crap futures

Careless whispers

Wed, 09 May 2018 12:24:30 +0100

In a previous post we mentioned the story of the infamous conflict between King Henry II and Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 12th century England. It’s a familiar story of two powerful and egotistical men clashing over issues of status and pride. After a series of altercations over clerical privilege, Henry finally loses his temper; what he actually said to the assembled courtiers has been lost to history, but the most likely version comes from the biographer-monk Edward Grim, who recorded it as follows:

What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?

Whatever Henry said, four of his knights (Richard le Breton, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, and William de Tracy) interpreted the utterance as a royal command. They rode to the Normandy coast, took ship for England, and confronted the Archbishop. What happened next was described by the aptly named Grim, who was on the scene and actually wounded in the attack:

The wicked knight, fearing lest Becket should be rescued by the people and escape alive, leapt upon him suddenly and wounded this lamb who was sacrificed to God, cutting off the top of the crown which the sacred unction of the chrism had dedicated to God.

More terrible blows followed, and eventually the Archbishop succumbed. Was the king’s statement interpreted correctly? We’ll never know. But we can perhaps read parallels to our own time in the complex motivations and agendas that informed the knights’ collective decision to commit murder.

Another story, more recent. This one takes place in Dallas, Texas, where a six-year-old girl asked her family’s Amazon Echo: ‘Alexa, can you play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?’ Alexa promptly complied, ordering a $300 KidKraft Sparkle Mansion doll’s house from one of Amazon’s suppliers. She also ordered (for reasons known only to the internal logic of the system) nearly two kilograms of sugar cookies. The story doesn’t stop there: the following day, when a San Diego news programme reported the story, a number of Echos were roused by the wake word ‘Alexa’ coming from proximate television sets, and they in turn followed the command to also purchase dolls’ houses.

What inspired Alexa to order the biscuits? A flawed system or a very smart one?

In 560 BC, King Croesus of Lydia set a challenge to the world’s oracles to determine who provided the most accurate prophecies. His emissaries were sent to seven sites to ask the resident oracle what the king was doing at that precise moment. The winner was the Oracle of Delphi, who correctly reported that the king was making a lamb-and-tortoise stew.

Oracles were seen as conduits to the gods, speaking and giving advice on their behalf. Divination came in many other forms: augurers would follow the flight paths of birds (legend has it that the location of Rome was decided through this approach). Haruspices would read the entrails of sacrificed animals. Today, however, reading the future is much less exotic or gruesome, being mostly about data and statistics.

The next story starts back to front. A man walks into a Target outside Minneapolis and demands to see the manager. He’s got a handful of targeted coupons that had been sent to his teenage daughter, and he’s angry. ‘My daughter got this in the mail!’ he said. ‘She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?’ In fact the daughter actually is pregnant. Target knows it before the girl’s father, thanks to a hunch based on its analysis of online searches and product purchases - in this case a particular lotion often used by pregnant women in the second trimester.

One more story. In happier times for Facebook, the social media giant played a significant - if unevenly distributed and still debated - role in the Arab Spring by facilitating communication between protesters. The April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, for example, used Facebook to launch a successful call for protests in the aftermath of the Tunisian Revolution that preceded the spread of uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011-12. Events of the Arab Spring demonstrated that social networks provide a perfect mechanism through which to disseminate information broadly and quickly, as long as you have access to the internet.

So far this is a familiar and well-trodden tale; the more interesting story, however, happened when Arab states began to shut down internet access. Activists in Cairo found the solution in a different kind of social network - not screen-based, but via the city’s taxi drivers. The activists realised that if they could direct conversations towards the planned anti-Mubarak gathering on 25 January 2011 in Tahrir Square, taxi drivers might spread the word and the protest would be a success. Initially, the activists tried to talk directly to drivers.

But they soon discovered that due to the highly politicised nature of their subject, conversations would quickly turn into arguments rather than dissemination, and their objective would fail. The solution was found in exploiting the human tendency to gossip. Instead of engaging in direct conversation, the activists allowed the taxi drivers to overhear a mobile phone conversation where they would disclose the details of the protests. The taxi drivers eavesdropped, and believing they had overheard a gossip-worthy secret, they began to spread the message.

‘Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and thereby human beings.’ - Adorno

In one of our very first posts, The Pleasures of Prediction, we described the daily experience at our local cafe - where the gestures of interaction were not always precise, sometimes brutal (depending on the mood of either ourselves or the people behind the counter), but mostly genial and surprisingly seamless. More recently, our colleague was telling us how his landlady keeps track of the number of bottles of alcohol he consumes each week by counting his recycling - a sort of small island version of a fitness tracker like the Fitbit. ‘She’s not judgemental’, he said. ‘Well … not really.’ Of course surveillance and tracking - mediating, amplifying, interpreting - have always been present in society; in the past they were just more social, or at least more analogue.

These examples raise some big questions, such as: Would you rather be monitored by a human being or a machine? If machine, why? Why don’t we trust humans? For that matter, why don’t we trust ourselves? How have we been shown to be untrustworthy and unable to control our own self-destructive or anti-social impulses? For the past two years we have been collecting stories that relate to the interpretation of information - tracing the shift from human beings to technological mediation as translator and interpreter; who is making important decisions, on whose behalf, and why.

There is certainly precision and brutality in Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data for micro-targeting and psychological profiling. Likewise Amazon Echo, a data-based Trojan horse mediating our personal lives in increasingly precise but also brutal ways. There is a tendency to understand and evaluate technology according to old-fashioned notions of progress: faster, easier, more efficient and so on. But digitisation, the data that it creates, and the vast networks of dissemination also facilitate the augmenting of darker aspects of human behaviour, targeting our deepest vulnerabilities. How we examine the implications, embrace the ethics, and understand the complexity of these systems are some of the fundamental challenges we face.

Real Prediction Machines

Shortly before the Echo appeared on the market in 2014, Real Prediction Machines addressed many of the issues Amazon’s new device (and others like it) would raise. The speculative project was developed by James Auger in collaboration with designer Jimmy Loizeau, artist Alan Murray, and Edinburgh University data scientist Ram Ramamoorthy, who at the time was developing predictive modelling systems combined with machine learning to predict when professional athletes might sustain an injury through overtraining.

James, Jimmy and Alan began by asking Ram what kind of other things might be predictable through such techniques, such as ‘Will my child become a professional football player’, ‘Will Labour win the next general election’, and ‘Will I suffer a heart attack?’ The words inside the circles of the Bayesian network diagram represent potential variables. In relation to a heart attack they could correspond to something like diet or exercise, the data coming from a supermarket loyalty card, or the accelerometer in your smartphone. Or more finite information such as family history, for example data coming from a genetic testing service like 23andMe.

These variables combine to create a live and ongoing feed into the predictive algorithm. The heart attack example seemed a little too banal due to its obvious connection to wellbeing and the huge growth of data and tracking methods, so the group suggested another question to Ram: Will I have a domestic argument?

The Bayesian network shown above looks similar to the earlier one, but in this instance a microphone was added for live sound input (anticipating the omnipresent Echo). Using machine learning, the system would become better at predicting arguments through the statistical analysis of keywords, tone, and frequency - identifying particular subjects that a couple might commonly fight about.

The output was translated into an object - not an app but something more symbolic, sympathetic. They settled on an ambient device sitting in the background, providing information when you might need it.

The device essentially has three states:

Clockwise means that the argument is moving into the future;
Anti-clockwise means that the argument is approaching, and the slower the rotation the more imminent it is;
When the rotating stops, the argument starts.

Projects like Real Prediction Machines work when it is not completely clear whether the idea is a ‘good’ one or not. Is it too invasive? Is it genuinely helpful? This is how we should think about all potential technologies, but we rarely do.

What happens next? How far away are we from Alexa ordering not biscuits, but a councillor? How much control will we have in the future, and how much do we want to have?

Images:

All diagrams by James Auger; photo of Real Prediction Machines by Sophie Mutevelian.

Time reconstrained, part 2

Tue, 20 Mar 2018 16:09:59 +0000

In the previous post we got onto the topic of time and energy. We pointed out that in this relatively blink-of-an-eye moment we’re living in—say the last hundred years—some of us enjoy the kind of energy abundance and comfort that no one before us had ever enjoyed and that, at this rate of simultaneous rapid consumption and spiralling environmental degradation, no one after us will either. We also described how, when time is factored in, fossil fuels are actually inefficient and low yield in terms of a time-energy ratio. Now let’s go a bit deeper into that thought: what if we took time seriously in our calculations of energy value and efficiency?

Time is a crucial factor that is often left out of discussions around energy. Traditional fossil fuels, as everyone knows, take millions of years to form and only brief moments to consume. So while they have very high energy densities (i.e. calorific values), drawing a direct comparison between fossil fuels and renewable energy sources can be misleading. Renewable energy sources have much lower energy densities—but they do not deplete in real time, and their formation timescale can be taken as virtually instantaneous.

The table and graphs below compare renewable energy sources and traditional fossil fuels in terms of energy per mass of fuel as well as energy fuel created per kilogram per million years. Figure 2 for example shows that if only approximate energy per mass is considered, the energy storage value of a gravity battery using a renewable energy source is negligible compared with the storage value of fossil fuel. However, if the time taken to form energy sources is taken into account, the situation is suddenly reversed: fossil fuel sources become negligible compared to a renewable energy source like the gravity battery (Figure 3). (Thanks to our postdoctoral researcher, Parakram Pyakurel, for crunching the numbers used in these diagrams.)

Fig.1: Comparison between timescale of formation and energy stored

Fig.2: Approximate energy per mass of fuel (kWh/kg) vs. fuel

Fig.3: Energy fuel created per kg per million years (kWh/kg/million years) vs. fuel

Images: James Auger

Time reconstrained, part 1

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 14:33:01 +0000

We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of ‘raw materials’, and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technological means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining.

- Wendell Berry, ‘The Total Economy’ (2000)

The condition in which some of us now live—and have lived for decades—is undeniably a luxurious one, energy-wise, comfort-wise. No one in human history has had what some of us now have; but equally there is a growing sense that if things don’t change neither will anyone have it again—we are rapidly depriving future generations of energy resources and a clean, stable environment, both of which have too long been taken for granted.

A piece of coal provides roughly eight kilowatt hours of energy per kilogram, which in one sense is extremely efficient. But the coal takes hundreds of millions of years to form. This almost unimaginable quantity of time is consumed with the flick of a switch, or at the press of a button—all dissipated, all devoured in an instant, to light a room or power a computer. When time is factored in, therefore, fossil fuels actually provide surprisingly low efficiency, low yield in terms of a time-energy ratio. A gravity battery, while seemingly of negligible energy storage value compared to fossil fuels, becomes much more powerful when time is factored into the equation.

The ideas underpinning our current exhibition (as the Reconstrained Design Group, until 15 April) at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) represent a radically different philosophy of energy storage and consumption. They indicate a shift away from quick, thoughtless consumption of ancient resources, towards visible, tangible, real-time consumption. Of course, at this stage the Newton Machine is more of an intervention than a practical solution—it is not designed to be an instant fix for the world’s energy problems, which are complex and multifaceted.

But before our prototypes and the thinking behind them are dismissed on grounds of impracticality, it is worth noting that our everyday relationship with energy is also a dream, an illusion of through-the-wall magic. It is unsustainable, based on a fantasy of unlimited supply, when in fact it has long been operating on a system of sleight of hand and perpetual deferral. When oil supplies are dwindling, the short-term answer is new technologies of extraction or batteries made from lithium and other non-renewable materials. What the Newton Machine offers is a new way of thinking about energy—a gesture, however rough, towards the seismic paradigm shift that is urgently needed to bring about a more responsible future.

Time is at the centre of this proposed shift in thinking. So is our relationship with nature, which must become balanced rather than extractive and exploitative. Even the generic and ubiquitous electrical sockets in our homes are anything but harmless. The apparent banality of the plug and socket has masked a century of unprecedented environmental destruction. By hiding energy, we have made it seem free of both limitations and consequences. A temporal convenience such as a hot bath or a flash of light releases potential (stored) energy irreversibly. Buttons, switches and plugs conceal enormous infrastructures and exploitation of existing resources on a truly sublime scale.

Design influences desire. If in the past design has been used to encourage consumption, to make consumer goods desirable, then in the future we must enlist design in the fight to bring our desires more closely in line with our needs. A shift is required to preserve what has taken millions or billions of years to form in the past, and to avoid a legacy of waste stretching forward into the future. We have to adjust the scope of our consumption. Reconstraining time means shifting away from the behaviours that brought us into the nightmare of the Anthropocene, and living sustainably within our own modest scale as an animal species on Earth.

Images:

James Auger (top): Gathering black sand for casting at Praia Formosa, Madeira; Miguel Taverna: Images from CCCB exhibition

Et in Orcadia ego

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 15:29:40 +0000

In a recent post (‘scrap futures’) we mentioned a project we’re doing with Laura Watts from ITU Copenhagen and partners in Scotland that involves building a gravity battery on the small island of Eday in Orkney.

We’ve just returned from that island-to-island journey. It was quite a trip, a proper eye opener. We arrived on Sunday evening with nothing - no tools or materials of any kind - and by Thursday we were running a public demo of a gravity-powered Casio keyboard playing Ode to Joy. Here is a brief (and highly subjective) travelogue and technical account of the process, which was not unlike a 72-hour Scrapheap Challenge, but involving the whole community.

The northward trek

Three of us left Madeira early on the Friday, bidding farewell to sunshine and flower blossoms. The fourth in our party, Mohammed, coming from rural Sweden, met us that night in Inverness. By Saturday morning we had reached Kirkwall, on the Orkney Mainland. Laura arrived on the next flight, and over a lunch of fish and chips we shared our thoughts about the gravity battery, including what sort of scrap we might use to make it - an old motorcycle, a car or tractor, even a crashed Vespa someone had mentioned. There was also the question of what we should do with the energy it released. Previously we had powered a record player; this time we had in mind a lamp, or an old radio playing The Shipping Forecast. None of us had ever been to Eday, an island of ten square miles with a population of just 130 people.

