Rob van Kranenburg One March afternoon in 2004, students from St Joost, Breda, set off for Oisterwijck, a lovely quiet provincial town. They were dressed in white suits (Figure 1) that made them look like weird medics, the kind of people who come to clean out your chicken farm after some horrible disease. Not the kind of people you would trust, at least that is what we (I was one of them) thought. Some had sticks to point at dangerous things - such as the sky… Don’t you trust it with all its satellite debris! Better watch out! Some students had stickers with icons of dangerous things, captured in words in a red triangle: Beware umbrellas, beware windows, beware trees. You can bump into these things, you know. You’d better watch out. Be careful. Hey! The idea behind this performance-like intervention was to obtain feedback from those who “got” the joke. The joke being a commedia dell’arte inspired comment on the converging top-down disciplining measures driven by the need for transparency and control. What happened instead was far more interesting but also far more disturbing. In his ‘Practice of Everyday Life’ De Certeau says: “There is so much belief, and so little credibility.” On that afternoon in Oisterwijck, we saw this played out in front of us. Whenever the students were approached with a question like “What kind of organisation are you from?”, they’d reply, “The government. We are the Watch Out Team, a new government-sponsored initiative”. And passers-by believed this. To the public we did not look like clinical scary government spooks; no, we came across as potential saviours, At the market where they dished out ‘Beware umbrellas’ stickers to grateful umbrella holders. I overheard a daughter telling her mother: “They should have done this much sooner!”. It seems that the current cultural/political paradigm of highlighting safety/insecurity issues only leads to more fear, more distrust, more anger, and more blaming as incidents inevitably happen. Aiming for the safe default is the current US policy. An alternative European strategy that aims to create an atmosphere of innovation and creativity should be to market, from a high level downwards, the idea of distributing insecurity: as there is no safe default, uncertainty becomes the default position. As a result of aiming for the safe default, the key themes and cultural and political views that are shaping our environment at the moment are fear, insecurity, and lack of safety. And this undermines other messages the public is getting. For instance, in communicating with the public, mobile industries use the image of a person surrounded by power stations, with connecting nodes that give the person “agency”/power. Security industries use exactly the same image, but in their case the “agency” lies with the nodes rather than the person. Yet in both cases the underlying idea is the same: you need to distribute yourself - or your data - into the environment. Pervasive computing, location based services, RFID (Radio Frequence Identification), are the necessary and logical next step in connectivity. From the pencil onwards technology has been about distributing data in an environment. But who is going to distribute themselves into an environment that is, as you are constantly being reminded, unsafe? 5 steps towards an ambient agora
It took Bernard Chouet, a French physicist a number of years to find that it is not the middle layer of data that hides information (as to whether a vulcano is going to burst) but the small one. Instead, vulcanologists had from the beginning of taking these charts thought that the middle line contained the data and the others were noise. (Figure 2)
It is the other way round.
This ability to determine what is data and what is noise will be the key to European success in the innovation triangle of R&D, Art/Culture and Sustainable economic products and services. Vital to this success is the implementation of a European Broadband Policy, fiber to the home. You don’t want the noise to be where it is now, with numerous operators and everyone waiting for others to start digging. Charles Ferguson claims that in the US current broadband policy is costing a lot of money:
“First, the pace of deployment and technological progress in broadband services remains seriously inadequate. Second, the principal source of this problem is the monopolistic structure, entrenched management, and political power of the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) and cable television (CATV) sectors, worsened by major deficiencies in the policy and regulatory systems covering these industries. Third, this is a truly important issue. Failure to improve broadband performance could reduce U.S productivity growth by 1% per year or more, as well as reducing public safety, military preparedness, and energy security. And finally, structural reforms in industry, policy, and the U.S. regulatory system are required.” (The United States Broadband Problem: Analysis and Policy Recommendations Charles H. Ferguson, 2002)
It may well be the case that the challenge of creating an ambient European agora might be less difficult then creating an angora that is not ambient. The following five notions may lead up to such an ambient angora if they are taking as starting points for discussion.
- Interfaces are the new processors
It is 1964, time of the original control console for the first supercomputer1, the CDC 6600, designed by Seymour Cray and manufactered by the Control Data Corporation (Figure 3). The supercomputer itself is shown in Figure 4.
Your average analogue computer2 in 1964 would look like the one in Figure 5.
Now in 1964 there was a mouse, shown in Figure 6
Figure 7 shows a drawing from Engelbart’s patent, do you recognize it?
Yes.
It is the only thing that we recognize.
It is the only thing that has not changed.
It is the interface.
From 1964 to 2004 all energy went to distributing system architecture, and centralizing system infrastructure.
