“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.

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“Marrying” anthropology and science

“I still write and publish my work in academic journals. To me, what we do in companies like Intel is the cutting edge of anthropological study.

“We form a relationship with the consumer and represent their needs. It’s a moral obligation to tell their stories.

“We find out what makes people tick, not just so that we can sell them things, but to make life better for them by ensuring that people in small towns and emerging markets can afford it. We want to help create technology for more people.”

Annoying things device-users do

“The top responses for strange mobile etiquette behaviour ranged from making a cashier wait until a cellphone call was completed and texting while driving.

Other responses included using a laptop in a public toilet, as well as hearing typing and conversations at church, during a funeral, and in a doctor’s office.”

Better television

“My engineering colleagues were desperately convinced that everything was a PC waiting to happen.

“What is needed is to meaningfully blend television and the Internet. My research conclusion was clear – consumers love television and only put up with their PCs because they want to connect to the Internet.

“It’s clear that people care about social networking and its technologies so how to we bring that into TV sets?

“Imagine accessing Flicker or Twitter on your television without turning it into a PC ? We desire for television to do more but it must not be too complicated. The challenge is to create technology that can accommodate local content,” she says, noting that there is a huge space for advancement in consumer electronics, especially to “make television better”.

“Social media is literally on the move. While useful for anonymous and asynchronous communications, computer-based social media is rapidly becoming old school. In comparison, mobile social media is personal and dynamic — and more closely tied to how people engage in the real world. SoMo not only provides us the freedom to meet each other where we are, it also gives computing a distinctly human face.”

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“According to Gesche Joost [...], cell phone manufacturers do need to distinguish between the specific needs of men, women, young and elderly people.

Her research has shown that women in particular put emphasis on privacy and look for cell phones that allow them to get contacted by a certain group of people (family, friends, etc.) but by nobody else. Another feature is micro communication. Joost claims that her work has shown that especially young girls want services like Twitter to be installed on their cell phones. A third factor asked for (especially by women with families) is the possibility to organize multiple tasks at the same time just by using the cell phone.”

Luckily a much more detailed synopsis of the actual research itself is also available, in English even:

Woman’s Phone
Exploration of female needs towards information and communication technology (ICT) based on a participatory design process; development of new services and products for female customers in ICT.
Project Partners: IxDS Berlin, T-Mobile International, Product Design Center DTAG, EAF (Europäische Akademie für Frauen in Politik und Wirtschaft)

Welcome to Lift!
Lift founder Laurent Haug and Lift France chair Daniel Kaplan will explain the theme and organization of the conference.

Initial and necessary challenge: “Technology & Society: Know your History!”
Is technology liberating us or enslaving us? Hardly a new question, says Dominique Pestre… He will thus challenge us to raise our level of thinking and, in searching for an answer, to embrace dissensus and complexity: How can we welcome techno-skeptics in order to produce more sustainable technologies? Can we really believe that green techs will allow us to avoid drastic (and collective) choices on how we live? How can the interaction between markets, democracy, usage, science, code, become more productive?
Keynote: Dominique Pestre, historian of Science, EHESS, Paris

Changing Things (1) – The Internet of Things is not what you think it is!
If the “Internet of things” was just about adding chips, antennas and interactivity to the things we own, it would be no big deal. Discover a wholly different perspective: Open, unfinished objects which can be transformed and reprogrammed by their users; Objects that document their own components, history, lifecycle; Sensitive and noisy objects that capture, process, mix and publish information. Discover an Internet of Things which intends to transform the industrial world as deeply as the current Internet transformed the world of communication and media.
Keynote: Bruce Sterling, writer, author of Shaping Things
They do it for real: Usman Haque (haque :: design + research / Pachube) and Timo Arnall (Elastic Space)

Video: Timo Arnall: “Making Things Visible” [22:13]
A designer and researcher at Oslo School of Architecture, Timo Arnall offers here his perspective about networked objects and ubiquitous computing. His presentation, and the intriguing design examples he takes, highlights two phenomena. On the one hand, he describes how sensors and RFIDs can enable to “make things visible” as the title of his presentation expresses. On the other hand, he shows the importance of going beyond screen-based interactions.