The wind picked up and the afternoon ferry was cancelled, so we headed over to Stromness on the other side of the Mainland to spend the night in the atmospheric Stromness Hotel. Enrique waxed poetic on the irony of Silicon Valley’s dreams of colonising Mars, when we were stranded ten miles from our destination by a bit of wind. But we made the best of it, and after a full Scottish breakfast with haggis on Sunday morning we drove back to Kirkwall and caught the afternoon ferry. We arrived after dark, windswept and seasalted, and followed the island’s only road to the only year-round accommodation, the hostel, where we met our documentary filmmaker, Aaron Watson. The trip north had taken three days, leaving only three days to build for the demonstration.

Build Day 1

We woke Monday morning to the sound of a large wind turbine spinning fast outside the hostel, telling us the weather conditions. In fact the island grid is powered entirely by renewable energy - Eday’s experimental and community-driven use of renewables, including wind, tidal, and solar, as well as storage in hydrogen fuel cells, is the main reason we were keen to visit. Even the electric heaters in the hostel are powered at certain times by energy overflow from the wind turbine outside. Everyone we met on Eday was extremely well versed in energy generation and storage, including the seven children of the local primary school who spoke knowledgeably about electrolysers and curtailment.

We met Clive, our local fixer and project partner with Eday Renewable Energy Ltd., after a solid breakfast of porridge and bacon butties. Before we set out to gather scrap materials and tools, he gave us a pep talk of sorts: ‘This may look like chaos. But I assure you the machine will be built, it will be demonstrated, and you will leave happy on the ferry Friday morning.’ In the car he pointed out the island’s landmarks and mentioned some of the people we would likely meet that day. As far as we could tell you were not allowed to have the same name as anyone else on the island - when a second Kate arrived she was renamed Katie, and the second Mike became Mick. This we decided was as good a definition of a small island as any we’d heard. Clive warned us that the community would need some convincing before they got involved. We should expect questions like: What’s in it for Eday?

The first stop of the morning was the Old Church, which had been bought by a woman from London with big plans in the 1980s and has sat derelict ever since. Here we found an old motorcycle, a red Kawasaki, parked in the middle of the church amongst other scrap (a Super 8 camera, a record player, a typewriter). The bike had only 12,000 miles on the odometer, but it was buried under a thick blanket of corrosive pigeon shit, and all of its insides were seized beyond reasonable use. We took a lot of photographs. At the second stop, the New Church a minute down the road, we found a large brass bell salvaged from a sunken steamship. We thought we might use it as a weight for the gravity battery. Permission would have to be sought, Clive said. The third stop was an old mechanic’s back garden, full of rusted cars and a jumble of engine parts. ‘Did he die?’ someone asked. ‘No, just left the island’, Clive replied. James opened the hood of an old BMW and found a live rabbit inside.

We checked out the building site next, a shed by the pier used mostly for deliveries. It had a forklift and plenty of room - the first real success of the day. We would have to clear out twice a day when the ferry docked, but aside from that it was ours. We agreed it would do very nicely. Our other Eday contact, Andy, who works with Clive, met us at the shed. From there we drove to an old quarry on the far side of the island, a five-minute journey. As we walked around the site, staring up at the sheer sides from the quarry base, someone had an epiphany about making a gravity-powered keyboard. Andy, it turned out, not only knew how to play (he was currently the church organist), he had also been the keyboardist in an eighties band called Freeez, who had a number one single in the US dance charts (‘IOU’). We all agreed that if we could get hold of a scrap keyboard the issue of what to do with the energy released by the gravity battery was solved.

After lunch at the hostel we met some people from the community in a building next to the island shop. The key moment in this meeting was the suggestion that Mick, who was spotted leaving the shop outside, had an old motorcycle in his barn; someone ran out to talk to Mick and he kindly agreed to let us follow him home. He was a large man in a CCCP shirt, who told us in a Liverpool accent to mind the ducks and sheep. He opened the barn and dragged out an old dirt bike, its wheels clogged with hay; he used an axe to free up the front wheel, and four of us rolled it up the driveway in the rain and waited as someone found a van to bring it back to the pier shed. We were cold and wet, and the light was fading on our first day, but we had a motorcycle and a rough plan. We ate a hearty dinner at Roadside, the island’s former pub turned occasional restaurant (actually just a dining room in a private house), and then returned to the hostel to drink whisky and sleep.

Build Day 2

We arrived at the shed Tuesday morning at 9.05am to find several islanders already waiting in boilersuits, ready to work. We introduced ourselves, made some tea, and set up to start cutting into the bike, while Clive got on the phone to order a new chain from the Mainland - the only part the bike was missing. We quickly sourced some necessary tools from generous community members, including an angle grinder (Aaron the filmmaker’s favourite, because it made a photogenic shower of sparks), a lathe, and a socket set, and got to work. By lunch the bike was stripped, leaving only the parts necessary for the gravity battery - the frame, engine, and rear axle. In the afternoon two of us went to the school to give a workshop while the others stayed back at the shed. The wind blew and the rain poured down. Countless cups of tea were consumed. Soon the day was over, the children went home, the shed was locked up, and at the hostel Mohammed made his special dhal. It was Halloween night on a remote Scottish island, so obviously we watched The Wicker Man. More whisky was consumed.

Build Day 3

The challenge now was how to get the gravity battery over the fence and down into the quarry, our chosen site for Thursday’s demo. We noticed a large tractor - who did it belong to? Could somebody drive it there? Health and safety was still a headache that Andy was dealing with, negotiating with the property owners in England and the insurance company. It was blowing a gale all the previous night and all morning; the rain beat down on the corrugated iron roof of the shed, making it hard to hear anyone speak.

On the positive side, people from the community were beginning to get excited about working together on this strange and unexpected project. Old habits were shifting as people from different parts of the island who rarely spoke to each other met and pitched in as a team. Hamish and Mel, native Orcadians, came to join in and brought their son Robbie, an apprentice engineer. An old Casio keyboard was found, and after some minor tinkering was brought back to life. The chain arrived by afternoon ferry. Calculations were underway for rigging a pulley over the quarry edge. More people showed up, to work or to watch. Clive told us stories of moving to London in the late sixties, working in Carnaby Street, seeing the Stones in Hyde Park. ‘What brought you up to Eday?’ we asked. ‘Cheap innit’, he said with a smile. We met other southerners who said the same thing. But their attachment to the place had obviously gone very deep.

On Wednesday afternoon we went to use the lathe in the shed of a friendly guy named Mike, another Englishman and ex-submariner who lived in the old schoolhouse. Mike left a note in the shed telling us what to do if a blackbird showed up at the door - he had trained the bird to come in and ask for food when it was hungry. Sure enough the bird showed up, looking at us expectantly until we passed it some raisins and a biscuit. When we finished our machining Mike invited us into the main house. In what turned out to be one of the highlights of our week in Eday, Mike showed us not only a display he’d made on the history of the school, but also - leading us through a hole in the wall - no less than a full-sized model of the inside of a submarine, complete with salvaged periscope, control panels, and torpedo launchers. We walked through room after room, through sleeping quarters with life-sized mannequin sailors, until we reached the end and emerged back into the schoolhouse. We shook hands with Mike, somewhat unsettled by what we’d just seen, and returned to the pier shed.

That night at dinner we discussed our visit to Eday as a three-act play. The first two acts, we decided, had established the principal characters and their relationship to the world they lived in. The inciting incident of Act One was our arrival on the island, with a mad plan to build a gravity battery from scrap. The rising action of Act Two was the first three days of building, where we pitched in with the community to make the thing we’d set out to make - the spectre of public humiliation creating tension and driving us forward. The character arcs of ourselves and everyone in the community developed under this pressure; Andy and Clive even told us that relationships between community members had been altered - for the good - by our presence. People who hadn’t spoken to each other in years exchanged words; old feuds were put to rest or laid aside. For our part we gained insights about ourselves, our roles, and the nature of our work.

Every story needs a climax, and it usually involves collectively overcoming a crisis. So it was not unexpected that we should receive a phone call at dinner that night, the night before the public demo, telling us that the absentee landowner would not allow access to our chosen site, the quarry, without insurance - and negotiations with the insurance company had reached an impasse. Andy was trying his best to provide evidence of due diligence to both parties; but insurance is about predictability, and is naturally risk-averse. Testing a gravity battery made from scrap in an abandoned quarry with children present is not an ideal scenario from the insurer’s perspective. How could we bridge the gap between health and safety, on one hand, and daring innovation and experimentation, on the other? How could we achieve a satisfying resolution and leave happy, as Clive promised, on Friday morning?

Demo Day

Andy, as we mentioned above, was a professional musician in his previous life - he had played on Top of the Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test. So when he sat down to rehearse for the demo on Thursday morning, perched on a wooden crate in shorts and hiking boots and a down jacket, tapping at the keys of a salvaged Casio, the other islanders laughed and jibed goodnaturedly: ‘You’ve come a long way, Andy!’ The crisis at the quarry had been overcome, or rather bypassed completely, by ten o’clock: just as the insurance problem was solved, we decided it would be easier to stage the demo at the pier near the shed, so that no major moving of equipment would be involved. Now momentum was gathering towards the final event and resolution.

The demo was scheduled for after lunch. Word spread and by late morning a small crowd started to gather. We were busy with small jobs: like untangling rope for the pulley to suspend the mass, a 25-litre water container, from a long metal pole extending off the fork of a tractor Hamish had driven over from his farm. The motorcycle chassis that formed the heart of the machine was strapped to a wooden pallet. We only had to figure out how to lift the weight into the air - in Madeira we had used a solar panel, but that was not an option in Orkney. Various attempts were made, including hooking up the battery from Mike’s car, but with no success.

The school bus pulled into the parking lot in front of the pier shed and the children got out. They lined up in front of the crowd and showed drawings of the gravity batteries they had designed earlier in the week. One child broke down under the pressure and sobbed loudly, but eventually held up his drawing between shaking hands. The weather was calm and dry. We handed out Madeiran sweets to the kids, who wore reflective vests for safety. Everyone stood facing us in a semicircle and waited for the show to begin. At the last moment a solution was found: James improvised an attachment to a rechargeable electric drill and used it to drive a super low-gear winch, slowly raising the water container. It seemed a bit of a cheat - though in fact it wasn’t, since the island’s grid is powered by renewables - but the mass was now suspended, the energy was stored until needed, and that was the main point. We called for everyone’s attention; released the mass; wires were connected and the keyboard came to life. Andy played ‘Ode to Joy’, followed by ‘The Flintstones’ for the children. The performance lasted several minutes, then the keyboard fell silent at the instant the water container touched the ground. The crowd went wild. We did it again, and then again - the last time letting the kids take turns banging out some noise. It was a success. We cleaned up as dusk fell.

That evening there was a gathering at the community centre. Andy led a discussion with ourselves and some of the islanders, including Hamish and Mel and their children, ‘Submarine’ Mike, Ivan and his son Jordan, and many others, that felt productive. It verged at times on emotional, as people discussed past achievements like the installation of the massive community-owned wind turbine, along with possible futures of the community and the island itself. We tried to impress the point that, given enough time and ideal conditions, their energy storage solution (or ‘Newton Machine’) would not be a gravity battery - which was something we had created out of the particular materials and terrain of Madeira - but rather a bespoke solution for Eday, built not from Madeiran sucata but from Orcadian bruck, taking advantage of local conditions, like a flow battery made with seawater. But we had three days to produce something spectacular with the community, so we decided to make an Eday version of a gravity battery - and according to those terms, we succeeded. As we sat around talking into the night, surrounded by absolute darkness except for the lights of neighbouring islands and the hostel in the distance, we also agreed that the machine we built was, in some real sense, a social machine.

We hoped that our strange event on Eday, our intervention of sorts, had made an impact on the community. We received a positive sign from Andy the day after we returned, in the form of a message that read: ‘I’m about to order my very first angle grinder, just so I can make my own sparks, just for the sheer fun of it.’ He said he’d been inspired to ‘have a go’. Between Andy’s words (and music), Clive’s stories, Mike’s submarine, Mick’s motorcycle, Ivan’s joyful exclamations of ‘happy days!’, the schoolchildren’s imaginative designs, and Hamish’s son Robbie melting aluminium in a kitchen pot with a blowtorch to cast parts for the gravity battery, we concluded that some good had come of the trip. Still ahead, Laura will write up our experiences on Eday from an ethnographer’s perspective, and Aaron will make a short film to present at our exhibition in Barcelona early next year. The gravity battery itself, meanwhile, remains on the island - being too heavy to transport - and will hopefully power Andy’s reconfigured Casio keyboard through the winter months.

Images:

Julian Hanna and James Auger.

The wolf at the door (domestication of technology, part 1)

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 13:00:51 +0100

One of the enduring objects used to represent the technological future is the robot. This legacy means that its promise has the ability to evolve in accordance with our societal and cultural dreams and aspirations. It can reflect the current state of technological development, our hopes for that technology as well as our fears. Fundamentally though, after almost a century of media depictions and corporate promises, robots are yet to enter our homes and lives in any meaningful way. Or at least not in the way we expected.

If we’re going to talk about robots we should begin with a definition. But this is by no means an easy task. Robot does not refer to one specific object; it is not based on a singular technology, context, or function; and while certain stereotypical (e.g. anthropomorphic) robot forms pervade, other diverse and surprising configurations of technology can also be considered a robot. The robot can exist simultaneously in multiple contexts and planes of reality, and for a multitude of reasons: as a functional engineered machine operating autonomously on a production line (such as an industrial robot); as a corporate vision of the future (humanoid robot); as a complex construct of fiction (android); or as a high-street product (robotic vacuum cleaner). While the promiscuity of the generic concept often leads to a blurring of these worlds and indeed the promise of migration between them, the actual artefact is very poor at making this transition - the spectacular robots of our technological dreams are yet to make it into our everyday lives.

