reached peak fame due to a nutrient-rich SXSW panel (always chum to geek-infested waters) I have found myself watching with fascination as each new article appeared over the last few weeks, in a way, it was like viewing a strange many-sided, multiplanar tennis match featuring Decartes, Donkey Kong, DJ Spooky and Duke Nukem. Sterling, Bogost et al have poked, twisted and pinched the blobular shape of the New Aesthetic to understand what’s inside, and how elastic it could be.

The varied typography, format and style of these interpretive pieces could themselves be turned into a separate Tumblr, collecting the machine presentation of critical essays on machine vision. No doubt newer derivative media are already underway. That’s the whole idea, it seems. I faintly recall a similar issue with critical deconstructions of literature on hyperlinking back in the day. It felt like we all might disappear up a footnote, never to be seen again, like Flynn being derezzed into Tronworld. Hoisted on our own metatag.

So, I’m game. I’ll play along, and I might even get a glitchy badge for it. What do I think? I feel like I have to think something, because so much thinking is going above and around me. It has officially become dinner table conversation with which to bore my own offspring, much as the political chat I sought to evade in my youth. I don’t do art theory, or critical theory, or many other theories, but I’ll tell you what I see.

The New Aesthetic does involve power and politics. I find myself looking over the New Aesthetic Tumblr archive in all its jittering network realism glory and find myself asking, “Why now?” “What’s changed?” and “What is the thread?” I look at the context of the collection itself and think about the drivers of its curation, beyond one person’s desire to collect seemingly similar signals as a means of arriving at an interpretation. (I also do this as a professional practice—collecting weak signals as prelude to an interpretation—so I know how it feels. There isn’t always an a priori justification, it just feels right.)

To me, the common thread is flaw. Flaw in the way the technological meets the social, the human. Corruption in the artifact. Seams in the seamless. Machines gone slightly wild, or missing a few bits upstairs. America’s Craziest GIFs. Asymmetry in a world of designed perfection. Computational daydreaming. The New Aesthetic has a thing about drones, and a thing about computer vision. It unnerves us a little in its attempt to document Sh*t My Computer Thinks, and the mishaps of the devices that watch, and watch over, us. It highlights, and seemingly delights in, the chunky, low-rez way they see us. By highlighting these elements and cataloguing the New Aesthetic collection for us to point and laugh at, or, perhaps, feel uneasy about, this “network-assembled heap” also uneasily mocks the weaknesses in the technology we’ve created (not directly, but by proxy) to understand us, to assist us, to inform us, to bring us security (through surveillance), convenience (through data processing), to augment us (through algorithms).

Graphic from 1982 live Devo show.In 1982, we could laugh at these flaws because, like a baby smearing food on its face, they were amusing and cute. We could jam a screwdriver into the circuits because we faced no retribution. We could trip the computer and watch it fall, because it couldn’t respond in kind. Now, in 2012, we can be bullied and controlled. We awake to news of drones laying waste to those on our terror watchlist. We are virtually stripped naked at airport security. We are witness to car accidents, prostitution and murder on Google Earth. We are denied a loan because the formula says no. In short, the noose of technology has become tighter. We’re developing a grudge. And when we dislike, we mock. We photobomb the system. We parody. We use code to avoid the encoded.

Our current power politics are built on technology, which is why many clap with glee when masked jokesters hack corporate Web sites, when mustachioed avatars front takedowns of intelligence agencies, when former Russian spies do lad mag shoots and hackers get talk shows. We get a chance to see these tools of power corrupted against “the system.” Power structures 932, People 5. It’s an unfair fight, but we can sleep at night knowing the machine has a flaw, somewhere. Its vision is faulty, its logic not watertight. It wants us to be machine-readable, symmetric, processable. We laugh by wearing t-shirts with its own distorted machine graphics. We blast the glitchy, whomping distortions of its delicate audio circuitry. We use the physical against the digital. In 1983 we played tic-tac-toe against your mainframe. Now we loop images of your mistakes, alongside celebrity wardrobe malfunctions and kitten comedy. We know your secret formula.