Changing Things (2) – Fab Labs, towards decentralized design and production of material products
Existing or unheard-of things, designed, modified, exchanged and manufactured by individuals or entrepreneurs anywhere in the world; Local workshops equipped with 3D printers and digital machine-tools, able to produce (almost) anything out of its 3D model; P2P object-sharing networks… Are “Fab Labs” heralding a new age of industrial production?
Keynote: Mike Kuniavsky, designer, ThingM
They do it for real: Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (Tinker.it) and Michael Shiloh (OpenMoko / MakingThings)

Changing Innovation (1)- The end of IT
Today, corporate information systems are innovation’s worst enemies. They set organizations and processes in stone. They restrict the enterprise’s horizons and its networks. They distort its view of the world. But ferments of change emerge. Meet those who breathe new air into current organizations, those who design tomorrow’s Innovation Systems.
Keynote: Marc Giget (Cnam)
They do it for real: Euan Semple (Social computing for the business world) and Martin Duval (Bluenove)

Changing Innovation (2) – Innovating with the non-innovators
Innovating used to be a job in itself. It has become a decentralized procès which includes, in no particular order, researchers, entrepreneurs, designers, artists, activists, and users who reinvent the products they were supposed to consume. Why is that important? What does it really change? And where will it stop? WILL it stop somewhere?
Keynote: Catherine Fieschi, Counterpoint/British Council
They do it for real: Marcos Garcia (Madrid’s Medialab-Prado) and Douglas Repetto, artist and founder of Dorkbot

Takeaways: Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet’s thoughts from Lift
“NKM“, 35, is Minister of State to the Prime Minister, with responsibility for Forward Planning and Development of the Digital Economy. Known as an activist for sustainable development, she was minister in charge of Ecology between 2007 and 2009.

Video: Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet’s takeaways (FR) [43:52]

Changing the Planet (1)- Sustainable development, the Way of Desire
What if global warming and the exhaustion of natural resources were in fact, initially, design problems? How do we move from bad, unsustainable design to a design – of goods, services, systems – that is sensitive and sustainable, durable and beautiful, sensible and profitable? Could we build sustainable growth on desire as well as reason, on creativity as well as regulation? Short answer: Yes!
Keynote: Dennis Pamlin, WWF, author of “Sustainability @ the Speed of Light”
They do it for real: John Thackara (Doors of Perception) and Elizabeth Goodman (designer, confectious.net)

Video: Dennis Pamlin: Changing the Planet [23:50]
Dennis Pamlin, who is Global Policy Advisor for the WWF, introduces the ecological challenges we face and contrast them with most of the technological progresses. His talk delineates a set of filters to understand how to judge innovation on conjunction with the long-term consequences they might have on the planet.

Video: John Thackara: Changing the Planet [23:14]
John Thackara, who is director of Doors of Perception, gives a provocative talk about the role of design in finding solutions to the ecological crisis. After inviting us to avoid terms such as “future” or “sustainable” as they maintain a certain distance to the problem we face, he shows a rich set of projects he participated in. He makes the important point that the resources to be put in place already exist and that they might not necessitates complex technological developments.

Changing the Planet (2) – Co-producing and sharing environmental consciousness
Planetary climate change is too large a challenge for each individual. It can quickly become abstract, technical, remote. How can we reconnect individual aspirations, personal and daily choices, to global challenges? How can we all become part of environmental measurement, evaluate and compare the impact of our own activities, become parts of our collective environmental consciousness?
Keynote: Gunter Pauli, ZERI (Zero Emissions Research & Initiatives)
They do it for real: Frank Kresin (Waag Society) and François Jegou (SDS-Solutioning / Sustainable Everyday)

Video: Gunter Pauli: Changing the Planet [55:14]
Gunter Pauli, who founded and directs ZERI, the “Zero Emissions Research Initiative” of the United Nations University in Tokyo, spoke about redesigning manufacturing processes into non-polluting clusters of industries.

Conditional Future
“The best way to predict the future, is to invent it”, said Alan Kay (and Buckminster Fuller). That is only true if as many of us as possible are given the opportunity to discuss, build, experiment and reflect upon their present and their future. Three speakers describe the conditions required to make that possible.
Rob van Kranenburg (Fontys Ambient Intelligence, Council) and Jean-Michel Cornu (Fing)

More videos are being posted to LIFT’s Vimeo, DailyMotion, Blip, Metacafe, Revver and Viddler accounts, so you can choose the platform you like.

