Lunch over IP

LiftAsia08: Tending towards beauty

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea. I am moderating this session, so only partial blogging.)

Jan Chipchase, designer and researcher and anthropologist for Nokia Design, opens the session talking about his work studying how people use technology and how they're influenced by it. Running notes.
More and more of what we use in daily life becomes pocketable, you carry it in pockets and bags.
Pocketable is a step towards technology becoming invisible: we are going to not see alot of technology; not invisible in the sense that it's disappearing into the infrastructure, but in the sense that you will be using it without other people noticing or knowing that you're using it.
When you have objects in people pockets that have similar functionalities, you're gonna see alot of serial solitary interaction (two people watching the same video each on his cell phone, one beside the other, for instance).
There is alot of buzz about sharing -- about YouTube, MySpace, etc. Sharing is inherently human, is generally socially positive, but when you adopt that technology it can raise a question of whether you're opting out of society.
In an era of mass production, tech is getting into people's hands at a younger and younger age: the distance between their social norms and ours (adults) is widening.

Christian Lindholm (wireless guru from Finland) asks: what do digital nomads tell us about the future? Defining mobility: contextual variables; ergonomic variables; physical variables:

The product-maker has to create beauty. What is beauty? Roman architect Vitruvius in 30 BC said: A structure must exhibit firmitas (solid, rugged), utilitas (utility) and venustas (beauty). Another architect, Leon Battista Alberti, defined beauty in 1435: "The adjustment of all parts proportionally, so that one can not add, subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole". But you also have to have "oréos", the greek word for "beauty of one's hour", timely beauty.
The Apple iPhone is beautiful, but it really still feels like a prototype.
To see the future, look at the present. We interviewed a group of "elite nomads", the bleeding edge of global travelling users. Here some of the findings:

• Data-roaming costs stifle demand; people downgrade to pure voice; they carry several prepaid SIM cards. Reliable Internet connection is like a shade under a palmtree for these digital nomads, it's comfort. Coffee, wi-fi and friends is an invaluable combination for these digital nomads.
• Battery life is a constant worry for them. Battery life is the number 1 enemy of convergence: basically everything already works, except that all-in-one runs out of batteries. Power is the digital water. People go to ridiculous length to find the power. What I see more and more is digital divergence -- a phone AND an iPod, separate devices -- and the main reason for this is to two batteries, so that you don't run out of juice in either (for the same reason many Blackberry users have also a cell phone: in order not to run out of battery in either calls or e-mail). My favorite mobile gizmo from Nokia from the last few years is the USB charger (Apple iPods also have one).
• Laptops are the only one that are qualified as "tools" by these leading digital nomads; the phone is a read-only device. All the nomads were carrying laptops, and many had also Blackberries and phones and other devices.
• This year is the year of bad touch screens (BG: picture of the iPhone behind the speaker). The reason why Apple is so phenomenal is because they have their own screen technology. But the natural evolution of the iPhone is a small sliding QWERTY keyboard. (BG: totally, totally agree: the iPhone will never become a business tool until the keyboard is there).
• The Internet builds a base for stronger ties when meeting physically.

Takeshi Natsuno, the father of the first, functioning, successful, large-scale wireless internet system, Japan's i-Mode (there is a whole chapter about it in my book "Roam") also spoke in this session. Unfortunately no time to take notes on his speech.

LiftAsia08: Six Swiss Startups

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea)

A session with short presentations ("elevator pitches", really) by 6 young Swiss startups that were selected for a Korea entrepreneurs tour by AlpicT.

Pixelux Entertainment (represented by Raphael Arigoni) started in 2003 and does 3D software for entertainment and movies, based around the physical properties of the objects realized (they call the tecnology "digital molecular matter"). The results are spectacular: think of scenes where anything bends, fractures or breaks: objects realized with Pixelux technology deform and flex in a very realistic way, looking like they would do in the real world rather than looking cartoonish. Arigoni says that the tech also makes realizing these sequences cheaper. They've worked with LucasArt on the "StarWars - The Force Unleashed" game.

Arimaz (represented by Pierre Bureau) works on entertainment robotics. One of their products is Mydeskfriend, a small robot that looks like a Tamagotchi, connected to the Internet; it can read messages and RSS feeds, be a character in games, etc.

