Bruce Sterling on Design-Fiction

Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling

Design-fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to dismiss the disbelieve about change. It is not an art movement or an academic movement, instead it is a sneaky hack that makes believing in change easier.

This is becoming relevant now because networked society makes prototypes much more visible than before. Most objects are imaginary: 90 percent of the patented objects have never been built. It has always been hard to see these concepts and prototypes: only very large corporations (think concept-cars) could do it. Now pretty much anybody can do it. Design-fiction pulls in multi-disciplinary people, there are assemble concensus around a product sketch. It crystalizes techno-social potentionals. It can do this outside standard commercial contexts.

One very tweetable quote is “If you know what to call what you are doing, you are not doing real fieldwork now”.

The most important term in design-fiction is diegetic.

Sterling has shared some examples of design-fiction on his Wired.com blog.

From Technocracy to Democracy

David H. Guston is the director for the Center for Nanotechnology in Society. His talk titled “From Technocracy to Democracy” tries to add some human purpose to the techno-scientific potential in the morning. How do you govern the stuff that hasn’t been made yet? Technology is always deeply social too: we call this socio-technical. He made a set of points about technology and society with relevant images (that I can’t reproduce)

  • People make technologies
  • People live in, with and through technologies
  • Technological change and social change are closely connected
  • There are multiple solutions to any given technological problem
  • Socio-technological systems are difficult or impossible to predict (and even if we get right, we often get it wrong)
  • Socio-technical change can be incremental or disruptive
  • New technologies are often controversial and risky
  • Our socio-technical imaginations shape our future (e.g. Frederick Soddy and H.G. Wells inspired each other)
  • People play an important role in governing technologies and this leads to many questions that we need to start answering. Can we be more reflexive about how we imagine, research, design, build, market, and assess new technologies by asking:
    • Who are the people who innovate?
    • Who are the people subject to innovation?
    • How do they participate in the governance of technology now?
    • How might that change in the future(Ss) we are imagining for them?
    • How can technology be democratically governed (we have to heed to Eisenhower’s warning: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Portraits of Science at Emerge 2012

The Scientists on Stage
The Scientists on Stage

These next few days I am attending Emerge 2012 conference in Phoenix, Arizona. The subtitle of this conference is “Artists + Scientist Redesign the Future”. The conference is a mix of talks, workshops and a media festival. The basic idea is that current science can inform us about what might happen in the future. Artistic exploration of those futures (i.e. science fiction) can than pull these futures forward and in turn inform science.

I will try and semi-live blog as much of this event as possible. Reflection will have to wait for later. Apologies for typos: I have a new laptop with a new keyboard that I still have to get used to.

Portraits of science and technology

The day kicked off with a group of scientists giving small portraits of the current cutting edge of their work:

What is interesting – Lee Hartwell

Hartwell really wants to understand where “interest” comes from. This is a research project that he is embarking on. He is hoping that he will find some answers to his question at this conference.

Some Thoughts on the Future of Healthcare – Neal Woodbury

Woodbury is from the Biodesign Institute from Arizona State University. How do you make medicine a much more sustainable practice? How do get useful medical technologies that are very inexpensive and look at medicine from an angle of keeping people healthy, rather than treating late stage disease? One example of this type of technology is the “Comprehensive Immunosignature Detection Array Platform: you take some blood and put it on a set of peptides and the outcome gives your insight in your current immune system. People with different diseases get very different immune system signatures/profiles. To enable this there are looking at possibilities for “painless blood draw”. His open question is how to you translate this type of technologies into useful practice at scale. What is the medical system of the future that will actually be able to utilize this type of information? When you have comprehensive health monitoring, you really have to change what diagnosis is for example.

Creating Creatures That Eat Bad Stuff and Excrete Valuable Stuff – Bruce Rittman

Rittman is focused on Environmental Biotechnology. The challenge they are addressing is that we need to replace most fossil fuels with renewable substitutes. We need to do this to slow down (and hopefully reverse) the atmospheric build up of CO2. He showed us a diagram of how renewable bioenergy might work in a carbon neutral loop where CO2 just goes through the circular process. They use a bacterium called “Synechocystis” which is capable of converting solar energy with CO2 into a fuel that can be used. They are tuning the genes of this bacterium to make it work even better, so that can turn these organisms into factories for producing energy based materials we might need. Another example are “Microbial Electrochemical Cells” in which they use bio-organisms on the anode of a fuel cell. The advantage of this is that they can create organic fuels.

