The two faces of innovation

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Following the Nature article discussed previously, this is a 2010 paper looking into innovation in the US based on patent data (1970-2005). It already depicts that invention (used here interchangeably with innovation) exhibits diminishing returns. An interesting distinction is made between two different approaches to innovation.

One understanding of innovation is that it is driven by incentives and the supply of knowledge capital producing either constant or increasing returns. This view is connected to economy and markets and therefore innovators are expected to provide solutions corresponding to price signals. In this paradigm, “private efforts at knowledge making increase the overall stock.”

Second (contrary and also what the authors ultimately believe) understanding is that innovation is “subject to the evolutionary dynamics of all living systems” and thus not constant. It is not only reliant on incentives and knowledge capital but also on constraints and it grows increasingly complex and costly and reaches diminishing returns; higher expenditures produce fewer innovations. Whereas early research plucks the lowest fruit and that specialized questions require more time and money to resolve, and more preparation.

The authors claim that “the stories that we tell about our future assume that innovation will allow us to continue our way of life in the face of climate change, resource depletion and other major problems.” However, solar power and wind energy investments are found to be producing fewer returns; innovation in these fields is shrinking. So do all research challenges where pioneering research has already depleted the broadly applicable questions and research is now required to more specialized fields. Were we to continue to produce innovation in one field, then we would have to allocate more resources to this field and fewer resources to others.

References

Strumsky, D., Lobo, J. & Tainter J.A. (2010). Complexity and the Productivity f Innovation. In Systems Research and Behavioral Science Syst. Res. 27, 496-509. DOI:10.1002/sres.1057

(photo taken at the recent Rotterdam biennale)

The decline of disruptiveness

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Authors of “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time,” recently published on Nature, argue that disruptiveness in papers and patents is declining as well as word diversity and combinatorial novelty. At the same time, declining disruptiveness does not preclude individual disruptive works. A substantive shift is undergoing in science and technology, they argue, that might appear as the slowing of innovative activity. Authors attribute their findings to a reliance on a narrower set of existing knowledge; this benefits individual careers but not scientific progress. Scholars, say the authors, may be encouraged to read widely and be given time to get familiar with the ever growing knowledge frontier.

Reading the paper I also thought disruptiveness is undermined by narrowing down slices of knowledge and yes I also think this is product of pursuing research for the sake of individual career paths. There are many more of course, like the radical increase of PhD research produced and published (and through that, the promotion of individuality in doing research), higher competition between institutions, lack of time for keeping up with all that is being simultaneously developed, you name it. I do think however that technological innovation in particular, often suffers from lack of relevance probably because it has been the case that people attributed more value on the power of technology itself rather than what drives it. The effects of Modernism and the siloing of knowledge production is now becoming increasingly more apparent causing, what the authors call, the discrepancy between the availability of knowledge and its use. Which is probably where we stand at the moment: too far ahead in the specific and too weak in making it relevant for others.

That said, it is no wonder that the wow effect of the very specific technology produced does little good to us in the midst of the overall crises we live in. The magnitude of our problems together with our incapacity to produce credible answers for them shows that maybe technology alone cannot be the answer for everything. And maybe that is why innovation is ceasing or slowing down: we are at crossroads; we are at that awkward moment in time that we’ve lost sight of the others. So, how do we move forward? The paper’s authors ask for broader research and more time. They also oddly claim that the philosophy of science believes in the potential of knowledge accumulated. Maybe so, but then again very Popper-proper. Maybe it is Kuhn’s change of paradigm what we are really, really, desperately in need of. Maybe then the new disruptive will be what makes sense for the many.

