IFTF's Future Now

Bonding with robots

New Scientist reports on a project by Georgia Tech researchers Ja-Young Sung and Rebecca Grinter that examines how people interact with Roomba:

"Dressing up Roomba happens in many ways," Sung says. People also often gave their robots a name and gender, according to the survey (see Diagram) which Sung presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Kathy Morgan, an engineer based in Atlanta, said that her robot wore a sticker saying "Our Baby", indicating that she viewed it almost as part of the family. "We just love it. It frees up our lives from so much cleaning drudgery," she says.

Sung believes that the notion of humans relating to their robots almost as if they were family members or friends is more than just a curiosity. "People want their Roomba to look unique because it has evolved into something that's much more than a gadget," she says. Understanding these responses could be the key to figuring out the sort of relationships people are willing to have with robots.

Until now, robots have been designed for what the robotics industry dubs "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs, like welding cars, defusing bombs or mowing lawns. Even the name robot comes from robota, the Czech word for drudgery. But Sung's observations suggest that we have moved on. "I have not seen a single family who treats Roomba like a machine if they clothe it," she says. "With skins or costumes on, people tend to treat Roomba with more respect."

So as they move from environments that we don't like into places that are more familiar, and from doing work we hate to work we just dislike, two things happen to our perception of robots: their social status goes up, and they become more familiar. But this doesn't just happen with robots who are doing "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs: humans who are doing those jobs can develop bonds with those robots, too.

US soldiers serving in Iraq and interviewed last year by The Washington Post developed strong emotional attachments to Packbots and Talon robots, which dispose of bombs and locate landmines, and admitted feeling deep sadness when their robots were destroyed in explosions. Some ensured the robots were reconstructed from spare parts when they were damaged and even took them fishing, using the robot arm's gripper to hold their rod.

Figuring out just how far humans are willing to go in shifting the boundaries towards accepting robots as partners rather than mere machines will help designers decide what tasks and functions are appropriate for robots. Meanwhile, working out whether it's the robot or the person who determines the boundary shift might mean designers can deliberately create robots that elicit more feeling from humans. "Engineers will need to identify the positive robot design factors that yield good emotions and not bad ones - and try to design robots that promote them," says Sung.

Architecture of the future? Probably not

Some of the most famous images of the future are architectural. Buckminster Fuller's 1967 Montreal Expo dome, for example, was hailed as a vision of the future; conversely, some of the first images that come to mind when you think of "the future" are things like the Jetsons' house.

Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, however, argues that avant-garde architecture like Fuller's, which is often described as "'experimental,' 'innovative,' or 'cutting edge'"-- and thus a preview of what everyone will be designing in years to come-- is actually a pretty unreliable guide to the future:

the term architectural avant-garde is an oxymoron, since an architect, unlike a painter, is able to experiment only within relatively narrow bounds. Buildings are expensive, and they are intended to last a long time, so the people who build them tend to be risk-averse.... Even if a building succeeds in breaking the mold, that is no guarantee that it is showing the way, for innovative buildings rarely anticipate the future. There have been exceptions. Frank Lloyd Wright's first Usonian house, built in 1936, with its one-story living, open plan, carport, and low-slung roof, did foreshadow the ranch houses of the '50s and '60s, and Mies van der Rohe's novel Lake Shore Drive apartment towers in Chicago, completed in 1951, were the first example of the steel-and-glass-curtain wall that would dominate commercial architecture for the next two decades....

The truth is that buildings belong firmly to their own time. This is especially true of architecture that self-consciously attempts to predict the future. That's why the settings of old sci-fi movies are often so funny; the future never turns out the way people imagine. Most buildings have a shelf life of 20 to 30 years; that is, it takes 20 to 30 years before they are perceived as "old-fashioned." This doesn't mean that the buildings are ugly, or not useful, or not cherished—simply that they now represent the past. That's not necessarily a bad thing—it would be disorienting to live in an environment that never aged (actually, it would be like living in Las Vegas).

Technorati Tags: architecture, culture, future

Amigo

Recently I came across a video overview of the Amigo project, which is developing "ambient intelligence for the networked home environment." It's a pretty standard day-in-the-life-of-the-home-of-the-future video.

Like many of these videos, the point is to give readers a sense of what life in the networked, infomated future would be like. The challenge you always have with these videos is that there's a tension between highlighting the technology-- which is all about novelty-- and focusing on the people and how they live-- which is probably not going to be so very different. As a result, some of these videos inadvertently make the home of the future look as appealing as a PC, because they choose to foreground the interactions people will have with their smart doors or mirrors in their hallways.

Technorati Tags: smart_home, video

Check

Atul Gawande has a terrific article in last week's New Yorker on an information technology that, after several years' testing, looks like it could transform intensive care. It's mainly been used in the reduction of line infections, which Gawande explains are

so common that they are considered a routine complication. I.C.U.s put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that, after ten days, four per cent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States, and are fatal between five and twenty-eight per cent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care.

This new technology was developed a few years ago by Johns Hopkins professor Peter Pronovost. After the first trial using it in a hospital,

The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital... [it] had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

For years we've heard that information technology could solve some of the most tractable problems with our health care system, and this seems to make that promise true. So what is this technology?

A checklist.

Not a gigantic database, or RFID tags in unconscious patients, or steerable needles (which boffins at UC Berkeley are now working on); but pieces of paper listing the steps you're supposed to take when doing something. You know what they are.

So why are they good-- good to the point of being able to save lots of lives and millions of dollars in an average hospital? Checklist offer

two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.

Tools like checklists aren't just accidental media containing information; when you look at how they're used, they turn out to be aids to memory, objects that help standardize what can be chaotic practices. Under some circumstances, they're tools for diffusing practices and raising standards.

The power of checklists rests in their simplicity, particularly the simplicity of their use. Documents behave predictably. That predictability, I would argue, in turn is important for its incorporation into work practices. With a checklist, you can easily see that steps have been followed: it's a bit like how strips of paper in air traffic control centers serve as tools for tracking who has responsibility for a plane.

How do you select user innovations?

Tuesday I went to a reception at the Innovation Center Denmark, an outfit on Page Mill Road that helps Danish tech companies interested in doing stuff in the States. They're a small but very interesting group, and the evening featured a talk by architect and industrial designer Frederik Andersen. Andersen cofounded a small design firm, Goodmorning Technology (what an optimistic name).

A good bit of the talk was about user reinvention, and its increasing importance in the design and innovation process. For me, the talk brought up a question: how do you figure out which user innovations are worth paying attention to? If the great virtue of user-driven innovation is that-- to borrow the language of evolutionary biology-- its a mechanism for generating a lot of mutations, what's the selection mechanism? Ultimately, of course, useful mutations will be more widely adopted than others; but most companies would like a way to detect the most promising ones before then.