Developing Synthetic Telepathy – Stephen Helms-Tillery

Helms-Tillery showed us a lot of different projects, most of them focusing on the hand and creating prosthetic devices for the hand. The hand is an interesting object for study: a complicated mechanical device that is essential for nearly everything that we do. It has twenty joints in in and all the “movers” are in the arm. Picking up something like a bottle is not a trivial thing from a biomechanical perspective. The hand doesn’t operate by itself, so it is important to look at the arm too (e.g. for reach). They are also looking at using your brain to control these external interfaces. Hands are also sensory organs and prosthetic hands should have similar sensory ability, so they are building sensorized skins. Current experiments with children who are in hospital to be treated for epilepsy show that it is very feasible to let them control something on the screen with their brain.

Be All You Can Be and Then Some: Military Human Enhancement – Dan Sarewitz and Brad Allenby

Sarewitz’ question is: where will the “next people” be come from. We are all currently much more enhanced than we were in the past (think doping in sports, kids taking Ritalin, vaccines, artificial knees or Google). This is all pedestrian though, the really enhanced people are in the military right now. So tomorrow’s humans will emerge from the Pentagon. What kind of things are happening there now: weapons, body armor, exo-skeletons.

According to Allenby is the problem that the human bandwidth is now the weakest link in systems necessary for operations in complex environments. They are working on building cognitive networks that include many individual human brains with systems of consciousness emerging as a property of this. They might even drive human beings out of the decision loop, because they might not be necessary anymore and might just be too slow. They will design human varietals: “we will never be human again”, get over it.

The Triumphs and Tragedies of Social Networks – Hari Sundaram and Marco Janssen

Janssen is interested in using information technology (and social networks) to empower citizens to act. How can we stimulate people to contribute to the public good? A few examples: In San Marcos they gave a few hundred households energy bills that showed how their energy use related to that of their neighbours. By combining this with simple smilies they actually managed to get people to use less energy overall. Another example is the use of towels in hotels: they experimented with it and found out that people cooperate if others do too. There are examples of this everywhere, like in Bali where people have shared irrigation for many years. The tragedy of the commons is not necessarily true anymore: Elinor Ostrom has developed a framework that shows how high level of cooperation is possible, but mainly in small homogenous communities. Cities are different: they are very heterogeneous and lack feedback on your behaviour. They think they can use computing to create these small homogenous communities in large cities. What is people are willing to be monitored in exchange for a reward? This is what some car insurance companies are already doing. The promise of technology lies in its ability to connect the large scale to the everyday.

Gaming the Future, With Impact – Sasha Barab and Alan Gershenfeld

Acccording to Gershenfeld, the game industry understands motivation and has pushed this forward as artistic artform. They keep people exactly on the edge of their capabilities and through challenges induce continued engagement with the game. Just because this medium has this potential doesn’t mean that is used for good. The current state of game-based learning is that the level of promise is very high, but that the scale of impact is relatively low: there is a big gap. Closing this gap is still a relatively young science and the Center for Games and Impact are working on creating a framework for actually building games that deliver impact and they have managed to rise the sector and get involvement from a lot of partners that are willing to fund the work and are interested in seeing what it can do for their problems.

Barab, a learning scientist, showed some of the initiatives that the center is doing are understanding, engineering and scaling for impact. Things like: games for transformational play, games as design fictions. He believes that video games of entire worlds in which learners are central, important and active participants. They are a place where the actions one takes have an impact on that gaming world and a place in which what you know is directly related to what you are able to do and who you become.

Sensor Networks in Search of Meaningful Knowledge – Andreas Spanias and Pavan Turaga

Enhancement, engagement and empowerment are the three themes that Turaga has heard about today. He talks about sensor networks that can actually empower change in behaviour. Sensing modalities are all over the place: these can mined for patterns. He showed an example of how their system could learn the rules of Blackjack by observing the interactions between people playing the game. How do we do this at scale? Using for example livelogged data to create adaptive representations which can then be used to make us better.

Spanias talked about sensor networks in our homes. He showed an example of moving from single microphones to microphone arrays that with proper algorithms can localize sound, cancel noise, do acoustic scene analysis and even solve the cocktail effect. They can use this to record and then create a spatial sound experience or do acoustic scene characterisation.