The social buzz: designing user experiences for social media
By Junaid Asad, UX and human factors professional
With the rise of social technologies, one-way design is no longer enough. The collective intellect of users, arising from the societies they represent, now has the biggest say in what could be considered a design success. Because of advancements in technology, users now have the power and freedom even to design their own user interfaces, according to their whims and fancies, ignoring recommended UX best practices. With social technologies, users often have the freedom to choose sets of features they would like to use in applications and even where they want to interact with them. Similar to the popular use of the term Web 2.0, we might now refer to the current phase of design evolution as Design 2.0.

Innovation workshops: facilitating product innovation
By Jim Nieters (director of UX, Yahoo!)
While the business community sometimes overuses the term, innovation is the single most important factor in business. It is what makes any company different from its competitors. An innovation is a novel idea that a company delivers to market with highly profitable results. As UX professionals, if we want our efforts to be relevant to the business, we have to think about more than just insights or great designs. Ideally, our role is to find the intersection of customer delight and financial opportunity. We need to find ways of introducing great ideas that make our companies money. As difficult as coming up with a new idea that differentiates your product from those of your competitors can be, just coming up with the idea itself sometimes seems easy compared to the challenge of getting your organization to accept and act on it. Innovation workshops can both help you come up with great ideas and align your multidisciplinary product team around them.

Reusing the user experience
By Peter Hornsby, senior information architect at Friends Provident
Like software component reuse, the reuse of UX design elements can be a very efficient form of reuse—particularly because this form of reuse occurs very early in the product development cycle. The ability to reuse prior work effectively is one characteristic of a mature discipline.
Done well, component reuse can provide a significant increase in the effectiveness of the design process. Effective reuse must minimize associated human and computational costs while still allowing a degree of flexibility. The human cost is the time a designer requires to find the component to be reused, to understand it, and to perform any necessary modifications. The computational cost is the cost of employing a reusable component relative to that of a purpose-built version of a component. While the formal development of a library of reusable UX components can be a costly process, building reuse into your development process and creating components from existing design artifacts can still bring significant benefits and efficiency to your UX team.

Moving into user research | establishing design guidelines
By Janet M. Six, principal at Lone Star Interaction
A discussion of readers’ questions:
* moving from technical writing to user research
* establishing and documenting design guidelines

In her critical contribution ‘The rise of the sensor citizen – community mapping projects and locative media‘, she takes a close look at community mapping and sensing projects, and points out both the opportunities and challenges for activism made possible by locative technologies.

“Community mapping and sensing projects that use commonly available consumer electronics as environmental measurement devices, enable people to collect and view a wide array of location-based data. As a form of public science, such projects stand to reinvigorate environmentally focused civic engagement. However, given public concerns around environmental risks and their connections to technological progress, I believe that this kind of active citizenship should promote more critical reflection on the values and goals of the very projects that expect to create such profound changes in these domains, and carefully consider the limits of its own power.”

Anne Galloway (site | blog) recently completed a PhD in sociology and anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, which involved conducting an ethnographic study of the design of mobile and pervasive technologies. She is interested in connections between technological, spatial and cultural practices, and her current research explores design as a social and cultural activity and asks how social and cultural relations are designed. Galloway’s work has been presented to international audiences in technology, design, art, architecture, social and cultural studies, as well as published in a variety of books and journals. She currently teaches design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.

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In “From Social Media To Social Business Design, David Armano explores what businesses would be like if they were truly social.

“Imagine if a company like GM, was at the core “social”. Not just participating in “social media”—but through every part of their business ecosystem, were connected—plugged into a collective consciousness made up of ALL their constituents, from employees to consumers to dealers, to assembly line works etc. What if big organizations worked the way individuals now do. We’re actively using cloud services, mobile, networks and applications that offer real time dynamic signals vs. inefficient and static e-mail exchanges. In short, imagine if what makes “Web.2.0″ revolutionary was applied to every facet of an organization transforming how we work, collaborate and communicate? We think this is possible. And we’re calling it “social business design“.”

Armano’s company Dachis Corp. is currently working on rolling out a set of offerings to help businesses understand and apply these constructs to achieve leveraged and emergent outcomes that are measurable.

Bruce Nussbaum loves it.

” This is one of the most important attempts to answer the key question of What Comes Next? What comes next after the great recession ends? What will be the New Normal for consumers, for businesses, for all global organizations.

In essence, David argues that it is not sufficient for companies to merely plug into and participate in the social media of its customers. Companies must BECOME social media and be organized as social media.”