Frederik's answer was that, at this stage, the selection process is still largely intuitive; which I suspect is the answer most people would give.

Pelle Braendgaard has blogged the talk more extensively.

Technorati Tags: denmark, design, innovation

Evolutionary algorithms, and design vs. understanding

This week's New Scientist has an article on evolutionary algorithms (sometimes also called genetic algorithms) and debates over their use. Put simply, EAs "mimic the processes of natural selection and random mutation by 'breeding,' selecting and re-breeding possible designs to produce the fittest ones." They might start with two current designs for an antenna, and generate a number of offspring that borrow characteristics from both. The offspring are tested; most fail to work and are discarded, while the survivors are matched up, and the cycle is repeated-- a few thousand times. The result is a new antenna design that is better than any of its ancestors.

Some of the biggest successes with EA (or evolutionary design, or artificial design, take your pick) have been with technologies where the scientific foundations aren't very firm, or don't work as well as you'd expect. Antenna design, for example, has had some notable successes with EA, in part because, as NASA scientist Jason Lohn notes, "Maxwell wrote down the four equations which govern all of wireless communication.... They describe the physics, but the weird thing is, you never use them. In practice, this field is so squirrely, the only way to learn is through trial and error. It's the school of hard knocks."

These methods have been around for a while, but they seem likely to become more widely accessible soon:

[Traditionally, EAs have required] ultra-fast computers, both to breed the thousands, or even billions, of generations and to simulate the results to select those offspring that are fit for re-breeding. This has limited their use to a few niche applications.

That is now changing with the availability of ever more powerful computers, the advent of distributed computing "grids", which pool the resources of thousands of PCs, and the emergence of multicore chips, which suit EAs because it's easy to divide up the tasks between cores. As a result, designs can now be evolved in days rather than months or years and EAs are going mainstream.

As one evolutionary designer recalled in 2004, "When I started doing this, I was running my simulations on a single Pentium 66 [MHz] PC.... That meant I had to be real careful with how large my problems were and how long it took things to run. Now, you can brute-force things a lot more easily."

So why if these methods work, and are becoming more accessible, why are they controversial? Here's where things get really interesting.

Proponents of EAs say they could replace traditional methods in many fields from designing exotic new types of optical fibre and USB memory sticks to more aesthetic computer-generated art. Critics argue that the technique may lead to designs that can't be properly evaluated since no human understands which trade-offs were made and therefore where failure is likely....

Essentially, some worry that these designs might perform better, but if we can't understand them, we won't know know what hidden costs or disadvantages they carry-- until it's too late. NASA scientist Lohn puts it a different way: he sees EA as forcing people into one of two schools of thought.

"One school of thought says you need a black box that does X, Y and Z. If I use evolution to get something that does X, Y and Z, I don't care what's in it as long as it works."

And the other school? "That one says, 'I need to understand what's in there,'" Lohn says. "Those are the people we can't really help, because a lot of times, we don't know what's in there."

So ultimately, the question isn't whether these designs work, but whether it's important for us to understand why they work.

Technorati Tags: design, evolution

Back to the Future

I love the ridiculousness of this waterproof wrist camera I found on ThinkGeek. Especially their claim that it "lies flat on your wrist."  It's actually clunkier than Dick Tracy's wrist videoconferencing device - but I don't know if Dick Tracy could get 3 megapixels or dive to 100 feet.

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

Synthetic Gecko

The gecko must be one of the most-studied animals in the world today, thanks to its ability to climb virtually any surface. A number of engineers are working on making synthetic gecko tape, which would adhere strongly to a surface, without leaving adhesive residue. British company BAE Systems recently announced that it had created Synthetic Gecko, a reusable polymer "covered in millions of tiny mushroom-like hairs."

Future applications could include an adhesive to repair aircraft, skin grafts or even a Spiderman-style suit.

"It would mean that your local window cleaner could dispense with his ladders and climb up the side of your house," says Dr Sajad Haq, a principal research scientist at the company's Advanced Technology Centre in Filton, Bristol....

It is manufactured by a modified version of a technique known as photo-lithography, commonly used to make silicon chips.

The technique uses light to etch three-dimensional patterns into a material.

"The processes we use are modifications of standard electronic fabrication processes," says Dr Haq. "They're cheap, well known, well understood and can be scaled up to very large areas cheaply."

Technorati Tags: biomimicry

Yahoo! Design Expo

Yesterday I went to the Yahoo Design Expo, an event bringing together bright design students from the U.S., England, and Brazil.

The exhibit had a number of demos or performance art-like pieces, which ranged from a bit weird (but I'm not very avant-garde) to fun to pretty compelling. Peter Merholz is right that Aaron Koblin's work is mighty cool, but I thought that the expo overall exhibited a few interesting themes. First, as Larry Tesler pointed out, they all played with a few big themes:

• Tangible interfaces;
• Collaborative/social media things;
• Geolocation;
• Wacky performance art stuff.

Okay, the last one might have been mine. (And for anyone who was there, yes, I'm the one that nearly destroyed the project with the spitballs and the ship's wheel. And yes, I hate art that much. I truly do.)

I talked for a few minutes with Joy Mountford, who has been organizing this expo every year since 1990, and got Yahoo to sponsor it after she joined the company as a senior designer. Joy is one of those Silicon Valley interface design types who's made the pilgrimages to all the storied, hot but unstable, or interesting places-- she founded Apple's International Interface Design Project, worked at Interval Research in the 1990s, and now it at Yahoo-- and taught here and there. (This ACM Ubiquity interview is a good intro to her work.) It's the kind of career path that's like a river. To visitors it seems meandering. Those more familiar it can decipher its logic and know its more picturesque turns. And the river itself is absolutely determined to get somewhere.

We talked about how the expo has evolved over the years. In particular I wanted to know when the tangible interface stuff-- which connects with my own work on the end of cyberspace-- started showing up, and when people started trying to move interface design beyond the WIMP interface. She said that there had always been such projects, but they'd become more prominent in the last few years, and now were commonplace: everyone in design and UI circles takes for granted that this is the future.

But the most interesting thing she said was that while in the Olden Days, students had to do a lot of fudging and improvising-- using magnets instead of sensors, or doing videos that showed how something would work if the technology were available-- today, the sensors, RFID tags, and just about everything else you need to make a working prototype are within an intelligent student's reach. At least four of the projects were using Max, a high-level programming language that makes it pretty easy to build simple systems combining sensors, logic, and actuators.*

As Larry Tesler put it, an exhibit like this is worth putting on at a place like Yahoo for two reasons: first, it gets Yahoo people thinking outside the box; and second, art students are a group that's regularly thinking about things that everyone else thinks about a few years later. As William Gibson might put it, they have an unusually high concentration of the future.