Using Scenarios to Think About the Future of Corporate Learning

At the 2011 Online Educa, I co-facilitated a workshop with Willem Manders, Laura Overton, Charles Jennings and David Mallon in which we used a scenario methodology to gain insight into the future of corporate learning.

This video provides a short introduction into the work that was done there (a thank you to Fusion Universal for producing the video, a transcript is available here):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiBtFJ_Omv8&W=450&H=259&REL=0]

If this triggers you, then do read more about the old boy network, the in-crowd, big data and the quantified self on the learningscenarios.org website and follow the Twitter account to stay up to date.

These are only the first steps, we need people to start bringing the scenarios to life, so help us if you are interested.

Fosdem 2012 or Why Open Source is Still Revelant

Fosdem is the place where you’ll find a Google engineer who as a “full time hobby” is lead developer for WorldForge an open source Massive Multiplayer Online game, or where you have a beer with a developer who has a hard time finding a job, because all the code he write has to have a free software license: “you don’t ask a vegan to have a little bit of meat do you?”. It probably is the world’s biggest free software conference: More than 5000 people show up yearly in Brussels, there is no fee to attend and there is no registration process.

I really enjoy going because there are few other events that have this few barriers to attendance and to approaching the event the way you want to approach it. I like wondering around and thinking about how these are the people that actually keep the Internet working. Below some notes about the different talks that I attended (very little educational technology to be found, beware!).

Free Software: A viable model for Commercial Success

Robert Dewar from AdaCore had an interesting talk about how to use free software as a true commercial offering. There was no ideology in his talk but only a pure commercial perspective. They usually sell free software as “open source” and focus on convenience and utility in their selling proposition. They tell the customer they get the source code included without locks and with no limits on the number of installs.

The business model is based around subscriptions (for support, testing, etc.). What he really likes about that model is that the interests of them and the customer are fully aligned: they only make money when the customer renews. Often companies have to get used to asking for support though, they have not been “trained” to value support in the past.

He considers commercial versus open source a bogus distinction. In many ways he would consider AdaCore to be very similar to what Microsoft in what they do. The main difference is the license of the software. The AdaCore is much more permissive as you are allowed to copy and do with it what you want.

He also spent some time thinking about whether AdaCore’s approach would work with other companies. Could Microsoft open source Windows? He thinks they could without it affecting them badly: people would be willing to pay for timely updates and support. Could a games company open source their games? Copryright protection is one way they currently protect their very large investments. It might be hard for them to open source, but in general the model could be used much more widely. Every company is in the business of giving users what they want and open source licenses are that much more convenient for users.

A New OSI For A New Decade

Simon Phipps has joined the board of the Open Rights Group and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). He talked about reptiles: they have no morality and are very old and only react to fear and hunger. Corporates are reptiles too. Corporations don’t have ethics, people have ethics. OSI tried to find a way to show large organizations that the four software freedoms (use, study, modify and distribute) are important for them too. A pragmatic rather than a moral perspective on open source software helped the OSI to be able to get corporate involvement. Their initial focus was very much on licensing. They have been succesful: OSI has become the standard for open source in government and the fear around the term has been turned around: other processes are now appropriating the term.

We are now in a new decade: Open Source is the default and digital liberty is moving to centre stage. OSI has lost some of its relevance, so they decided to reinvigorate the organization with a member-based governance which should include all stakeholders. They now have new affiliates (other open source non-profits like Mozilla or Drupal) and the next stage will be government bodies and non-entities (whatever that might mean). Later they will get personal associates and then corporate patrons. All of this should enable a bottom-up governance. Members will decide how OSI will operate, they will create OSI initiatives, they can use OSI as a policy venue and they will co-ordinate initiatives locally and globally.

A new OSI project will try and help educators educate the world about open source: FLOSSBOK. I am personally not sure the world is waiting for another project like this. There are quite a few alternatives already.