So, this is probably not why James Bridle collects his glitch ephemera. I wouldn’t presume to say exactly. But I suspect it’s why it resonates. We feel power slipping slowly away. We’ve seen two decade-long wars (trying to be) conducted with mechanized detachment. We’ve watched ourselves be reduced to buying behaviors and CCTV images. We’ve seen technology-laden responses to our own unrest. We’re about to see the biggest peacetime security operation in history effected to seal off a global sporting event. We’d like something to humor ourselves with in the meantime.

Strategic Design and Foresight for Policymaking

2012-04-16T17:41:51Z

Sample macrotrend from the project.

While most folks were winding down for the holidays, my friends at Superflux and I spent most of December 2011 and into 2012 working on an intriguing project: fusing our individual but highly complimentary approaches in the service of supporting more forward-looking policymaking in the public sector. Our client, in the UAE, gave us an opportunity to apply design-led futures to this aim. As the Superflux team describes on their site, process was:

“to synthesize the client’s pre-existing user interviews, quantitative data, and our own independent macrotrends research around demography, technology, health, culture, and urbanization. With research unfolding over a two month period, this work was written up as a clear and concise report for internal use; a document that set out both the meaning of these macrotrends and their likely implications for life over the next 10-15 years.

From this research, we also created a diegetic future vignette; a short scene emerging from the interface of several of these macrotrends, presented from the point of view of individuals on the ground. A series of designed props, prototypes and character visualisations were combined in a visual comic strip, designed to help a range of stakeholders grasp some of the challenges and possibilities raised by our research.”

This project, the client for which we can’t disclose, was compelling in part because of the unique nature of the subject culture—in which many of the “normative” boundaries of the future are unique, with widely variable rates of change and roots and vastly different levels of society. It was also fulfilling in that we were able to stretch beyond the macrotrends stage to synthesis into narratives, visualizations and artifacts as a means of igniting imagination.

Exploring Object-Oriented Futures at Emerge 2012

2012-04-03T20:51:36Z

I’m finally getting to sit down and write a belated recap of personal observations from the Emerge 2012 event held at Arizona State University earlier this month. I felt lucky to sneak a chance to attend, though it came in the middle of a multi-project crunch, hence the delay. There has been some benefit in looking at the event and interactions in the rear view mirror—a lot of the discussions and experience I’ve taken away are of the foundational type, going deep into the roots of what I do professionally, as practice and as guiding philosophy.

The workshop I spent two days in, Design Science (expertly led by Gretchen Gano, David McConville and Ned Gardiner), presented an interesting opportunity to examine what it means to shift perspective on systems problems—in this case, looking at the universe from the outside in. Using a terrific visualization “dome” from The Eluminati, and visual media created by Worldviews Network and NOAA, we spent time considering both the literal and figurative meaning of shifting perspective on systems challenges as a precursor to stepping through stages of a Design Science approach inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s work. While this was an intriguing exercise by itself, for me it re-opened wider questions about the usefulness of experiences and, more importantly, objects as the starting point for constructing and investigating possible futures.

This was a great segue into the work that was going on in other sessions, involving approaches such as Brian David Johnson’s Science Fiction Prototyping method to development of gaming as a narrative platform for exploring the future to two variants on design fiction, Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan working with the object of a mysterious glyph (see the video below) as the center of one exploration, and Julian Bleecker and Nick Foster’s session examining the role of the quotidian convenience store product as a point of departure for possible near futures.

Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy’s “The People Who Vanished”.

With a member of Shell’s GameChangers team in my session, the issue of moving beyond the 2x2 scenario structure to other anchors for future narrative development was central point of early discussion within our group. For me, (and I stress this is a personal point of view) in some ways, the use of the traditional scenario matrix defines the playing field for the participant, as well as the rules of play, and asks him or her to provide some variation within. By building around an object, we start with a central artifact and ask participants to develop the context, and in many ways define the relevant affordances of a particular future they describe. In a straightforward way, one session’s exercise did just this—through an archaeology of the future workshop run by Daniel Erasmus and David Conz that started with a randomly shaped object, for which the holder would construct a narrative about the future. A simple, but incredibly accessible process, this practice literally put the creative synthesis in the hand of each participant.