My instinct is that this is true for the tools they use, as well: just as CAD has gone from an exotic expensive thing to something that you play with in Second Life, and robotics is now as accessible as Lego, If design students are able to build M.A. projects with this stuff, when my daughter is in high school she'll be building anti-sibling detectors to keep her younger brother and his various robots (which he will have also built) out of her room.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, design, digital-physical, geoweb, prototyping

Smart homes and smart aging

The Associated Press has an article on a new JAMA study documenting the relationship between daily exercise and longevity:

Chores can keep elderly alive

Just doing household chores and other mundane activities of daily living is enough to help older adults live longer, new research suggests.

Elderly couch potatoes were much more likely to die within about six years than those whose lives included regular activity no more strenuous than washing dishes, vacuuming, gardening and climbing stairs, according to a study of adults age 72 to 80.

About 12 percent of people with the highest amount of daily activity died during the six-year follow-up, compared with nearly 25 percent of the least active participants.

This is the latest in several studies establishing a relationship between activity and longevity among elders. Taken together, they send a clear message about the design of smart home technology, one that we advanced in last year's RFID report:

The ideal smart house used to be thought of as one that would take care of everything for you. It would be a “machine for living in,” to borrow modern architect Le Courbusierʼs phrase. In contrast, some of todayʼs best scientists aim to create systems that help residents do things, instead of systems that doing things for them. As professor Stephen Intille has described the MIT House_n project:

Our primary vision is not one where computer technology ubiquitously and proactively manages the details of the home. Technology should require human effort in ways that keep life as mentally and physically challenging as possible as people age.

Work on communications and monitoring systems has taken off thanks, in part, to the discovery of a clear relationship between isolation and depression. Elders are much more likely to stay active when their social lives are active and theyʼre in touch with family and friends. Active elders are healthier elders. Sedentary elders are at greater risk of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. (Elders often need encouragement to remain active. In Japan and the United States, the elderly watch 5–6 hours of television per day.) Likewise, there is evidence that, by remaining mentally and physically active, elders can fight the onset of Alzheimerʼs. Having a house that does too much to take care of you can be bad for you.

Technorati Tags: aging, architecture, design, RFID, smart_home

Adam Greenfield on Everyware

Adam Greenfield gave a talk at the Institute today. Here are the notes:

What

AG's notion of ubicomp draws on Weiser's vision of computing being "invisible but everywhere around us" (weiser 1990), built upon very cheap computing "spread around like grass seeds", and "embedded, wireless, imperceptible, multiple, and post-gui" (AG, 2006).

This would generate new kinds of modalities of interaction, particularly design "dissolving into behavior."

It would also allow for the instantiation of computing and interaction with it at a wide variety of physical scales, at the level of the body (Body Media SenseWear), the object, the room (Sensasell), the building, the street (Shinjuku RFID lamppost).

But they're also networked together, which allows for some really interesting interactions; and hard to see, literally and figuratively (because you can't detect or sense embedded computing). So what does this look like?

Meaning

In the PC age, you have clear interactions and presentations of self: it's obvious to others that you're online, and it's obvious to you what technologies you're using (or are studying you). In everyware, in contrast, users aren't knowingly engaged in a technical interaction; they're surrounded by many devices, systems and services; their positions (location, orientation) matter.

"The way the self is perceived is beyond the user's control."

Desigers "need to take particular care in crafting these experiences, because... everyware can be engaged" inadvertently, unknowingly, or unwillingly.

When

Isn't this all science fiction? No. Here are three straws in the wind:

Octopus (1997): RFID-based smart card infrastructure in Hong Kong, adopted by 95% of the population, and is used constantly-- at vending machines, public transportation, as a key, an e-money. You don't get much more ubiquitous than this.

New Songdo (2004): Korea's ubiquitous city, filled with RFID, sensors, etc..

Mastercard Paypass (2005): RFID-embedded credit card. Market research suggested that people would spend more when they can just swipe and go; but it hasn't worked out, in part because Paypass is more of a stand-alone system than Octopus. Still, it's a signal that these kinds of everyware are coming to the U.S.

Why Do It?

Why are companies into it?

• Money.
• Structurally latent. IPv6 gives enough address to provide a vast number of addresses.
• "It's technically sweet."
• Public safety.

How

How to design systems that respect prerogatives of civil liberties, privacy, etc.? AG suggests five ethical principles:

1. Default to harmlessness. Everyware "should default to a mode that ensures their users' safety." It's beyond graceful degredation, because everyware takes so much responsibility upon itself to take care of people.
2. Be self-disclosing. You should be able to see what systems are operating in a space, both to geeks and to people who aren't wired up. This requires "a new universal vocabulary of signs" for everyware; and the ability to look under the hood.
3. Be conservative of face. Everyware should not "unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate or shame their users." Nor should it completely dissolve the boundaries of privacy that people expect.
4. Be conservative of time. Don't "introduce undue complications into ordinary operations." Having physical equivalents of Clippy the Office Assistant would be a pain.
5. Be deniable. Everyware "must offer users the ability to opt out, always and at any point." If ubicomp systems offer some functionality and benefit, opting out should just turn those off. (How do you opt out of being photographed by surveillance cameras?)

Technorati Tags: design, digital-physical, end of cyberspace, Everyware, IFTF, pervasive computing, ubicomp

I think I'll start a global standard today

Recently I spent an afternoon with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. She's author of the Crafter Manifesto, and recently launched ThingLink, a "free product code for creative work." The basic idea is very simple:

Thinglink.org is an open database where makers can register free unique identifiers for their work and create labels for their products. The beta was launched at the Maker Faire/San Francisco in April.

Artists, crafters, designers, and small producers stand to benefit from online recommendation systems because recommendation systems place their products on equal footing with those of the large corporations. However, recommendation systems require unique identifiers for products. UPCs, EANs and EPCs are examples of standard ID schemas. These codes are not accessible to individuals and small producers especially in developing countries because the codes cost money and reserving them is a complex process.

Thinglink is a free, alternative product ID code that can be attached to products in the form of a human-readable label, a barcode, or a RFID tag. The idea is that anyone can thinglink a product, and anyone with the will and the skills is free to create a recommendation system for thinglinked products.

I think there are a bunch of provocative things here, all wrapped up in a very simple object.