Brain(s) to brain(s)

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Computer mediated brain to brain interaction (mice)

A brain-to-brain interface records the signals in one person’s brain, and then sends these signals through a computer in order to transmit them into the brain of another person. This process allows the second person to “read” the mind of the first or, in other words, have their brain fire in a similar pattern to the original person

In 2013 scientists tested the method to mice; they surgically implanted recording wires that measured brain activity in the motor areas of the brain

Brain to brain interaction using an electroencephalography cap and transcranial magnetic stimulation (humans)

the human device was non-invasive, meaning surgery wasn’t required. This device transferred the movement signals from the encoder straight to the motor area of the brain of the decoder, without using a computer (…) Then the scientists used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the decoding person’s brain, sending little magnetic pulses through their skull to activate a specific region of their brain. This caused the second person to take the action that the first person meant to (…) The decoder wasn’t consciously aware of the signal they received (…) however, only movement was transferred, not thoughts

Brain to brain interaction using an electroencephalography cap and transcranial magnetic stimulation & led lights (humans)

Same researchers designed a game with pairs of participants, similar to 20 Questions. In the game, the encoder was given an object that the decoder wasn’t familiar with. The goal was for the decoder to successfully guess the object through a series of yes or no questions. But unlike in 20 Questions, the encoder responded by looking LED flashing lights, one signifying yes and the other no. The visual response generated in the encoder’s brain was transmitted to the visual areas of the brain of the decoder (…) The decoders were successfully able to guess the object in 72 percent of the games, compared to an 18 percent success rate without the BBI (…) this was the largest BBI study, and also the first to include female participants.

Multi-person brain-to-brain interfaces/ collective intelligence

To do this, researchers drew on their past work with brain-to-brain interfaces. The Senders wore electroencephalography (EEG) caps, which allowed the researchers to measure brain activity via electrical signals, and watched a Tetris-like game with a falling shape that needed to be rotated to fit into a row at the bottom of the screen. In another room, the Receiver sat with a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) apparatus positioned near the visual cortex. The Receiver could only see the falling shape, not the gap that it needed to fill, so their decision to rotate the block was not based on the gap that needed to be filled. If a Sender thought the Receiver should rotate the shape, they would look at a light flashing at 17 hertz (Hz) for Yes. Otherwise, they would look at a light flashing 15Hz for No. Based on the frequency that was more apparent in the Senders’ EEG data, the Receiver’s TMS apparatus would stimulate their visual cortex above or below a threshold, signaling the Receiver to make the choice of whether to rotate. With this experiment, the Receiver was correct 81 percent of the time.

There’s a mind-boggling number of possible applications—just imagine projecting ideas in an educational environment, directly sharing memories with others, replacing the need for phones or the Internet altogether, or even, in the more near-term, using it to teach people new motor skills during rehabilitation.

References

THE SECOND GLOBALIZATION DEBATE, An interview with Antony Giddens (29/01/2000)

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(…) Globalization is not primarily economic. It’s not solely driven by the global marketplace. It’s actually about what we’re doing now. The driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution (…) one mustn’t think of these things as solely driven by technology, and one mustn’t ever imagine that technology drives itself, and one mustn’t imagine particularly that technology is unilinear — that the future will always be more of the same as the present. History moves dialectically; it takes us by surprise. The future is not linear. You will get many different kinds of reactions to these technologies, some of them hostile, some of them producing new technologies, many of them unpredicted (…) I still write about risk because it’s deeply, deeply involved with technological transformation, obviously. What’s happened in our lifetime is a transformation from one type of risk environment to another (…) It’s only when you have a future-oriented world that you need the notion of risk, because the notion of risk is a confrontation with the future, essentially. It’s about future time and the management of future time. What’s happening now is that we live in the most future-oriented society that has ever existed (…) What we have to deal with is a very, very interesting thing, which is very crucial to scientific innovation, which is exploring the edge between the positive and negative sides of risk (…) Now, when scientific innovations happen they impact on our lives very directly (…) tradition and custom, and nature itself, no longer structure our lives like they used to do (…) Now we know that whenever you drink a cup of coffee or you stick to water as you’re doing there, you’re calculating risk there (…)  You can’t just turn to experts to give you an authoritative opinion in many situations, particularly in innovations, because they disagree. Therefore, you must have both a public debate and political and legal decision-making about these things. This is particularly true when different people say completely the opposite things, even though both seem to be equally eminent scientists. I’m not saying that in the end they wouldn’t find some agreement, because they might after years of research, but you have to deal with it now, plainly (…) You must restrict the role of the market in human life, and you must try and create a form of political thinking which is no longer half-theory. 

