8 disruptive pitches

A new platform has just been launched in beta. It is called Imagination for people, a collaborative platform dedicated to social innovation. The projects listed on the platform have to be for the public good, they have to be disruptive (so a “worldwide first”) and it needs to be able to scale.

We were presented with eight different ideas in this vein:

La Ruche qui dit Oui a way to disintermediate wholesalers and supermarkets from the farmer client relationship by creating “hives” of consumers that pool their demand.
Mocaplab does motion capture services. He is talking about using motion capture to create a tool to record, play and edit the natural language of many deaf people: sign language. This is a challenge because you need to capture the motion of not only the fingers and hands, but also the face and eye movements. I find this completely fascinating. One thing I wonder about though is what standard you would use to digitise the language, how else will you be able to synthesize the language.

Fivefive, “the emotional experience”, is an attempt to create sensitive and emotional devices that enhance the way people communicate over the Internet. Our current interface devices don’t allow us to create real presence remotely. It is an object that looks like a pebble, that will produce light when you touch it. You would use it in pairs. It will add an extra dimension to your communications and might actually create a new type of language.
A project by the Digital Empowerment Foundation to bring digital technology to weaver communities in India. This allows them to get more value out of the total chain that profits from their work. They have four problems: Not enough money to buy raw materials, not enough skills to design the clothes, no way to find a market to retail their products and a younger generation that doesn’t belief you can earn a living with weaving. The digital technology helps them capturing and storing designs and contains an ecommerce website helping sell the weaves. Each aspect is organized in self-help groups, so that there is a sense of ownership and sustainability.
Exposition au Danger Psychologique is an (art) project by Emmanuel Germond aiming to prevent psychological harm from just not talking to each other anymore. Currently there is a online form where you can rate your own exposure to psychological danger, which will then allow for preventative measures and treatments (like extra-marital sex or a D-tox box). Check out the EPD Observatory to learn more.
Neen or Non-verbal Emotional Experience of Notification. He used the metaphor of a door to create new forms of presence (“open doors for close communication”). This short video summarizes the main theme of the project.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/20243778]

A project that creates a new definition of “health” for a new generation of digital native patients. It consists of multiple smaller on the edges between the social sphere, the physical sphere and the cognitive sphere. Read more here.
Eli Commins has developed the Breaking project. Commins tells the story of how he followed an Iranian young man on Twitter who wasn’t at all interested in the electoral process going on there. As the electoral process continued the young man slowly started to become an activitist. Commins then decided to get together a diverse set of testimonies from Iran and try and find a way to visualize this on stage.

Disruptive innovation in healthcare and well-being

One theme at Lift France 2011 is Care. It is introduced as follows:

From patient networks to personal genomics, from the quest for autonomy and well-being to do-it-yourself bio, new technologies and new business models are getting ready to transform the world of healthcare. Are the players ready?

First up is Paul Wicks a research scientist at PatiensLikeMe](http://www.patientslikeme.com/). His talk is titled Putting patients at the center of healthcare; disruption in medicine, research, business, and drug safety.

Initially we got things wrong on the Internet. We thought it was about information, but have now learned that it is about really easy group formation (Wicks must have gotten this from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody). This has been very disruptive for certain type of industries (e.g. the travel agent). One of the professions that has not been disintermediated yet is the medical profession. The point of PatientsLikeMe is to for patients to share their health information in order to learn from others like them and then use that information to discuss treatment options with their health care team.

One radical idea that they have is to give back the data in such a way that people can do their own data analysis (e.g. comparing effectiveness of certain types of medicine for a medical problem correlated with chance of side-effects). They try to be scientifically rigorous in the way that the data is used and make sure that all articles are open access. 23andMe is doing something similar with their 23andWe research.

This is not without problems, mainly around privacy. Wicks suggest we might need a phenotypic non-discrimination act for people who are willing to share their data for the greater good. Based on questions by the facilitor I now realize that PatientsLikeMe is actually quite a commercial venture and earns its money by selling the data to 3rd parties.

Jonathan Kuniholm lost an arm in a war, came back and started a PhD studying prosthetics. He created the open prosthetics project. He started his talk saying that he is wearing an arm that was patented in 1912 with a hook that was developed in the fifties and that the whole arm contains no motors. Imagine if the technology that we use would progress in a similarly slow pace: terrible. The problem is the small market size (only six other amputees are on PatientsLikeMe for example) leading to relatively small research budgets. We have a multiple market failures here. There is no lack of ideas, they are actually rampant. But very often they are design exercises without any practical purpose.

