I sometimes use the Metcalfe Law in my work to describe how communication systems (mobile phones application, location-based services, etc.) have a value only if there is a critical mass of users. Being the only local boob with a fax machine does not allow you to go beyond showing off, it’s actually like having one shoe. First formulated by Robert Metcalfe wrt to Ethernet, Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system(N2).

It’s then interesting to dig that stuff and see why very serious folks in IEEE Spectrum are pondering that argument. They actually critique how this “law” has been turned into a mantra during the Internet Boom (and now with the Web2.0 frenziness) and mostly focus on the correctness of its definition that sits in between linear and exponential growth:

“If Metcalfe’s mathematics were right, how can the law be wrong? Metcalfe was correct that the value of a network grows faster than its size in linear terms; the question is, how much faster? If there are n members on a network, Metcalfe said the value grows quadratically as the number of members grows.

We propose, instead, that the value of a network of size n grows in proportion to n log(n).“

(Taken from here)

But more importantly:

“The fundamental flaw underlying both Metcalfe’s and Reed’s laws is in the assignment of equal value to all connections or all groups. (…) In general, connections are not all used with the same intensity. In fact, in large networks, such as the Internet, with millions and millions of potential connections between individuals, most are not used at all. So assigning equal value to all of them is not justified“

Why do I blog this? it’s interesting to understand how such law can be criticized. I actually do think the cluster metaphor is still valid but one should be cautious about how to employ it (and take the limits they describe into account). Should there be a commonsensical use of that law and a more mathematical one (the latter…. to make quantitative forecast… which I am not into)?

Julian posted on the near future laboratory website the translation from an interview we gave to Digicult, an italian magazine about digital culture.

The interview deals with the near future laboratory’s existence (” an opportunity in a design and research practice that operates between traditional long-term academic research studies and short-term commercial product development“), rationale (”a positive reaction to the difficulties of engaging in creative, insightful, fun and innovative work with fewer of the constraints we have found in academia and in the normal commercial world“) and some current projects.

Why do I blog this? tracking the near future laboratory conversations!

In a WSJ article, Jason Fry how he feels like George Jetson with all the technologies that we have around (cell phone, TiVo, etc). He interestingly describes what was interesting in that TV series:

“Then there was another influence, one that makes space opera sound like real opera. That, of course, was “The Jetsons” — the Hanna- Barbera show featuring flying cars, robot maids, and Space Needle apartment buildings filled with Rube Goldberg labor-saving devices. I doubt the creators of “The Jetsons” ever imagined how they’d
influence kids growing up in the 1970s.
(…)
Why such an influence for a show that was basically “The Flintstones” in aerial houses? (…) The only reason “The Jetsons” is a touchstone for the future instead of just childhood nostalgia is that it was “about” the future –
which was bound to arrive because, well, that’s what the future does. (…) “The Jetsons,” on the other hand, is pretty close to a sure thing, conversationally. (…) The other thing about the future is it tends to arrive slowly — so slowly that often we don’t notice how thoroughly things are changing.“

And then relates to today’s situation:

“I may not have a ticket to a moonbase quite yet, but if you could send me back to the 70s to tell
my nine-year-old self what’s coming, he’d be thrilled. To him, for all intents and purposes I am George Jetson.

What technological milestones have taken place during your lifetime? What do you take for granted that your nine-year-old self would have never believed possible? And what do you think the future holds? “

Why do I blog this? pure interest in (past) representation of the future and how it unfolded afterwards. Cultural artifacts like TV series are part of that ecosystem. And it’s crazy how today the word “jetsons” is employed in discourse about the future (newspaper articles, futurists conference, designers’ discussion and even academic papers).

This notion of a “touchstone” for the future is important, the normative representation of “what could be” at that time is the benchmark towards which one evaluate what we have today (”where’s my 3D video phone that I could use in my flying car?”).

An interview of foresight research Wendel Bell by himself offers interesting elemeents (although the idea of a robotic interviewer is a bit lame). It was actually published in 2005 in the Journal of Futures Studies 10(2) (November 2005): pp. 113-124.

