The report, which is sponsored by Johnson Controls, “predicts that as workforces get more mobile, technology will ensure that everything an employee needs is available no matter where they are.”

“The report posits a situation in which, from the moment someone wakes, the world is aware of their needs and uses any and every means to keep them up to date.

Walls could become screens showing diaries, documents or video conferences. Homes and cars would measure mood and tune surroundings to, for instance, soothe a worker if they were feeling stressed.

The number of offices in use could shrink as smart scheduling software ensures that they maintain maximum occupancy.

A tiny smart mobile, with a folding screen and a powerful pico-projector could be the gadget that co-ordinates the way information is passed on, speculated the report.”

- Read full story
- Download press release
- Download report

Following the success of drivers of change 2006 publication, Arup Foresight recently published an update.

This new set of 175 cards investigates leading drivers in greater depth that have particular relevance to the work of Arup. They include energy, waste, climate change, water, demographics, urbanisation and poverty.

The cards can be used for developing business strategy, brainstorming, education and to help the reader to gain greater knowledge of the issues which are driving global change. The publication also encourages us to think holistically and creatively.

Also check out the various Arup Foresight blogs:
* future frequency
* emtech primer (by Duncan Wilson)
* global village
* foresight podcasts
* city of sound (by Dan Hill)

“The 20 century avant garde was built on the principle: separate and shock. The avant garde of the century to come will have as its principle: combine and connect. The web will encourage a culture in which art creates relationships and promotes interaction, encourages people to be a part of the work, if only in a small way.

This “participatory” avant-garde will not emerged from thin air. It will be fed by the way the web gives new energy to participatory approaches to art, a digital version of a folk culture in which authorship is shared and cumulative rather than individualistic. [...]

For the participatory avant-garde a work of art becomes more valuable the more it encourages people to join a conversation around it and to do something creative themselves. Participatory art is based on constant feedback and interaction, people talking, arguing, debating around the art and their views having some impact. “

Highly recommended reading, as its implications go far beyond the arts world.

Download essay

Watch video

Related is a post by Jenna Wortham who in her New York Times blog from SXSW introduces several web applications that make sense of the social media pile-up.

Ideas Project also contains a new feature story, entitled “Besting the Human Brain“. It explores the fact that the distinction between artificial and human intelligence may soon disappear entirely, and features the thinking of science fiction author and mathematics professor Vernor Vinge, cyberlaw scholar Jonathan Zittrain, neurobiologist and Whyville founder James Bower, communications and digital pioneer Dewayne Hendricks, and tech observer Jerry Michalski.

“Books are the last bastion of the old business model—the only major medium that still hasn’t embraced the digital age. Publishers and author advocates have generally refused to put books online for fear the content will be Napsterized. And you can understand their terror, because the publishing industry is in big financial trouble, rife with layoffs and restructurings. Literary pundits are fretting: Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe?”

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But Robert Fabricant went a step further:

“In 10 years, the phone won’t matter at all. We will have moved from a phone-based network to an account based network in which I can access all of my communications data from the cloud–from any phone or device that is convenient. The tight coupling of my information to specific piece of hardware will be eliminated, just like email has nothing to do with my PC anymore. This is not just the future for those of us in developed markets with access to corporate IT support and MobileMe. This is the future for the masses. There is a desperate need for broad-based access in developing markets that doesn’t require the ownership of a dedicated personal device. Services will allow someone to access their contacts, messaging and credit from any device, whether the phone belongs to their uncle or is a community phone. People will have multiple accounts. Employers will enable accounts as will local health workers so that people can access sensitive information related to HIV or TB without having to compromise the confidentiality of this information on a shared device. This revolution is starting right now with companies like MoVirtu.”

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“Given the themes of the conference and who else was speaking I decided to steer clear of potential irrelevance, and had fun superficially exploring an area actually at the frontier of the day’s very themes.
When the smart city will come to be – if it has not already – what will it mean for its human inhabitants?
Even more vertically: what will living in such a techno-cultural milieu do to people’s first-life avatar – to their body – and to their very perception of it?
I briefly touched upon “the body as a terminal” and “the body as a node”, and left “the body as a conduit” for a longer timeframe.”

- View presentation notes and slides (alternate link)
- View presentation video (24:59)

You can also watch other Frontiers of Interaction resentations in English (skip the Italian introduction):

• Elements of a networked urbanism, an excellent presentation by Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design, and author of “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing” (33:47)
• The Consciousness Panopticon by David Orban, founder of WideTag, Inc. (12:55)
• Two thoughts by Liam Bannon, director of the Interaction Design Centre of the University of Limerick (8:23)
• The Real Time City by Andrea Vaccari of MIT’s Senseable City Lab (13:09)

See also my earlier post on Matt Jones’ talk at the same conference.