by John Brockman

Full article available here

The ‘Disrupted Classes, Undisrupted Learning’ program

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Full report available here

The project team for ‘Disrupted Classes, Undisrupted Learning’ ran by the Chinese Ministry of Education reviewed the international literature relating to skillful remote teaching, identifying some of the characteristic challenges that needed to be addressed. The Chinese project team advocated schools designing a blend of synchronous and asynchronous teaching and identified four essential technologically enabled pedagogical techniques that should be used in combination:
• Live-streaming teaching (lecture format)
• Online real-time interactive teaching
• Online self-regulated learning with real-time interactive Q&A
• Online cooperative learning guided by teachers
For each method, associated benefits and risks were identified – such as the fact that live streamed lessons were technologically challenging and that the real-time class discussion in a synchronous ‘lesson’ could be of a poor quality (…) To recreate the learning atmosphere of a face-to-face classroom, three pedagogical priorities were promoted: Building a sense of belonging to a community/ Providing timely feedback to learners/ Encouraging learners to relax and not be preoccupied with competitive achievement.

Notes from Peder Anker’s ‘The closed world of ecological architecture’

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Whole World Catalogue Magazine, editor Stewart Brand, a firm believer in colonizing space. The image of Earth as seen form outer space allowed the ability to it as a whole. Image available here

astronauts’ cabins as models for environmentally responsible landscape design and architecture/ space colonization has been the underlying ethic/ living in harmony with Earth’s ecosystem became a question of adopting space technologies, analytical tools and ways of living/ their aim was to escape industrial society/ life in a future ecologically designed world was focused on biological survival at the expense of wider cultural, aesthetic and social values of the humanist legacy/ their work was based on diagrams of energy flows as input and output circuits in a cybernetic ecosystem/ construction of self-efficient closed ecological systems within submarines and underground bomb shelters/ the turn towards space ecology emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the light of of alarming reports such as The Population Bomb (Paul Elrich, 1968) and Limits to Growth (Club of Rome, 1972) reinforced by the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo/ a way of designing which fed on its own ideas and gradually closed itself off from developments in the rest of the architectural community. Its followers sense of self-sufficiency resulted in a sect-design for the believers whose recycling of resources and ideas led to a lack of interest in an outside world simply described as ‘industrial’ and thus not worth listening to:

ecological design is inspired by a biologically informed vision of humankind embedded in an Arcadian dream of building in harmony with nature

Chermayeff/ Alexander, Community and Privacy (1963): advocated for self contained ecological capsules, ecologically autonomous buildings to stop exploitation of natural resources/destruction of natural scenery. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969): cabin ecology as a model for understanding life on earth/ Earth as a huge mechanical ship travelling in space/ Doxiadis, Ecumenopolis: humanity was heading towards a universal city/ Ian Mc Harg, Design with Nature (1969): science-based modernist architecture and planning with respect for nature/ ecological crisis was caused by reckless laissez-faire economy, industrialization, greed chaotic urbanization, social structures fragmentation and lack of planning/ he pointed to the holistic ecology of the ‘Orient’, human would build and settle in a space buoy located between the Moon and the Earth/ one should make an ecosystem inventory of an environment, investigating its changing processes and then attribute values to the ecological aspects and determine a. what changes would be permitted and prohibited and b. identify indicators of stability and instability/ (influenced by) John Phillips, Ecology in Design issue of Via Journal (1968): holistic approach to architects and region planners/ they ought to include all forms of life in their designs/ John Todd & William McLarney, New Alchemy Institute and From Eco-Cities to Living Machines: Principles of Ecological Design (1980/ 1984/1994): how to survive an impeding catastrophe, closed ecological life boats that would keep afloat/ New Alchemists aimed at solar-heated and wind-powered greenhouse-aquaculture buildings/ Grumman Corporation, Grumman Lunar Module (1960s): they also developed other household system prototypes: a waste disposal system inspired by space recirculation technology, a sewage system inspired by the astronaut’s lavatory, and an energy efficiency system for homes that incorporated solar cells/ Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in California also developed related technology/ Integral Urban House (1972)/ BioShelter/ Alexander Pike: austerity in place of plenty/ his aim was to use ambient solar and wind energy, to reduce energy requirements, and to utilise human household and waste material/ Brenda &Robert Vale, Autonomous House, a shelter for the coming doom/ Kenneth Yeang: by imitating processes in nature, architects could find new environmentally friendly designs for human life/ biological analogies for optimum survival/ a building was to be sealed off both environmentally and culturally from industrialism/ Phil Haws, Biosphere 2 in Arizona (completed in 1991): the first fully enclosed ecosystem, tested for a period of over a year