First is the idea that there's value in attaching digital IDs to handmade-- or really any unique-- objects. Ten years ago, creating a unique identifier system that closes the gap between an object and information about that object would have seemed really weird, or just sinister; but now, at least among some circles, the value of such a system is easier to see. (ThingLinks are little bits of spime.)

But this isn't just a matter of creating a UPC scheme for crafts. Industry codes establish objects as members of a family, and do so largely for purposes of supply chain and inventory management. While you might be able to build such functionalities around ThingLink, its purpose seems to different: ultimately, it's not about helping establish some object as part of a category, but capturing unique information about it. This is particularly cool because, as Dan Pink might put it, more and more of us don't buy things; we buy things that have interesting stories.

Of course, the two functionalities aren't mutually exclusive. Consider books, which have ISBN numbers. Booksellers who deal in rare or used books can use ISBN numbers just like Amazon; but they also want to collect information about specific books. Antiquarian booksellers record information about a book's overall condition, dust jacket, marginal notes, inscriptions, dedications, water and mold damage, and other things; having a way for that information to be associated with books would be quite useful.

The fact that the system is low-tech compared to UPC codes is also something that works in its favor. It means that the barriers to entry are pretty low, and may create more room for experimentation and evolution. For example, I could imagine a in which weavers could send pictures of their latest creations to ThingLink via their camera cell phones, and have the system send back an ID for that object, and create a record of it in the database (with the ID number, the picture, creation date, and information about who sent it). Such a system might be like folksonomies or Wikipedia: informal and imperfect, but good enough for everyday use, and very attractive when the alternative is nothing at all.

But what struck me most forcefully wasn't anything about ThingLink itself, but the casual ambitions behind it. Have we really reached the point where a graduate student in Helsinki, Finland, working with a few friends and a couple off-the-shelf commercial services, create an international standard? Are there enough servers in the world, enough cheap computers, and sufficiently ubiquitous Internet access-- not to mention an instinct regarding the value of using common protocols, if not absolutely formal standards-- to make this possible? Can individuals now command the resources to do what used to require formal organizations, lots of special interest group meetings, and offices in Geneva? Josh Schachter pulled off something like this with del.icio.us; of course, Tim Berners-Lee arguably did this with the World Wide Web protocol (though being at CERN and being able to build on a trend toward standardization in publishing formats helped).

Maybe.

Technorati Tags: business, cooperation, culture, digital-physical, RFID, Shaping Things, Web 2.0

phone shui

Jason Li at Virtual China writes: Samsung Motorola has recently put forth a patent for the Feng Shui Phone, which, according to Unwired View, does the following (and I quote):

• Three-dimensional Hall-effect sensor for measuring the strength of electromagnetic fields and to form a compass to determine the geographic direction in which the main wall of the house faces.
• Digital camera to determine color saturation, order and balance of the surroundings.
• GPS receiver to determine geographic location of the phone.
• The coordinates are then sent to the GIS databse through wireless network to to get the information about the surroundings of the location, e.g. the distance from the undesirable sites such as major airports, landfills, and factories.
• Cellphone microphone is used to measure noise level of the location.
• AM/FM radio to measure the AM and FM transmission strength and the distance form nearest AM/FM towers.
• The table with the chi values of each parameter is stored in phones memory and is used for calculation of chi  values of different parameters.

Via PostShow; info from Unwired View

Sim City, aka Cad Land

One of the largest future market opportunities for very low-cost 3D printers is children. They love to create objects, and they, their parents, and their schools will buy them in large quantities. Consider the past. Many of us grew up playing with Tinkertoys, Creepy Crawlers, Incredible Eatables, Play Dough, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, and Lego bricks. All of them are about creating three-dimensional objects.

Today's kids are producing 3D objects on computers. Consider SIMS (a.k.a., SimCity), the most popular computer game in the world. The buildings, furnishings, and surroundings are fully described as 3D models.

(Terry Wohlers)

It had never occurred to me to think of massive multiplayer game spaces as breeding-grounds for design and engineering skill; but maybe 20 years from now there'll be a generation of kids for whom virtual world-building and rapid prototyping are as natural a combination as word processing and printing were for mine-- or rather, the cohort that came about 3 years after me.

More on this at End of Cyberspace.

Technorati Tags: children, design, education, prototyping

Quote of the day

From bitsandspaces:

Architecture in 2010 will inevitably fall into three classes: physical, virtual, and hybrid 'bits and bricks' architecture.

Pure physical architecture will become rare. Examples could include the most extreme of sustainable buildings, architecture in developing countries, or buildings that for cultural reasons renounce the integration of computer-driven technology. Pure physical buildings can also be the outcome of very natural reactions to specific conditions. The traditional building technologies that developed over centuries in response to the unique needs and circumstances of a certain region are one example.

Virtual architecture will be an alternative in many respects to the excessive production of physical architecture. It will put an end to the non-sustainable expansion of area used per person, which has more than doubled in industrialized countries since the middle of the last century. With improved virtual reality environments and computers, whose performance needs to increase by a factor of one thousand, realistic virtual surroundings will be the natural working environments for most people in information societies.

However, 'bits and bricks' architecture will ultimately predominate -- most buildings will have thousands of sensors, processors, and software integrated in their structure. They will be monitored, controlled and protected by computers and communicate with inhabitants and other buildings. Their aim will be to optimize the use of resources and the comfort of the environment they are providing through active and reactive behavior.

Personally, I think building in developing countries hardly constitutes something "rare," though much of it happens without direction from professional architects, and I'm skeptical about the VR argument, but the notion of a "bits and bricks" architecture is intriguing.

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, end of cyberspace

Cafes, the new garages?

Jackson West writes about the growing importance of cafes in the Bay Area as workspaces:

Forget Palo Alto garages-- San Francisco coffee shops are where to get your
startup off the ground. Internet cafes are emerging as an important place to get work done, hold meetings and network. Since writers, designers, developers and anyone else who can work from their laptop are going to show up, you can even recruit talent, publicize your project and even demo your product for potential users and investors.

I think this won't come as news to many, but the notion that cafes can legitimately be thought of as business places (and not just to sell coffee, but to conduct a wide variety of businesses) has a lovely early modern quality about it.

At the same time, it reinforces a point that many smart writers about the relationship between the Internet and physical places have made: Web access (and especially wireless access) doesn't make place irrelevant, it just changes the criteria people use for deciding which places they're going to work in. In an interview we conducted a couple months ago, MIT professor William Mitchell explained how unwiring Internet access and other facilities was changing both the ways users think about workspace, and the opportunities architects have to design interesting spaces:

In architecture, in making the layout of a building, adjacency is a scarce resource. You can never satisfy all of the adjacency requirements that exist. Everybody would like to be next to the coffee machine and simultaneously next to the best view and simultaneously next to the people they work with. That's impossible.