Meanwhile Jevon MacDonald of the same corporation is giving the idea a bit more grounding on his own blog and the Fast Forward blog. Read his contributions:

Understanding the role of Enterprise 2.0 and moving towards a Social Business
In the last few years the concept of social software in the enterprise has matured significantly, but we are still grasping for a real understanding of its role, and what to call it. I believe that understanding the separation of social software and social strategies can bring us closer to seeing the complete picture.

Taking the leap: Social Business Design
Social Business Design is the first (as far as I can tell) effort to completely unite both the strategic and implementation components of a new kind of business. Social Businesses are those which are designed from top to bottom as a reflection of the world we all live in online today. A business were everyone is connected and able to contribute but also where the right tools are available to them to do all of this with a business intent from the beginning.

Social Business Design and the Real Time Enterprise
For the first time we are seeing a complete set of ideas emerge which are applicable on both a strategic and implementation level. The four major archetypes of Social Business Design can be integrated to move past simple data interchange and in to a world of work in which end-users are in control and through which they can collaborate in real time. Without this framework it was easy to miss the need to develop strong ecosystems and intelligent metafilters in addition to a dynamic signal.

“Social movements are, well, social, by their very definition; people have been agitating and acting together since the platform tools to do so were quill pens, inkwells, and whispering in one another’s ears. Nothing new there. So the first question to ask is whether new media changed the conduct or outcomes of the social event itself (i.e. in Iran).

I’m not sure it did.”

In fact, provocatively he asks: “So what if George Washington’s troops had tweeted about their suffering at Valley Forge, or the Mensheviks had similarly described the cruelty of their Bolshevik brethren. Would subsequent events have turned out differently?”

Actually his best one comes at the end: “What if it were Florida in 2000? A candidate wins the popular vote (vs. the Iranian pretender losing by 20 million or so), and then a court made up of unelected lifers decides that the other guy won. I wonder if there’d been tweets of the protesters there would have been more protests…or a greater popular uprising?”

Read article

(via FutureLab)

Another reflection on the same topic comes from an article in the International Herald Tribune:

“Iran’s sometimes faltering attempts to come to grips with this new reality are providing a laboratory for what can and cannot be done in this new media age — and providing lessons to other governments, watching with calculated interest from afar, about what they may be able to get away with should their own citizens take to the streets.”

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.

“Technology gets a bad rap in the old media. In books and films, it is often the machinery used by governments to crush individuality. [...]

A funny thing happened on the way to the digital dystopia. Far from being a tool for repression, the internet has become a means by which people shake off state censorship.

The internet has pushed governments in undemocratic and semi-democratic countries on to the defensive. They used to be able to control the flow of information on televison or in newspapers with relative ease. The ability of anyone with a mobile phone or a video camera to broadcast at will has confounded them.”

The reflective article also cites Clay Shirky.

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His idea is deceptively simple: most people use the Internet to enjoy their lives, and among the ways people spread joy is to share pictures of cute cats. Even the sarcastic types (who, for example, have been known to insert misspelled messages under pictures of kittens) seem to be under their thrall.

So when a government censors the Internet, it had better think twice: “Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites,” Mr. Zuckerman wrote for a recent talk. People who could not “care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos” and thereby “block a few political ones.”

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Robert has meanwhile posted the full text of his response to the questions. Here another quote:

“Density and connectivity are the keys drivers of social transformation and mobile technologies are the medium. There may be a scarcity of financial resources in the the developing world but their is an abundance of social resources. This is no longer about leapfrogging the wired telecommunications infrastructure. The effects are far more profound in terms of economic development and social transformation.

I spend a great deal of time working with social impact initiatives in health, agriculture and conservation and in almost every case the key point of leverage is mobile technologies. And what most designers don’t realize or want to realize is the degree to which the most basic platforms like SMS, USSD and Voicemail can support rich services that create social value way beyond what we experience in the US market. Services that are far more profound than Urban Spoon. We are blinded by the iPhone and the Blackberry into thinking that these sophisticated gadgets are necessary to build rich applications. Just look at what Unicef is doing with rapidSMS and rapidAndroid to transform healthcare delivery and respond to global emergencies like famine, disease and warfare.”

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Although he could not attend, he posted a 10 minute video on the role of the Internet and the way it is affecting journalism, that is highly recommended.