With such a broad range of possibilities the definition must be quite vague. But for the purposes of this discussion it could be as follows:

For a thing to be considered a ‘robot’ it should be able to sense and interpret in some fashion its environment, compute decisions based on that sensory information, and then act on those decisions in some way.

This statement is satisfying from a technical perspective, but its dryness fails to reflect the mythical or emotive factor commonly associated with robots. Therefore to the technical definition we will add:

The complexity or sublimity of either the sensing, computing or mechanics should elevate the status of the robot above that normally ascribed to machines or products.

The dream of robot servants, as with so many technological dreams, is centuries old. In the 1890s Oscar Wilde talked about the need for mechanical slaves in his manifesto for fully automated luxury socialism. At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation gave the dream a physical form with Electro, a giant metal walking and talking robotic man. While not the first humanoid robot, Electro was important for pushing forward the idea that robots could enter the home as domestic help.

The promise of this particular type of robot future persists to this day, exemplified by corporate robots such as Honda’s ASIMO and the vast number of similar objects emerging out of academic and corporate research. But while such robots have become commonplace in production lines, tech fairs and research laboratories, their presence is yet to be accommodated in the domestic sphere. Robots continued to hover at the threshold as unwelcome guests, our resistance to strangers seemingly too strong to overcome. Bringing a full-sized humanoid robot into the domestic sphere would be like bringing a wolf through the door. Instead, like the gradual domestication of the wolf, it is happening little by little, in gradual steps, by the process of future nudge. New types of robots are entering millions of homes with the introduction and growing ubiquity of AI-based virtual assistants. Not in our homes, obviously - we’re not called Crap Futures for nothing. But a lot of people actively welcomed these devices into their daily lives.

The key word to describe these new robots is adaptation. Embedding virtual assistants in phones and watches blurred the lines from the start. These familiar everyday objects - rather than creepy humanoid forms - acted as the Trojan horse, and succeeded in bringing robots into the domestic sphere. This had been done to some extent before: the Atari video game console mimicked domestic objects (wood-veneer inlays) and mated with the familiar and thoroughly domestic television set, smoothing its transition from the seedy arcade to the family livingroom. The anonymous black dots and cylinders that house most standalone virtual assistants are a step further along this progression. The domestic robot was decentralised and subtly dispersed around the home, across our numerous devices, as a ubiquitous service. Embodiment is no longer necessary in our post-industrial era: manual tasks are performed either by cheap human labour (a persistent feature of late-capitalist society) or bespoke machine automation, leaving domestic robots free to perform more useful mental labour (choosing dinner music or finding recipes), or to serve as conduits to the supply chain.

There are many reasons why Amazon and the other big tech companies want to have a presence in your home. The work of Paul-Olivier Dehaye and others has demonstrated the value, extent, and secrecy of data collection. Data has become the world’s most valuable resource. The new gold rush is on, and we - it is not too self-aggrandizing to say - are the gold. Advertisements for Amazon’s new Echo and Echo Plus focus specifically on children, seeking - like Facebook’s cradle-to-grave timeline - to gather data on individuals across every stage of life. ‘Kids today’, said David Limp (senior VP in charge of Echo devices), ‘will grow up never knowing a day they couldn’t talk to their houses.’ Except they’re not talking to their houses, they’re talking directly to Amazon.

It is a clever marketing trick referring to Alexa or Siri as a) part of the family or b) synonymous with the home itself. Historically, of course, slaves and live-in domestic servants were often treated this way, being ‘given’ the surnames of their owners. But they obviously fell short of being true family: they were treated not as family but as family possessions, chattels bound together with other property. These moves - naming, possessing, adopting - signal domestication, in the same way that you might consider a dog part of the family, even giving it your family surname to suggest benign ownership, but would not name the deer that wanders through your garden. Alexa and other virtual assistants are different in one important sense, which is that they maintain a primary connection to their true master, the corporation. They are not family, or even family property, but rather family spies. (This is at the heart of their designation not actually as a device but as a service controlled by the provider.)

From the business standpoint the case for wanting robots in every home is clear enough: it is the domestication of capitalism, strengthening our emotional connection to consumption and allowing it to pervade every corner of our lives. But why did we finally invite the wolf inside? The answer must be convenience; and, at last, a degree of comfortable familiarity, an overcoming of the uncanny. The mobile phone now feels to many people like a natural extension of their body and even mind. The fixed or standalone presence of an AI-based helper in the home, the modern domestic robot, is only a short step beyond Siri, if at all.

To return to the fundamental questions:

Is it good? For whom? And in whose interest?

In Part 2 we’ll continue the discussion through the analogy of animal domestication.

Images:

Westinghouse Televox; Electro and ASIMO; Atari 2600; all via Wikimedia Commons

Scrap futures

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 10:03:53 +0100

We’ve noticed a lot of detritus, scrap, and abandoned infrastructure on our island of Madeira (as in most places) - from rusty Christmas light scaffolding, to useless TV antennas that dot the skyline over Funchal, to automated turnstiles that don’t scan your ticket, to those free bag dispensers for dog walkers (a noble initiative, probably refilled once at most and still stuck to every pole) - remnants of old ideas, broken futures, and faded technological dreams.

Then there is e-waste (or WEEE). This again is a universal problem, but like all problems of material waste it becomes more obvious and more acute in a small island context. Where do you put all those old monitors, keyboards, phones, game consoles, smart fridges, and Juicero juicers? Our collaborator and resident scrap wizard Enrique has forged a relationship with the organisation that handles e-waste in Madeira. He brings old printers and other objects back to the institute for deconstructing; their guts can be seen spilling out of the workshop most days. Enrique tells us that two or three shipments of e-waste are sent to the mainland every week - that’s a lot of waste for an island that doesn’t particularly care about keeping up with the Joneses.

Motorcycles are a particular obsession of Crap Futures, which is one reason why some of our gravity battery prototypes (like the one pictured above) use gear boxes and other bike parts from the local breaker’s yard. But the other thing about motorcycles, and scrap motorcycle parts, is that they can be found all over the world - they are almost universal as readily available local materials. This fact makes them especially attractive to us for our energy experiments, because we try to make use of local materials, terrain and knowledge as much as possible.

In case we haven’t mentioned it on the blog yet, we won an award. James went to Barcelona in June and came back with the CCCB Cultural Innovation International Prize for a project, The Newton Machine, that we’re doing in collaboration with Laura Watts at ITU Copenhagen and our partners in Orkney. The prize came with some money, which was nice, but also some strings: next January we will be installing an exhibition of the Newton Machine (or machines) at the CCCB, including prototypes, a documentary film, some photographs, ethnographic notes, a manifesto, catalogue, and other material we collect in the meantime. The installation will join the larger exhibition After the End of the World which opens next month and continues through April 2018.

The CCCB prize also means some upcoming opportunities for doing and making. First we’ll be hosting Laura and the Orkney partners in Madeira at the beginning of October, then we’ll pay a visit to the small island of Eday in Orkney one month later to build some prototypes and meet the local community there. With its cutting-edge energy schemes, Scotland, Orkney, and especially little Eday seemed like the ideal place to test our plans in the wild (to use that hated phrase). From what we’ve heard Orkney will be fairly wild in November.

Where Madeira has sucata or lixo (scrap or waste), Orkney has something very particular to remote islands: bruck. Bruck, so we’re told, is the kind of rubbish that washes up on the beaches, or the kind of rubbish you talk in the pub - but it’s also the kind you might find in your shed, or swap with your neighbour. People in Orkney try to make sensible use of their bruck, material resources being relatively scarce. (We’ve already heard the story of a local man who made a hovercraft out of a washing machine - ‘and it worked, too’.) We’re hoping to use some of Eday’s bruck, along with its unique terrain and local knowledge, for our Newton Machine prototypes.

Back to our scrapheap challenge. Next up: domestication.

Images:

Gravity Battery (Rotterdam) by James Auger; CCCB; Creative Commons CC0.

Reconstrained Design

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 16:01:01 +0100

For the record, here is the Vorticism-inspired manifesto poster we brought to the Designing Interactive Systems conference in Edinburgh.

Find the full paper here: http://dis2017.org/provocations-works-in-progress/

Higher res version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mnmolehr0j1t3gt/MANIFESTO.pdf?dl=0

The automated island

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 10:08:06 +0100

(For some background to this discussion of automation in our very eccentric and local context, revisit one of our first posts - ‘The pleasures of prediction’.)

There’s a spot we often go swimming in Madeira called Ponta Gorda, ‘Fat Point’. It’s like a public swimming pool - in fact it does have a decent saltwater pool - but most people who go there dive straight into the open sea, which gives you the thrill of swimming in very deep water - 2,000 metres close to shore descending to 4,000 metres further out. So the sea is a public swimming pool, and you pay your euro for amenities like the changing rooms and cafe. It’s a good place for lunch or a cold beer when the sun is shining. Umbrellas and sunbeds cost extra, but we prefer to bake on the hot concrete after a cool swim.

Into this idyllic scene comes automation. There’s a person who works in the entrance booth and takes your euro, and adjacent to the booth is a row of turnstiles. Presumably until a couple of years ago you paid your money and went straight in. Since we’ve been going to Ponta Gorda, however, a newer system has been in place: an automated scanning system.

The system is supposed to work like this: first you buy a barcoded ticket or charge your card with the person in the booth; then you scan your ticket, unlocking the turnstile, and you walk through. (The scanner uses that red laser thing to read the barcode.)

What actually happens is this: we arrive at the booth, say hello to the friendly woman who works there - because we all know each other by now - pay for a ticket or charge our card (if we’ve remembered to bring it, which is rare), try to scan the barcode under the laser in the bright midday sun, fail miserably, smile at the woman in the booth to signal our failure, wait as she grabs her keys and comes out of the booth, watch as she tries in vain to scan it several times, exchange sympathetic smiles when she too fails, together blame the sun, stand by while she unlocks the gate at the side, and walk through.

We’re not sure why the automatic gate always fails. Things often don’t work on this island. They remain broken for months or years, and people get used to working around them. The parking garages and supermarket checkouts are the same: there is always someone to help you scan your ticket or purchases because the scanner never works properly. These are de-facto semi-automated systems that require the same human worker they required before the machine was installed. So why have a scanner at all? Who said this was a good idea? What was wrong with the old way?

Well, it’s progress, innit? Unfortunately what may work under ideal conditions in, say, London or Oslo may not necessarily work under less than ideal conditions, and without maintenance support, in Madeira. It’s like those tractors in the Soviet Union under collectivisation that broke down or simply ran out of petrol and were left to rot in the fields. Not to mention the fact that automation is often about efficiency, and efficiency - in terms of saving either time or labour - is not something this sleepy island particularly wants or needs.

People in Madeira are adaptable, they get along fine with less than optimal technology. But significant resources are wasted in the pursuit of Mainland ideas of progress. Then there are the side-effects of automation that are not particular to islanders: deskilling, alienation from labour. Few people actually lose their jobs because the technology can rarely be trusted - but everywhere you see people sitting idle in their work, passive, mere appendages of the machines they are paid to assist. Is this the techno-utopia we were waiting for? Sometimes on the periphery, as Laura Watts said to us recently, small perturbations are felt more distinctly than in the centre.

In his frankly curmudgeonly but still insightful essay ‘Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer’ (1987), Wendell Berry lays out his ‘standards for technological innovation’. There are nine points, and in the third point Berry states that the new device or system ‘should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better’ than the old one. This seems obvious and not too much to ask of a technology, but how well does the automated entrance at Ponta Gorda fulfill that claim?

Berry also has a point, the last in his list, about not replacing or disrupting ‘anything good that already exists’. This includes relationships between people. In other words, solve actual problems - rather than finding just any old place to put a piece of technology you want to sell. Even if the scanners at Ponta Gorda did work, how would eliminating the one human being who is employed to welcome visitors and answer questions improve the system? In Berry’s words, ‘what would be superseded would be not only something, but somebody’. The person who works there is a ‘good that already exists’, a human relationship that should be preserved, especially when her removal from a job would be bought at so little gain.

In the next post we’ll go deeper into a taxonomy of automation. Now we’re going for a swim.

Images: James Auger and Julian Hanna.

Back to nature

Tue, 09 May 2017 15:18:33 +0100

We live on a remote island - mountainous, mid-Atlantic, still heavily forested and pretty wild - and for that reason nature sometimes sneaks into our otherwise technology-centred work. It is hard not to think local when you live in a place like this. We’re neither farmers nor pioneers - except in the sense that resident aliens on this island are few - but lately our reading has got us thinking about ancient paths and rural places. We’ll discuss the paths today and save most of the farm talk for a future post.

Paths v roads

In his 1969 essay ‘A Native Hill’, Wendell Berry - the American writer, farmer, activist, and ‘modern Thoreau’ - makes a useful distinction between paths and roads:

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand … embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape. … It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way.

Aside from conversation as usual, the reason we are talking about Berry is the arrival of a new film, Look & See, and a new collection of his writing, The World-Ending Fire, edited by Paul Kingsnorth of Dark Mountain Project fame. Berry and Kingsnorth, along with the economist Kate Raworth, were on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week recently chatting about the coming apocalypse and how it might best be avoided. It is a fascinating interview: you can actually hear Berry’s rocking chair creaking and the crows cawing outside the window of his house in Port Royal, Kentucky.

