Meet Oblong Industries‘ G-speak, an amazing gesture based interface à la Minority Report allowing ‘hands-on’ interaction between people and data. The resemblance is no co-incidence as one of Oblong’s founders – John Underkoffler, formerly at MIT’s Tangible Media Group – was one of the science advisors to the movie-team.

“The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.”

Some of the system’s features seem to build further upon early-day HCI projects at Frauenhofer (GMD at the time) in the 90s.

NewScientist recently reported on some amazing new discoveries using advanced fMRI technologies (see also here). The team of Yukiyasu Kamitani at Japan’s ATR’s Computational Neuroscience Laboratories …

“[...] has used an image of brain activity taken in a functional MRI scanner to recreate a black-and-white image from scratch. “By analysing the brain signals when someone is seeing an image, we can reconstruct that image,” says Kamitani. This means that the mind reading isn’t limited to a selection of existing images, but could potentially be used to “read off” anything that someone was thinking of, without prior knowledge of what that might be.”

What if one could use it to communicate with people with lock-in syndrome? What if ‘design thinking’ or ‘thinking a design’ would be enough to prototype? What if future privacy laws would include the privacy of one’s mind and thoughts? It is not hard to image many uses … yet also abuses of such a technology as it matures.

Image courtesy of Neuron/Cell Press via NewScientist

Games, simulations, … have long entered the arena of what-if In fact they have always been in the position of luring our minds into the mode of unfocussing and thinking in terms of multiple possible outcomes, alternative scenarios, strategies etc. Ecofootprint calculators allow us to play what-if with our own (un)sustainable behaviours, GIS-enabled knowledge and simulation systems serve as decision support tools for everyone from urban planners to policymakers, etc.

In true W3 (weird-ways-of-the-web) style, we recently stumbled upon MetroQuest … an interactive scenario planning tool allowing stakeholders (e.g. in the future of a city) to experiment with the future, the outcomes of policy choices, external drivers of change etc. According to their website, MetroQuest can help:

•     Communicate complex planning concepts easily to lay people.
  
•     Generate excitement and public awareness for your initiatives.
  
•     Increase public and stakeholder participation in your planning initiatives.
  
•     Help the community develop an understanding and acceptance for policy decisions.
  
•     Create broad-based consensus for your community’s future vision.

The tool appears to be mostly focussed on quantifiable and quantitative change. Besides a process-embedded version of MetroQuest using handheld keypads in stakeholder workshops, the system also has been deployed online (see the Yellowknife and Niagara cases).

We should have known … looking at our stats: flying cars are still one of people’s favourite future subjects. So to still your hunger, check out the Icon A5. 

With space tourism being commercialized and low cost airlines booming, maybe personal flight is finally on the verge of its long-awaited breakthrough.

Via Wired, Image by Andrew Zuckerman

Set to go live July 2009, Amsterdam’s CityCargo is about to liberate the inner city streets of heavy traffic. Goods destined for shops & offices will be loaded onto a specially equipped tram via loading platforms at the edge of the city. In town, small electric cars will unload them from the tram at specific drop off points and run the last mile to their destinations.

Similar initiaves are already operative in cities around Europe and others are bound to follow (Belgian cities: take note and catch up, please). The CargoTram for example runs in Dresden and delivers parts to the Volkswagen factory, the GüterBim already runs through Vienna, etc.

What if these trams would also carry waste out of town? Or filter/clean city air while running?

As American philosopher Susan Sontag – among others – reminded us, there is no neutral way to picture reality. The photographer’s eye and his mind’s eye’s point of view through which he/she looks at reality is always in the middle, directing gaze, adding interpretation to a seemingly – but only seemingly – ‘objective’ act of perception. Different perspectives, different intentions, different interpretations … the wealth of the eye.

Digital photography has exploded the amount of pictures taken around the world. Social media have brought them together, now what? Recreating reality ? Creating alternative realities? Microsoft developed Photosynth, but now the image gurus at Adobe have also joined the race to the next visual killer app.

Inspired by Bladerunner tech envisionments, Shai Avidan, joined by MIT’s Bill Freeman, recently showcased Adobe’s new Infinite Images technology at their MAX Europe conference in Milan (MAX blog). Check out the video as well as John Nack’s post here.

In 1975 Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia (revisited by NY Times here), a novel which quickly gained cult status (see also video). Three years later, fascinated by the book, architect Craig Hodgetts (of Hodgetts+Fung Design) crafted a set of amazing drawings depicting some of the scenes and concept envisioned in the book, eager to produce Ecotopia for the big screen. Imagine retro-yet-ever-so-futuristic balloon generators over San Francisco Bay, solar-powered high-speed mag-lev trains, helium-filled mylar balloons to lift and orient a wind-powered generator, …

Callenbach said it right: “It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now, but without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.” 

Inspired by TheArchitectsNewspaperBlog

It might be considered old news in these twittery times, yet somehow it rises to foreground in today’s economic climate with a sense of lasting freshness and value. Students at the RCA’s Design Interactions department led by Anthony Dunne, carried out a fascinating design research project in collaboration with Intel’s People & Practices Research Group entitled ‘the future of money’. They explored new types of value and value interaction from a variety of perspectives, which led to some pretty thoughtprovoking and even poetic future views .