When you introduce wireless connectivity, though, you eliminate a bunch of requirements for adjacency. You no longer have to be adjacent to a network jack in order to have connectivity, or adjacent to paper files in order to do your work. You can take them, sit down anywhere, and work.

What happens then is that adjacency demands that had previously been latent and unsatisfiable have now become satisfiable, so they take over, and reclustering begins to emerge.... If there's been a kind of latent demand for clustering, socializing, serendipity, getting together, all of that kind of stuff, if you loosen up the old adjacency constraints people are going to satisfy those demands. If people are working in loud environments and they'd really like to be working in the garden or in the sunshine or something, then that's what's going to happen.

This is something that will only become more pronounced as time goes on:

I think we are seeing a very clear movement towards much more flexible and nomadic occupation of space -- of architectural space, of urban space.... [Furthermore,] as digital technology becomes really good -- becomes really small, really reliable, really capable, and really ubiquitous -- it can disappear... [I]t becomes less and less necessary to build architectural environments around specialized technical requirements. If you've got better control systems you can have operable windows and natural light. Do you remember old-fashioned computer labs that used to be darkened spaces because the screens were so dim? Well, you don't need that anymore because screens are bright -- they just work better. Similarly, it used to be that classrooms were darkened because the audiovisual equipment meant you had to darken the space. Well, now we can put natural light into classrooms because, again, the display technology is powerful enough.

The interesting paradox is the more high-tech a space really is, the less high-tech it looks. And you can go back to very basic human things like light and air and view with operable windows and sociability. So you start to go back to being able to build the architecture around the human beings rather than the technical systems. And it's the opposite of what everybody thinks, what most people think, and it's a tremendously exciting thing for architects.

Likewise, the shift from garages to cafes reflects not a sense that you can completely do away with offices or meeting-spaces, but a shift in preference away from spaces that are privately owned and isolated, to ones that are more public, that provide services, and offer the potential for fruitful random encounters and social interactions.

Technorati Tags: business, cafe, collaboration, Silicon Valley

iPod my ride

Institute friend Peter Hesseldahl writes about iPod integration now influencing car buying:

Several people (no, not from Denmark) have told me how the integration of an ipod with the stereo system was a major factor when they choose their new, expensive car. Amazing how a $250 gadget can determine the purchase of product that's a hundred time more expensive.

Übercool adds to the story:

Few carmakers realize it yet, but seamlessly integrating an Apple iPod with a new automobile is influencing a lot of car buyers.

In one sense it's amazing, as Peter says; but two bigger trends make it make more sensible.

First, plenty of car buyers expect to spend a lot of time in their cars. In major metropolitan areas in the U.S., drivers can spend a couple hours a week-- or, added all together, several days a year-- commuting to and from work (see below). Then add shopping, chauffering kids, etc., and you get a substantial amount of time.

(Source: U.S. Census press release)

This connects to the second trend. More people-- in particular, families in the U.S.-- treat cars not just as transportation devices, but as living rooms. It's where families catch up; sometimes where they eat; and increasingly cars are equipped with comfy chairs, DVD players, and other entertainment systems. So having your music with you-- or more specifically, being able to carry some functionality from your living room to the car-- shouldn't come as a surprise.

Or perhaps the connection comes from another source: cars = mobility; iPod = mobility; ergo, cars = iPod.

What'll really be amazing is if bicycle designers start playing around with iPod integration: adding little speakers on the handlebars, say.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cars, ipod, travel

The best thing since sliced bread. Hey--

Though it was invented several years ago, it still deserves notice: as Nicolas explains, a toaster that prints information about the day's weather, and thus uses "bread as a display device."

As The Register explains,

It's the engineering equivalent of a haiku: Robin Southgate's Java toaster, a device he assembled as part of his final year design project at Brunel University in England. The toaster dials a freephone number to get the weather forecast and burns the appropriate symbol on a piece of toast. And ... that's it.

An earlier article explains how it works.

The unit makes use of an embedded Java device from Dallas Semiconductors called TINI, Robin tell us, with the imaging being performed by dropping a heat resistant PTFE mask in front of the heating elements about 30 seconds before it's due to pop up. He taught himself Java to produce the device, which contributes to his final year project.

Then there's this from the BBC:

The current prototype creates one of three images familiar from TV weather maps on the bread using stencils that mask part of the slice while the rest continues to be toasted. The images are made of heat-resistant plastic and stay rolled up round an axle until needed.

When bread is first inserted into the forecasting toaster, it is browned just like in any other toaster. But in the last 20-30 seconds of toasting, an electric motor inside the toaster rolls out the appropriate stencil in front of the bread.

To ensure the symbols are uniformly etched on to the bread, the controller chip inside the toaster notes how dark someone wants their bread browned and only unrolls the stencil for the last 20 seconds or so of toasting time. "It works with brown, but best with white," said Mr Southgate. "But it should work with any bread."

Weather forecast information is held on a website created just for the smart toasters and this is consulted regularly via a modem inside the toaster to find out the latest information. Mr Southgate was keen for the toaster to work like any other and make no special demands on users.

While it's whimsical, I can kind of imagine this being useful-- assuming you had toast every morning for breakfast.

And the idea that things like toasters can be used as communications media, and that food could be a channel for communicating time-sensitive or context-specific information, is very cool.

Technorati Tags: displays

A cool thing to have around the office

We have a very open office space, and while most of the time it's great, occasionally you want to be able to create some little mini-rooms or partition off some space. So something like this catches my eye:

paper softwall by forsythe + macallen

the paper softwall is a lightweight, freestanding wall that can be arranged into almost any shape, or easily compressed into a compact sheaf and stored away. softwall dampens sound and can both absorb and transmit light. the paper softwall is made from 400 layers of honeycombed translucent white, fire-retardant paper, bounded by natural wool felt ends. the thick felt ends fold to create handles when the wall is open, and form a casing when the wall is compressed. paper softwall is modular, as the felt ends have velcro fasteners which can link walls together.

More broadly, I wonder: Most of us develop a capacity to organize our desk space, and the space within arm's reach, and get fairly good at it. But how many of us can design an office, or a small room in which we're working with others-- either brainstorming for a couple hours, or working on a project for a few weeks? I suspect there's an inverse square law that limits our native ability to arrange collaborative space-- and that groups of people aren't much better at designing their spaces, either. Just a thought.

It's also definitely the case that, so long as it's still functional, a novel space can encourage creativity in groups: it's something I've seen repeatedly, and one of the virtues of the Institute's current space. Being more mindful of how to create interesting space-- through how it's configured, through lighting, ambient noise, whatever-- might be a useful skill for anyone who wants to boost group creativity to develop.