Crampton divides the Internet’s effect on the way he work into three distinct phases:
1. internal communications (1995-1999) – using the Internet to improve communications
2. research (2000-2004) – using the Internet as a way to find information
3. social media (2005-today) – changing the processes of the newsrooms entirely (due to a fundamental change in the role of the ‘audience’)

Interestingly, Crampton describes how especially the third change (which he calls “a revolution”) had the biggest impact on his professional life. He is now working for Ogilvy, running their social media strategy across Asia-Pacific.

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Breakthrough cities is a groundbreaking report on how cities can mobilise creativity and knowledge to tackle compelling social challenges. The report was commissioned by the British Council from the Young Foundation. Geoff Mulgan and Charles Leadbeater, established international experts in social innovation and creativity, are major contributors.

The Breakthrough cities report is a unique resource for anyone working in the field of city policy – policy makers, consultants, public employees, workers in the arts or education sectors, NGOs, or simply private individuals committed to improving city lives. It provides inspiring ideas, understanding and guidance that can help make cities better places to live in.

- Download report (1.4 mb)
- Transforming Public Spaces – some ideas from the UK (3.1 mb)

Aside from a Q&A session with Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibarguen and sociologist/author Eric Klinenberg about the future of news, Zuckerman posts two longer contributions about citizen media, which I thought were worth highlighting:

Iran, citizen media and media attention

“I’ve written at some length about homophily, the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. Turns out that reporters flock, too. It’s somewhat amazing to me the extent to which reporters from really good newspapers are all asking the same questions. I’m glad that people are taking a close look at the phenomenon of social media in the Iranian protests – it’s an important, fascinating and worthwhile topic. But there’s a lot of topics out there, and I wonder whether we benefit from a thousand well-researched stories on this phenomenon rather than a hundred, and nine hundred other stories.”

Chris Csikszentmihayli and a complex vision of citizen media

“Chris closes his talk with remarks on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote not just political philosphy but “bodice-ripper novels”. These novels allowed individuals to “live in the skin of others”, experience the empathy that comes from living for a while as a servant or a noble. The daily paper, he believes, can give a sense of community empathy, the ability to live another’s experience through storytelling. That’s something we need to preserve and cultivate as we move into a digital future.”

“The maze of electronics on a typical circuit board can be difficult to decipher, but as hackers and tinkerers grow in number, an industry and web community have emerged to provide them with instructions to make their work simpler.”

Read full story

The Commission has launched a 14-point action plan to address the issues raised from such widespread interconnectivity.

“New examples of applications that connect objects to the internet and each other are created [everyday]: from cars connected to traffic lights that fight congestion, to home appliances connected to smart power grids and energy metering that allows people to be aware of their electricity consumption,” said EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding.

The EC expects there will be a progressive connection of a variety of physical objects, and not just computers – creating the ‘internet of things’. These could be everyday items such as food packaging that records the temperature along its supply chain, or different prescription drugs that warn patients of a possible incompatibility.

- Read full story
- Read EU press release
- Read commentary by The Register

“In noting the potential power of social networking tools for organizing mass change, I thought out loud for a moment about what kinds of dangers might emerge. It struck me, as I spoke, that there is a terrible analogy that might be applicable: the use of radio as a way of coordinating bloody attacks on rival ethnic communities during the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s. I asked, out loud, whether Twitter could ever be used to trigger a genocide.”

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New work
Work isn’t what it used to be. Across the UK, a significant portion of the workforce does not have a traditional nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday job. Around 13% of working people work for themselves and many more work in very small or micro businesses employing one to five people, where factors like location and working hours can be very different from working in a large corporation.
In the North East, 88% of working people are employed by micro businesses. Those who took part in the New Work project during Dott07 agreed that new ways of working offer new opportunities, but also bring new problems.

Our new school
In 2007 Walker Technology College in Newcastle received £13m funding from the government’s £70bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme to renovate its buildings. Headteacher Steve Gater knows how big an opportunity this is. ‘The last thing we want to have with our BSF project is a new old school,’ he says. He wants a school that helps the 1,200 pupils get the most out of learning and fits into the community. That’s where designers at Dott 07 came in.

Move me
Growing emphasis is being put on cutting pollution in the UK by reducing our use of transport. But millions of us still need to move by car, bus or train each day. In the village of Scremerston in Northumberland, getting around was problematic. Many villagers don’t own cars or faced a lack of regular and affordable public transport to get them to school, work or hospital appointments.

Low Carb Lane
As part of Dott 07 designers wanted to tackle domestic energy consumption. So a design team set themselves the aim of reducing the energy consumption of one house in Castle Terrace, Ashington, by 60%.