The normally optimistic Berry agrees somewhat crankily to read ‘the poem that you asked me to read’ on the programme. ‘Sabbaths 1989’ describes roads to the future as going nowhere: ‘roads strung everywhere with humming wire. / Nowhere is there an end except in smoke. / This is the world that we have set on fire.’ Berry admits that this poem is about as gloomy as he gets (‘blessed are / The dead who died before this time began’). For the most part his writing is constructive: forming a sensual response to cold, atomised modernity; advocating for conviviality, community, the commonweal.

Paul Kingsnorth talks compellingly in the same programme about transforming protest into action, although in truth no one walks the walk like Berry. Kingsnorth says: ‘We’re all complicit in the things we oppose’ - and never were truer words spoken, from our iPhones to our energy use. In terms of design practice, there are worse goals than reducing our level of complicity in environmental harm and empty consumerism. Like Berry, Kingsnorth talks about paths and roads. He asks: ‘Why should we destroy an ancient forest to cut twelve minutes off a car journey from London to Southampton? Is that a good deal?’

It’s a fair question. It also illustrates perfectly what Berry was describing in the passage that started this post: the difference between paths that blend and coexist with the local landscape, preserving the knowledge and history of the land, and roads that cut straight through it. These roads are like a destructive and ill-fitting grid imposed from the centre onto the periphery, without attention to the local terrain or ecology or ways of doing things - both literally (in the case of energy) and figuratively.

Another book we read recently, Holloway, describes ancient paths - specifically the ‘holloways’ of South Dorset - in similar terms:

They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than of suddenness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to other old paths & tracks in the landscape - ways that still connect place to place & person to person.

Holloways are paths sunk deep into the landscape and into the local history. Roads, in contrast, skip over the local - collapsing time as they move us from one place to the next without, as it were, touching the ground. They alienate us in our comfort.

Here in Madeira there are endless footpaths broken through the woods. Still more unique are the levadas, the irrigation channels that run for more than two thousand kilometres back and forth across the island, having been brought to Portugal from antecedents in Moorish aqueduct systems and adapted to the specific terrain and agricultural needs of Madeira starting in the sixteenth century.

Both the pathways through the ancient laurel forests and the centuries-old levadas (which, though engineered, were cut by hand and still follow the contours and logic of the landscape) contrast with the highways and tunnels that represent a newer feat of human engineering since the 1970s. During his controversial though undeniably successful reign from 1978 to 2015 - he was elected President of Madeira a remarkable ten times - Alberto João Jardim oversaw a massive infrastructure program that completely transformed the island. Places that used to be virtually unreachable became accessible by a short drive. His legacy, in part, is a culture of automobile dependency that is second to none. The American highway system inspired by Norman Bel Geddes’ (and General Motors’) Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair almost pales in comparison to Jardim’s vision for the rapid modernisation of Madeira.

But when you walk the diesel-scented streets of the capital, or you drive through the holes bored deep into and out of towering volcanic mountains to reach the airport - and even when you think back in history and imagine those first settlers sitting in their ships as half the island’s forest burned, watching the dense smoke of the fires they lit to make Madeira favourable to human habitation - it’s hard not to think what a catastrophically invasive species are human beings.

Bespoke is a word we use a lot. In our vocabulary bespoke is not about luxury or excess - as it has been co-opted by consumer capitalism to suggest. Instead it is about tailored solutions, fitted to the contours of a particular body or landscape. Wendell Berry insists on the role of aesthetics and proportionality in his approach to environmentalism: the goal is not hillsides covered in rows of ugly solar panels, but an integrated and deep and loving relationship with the land. This insistence on aesthetics relates to the ‘reconfiguring’ principles that inform our newest work. The gravity batteries we’ve been building are an alternative not only to the imposed, top-down infrastructure of the grid, but also to the massive scale of such solutions and our desire to work with the terrain rather than against it.

Naomi Klein talked about renewable energy in these terms in an interview a couple of years ago:

If you go back and look at the way fossil fuels were marketed in the 1700s, when coal was first commercialized with the Watt steam engine, the great promise of coal was that it liberated humans from nature … And that was, it turns out, a lie. We never transcended nature, and that I think is what is so challenging about climate change, not just to capitalism but to our core civilizational myth. Because this is nature going, ‘You thought you were in charge? Actually all that coal you’ve been burning all these years has been building up in the atmosphere and trapping heat, and now comes the response.’ … Renewable energy puts us back in dialog with nature. We have to think about when the wind blows, we have to think about where the sun shines, we cannot pretend that place and space don’t matter. We are back in the world.

In a future post we will talk about the related subject of sustainable agriculture. But speaking of food - the time has come for our toast and coffee.

Images: Wendell Berry courtesy of Look & See; all others via Wikimedia Commons

Chatting by the fireside

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 15:46:14 +0000

In Don Delillo’s novel White Noise (1984) - which by the way is both hilarious and more relevant than ever with its themes of media saturation, environmental catastrophe, consumerism as religion, and fascism (the main character is a university chair of Hitler Studies) - there is a philosophical exchange on the subject of everything we don’t know about the technologically advanced society we live in. Framed as a kind of Socratic dialogue between father and son (with the son always playing Socrates), the 14-year-old Heinrich describes our diminished agency in a system that casts us only as passive consumers. ‘What good is knowledge’, he asks, ‘if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.’

To illustrate this point he gives a lengthy diatribe on everything we don’t know about the society we live in. The ignorance he describes is highlighted by the community’s helplessness in the face of a catastrophe (an ‘Airborne Toxic Event’ set off by a chemical spill):

‘It’s like we’ve been flung back in time,’ he said. ‘Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? What is light? We experience these things every day of our lives but what good does it do if we find ourselves hurled back in time and we can’t even tell people the basic principles much less actually make something that would improve conditions. Name one thing you could make. Could you make a simple wooden match that you could strike on a rock to make a flame? We think we’re so great and modern. Moon landings, artificial hearts. But what if you were hurled into a time warp and came face to face with the ancient Greeks. The Greeks invented trigonometry. They did autopsies and dissections. What could you tell an ancient Greek that he couldn’t say, “Big Deal.” Could you tell him about the atom? Atom is a Greek word. The Greeks knew that the major events in the universe can’t be seen by the eye of man. It’s waves, it’s rays, it’s particles.’
‘We’re doing all right.’
‘We’re sitting in this huge moldy room. It’s like we’re flung back.’
‘We have heat, we have light.’
‘These are Stone Age things. They had heat and light. They had fire. They rubbed flints together and made sparks. Could you rub flints together? Would you know a flint if you saw one? If a Stone Ager asked you what a nucleotide is, could you tell him? How do we make carbon paper? What is glass? If you came awake tomorrow in the Middle Ages and there was an epidemic raging, what could you do to stop it, knowing what you know about the progress of medicines and diseases? Here it is practically the twenty-first century and you’ve read hundreds of books and magazines and seen a hundred TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell those people one little crucial thing that might save a million and a half lives?’
‘“Boil your water,” I’d tell them.’
‘Sure. What about “Wash behind your ears.” That’s about as good.’
‘I still think we’re doing fairly well. There was no warning. We have food, we have radios.’
‘What is a radio? What is the principle of a radio? Go ahead, explain. You’re sitting in the middle of this circle of people. They use pebble tools. They eat grubs. Explain a radio.’

It’s an unsettling speech. Sure, some of us know how a radio works, or how to light a fire without a match, but not many; certainly it’s a shrinking minority. Learning how things work is one small step we can take, especially now that all the information we need is literally at our fingertips.

We’ve been talking a lot recently about Albert Borgmann’s device paradigm, about ‘thingness’ and being connected to a larger ecosystem. Borgmann illustrates his concept with the image of the traditional hearth, ‘a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house a centre’. Our latest projects explore in part the ways we might make devices back into things.

On a less pedantic note, we had a clear night this week and we got a fire going. We wanted to meet for a couple of hours, the two of us and our PhD student Enrique, to develop some fresh ideas for future projects. Why go to a meeting room when you can sit by the fire with a sketchbook and pencil and a bottle (or two) of good red wine? So that’s what we did. The fireside is now our preferred meeting place, especially for the big ideas that can be filled in with details later. It’s a good way to escape the noise and rediscover the signal.

Interaction 17 presentation

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 19:41:48 +0000

Crap Futures were in New York for this year’s Interaction conference. It was uplifting, enlightening, inspiring, and exhausting. Here are the slides from our presentation - somehow we condensed 15 months of Crap Futures thinking into 20 minutes.

Of course design can be and do all of these things, but for the most part it has become so linked to the market and conspicuous consumption that it has essentially become a novelty machine.

This imposes constraints that limit the potential of design as a positive force. In this talk I’ll explore some of these constraints before suggesting ways of re-thinking them.

The first constraint is progress dogma.

Christian Schussele’s Men of Progress - a painting commissioned in 1857 to celebrate some of the key scientists and inventors that had positively altered the course of contemporary civilisation.

Despite powerful criticism - voiced over the past two centuries by Romantics such as William Blake, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, and avant-garde provocateurs like Dada - the belief that technology will solve our problems remains largely pervasive.

According to Langdon Winner:

Not much has changed: think of Donald Trump’s 2016 meeting of leading technologists (more women than Men of Progress … but not many).

The power of Silicon Valley continues to shape all our futures: familiar utopian dreams made possible by advances in technology - smart everything, automation, robotics and so on.

Of course these things can improve people’s lives, but they can also disrupt enormously. This is the irony of the rise of Trump and the pro-leave EU campaign in the UK - the cry of immigrants taking jobs - that automation is a far more obvious threat but is rarely mentioned in these circles.

According to a 2016 report by the Eurasia Group consultancy, ‘the rise of technologists’ is one of the ‘top risks’ at present - due to the fact that ‘highly influential non-state actors from the world of technology are entering the realm of politics with unprecedented assertiveness’.

Removing the constraint of progress dogma means that we are not simply selling futures but also exploring what could go wrong - an approach we began developing in the early 2000s.

This is the audio tooth implant, developed with Jimmy Loizeau in 2001. Based on the growing ubiquity of mobile telephones we imagined that the next logical step would be for the phone to become part of our body. We pitched this as a semi-real concept at the Science Museum in London.

We sculpted a model tooth and cast it in clear resin with an old computer chip embedded in the middle.

It was broadly disseminated by the popular media - here on the front cover of Time magazine.

But this is an example of the true product here - a thoughtful and considered expert appraisal of what could go wrong - before it’s actually available. This aims to facilitate a more responsible approach to the technological future.

The second constraint is means and ends.

In the 1920s Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers made the following statement, essentially signalling the rise of conspicuous consumption and the worship of gadgets. Designers were (and still are) complicit in this process.

Albert Borgmann has another way of describing it through his device paradigm:
things are inseparable from their context: we engage and interact with them in their worlds. Devices, on the other hand, unburden us of their contexts through the operation of background machinery; the more advanced the technology, the more invisible or concealed the machinery. Borgmann used the fireplace as an example of a thing - it provides a focal point for the household, it links people to local terrains through the gathering of firewood and demands an idea of how much wood is required to get through the winter.

In contrast the central heating system disburdens us of all these other elements as the means become invisible - controlled and managed by others.
Designers and consumers alike have become obsessed with the end - glossy glamorous products - whilst the systems behind become increasingly opaque.

This pathway essentially leads to automation - devices satisfying all of our needs as efficiently as possible through techniques such as machine learning, prediction algorithms and so on. Completely invisible, intangible, and operated by others.

Jean Baudrillard was already describing the consequences of automation in the 1960’s.

Removing the constraint of end focus encourages the designer to think beyond the generic solutions and objects of so-called desire to re-engage with local systems - making and materials.

This is an open-source hardware vacuum cleaner designed by Royal College of Art graduate Tom Lynch. All elements sourced or made locally and all documented on the project’s wiki - a fully functional product for under $50. The challenge is to combine the maker ideology with good design - the competition is strong as consumers are programmed to desire sexy products.

The OpenStructures WaterBoiler, originally designed and composed by Jesse Howard in collaboration with Thomas Lommée, provides some inspiration as to how this new aesthetic might be achieved.

Constraint No.3: Future Nudge
We can only design what the product could realistically evolve into.

The economist Robert Heilbroner described the way technology (and therefore technological products) evolve - this means that what comes next will be similar to what came before.

The car is a good example. Travel is instrumentalised as we focus on the object rather than the act. It iterates in small steps made possible by advances in specific areas.

This constrains us to design only what the product could conceivably evolve into. Smart products, for example, are usually existing products simply updated with smart technology.

Mobile telephones provide another good example - 7 phones in 7 years - each a small advancement on the previous. Typical progression is derived from Moore’s law - smaller, more powerful, more efficient (more sales, revenue, etc.).

Re-constraining future nudge allows us to imagine what might happen should we step out of the lineage - to focus for example on how we might design for quality experiences.

The Iso-phone was developed in 2003 to re-think the telephone from the perspective of qualitative experience rather than efficiency.

The concept used sensory deprivation theory to a facilitate a reduction in sensory input - the only thing the wearer experiences is the voice of someone else arriving from somewhere else in the world. Here’s a short video of the project:

The final constraint is Infrastructure.

Infrastructural and legacy constraints inform almost everything we do and everything we design - from food systems to transport, manufacturing to entertainment. I’m going to explore the subject of energy.

Tesla’s invention of AC current afforded the building of huge power stations built in the countryside, generating power through the burning of fossil fuels.

Radially distributed across nations via grid systems …

Arriving magically at our houses via sockets in the walls. These sockets and the plugs that are inserted into them dictate how all electrical products are used and how all products are designed.

With my Crap Futures co-author Julian Hanna we have been thinking about how to re-constrain energy infrastructure on our home island of Madeira, based on the implementation of renewables.

As a place with ample sun, wind, rain, and sea it would be easy to assume that renewable approaches to energy would be thriving in Madeira. What you see when you fly over the island supports that notion: vast banks of solar photovoltaic panels line several of the exposed hillsides; wind farms are exposed to the full force of the gales blowing in from the Atlantic.