Some excerpts:

“Prediction—or whatever euphemism a futurist may use, such as projection, forecast, foresight, prophecy, or prospective—necessarily enters into what a futurist does. In fact, it is one of the defining features of futures studies. In contemplating the future, we imagine alternative possible futures and we try to assess which futures would be most probable under a variety of conditions, including alternative actions that people might take. We try to answer the “what if” question. For example, what could or would happen if people did this, or that,
or something else? But—and this is important—we seldom predict a single future.
(…)
I am not suggesting that futurists have all the right solutions. But they have been asking the right questions. For example: What can we humans do to create societies that will be sustainable into the far future? What are the conditions under which all people everywhere can have sufficient water and food, modern sanitation, good health, freedom, personal security, and community support?
(…)
Some answers come from the futurist program of investigating the facts of the past and the present and, based on them, making speculative and imaginative, but presumptively true, assertions about possible and probable futures. Answers come, too, from judging these futures by some scale of values, and assessing their relative desirability. They come also from communication among people about these assessments of the desirability of alternative futures and letting people’s voices be heard by decision-makers. Answers come, as I said before, from gaining foresight into the true consequences of our actions. They come, also, from understanding that all people ought to be included in our community of concern, realizing that our own beliefs may be wrong, and showing tolerance toward the beliefs of others“

Why do I blog this? even though the notion of “futurist/m” seems a bit passé and awkward (long-range design, future research, foresight research sounds better), there are some pertinent things here, a good introduction for his book.

Yet another interesting interview of William Gibson! Some excerpts I found pertinent:

“The slot in culture that I’m most closely associated with is one in which charlatans declare that they know the future. My job is to sit near that slot and when people approach me I say: ‘Only charlatans say they really know the future.’ I sit near the tent where they give out bullshit and offer people a different sort of dialogue. My role is to raise questions.
(…)
Virtual reality was one of our most recent experiences of a future that didn’t happen. The one before that would have been interactive television, on which millions of dollars were spent. Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted it at all. But the Internet wasn’t here yet, and people were saying, it would great if people could go back and forth with media, but it turns out the medium they wanted to do it with is one that presents the world, rather than a bunch of entertainment — the Internet.
(…)
One of the things that I’ve found through whatever loosey goosey reading of human history I’ve managed through my life, is that very little is really new. (…) The present zeitgeist, now, is only one news cycle long. Something could happen tomorrow that would throw everything into a cocked hat“

Why do I blog this? some interesting points here and I actually prefer reading what a sci-fi writer says, as opposed to weird futurists.

As described by Bob Johansen in his book about foresight, Herman Kahn interestingly use this disclaimer in his reports: “some of the ideas in this report are deliberately misleading in order to provoke thought“.

I like that sort of angle, very close to the near future laboratory spin; not so much of the “Misleading” thing but rather about the oblique strategy it leads to. It’s maybe more “niche” or “provocative” in our case.

“Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, Knowledge (Human Science for a New Era, 1)” by Wendell Bell is one the best book I’ve read in the last couple of months. It’s definitely the bible of foresight research with some extensive discussion of future research epistemology, introduction to research methods, a detailed description of assumptions and examples of work.

I won’t comment on the whole thing but will maybe grab and comment some part of the book in different blogposts. There are some really good stuff there, so I need to take notes.

Bell’s discussion about the not-factual existence and research about the future is interesting and lead him to describe phenomena that aid the scientific delineating of alternative descriptions and assessments of the future:

“

1. Present images of the futures and expectations for the future that people hold, that is, their conceptions of the possible.
2. People’s belief about the most likely future, that is, their subjective probabilities concerning the chances of particular futures occurring.
3. The goals, values, and attitudes people hold; the preferences they use to evaluate alternative images of the future, that is, people’s hopes and fears.
4. Present intentions of people to act
5. Obligations and commitments that people have to others (…) knowing those responsibilities can help futurists anticipate future behaviors of the people involved.
6. Knowledge of the past: Tradition (memories of the past, legends and customs, highly valued patterns of behavior), the use of trend analysis, the restatement of scientific explanations into a predictive form, analogy, past images of the future
7. Knowledge of the present: we can view the present as containing at least two ways of exploring the future: (a) the design perspective (some things that now exist or are developing can be expected to continue in the future and have implications for shaping the future), (b) present possibilities for the future.

“

Why do I blog this? As the author explains, no one of these “yields easily to measurement and interpretations” since they are, after all, subjective phenomena but they can have objective manifestation that can be observed and from which they can be inferred. This is exactly the point why I am interested in these “sources”.. More specifically, two reasons why I am blogging this (1) because I am interested in what constitutes “data” in foresight research, (2) because I am preparing a course about design+foresight I will be giving in 2008 (possibly at different places, the school and for a master in interaction design in France).