Secu4 (represented by Ralph Rimet) develops a protection system for valuables, based on wireless tech. 3300 laptops are forgotten, lost or stolen every week in the 8 biggest airports in the EMEA Europe, Middle East and Africa) zone. The idea of Secu4 is to insert a small bluetooth card, connected with a cell phone. For ex, put the card in your purse. If someone picks up the purse you've put besides your chair; or you forget it there and walk away; as soon as the purse-with-card is out of range (a few meters), the cell phone rings to alert you.

Poken (reprensented by Stephane Doutriaux) is a little keychain accessory. It's a funnily-designed USB key that lets you "touch" another person's poken to connect with that person in social networking sites almost automatically (plug in the USB and automatically upload your new connections, and there you go). It also captures a time stamp of the meeting.

Lighthouse (represented by Robert Tibbs) does security software for cell phones and wireless communications.

KeyLemon (represented by Gilles Florey) has developed an easy-to-use face- and speech-recognition software that can be used through a normal webcam. That allows continuous authentication by face recognition: your computer "recognizes" you. If someone else sits in front of your computer, the software locks it. The software can be downloaded for free from the KeyLemon site (Windows only for now; Mac under development, cell-phone version too, although it needs more powerful processos).

LiftAsia08: Keeping things longer

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea)

Raphael Grignani of Nokia Design in San Francisco says: We live in the contrast between infinite human potential and finite Earth resources. There are almost 3 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world, 5 time more than computer.
If there are 3 billion mobile phones out there, there are 3 billion chargers. Energy is lost when the phone is fully recharged but the phone is still plugged into the charger (recharging a phone generally requires less than 2 hours, but many people plug them in overnight for example, or keep them plugged all day at the office). Nokia is testing new designs to automatically switch off the charger after the phone is charged.
Once we have digged all the resources from the underground, we will have to learn to produce with what's already above ground -- recycling, re-making. Is it possible to create a cell phone using nothing new? (He shows the "Remade" prototype).
How do we encourage people to keep things longer? Another project explores how you can update devices digitally, rather than physically; made to last; encouraging a "culture of caring".

On a side note, Grignani announces a new project: Fivedollarcomparison.com, a site asking people to submit example of objects or else that cost the equivalent of 5 dollars. Such as these:

LiftAsia08: Massively parallel, networked, talking cities

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea)

Adam Greenfield, of Nokia Design, talks about "the long here, the big now and other tales of the networked city". It's not a tech talk, it's about the emotional aspects of living in a networked city: what it's gonna feel to live there?
I think we can get a decent idea about it by looking at the way people right now are using mobile phones and other contemporary digital artifacts. With mobile we are edging already into a truly ubiquitous experience, "mobiquity".
One of the very first things that I think we can get rid of is the notion that the physical element is the sovereign element in our life. No longer are our choices dictated by the physical space. Think at when we walk around in a shopping mall talking on the phone: our movements are not determined by the architecture around us: it's determined by "where we are", that is, on the cell phone.
Dogma: that which primarily conditions choices and actions in the city is no longer physical, but has become the invisible and intangible overlay of networked information that enfolds in the city.
These are some of the potentials that I see happening:
- the long here: layering a persistent and retrievable history of the things that are done and witnessed in a place, onto that place (example: Oakland Crimespotting project; Flickr geotagging, giving geographic coordinates -- GPS -- to pictures),
- the big now: locally, making the total. real-time option space "massively parallel", giving you a sense of all the potential of a city (examples: London's Making bridges talk, by Tom Armitage: hooking up bridges with sensors and interfaces to the web so that they can twit -- Tower Bridge twittering and blogging when it's opening and closing; the idea is for the city to tell what the city is doing; or the New York Talk Exchange, mapping incoming and outgoing phone traffic from and to NY.
- the soft wall: there are less happy consequences, inevitably these technologies will be used to deny or degrade a space, to exclude people, to make them difficult to find, to put them under surveillance, for differential permissioning (some are allowed in, others not).
We will see new patterns of interaction: information about cities and patterns of their use will be visualized in new ways made available locally, on-demand and in a way that can be acted upon (ie. via mobile devices). Nothing in the world is as interesting and useful as information about one place, when you are actually in that place.
We will also see the emergence of addressable and scriptable surfaces around us: façades as interfaces, etc.
We are moving from browsing urbanism to search urbanism. That's really gonna change the way we use the city, from passive consumers of reality to active users of it. What kind of places will those cities turn out to be will be up to us.
Where will this happen first? As Mimi Ito says, every culture has an "alternative technologized modernity", which is proper to it. Each place needs to have to make its own choices about this. Every bus in Helsinki for ex is a Linux server that is constantly broadcasting information about the bus' whereabouts.