Maria Bezaitis: “Whenever we make things, we implicitly imagine the people who will use them.” #emerge2102asu
— Scott Smith (@changeist) March 1, 2012

What’s important here, to my mind, is the object as entry point, not as the terminal point. As Bruce Sterling said in his opening talk at Emerge, “It’s the world that matters in design fiction, not the gadget.” By starting with the object, or the gadget, in some ways we quickly take the focus off of that object and place it more on populating the world around it, rather than creating a world in which our object of choice (whether it’s a product or some irritant we hope to overcome) fits just so, which I think is the unconscious tendency when starting with the universe first, then placing the object we desire within it. It’s something we are familiar with from the play of our younger years—a toy car, a doll, a stick for a sword all give us the jumping off point for a larger adventure and help us imagine the world in which we want them, and ourselves, to exist. To paraphrase Anab Jain from Jonathan Resnick’s recent paper on materialization of the speculative (PDF download), objects help people enter a world by being both immediate and tangible.

In the end, what matters is having new tools and approaches available to us to shift perspective and try a new way “in” to insight or epiphany, not to let the traditional approaches institutionalize our perspectives on the future. Emerge saw a fresh range of methods entertained, and so engaged a multidisciplinary mix of artists, engineers, writers, coders, film makers, game designers, biologists—forming a third culture, if you will—in the pursuit of imagining new solutions to our systemic challenges. In doing this, the event, its organizers and participants took an important step forward toward opening the door for these fields and others to engage with and add to practices of strategic foresight and design, taking down some unnecessary walls along the way.

See more pictures from the event here.

PS—I suspect this will get even more interesting once I’ve digested Ian Bogost’s “Alien Phenomenology,” just out this month.

QUOTED: Phoenix Focus

2012-04-02T21:56:37Z

I was interviewed late last year by Ashley Milne-Tyte for an article on the future of work, and how to gain competitive skills as new competencies emerge. Or, as I grumbled last month:

The ability to define a job is decaying faster than the nature of work is evolving. That is all.
— Scott Smith (@changeist) March 22, 2012

From “Tomorrow’s Job Market,”

“Smith says everyone will need to regularly re-educate themselves. And for many of us, that means taking classes. ‘The danger is that traditional universities aren’t moving fast enough to keep up with this [pace of change],’ he says. ‘It opens up the field to nontraditional players—places you can go for a week, two weeks, three weeks to add skills to your core competencies.’ Or even half a day, if you’re just brushing up. And, of course, you can always study online. Just make sure you do some research before picking your educational destination.”

Team Futures Institute 2012 Takes Shape

2012-03-20T18:05:32Z

I’m super pleased to announce the instructional team that will be joining me for the upcoming Duke TIP Futures Institute in June. Making up the young, energetic and idea-filled crew—and tri-nations—will be newly San Franciscan Michele Perras, formerly of OCAD and MEIC, now VP of Strategy for Mobile at Klick Health, and London-based Justin Pickard, writer, futurist and Associate at Superflux, with whom I’ve recently had the pleasure of working with design futurescaping in a desert city.

I’m very excited to be working with these folks to build an ambitious course, adding deeper dives into innovation, open science, speculative exploration of technology and quite a bit more yet to come. They bring a common interest in building brilliant futures, and bring diverse cultural experiences and a variety of intellectual and instructional kung-fu along with them.

Welcome aboard the spacecraft, Michele and Justin. More announcements to come!

Quoted: Capacity

2012-02-09T19:07:24Z

It’s old now, but I stumbled across an article from Capacity, a telecoms industry magazine, in which I was quoted in late 2010 talking about the application of foresight in long-term technology strategy. In it, I talk about future opportunities for telecoms companies in areas that, five years ago, didn’t seem to have much to do with their core businesses, such as health care, urban environments, and banking in developing markets.