“Some fear . . . a loathsome “post-human” future. They predict a kind of technologically incubated mind-rot, leading to loss of identity, loss of control, overload, dependence, invasion of privacy, isolation, and the ultimate rejection of the body. And we do need to be cautious, for to recognise the deeply transformative nature of our biotechnological unions is at once to see that not all such unions will be for the better. But if I am right – if it is our basic human nature to annex, exploit, and incorporate nonbiological stuff deep into our mental profiles – then the question is not whether we go that route, but in what ways we actively sculpt and shape it. By seeing ourselves as we truly are, we increase the chances that our future biotechnological unions will be good ones. “

In Clark, A. 2003. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Mind, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Forbes had a good bunch of articles about the future lately. Among them, the on about why video telephones never took off (even though they have been pushed on the public for more than 40 years) is quite interesting. The author, Neil Steinberg describes some reasons ranging from bad phone service, need for big bandwidth and need to have people with the device as well (”To invest in a PicturePhone for yourself was about as useful as buying one shoe,” notes technology writer Jonathan Margolis).

What is interesting there is how Steinberg highlight the problem of “futurism” in this context:

“Futurism has a tendency to take the products of today and merely extrapolate them. Thus TV becomes 3-D TV, cars become flying cars and telephones become video telephones. Sometimes it takes the sanity of the marketplace to dash cold water on those technological projections. We were all going to take our nutrition in pills until someone realized that preparing and consuming food was one of the primary joys of life, and no one wants to swallow food pills.
(…)
future marvels of the past–food pills, jet packs, flying cars and, yes, video telephones–have an inertia that reality doesn’t seem to be able to completely thwart. They manage to be both old and repudiated, yet somehow retain their cachet as attractive potential future wonders. Video phones remain a real possibility–if they wish, people placing phone calls over the Internet can already see each other using Webcams. It’s easy to imagine this becoming standard practice.

Or not. Because no matter how cheap and easy pervasive computer technology makes video telephones, they still bump up against one central issue: whether people will want to see and be seen by those they communicate with. “People did not want to comb their hair to answer the telephone,” said Lucky in an interview with Bill Moyers. Of course that could change, too, and wouldn’t it be ironic if the breakthrough to popular video telephony ended up not being any technological advance, but a shift in human vanity. Once we stop combing our hair when we go out, then we’ll finally embrace video telephones.
“

Why do I blog this? critical foresight is about exactly this: understanding the reasons WHY something did happened or not happened, hence I always like reading about this sort of story. To some extent, “failed futurism” is one of my favorite topic.

“What happened to the science-fiction future?” by Katherine Mangu-Ward is a very good piece from Reason. The article is about sci-fi futures that never happened, technological innovation and user’s pragmatism. Some excerpt I liked:

“Fanciful futurist visions can obscure all the neat stuff we’ve accumulated, once-wild innovations that are far cooler and more functional than jetpacks. (Microwave ovens, anyone?) They also make it easy to forget that the ultimate responsibility for choosing which technologies fill our lives lies with us, the ordinary consumers, more than any rocket scientists.
(…)
Small boys everywhere will always doodle Ferraris with wings when they’re bored in class, but the actual lived “future” is not something that leaps off an engineer’s drawing board or from a novelist’s visions. It emerges from complex, unpredictable interactions between visionary inspiration, technological limits, and consumers’ insistent pragmatism.
(…)
In another recent book, The Shock of the Old (Oxford University Press), the British historian David Edgerton posits that technological innovations don’t matter as much as we think they do. We tend to consider scientific and engineering breakthroughs themselves as the important thing, he says, when what really matters is how we fit them into our lives. Edgerton disparages our high hopes for each new innovation as “futurism,” a disease that led us to believe in a new world birthed by engineers, where electricity would be “too cheap to meter,”“

Why do I blog this I definitely like this topic, and working as a UX researcher in a tech school makes really buying the things that are described here. The article gives intriguing examples (skyscrapers, jetpacks, roads-that-must-roll and underwater dwellings) about techno-push futures that have troubles finding their way to users acceptance… and it’s not because there is a tech breakthrough that a product is there, acceptable, usable and successful. The last bit about the role of science-fiction is also interesting considering the recent books/short stories by Bruce Sterling or William Gibson:

“we—shouldn’t read science fiction to get a sneak peak at as-yet-unseen innovative technologies. Rather than as a blueprint for what should happen, we should read it to imagine the ways humanity will figure out how to use whatever shows up, or to tweak the impressive tech that’s already lying around.“

Stone, A.R. (1991). Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? In Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): 81-118.