Interactive cities visionary Jeff Huang (from EPFL) asks: how can we merge digital/social/interactive technologies with our physical cities to foster better communities? This is a fundamental design question. Good cities is an emergent phenomenon if you get the design of the underlying architecture right. What is really lacking is the way technologies are applied in cities, they're often wrongly designed. The most obvious appearance of ubiquitous technologies are essentially surveillance cameras and media facades (big electronic billboards used to bombard people with commercial messages -- see Times Square). You can compare what's happening in cities with the first generation of what happened on the Web: at the beginning companies had web pages to advertise their products to users; but the Web has moved along. If I had to summarize in one sentence what we have trying to do when we are designing a project for the interactive city, is to push it towards a more empowered, social medium (from passive consumer to empowered urbanite).
Project Listening Wall: a project to give walls ears, so that they can listen to what's happening in the room.
Project Swiss House/Swissnex: a network of 22 "nodes" around the world for Swiss scientists/researchers/creators abroad to connect back to the homeland: each of the buildings are connected, and even "collapsed" (looking at the wall in one is like looking into the space of the other, because that wall is a connected big screen).
Project Seesaw connectivity: learning a new language in airports.
Project Beijing Newscocoons (in the picture above): a set of pulsating objects that live and breathe, displaying user-generated video clips, pictures, stories, and blogs from geographically distant sources and that interact with the people surrounding them.
So the answer to the original question (how to merge digital/interactive with physical cities to foster better communities?): go beyond the passiveness of media facades and surveillance cams; go from passive to interactive, to social, to co-creator; tap into the social and tactile dimension; there are issues (good business model or public good?) and sustainability questions.

Soo-In Yang, a Korean architect working in NY, works on how buildings communicate with each other. Talks about his "Living City" project, a project to link buildings to one another so they can "talk" and share information and even sometimes take collective action. For example we know that in Korea the sand blowing over from China are a problem: so imagine if the buildings on the eastern part of the city could "warn" the buildings downwind so that they could "get ready". These things are possible because of advancements in ubiquitous computing, sensors and chips and wireless connectivity are becoming cheaper, etc.
Other idea: experiment with air and building facades as public spaces. Air is something that everybody shares in a city; measuring and communicate its quality allows to take action. Buildings can be owned by individuals but facades are more difficult to "own" because it belongs in the street. Facades could really become alive and sense things and communicate things and become interactive, that's a further space we could become an ecology of information and interaction.
(Seoul, btw, has sensors measuring air quality, and public information diplays and maps sharing the information in real time).

LiftAsia08: Gadgets, energy, walking

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea. I'm moderating this session, so only partial blogging.)

Dan Dubno -- technologist, broadcaster, producer, conference host (the invitation-only Gadgetoff), blogger (Gizmorama), pioneer in the use of graphic and visualization tools on television, and more -- is Mr Gadget. He is the opening speaker of the sustainable development session which, sponsored by WattWatt, is becoming a permanent feature of the Lift conferences. So Dan talks also about (and shows) "green" gadgets -- although, he says, clearly no gadget is really sustainable. Among the things he shows: Brunton solar displays, Solio solar charger ("Much of these things are not totally efficient, but they are symbols for what's possible"), the Kill-a-watt to monitor energy consumption, the Lightcap solar-power bottle, the Steripen to purify water, a GPS cell phone for kids, the Clocky alarm clock for kids, a cell phone signal jammer, the TV-be-Gone that turns off all the remote-controlled TVs within range (imagine doing that in a sports bar in the middle of the action), a USB microscope, the bluetooth sunglasses by Oakley, the Pleo animated dinosaur (image right), a handheld infrared camera, and the Celestron SkyScout telescope, a handheld device that uses GPS to point you to stars -- or to tell you what star you're looking at. "The only one you really need to get", Dan told me.

