IFTF's Future Now

links for 2006-08-23

• BEING SPACES | An emerging consumer trend and related new business ideas
  "Urban dwellers are trading their lonely, cramped living rooms for the real-life buzz of being spaces: commercial living-room-like settings... [that] facilitate small office/living room activities like watching a movie, reading a book, meeting friends and
  (tags: place-space city culture leisure)
• Blog of the Gate 3 WorkClub
  Blog of the now-defunct Gate 3 WorkClub. Interesting as a primary source.
  (tags: work space office mobility collaboration)
• Crossroads Copenhagen - Living Lab - The Living User Panel
  "The Living User Panel is a platform for the development of innovative products and user-centered product development processes."
  (tags: ethnography endofcyberspace denmark users)
• Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design
  "The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design is a new initiative happening in Denmark."
  (tags: design denmark education university)
• ChangeThis :: The Bioteaming Manifesto
  "Today's virtual teams have yet to realize their full potential. They could learn a lot from Mother Nature's teams."
  (tags: collaboration business biomimicry)
• ChangeThis :: View manifestos
  Library of manifestos published on ChangeThis.
  (tags: business culture design innovation marketing society sustainability work)
• The Bumble Bee
  Ken Thompson's blog on bioteaming.
  (tags: business collaboration innovation biomimicry work)
• Ken Thompson and Robin Good, "The Bioteaming Manifesto" [pdf]
  "[W]e suggest looking at nature’s most successful biological teams to uncover the secrets of extended cooperation and effective collaboration. "
  (tags: biomimicry collaboration business management)

links for 2006-08-22

• Guardian Unlimited | Science | The 100 questions at the heart of the UK's environmental future
  "Scientists have drawn up a list of the 100 biggest questions to face the UK environment.... [T]he list was an attempt to get politicians to base decisions more on the available scientific evidence."
  (tags: science UK policy environment)
• Big Ideas@Berkeley
  (tags: Berkeley university)
• And life created continents (24 March 2006 - New Scientist)
  "Life on Earth may have driven the evolution of the planet itself. The idea is that ancient microbes provided the chemical energy to create the Earth's continents."
  (tags: science evolution biology)

The city as laboratory

Another data-point in my and Anthony Townsend's ongoing study of how R&D is turning into an urban enterprise-- and often turning cities into hothouses and laboratories:

Google's Latest Laboratory: The City of Mountain View

Google, known for its innovative hiring practices and research-based worked environment, unveiled its most interesting laboratory to date: a wireless network in Mountain View, CA, that covers "11.5 square miles and has 380 access points in the city with a population of about 72,000, 35 miles south of San Francisco," according to this Bloomberg article.

The company insists it has no desire to roll out a nationwide wireless service; instead, it plans to use its hometown as a test bed for consumer interest in wireless products.

Bloomberg adds,

Google engineers attached antennas to lamp posts in Mountain View, which approved the project in November.

Consumers need to sign up for a Google account to use the network that offers connections of about 1 megabit per second, more than 15 times the speed of most dial-up services.

Technorati Tags: city, R&D, science, wireless

Manufacturing and the end of cyberspace

I have an essay on rapid prototyping, personal fabrication, and the future of manufacturing in the latest issue of Samsung DigitAll Magazine. Here's the opening:

The transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a creative, knowledge-intensive space is a development few could have seen. Are you ready for the next industrial revolution?

For many people, the word “factory” conjures up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. They imagine landscapes of machinery, consuming men and raw materials, blackening skies and destroying lives. Whatever they produce, factories are inhuman and unnatural. Certainly such factories still exist; but companies that aren’t trying to win the race to the bottom are taking different paths. The outsourcing movement, and more recent attention to product design, have eclipsed a quiet transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a more knowledge-intensive, even creative, space. In surprising ways, the factory is now following a path blazed by the design studio and modern office: it’s becoming more knowledge-intensive and flexible, even as it grows more tightly connected to markets and suppliers.

Technorati Tags: design, manufacturing, pervasive computing, ubicomp, Web 2.0

Paper, walls, and the sociology of collective knowledge

Prof. Armsworth's comment that the University of East Anglia environmental exercise was "a very physical experience" caught my eye. Sometimes clients or workshop participants will ask, an exercise to map the future that's done on a wall with giant Post-Its seems a little retro. Why don't we do this with computers?