Last week the people of Nokia Conversations had the opportunity to chat to them at The Inside Story design day in London about their ideas on mobile gesture design, the research they’ve been doing, and the tools that have been developed to help test how well future mobile gestures might work.

“As part of their fieldwork they ask people from many countries and a broad spectrum of cultures to play out scenarios of how they might perform a task with a gesture that feels natural to them, using simple plastic mono block phones as props.

They set out a series of tasks for people, such as silencing a ringing phone. Sure, the flip-to-silence gesture is already alive in a number of devices, such as the Nokia 8800 and N97, but it was great to hear examples of some of the physical gestures people suggested in their research. A few of my favourites that Younghee and Joe mentioned were people wanting to squeeze the phone to shut it up, while others put their index finger over their mouth to shush it or simply covered the phone with their hand. The strangest, but my pick of the bunch was simply staring at your phone with a rather annoyed look, as if it were a naughty child that needs to be quiet.”

In a video interview they talk about the creation of the gesture phone prototype that they use to explore this new dialect of physical interaction designed to let you perform tasks and communicate in very new ways.

Read full story (with video interview)

Although it seems like an ironic example of design gone wrong, Microsoft thinks this is exactly what we need and is now collaborating with Fugoo to bring Windows to a new generation of “neo-diginet” devices.

“Among the technologies Microsoft is highlighting in its booth at CES this year is a hardware and software platform for the next generation of more useful and flexible household objects, appliances and accessories. The Windows-based platform is the result of a collaboration between Microsoft and a recently formed company called Fugoo. Two of the concept designs featured in a video at the booth are a “net” clock that, in addition to giving the time, can also download and display a stock ticker and local traffic and weather reports, and a digital photo frame that can not only download your latest holiday photos, but can also be programmed to display anything else available on the Internet, from current news headlines and sports scores to full-length movies.”

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“The dislocation of form and function has set a new challenge for designers: how to help us to operate ever more complex digital products.” [...]

“The first wave of U.I. designs sought to reassure us by using visual references to familiar objects to help us to operate digital ones.” [...]

“The next phase of U.I. design will take this further. John Maeda, the software designer and president of the Rhode Island School of Design, believes that our current “awkward mechanical dance” with computers will be replaced by an intuitive approach.”

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“Tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its ‘now’ is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today’s needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.”

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(In short, we are all hackers now).

“The mobile global internet is growing quickly to connect billions of people, devices and things. It offers much greater productivity and lower barriers to entry for users and businesses.

In my travels I see “suits” in Manhattan, shop owners in Hyderabad, tour guides in Luxor, students in Santiago del Chile, Aboriginal artists in Alice Springs, fisherman in Hoi An; all glued to their handsets and the net.

This empowerment of individuals, especially in the developing world, is transforming social, economic, and political relationships.

At a time of financial crisis, when all are calling for transparency and good governance, the internet economy’s feedback loops should be grasped, transforming the way we think of currency and accuracy of information and to change how we develop policy and make decisions.”

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First fictions and the parable of the palace
November 2008
An overview of everyware’s roots in early depictions of ubiquitous computing by Mark Weiser and others, a consideration of the critical role of user experience in the coming world of everyware, and a description of some of the challenges we face in designing everyware / lifeware user experiences.

A near-term vision for everyware: synthetic serendipity
March 2009
A look forward from the present day, using stories by well-known science fiction authors as the source for vision or concept scenarios that describe some possible experiences of living and working with everyware.

Designing post-humanity: everyware in the far future
May 2009
Looking further afield is also important. Our reactions to more speculative and exploratory fictions affect our decisions about the appropriate reach and scope of design in the future. The conversations designers have about such fictions help us solidify both what and how we will design for the coming world of everyware. As designers, the decisions we make today will help decide what humanity is to be tomorrow.

“We’re entering a time in which products are expected to give themselves over as platforms for innovation and reinvention. Even money, something we tend to think of as absolute, seems to have lost some standing as a singular fixed medium with which to conduct transactions. This deterioration may have begun with the excesses of the past thirty years, when money came into its own as a commodity. Derivatives, options, credit default swaps, margin calls, shorts were inventive new ways to repackage money, some of which resulted in the near-collapse of our financial system. The recent challenges to our banking system notwithstanding, a different kind of transformation, on with implications to the very essence of our money system, is being affected by technology.