Philippa Martin-King is one of the people behind WattWatt, a community devoted to discussing and promoting energy efficiency, backed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and which features the competition for schoolchildren Care4it. Energy efficienty is the topic of her talk. Running notes: Korea is the seventh biggest consumer of energy in the world (after US, China, Japan, Germany, Russia and India). How do we waste electricity? Stand-by devices, lighting, air conditioning, refrigerators, lights on at home and at work, air-conditioning, refrigerators, etc. Almost 4% of energy in Switzeralnd is produced through burning waste. (BG: this surprises me, it's a rather high number).

Swiss adventurer Sarah Marquis has traveled the world by foot. Europe. Latin America. Australia. She's been walking, solo, for 17 years now, alternating one or two years of travelling and one or two of preparing for the next one, telling her story, and finding sponsors. She crossed Australia (the subject of her first book), traversed Latin America, went fom Mexico to Canada. Her talk is about reconnecting with nature and how to be autonomous when, say, walking across the Australian desert or the Cordillera Andina alone for weeks -- including, because of the many techies in the audience, how to travel in energetic independence. The picture behind her shows a flower in the Australian desert:

Running notes: My trip from Alice Springs to Alice Springs via a tour of Australia took me 17 months for 14'000 km. You cannot carry water and food for that much food, so you have to find it there, catch your own food (lizards, etc). You must be open, but you also need to be a bit hungry, and when you're really hungry you realize that you can do things, because you're ready for something else, for making a further step, even if you don't know what happens there. A journey in the bush starts with nature. After 4 months I get to a stage where I need to change my gear, I need to shower, to eat. So my brother came to meet me at a checkpoint. Why am I going alone? Because that journey is about understanding. When you are in those desert areas, where there is nothing, you learn step by step about yourself, about life, after one month I don't think the same thing than after two months. You can learn tricks before leaving (wrap a tree branch with a plastic bag, and harvest the condensed water; etc) or by observing the way animals do it. I started when I was 17, I did 30'000 km since, but it's not really about distance and performance: it's about what happens there -- hunting with the Aboriginals, for example. There is no real reason for walking -- but no reason for not walking, either. I carry camera, videocamera, GPS, flexible solar panels, I need technology. When you get to the end of a multiple-months 7000-km trip, after all the energy that you've put into it, you don't really want to get there. Next plan: from South Siberia walking across Mongolia, China, the Himalaya range, Nepal, India, Birmania, Malesia, Indonesia, and then back to Australia. I have one year to get ready. (BG: and she's looking for sponsors).

LiftAsia08: Beyond the browser

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea)

I'm spending the week on the island of Jeju, in Korea, for the LiftAsia08 conference. The volcanic island has spectacular sites -- lava tubes, tuff craters, dark-grey beaches, and a Unesco heritage mountain right in the middle, mount Hallasan -- and the population is inclined to kindness: the first street sign that you see upon leaving Jeju airport says "We love having you here". The slogan is repeated on billboards around the island, but this first one is not a billboard: it's a blue highway sign, suspended above the lanes, in three languages (English, Korean, and I guess Japanese), as if to indicate a direction.

The island is booming. The hotel we're staying at, on a cliff above the ocean, looks like a spaceship (it might be one: the toilet, called LooLoo, has an electronic command keyboard with 14 keys). The congress center is gigantic. The region proclaims itself "autonomous self-governing", and that's what the local authorities are trying to achieve: become to Korea something like what Hong Kong is to China. The food is an adventure -- and in this domain I'm of the non-adventurer, stick-to-Mediterranean-cuisine type, so I haven't got into the mood for live octopus and other similar delicacies yet. Nor I plan to.

The conference's theme is "Beyond the web browser". The room is full, there are about 400 attendees. After a welcome message from Jeju's governor Kim Tae-hwan, and a short introduction by Seo Young Roh, of the Art Center Nabi in Seoul (which has created some spectacular installations here, under the moniker "Lift Experience", Laurent Haug and Jaewoong Lee give the opening speech, offering an introduction to the conference and discussing "what a mature web will mean for our society". Haug is the founder of Lift (which takes place in Geneva every year, and of which I'm an adviser); Lee is a Korean entrepreneur, CEO of Daum communication, one of Asia's largest Internet platforms with over 40 million users -- Daum is one of the main LiftAsia sponsors.

Haug: The web is now mature, we have one billion user. Alot of things are happening; we have experiencing an overload of information and innovation; "relevant" is the new "new"; we're back to forms of hierarchy; we enter "casual everything", casual gaming, casual e-mail, casual news reading; etc. In a way, there is less innovation happening inside the browser.