It would be great if prosthetics could use the innovative solutions that are developed in other industries. Unfortunately licensing agreements and patents often get in the way. Designing for larger markets also would not really work. Another option is using user participation and social collaboration. He then showed a lot of examples of “make” culture and 3D printing and how people are trying to use these type of technologies (not really successfully) for prosthetics. He is now starting a company, StumpWorks, owned by amputees to build the things they want to build.

A "chap watching his own body's performance"

Tobie Kerridge is based in the interaction research studio at Goldsmiths in London. His talk is titled Debating Biotechnology – Speculative Design as Public Engagement. He is doing a project called material beliefs. From the website of the project:

Material Beliefs takes emerging biomedical and cybernetic technology out of labs and into public spaces. The project focuses on technologies which blur the boundaries between our bodies and materials, and how design as a tool for public engagement can be used to stimulate discussion about the value of these forms of hybridity. [..] The lab becomes a site for collaboration between scientists and engineers, designers, social scientists and members of the public. Alongside existing research activity such as collecting experimental data, writing academic papers and funding proposals, the collaborations lead to a parallel set of outcomes including interviews, brainstorming, drawing, photography, filming and discussion.

Who needs to become “smart” in tomorrow’s cities?

Transforming abandoned oil platforms into ocean mini cities

The first true theme of the conference is Urban, who needs to become smart in tomorrow’s cities. From the introduction:

We want cities to become greener, safer, more competitive, more inclusive, more vibrant or easier to move in. To achieve that takes more than great engineering and determined leadership, yet this is what most models of “smart cities” are built around. It requires trust and collaboration, the deliberate sharing of urban (hardware, software, informational) resources, open innovation ecosystems, empowerment policies… How will we achieve smart and open cities that could be livable?

Saskia Sassen is talking about The future of smart cities. Her research question is how much of the new technologies are truly urbanised. The cities is not just the materialities, it also is the people, the practices, etc. This means that the city can “talk back” and there is a notion “cityness”.

What would it mean to do open source urbanism? What would it mean if we start to think of the city as the hacker? Incompleteness is her foundational image for the future of the city because the concepts of the user don’t align with the concepts of the engineer.

I thought it was unfortunate that Sassen did not develop her thoughts further than these large broad philosophical strokes. This was in stark contract with the next speaker: Adam Greenfield runs a shop in New York called Urbanscale. His talk is titled: On public objects: connected things and civic responsibilities in the networked city. He prefers the term “network city” over “smart city”).

He is inspired by Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city. In our current networked city we have become an instrumented population. There is a strong spread of locative and declarative media. Increasingly we live among declarative objects (see Tom Armitage’s project of the talking Tower bridge).

We are surrounded by objects that can process information and “speak” to us leading to new modes of surveillance based on information gathering objects. What might it mean to speak of our right to the networked city. Maybe we need a new theory of public objects to help us think about them?

Greenberg show examples of a couple of technologies that are used in urban settings to get at a “taxonomy of effects” and a first start at thinking about the morality of objects:

Välkky traffic sensors are non objectionable: there is local collection with a local effect and a clear public good.
The Nikon advertisement that is “paparazzi billboard” is mildly disruptive: there is local collection and local effect, but there is no public good and slight disruption.
The Acure touchscreen vending unit is gathering information about you and tries to discern your age and your gender and then present you with the right proposition. This is a prescriptive and normative non-urban technology. This is local collection with global effect and no public good: the data is analysed and used to change the propositions.
Quividi (“he who watches”) VidiReports video analytics suite is a technology that records people as they pass by billboards and tracks their attention. Vidireports is leeching value of the cityscape. This technology is predictive and prospectively normative. Greenfield is actively trying to influence government to legislate against this type of technology.

Greenfield then gives a definition of the public objects. They should be designed in such a way that they are open and easily available. This has some problems: we are enormously increasing the “attack surface”. We also don’t have the etiquettes and protocols of precedence and deconfliction. But the aspirations are big though: among other things it could be a physical manifestation of the public sphere.

Next up was Alain Renk talking about Unlimited cities. He talked in French which was simultaneously translated. This setup made it very hard for me to both pay attention to the talk and blog. According to him we are confronted by a trend of standardisation of urban environment and it is very difficult to develop “urbadiversity”.

Robin Chase gave an incredibly inspiring talk about people-(em)powered platforms.