Grumman Lunar Module. Image available here

Anker, P. (2005). The closed world of ecological architecture. In Journal of Architecture, Vol. 10, no.5. DOI: 10.1080/13602360500463230

Light as a service: the ‘pay-per-lux’ system

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Schipholl Airport, Lounge 2: The specially developed sustainable Philips luminaires, which hang in an attractive pattern in the transfer hall above the passenger’ heads, comply with the stringent requirements of the circular economy concept. These luminaires have been specifically designed to allow fast and easy repair or replacement.

Turntoo developed Light as a Service and Circular Lighting for Philips: a service in which you buy light without an investment, but with the best products and hassle free. The installation remains Philips’, who is motivated to the utmost to create products they can reuse: a closed system for used materials. Philips retain ownership of the lights and take care of the reuse, refurbishing or recycling to ensure customers get maximum value from the lighting system. For customers this results in potential maintenance cost savings of 60% and 20% more cost effective upgradability.

For more click here and here

blu Marble V finch3d

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I only bumped into this artist because of a post he made on Instagram I read about on Dezeen. Influenced by the group finch3d and their Adaptive Plan 3d algorithm for designing houses Sebastian Errazuriz urged architects through his post to “continue to think and design “architecture” for more abstract systems” in fear that the nature of the profession is changing and fewer architects will be needed in the future.

The finch3d tool is actually pretty fun to watch: a house plan keeps changing while someone presses/slides different buttons of a grasshopper code. Yet I fail to see how that changes architecture. First of all, someone did write that code, probably an architect, choosing what parameters can be changed and how. The very choice of what can be changed is already intentional; it expresses the hierarchical thinking of its designer. By transferring this intentionality to a potential client you only allow him/her to think within a framework that is already set. Unless the client himself/herself writes this code, finch guarantees no more freedom in planning than before.

And by allowing/promoting the use of such tools to the greater public do we really think that we are being deprived of designing? Hasn’t it always been the case in anonymous architecture? US building code for example allows people to freely build their houses on their own as long as they comply to state regulations. So what if that person used the finch tool? And why is the finch tool any different in its conception that the state regulations? They both perceive design as in keeping up with predetermined rules.

So, do I think that architecture is an endangered profession? Do we really risk our jobs by evolving and expanding into new realms? Not really. Experimenting with different design tools has always been a core activity of our profession. But designing is not just designing space, is it? Because then, a code like that could definitely jeopardize what we do. We don’t design space: we design spaces for the people who use them. And it is the elusive nature of human thinking and being keeps us afar from any certainties. It is this incompleteness, the lack of a single answer that drives us and will keep on driving us to explore what it means to be fully human.

Image available here

And then I see Errazuriz’s breathtaking installation: a led lit image of the earth set in an urban void, an unexpected surprise event that invites viewers to contemplate on the “fragility of our existence.” (artist’s own words). And then I think: “go ahead and make as many codes as you like. You will never be able to codify the feeling/the sense of fragility of existence.”Because there are qualities and values in architectural designing that can not possibly be expressed algorithmically.