From 1964 to 2004 all energy went to cutting down processor size, and speeding up processor power.
40 years well spent.
But can we afford such onesided innovation when it comes to the merging of the analogue and digital with ubicomp and RFID?
Clearly not.
Interface is as essential as infrastructure and architecture when it comes to connectivity in the real world.
- Reviving notions of friendship, sentiment and sentimentality.
All things tend to disappear, and especially things man made.
'Ephemeralisation' was Buckminster Fuller’s term for describing the way that a technology becomes subsumed in the society that uses it3. The pencil, the gramophone, the telephone, the cd player, technology that was around when we grew up, is not technology to us, it is simply another layer of connectivity. Ephemeralisation is the process where technologies are being turned into functional literacies; on the level of their grammar, however, there is very little coordination in their disappearing acts. These technologies disappear as technology because we cannot see them as something we have to master, to learn, to study. They seem to be a given. Their interface is so intuitive, so tailored to specific tasks, that they seem natural. In this we resemble the primitive man of Ortega y Gasset:
“….the type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world. The world is a civilised one, its inhabitant is not: he does not see the civilisation of the world around him, but he uses it as if it were a natural force. The new man wants his motor-car, and enjoys it, but he believes that it is the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree. In the depths of his soul he is unaware of the artificial, almost incredible, character of civilisation, and does not extend his enthusiasm for the instruments to the principles which make them possible.”
Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
This unawareness of the artificial, almost incredible, character of Techné – the Aristotelian term for technique, skill – is only then broken when it fails us:
“Central London was brought to a standstill in the rush hour on July 25 2002 when 800 sets of traffic lights failed at the same time -- in effect locking signals on red.”4
Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy: The Aristotelian protests against introducing pencil writing, may seem rather incredible now, at the time it meant nothing less than a radical change in the structures of power distribution. Overnight, a system of thought and set of grammar; an oral literacy dependant on a functionality of internal information visualization techniques and recall, was made redundant because the techniques could be externalised. Throughout Western civilization the history of memory externalisation runs parallel with the experienced disappearance of its artificial, man made, character. An accidental disappearance, however much intrinsic to our experience, that up till now has not been deliberate:
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it ” [1].
In Evolution, Alienation and Gossip, The role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century, Kate Fox claims:
“The space-age technology of mobile phones has allowed us to return to the more natural and humane communication patterns of pre-industrial society, when we lived in small, stable communities, and enjoyed frequent 'grooming talk' with a tightly integrated social network [2].”
According to her about two thirds of our conversation time is entirely devoted to social topics: “discussions of personal relationships and experiences; who is doing what with whom; who is 'in' and who is 'out' and why; how to deal with difficult social situations; the behaviour and relationships of friends, family and celebrities; our own problems with lovers, family, friends, colleagues and neighbours; the minutiae of everyday social life - in a word, gossip”
This underlines the importance of the notion of enaction that Varela outlines in his study Ethical Know-How’, Action, Wisdom and Cognition:
“enaction as the ability to negociate embodied, everyday living in a world that is inseperable from our sensory-motor capacities” [3]
For him this notion is the key to understand ethics in our everyday life. He wonders if the traditional way of setting up a cognitive set of ethical principles and axioms; you should do this, you should not do that…is actually indicative of the way people behave when confronted with difficult decisions. What do you do, he asks, when you enter your office and you see your colleague tied up in a what appears to be embarrassing telephone conversation? Would you not be very quiet and try to sneak out of the room unnoticed? Was that not an ethical decision that you made? And were you not immediately convinced that is was an embarrassing situation? Varela then wonders if we posses a kind of ethical sense. A sense to negociate encounters on a daily level.
In the philosophy of Aristoteles there are three domains of knowledge with three corresponding states of knowing; Theoria, Techné and Praxis.
Theoria with its domain of knowledge epistéme, is for the Greek gods, mortals can never reach this state of knowing. But they can strive for it. In Theoria and epistéme we recognize our concepts theory and epistemology.
In Techné with its domain of knowledge poèsis we find technology and poetry. The original meaning of the word 'technology' was concerned with know-how or method, and it is with the Great Exhibition of 1851 that the word becomes synonomous with machines.
It is therefore all the more interesting that the domain of knowledge which belonged to Praxis: phronesis has dropped out completely, not only in our language but also in our thought and ways of thinking. Phronesis, that knowledge that any one of us uses daily in the practice of living his everyday existence, is no longer recognized as an important domain of knowledge with a modern linguistic equivalent.