Lee: The innovation today comes at the intersection of the individual, the computer and physical space. The online-offline frontier is blurred.

Eric Rodenbeck, of Stamen Design in SF, talks (and shows plenty) about the evolution towards "richer" media forms through the use of new types of information visualizations. Running notes: French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, mid-19th century, studied movement, juman and animal, particularly birds (he invented a "photographic gun" and other devices to capture movement). Things are different now, we deal with systems of organisms and not with individual motions, like the 1K Project, 1000 cars racing in 1000 videogame racing sessions and recorded all together. There is a vast amount of data that it's now generated "live" by each one of us. Eric shows DiggLabs' "Swarm", showing what's happening in real time, what stories "grow" when people "digg" them, etc; Cabspotting, which tracks cabs in San Francisco, creating a map of the city (example at right) that's not based on the street grid, but on the actual activity of the taxis (based on the idea that the city is an organism, you can take the data, take the flows, and reveal the patterns that are hidden inside them).

Chang Kim, CEO of Korean blog hosting company TCN, talks about the future of the social web. (Korea btw has a 64% penetration of broadband). Running notes: The future of social media is a better homepage. Today there are too many destination sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc), but none of them are really mine or yours. To make matter worse, there are now apps and widgets. Before I just consumed content; now I'm creating content, and my content is scattered all around, and none of these sites are mine. It's like a hotel vs home experience. Today you check into these different "hotels"/destination sites managed by others; what we need is ownership, "home business", a true home where I can start and end my journey. The second problem is that data aren't really portable, copy/paste is not really efficient. Third problem: relationships online don't really model after real life; online you're either my friend or you're not, there isn't much nuance. The relationship on the web today is represented flatly. The only solution is different levels of trust. The fourth problem is that the places of content consumption and content authoring are different. Most power bloggers don't understand the fact that content authoring can be difficult for many people. I believe there is an emerging social networking fatigue.

The second session (which I'm moderating, so only limited blogging -- that will be the case for several sessions during this conference) features economist David Birch and sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling talking about the digitization of money and the emerging cashless economy.

Birch is a director of Consult Hyperion and a specialist of electronic business and banking (he was once described as "one of the most user-friendly of the UK's uber-techies"). Running notes: Cash doesn't work very well for many people. For example: cash costs too much (from the cost of withdrawing money from an ATM to fees for remittances etc) and these costs disproportionally fall on the poorest. In societies with cash-based economies (for ex Sweden) risks for robberies is higher. So don't take it for granted that cash is the best way of doing things. US: about 2/3 of all the US dollars in circulation, are not in the US. Being the person that issues the cash, it's a very good position to be: people basically give you an interest-free loan. The amount of dollars in circulation is actually falling. Cell phone in some countries has already become an alternative to cash payments, and even to plastic payments. Ex Japan, where operator DoCoMo has invested in Sumitomo bank to develop its payment systems. Other Asian cell-phone payment systems: G-Cash and Smart in the Philippines; E-tong in China; SKT Visa and KTF MasterCard in Korea; ETS and EZ-Link in Singapore. This demonstrates very clearly that consumers have no problems whatsoever with the idea of using their cell phone instead of cash or plastic cards. In Kenya: M-PESA, which has millions of users and signs up thousands of users a day (it's a system that allows to send Kenyan shilling from cell phone to cell phone). In other countries such as Congo, mobile-phone minutes have become an "alternative currency". If you're just talking about putting extra menus into a mobile phone, then you can try experiments, letting people choose among a series of possibilities for payments. In Latin America, branchless banks and shared agent networks in Brazil.

(Here a series of M-PESA screenshots showing how it works)

Let's assume that we replace cash with cell phones. Who whould be the winners? There would be economic growth (0.5%?). We may get reduced crime (no robberies). There would be reduced tax evasion. Banks: no more cash handling, filling ATMs, etc. And poor people would get rid of the weight of transaction charges.