Imagine sensing how much e-money you’re spending. Or imagine a world in which interpersonal relationships and human interaction time are the new value-basis, or energy is currency. What if the favour bank would be our main way of exchanging products and services, hence value? Think about new relationships to money, virtual piggy banks, ethics/ethical trading, a liquid economy, live tissue for value, listening to your good and bad side as purchase advisors, gesture-based payment or counting rituals (a, b), 1 bankcard per personal value, consciousness enhancing money traces, miser pathologies in an e-money world, new controlling behaviors, complementary responsible-behaviour-currencies, mitigation management, identities as currency, new e-money rituals, a national fiscal health service, physical money as a luxury product, future money paradoxes, domestic economy,  country-company mergers, 

The world could use (a lot) more debate-stimulating ‘design massages’ like these, which assess topics from multiple angles in a tangible way, which ask questions, which dare to envision a world based upon different standards. Pantopical in nature, keep up the good work Tony, Fiona et al.!

We could have easily called this post the future of money, yet in a more profound sense the current financial climate and the questions it is raising are provoking us to rethink value and the systems we devise to organize processes related to it.

Heather Moore, User Experience Manager at Vodafone, recently launched the lovely public domain initiative KashKlash aimed at an open discussion to co-create our future value systems. The sharing economy, the reputation economy, the gift economy, the free economy, alternative economies, shifting balances between production and consumption, ways to replace money, etc. are all themes up for debate over at the website.

 

“We are envisioning a new world where today’s aging, less useful and even dangerous financial systems

are replaced by or mixed with more disruptive innovations and exchanges. Imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s financial resources. Maybe you’re a refugee or stateless. Yet you still have your handset and laptop and Internet and a broadband cellphone connection….”

 

Bruce Sterling proposes to explore 4 future scenarios, set up around 2 key variables: the degree of stability in exchange systems (ranging from a ‘confusing mess’ to ‘massive change’) & the state of communication technology (ranging from ‘old and broken’ to ‘the new cloud’).

Check out the stories of the scenarios’ main characters Big Mama, Greifswald, Rebel kids and Brixels.

Technology explicitly designed or employed in such a way as to alter people’s behaviour (in a sense, technology as a medium always does, interaction design for example makes extensive use of affordances for example) is making its way into consumer products in ever more subtle, even poetic ways. According to Wired …

“Ford and Honda’s next-gen instrument clusters feature trees (a vine in Ford’s case) that grow more lush as drivers learn to hypermile — the fine art of maximizing fuel economy. Leaves grow like crabgrass in springtime if you use a light touch on the accelerator and go easy on the brakes. Drive like Jimmie Johnson and they’ll wither faster than General Motors stock.

The idea, says Honda VP Dan Bonawitz, is “to help drivers improve their efficient driving skills by making the hybrid experience more fun and rewarding.”

The article also includes reflections by Clifford Nass, which some of you with a background in HCI or interaction design might know from the lovely book he wrote together with Byron Reeves several years ago: “The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places”

Reading such developments, one might be reminded of what B.J. Fogg once called captology, which led to Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology lab. Like any paradigm it can be used for better or worse, yet let’s be positive and imagine this kind of design thinking aimed at mentality changes applied to issues of sustainability, good citizenship, healthcare, etc. Imagine waste bins encouraging you to sort your waste, mirrors encouraging you to brush your teeth as you’re supposed to (no scifi any longer), …

Inspired by Wired

… ironing shirts, wasting energy, shortening the lifespan of your shirt’s cloth. The Swedish brand Eton shirts has developed a coatingless cotton-fibre which returns to its original shape after washing. In fact bodyheat is enough to iron your shirt as you wear it. The fibre responds to heat – not unlike shape memory alloys) – to maintain its form.

Let’s extrapolate such a development for a second: imagine a world in which no shirts need to be ironed any longer. Consequences: significant decrease of energy usage since irons no longer need to be heated, presses are no longer necessary, thereby also increasing the lifespan of the shirt since the cloth is spared from several aggressive interactions. Combine that with a waterless washing machine such as Electrolux’ Airwash system. In terms of saving the environment. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how energy- & eco-efficient the production of the special cotton fibre (and the rest of its lifecycle) is before we can truly assess its impact. From a socio-economic perspective however – like any technological development which renders human (inter)action obsolete – the no-iron cotton fibre – if used on a large scale – might put extra stress on or obliterate ironing shops.

On a higher level of abstraction: think of all the kind of products which nowadays, because of their systemic or material makeup, require labour (implying usage of all kinds of other resources) in order to remain functional, usable etc. Windows need to be washed, houses need to be heated or cooled, etc.

What if … changes at the material/systemic level of these products, which nearly all of us use, could make these ‘wasteful cycles’ of energy. If employed at a large scale, effects (both positive and negative) of these changes can often be exponential in nature as they work their way through the chain of reactions linked to the lifecycle of the product. They alter the system of their ‘ecology’, their context (whether bio-, techno- or homosphere). Glass can be self-cleaning, houses can go without or using a minimum of heating/cooling energy, etc.