[via The Adventures of Teapot the Cat]

Technorati Tags: architecture, design

Just in time for the holidays

The next sign that e-paper is getting serious: according to Popgadget, it's featured in a little piece of limited edition commodity fetishism, courtesy of Seiko.

Seiko Watch is about to market the first wristwatch that uses electronic paper. The company intends to release only 500 units in January worldwide, using the novelty of the product to spark new demand for such wristwatches.

The braclet-wristwatch features a thin, bendable e-paper trimmed in stainless steel which makes it a high-tech accessory without the geeky look. A black-and-white pattern of stripes on the watch changes every hour.

[via Gizmodo]

Technorati Tags: epaper, Japan

High concept quote of the day

Via city of sound, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban quoted in a Guardian profile:

The idea of building with paper seems riddled with problems - it is flammable, vulnerable to water, weak and temporary, but Ban turns all these arguments upside down: "How long do you think concrete lasts? It has many problems and it's very difficult to replace or fix. If a paper tube is damaged it can be replaced by a new one. The lifespan of a building has nothing to do with the materials. It depends on what people do with it. If a building is loved, then it becomes permanent. When it is not loved, even a concrete building can be temporary."

Technorati Tags: architecture

Greetings from Denmark

While my colleagues are occupied with putting on a brilliant conference for the Technology Horizons program, I'm in Aarhus, Denmark, doing a talk at the DesignDay conference. I'm talking about the future of technology and the role of design in creating products (and by extension, company value).

There are two big points I'm working on in this talk.

First, while it used to look like the future of technology was about making things smart, it now seems clear that it's going to be about making people smart. Smart things are a means, not an end: the end is sociability-- linking to other people, and creating cooperative/collective systems for doing cool things. Design strategies that take full advantage of pervasive computing technologies, but also pay a lot of attention to interface issues, and also operate in ways that don't crowd out person-to-person interaction, will be especially compelling.

I realized on the flight over that lots of different things I've studied over the last year-- ranging from the open source movement to aging in place-- share underlying technologies and aims that enable and/or encourage sociability and cooperative behavior. I want to try to flesh this argument out.

The second point is that Denmark has both world-class computer science researchers who are interested in pervasive computing, and an incredibly deep design community that extends from architecture and furniture through to toys and stereo equipment. (Okay, Silicon Valley is the other place where you've got this mix, and arguably good Japanese electronics has drawn on Japanese aesthetics. And the Koreans are trying like mad to get world-class in design.) There are already some contacts between parts of these communities (obviously Bang and Olusfen has more than its share of acoustics and electronics experts), but in the future, as wearables become a real thing, as smart furniture moves into the marketplace, as aging in place takes off, there will be opportunities for Danish companies and design firms working all across the industrial/product spectrum to create value by collaborating with pervasive computing people.

We'll see how it goes.

(Incidentally, I'm keeping meticulous records of the trip at my personal blog, and have a Flickr photo set devoted to my views of Denmark.)

Technorati Tags: aarhus, denmark, design, travel

Color flexible displays

My fascination with the electronic paper/flexible OLED display space kicks up another notch with several reports about Siemens' rollout, as it were, of flexible miniature color displays. From physorg.com:

The flexible miniature displays operate using electrochromic substances, materials that change their color when an electrical voltage shifts charges in their molecules. As a result, the molecules absorb different wavelengths than in their original state. The display consists of a electrochromic material holding a pattern of electrodes. A conductive plastic foil serves as the other electrode and the transparent window. To date, the engineers have been using silicon switching elements to control the device. The objective now is to use a printing process to manufacture the entire display, including the appropriate control electronics, from conductive and semiconducting plastics.

The displays can obtain their energy from printable batteries, which are already available. Because they last only a few months, this solution is only feasible for merchandise with high throughput rates or short-use durations. It may also prove feasible to use printed antennas as a local energy source. They would receive pulses from a transmitter in the shelf and convert the pulses into electricity.

Siemens says the displays will be ready for commercial use by 2007.

Technorati Tags: displays, epaper, innovation

It's good to be a trendsetter

Last Christmas one of my in-laws gave me a 1 GB flash drive-- a very nerdy present, but since he's a programmer, it was very fitting. I immediately found a chain (actually a piece of string), and started wearing it around my neck. Fitting, I thought, to keep close to my heart all my notes, old articles, book manuscript, and everything else that defines my intellectual life is on it. (And my cell phone and iPod already compete for space in my pocket.)

Little did I know I was (for once) a fashion trendsetter, as The Economist reveals:

Flash drives, which allow huge amounts of data to be carried around easily, are changing from geek toys into fashion items...

[F]ash-drive necklaces are most popular among men in wealthy Asian countries. The bestselling models in Asia are cute and shiny with brightly contrasting colours. SanDisk, a firm based in Sunnyvale, California, that pioneered flash drives, recently launched new models with vibrantly coloured rubber casings, which are selling briskly in Asia....

Rappers and hip-hoppers bear some responsibility for the rise of the wearable flash drive. Their enthusiasm for heavy, metallic neckwear made it acceptable for men—who own 80% of flash drives—to wear chunky pendants. But flash drives aimed specifically at women are on the way too. PNY, a New York-based manufacturer with a product line that includes a flash drive hidden inside a pen, will launch a collection this autumn of drives with “feminine” shapes, colours and materials. “A fashionable drive needs to be shown off,” says Stephane Rouveyrol of PNY. Similarly, Maastrek, a firm based in Hildesheim, Germany, that already sells flash drives built into watches, is designing a line of flash-drive earrings and bracelets, and a series of necklaces in the shapes of tigers, birds and fish. They will go on sale later this year.

Technorati Tags: design, digital culture

John Thackara and the Map of the Decade

It's often the case that an outsider can see things in your work that you can't. John Thackara recently posted about the IFTF Map of the Decade, and exposed some elements of its intellectual heritage that I hadn't known about:

Jason Tester, an alumnus of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, is helping IFTF enhance its maps by the development of 'artefacts from the future'. At Ivrea, the design of enticing representations of imagined futures was regarded as a core process, and a technique was introduced there by the English service designers Live|Work. Live|Work called their technique evidencing. One of the roots of evidencing, in turn, was the development by Tony Dunne and Bill Gaver of "cultural probes" at the Royal College of Art during the late 1990s (where the Live|Work guys studied interaction design). I don't suggest that a linear history is playing out here - but every now and again in the chaotic blizzard of life one briefly glimpses tracks in the snow.