However, beneath the optimistic surface lies a darker reality.

The (oversimplified) problem is this:

Solar PVs only generate energy while the sun shines. Wind farms generate energy when the wind blows. The wind is unpredictable and the sun shines during the day when most people are at work, meaning that energy cannot realistically be consumed in real time. The only viable option at the moment is to sell energy back to the grid; unfortunately this conflicts with the power company’s business model. So while incentives seem to abound, the reality is that these incentives are diminishing. Portugal practices an instantaneous net-metering scheme, meaning that the energy generated by the PV system has to be consumed at the same instant that it is produced to be considered self-consumption. The grid injection tariff is four times lower than the consumption tariff, forcing solar producers to self-consume and not inject any solar power into the grid. As things stand, users of renewables still rely on the grid during dark or windless periods, and therefore utility owners argue - with some reason - that they should pay for grid upkeep.

While the infrastructure battle rages on, what else can be done?

By thinking about what’s beyond the wall - local contexts, landscapes, materials, skills, culture - it becomes possible to develop bespoke solutions.
In Madeira that means cliffs and cliff-side communities. Many Madeiran communities are built on cliff-sides with drops ranging from a common 7-8 metres in the centre of Funchal to the 780 metre Cabo Girão on the south coast. These provide one solution to the storage issues that problematise solar panels - gravity batteries. The aim is to use locally sourced and inexpensive parts with minimal complex making.

We’re working on a book of 100 alternative energy ideas …

From small operational prototypes such as this low power gravity battery - exploiting the vertical nature of the island - to more spectacular, ambitious, even crazy concepts such as this huge series of elevators in our capital city of Funchal - This sketch by another collaborator on the project, Mohammed Ali.

Inspired by the Neo-Gothic splendour of the Elevador de Santa Justa, Lisbon (1902):

Here’s a more serious prototype that we’re currently testing.

All parts are sourced or made locally. Solar energy lifts the mass during the daytime, storing it as potential energy. Allowing the mass to drop releases the energy when it is needed.

We have a mass - in this case around 15kg that rotates a pulley as it falls.
This turns the shaft of a DC motor via a gear box, increasing the revolutions.

And the latest iteration: using a locally found scrap motorcycle engine as the gearbox, ready-made and super efficient, minimises complex making.

Finally, a video of the prototype - it’s a bit rough and ready as we only tested it last week (and I edited it on the plane over).

The best aspect of this design is the tangible relationship with energy that it affords. Turning up the volume makes the mass fall faster, reducing the time available to listen to the music. In the next steps we’re planning to boil a kettle and toast some bread …

Thanks for listening. Find out more by reading the rest of our blog.

Cash in the café

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 15:50:28 +0000

A little while back we mentioned a gravity battery we’re developing to solve issues stemming from grid control of energy. The battery, like other designs we’re exploring, works by exploiting our island’s vertical terrain, local materials, and expertise.

Energy, especially renewable energy, is topical at the moment. Last year was the hottest year on record. The effects of global warming, including melting sea ice, rising sea levels, and changing weather patterns, are increasing - as we are constantly being told - at an alarming rate. Faced with the impact of air pollution and climate change on daily life, China and India are making huge investments in renewable energy initiatives. Meanwhile, on the very day of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, references to climate change were quietly purged from the official White House website. In the first week of his presidency, Trump introduced a dangerously retrograde ‘America first energy plan’ focused on promoting fossil fuels, and signed executive orders allowing renewed construction on the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines. And this is just the tip of the (Titanic?) iceberg.

Meanwhile in the UK, the Tory government and move towards Brexit also have strong negative implications for energy. As we wrote in a blog post last summer: ‘Constraints express a lack of control; they are basically the opposite of control. So taking back control means finding ways to remove constraints.’ But what does the much abused dream of freedom from constraints look like in 2017? Six months ago we saw Brexit as ‘a meticulously planned political remake of The Italian Job - a magnificent heist orchestrated to turn Britain into a libertarian super-state, Seasteading’s head office.’ That judgement seems more relevant than ever, perhaps even a bit optimistic. Such plans are now in the open - just look at Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sinister proposal to copy the lower safety and emission standards of the US or even India (‘We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that.’). The UK’s global renewable energy standing has already fallen as a result of Brexit.

In the midst of increasingly disturbing global events we have quietly been making progress with our prototyping - with the view that action, however limited, is preferable to helpless hand-wringing and endless news scrolling. This has comprised several visits to our local motorcycle breaker, familiarising ourselves with local hardware stores, receiving an ancient lathe from the mainland and giving it a major service, and exploring local landscapes for suitable testing locations. We also had to learn to fly a drone for documentary footage.

To provide a simple explanation of the concept: the gravity battery is a storage device designed to be used with a variety of renewable energy generation methods. In our case, energy (provided by the abundant Madeiran sunshine) is captured by solar photovoltaics. This energy powers a motor, and with the help of a homemade gearbox is used to lift a fixed weight into the sky. (The real-life context could be, for example, one of the local homes we see built on the cliffsides of the island.) When it is needed the energy is released by dropping the weight, which in turn rotates the motor - now a generator - to produce electrical energy. The power available is determined by the size of the dropping mass, the speed at which it drops, the gearbox ratio, and the drop distance.

First iteration:

Based on an initial design by M-ITI Design PhD candidate Mohammed J. Ali, the first gravity battery used lathe gears and an off-the-shelf DC motor. In early testing we discovered that building a gearbox is relatively difficult, and that efficiency is largely dependent on very tight tolerances and hugely affected by the choice of drive train.* While the first iteration showed promise, it required too much mass to turn the gears - in excess of 30kg. We removed one gear train and managed to generate a steady 40W with a mass of 20kg, but it still descended too quickly. (Some investigation showed that the pulley belt final drive was very inefficient.)

The prototype was updated with CNC-machined aluminium side plates to ensure alignment of lathe-turned bearing holders and a motorcycle timing chain final drive to the DC motor. This last piece was rescued from a scrap Honda VF500, donated by our local bike breaker. We also experimented with bicycle gears, but these were less efficient than the timing chain and gears, which were designed for higher motorcycle speeds. With exactly the same gear ratios as the first iteration, this version comfortably descended with a mass of 10kg.

To communicate the concept of the prototype we recorded a short video. We had to think of a use for the generated energy, so we decided it would power a self-contained vinyl record player - the kind dads everywhere have been buying up recently with the aim of inflicting albums by the Pixies or the Smiths on their children. They’ve become so ubiquitous you can even buy them on our little island, which meant we could happily sidestep Amazon.

Here’s a video of this updated first iteration, filmed on the balcony of our local cafe.

This set of experiments was incredibly insightful. The balcony has a drop of approximately 9 metres. The record player normally uses an adaptor to convert 220 volts of AC power to 9 volts DC. We built a regulator to limit developed energy. In the first test we dropped 20kg of water held in a typical water cooler container. It played the music perfectly but the drop time was only 1 minute 25 seconds, which was too short for any song on the album. In the second test we used 10kg of water, but it only generated 6 volts, which was not enough to power the record player.

If you know the story of the three bears, you’ll anticipate that the third test was just right. We borrowed the water jug from the cafe and added 5kg to the container, bringing the total to 15kg. Not only did it generate enough power to start the record player, the drop time was just short of 9 minutes; we managed to play the better part of Side 1 of the Johnny Cash album At Folsom Prison (1968). Success! We attached an electrical tester and observed that the output power varied significantly. This was related to the music: the louder we turned up ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, the faster the weight dropped. This was surprising and instructive in itself.

Second iteration:

The next iteration aims to solve an important problem. Finding lathe gears and having access to a lathe limits the potential of easy access, so we had the idea of modifying a basic motorcycle for our experiments (ideally something around 125cc single cylinder). The main premise of this iteration is to reverse the purpose of the bike. Apologies for all the technical details, but in the interest of open knowledge here is a brief explanation:

Normally the bike engine burns fossil fuel (petrol) to move the piston down, which is converted to rotary motion with the crankshaft (every 4th stroke in our case)
Rotary motion (or RPM) is modified by the gearbox and ultimately rotates the rear wheel via a chain drive providing forward linear motion to the bike (and rider)
We reverse this situation: instead of fossil fuel, gravity spins the rear wheel using it as a pulley attached to the falling mass
This spins the drive sprocket, increasing RPM in the gearbox and finally driving the crankshaft at a speed determined by the selected gear, the diameter of the pulley, and the falling mass.

Motorcycles commonly generate electrical power (for the starter motor, lights, ignition, etc.) using a generator spinning on the end of the crankshaft. Unfortunately, in our case, the breaker had already sold on this key component before we received the donated bike. So we will test this ideal solution as soon as a complete scrap bike is found. For this iteration we use the same DC motor used in the first prototype.

Analysing the engine we noticed that the starter motor gears spin much faster than the crank - these operate in one direction to start the bike. With a bit of welding we solved this problem. We hacked into the engine cover to allow access for an output chain drive, and with some simple machining we converted the output drive to a timing gear. Next step - boil a kettle from the same balcony…

Once the second iteration is complete, the gravity battery will be ready to progress to another major phase: adapting it to new terrains, materials, and expertise in other locations, and testing the concept in the wild (although our local cafe, it must be said, is pretty wild).

Designing things is always a political act. In our work we are reusing available materials, basing designs on local needs and local terrain, and developing environmentally responsible off-grid energy solutions that empower local communities. How important is this approach given the current state of things? Well, although practically speaking it might be a drop in the proverbial bucket, at the moment it seems very important.

I ain’t seen the sunshine

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 11:05:51 +0000

… since I don’t know when

- Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues

We don’t normally write about our travels at Crap Futures, but last week’s trip to Longyearbyen, Svalbard seems worth a mention. The archipelago lies between Norway and the North Pole, far above Iceland, and at 78 degrees north Longyearbyen is the world’s northernmost settlement. There are 30% more polar bears than humans. There are northern lights, apparently. We did not see the northern lights, or any other natural light, during the six days we were there. The conference we attended was called, in all caps, REMOTE.

If you ever get a chance to visit Svalbard, even in January, take it. Despite the 24-hour darkness of polar night, drawn like a heavy curtain over Longyearbyen from October to February, the people we met there were lively and happy, even slightly giddy, drunk on the melting together of night and day. School children wearing reflective vests built snow forts under stark electric lights. People rode past on bicycles even in -20 degree temperatures, or on snowmobiles with rifle mounts. Huskies were tied up outside shops, and you had to check your gun at the door. It all had a Wild West feel about it.

The day after we arrived a mother polar bear and her two cubs wandered into town and were gently escorted out again in the most Scandinavian way, only to return the following day. The three bears also showed up at our dogsledding camp outside Longyearbyen, news that was conveyed to us by a man with a gun as we warmed ourselves with coffee and brandy in the lodge. (By law you can only leave the city limits with a high-powered rifle, or a guide who carries one.) The exchange between the man with the gun and our guide, who also had a rifle but carried it discreetly and put it in a locker at the camp, went as follows:

‘These people have all signed the waiver.’

‘Ah good, they’ve signed the waiver.’ (The waiver stipulated that if we were eaten by a bear it was not the company’s fault.)

‘Look – they’re in Philip’s camp, near his tent.’

‘Is Philip there?’

‘Ja, I think so.’

‘Yesterday they scared them away and said everything was okay, but they came right back.’

‘Ja, they must be hungry. They came up here maybe because of the meat.’

Then they turned to us and said: ‘So stay with the boss, okay?’

The scary thing about bears wandering into settlements – aside from the obvious menace of a large white bear hiding in a blizzard during the polar night – is the suggestion that something is going seriously wrong with nature; that hungry bears are a visible sign of climate change. Rising temperatures in the Arctic mean melting sea ice, which in turn makes it harder to find food (in the form of seals), and the whole sea ice ecosystem starts to collapse. The desperate mother bear – for what bear in its right mind would go near a place full of dozens of barking dogs, shouting humans, and vehicles – was likely trying to find enough food to feed her cubs.

The Arctic weather was generally cold and clear, with soft, drifting snow, but again, dark. The surrounding mountains and fjord could be glimpsed only in dim outline. The effect of day after day of total darkness is hard to describe. It wasn’t far to reach the end of the road in any direction, and the end of the streetlights – after which there was only an abyss, like falling off the map. Gale force winds whipped up unexpectedly, turning a walk to the pub into a blind life-or-death journey in which your colleagues suddenly disappeared and you were walking down an endless icy road, alone. This made one pub on the edge of town feel a bit locked in, like Minnie’s Haberdashery in The Hateful Eight. On the other hand there was the hygge factor: everywhere indoors, for example, in restaurants and pubs and shops, people padded around in woolly socks; we even presented in socks, which certainly gave the conference room a cosy vibe.

At the conference itself we met Owe Ronström, ethnologist and musician, a warm and generous soul from the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, who gave the keynote (and showed us Don Martin cartoons of desert islands). We sat drinking wine from the Nordpolet late into the night with colleagues like our subversive friend Kirsten Marie Raahauge, from the Design school at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. We talked about anticipation and wish fulfilment, needs and desires, the late Zygmunt Bauman and our own beloved Borgmann, as well as more topical questions: What is the best (peaceful) defense against polar bears? What are you supposed to do with brown cheese? How long can a human survive without sunlight? Is it healthy to jump into the snow after a jacuzzi? Credit must go to the organisers, Adam Grydehøj and Yaso Nadarajah, for keeping things running smoothly and losing not a single delegate.

We’ve been to larger events in the past year, but none so remote or intimate. Bringing together an eclectic mix of Island Studies researchers, the presentation topics ranged from medieval Norse-Sámi relations to intercorporeality and islandness to cultural identity and animal husbandry on the Estonian island of Ruhnu (pop. 97). For our part, we spoke about designing energy solutions for Madeira, ending with a video of our first prototype that James cut together on the plane. (We’ll post the video along with the latest project news in the next week or so.)