American sci-fi writer and initiator of the cyberpunk genre Bruce Sterling is next. He has already addressed (on different topics) past LIFT conferences in Geneva twice, and is therefore a sort of unofficial LIFT resident big thinker. Running notes: Rather than talking about the hi-tech world of computing, I want to talk about the poor world, without computing. There are two kinds of poverty: the first kind is people that have no money, and the second kind is the people who can't make any money. The latter are going to remain poor, but there are alot of people that are very capable of making money but are shut out of that possibility by their current financial system. The new poverty is urban: peasants all around the world are living their land and moving into cities, places like Lagos, Sao Paulo, Mumbai. These poors have cell phones, there is no cell phone divide. People are really surprised, and even alarmed, at how eager the poor are to have cell phones. In India the cell phone user base in 2008 is expanding by 6 million people a month (and those are just accounts: typically a whole family would use a cell phone). There are people who can't read and buy cell phones. So these are not the "old" poor: these are big-city people, and like most people in big cities they're rather sophisticated. They just don't have money, they don't have banking services. But they do have some of these cell-phone-based payment services that David just described. This is disruptive innovation: it's not an add-on to the banks that rich people already have; this are millions of people being brought into a parallel financial system. These are not banks: I think we're seeing the invention of some kind of anti-bank, or even an anti-money, here. I suspect (BG: here Bruce addresses the Koreans in the audience) that your contribution will be in North Korea. Will the regime in North Korea collapse? Yes. When that happens, who can do something about it? South Korea of course. You will have to lift NK out of their poverty, and I don't think that you can do it with conventional economics and with these nice currency notes (He shows a 10'000-won note). They are poor and they have never had cell phones, but as soon as the regime collapses that's what they are gonna get: cell phones. And they will go to cities. Consider the historic example of Eastern and Western Germany: the West thought they could replace one economic and currency system with the other, but that didn't make them into capitalists. You will have to replace it completely. You will have to come up with some Korean electronic solutions for poverty. NK is not going to collapse tomorrow, but you should start preparing, to start thinking: when my fellow Korean from the North becomes free, what kind of technology should we put into his or her hands so that in ten years they become happy citizens?

LIFT08: Seeing change clearly

(Running notes from the LIFT08 conference in Geneva - Conference blog - video.)

Just a few quick notes from the LIFT08 closing session.

Scott Smith, founder of foresight firm Changeist, explains that his job is about "helping people see change clearly" and offers seven tips of foresight:

• Be aware of what's going on around you
• Scan, collect, organize
• Look for patterns and deep currents in the things you see
• Understand the role of values
• Have a view, but not an ideology; be ready to step outside your boundaries
• Stay grounded
• Be prepared to leave behind the artifacts of your experience

Francesco Cara, a design strategist at Nokia with a psychology (Piaget) background, looked at the evolution of mobile communication ecosystems and described it in three stages:

• First stage (from the inception of GSM telephony): closed systems made of operators + manufacturers + regulators. In this ecosystem, the cell phone has very few links towards the external world, only those towards the operator's network.
• Second stage (around 2000): ecosystem starts to change with WAP and other technologies, new players come in: content providers. The cell phone starts to have more links to the external world, to data, to messaging.
• Third stage (our current stage): the ecosystem is expanding at warp speed, new players (Apple, Google, etc), new features and services, growing complexity. Some applications on the phone open directly to the Internet (maps, e-mail, photo, etc).

Problem: in this third stage, while the ecosystem keeps expanding, five metaphors seem to be used by phone manufacturers to connect devices to the Internet, and none is amazingly new: the basic, enabled phone (just basic features); the specialized (Blackberry); the chaotic (SonyEricsson, providing a variety of paths to connect); the desktop (iPhone); and the dynamic portal (Windows). Cara (tracing a parallel to the invention of the Palm): "In the relationship between the mobile devices and the ecosystem -- the "cloud" -- we are at a key moment when a new metaphor could emerge and modify fundamentally the ways we interact".

Bill Cockayne, director of the Stanford Center for critical foresight, advised the audience to read the too-often-ignored last chapter of Jane Jacobs' seminal "Death and Life of Great American Cities", published in 1961. Titled "The Kind of Problem Architecture Is", that chapter is a fundamental read for whoever is interested in foresight. I abound in Bill's direction. I couldn't find a full version of the chapter online, but here is a long excerpt.

LIFT08: Human/Machine, Nature/Culture

(Running notes from the LIFT08 conference in Geneva - Conference blog - video.)