In a way, it is. After all, what's more antiquated than paper? But there's more to such an exercise than just making a big list and voting on it. We find this old media valuable for a few reasons.

First of all, you can't underestimate the value of working on an entire wall, rather than just a screen. When you're dealing with upwards of a hundred ideas-- and a brainstorming session with a couple dozen people can easily generate a few hundred-- you can't fit them all on a laptop screen. You need a big wall when you're dealing with lots of ideas.

Not only does the big wall help individuals make sense of the "one great blooming, buzzing confusion" (to use William James' felicitous phrase) of brainstorming; it's also essential for groups. The irony of computer technology right now-- at least the kind that isn't fresh out of the lab and requires two grad students and a union foreman to get working properly-- is that while it makes communication with people in other time zones much easier, it just as easily stifles communication with people in the same room. A roomful of people all looking at screens don't interact with each other; they're a bunch of individuals working by themselves, not a group working together. (And yes, IM side conversations may erupt, but when you're working with a group, they're generally more of a problem than a solution.) The big wall, in contrast, provides a focal point, a common reference point, for groups.

It's also much, much easier for groups to work together on a big wall, than a bunch of little screens. You can watch other people cluster cards into groups, add yours, and move things around. Discussions about where cards should go emerge spontaneously. You can see what other people are doing, and they can see what you're doing. The wall becomes both a medium for work and a conversational space.

The simple fact that people are working as a group is a serious benefit for some clients. Often, we work with groups of executives, government officials, NGO managers, or others who don't spend much time together, but collectively have a significant amount of brain power and operational knowledge: to use the tired phrase, they're the future of the organization. Our events are set up to work with them to figure out what futures they face, and what they have to do to bring the preferable ones into being. At the end of a couple days, in other words, they're 1) a group rather than a collection of individuals, and 2) have a common vision of the future.

So moving around, seeing how other participants have voted or clustered cards, and interacting with other people aren't distractions. They're central to the process.

It is indeed a more obviously physical experience than most knowledge work, but it should be noted that all knowledge work, to some degree, has a physical component to it. Our normal habit is to assume that thinking is purely cerebral, and collaboration is essentially nothing more than an exchange of formal information. Neither is true.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, communication, IFTF, work

UK environmental issues

The Guardian reports that scientists at the University of East Anglia have

drawn up a list of the 100 biggest questions to face the UK environment, including controversies such as whether farmers should be allowed to kill badgers to protect their cattle from disease and how many seabirds are slaughtered by wind farms.

The list, a roll call of Britain's most pressing ecological problems, is based on the suggestions of more than 650 experts in universities, conservation groups and government institutes. It is intended to inform policy-makers and steer research over the next decade to answer key questions in areas such as farming, climate change, pollution and urban development.

One term you hear if you spend any time with people in the British government is the phrase "evidence-based policy," which is exactly what it sounds like: policy based on evidence. However, proponents of this don't argue that policy has heretofore been made without evidence, but that it can be improved with deeper and more forward-looking information.

The list is pretty specific.

The list includes current controversies in environmental science, and introduces some new ones. It asks whether there is evidence that organic farms are better for the environment, as supporters claim. It revisits the problem of whether badgers spread bovine TB to cattle. And it raises the thorny issue of the damage that domestic cats might be doing to bird and animal populations, a long-standing question that ecologists rarely voice in case they anger the UK's millions of pet owners....

Several of the questions cover the indirect environmental effects of government decisions in related fields, such as energy. Groups including the RSPB have objected to large wind farms, such as the one planned for the Isle of Lewis, because they argue not enough is known about their impact on wildlife. Scientists in Norway recently reported that coastal wind turbines there were responsible for a spate of sea eagle deaths, and are now investigating how to keep the birds away from the blades.

The experts who compiled the list also want to know more about the environmental impact of other forms of renewable energy, including wave power.

Some of the questions are "effectively unanswerable", the report admits, while others are "essentially too vague". For that, Dr Sutherland says we should blame the policy-makers, who had the final say and deliberately broadened the specific problems posed by the scientists.

Interestingly, the process they used to come up with their top 100 sounds rather like one of our expert workshops.

The original survey gathered 1,003 suggested questions - including "if the government gave more money to ecologists, would the country be better off?". These were whittled down during a two-day exercise at the University of East Anglia in February 2005.