The theme of our panel was ‘Remote Island Sustainability’, and our talk was about ‘Promise in the Periphery’ – so how did Madeira fit in? In many ways Madeira is not remote or peripheral at all: it is the second wealthiest region in Portugal, it has decent air links to the rest of Europe, a centuries old tourism industry, and historically it was a major stopping point on transatlantic journeys. Nevertheless, it is peripheral in the sense of dependence; that – for example – much of its energy is still imported, along with much of its food and other goods – more than need be the case, given its natural attributes. Why is this? The constraints of infrastructure make it easier and cheaper to buy into the larger grid than to find local solutions. But is it easier and cheaper? What are the real costs of ignoring the local?

Judith Schalansky has a useful description of islands as ‘footnotes to the mainland’: ‘expendable to an extent, but also disproportionately more interesting’. Similarly, after her recent trip to Svalbard, Rebecca Solnit wrote: ‘More than anyplace I’ve ever been, [Svalbard] imposes a dependency…. Which is also an independency, from the rest of the world.’ Being peripheral should not be viewed as an obstacle, but as an advantage and an opportunity.

We’re exploring ideas of dependency and independency in relation to energy – taking the shape of a speculative design approach to energy generation, infrastructure and behaviour in Madeira. In our work we’re seeking to exploit remoteness and peripherality as drivers of creativity, possibility, resilience. In particular we aim to challenge the traditional radial model of centrally generated electricity, with the aim of allowing communities to reclaim ownership of energy generation and storage. We want to create new ecologies of energy relationships among islanders.

Darwin called the Galapagos Islands ‘a little world within itself’. The insulated species he found there – the tortoises and finches – give us an analogy for tailoring solutions to island-specific challenges. Bespoke innovation requires you to see the island as a whole, as a unique, self-contained site. Unlike the finches of the Galapagos, however, we intend that our bespoke energy solutions for Madeira will fly abroad, to be adapted to other Macaronesian Islands – in the case of one of our projects – and places further afield, as in the case of another project we’re developing.

The first line of the Madeiran anthem – Do vale à montanha e do mar à serra (‘From the valley to the mountain and from the sea to the highlands’) – gives a sense of how extreme this landscape is. The highest point, Pico Ruivo, is almost 2km above sea level, and it gets snow in the winter when it is still 20 degrees at the coast (and in the sea).

As a recent BBC documentary on Svalbard states: ‘This is not a place for normal.’ We found this to be true – certainly after a week in the dark – but we also found the potential for experimentation, both in the case of Svalbard and our own remote island. We saw the sun again at last as we flew back to Oslo via Tromsø. That night we re-entered the world just in time to watch Trump’s ‘American carnage’ inauguration speech on CNN. Suddenly the remote expanse of Svalbard looked far less like a hostile and frozen wasteland, far more like an oasis in the midst of a greater apocalypse.

Maybe I like the misery

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 15:32:53 +0000

We at Crap Futures travel a lot, but most of the time we live on a remote island on the edge of Europe. This creates a dissonance of sorts: on one hand we follow the latest emerging technologies and experience their effects when we visit Los Angeles or London or Berlin; on the other we pass most of our days in rural splendour, playing with our drone or working outside our institute in the warm December sunshine. Because we live in Europe and work at a tech institute we have access to the latest mod cons; but they are not as intrusive as they are in the big cities. No one here has an Amazon Echo, nor is there a single Starbucks or Costa on the island. Everyone smokes, but no one vapes. The taxis are old diesel Mercedes with hundreds of thousands of kilometres logged; the nearest (fiercely contested) Uber is in Lisbon. In other words, we are further than most in the developed world from what might be called a WALL-E state of being.

We wrote about automation in our first post for this blog, in the context of our local cafe. ‘The Pleasures of Prediction’ offered a few words on the gradual smoothing of our interaction with the woman behind the counter until it became seamless and no verbal instruction was necessary. We only had to approach the counter and put down €2.60 and the transaction would be made. Since then we’ve had a few hiccups: when one of us showed up and ordered half a plate of toast (one slice, three soldiers), or three of us showed up and ordered two plates of toast (=12 soldiers, or four each, one more than usual), the routine was temporarily broken and trust in the stability of the system had to be rebuilt. There was also the time a new employee started who was unfamiliar with our routine: when she asked for our order, it took us several seconds to remember what we wanted - what did we want? - and we realised then that we had placed trust in the system to know our desires, just as we relied on our devices to remember our passwords.

Working within such a system each day we become less and less conscious, less in control, more passive in meeting our needs and fulfilling our desires. The system calculates, the system learns, and of course, the system benefits. As this piece in Wired reminds us, ‘The more we use the butler, the more power it will have.’ This includes the power to manipulate its putative master. In the case of our cafe, there were no discernible ulterior motives - they just wanted to keep the line moving. In the case of the big four tech companies, control is very much an issue. So we should always ask: Who or what is taking control of our desires? Who or what do we increasingly rely on for the handling and fulfillment of those desires, and what do we give them in return? Whose script are we living by?

As this recent Guardian article pointed out, ‘Detractors warn of an inglorious future where we casually mention that we’re out of washing up liquid, and an hour later a drone drops some off at our door having already billed our credit card.’ This weird-future scenario has its potentially comic side, but it reminded us of the more lethal example of Thomas Becket. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s gruesome murder by four knights was set in motion, according to tradition (though the words might have been different), by an offhand utterance that was interpreted as the King’s official command: ‘Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’

You want to be careful about the confusion of casual utterances or the venting of emotions with actual commands to be executed by others, so to speak. This case ended badly for Thomas Becket, who lost the top of his head as a result. What do you say in the privacy of your own home? (As this New Inquiry article on ‘smart houses’ reminds us, ‘The possibilities for betrayal are endless.’) How might your utterances be used in ways you did not intend, or used in ways you did not think through, or even used against you? What havoc might you wreak when drunk, that might be even worse than those late-night ‘one-click’ spending sprees? As the Guardian article mentioned above points out, ‘Much of our interaction with a smartphone is conducted in public, where talking to it is simply too embarrassing. In the privacy of the home, however, we can explore [Amazon Echo’s] capabilities and slowly come to terms with the reality of talking to a machine.’

What will this reality look like? What dark aspects of ourselves will we reveal? Will it be a sexy-lonely vibe, like Spike Jonze’s Her, or something more adversarial-sinister-anarchic, like Chaplin’s Modern Times? One point to keep in mind: when automation is employed to play to its strengths, the potential consequence is that we in turn become automated – less emotional, more rational, programmed and predictable. Technology effectively replaces human thought. This in turn brings to mind Theodor Adorno’s critique (in Minima Moralia): ‘Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.’

Or will it be more of a Father Ted future? We’re thinking of that scene from ‘A Christmassy Ted’ in which a rebellious Mrs. Doyle tells the man who is trying to sell her a Teamaster, an automated tea-making machine designed to save her from hours of misery (i.e. her job): ‘Maybe I like the misery.’

This raises a fundamental question: What do we like? What do we need? How much ‘help’ can we take? When is it all enough? One basic point we keep returning to in this blog is that it is always worth asking why. Why automate? Why innovate? To what ultimate end?

(In a future post on automation we will dive deeper into taxonomies …)

Images:

France in 2000: Future school - Jean Marc Cote or Villemard, 1901 or 1910; The Assassination of Thomas Becket, from History of England by Henry Tyrrell, c. 19th C. Both images in public domain.

A Crap Futures Manifesto

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 13:48:47 +0000

Challenge #1: reverse this statement

‘We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture, people must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.’

Paul Mazur, Lehman Brothers, 1927

Challenge #2: reclaim the means - stop obsessing with the ends

‘Modern anthropology … opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means.’

John Carroll

Challenge #3: (as things become increasingly automated) facilitate action not apathy

‘[W]hen it becomes automatic (on the other hand) its function is fulfilled, certainly, but it is also hermetically sealed. Automatism amounts to a closing-off, to a sort of functional self-sufficiency which exiles man to the irresponsibility of a mere spectator.’

Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

Challenge #4: bring an end to this vacuous celebrity designer BS

‘My juicer is not meant to squeeze lemons; it is meant to start conversations.’

Philippe Starck

Challenge #5: interrupt legacy thinking and product lineages

‘All inventions and innovations, by definition, represent  an advance in the art beyond existing base lines. Yet, most advances, particularly in retrospect, appear essentially incremental, evolutionary. If nature makes no sudden leaps, neither it would appear does technology.’

Robert Heilbroner

Challenge #6: rather than feed the illusion of invincibility, work from the reality of uncertainty and transience

‘Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the Arabian Nights tales. But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.’

J.G. Ballard, The Miracles of Life

Challenge #7: set aside the easier work of critique and take up the more difficult challenge of proposing viable alternatives

‘It is true that I can better tell you what we don’t do than what we do do.’

William Morris, News from Nowhere

Challenge #8: ask yourself (before putting things in the world): am I qualified to play God?

‘It’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough.’

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Challenge #9: design ecologically

‘One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it … all things are one thing and one thing is all things – plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.’

John Steinbeck, The Sea of Cortez

Challenge #10: adopt a khadi mentality

‘True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery.’

Pyotr Kropotkin

Challenge #11: be patient for the quiet days

‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.’

Arundhati Roy

Challenge #12: start building the future you want, with or without technology

‘People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.’

Ray Bradbury, Beyond 1984: The People Machines

The Crap Futures Manifesto: A Preamble

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 14:42:41 +0000

It has been almost a year since we started this modest venture, with the aim of casting a critical eye on corporate dreams and emerging technologies.

To mark the occasion, we’ve been issuing a series of design challenges on Twitter. We thought we might gather some of these challenges into a proper manifesto, a statement of principles. (Manifestos are back in vogue, thanks in no small part to the internet and the ridiculous state of the world.) But how to write a manifesto? Where do you begin?

According to F. T. Marinetti, the leader of Italian Futurism and arguably the greatest manifesto writer of all time, the key ingredients of any manifesto are violence and precision. Manifestos must take no prisoners, they must be bold and direct like the advertisements they imitate. From ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ in 1909 to the ‘Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine’ in 1930, Marinetti and his comrades wrote hundreds of manifestos across all subjects.

The problem with the Futurists was that they believed too much in the future. As Marinetti himself put it: ‘Contrary to established practice, we Futurists disregard the example and cautiousness of tradition so that, at all costs, we can invent something new, even though it may be judged by all as madness.’

This single-mindedness is what made the Futurists exciting, but it was also their greatest weakness. They lacked any sort of critical distance, to the point that they became cheerleaders not only for Suffragism (good) but also for war and Fascism (bad), as well as industrial waste, library closures, and other downsides of modernity. Their rivals in London, the Vorticists led by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound (who called on artists to ‘make it new’ - but not that new), mocked this reverent attitude to technology. They called it ‘automobilism’, after the leading technology of the pre-war era:

‘AUTOMOBILISM (Marinetteism) bores us. We don’t want to go about making a hullo-bulloo about motor cars, any more than about knives and forks, elephants or gas-pipes.

Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.’

Also wary of technology and progress were the Dadaists, led by another great manifesto writer, Tristan Tzara. Operating during the carnage of the First World War, Dada came out as ‘definitely against the future’, even calling for the ‘abolition of the future’. Tzara brought an ironic and self-critical gaze to the manifesto’s masculinist posturing, so that while the 1918 manifesto begins with a Marinettian definition:

‘To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC

to fulminate against 1, 2, 3

to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence’

It proceeds to tear it all down:

‘I write a manifesto and I want nothing … and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles.’

Because by 1918 all beliefs were suspect, spent. Everything was bled of meaning.

Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes lies the perfect manifesto: at once direct and assertive, critical and self-aware, not taking itself or the future too seriously while being, beneath it all, deadly serious.

That is basically what Crap Futures is aiming for: a manifesto to mark our first anniversary that is neither too dogmatic nor too ironic. God knows the world has enough of both.

So what do we stand for? Stay tuned to find out. As Valerie Solanas told reporters outside the 13th Precinct in New York on June 3, 1968 after she’d shot Andy Warhol: ‘Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am.’

Images:

F. T. Marinetti; Marinetti’s automobile accident, 1908; Valerie Solanas being taken from court to jail, 1968.

Three stages of design fiction (energy futures, Part 2)

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 12:35:51 +0100

Here we describe the complex relationship between reality and fiction, how this is managed in the design fiction process and how, in a successful project, fiction influences future reality.

1. Establishing the coordinates of reality: understanding the non-storyworld

A thorough awareness of these coordinates is an essential starting point for any work of design fiction. The origin is provided by the core theme of the project - in our case energy infrastructure. Factors informing the coordinates are therefore political, economic, ecological, material, behavioural, historical, and social.

In developed countries the dominant approach to energy is based on a national grid system, a model typically implemented in the early 20th century. Such systems were designed for a one-way flow of electricity - from remote state or corporate-owned centralised generating stations to individual consumers via transmission and distribution lines.

In the 21st century a growing demand for energy, combined with environmental concerns and climate action, has led to major shifts in policy. Two examples are the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) and the European Commission’s Smart Grids Task Force. Such acts essentially call for classic grid topologies to evolve towards more distributed systems, exploiting bidirectional energy flows facilitated by, for example, wind turbines, solar PVs, and hydroelectric, and also two-way flows of information aimed at optimising supply and demand and making the system more transparent, safe, and efficient.