Some examples of people-(em)powered platforms are meetup and Etsy, Waze, Airbnb or Couchsurfing. This stuf is powerful: Intercontinental built 4400 hotels in 60 years, whereas Couchsurfing has 1.2m “couches” in 8 years (twice the volume of Intercontinental).

The economics are sustainable: I put my excess capacity into a common platform. This can grow very fast (low financial risk) because now the common platforms are completely scalable. This is a much more efficient use of resources. It is a dematerialisation: so more service than asset and it is focused and collaborative consumption. Put another way: ownership will not be the higher status consumption.

Chase has now started buzzcar (they have an app), a way for people to share their cars. It uses a collectively built infrastructure that is collaboratively financed where end users gain financially. Doing it like this she doesn’t have to wait for government or private companies, instead she has “auto-preneurs” putting their cars into the system. See here for a video explaining the concept. This way one well-used shared car can be used by 30-50 people. Some of these people will sell their car so one well-used shared car equals about 15-20 cars and can save 40-60 parking spaces.

This type of collaboratively built infrastructure will create the people’s city. Rather than having centralized or decentralized systems you now get distributed robust and resilient systems. We can finally have a future where there is scale without the homogenisation that this would usually bring.

The final talk is by Frédéric Mazzella. He has created a new way of carpooling and talked about how car-pooling can help forecast car traffic. Covoiturage.fr has 1.2 million members. By using people’s intentions of where they want to go when, they can forecast traffic (he showed a nice visualisation of this).

Innovating within innovations challenges…

Joëlle Liberman (Égérie Research) and François Jégou (Strategic Design Scenarios) are hosting a session titled Innovaton Futures, Innovating within innovation challenges. This workshop is based on an European project titled Innovation Futureswhich is a foresight exercise on emerging patterns of innovation. From their introduction:

How is innovation changing and which challenges innovation will have to face in the coming future? INFU (www.innovation-futures.org) is an on-going European research project focusing futures of innovation, scanning weak signals of change in the current innovation landscape, extrapolating new patterns, discussing emerging visions, scenarios and implications for policy and practices.

At the start of the workshop we were put into pairs and given a “weak signal” that they have identified. Mine was: CoWorking Houses as Creative Hubs: “More and more of the nomadic knowledge workers from the creative class join CoWorking spaces. CoWorking houses offer an easy, flexible and budget workspace combining workspace with a creativty hub. One question to ask about these weak signals is what would happen if they would turn into mainstream which of course begged the question whether maybe in the future mainstream is that there is no mainstream anymore. Next up we were asked to imagine being at a board meeting of the Innovation Agency in 2036 (25 years from now). The agency is facing a couple of challenges and has to find a solution to these. Our table had to think about the following:

Thinking about the challenge — Thinking about the waste challenge

“Waste based innovation has taken off in the 00’s and a complete new range of new products definitions and production processes based on reuse of existing components instead of rough materials. The world waste stock exchange market is working very well, even too well inducing a perverse increasing demand for waste materials. The Innovation Agency is asked to propose solutions to avoid this bias.” ‘

Our initial thoughts were around whether this would be a problem that the market can solve itself or whether this would require some governmental intervention to solve. Could there be a tertiary market around waste credits to counter this? Should we require companies to deal with their waste locally, avoiding worldwide trade in waste materials?

I proposed that the cause of the problem seems to be that the consumer has been educated to appreciate recycled products. This signal for whether something is “good” is not working anymore and we should have an alternative. The obvious thing to do is to take more effects of a product into account when you decide to buy something: look at the total cost of ownership over the use-life of the product. Philippe Méda suggested that one way of doing this would be to focus on making sure that products have longer lifecycles. How do we know whether it is better to drive a very old but wasteful car, versus buying a new one with its environmental costs of production? Somebody suggested that maybe the idea of ownership is the problem and wasteful in itself. Instead of ownership you will start licensing/renting products. Proposing an alternative model to ownership based on sharing. Hopefully the current transaction costs for sharing will be made small enough in 25 years for this to be easier than it is today!

Each group had to present their ideas. Unfortunately this drained the energy out of the room. It seemed like each table had had a good discussion, but these discussions didn’t translate well to a presentation to the whole group. No deep discussions after each presentation. I do hope the output of each group will be digitised in some way and made available (the presenters promised it a link will be published here).

The one question I have after this workshop is about the methodology itself. I think there is a lot of potential in imagining yourself in a board meeting somewhere in the future, but not all the potential came out at this workshop. How could this be improved?