An excerpt:

“In the developing world, Smith looks at the ways in which mobile technology has replaced a set of functions which may not have been a telecommunications problem before, such as sending money to a colleague or friend. This does not require much bandwidth, but does require a reliable application that is available to users with little education. The value in the network inexorably moves away from the network provider to the skill of the application provider. Similar issues apply to cities, which Smith sees becoming ‘sentient intelligent environments’ where reality is augmented by contextualised information delivered to you, your car or your phone – and where information depends on the machines around you knowing who you are and what you need. This, Smith says, promises to cut waste and the cost of public services dramatically.”

Quoted: Wired's Beyond the Beyond

2012-02-07T16:05:32Z

Nice tip from Bruce Sterling on last week’s post on political design fiction in his Beyond the Beyond column on WIRED.com.

Always good to make the cut.

Robot Troopers

2012-02-02T15:51:25Z

I wrote recently about our conflicted relationship with robots. In some ways, robots are becoming seen as the hammer that could be used to drive a wide range of situational nails. Just look at the explosion of interest (no pun intended) around drones as the hot new platform for security/safety/surveillance/socializing/etc. For all the enthusiasm, it’s a smaller group that asks, “is this right tool for this situation?” Increasingly, robots are just rolled right in with only cursory consideration of appropriateness—see the drone usage creep in domestic law enforcement as evidence.

I’m thinking about this because of an incident that occurred several days ago very near me, where an obviously disturbed local resident started his day naked in front of his house, brandishing and firing a rifle (needless to say, not a typical day around here). After responding to the incident, police deployed a tactical robot through which to negotiate with the man who was, according to bystanders, trying to “speak to God.” According to news reports, the robot ran out of battery power halfway through the standoff and had to be replaced by a loaner unit from a nearby department.

While tactical robots are potentially lifesaving technology for officers, they can still be a blunt instrument in a psychologically delicate situation such as this. One imagines a future where such robots further disintermediate an already disconnected relationship between, say, rioters and police, or mental patients and guards. That the unit ran out of power part way through negotiations shows how far we have to go to be able to replace human interaction with a mechanical enforcer.

Political Fiction

2012-02-01T15:25:42Z

Image: Flickr / captain_ambienceIt hasn’t escaped my notice that, in the current US presidential election race, two of the most prominent super PACs, or nominally independent political action committees that support a presidential candidate, use the word “future” in their names: the Mitt Romney-supporting Restore Our Future and Newt Gingrich-supporting Winning Our Future. One could also count Steven Colbert’s Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow super PAC, but will put that on the side for the moment.

Use of time, invocation of eras and projection of visions come and go in political messaging. As this handy list shows, for US presidential campaigns, when they do invoke time, slogans tend to talk about the short-term—often in one-term increments. McKinley’s “Four More Years of a Full Dinner Pail,” or Reagan’s “Are You Better Off Now Than Four Years Ago” use this yardstick, for example, in either direction. It probably wasn’t until Reagan ushered in the era of slick political communication on a grand scale that we started getting competing visions about epic futures, but even then, they sought a future that would be a return to a fictional past—what I’ve called imagined authenticity. The Tea Party has built almost its entire “brand” on this, right down to the costumed characters at rallies recalling an 18th century idea of America.

Campaigning as he was in the late 1990s, Bill Clinton took a stab a roadmapping the future rhetorically, with his “Building a Bridge to the 21st Century” call to action, urging the country to embrace the investments that he and others thought would help us make this transition to a new century—an idea that evokes a leap to the “other side” of this century divide, like jumping through a time portal. Plenty has been written about fin de siècle psychology, but it was an interesting attempt to appeal not just to progress, but to an active embrace of the future. Contrasted with a WWII hero in Bob Dole, it was a very stark rhetorical choice.