While such changes are in essence positive, substantive change is limited by constraint no. 2: legacies of the past. The key issues are:

The radial model of central generation (through burning fossil fuels or nuclear fission) and distribution via a grid system have led to a well-established system of governance and ownership of energy infrastructure (both state and private)
These owners are reluctant to cede control
Alternative means of generating energy such as renewables could provide sufficient means but currently rely on connection to the grid (on terms dictated by its owner)
The ubiquity of the grid system has resulted in an ‘always there’ approach to energy consumption meaning that it is easily taken for granted by consumers
The ubiquity of the grid system means that all electrical products are adapted to it (with a few unique exceptions such as the wind-up radio)
Solutions tend towards the generic one-size-fits-all, ignoring the potential of bespoke possibilities based on unique landscapes or contexts

Once the problematic has been well defined it becomes possible to begin developing the storyworld by carefully manipulating the constraining coordinates.

2. Creating a fictional storyworld with a new set of constraints

As we consider this point it becomes apparent that this is perhaps where speculative design and design fiction differ. A kind of chicken-and-egg conundrum: strategically, what comes first - world or object?

Speculative design starts with and centres on the object. It extrapolates existing product lineages guided by the promise of an emerging technology and contemporary trends. Auger-Loizeau’s Audio Tooth Implant (2001) is a classic example. The storyworld is then built around the artefact to examine its potential implications, or it is left up to the viewer to imagine the future society in which the hypothetical artefact exists.

Design fiction starts with the storyworld. The artefacts follow, designed for that world like props in a film. The main reason for developing a storyworld - in the design fiction approach - is to provide a new context or set of circumstances to design for. These are carefully crafted to counter or address the key issues identified in Stage 1.

Fiction writers have given us countless carefully described storyworlds through the ages. Scholars have written at length on the details of their construction. But there are specific (and very recent) approaches to developing a design fiction storyworld that are worth noting. In his study of alternative monetary systems, for example, Austin Houldsworth has developed a methodology he calls ‘counter-fictional design’. Houldsworth’s approach borrows existing storyworlds - storyworlds drawn from literary history - and asks how money would function in these alternative societies. A monetary system designed for B. F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two, for example, describes a payment system that challenges the established monetary function of ‘a store of value’.

This approach works well when a novel can be found that aligns with the particular theme in question. For example, George Orwell’s 1984 would be a good match for redesigning things based on alternative constructs of privacy. The problem is that the storyworld of many sci-fi and fantasy novels resides too far along the fictional end of the fact-fiction scale, resulting in a design solution that, in Žižek’s terms, ‘shatters the coordinates of our reality’. With the loss of plausibility, the value (at least for design fiction purposes) is diminished.

An approach that more directly manipulates the coordinates of reality is counterfactual history - a method that begins by changing a specific historical event and extrapolates the consequences to build the storyworld on a parallel timeline. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is one commonly cited example: it imagines an alternative history in which the Axis Powers have defeated the Allies in World War II and Germany and Japan have divided America - the story playing out in Japanese-occupied 1960s San Francisco.

A design fiction example of this approach is Sascha Pohflepp’s project, The Golden Institute, based on a different outcome to the 1980 US general election. A Carter victory would have enabled a continuation of energy-friendly initiatives undertaken during his previous term; these were promptly cancelled by Reagan when he took office. Pohflepp’s project described the research developed by the fictional institute, creating a poignant reminder of what might have been lost. The storyworld here simply provides a logic to furnish an alternative history in which large resources are funneled into renewable energy.

In the case of our project the motivations are somewhat similar - to develop a storyworld framework to inform the design of an alternative energy infrastructure. Likewise the project takes place in a real location: Madeira. Thus the storyworld is an alternative version of the island that retains some of its eccentric and original elements: the complex and rich history of the levada irrigation system, alternative modes transportation, and sometimes hubristic notions of transportation infrastructure and island planning.

What has changed, however, are the elements that led to the problems identified in Stage 1, the 20th century forces that shaped the island’s energy history. In our storyworld with its counterfactual history, the island of Madeira has:

No radial model of central generation
No central ownership and control
No generic solutions
No patenting and knowledge protection
No consumption of fossil fuels

These fundamental differences allow for the imaginary reconstruction of society and human behaviour - from how energy is generated, to the rethinking of products that no longer have wall sockets ready to provide them with always-available power.

3. Designing in the fictional world: new constraints, new possibilities

When the fictional world has been constructed in sufficient detail, it can become a testing ground for new ideas and approaches.

We mentioned Mohammed J. Ali’s energy-focused project, A New Scottish Enlightenment, in an earlier post. Similar to The Golden Institute it describes an energy related counterfactual history, in this case an alternative outcome to the 1979 Scottish independence referendum leading to a split from the United Kingdom. New Scotland’s key policies include legislation aimed to deliver increasing resources and independence to its citizens. This simple counterfactual history provides a powerful framework through which to rethink energy. Redesigning Madeira is essentially a re-location of Mo’s project (we are working with him) but with the key goal of actually implementing the design solutions.

Charles Eames once described design as ‘a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose’. Eames’s statement can be used to compare and contrast the function of normative design and approaches to technological application with the strategies/methods being developed for this project. As with energy, dominant approaches to the design of products and services were formulated last century, and likewise the systems and infrastructures in which designers operate exist along similar topologies with the elements being gathered and arranged at central locations and distributed radially around the globe. The role of the consumer is limited to simply interacting with the end product – for the time that it remains viable. Building on participatory design methods, combined with open-source knowledge practices, Redesigning Madeira will draw its elements from the local context: both natural elements in the landscape (as a source of energy) and cultural elements in the landscape (that can be potentially reused and recycled).

The plan is informed by local knowledge and terrain. Our island’s unusual landscape (as we’ve noted previously) is ideal for experimentation. It holds the potential to inform and inspire the design of numerous bespoke energy generation and storage solutions, from highly radical macro speculations to more pragmatic, plausible human-scale solutions. The unique approach of jointly designing for the real world and its fictional counterpart means that prototyping is possible on different levels. Tangible concepts can be prototyped in the engineering sense, made to function better in specific real locations; while speculative concepts, as well as longer term social and ecological impacts (of functioning prototypes), can be tested in the storyworld.

The final stage will be to make more deliberate use of the diegetic prototypes, not only to suspend disbelief about change with the purpose of facilitating:

A focus on local rather than central - materials, skills, landscapes, tools, etc.
Energy considered ecologically rather than siloed
Open-sourcing all knowledge
Turning ‘devices’ into ‘things’
No consumption of fossil fuels
‘Make it yourself’ mentality

Conclusions: beyond autonomy

In a famous lecture to Cornell University students in 1948, Nabokov declared: ‘Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.’ But however untrue, fiction can still inspire real action in the world by giving the designer permission to bypass existing constraints and work with an entirely new, fictional set of constraints. On the more practical end of the scale, ideas conceived to meet these fictional constraints can provide alternatives to entrenched realities: new forms of energy generation and new models of consumption, for example.

Another passionate believer in the autonomy of art, Oscar Wilde, overturned conventional wisdom more than a century ago in his essay ‘The Decay of Lying’, when he declared: ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.’ But again, this apparent proclamation in support of autonomy and l’art pour l’art has important real-world implications. Wilde argues in the same essay that the best art and literature teach life how to be: not through dull didacticism, but by imagining and giving shape to preferred futures. This is one essential function of design fiction: by allowing our imaginations to travel beyond pragmatic (e.g. industry) constraints, we open up the potential for radical new discoveries.

Important questions remain: Who is design fiction for? What is the ideal medium? Does it exist more as a framework to help the designer? Or is it a fully fledged genre, aimed at a public audience? How much is too much fiction?

Our overall approach, which blends speculative and practical design, aims to be agile and versatile. Although our current project is focused on the theme of energy and based on the characteristics of one particular island, it also stands as an example of a methodology - an approach that facilitates the imagining of alternatives and also the means to artificially test them in real life. The approach could equally be used to explore energy alternatives in other locations, or different themes such as transportation. The key goal, once again, is to close the loop - from fiction back to reality.

As Wilde states at the end of ‘The Decay of Lying’: ‘Come! We have talked long enough.’ Time for a swim.

Images:

Turbo Generator - Siemens Pressebild; Bullock Carro, Funchal, Madeira - Harry Pollard. Both images CC BY-SA 3.0.

Barreirinha swimming complex, Madeira - James Auger.

Exploring energy futures through design fiction (Part 1)

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 15:01:16 +0100

With the autumnal equinox upon us, Crap Futures is nearing its first anniversary. We began shooting ideas back and forth last September when James arrived in Madeira. Now, after a long, hot summer, it seems like a good moment to take stock and reflect on the past year whilst also making plans for what comes next.

In the post When the sun shines we gave an overview of our ongoing design project. This has been ticking along in the background since early 2016, with time spent articulating the research methodology, transforming the concept into funding proposals, and identifying and discussing with potential collaborators. Back in April we described the problem of using renewable energy sources on the island (and beyond), identifying some of the factors currently hindering their implementation - for example historical legacies. The project asks:

What might our energy infrastructure look like if it were not constrained by these outdated constructs?

A key motivation has always been to move beyond the discursive, the critical, the speculative and the fictional. As we wrote at the time: ‘With this project (unusually) we’re not interested in fiction.’ In retrospect this statement seems a bit rash. So before moving into the making phase, we thought it necessary to probe a little deeper into the relationship between fact and fiction. Or more precisely, What is the role of fiction when trying to make change - desperately needed change - in the real world?

To start with Bruce Sterling’s familiar definition:

‘Design fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.’

There are several keywords here that demand closer examination. First, fiction - in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek describes the viewer’s reading (of cinema) by stating that, ‘if something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too filled in with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality - we have to fictionalise it’. This statement is helpful as it succinctly describes two states of being and the relationship between them: the nonfiction world, defined by the coordinates of reality, and its fictional counterpart (diegesis).

Second, diegetic - from diegesis: the world in which the story takes place and for which the prototypes are designed. Through the manipulation of a particular set of coordinates, a fictional or alternative world can be constructed.

Third, a more complex issue is raised by the use of design when combined with the term change. The recent emergence of counter or oppositional forms of design (such as design fiction etc.) suggests that there are problems or limitations with mainstream design; for example, design’s affiliation with the market and the prevailing demands of consumption and innovation. These are the (normative) designer’s coordinates of reality: in practice experienced as constraints that limit the potential of design to make substantive change (see Future nudge). Designing for a carefully crafted diegesis can provide new constraints, in turn facilitating new solutions.

Fact and fiction should not exist as a dichotomy but rather an elastic scope of possibility. Good design fictions do not shatter the coordinates of reality; they stretch and manipulate them in carefully crafted ways, hence the suspension of disbelief. But, and this is important, to what end? Sterling’s phrase ‘deliberate use’ suggests purpose … but what is the purpose?

In Building Imaginary Worlds, Mark J.P. Wolf examines why authors find it necessary to invent other worlds. He concludes that the answer lies in ‘the changing of Primary World defaults, to amaze, entertain, satirize, propose possibilities, or to simply make an audience more aware of defaults they take for granted’.

In his introduction to Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury offers some additional motivations:

‘Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it’s good to look forward, not back. Because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine.)’

In the closing sentence of his book Technophobia! Daniel Dinello suggests that ‘At its best, science fiction projects a dark vision of the Technologist’s posthuman future that encourages us to create a better one.’

But does highlighting wrong paths lead us to preferable ones?

This question was raised in Republic of Salivation, a post on MoMA’s ‘online curatorial experiment’ Design and Violence:

‘Do violent, dystopian visions ever lead to positive, substantive change?’

Design fiction futures, it is true, are often dystopian - this is one of several lines of critique aimed at design fiction projects. The upcoming Speculative Now! conference in Split, Croatia, for example, has chosen to focus debate on the role of speculative design in the ‘real world’. Similarly with our project we aim to advance the goals and practice of design fiction by defining positive paths. Our approach will bring fiction-based prototypes back into real life, seek to produce tangible societal outcomes, and work to turn (positive) aspects of fiction into fact. Design fiction can help us work toward ‘the future we actually want’, imposing our own agency in how the future happens.

In our next post we will examine three stages of design fiction, explaining how a carefully contrived diegesis can provide the ideal framework for redesigning the real world.

Images:

Christian Schussele - Men of Progress [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; SAFEGE test track at Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, France (used in filming of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451), via Wikimedia Commons

Control

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 19:14:12 +0100

It has been a while since our last confession. And what a while it has been. This mid-summer post makes a small departure from our normally tech/design focused ramblings to pick over the events of the past couple of months.

Crap Futures has been pondering, for almost a year now, how the future happens - pinpointing, examining, and critiquing the various factors that influence change. These mostly operate in the background. They are subtle and complex. Sometimes months and years pass by with little discernible change. And then suddenly there is a moment that will be looked back on as monumental; a seismic, future-shifting event that will be picked over and debated for generations to come.

Take Brexit: let’s imagine it’s circa 2500 and the contemporary equivalent of Hilary Mantel is sifting through the events leading up to that great fiasco, recounting and colouring in the key players and moments. The parallels between the events described in Wolf Hall and the UK choosing to leave the EU are striking, and highlight the fact that England (let’s not burden the rest of the Union with England’s folly) has always had a rather large ego and a will to go it alone. Brexit reads like fiction - the cartoonish characters, the backstabbing, the lies and deceit, the shocking and surprising outcomes. One notable difference, however, is the lack of a Thomas Cromwell (or Mark Rylance) - a master negotiator, a charmer. Instead we have Boris Johnson (Gerard Depardieu crossed with Benny Hill?); although Michael Gove might be the modern equivalent of the sneaky Stephen Gardiner (Mark Gatiss). A game for sleepless summer nights.

We’ve discussed the idea of constraints a few times on the blog. Constraints express a lack of control; they are basically the opposite of control. So taking back control means finding ways to remove constraints - like Henry VIII telling the Catholic Church to sod off so that he could swap his Catherine for Anne. Those following the run up to the UK referendum became familiar with the Leave camp’s Jedi mind-trick like mantra: TAKE BACK CONTROL.

This raises the kinds of questions we like to ask, such as:

From whom?

Once ‘taken back’, who has control?

