Changeism

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.

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.

2012 Futures Institute in the Incubator

2012-01-19T16:46:23Z

It’s that time again. Or, six months before that time again. Registration for the Futures Institute at Duke University’s TIP program is open (and for all other Institute programs), syllabi are being hatched (?), and new plans laid for this summer’s course. Now in it’s third year equipping exceptional high schoolers with tools to create their own futures, I’m revamping the program to take us deeper into exploration of science and technology foresight and innovation—which should be both exciting and provide a great platform for creativity and a little healthy geekery along the way. (Download a PDF description here)

As a once-a-year exercise, it’s an amazing point of leverage on the future, putting tools and ideas in the hands of over two-dozen promising students before they’ve gotten locked down on their professional paths as college students. For some, it lights the fuse on change maybe a decade or more down the road. Each time, I come away having learned as much as they have, and seeing my own role differently. Many of the students remark that it radically changes their perspective as well, giving them a different view of their possible paths ahead.

I’ll have more news soon about the fantastic instructional team that will be joining me—reaching further afield into new disciplines, but with a common futures thread. We will also be joined by a great new group of experts via Skype lectures and in person doing some exciting work in their fields of DIY science and bottom-up innovation. We’ll weave learning about important futuring tools and emerging thinking on innovation with deep dives into fields such as synthetic biology, citizen space exploration, alternative mobility, open robotics, and more.

Most importantly, the students won’t just be thinking and learning, but doing—along the way, through writing, building, mapping, gamestorming and prototyping, but also as the ultimate point of the course. Building off last year’s final challenge, teams will fuse everything they’ve acquired throughout the two week intensive in an even bigger Innovation Challenge to cap it all off. More will be said soon about this, too.

So, if you have a high-school aged student (not just in the US, but worldwide) who wants to shape the future of science and technology, have a look at what we’re doing and consider joining us in our happy R&D lab at Duke. What better place to spend two weeks this summer?

Humans + Robots: It's Complicated

2012-01-09T18:33:33Z

Image: Flickr / ocularinvasionMy most recent column for Current Intelligence, released at the beginning of January, looks at how human relationships with robots got a liitle more complicated in 2011. It was a year when more attention was focused on how robots serve us, how they see the world, how we relate to them, and how we fear them. In short, humans and robots are edging even closer to a domesticated relationship. An excerpt:

“We’ll need to get used to seeing the benign, geometric world of the sensor vernacular, as well as the unblinking, unsleeping view of the eye in the sky, and become more comfortable making decisions in both environments. As we develop more sociable, domesticated assistants, help-meets, and even protectors, I suspect that we will find ourselves being re-programming in much the same way domestic dogs and cats have been doing since they were first domesticated, quietly nudging us into their need-states more than we do with them into ours. We already talk of an impending drought of empathy as we drift deeper into computer-mediated society, generations raised on steady diets of simulation increasingly distanced from the realities, necessities and benefits of human socialization. As fast as we try to adapt AIs to our own needs, it’s a fair bet we’ll find ourselves bending to theirs.”

Media Futures

2011-12-08T16:17:06Z

In the summer of 2010, I was asked to participate in an open foresight project, organized by Ontario’s creative media cluster, Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) at OCAD University, Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC) and a group of sponsors, that attempted to shed light on where the media world may be in 2020, and what the implications of potential evolutions may be. The project, called 2020 Media Futures, looked at trends and drivers across the full STEEP+V spectrum, and across not just music, film and television, but books, magazines, and interactive platforms as well. The findings were released recently and make excellent reading.

My role involved working with the core team to filter the initial trend propositions, after which I authored a compilation of trends and drivers that could influence the landscape leading up to 2020. This phase looked at themes from attention fragmentation to hybrid media, data visualization, DIY production, the environmental burden of physical media and social collectivity. These trends and drivers, for which the working deck is available for download here, were then fed into a Delphi study earlier this year to identify critical uncertainties, and finally developed into a set of scenarios and final report.

Along the way, the initial research was put through a number of filters, and synthesized in well-considered working groups to create a highly valuable final product. If you are interested in the future of media, I strongly recommend digging into the project as a whole, and the final report in particular.

Man vs. Machine

2011-12-07T18:38:00Z

2011 has been a tumultuous year, and it is ending more unsteadily than it began. The US heads into an increasingly surreal election cycle, European economies threaten to come unstitched, Asia strains after years of rapid growth, and the Arab Spring has changed to long, hot summer and now autumn of Occupation. My November entry for Discontinuities on Current Intelligence addresses the growing rift between social needs and number crunching, and how this is beginning to manifest in political shifts. An excerpt:

“Our current economic, political and technological conflicts center around the amassing of enormous amounts of data, which fuel computer perceptions and projections for how the real world is behaving. The TSA, the PRC, American Express, Wal-Mart, Bank of America—the list of organizations converting human behavior and needs into data points for modeling, upselling or interdiction continues to grow. The weight of all this analysis, the codification and commodification of daily life, continuously tracking attitudes and beliefs, actions and interactions, is in part what drives the discontented onto the streets. We’ve only just begun to see the society-wide impacts of algorithms gone wild. Data spillages, robo-signing, and flash crashes are just the start.”