Mozilla Devroom

Tristan Nitot, Principal Mozilla Evangelist kickstarted the Mozilla Devroom. He told us that six European organisations have gotten significant grants from Mozilla (one of them being Fosdem). Mozilla strives to create an Internet that is benefiting everyone. The Internet that is being built currently does not benefit everyone. He focused on a couple of trends on the net:

  • App Stores have good sides (app discovery and monetization), but also very bad sides: they create vendor lock-in and prevent people from switching platform (I have personally felt this when contemplating switching away from the iOS platform) and occasionally inhibit free speech through “censorship”. Mozilla believes you can get the good of the app stores without the bad.
  • Social networks have obvious good sides, but also profile users, prevent users from porting their data to other services and identity providers can even lock people out of their digital lives. Using Facebook is ok, but don’t use it exclusively to interact with others. When you use something for free, then you can assume that you are the products. He showed us a great cartoon about Facebook users:

    The "Free" Model by Geek&Poke
    The "Free" Model by Geek&Poke
  • Newer devices (tablets, smartphones and netbooks) are increasingly convenient and popular. Very often they force users to a specific browser (e.g. Chrome on the Chromebook or Safari on iOS) making them definition the opposite of the web.

What is Mozilla doing about these things:

  • Open Web Apps are based on open web technologies, cross-browser and available in multiple app stores. You can even host your own apps on your websites for others to install in their browser. WebRT brings this a step further. It is a runtime for web applications that makes web apps look and feel like native apps on multiple platforms. Things like a Media Capture API will really change what is possible to do with Javascript in a browser. Other surprising APIs are the Battery API, the WebNFC (Near Field Communications) API and the Vibration API(!). More documentation is available here
  • They are trying to solve identity in a decentralized, browser agnostic and privacy respecting way. The codename for the project is BrowserID and it is based on using email addresses to provide identity.
  • Boot2Gecko (B2G) is a complete operating system build for the open web. Check out the Frequently Asked Questions about the project.

In my book these three projects (especially the last one) make Mozilla a group of absolute heroes. Donate here!

There was an interesting talk about how Mozilla organizes its own IT services. Currently that is done by paid staff, but they strongly believe they can get this done through the community (MediaWiki does something similar.

Kai Engert talked about a very important topic: “Web security, and how to prevent the next DigiNotar“. He has a let’s say “unconventional” presentation style: instead of slides he used a piece of written text that he displayed on the screen and read out loud. Maybe this should be called something like “live visual podcasting”. His points were good though. He explained how it is a problem that every Certificate Authority (CA) has unlimited power and he listed the alternatives. You could maybe use a web of trust like the CAcert community. This still doesn’t solve the problem of a single root key. Another proposed solution was Convergence using notaries that would monitor certificates. Kai see too many problems with this as a solution for general users. One suggestion could be build on top of DNSSEC. Again that has problems. How do you know who has signed the the DNS? Google has also proposed something called Certificate Transparency which might work, but also might create some problems. His proposed solution builds on what is in existence using the existings CA combined wit the notary system. This talk was bit dense (I got lost half way if I am honest, obsessibely reading Megan Amram), so if you want to read it yourself find it here.

Michelle Thorne is the global event strategist for Mozilla. She is currently very focused on creating communities of “webmakers” and they are starting with children, video makers and journalists first. She presented three tools/projects for these webmakers:

  • Hackasaurus let’s anybody edit the web. Kids are suddenly empowered to remix existing web pages. Check out the hacktivity kit if you want to use this in the classroom.
  • Popcorn.js is a HTLM5 media framework that allows you to connect web content with video.
  • OpenNews (formerly called knight-mozilla) puts web developers in newsrooms building tools that help journalistic challenges.

One thing I noticed is that she used htmlpad to present a few slides. I need to check this out as it is probably one of the simplest ways of collaborating around text or getting a quick HTML page online.

The focus for Mozilla in Fosdem is very much on the technology side of things and less on the broader themes that the Mozilla foundation is tackling. I had a hard time finding somebody from the Mozilla Learning team to talk about Open Badges, but did get some good connections to have this conversation later in the year.

Wikiotics

Wikiotics did a very short lightning talk of which I only managed to catch the tail end. Their goal is to make a site that allows anybody to create, update, remix interactive language lessons.

The Pandora

The Pandora is a small Nintendo DS sized open Linux computer designed for gaming. It has a 800×480 touchscreen, wifi, bluetooth, two SDHC card slots, SVideo output, two analogue controllers, a DPad, L/R buttons, a QWERTY thumb keyboard, 256/512MB RAM and 512MB NAND Storage. It has about 10 hours of battery life (full use).

It comes with its own repository (an app store) allowing for easy installation and updating of games and other applications. One thing that will appeal to many people is the amount of emulators that it can run. If you want to relive the days you spent on the Amiga 500, Commodora 64, Apple II or the Atari ST it will work for you.