What do they want to do with it?

And more tellingly (to borrow from architect Cedric Price): Brexit is the answer, but what was the question?

We at Crap Futures tend to see things with a sceptical, even jaundiced, view. So in a preemptive scripting of this future Mantel’s Brexit-based historical fiction we read the whole thing as a meticulously planned political remake of The Italian Job - a magnificent heist orchestrated to turn Britain into a libertarian super-state, Seasteading’s head office. (Seasteading backer Peter Thiel gave a high profile endorsement of Donald Trump in a speech at the RNC last month, suggesting a new, almost pragmatic approach to world shaping. This followed his admission that the techno-libertarian island utopia idea wasn’t going so well.) Those in the Tory head office seem a little too comfortable with the shocking outcome of the referendum.

New New England is desperately in need of a niche, so a dramatic and radical extrapolation of the pathways forged by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s seems like a logical plan. They have won control and now want to make a lot of money, at the expense of anyone and anything - workers, ethics, the environment, European projects and relationships … the list goes on.

Meanwhile over in Trumplandia similarly destructive, ill-intentioned plans are being hatched. Trump’s enthusiasm for nuclear weapons has got us worried; his ‘isolationism, nativism and protectionism’ has been attacked even by the likes of fellow havoc wreaker George W. Bush. His outlandish pronouncements seem to know no bounds: first he calls on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton, then he drops the astounding hint that she might be assassinated by gun nuts. Hopefully this bleak circus will pack up and leave town in November. Should it triumph, however - and who would trust predictions in the wake of the morning after shock of Brexit? - it will undoubtedly push us down the path of more crap futures.

Trump and Brexit must be seen as reactions - kneejerk and narrowly nativist, but honestly felt by their grassroots supporters - to the sweeping economic and social changes brought by globalisation. The tragic irony, as numerous commentators have pointed out, is that the working class is voting against its own interests, allowing itself to be swayed by cynical appeals by cutthroat capitalists to our basest fears, seductive fears of the coming apocalypse that push aside hope for a better future.

The English half of Crap Futures experienced this first hand on a recent trip back to the UK. A couple of days were spent in a shell-shocked London before catching a train north to the Brexit heartland of Derby where it felt like England had just won the European Football championship (that honour, of course, went to our adoptive Portugal). People genuinely thought they had taken back control - that the EU were responsible for all the things that had made life crap over the past forty years. Sadly, checking in a few years from now will almost certainly prove otherwise; that control is more elusive than the politicians’ promises suggest.

On a lighter note, the Canadian half of Crap Futures has been enjoying a brighter, Justin Trudeau-tinted future back home. Montreal’s vision of the future is particularly attractive. A native wariness to global capitalism manifests in a refreshing absence of cookie-cutter high streets: it is hard to find a recognisable chain store along Rue St. Laurent or Rue St. Denis. At the same time the city’s cosmopolitanism has deep roots and is visible everywhere (you often hear people switch in conversation not only between French and English but also a third language like, say, Portuguese). Montreal’s militant protection of its rusted analogue heart sits comfortably alongside the quiet, selective adoption of technological innovations. The BIXI bikes are a good example, replacing a significant amount of car and bus traffic (it’s cheaper than other forms of public transit) with a clean, silent transportation network of more than 5,000 bikes supported by a smooth payment system.

Sat in a cafe in Mile End or cycling along the Lachine Canal (or drinking in the Godspeed You! Black Emperor-owned Bar Le Ritz in Jean-Talon) you get the sense that things are changing for the better, or at least not getting any worse. That is a rare enough feeling these days. At a bakery in Chinatown your fortune cookie tells you: ‘Your future is as boundless as the lofty sky.’ Even seeing 666 written in the sky above your head while drinking at the McAuslan terrasse can’t dull the prevailing sense of optimism. Julian’s usual toast and coffee has been replaced by a fine French pastry and something called a Gibraltar, made on the most elegant espresso machine he has ever seen; he is seriously thinking of making his next laptop an Olivetti Valentine. He had better return to the Crap Futures island lair before all this Canadian optimism goes to his head.

But then, in a highly dramatic twist, this week started with our island lair nearly burning to the ground. Thankfully our homes and institute were (narrowly) spared, but the lesson in precarious futures did not go unheeded - in the coming year we will be giving more thought to uncertainty among other themes. And then of course such unforeseen events should act as a reminder to those claiming to have control that ultimately, well, there is no control.

(Note: Crap Futures will return to its normal themes in September. And apologies to those who haven’t read or seen Wolf Hall.)

Images:

Ronald Reagan televised address, 1981, PD; Montreal 666, Julian Hanna; 2016 Madeira wildfires, Hélder Santos / Global Imagens, CC0.

Make it yourself: The state of design, part 2

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 16:56:20 +0100

We ended part one with the following question: ‘How can designers reclaim the means on behalf of their products and the people who use them?’ In other words, how can we see past the allure of the ‘device’ to re-engage with both the systems that bring it to fruition and the systems in which it operates? We will now discuss the promise of maker movements as one possible answer to these questions, as well as some problems or limitations of ‘making’.

Maker movements

This New Yorker article provides an insightful history of the current mania for making, tracing its roots back to the Arts and Crafts movement a century ago. The author lists a couple of key points that explain why and how the earlier effort failed to have a wider impact. He brings in the American women’s rights advocate Mary Dennett’s contention, for example, that Arts and Crafts spent ‘too much time on “rag-rugs, baskets, and … exhibitions of work chiefly by amateurs”, rather than asking the most basic questions about inequality.’ He also argues that the movement failed to present ‘a radical alternative to the alienated labor of the factories. Instead, it provided yet another therapeutic escape from it’, devolving into a hobby for the bourgeoisie. Sound familiar?

While it is true that elements of makerism have settled in the craft beer, custom bike, and sourdough cultivating gentrifications of East London and Brooklyn (not that there’s anything wrong with beer, bikes or bread per se), a less hipster, more revolutionary, tech-orientated approach has also been bubbling away.

Maker spaces, with their invaluable dual access to machines and people with knowledge, have been touted as invigorating local economies and making it possible for small entrepreneurs to compete with MegaCorp. On a recent trip to Hong Kong we visited Cesar Harada’s MakerBay, and it struck us as a great example of what these spaces can be. MakerBay houses several independent start-ups, offers classes training local people how to make, and provides a nice mix of making practices and tools (see point below).

Our opinion is that there is great potential in making, but design needs to play a more expansive and engaged role. Here’s why:

1. Complexity

In a previous post we discussed Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione. The skills and tools required to make his furniture are relatively simple, but what about the construction of more complex technological products that require electrical or electronic components, or things that demand skills beyond basic wood cutting and nails?

We mentioned the example of Dyson in part one. Tom Lynch’s open-source vacuum cleaner provides an (almost) ideal example of how more complicated products could be made differently. The project explored the idea of building one’s own vacuum cleaner, based on Dyson’s cyclone, using only locally sourced materials and basic making skills. All experiments and knowledge were loaded on the project’s wiki, with the idea that other contributors around the world would add their own local information.

After a few prototypes Lynch produced a fully functioning vacuum for less than £50. The example highlights two key strengths of open source: free sharing of knowledge and access to expert communities. If more designers were to embrace such an approach the proliferation of knowledge would inevitably lead to increasingly complex and diverse objects becoming available. Devices become things.

2. Aesthetics

‘Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbours’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee pot, by the well-modulated color schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture, and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.’

- J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

Consumers have been programmed for sleek, seamless products far too long to accept the standard (non-designed) DIY aesthetic overnight. The desire for award-winning coffee pots (and phones, juicers, hair dryers, etc.) is strong, and for the time being Ballard is most likely right - there is no possibility of escape. This leaves two options: one easy, one very difficult.

The easy route: Adapt the maker aesthetic to what people want. Introduce a better sense of design that allows maker products to compete with mainstream exemplars of good design such as Apple and Dyson. Lynch’s vacuum cleaner is an example of what maker products often look like - material choices are based on what is available (and what can be manipulated) rather than what is optimal. What would the device look like if it had the touch of Charles and Ray Eames? Or Dieter Rams? Or Enzo Mari?

There aren’t many designed maker objects to be found (please contact us if you know of some). The OpenStructures WaterBoiler is one example of how such things could look. Originally designed by Jesse Howard and Thomas Lommée, it was adapted by Unfold, who replaced the PET bottles with a cut-through bottle (see Tord Boontje’s Transglass project for the potential of cut recycled glass) and used a combination of 3D-printed ceramic, off-the-shelf plumbing material and simple folded steel. If more objects like these were produced by the maker movement, there might be a chance of shifting consumer habits.

The hard route: Adapt consumer desires to a maker aesthetic. Reprogramme people to be less obsessed with brands, or to see value in what is rough, cheap, or practical.

Adam Curtis in Century of the Self describes the rise of public relations in the 20th century and how the United States (and thereafter the world) was transformed as a result. The Wall Street banker Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers is quoted as saying:

‘We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture, people must be trained to desire. To want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.’

The PR people, including Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, were of course incredibly successful - leading to the situation we described in the previous post. But (and it is a big but) if need can be transformed into desire, should it not be possible to reverse the process, to return to a more sustainable, less consumer-driven situation? Even perhaps by exploiting human susceptibility to such manipulation to secure better ends?

Bernays convinced women to smoke in the 1920s through public relations. Now government campaigns are attempting to do the exact opposite, through similar methods (although so far they lack the cunning of Bernays’ tactics). However it is unlikely that any government will wholeheartedly embrace the notion of reversing the desire for consumer products any time soon: it is too closely related to economic growth.

Makerism could begin to make inroads with consumers through signification. Freitag’s tarpaulin bags succeeded in stoking consumer desire because they embodied a clever mix of good design and bold environmentalism. We’re complicated creatures, and becoming more so at a seemingly exponential rate. How something signifies is important to us. Maybe playing with signification is the way to convince people to consume differently.

As a company, Freitag combines good design with environmentalism in a way that offers one possible solution to both sides of the aesthetics issue. Design what people want, but also make people want more responsible design. Could a similar approach work for makerism?

3. Education

In this Atlantic article John Tierney lists the dilemmas of maker culture, with a specific section on education. His conclusions are based on panel discussions from last year’s Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado. Some of the advice is sound:

‘the emphasis should be on collaboration (learning with others, working with others - both keys to much of the advancement of the maker culture)’;

and some is limiting:

‘The consensus on what’s important for older kids and adults is concise: coding. All the panelists agreed on that, and clearly that viewpoint is already widespread.’

Coding is essential, but in our view so is knowing how to use a chisel or a lathe. There is at present an over reliance on the digital. 3D printing and laser cutting not only broaden but - if used exclusively - can also drastically reduce the range of possibilities.

Design education teaches students how to choose the appropriate material for a particular purpose. Choices are based on many related factors such as functional behaviour, quantity required, formal qualities, and so on. As we pointed out in this post, the 3D printer shouldn’t be the only tool in the workshop.

4. Design politics

In the last post we asked: ‘What is the point of good design when the systems in which it operates are profoundly bad?’

Many designers and design engineers work on products that solve genuine and serious human problems. Robotic surgery is a good example - in this realm, precision robots have clear advantages over their human counterparts. At the same time, surgery robots are prohibitively expensive.

Frank Kolkman’s project OpenSurgery attempted to address this issue by building and sharing the design of a DIY robot. But almost immediately he ran into another crucial problem: ‘as it turns out’, he writes, ‘it is almost impossible to design anything related to robotic surgery without infringing upon someone else’s intellectual property.’ All possible robotic arm configurations were patented by the Da Vinci Surgical System several years ago, even though many are not currently in use. Kolkman writes: ‘where intellectual property law begins to fail … is where large companies are monopolizing over extensive patent portfolios with very broadly defined patents on concepts and mechanisms’. This is a classic example of constraint of infrastructure - in this case the protection of knowledge to the detriment of society.

OpenSurgery works as a critical project in two ways. First, it is an investigation into the rules of patents and potential (legalish) ways to circumvent ‘protection’ - such as sharing files on private peer-to-peer networks or basing the website in a country where the patents are not valid. In this sense it is a practical project that could be implemented. Second, it exposes the existence of ‘patent profiles’ and the behaviour of their owners, thereby becoming a project on the politics of making. It is a powerful exposé of how control can be misused - and what might be done about it.

Fixing it

Some of the issues we describe above are addressed in this Guardian article from 2012, which begins:

‘Too often design education funnels bright, imaginative minds towards places where they are the least useful – into the corporate design teams of commercial companies, or the rarefied world of galleries and one-off production. The people best trained in solving problems are rarely connected to the people who have problems to solve.’

Crap Futures friend Daniel Charny, designer and curator of the excellent ‘Power of Making’, and Sugru’s James Carrigan were the subject of the piece. Their Fixperts scheme exploits the skills of designers - not to sell more glossy products, but to solve problems through bespoke means. They are also very interested in design education ensuring that new generations of designers are privy to the kind of skills necessary to be a ‘fixpert’ and not just a ‘digipert.’

Fixperts isn’t unique - it is part of a trend born out of frustration with the current state of design. Another example is The Restart Project targeted at reducing electronic waste, with its encouraging motto: ‘let’s fix our relationship with electronics’. This project takes an appropriately holistic view, tracing and attempting to improve the journey ‘from design and manufacture, through use and end of life’. Both Fixperts and The Restart Project exemplify this notion of designers (and engineers) reclaiming the means - of wresting back control of our products and the systems in which they operate.

So far the maker movement has consisted of small, fairly insular communities of like-minded, idealistic individuals. What would it look like scaled up to a much larger level? And more importantly how can we help make this happen?

Images:

MakerBay Hong Kong; Tom Lynch’s open source vacuum cleaner; Open Structures WaterBoiler by Jesse Howard and Unfold; OpenSurgery by Frank Kolkman.