Endless Curiosity

Just came home from Pecha Kucha New York event. Majority of the 20 seconds per slide times 20 slides presentations were quite random (they usually are as the format seems to be surprisingly challenging for many speakers for some reason), but there were a few brilliant 5 minute sessions too.

One of the inspiring ones was the presentation drilling down to the history and visuals of the New York Hard Core scene. The whole X thing (straight X, etc) made me think how the visual NYHC identity fits well to the visual future scenario project I’m working on. It uses the X as a central element as does the scenario model (with 4 scenarios) but giving the grid a whole new meaning.

Now move on, move on, nothing else to see here, this is still a work in progress and updates will follow…

It’s good to remember that even if the current state of the world looks overall somewhat gloomy, there is always another side of the story:

Recently some of the creative small businesses have truly thrived as the big players with high fees are in economical trouble. Similarly new cultural phenomena seem to emerge in the areas that have been struct the hardest by the economic downturn. It has been discussed that New Orleans, that experienced a major game changing event a few years earlier than the rest of the US, is now the home for many interesting projects, often started from the bottom-up.

The recent post on PSFK also plays with the idea of Detroit becoming a new Berlin, where for the past several years, artists, musicians and others seeking time and space to work, and an inexpensive place to live have flocked to the German capital. According to the post it might seem that Detriot may be headed towards a similar influx of like-minded people.

It’s good to keep in mind that big cultural movements, such as Punk, Disco or Hip hop, have emerged exactly during the hard times when poeple have been pushed to the limits and innovation starts to happen at the epicenter of change!

Back in 2007, when I was nominated for the Index Award and participated the conference in Copenhagen, I got my hands on the brand new book called Concept Design - How to solve complex challenges of our time [August 2007, published by FORA, the Danish Authority for Enterprise and Construction’s division for Research and Analysis].

The concept design model presented in the book has since followed me and has proved to be an effective framework for understanding succesfull innovations and how the consumer trends and insights can be applied to basically any innovation process, strategy or project.

Concept Design combines the competences of business, design and social sciences and lays in the intersection of these three areas of innovation. The key takeaway for me has been that ALL THE SUCCESSFUL INNOVATIONS USUALLY HAVE PAID ATTENTION TO ALL THESE KEY ASPECTS. (it also links nicely back to the Duncan Watt’s idea that a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, not on the flashy design of the product, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend…)

Concept Design model is explained by linking it to the complex challenges the companies are currently facing:

Today’s companies are seeking answers to the question “what?”. What should companies focus on? What problems should the
companies’ innovation solve?

In the past companies wanted answers to the question “how?”. How do we develop a new product? How should it be designed? How should it be marketed, and how should the company be organised to achieve the best solution?

When companies seek advice and answers to how questions they can turn to consulting engineers, designers, advertising agencies or management consultants. Until recently, this has provided a reasonably clear division of labour between different consulting offerings.

In terms of answering questions related to what a company should innovate and produce, companies have no obvious place to go. For that purpose consulting engineers, design companies, advertising agencies and management consultants could all be involved. However, none of these companies are single-handedly able to answer the question “what”. Hence, we are witnessing industry break-up and gliding.

The task of answering the question “what” is termed ‘concept design’ and the companies working with concept design are termed ‘concept design
companies’. Concept design is thus the discipline of creating concepts that answer the question “what”.

A new concept is a solution to a problem that has not yet been solved or which so far has been solved in an unsatisfactory way. A concept can be a single product, a single service, or a combination of different products and services. New technology can be an important part of a new concept, but a concept can also be created by making surprising new solutions based on well-known technologies or non-technological knowledge.

Creating new concepts and carrying out concept design require at least three different competences that must be combined in a new and untraditional way. The required competences are business, design, and social science.

Business competences are necessary for identifying the validity of the concept in the market as well as potential consequences for the company’s business model. Social science competences are necessary to interpret cultural trends, to observe user behaviour and to uncover user needs. Design competences are important when transforming new knowledge on user and market needs into functional and aesthetic products or services.

A successful concept can be measured on several parameters. For example, on whether the solution is a business success or if it solves social or environmental challenges. Successful concepts are not necessarily based solely on their functional characteristics. The experience of the solution can also provide the concept with its primary value.

You can download the Concept Design book from the FORA’s site.

Check out also the fascinating cube model explaining how concept design work is usually abstract, strategic and multidisciplinary compared to many other design challenges. Neat thinking!

Highly receommended!

Nice presentation of “pattern recognition”, a simple method for trendspotting, by an anthropologist and MIT professor Grant McCracken at PSFK NYC Conference 2008. Not my favorite cup of tea, but a good start for identifying the change.

(image from ATELIER AQUARIUM, not related…)

• In a worst-case scenario, where no action is taken to check the rise in Greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures would most likely rise by more than 5 °C by the end of the century. This would lead to significant risks of severe and irreversible impacts.
• In the most optimistic scenario, action to reduce emissions would need to start in 2010 and reach a rapid and sustained rate of decline of 3 per cent every year. Even then there would still only be a 50-50 chance of keeping temperature rises below around 2°C. This contrasts sharply with current trends, where the world’s overall emissions are currently increasing at 1 per cent every year. Only an early and rapid decline in emissions gets anywhere near to the 50 per cent reduction in emissions needed by 2050 to avoid large increases in temperature as recommended in the latest IPCC report.
• Two further scenarios have been considered, which fall into the middle-ground of temperature projections. Delaying until 2030 together with a slow reduction of emissions results in a 4ºC rise by 2100 compared with almost 3ºC linked to an early but slow reduction in emissions. All of these temperature projections are the ‘most likely’ rises.
  