Because the device is so open, the possibilities are limitless. For example, you could connect a keyboard and mouse using a USB hub and connect it to a TV to turn the Pandora into a small desktop PC or connect a USB harddisk and turn it into a web- or fileserver. The price price will be €375 (ex VAT). What is great is that the device is produced in Germany and so does not have any sick labour conditions for the people building it.

Balancing Games, The Open Source Way

Jeremy Rosen has been working on Battle for Wesnoth, a turn-based strategy game, since 2004. He talked about how to achieve balance in a game. When you are talking about multiplayer balance:

  • No match should be decided by the matchup
  • No match should be decided by the chosen map
  • The best player should win… usually

Single player balance is different, in single player game fairness is not important anymore, it is just about having fun:

  • The AI won’t complain if the game is unfair (Jeremy on the AI: “By the way our AI doesn’t cheat, but is very good in math”)
  • Players want the game to be challenging
  • Each player has different capacities, we need to decide who we balance for

Balance problems can occur in many places (e.g. map balance, cross scenario balance, unit characteristics) and aren’t easy to find. One way of finding them is by organizing tournaments as people will do their best to exploit balance weaknesses to win. Balance will always be a moving target and new strategies will appear. User feedback is not so useful because players think they never make mistakes and that all their strategies should work. Sometimes you can find some good providers of feedback: “These persons are important, and like all of us, they are fueled by ego. Don’t forget to fuel them”.

His recommendation is to find somebody in your game’s community who can make a balance a fulltime job.

Freedom Box: Out of the Box!

 

The FreedomBox Foundation
The FreedomBox Foundation

Bdale Garbee, gave us an update on the activities at the FreedomBox Foundation. According to him it really is a problem that we are willfully hand over a lot of personal data to companies to manage on our behalf without thinking much about the consequences. Regardless of the intention of companies, for-profit companies have to operate within the rules of the jurisdictions that they operate and can lead to things like Photo DNA.

Freedombox’ vision is to create a personal server running a free software operating system and applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy that should run on cheap, power-efficient plug computers that people can install in their own homes. That will then be a platform on which privacy-respecting federated alternatives to current social networks can be build. These devices will probably be mesh-networked to augment or replace the current infrastructure.

The foundation has to do four things:

  • Technology
  • User Experience (this is very important if it is going to be useful for people who are not “geeks”)
  • Publicity and Fund-Raising
  • Industry Relations

They have had to bound the challenge by focusing on software, rather than custom hardware and on servers and services rather than client devices. They have also decided to use existing networking infrastructure where appropriate while working to move away from central infrastructure control points (like the Domain Name System (DNS)). Another decision has been to build all elements of their reference implementation on top of Debian which is a completely open volunteer based International organisation. This means that regardless of how successful they will be as a foundation all of their work will survive and remain available. Their goal is that new stable releases of Debian should have everything needed to create FreedomBoxes “out of the box”.

The first “application” they want to deliver is a secure chat service. They have based this on XMPP with Prosody on a single host (by chance I was sitting next to one of the Prosody developers).

They have also decided to make OpenPGP (GnuPG) keys as the root of trust. It is great technology, but it is hard to establish initial trust relationships. One interesting idea is to take advantage of smartphone technology (that we all walk around with) to facilitate initial key exchange (see the work from Stefano Maffuli).

They have done some investigations into plug computers. They focused mostly on the Dreamplug (which gave them quite a bit of GPL related headaches), but you also have the Sheeva and the Tonido.

He finished his talk by quoting Benjamin Franklin:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

What I should have written last year: distributed and federated systems

There is an overarching trend at Fosdem that I could already see last year: the idea of decentralisised, distributed and federated systems for social networking and collaboration. There is a whole set of people working on creating social networks without a center (e.g. BuddyCloud or Status.net or distributed filesystems (like OpenAFS), alternatives to GoogleDocs (LibreDocs) and mesh networking (like Village Telco with the Mesh Potato). There are even people who are trying to separate cloud storage from the cloud application (Project Unhosted). These are very important project that have my full attention.

If you have reached this far in the post and still want to read more (with a little bit more of a learning perspective) then you should check out Bert De Coutere’s blogpost. Through him I learned about Open Advice, an interesting approach to capturing lessons learned.