- Becoming not ‘being’: creolization
The notion of change is the only constant in a European Union. Within the various member states the very concept of the nation state as opposed to a viable Europe of regions is revitalized by the growing frictions between a native white and a partly native ‘foreign’ population. As groups grow more alike in size, research has shown that although you would expect close encounters to occur, the opposite is the case. Designing creole mental models for nation states, is therefore of vital importance for the creation of European stories, histories and common future projections.
- Bystander Intervention
A networked, hybrid, world needs a notion of understanding, what does it mean when understanding takes places or happens. When is a design successful? What are the criteria for its succesfull diseappearing into the local flow? What happens if you understand? When do you feel responsible for the implications of your understanding? A notion that can be developed in this context is the notion of bystander intervention. When do you feel responsible enough to act? To help? To offer your services? Design should allow for this process to happen.
- Alliances: slow money
Investments in innovative, high-risk projects should have a slow return, but no taxes. Of the total revenue 60% is payable only to the grandchildren of the investor. In this way everyone profits from developing sustainable products and services.
Case: health: ageing
How can we make these notions relevant in concrete cases? Let us take health, and especially the issue of ageing population. This is a global issue, all over the world people are getting older and there is less and less care.
The American solution is to use pervasive computing to design closed ‘care’ loops:
“RFID technology can also improve health care for the elderly, said researchers at Intel Research Seattle and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Caregivers receiving data via the Internet from RFID readers can monitor seniors' daily activities by recording which tagged items they have picked up, and when. By comparing real-time data with a record of an individual's normal daily routine, caregivers can easily spot any significant changes. Changes in an individual's daily routine often signal the onset of illness and cognitive decline, according to physicians and experts on aging.The new systems, Intel's Caregiver's Assistant and Georgia Tech's Memory Mirror, will also ensure that forgetful seniors take their medication on time and stick to their prescribed diets, their developers say.”5
Fewer and fewer living persons are involved in the process:
“The Caregiver's Assistant even automatically fills out a daily activities form, which is normally completed by caregivers for the elderly when they make home visits. The researchers presented the Caregiver's Assistant and Memory Mirror at a demonstration of assistive technologies for the aging in Washington, D.C., this week. The demonstration marked the founding of the Center for Aging Services Technologies, or CAST, an organization run by Intel that will promote the development of devices to help people "age in place," which means growing old at home rather than in a nursing home.”
How much home is such a home if it isn’t for the people? Where is the conversation? Where is the two thirds of vocal grooming that we need for us to feel human?6
The Japanese solution is to build robots. Rather than granting visas to foreign nurses,
“Japanese companies plan to start marketing a "robot suit," a motorized, battery-operated pair of pants designed to help the aged and infirm move around on their own. Then there is the Wakamaru, a mobile, three-foot-high speaking robot equipped with two camera eyes. It is used largely by working people to keep an eye on their elderly parents at home.”7
Most of the programming and interface work lies in hiding the robotness of the robots behind human features. Here also most people will be able to stay in their homes:
“Nursing homes are not seen as a financially viable option in a society where the portion of people aged 65 or over is forecast to soar to 36 percent in 2050, from 19 percent today. By that time there may be only one worker for every retiree.”
How much of a home is such a home if it isn’t for the people?
A European solution could be to design the corporeality of the home setting by using pervasive computing, domotics and the principle of bystander intervention. The strength of the use of ambient intelligence in i3 projects such as LiME is that it foresaw the principle of company and personal dashboards8 by creating community dashboards.
Community dashboards embed the principle of bystander intervention as everyone in the community becomes an interested party.
Community dashboards, embedded local city and town environments are not closed loop designs. The pervasive loop breaks down with human response This means questioning the notion of seamless design. There is no such thing as seamless transition in hybrid situations. Aiming for the development of middleware to somehow create this seamlessness on a different level is an intrinsic impossibility.
We urgently need creative ways to fund productive (now dead) projects such as LiME9 that suffer from the multidisciplinary approach that helps them in the creative phase but mangle them in the end as no single party is able to develop it further. Above all we need creative alliances that will accept a slow money return on investments in favour of a relatively stable prosperous free diverse market.
So where is Europe hiding?
Europe is hiding in her poets.
Ah, to be able to have such faith in the grandness, in the necessity, in the love like labour of building a Europe that cherishes its freedom, brotherhood and ambient agora,
Der Jungfer Europa ist verlobt mit dem schönen Geniusse der Freiheit, sie liegen einander im Arm, Sie schwelgen im ersten Kusse
Best bring them out.
Rob van Kranenburg is a media theorist interested in connectivity. He teaches at Willem de Kooning Academy and CMD, Breda. He organizes scenario workshops on the implementation of new technologies. Currently attached to the Virtual Platform. |