Now, with the Republican race at full tilt, we are seeing two different uses of the future emerge. The “going back to go forward” idea is what Romney has put forth, for example, rhetorically calling for the US to return to some lost path as the way to the future—inherently conservative, from the historically moderate candidate. Gingrich, on the other hand, is painting an increasingly detailed image of a future as he sees it—an odd mix of restored historical “norms” (as he sees it) and very modern, almost aggressively futuristic ambitions, like his moonbase concept. Gingrich’s fondness for grand future visions is well documented, and has even become a campaign issue in debates. And on the Democratic side, President Obama’s campaign hasn’t missed this trick either, calling for an “America Built to Last,” gently invoking a long-term future, though one arguably built on a mashup of future-facing investments (e.g., clean energy) and “bringing back” a manufacturing base from the past, restarting a blue-collar workbase on an obsolescent platform.

So, three of the major candidates are playing with different constructions of the future, and one of them—Gingrich—is increasingly painting detailed scenarios, describing day-by-day plans of action, and putting a vivid vision of a Gingrich-driven future in his followers’ minds. One wonders if he will be the first candidate not just to depict a fantasy present for America—sun shining and picket fences—in TV ads, but if he’ll go one step further into the realm of fictional future scenarios, the kind we get from tech companies and defense contractors, showing what a day in 2017 in Gingrich’s America, with moonbase launches and biometric immigration checks. I think it’s where we’re headed—the first design fiction candidate for president can’t be too far off.

This isn’t a political commentary, but a professional one, and surely not the end of the discussion. Politics, foresight and design are tightly intertwined, as Stuart Candy’s great Ph.D. dissertation covers in depth. I look forward to opinions and views from some of my colleagues as to how they see this playing out. We have at least 10 months to watch!

Pushing Boundaries

2012-01-27T21:56:14Z

In an interview just published in Urban Times, friend and colleague Noah Raford lays out his view of the role of futurist—a professional pursuit or skill that is a double-edged sword. Because the role of foresight is often to step outside a current reality long enough to contemplate alternatives, it puts practitioners in a highly vulnerable position, stepping outside the realm of the comfortable to conceptualize something between the impossible and the inobvious. In his discussion of inspiration, Noah generously included me among a shortlist of younger futurists he sees as expanding this role even further than the two generations of writers, teachers and practitioners we’ve learned from:

“Finally, you’ve got all these amazing new, young thinkers pushing far beyond this restraint. They benefited from all the groundwork that GBN and others have laid, but are also able to incorporate new tools, new cultures and new attitudes in an amazingly sophisticated way. Folks like Aaron Maniam in the Government of Singapore, the Superflux crew in London, Stuart Candy at ARUP, Scott Smith at Changeist, the guys and gals at IFTF in Palo Alto (and their alums, like Alex Soojun-Kim Pang), etc. All of those guys are incredibly design savvy, doing incredible work, and have a remarkable sensitivity to the ethnographics of power. It is just a joy to see them in action as well, since they’re all so eager and capable of pushing beyond mainstream design work in truly innovative ways.”

It’s a great compliment to be in this company. More importantly, though, it’s good to recognize that a defining element of the work younger futurists are doing today is that it is increasingly multidisciplinary, experimental and open to innovations in method and application. Everyone Noah lists, and many more great people not on this list, have are actively fusing foresight into other fields and practices, and hopefully giving it continued momentum by creating something new with it—creating a third culture between foresight and other fields, and comfortably standing at that point of balance.

In their excellent guide published last year, “Recipes for Systemic Change,” Brian Boyer, Justin Cook and Marco Steinberg at Sitra’s Helsinki Design Lab talk about the importance of third culture. In the context of so-called design thinking, one may not have a design degree, but:

“…it’s also possible to find individuals without any background or training in design who are very creative in solving problems and therefore might be said to operate like a designer. Likewise, many who hold a degree in design are not particularly suited for systemic or strategic design pursuits.”

Similar things can be said of futures thinking. There are some great talents coming into the field from outside who have a facility to fuse a foresight mindset with other interests and abilities, and some who are able to take foresight into new arenas as a way of looking afresh at issues of strategy and innovation. By doing this, hopefully we can diminish the vulnerability Noah talks about: foresight being dismissed because it brings to the table issues that many organizations aren’t structured to deal with. By becoming more multidisciplinary and better connected to other fields and practices, foresight becomes better positioned for the interventions it should be delivering.