Technorati Tags: design, information design, IFTF

John Thackara, "In the Bubble: Daily Life as a Design Opportunity"

Notes of a talk John Thackara just gave at IDEO. John's latest book, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, is just out. As usual, these should be read as my take on the talk, not a transcript.

Big idea. We used to think that innovation starts where technology starts. That's changing now. Innovation starts with groups of people who possess tools to link up with each other, to locate and track things, and to coordinate actions between people, objects, and places. The challenge for designers is to figure out how to do their work in ways that supports this trend.

Here's how.

Principles for doing design projects in daily life

Enable human agency. Design people into things rather than out of them. Take the "walking bus," in which parents walk groups of kids to school: this is an incredibly simple thing, but parents who organize it are basically forming smart mobs, using GPS to plan routes, mobile phones to coordinate ad hoc groups, etc.. With tools that enable human agency, genuine grassroots innovation becomes possible.

From science fiction to social fiction. The view of technology as something fantastic and futuristic-- and of futures that are technology-driven-- should be replaced by a vision of alternate social futures, or social fictions. Take Estonian potato farming. The food quality/quantity tradeoff (e.g. plenty available through corporate ag, but at the cost of quality) has driven creation of collaborative groups who are reorganizing food production and distribution, with effective results. Small-scale potato farmers are doing better, people who wish to be more connected to their food are able to be so; these groups are borrowing tools from DHL, FedEx, as well as other stuff.

Self-service > enable sharing. We all have needs to share stuff. Power drills are used for 10 minutes during their lifetime; cars are used for a few minutes a day; the result is huge inefficiencies in consumption. "The notion of sharing material resources is just exploding," particularly in Europe. People are designing sharing systems for space, equipment, time, services.

Sharing knowledge is also a big thing: Deborah Solomon's Nomadic Banquet (organized for Doors of Perception 8) gave people a chance to share inside knowledge about street food. They expected it to be a cellphone, Zagat's guide online kind of thing; but there are all kinds of social and cultural sensibilities surrounding street food that couldn't be accommodated by the technology. It turned out to involve issues natural resource allocation, distribution, packaging, storage, displays, streetscape, etc., etc..

High concept > deep context. "Going with a concept and trying to apply it to a context is a terrible way to do design.... Concepts predate the messiness and complexity of real-world situations," and don't take into account all the complexity of everyday social and cultural life. The "nature in the city" movement, for example, has morphed from large-scale efforts led by the Daniel Burnhams or Christopher Wrens, to self-organizing, small efforts on rooftops, brownfield sites, even dustbins converted to planters. In Europe, there's a tremendous variety in the rules these follow.

Think whole systems. "95% of design is still about objects in showrooms being admired for their objectness. I'd thought we'd destroyed that idea?" The result of a focus on objects is either bad products, or objects that are cool but hard to use.

Don't own, locate. I don't want to own a car, but I want to be able to use one when I need it." Car-sharing schemes in Europe are approaching critical mass: in Amsterdam, car services, mobile phone providers, and the city have worked together to create a pretty good system, but there's still lots to be done that could make the service easier to use. What these efforts point to is the possibility of reducing the sheer amount of stuff you need, and need to own, to have a good life.

William McDonough in Newsweek

The latest issue of Newsweek has a lengthy interview with William McDonough, co-author (with Michael Braungart) of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. The most interesting, and newest, part of the interview covers his work in China:

What are you doing in China?

The China Housing Industry Association has the responsibility for building housing for 400 million people in the next 12 years. We're working with them to design seven new cities. We're identifying building materials of the future, such as a new polystyrene from BASF [with no noxious chemicals]. It can be used to build walls that are strong, lightweight and superinsulating. The building can be heated and cooled for next to nothing. And it's silent. If there are 13 people in the apartment upstairs, you won't hear them.

We've designed a luxurious new toilet. The bowl is like a lotus leaf—so smooth, axle grease slips right off. Nothing sticks to it, including bacteria. A light mist when you're done will be enough to flush it, so you won't use lots of water. We'll have bamboo wetlands nearby to purify the waste—and the bamboo, which grows a foot a day, can be harvested and used for wood.

The Chinese are afraid urbanization will reduce productive farmland, so we'll move farms onto rooftops. At least, that's what I'm proposing. The farmers can live downstairs. And when you look at the city from a distance, it will look like part of the landscape.

iPod-cellphone smackdown

For the last few days, Tech Review bloggers have been arguing about whether, in the next few years, we'll continue to carry around several mobile devices (cellphone, iPod, etc.) or whether we'll carry an electronic Swiss Army knife-- a cell phone that also plays MP3s, is a camera, and makes Julienne fries. (Our story to date: It started with a Wall Street Journal article, which Wade Roush critiqued; picked up steam with a Business Week profile of coming "iPod killers," which prompted another response; all this, in turn, inspired an Eric Hellweg reply. It's the kind of exchange that's the very definition of intelligent blogging.)

In the latest turn, Wade Roush makes a subtle-yet-sensible argument in favor of the survival of multiple devices:

Many technologists I've talked with believe that in the long run, the answer will be two: one communications device and one entertainment device. They probably lean toward the two-device solution because, as technologists, they know how difficult it is to build a single device that's good at sending and receiving data wirelessly and good at storing and displaying that data.

But I tend to think the answer is just one.... I think people switch devices during the course of the day, depending on what activity they're engaged in. They may carry a cell phone from 9 to 5, then stuff the phone in their purse or duffel bag and don an iPod for their trip to the gym after work.

So while people will only manually carry or wear one sophisticated PDA-sized device at a time, they'll still own more than one.

In the end, I'm not sure the iPod versus cell phone debate is really an either/or situation; it's more like a Venn diagram.... [T]he iPod circle is not a subset of the cell-phone circle; rather, the two overlap.

This strikes me as right on-- though, to be honest, I'm one of those people who feels naked without his cellphone, and I really liked having my entire music collection in a little tiny box in my pocket (before I broke my 20GB iPod). But certainly, Wade's sense that the real issue to think about isn't just device design, but use and context, is unquestionably the right way to go.

IBM store of the future

Business Week has a small slide show of devices in IBM's prototype Store of the Future. Like a lot of these kinds of exhibits, you don't get to see the exhaustive research that goes into them, which helps you understand why it is that you might want a "shopping buddy" or "personal shopping assistant."

Speaking as both a parent and technology-watcher, it seems to me that if you're going to put a computer touch-screen on a supermarket cart, you've got to do two things: make it seriously child-proof (like immune to drool, being hammered on, etc.), and have a game mode to keep the tots entertained while Mom and Dad decide which chick peas to buy. Everything else is optional. I can keep track of what I've bought just fine; keep my kids from flipping out and embarrassing me, and I'll come back.