  It is increasinly clear the “middle ground” is unstable in that once you hit 500 ppm (or possibly lower), the amplifying feedbacks kick in: These feedbacks include:

• The defrosting of the permafrost
• The drying of the Northern peatlands (bogs, moors, and mires).
• The destruction of the tropical wetlands
• Decelerating growth in tropical forest trees — thanks to accelerating carbon dioxide
• Wildfires and Climate-Driven forest destruction by pests
• The desertification-global warming feedback
• The saturation of the ocean carbon sink

Dr. Vicky Pope, head of climate change predictions at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, writes in the UK Times that

In a worst-case scenario, where no action is taken to check the rise in Greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures would most likely rise by more than 5°C by the end of the century.

It may be “a worst-case scenario” for rational people like her, but right now even Hadley understands it is better described as the “business-as-usual” case.

The consequences of 5.5°C warming by 2100, which Hadley says is “likely” on our current emissions path are all but unimaginable — mass extinction, devastating ocean acidification, brutal summer-long heat waves, rapidly rising sea levels, widespread desertification. But they are rarely studied or articulated by scientists who can’t imagine humanity would be so stupid as to let this happen.

A 5.5°C warming would inevitably lead to the mid- to high-range of currently projected sea level rise — 5 feet or more by 2100, followed by 6 to 20 inches a decade for centuries (see “Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100“). That means 100 million or more environmental refugees by century’s end alone.

Then we have desertification of one third the planet and moderate drought over half the planet, plus the loss of all inland glaciers that provide water to a billion people.

“The unexpectedly rapid expansion of the tropical belt constitutes yet another signal that climate change is occurring sooner than expected,” noted one climate researcher last December. As a recent study led by NOAA noted, “A poleward expansion of the tropics is likely to bring even drier conditions to” the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, Australia and parts of Africa and South America.”

How hot is it likely to get in this country on the do little path?

Well, 5.5°C global warming means an average warming of 15°F over much of the inland United States. Based on two studies in the last few years:

By century’s end, extreme temperatures of up to 122°F would threaten most of the central, southern, and western U.S. Even worse, Houston and Washington, DC could experience temperatures exceeding 98°F for some 60 days a year. Much of Arizona would be subjected to temperatures of 105°F or more for 98 days out of the year–14 full weeks.

Yet that conclusion is based on studies of only 700 ppm and 850 ppm, so it could get much hotter than that.

Then we have the rest of life on this planet. In 2007, the IPCC warned that as global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C [relative to 1980 to 1999], model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe. That is a temperature rise over pre-industrial levels of a bit more than 4.0°C. So a 5.5°C rise would likely put extinctions beyond the high end of that range.

And, of course, “When CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans.” There aren’t many studies of what happens to the oceans as we get toward 800 to 1000 ppm, but it appears likely that much of the world’s oceans, especially in the southern hemisphere, become inhospitable to many forms of marine life. A 2005 Nature study concluded these “detrimental” conditions “could develop within decades, not centuries as suggested previously.” Large parts of the ocean will become hot, acidic dead zones on our current emissions path.

An interesting piece of research by the Facebook Data Team published in Economist and further discussed in a post by the FB Data Team that finally sheds some light to the age old question of the effects of communication technology to the so called Dunbar number, the magical maximum number of 150 (148 to be exact) contacts in the social network that human brain is hardwired to handle. In addition, and more interestingly, the study found out that we tend to have the same old small circles circles for intimate relationships that we had before the era of social networking services, or any other preceding technologies:

“In Facebook, an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

What mainly goes up [with the help of technology], therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden’s ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

Technologies like News Feed and RSS readers allow people to consume content from their friends and stay in touch with the content that is being shared. This consumption is still a form of relationship management as it feeds back into other forms of communication in the future. Still, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”

The graph below shows the same data as the first graph, only combined for both genders. What it shows is that, as a function of the people a Facebook user actively communicate with, you are passively engaging with between 2 and 2.5 times more people in their network.

What effect does a 2x increase in connectivity mean for a network? The easiest way to observe this is to look at one person’s personal network:

“The first diagram shows an entire network, namely all of the friends, and all of the relationships between the friends. It is clear that the cluster on the top is the highly connected set of coworkers, and the cluster on the right is another group of friends.

The second cell shows only those relationships that have reciprocal communication. Many of the individuals in the network are completely disconnected or out of touch with each other. Moving to the third cell, we see the slightly more connected network containing one-way communication. This includes every person who wrote a comment, sent a message or wrote a wall post to one of my coworker’s other friends. The final cell shows the passive network, including all those people who were keeping up with their friends. While some of the friends are still disconnected, a very large percentage are now reachable through some set of observations.

The stark contrast between reciprocal and passive networks shows the effect of technologies such as News Feed. If these people were required to talk on the phone to each other, we might see something like the reciprocal network, where everyone is connected to a small number of individuals. Moving to an environment where everyone is passively engaged with each other, some event, such as a new baby or engagement can propagate very quickly through this highly connected network.”