“In this nearly 27 minute video Bruce Sterling, a leading futurist, speaker, columnist and science fiction writer, shares his vision on where mobile is heading. Preaching his story from a somewhat unconventional place, the pulpit instead of the stage, he managed to silence the audience. Check the video to see what he had to say to the Mobile sinners.”

Via MobileMonday

In preparation of the upcoming US presidential elections, now only days away, both WIRED and Monocle did the exercise and laid out the cards of their ‘dream’ cabinet … not necessarily of politicians, of people running for power by choice, but of individuals they see most fit for the job to solve at least some of the most pressing challenges that US society is facing. It would be all too easy to dismiss their move as technocratic dreamery. Times are achanging and systems of governance, leadership and societal problem solving are not immune to that.

It is an interesting thought experiment to ponder over the future of our socio-political systems, yet it is also true that the person who dares to ask ‘what comes next, after democracy?’ can be fairly sure to be looked upon in disbelief, fear or outright insult. We use the term democracy often lightly – and in the meantime do not always do justice to its complexity by dumbing it down to but the folk notions that fill the airwaves – as if the concept has remained the same since it was coined in the stoas and on the agoras of ancient Greece. The term has remained the same throughout the ages but what the complex denotes has changed and continues to change. To remain in sync with the dynamics of contemporaneity and those of times to come, systems (need to) change. Change does not necessarily mean that good characteristics of the current system will disappear (nor bad ones, sic) yet reinvention ought to aim for the best fit not on where we are but also in view of where we wish to go. So what are the images people have of the future of our socio-political and institutional systems? How far can we and do we dare to look ahead?

In times in which big, familiar ideologies are fading or have stopped reinventing themselves and the political landscape looks bleak, covered with visionless or populist rubble, in times in which change is fast, challenges are huge and increasingly exceed election cycles and national borders, imagine a future where perhaps not party-politics but projects to tackle challenges define the team and the dynamics of the game of governance and leadership, where not politicians but a diverse mix of people takes the lead , where management vs. innovation of the nation and its systems are perhaps two different games played by different groups of people, within different timeframes, where … There are many aspects of our current system that could be different in the future. A thousand tomorrows are possible for those who set their mind to it.

For those among you who still believe that little innovation can be expected to come out of Africa, check out AfriGadget every once and a while or catch up on Ethan‘s musings. It is a humbling experience, which forces one to see, realize and admit one’s ignorance with respect to the diversity of innovation throughout the world, especially in the less known – but often most stereotyped – corners of our planet.

The examples show once again how scarcity and constraints can be powerful drivers of change and stimuli for high-impact innovation. Now that modern communication technologies are taking over even the poorest and most remote corners of our planet, leapfrogging legacy systems of the West, their effect can be multiplied, scaled up more easily. Such endeavours show the immense potential of human creativity, no matter who you are or where you are born. We often block our own creative pathways, by looking for excuses: ‘it can’t be done unless we find a way to raise 30 billion euros’, ‘if only we were a multinational-sized company’, ‘it is impossible with the government organizing and/or orchestrating it’.

Of course, there are challenges which cannot be tackled using a cartwheel and a piece of rope (if you did get nuclear fusion to work in your basement using just that, drop us a line), challenges which do require large budgets, advanced organizational structures, etc. Yet all too often we use these arguments as but excuses in order not to ‘be truly creative’ & ‘try something’, ‘do something’, … In our spoiled context, it is easy to sense fear setting in as we realize that there is perhaps more to lose than to gain from trying. Risk management can be a killer as much as risk itself.

Massive change in terms of an increase in quality of life at personal & community levels can be but one mind and one pair of hands away. The driven individual is a powerful catalyst for change. Therefore, think again when installing elaborate innovation strategies before liberating the minds of individuals and breaking the shackles of their creative initiative.

For about two years already we have been a core partner in setting up “Plan C”, a transition management experiment in Flanders, aimed at catalyzing the societal shift to a world in which materials are managed in a sustainable way.

In a long term oriented participatory process seeded by OVAM (the Flemish Public Waste Agency) and guided by Pantopicon, Resource Analysis & the Center for Organizational and Personnel Psychology a possible future for sustainable materials management in Flanders was envisioned. Smart, creative, entrepreneurial minds from knowledge institutions, business and industry, ngo’s, government agencies etc. formed new alliances and have been smashing heads and hands together to come up with opportunities for radical innovation and structural change. 5 transition teams self-organized into 5 themes:

• closing the loop: cradle2cradle & beyond
• waking up society: towards a behavioral change
• at your service: from products to services
• tailored materials: making ‘making’ different
• sustainable plastics: towards a new basis

Each of these teams has defined a series of experiments they wish to set up and conduct in view of catalyzing structural change in the way deal with materials.

On October 15th, the current Plan C network members (60-80 heads strong) launches its vision, presents its experiments and invites fellow smart, creative and daring heads and hands to join in at a network-mindsstorm event in Mechelen (Belgium) (note: meeting will be in Dutch).

Spread the word and do join in!