An excerpt I like from this paper:

“Neuromancer reached the hackers who had been radicalized by George Lucas’s powerful cinematic evocation of humanity and technology infinitely extended, and it reached the technologically literate and socially disaffected who were searching for social forms that could transform the fragmented anomie that characterized life in Silicon Valley and all electronic industrial ghettos. In a single stroke, Gibson’s powerful vision provided for them the imaginal public sphere and refigured discursive community that established the grounding for the possibility of a new kind of social interaction. As with Paul and Virginia in the time of Napoleon and Dupont de Nemours, Neuromancer in the time of Reagan and DARPA is a massive intertextual presence not only in other literary productions of the 1980s, but in technical publications, conference topics, hardware design, and scientific and technological discourses in the large.“

Why do I blog this? avidly reading some material about the relationship between media/culture and their possible influence on technological development. In my talk about the user experience of ubiquitous computing (and how it fails most of the time), I often quote the problem of how sci-fi has created a normative future of what should be the tech future. This quote nicely exemplifies this issue by describing how a novel such as Neuromancer can be think of a common ground for engineers and designers. One can see these novels as sort of anchors to point what the future will be.

Wednesday started with a talk with Julian at SK Telecom in the Technology Innovation Planning Team, a sort of foresight/innovation group. Our presentation can be found here (.pdf, 15.5Mb).

The point of the meeting was to discuss the near future laboratory methodologies and projects. We spent 2 hours talking, exchanging about foresight methods, trend analysis and how it’s difficult to have a rigorous scientific methodology. Our point was that we aimed at mixing wide-analysis of social, cognitive and cultural trends to inspire sketching and prototyping + testing. Prototypes are not the end per se but a way to try and gain some understanding about tech uses and innovation. A sort of bricolage way to inspect the near future. We insisted on this aspect that we did focus not on tomorrow’s design nor long term-range foresight but 3-4 years ahead.

The presentation also included past project description such as the blogject workshop serie (See the report here and there), insisting on some concrete outcomes and how we appreciated that the meme spread and lead some attendants to design their own projects (see Blinks and Buttons for example).

Present projects we described revolved around the “new interaction rituals” (going beyond current I/O in pervasive computing) and the “new interaction partners” (letting pets participating in video games and the social web).

Thanks JongChae Oh for the invitation!

Reading “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design” by Bill Buxton, I ran across this part that I found relevant:

“in order to design a tool, we must make our best efforts to understand the larger social and physical context within which it is intended to function. Hutchins refers to such situated activities as “in the wild” in order to distinguish their real-world embodiment from some abstract laboratory manifestation that is as idealized as it is un-realistic. I call this process that expressly takes these types of considerations into account “design for the wild”.
(…)
The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday

To adequately take the social and physical context into account in pursuing a design, we must experience some manifestation of it in those contexts (the wild) while still in the design cycle“

Why do I blog this? preparing some proposal I found this point very nicely expressed and may quote it. Buxton’s phrasing interestingly exemplifies this important point. Besides, I quite like the Gibsonesque “The future is already here but it’s just not evenly distributed” approach situated in time and mostly in the past.

Read in “Shampoo Planet” (Douglas Coupland):

“We discuss the future a lot, my friends and me. My best friend, Harmony, (…) thinks the future will be like rap music and computer codes, filled with Xs, Qs, and Zs: “Letters liberated by the computer keyboard.”

Why do I blog this? I often find funny how sci-fi pieces (novels, manga, comics, anime, movies) use x,y,z as well as crazy numbers or even greek signs to talk about devices of the future. Which is why I like that quote.

Yesterday I gave a talk in Lyon for the video game/mobile game industry about the “near futures of digital entertainment”. Slide are available here (english) and ici (en français).

The talk started by a quick overview of research projects about mobile/pervasive gaming (location-based games, mobile tagging, etc) showing how this is difficult to throw to the markets (hardware/software issues + infrastructure problems…). I then tried to show some hints about what to do with examples that I find interesting and very down-to-earth: using the phone microphone, tv-phone tie in, etc. The point was to show people from the industry that they can do something almost overnight, not using ultra-tech fancy GPS solutions and stuff.

I concluded the talk with a mapping of the possibilities (in the form of an uncertainty cone):

The horizontal line shows the consumer market. When circles/things are close to the edges, it means that it’s not certain to be around before few years? The problem is to find what can turned them into more market-orientated products. For example, a way to bring location-based games closer to the market would be to forget the use of GPS but to let people self-disclose their locations.