From its role in institutions to its use for transactions, in places as far flung as Uganda and Bangladesh, money is giving way to other forms of currency or, in some cases, nothing at all.”

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“We have entered an unimagined culture. In this world of search engines and cross-links, of keywords and networks, the solid smokestacks of yesterday’s disciplines have blown out. Instead of being armored in technique, or sheltered within subculture, design and science fiction have become like two silk balloons, two frail, polymorphic pockets of hot air, floating in a generally tainted cultural atmosphere.”

Thank you Bruce.

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New technology is changing the way we live and work so quickly that it is easy to overlook the social and ethical implications of each new development. [...]

So a two-year research project to identify emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) and assess any associated ethical pitfalls could be seen as a timely initiative. The Ethical Issues of Emerging ICT Applications (ETICA) project, led by Leicester’s De Montfort University, seeks to minimise the risks associated with technologies likely to enter common use over the next 10 to 15 years. [...]

Some of the technologies being considered by the ETICA team are already fairly left-field, such as ambient intelligence and emotional computing.

Read full story

Since 2004, broadband connections across Europe have grown by almost 95%, from 44 million households in 2005 to over 85 million. In fact, broadband Internet connections in Europe today outstrip those in the US, representing 83% of all Internet connections, compared to 70% in America. The explosion in broadband uptake combined with the relentless pace of technological innovation is driving a major change in consumer behaviour and is transforming our traditional media landscape.

Alain Thys highlights some of the findings:

• in June 2010 Internet will overtake (traditional) television in terms of media consumption time
• internet use on PC’s will drop from 95% today, to 50% in five years
• browsing will grow from 19% in 2008 to 30% in 2013
• 28% of Europeans watch short or full length videos online

View report

Despite the fact that U.S. citizen Bruce Sterling and Serbian citizen Jasmina Tesanovic have been married for nearly five years, and for all I can tell still very much in love, US Immigrations doesn’t believe so.

Read full story

Portfolio.com takes a look at the phenomenon of “mass customization” — a way of making standard consumer products as customizable as a Facebook page. While Wired.com dives into the DIY subculture, and meets a group of hobbyists who are starting to hack furniture and product design like it was all just so much Unix code.

Portfolio’s Perspective: Custom Everything
by Sara Clemence
What happens when you can design your physical world as easily as you can reformat your blog?

“Bespoke products have always been available to anyone willing and able to pay the price, whether for an individually tailored suit or a customized car. In recent years, one of the big shifts in retail has been giving customers the ability to design their own versions of premium products—like wedding rings, pricey handbags, and Nikes—at prices that are comparable to the regular versions.

Now, without most of us realizing it, we’re on the cusp of another big change. Thanks to market demands and developments in technology, we’re going to be living in a user-generated world, where everything we use can (and will) be customizable. It’s already happening, in ways both obvious and not.”

Wired’s Perspective: In-Home Manufacturing
by Jennifer Kahn
Some are already designing a future where physical objects can be downloaded — just as software is today.

“As computer-aided design has become more accessible, the tools for fabrication have also become cheaper. New “desktop” 3-D printers now cost $5,000, while the price of a water-jet cutter—capable of slicing any material, from glass to marble, to tolerances of a hundredth of an inch—has fallen by half. [...]

If everyone has access to computer-controlled machine tools and advanced 3D printers, why ship an item from manufacturing plant to customer? Why not just fabricate the object near home, on demand?”

“Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things like science fact, I wanted to think about how this happens, so that I could figure out the principles and pragmatics of doing design, making things that create different sorts of near future worlds. So, this is a bit of a think-piece, with examples and some insights that provide a few conclusions about why this is important as well as how it gets done. How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called “design fiction” that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices. [...]

The essay is a way of describing why alternative futures that are about people and their practices are way more interesting here than profit and feature sets. It’s a way to invest some attention on what can be done rather immediately to mitigate a complete systems failure; and part an investment in creating playful, peculiar, sideways-looking things that have no truck with the up-and-to-the-right kind of futures. [...]

Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. It’s about reading P.K. Dick as a systems administrator, or Bruce Sterling as a software design manual. It’s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination.

Design is about the future in a way similar to science fiction. It probes imaginatively and materializes ideas, the way science fiction materializes ideas, oftentimes through stories. What are the ways that all of these things — these canonical ways of making and remaking and imagining the world — can come together in a productive way, without hiding the details and without worrying about the nonsense of strict disciplinary boundaries?“

- Read Julian’s introduction
- Download essay