The morning starts with an exploration of "new frontiers" questioned by technological developments. Starting with the human-machine interface: where does the former end and the latter start? Kevin Warvick, the British "cyborg" researcher who had a microchip implanted into the median nerves of his left arm and, through that, linking his nervous system directly to a computer -- and through that to the Internet. The key aim of the experiment was to assess use of the technologies for disabled people, but the possibilities of extending our sensory range seem limitless.
I've already extensively blogged Kevin's work here. Just an update: his current research is about culturing neural tissues (neurons taken from rat brains) and building them into robots, hence creating computers with biological brains.

The next speaker was supposed to be Henri Markram, who leads the Blue Brain project that the EPFL in Lausanne is conducting with IBM to simulate the functioning of all brain cells -- one of the most important scientific experiments in the world today (in the picture right, a "forest of neurons", a minute fraction of the cells and connections within the circuitry of the neocortex). Unfortunately Henri had to cancel.

Holm Friebe and Philipp Albers are co-founders of the Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, which translated from German means literally "Central Intelligence Agency". They describe it as a socialistic-capitalist firm, and their job is to explore new forms of cooperation and collaborative work in today's society. A lot of people are unhappy with their organizations and the work conditions they find. How do you integrate individuals with a strong sense of self, who aren't comfortable with hierarchical routines? The two speakers suggest an approach called "hedonistic company" and offer "seven (plus) rules of working together professionally and still stay friends":

• The 7 "no": no office, no employees, no fixed costs, no pitches, no exclusivity, no working hours, no bullshit.
• Work-work balance: between internal projects and client projects
• Instant gratification: use money as incentive and distribute profits immediately after job is finished.
• Pluralism of methods: find technical solutions for social problems. Use online tools of collaboration instead of meetings if possible.
• Fixed ideas: live up to your intellectual obsessions and dark desires at work. Don't hesitate to polarize (or offend people) if necessary.
• Responsibilities without hierarchies.
• The power of procrastination: Don't try to be too efficient. Good ideas will adapt and catch on even if you neglect them for a while. There is a darwinism of ideas.
• Bonus rule: Marketing by feuilleton: no advertising, no PR. Do something interesting and press coverage will come to you.

Dutch designer Mieke Gerritzen talks about nature becoming culture -- cyborgs, but also man-made islands, cellphone antenna trees, designer cats and featherless chicken (photos below) and the hybridization of everything. What she calls "next nature".

Finally, in the "open stage" (sessions picked by the audience) Henriette Weber-Andersen talks about "community marketing". Kushtrim Xhakli, young entrepreneur from Kosova, discusses a project to develop a national education and training portal for technology teachers.

LIFT08: The fondue evening

(Running notes from the LIFT08 conference in Geneva - Conference blog - video.)

The LIFT fondue evening is becoming a legend in conference circles -- soon some other organizer will copy it, but it won't be the original. Yesterday night, 600 people shared a fondue, prepared by the LIFT team in cooperation with Le Gruyère, the organization of professional cheesemakers of the Gruyére region. The fondue was delicious, the service great, and the networking/fun quotient very high. Last year, LIFT and Walabab published a "Swiss cheese survival guide", a primer about fondue: it's still available here. Here a picture of yesterday night's preparation:

LIFT08: If we want global action on climate change, we need to recognize that not everybody can act alike

(Running notes from the LIFT08 conference in Geneva - Conference blog - video.)

For the first time LIFT hosts, for this session on sustainability and energy, a Nobel Prize recipient as speaker. Before, however, technology critic Bill Thompson (blog) and Philippa Martin-King of Wattwatt.com do a brilliant double-act discussing energy efficiency. Wattwatt (it's of course a word play between the unit of power and "what") has co-organized the session. It's an online community of people interested in energy efficiency. Which is not as boring a topic as it sounds. They are launching Care4it, a contest for kids under 18 and schools for the best idea to make a difference in climate change and energy efficiency: widgets, awareness campaigns, etc. Main prize: 10K USD and a carbon-neutral trip to Geneva to pick up the prize.

Then Tom Taylor, from Headshift, a company that builds and consults on social software applications in London, talks about tech and behavour: how to use social networking -- and peer pressure -- to inflect people's behaviour towards more sustainable activities. He presents the Green Thing, an online community that encourage people to engage in sustainable behaviour, little step by little step (I've already blogged about it here). Things like "walk to work once a week" instead of driving.
Check out the videos on this page, particularly the "Old thing wrap" or "Touching the Stairs" (picture left). Inciting behavioural change is not new. Why is the Green Thing different? It's a positive thing. It's easy, you don't have to make a major commitment. It's creative: it's entertainment that tries to lead to understanding and hence stimulate engagement. It's social (there is power in numbers, and energy in peer respect).
There are other sites that use the same ideas, such as Pledgebank (I pledge that I will do a certain thing if X people pledge to do the same).
Takeaways: measuring, visualizing and exposing/sharing behaviours in the social graph can have massive effects on behaviour. But it needs to be positive, fun and easy.