Third Economy

2011-12-02T22:18:14Z

As a part of ongoing scanning, among the many sources I read at least weekly are job ads (there’s a foresight joke in here somewhere, but I’ll leave it for now). To me, the changing nature of work as described in the evolution of required duties and experience levels are an interesting leading indicator, at least of perception. What do companies think they will need, in what quantity, and based on what skills?

Granted, I’m looking at certain sectors that are the apparent leading edge of services, manufacturing and media, but several big shifts seem to be taking place in the way roles are described, and what skills and experience are required by employers to fill them. Some examples:

Required education levels are getting higher. A BA or BS is becoming the equivalent of finishing secondary school. Master’s degrees are sought after more and more. Leading to…
A jump in demand for specialized education. A general master’s level degree doesn’t seem to suffice—it has to be specialized in a niche area. Urban planning, design research, astrobiology, early childhood education.
Transdisciplinary capabilities. It’s not enough to have had a breadth of experience, but one needs to be able to call on both sides of the brain, and all areas of practice, all of the time. Graphic design? Check. Interactive design? Check. Project management? Check. Marketing and communication? Check. Research and insights? Check. On and on, a single department or division, rolled into one person. I suspect this is a sort of risk averse trend whereby many potential needs are crammed into one job, requiring not so much as a “T-shaped” individual as a fantasy firefighter/ninja who will cover the inadequacies of others when faced with an increasingly complex and chaotic environment.
Analytical capabilities. This is the one that jumps out more and more. Problem solving isn’t sufficient. Being able to assess and analyze “insights,” what industry generally calls half-digested data today, is de rigueur. Increasingly, jobs appear to come with a data set, or a petabyte of data, attached. Be prepared to receive a data dump, and capable of telling a coherent story from it. Which means…
The ability to weave a narrative. One must be able to always tell a story, craft a use case, layer up a persona, or imagine a segmentation. With increasing levels of disruption around them, organizations of all kinds seem to need to tell themselves a story. Who are we? Who do we serve? What is our backstory? What are our customers’/competitors’ motivations?

The availability of data seems to be driving these latter two elements. As a recent McKinsey Quarterly article called “The Second Economy,” posits, our global economy is in the midst of a sort of molting—the physical economy that grew from the Industrial Revolution has spawned a second economy that is largely invisible, and a product of IT, a data economy. “This vast global digital network that is sensing, ‘computing,’ and reacting appropriately—is starting to constitute a neural layer for the economy.” writes W. Brian Arthur in this piece. “The second economy constitutes a neural layer for the physical economy.”

Arthur goes on to say that this second economy doesn’t require the jobs the first, physical economy did. In his view, the intelligence we build into the system—the algorithms—do a lot of the lifting individuals used to. A clerk isn’t required to draft a report, move a document along, and make a decision. If you apply for a credit card today, or try to book a one-way flight with cash, somewhere an algorithm is sniffing you, matching your behavior to a set pattern, and rendering judgement. Others are coming to a similar conclusion, with much handwringing about how technology is displacing jobs.

But the anecdotal evidence of scanning the job postings suggest otherwise. Our data sets are growing larger as the “aspen root system,” as Arthur calls the sensing tendrils of this second economy, grows more extensive. We can collect more, so we have more not to simply analyze, but contextualize and convert to meaningful narrative. This need to see the patterns in the noise itself may be the catalyst for an even higher (or deeper) level economy—a third economy of sensemaking. Collecting and warehousing massive amounts of data is simply an exercise in hording if we can’t see, contextualize, and use the patterns in the noise. (This article on the growing genetic data glut is a great example.)

This evolution will requre even greater, and more meaningful, analytical ability from workers of the near future. If sensing and collection is ubiquitous, then our ability to be analytical polyglots must be as well. Arthur is correct in that fewer people will be required to push a button or shift a document, but we are in serious trouble if we don’t grow the capability to make sense of what we “know” at a pace relative to the speed with which we can collect. Algorithms can only take us so far, which we are seeing even now.

America's Own Emerging Market

2011-10-28T17:42:00Z

Amid a wave of indicators showing long-term weakness in the American middle class, this month’s Discontinuities looks at how continued decline at the lower end of the economy is bringing some segments of the US market more inline with those of the emerging middle classes of developing world.

An excerpt:

“Underneath the stereotypical American tier of multi-device, high-speed households choc-a-bloc with the newest Apple devices, games consoles, flat-screens and fibre connections, is a growing layer of pragmatic technology users for whom utility is a higher priority than entertainment or convenience. For them, a mobile is a life tool, a means of staying both connected and afloat. If one factors in the possibility that US incomes could remain flat for the next decade, as just forecasted by a Wall Street Journal panel of economists, this layer will grow to be a more substantial part of the technology audience, looking much more like the lower middle classes in the BRIC economies than the more economically mobile top tier.”