HP's Remanufacturing and Remarketing Group Doing Well by Doing Good

I had the opportunity recently to spend some time with HP's remanufacturing and remarketing group. Among other things, this group refurbishes used HP equipment (servers, PC's etc.) and then resells this equipment. HP has been doing this since 1982, and while I can't talk about the actual numbers it is a surprisingly large and successful business for HP.

This is a great example of a corporation "doing well by doing good". Electronic waste is a large and growing problem (see The Computer Take Back site for more information) and discarded electronic equipment makes up a disproportionate amount of toxic waste in land fills. By focusing on recycling and remanufacturing used equipment, HP is providing value to their customers through lower prices, trade-in programs, taking care of the disposal of old equipment, etc. - while cutting down on toxic waste.

They also make money, and corporate social responsiblity programs that also provide tangible corporate benefits are much more likely to be successful and sustained than programs viewed as just charity. Alex has posted on the related subject of Cradle to Cradle design and HP is using many of these concepts. Congratulations to HP and their remarketing team for figuring out a way to "do well by doing good".

Mau Mau

The Toronto Star's Christopher Hume reviews Bruce Mau's Massive Change. Its title-- "A massive fraud?"-- pretty much sums up the tone of the piece, but it does make one very substantive, if arguable, point about Mau's call for design to be reconceived as "a way of thinking that is relevant to all aspects of living," a discipline that "allows us to reimagine the way we live." Hume sees this kind reform as something that's been tried before, and has always been a notable failure.

There is no question that design, in its broadest definition — from architecture to engineering, from fashion to the workings of a mechanical loom, from the handmade buggy to the latest mass-produced car — has shaped our world. Of course, designers have been as much a part of the problem as the solution. Let's not forget that burgeoning cities, gas-guzzling SUVs and every other planet-destroying, toxin-spewing, ozone-depleting feature of contemporary life, big or small, were designed. And not out of some romantic notion either, but in the service of a rapacious market economy....

In Mau's vision, the future of design lies less in individual accomplishment than in collaboration, and not just between various design disciplines but among all of society's players.... [D]esigners working with "architects, artists, writers, curators, academics, entrepreneurs, businesses and institutions," as Mau says on his website, can work together to use the "promise of design" to "minimize unintended consequences and maximize positive outcomes."

The utopian urge to create a better society is close to the heart of all designers, and it stretches back to William Morris. The 20th century, especially, bred countless would-be saviours, ready, willing and eager to remake the world in their own image.

None got the chance, which was fortunate in some cases — the damage would have been incalculable. For example, the great apostle of modernism, Le Corbusier, once suggested tearing down the heart of Paris and rebuilding it as an over-sized St. James Town.... The notion of the designer as god-like creator reached a peak with Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.... in which architect Howard Roark blows up his own building rather than see it compromised.

Mau's collaborative approach stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Rand's rugged individualism. But where his predecessors provided the backdrop and the stage for modern life, Mau would redesign modern life itself.

I've been a fan of the "design is more than industrial engineering" school of thought. But Hume's implication is that its intellectual lineage is suspect, and has been bad for both design and society. Could Hume be right? Or would a more collaborative approach avoid the kind of authoritarianism that Corbu and Roark saw as synonymous with good design?

Cradle to Cradle

Notes* on Michael Braungart, "Cradle to Cradle: Innovation for the Next Industrial Revolution," PARC, 16 February 2005.

Part of PARC's Science and Technology for a Sustainable World series. Braungart heads EPEA (www.epea.com), and MBC (with William McDonough).

The problems

Bad design. Technologies aren't designed for disassembly, and have toxic (and often expensive and rare) chemicals. Things like cell phones and kids' toys can have higher toxicity levels than gas stations; industrial fabrics (used in carpets, for example) are often hazardous waste, and give off breathable toxic chemicals; if you applied industrial emissions standards to computer monitors, you'd see they're not suitable for indoor use.

Because they can't be disassebled easily, they are shipped abroad, where dangerous labor-intensive work goes into extracting it. There's no recycling here in the US: most of our stuff is shipped to other countries (because we don't have much else to export). In 1994, US biggest industrial exports were fine chemicals and polymers; now we run a deficit. The biggest export is waste paper and scrap (which go to China).

One important component is to have good design. "Most industrial design [in the US] is amazingly ugly, because design is so low on the food chain."

Global sourcing makes it harder to do environmentally smart design, because it's harder to know what goes into components.

Sustainability. Sustainability is boring; it isn't good, just less bad; and its approaches don't necessarily yield good solutions. Sustainability doesn't respect and celebrate human creativity, and assumes that humans are bad, and wants to minimize our impact on the planet. What he wants to do is build systems that support nature, not have little impact on it.

Substitution programs lead to products that may be less bad, but aren't really better. European regulation to create lead-free electronics is boosting use of other, equally dangerous chemicals, like bismuth; asbestos-free brake pads have antimony, which is even more toxic.

Sustainability also encourages a focus on the wrong things. MB argues that the big problems we're facing are not on the energy side (you can make gasoline from lots of different things, and there's gigantic quantities of solar energy unused), but on the materials side: our access to metals is finite, and recycling generally yields weaker metals. Likewise, overpopulation is a political problem rather than a basic biological one. (It's still better than nothing, though.)

Cradle to Grave Design Paradigm

Take (raw material extraction and synthesis) --> Make (manufacturing, production, dustribution, use) --> Waste

Eco-efficiency is about dematerialization (services instead of materials, lighter goods), but that approach just slows down rates of destruction. Less bad is not good; minimizing damage is not a form of support. The drive for efficiency tends to lead to solution that are efficiently wrong, rather than actually good. Instead, what you want is

Eco-effectiveness. This paradigm isn't about minimizing environmental impact, but maximizing environmental benefit.

Design principles

• Waste = Food
• Use Current Solar Income
• Celebrate Diversity

Sales --> Services. Traditional sales insults customers: it requires building goods that will wear out predictably, and forces you to spend a lot of money retaining customers (Nike spends 70% of its budget on marketing). A smarter approach is to go with services, wherein you have an incentive to create better goods, sell the use of the material rather than the material itself (e.g., newspapers that have inks that can be washed out of paper and reused).

Cradle to cradle and competitiveness. This could be a critical resource for the competitiveness of Western countries: it'll take generations for the Chinese to get on board with these ideas (just as it took decades from the publication of Silent Spring to get to today).

* As with all blogged notes, this is my attempt to capture the important points of the talk, not a transcript or authorized summary. Caveat emptor.