Somebody has calculated that the quantity of solar energy that reaches the Earths surface every minute would be enough to cover the needs of the entire world's population. However, only a small fraction can potentially be captured, and an even smaller one is actually captured today. However, it's clear that the true energy of the future, medium and long term, is solar. We just need to find efficient ways to harness it.
There are many different technologies, from photovoltaic to thermal solar, and many projects have been put forth, from gigantic thermal solar plants in the deserts to huge photovoltaic islands off the coast of the Arab Emirates.
Guy Pignolet is a member of the SunSat Energy Council, which is a UN-afffiliated NGO, and they have a particular idea on how to capture solar energy: do so in orbit, and beam it down to Earth with microwave beams in a 24-hours a day controlled process, and use it in combination with hydrogen technology.
He shows a satellite blueprint composed by vast surface of "sail" solar cells and a central body from where the energy would be transmitted to Earth. Crazy? Pignolet says that 200 people in the world are working on space solar power. The satellite concept has actually been around for 40 years, since engineer Peter Glaser theorized it in 1968. "We have now all the basic science and technology working for this". Problem: this needs to be the size of Manhattan. "So we don't expect to have a full system operating before 30 or 40 years for now".
He also addresses the other problem with electricity as a form of energy: electrons can't be stored, they can only circulate. He suggests that hydrogen may be the solution, as an energy storage vehicle. "We could use electricity to hydrolize water in a clean way, and then store the hydrogen -- which can then be recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell to make electricity again" (that's the design used for the prototype cars that I described here and here, but which can of course be applied to domestic energy needs etc).

Andy Reisinger is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC - wikipedia page) that won -- collectively -- the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore for their work on scientifically assessing the state of the Earth's climate. He's actually a very important member of the group, because he has coordinated the small group writing and editing the summaries of the reports -- the documents that you've read about in the press and that have landed on governmental desks all over the world.
I'm moderating the session and introduce him as a "co-laureate of the Nobel Prize for Peace". Before starting his talk, he stresses that he's expressing only his personal views and is not representing the IPCC in a formal capacity.
He shares five key messages:

1. Climate change is inequivocabily happening. There is an increasing confidence among scientists that the change over the last 50 years is very likely due to greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities.
2. Changes in climate of 21st century will be unilke everyting that human civilization has experienced previously. "The world has not been that warm, nor has the global climate changed that rapidly, at any time over the past 10'000 years (ie. The span of human civilization)". Some key impacts of climate change if warming keeps going as it is going: Water stress for more than 1 billion people; 20-30% of species at increasing risk of extintion; Reduced crop yield at lower latitudes; Costal flooding in megadeltas of Africa/Asia; Health risks from heath, malnurition and diarrhea; Long-term (centuries) risks of meters of sea level rise
3. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow largely because they're linked to development status, and alot of people ispire to the development status of the western world (China and India and Brazil). Under business-as-usual global emissions are projected to increase by 25-90% by 2030. It's of course very difficult to tell developing countries that they can't seek that status.
4. Technology is the key tool that will allow us to provide more and more people with better "services", but provided at a lower amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Lots of potential for energy efficiency in building, industry, plants. And of course renewables can make a significant contribution in reducing growth in emissions. Nuclear power is also an option, if reducing emissions is your focus. Carbon capture is the newest tech, it's not expected to make a significant contribution in the next 15 years. So a portfolio of technologies both on the supply and the demand side can do the job.
5. But the real question is that the application of available technology is not only a function of tech itself: it's a societal choice. Most of the technologies are currently available, but they also have to be affordable of cost-effective (societal choice: put a price on carbon), must be attractive, and must not be crowded out by existing investments. This can only be achieved with adequate policies and choices.

What Andy is saying -- I'm interpreting here -- is that global solutions need a global price on carbon, but if you want global action, you need to recognize that not everybody is in the same position to act - it comes down to a foundamental wealth transfer, and we're not ready for that.