The suggestions were printed and pasted across the walls and the policy experts invited to mark their favourites with sticky labels. (The scientists were there to advise only, and, in the words of Dr Sutherland, "to make the tea".)

Paul Armsworth, a lecturer in the animal and plant science department at the University of Sheffield, said the exercise was among the strangest experiences of his career. "For a nerdy scientist who usually sits at my desk this was a very physical experience. It was very much a one-off - a unique and ground-breaking effort."

Many of our expert workshops begin with a big brainstorming exercise. From there, we narrow down and order the ideas, by doing voting exercises that rank them, sorting them into categories, or building a map around them.

Technorati Tags: environment, policy, science, UK

Shakemovie, the future of science

I'm only half joking with the title of the post. When I was at Britannica, I spent forever trying to commission a set of 3D visualizations of earthquakes; for various reasons, the project never went anywhere. Tonight I discovered that a Caltech site publishes visualizations of earthquakes in near real time.

Caltech's Near Real Time Simulation of Southern California Seismic Events Portal. This portal has been designed to present the public with near real time visualizations of recent significant seismic events in the Southern California Region. These movies are the results of simulations carried out on a large computer cluster. Earthquake movies will be available for download approximately 45 mins after the occurrence of a quake of magnitude 3.5 or greater.

As they explain, the data comes from the Southern California Earthquake Data Center, which maintains several hundred earthquake monitoring stations (here's a map of the array); the data is then run through a 3D wave simulation, and a movie is generated.

It's an example of what interesting things you can do with real-time environmental data, ample processing power, and an Internet connection. It's easy to imagine amateur scientists creating things like this, or environmental groups generating visualizations of deforestation or soil erosion, or neighborhood activists creating movies highlighting local polluters.

[via Jill's notebook]

Technorati Tags: pervasive computing, science, ubicomp, visualization

Pheeder - Multicast Shouts thru Cell Phone Networks

John Geraci, creator of NeighborNode (and a former student of mine at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program) has a new project out called Pheeder. It's another one of the NYC-style social cell phone apps like Dodgeball that are designed around roaming groups of hip young singles who want to coordinate social events and meals in the city. Dodgeball lets you send text messages when you arrive at a bar or restaurant to your friends everywhere, and to friends of friends who are nearby.

Pheeder is the next generation of these SMS social apps - while its not location aware - it lets you call a hotline and leave an audio message, which is then blasted out immediately to your social network. You can subscribe to feeds that people create and have your phone ring off the hook constantly. It's sort of like Dodgeball meets audioblogging.

I was having drinks the other night with Sean Savage of Placesite and we were talking about how essentially zero cost wireless VoIP would lead people to keep audio chats open pretty much all the time as they move about the city. Combine that with a syndication mechanism like Pheeder and you're basically talking about a world where everyone has an audio stream of aggregated voices feeds coming in from their social network automatically. Sounds like telepathy to me....

Subscribe to my pheed, which will feature me and random people I meet saying things in foreign languages (which sometimes will just be made up gibberish). Fun fun fun.

On vacation

Just for the record, we haven't disappeared-- permanently at least. I'm on vacation for another week, and will be back online from the 21st.

Power, water, and refrigeration on the go

posted by Roland Piquepaille at ZDNet and SmartMobs,

Engineers at the University of Florida have built a machine that provides power, water, and refrigeration and could possibly be made small enough to fit into a large truck.  The project, funded by the US Army, helps to deal with the scarcity of all three resources in remote locations with little infrastructure, and boasts small improvements in efficiency (3-8%) by combining the three processes.

The engineering researchers' solution: a small system that ties a novel gas turbine power plant to a heat-operated refrigeration system. The refrigeration makes the gas turbine more efficient, while also producing cool air and potable water. The turbine can run on conventional fossil fuels as well as biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen.

Lear said gas turbines are a common power generator used in everything from jet engines to electricity plants. The problem with traditional versions is that they lose efficiency both when not operated at full power and in warm temperatures, he said.

Seeking to erase this loss, he rerouted the path of gases passing through the turbine, cooling them via heat exchangers. Sherif, an expert in refrigeration, then tied the system to absorption units, cooling the gases still more.

Users can either tap all the cooling power to obtain peak efficiency for the turbine, or divert some for refrigeration or air conditioning. "You can decide how much of one you want versus how much of the other, depending on your needs," Sherif said.