Architecture can never be generic, nor abstract. In that case, it isn’t architecture, it’s just building. Architecture in my understanding is site-specific, it is contextual, it is a means of communicating who we are not just in terms of our physical existence, but also in relation to others, it is transcendental, just like that earth image suddenly hitting you as you walk by. And if there is ever a code that does that, hell, I am gonna be the first to use it.

Circular cities

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Article discusses the efforts of Prof. Williams in UCL in promoting the ideas and practices of the Circular City by establishing UCL’s Circular Cities Hub in 2016.
A book is to be expected in 2020 entitled “Circular Cities: A Revolution in Urban Sustainability” by Williams that will be published by Routledge.

Part of this has involved viewing cities holistically. This means not just looking at resources, but seeing urban areas as organisms that constantly adapt to changes, such as migration and increasing diversity, as well as considering different trajectories of development, from shrinking, post-industrial cities such as Detroit, to places like London, where corporate and foreign investment is squeezing out lower-value, circular activities.

Networked Learning

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NETWORK LEARNING

The network is a network of people: networked learning aims to understand social learning processes by asking how people develop and maintain a ‘web’ of social relations used for their learning and development (de Laat)

Networked learning does not necessarily involve ICT, though in specific cases it may make use of technology. What makes learning networked is the connection to and engagement with other people across different social positions inside and outside of a given institution.  The network is supportive of a person’s learning through the access it provides to other people’s ideas and ways of participating in practice as well as of course through the opportunity to discuss these ideas and ways of participating and to potentially develop nuanced, common perspectives (Carvalho and Goodyear)

Networked learning may utilize ICT but it might me also supported by other means such as physical artefacts or artistic stimulation of senses and feelings while connections may also be drawn spontaneously by the learners themselves (Bober & Hynes)

The network is a network of situations or contexts: connections between the diverse contexts in which the learners participate as significant for understanding learning beyond online learning spaces, and, indeed, within them as well. This is the sense in which the network, under-stood as a network of situations, supports learning: by offering tacit knowledge, perspectives and ways of acting from known situations for re-situated use in new ones. Networked Learning’ on this under-standing is the learning arising from the connections drawn between situations and from the resituated use in new situations of knowledge, perspectives and ways of acting from known ones (Dohn)

The ‘network’ is one of ICT infrastructure, enabling connections across space and time: The support for learning provided by the network is one of infrastructure, i.e. the ease of saving, transporting and retrieving content for future use. Learning, it would seem, will be ‘networked’ whenever it is ICT-mediated, by that very fact; perhaps with the proviso that the situations of learning should indeed be separated in space and/or time so that the infrastructure (the ‘network’) is actually brought into play. This proviso would differentiate the field of networked learning somewhat from the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), where many studies concern ICT-facilitated group work between physically co-located students. The re-search field of Networked Learning is characterized, not only by focusing on ‘networks’, but also by taking a certain approach to learning, focusing critically on aspects of democratization and empowerment (Czerniewicz and Lee)

The ‘network’ is one of actants: consisting of both human and non-human agents in symmetrical relationship to each other. It is a systemic approach to learning, where individual learners’ interaction and learning may be analyzed as a result of socio-material entanglement with objects and other people. The network supports learning in the sense that any learning is in fact the result of concrete socio-material entanglement of physical, virtual, and human actants (Wright and Parchoma; Jones)

 

References

Bonderup Dohn, N., Sime, J-A., Cranmer, S., Ryberg, T., & de Laat, M. (2018). Reflections and challenges in Networked Learning. In N. Bonderup Dohn, S. Cranmer, J-A. Sime, M. de Laat, & T. Ryberg (Eds.), Networked Learning – reflections and challenges (pp. 187-212). Switzerland: Springer. Research in Networked Learning,
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74857-3_11

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Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Grudin

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CSCW

1984: twenty people from MIT and Paul Cashman of Digital Equipment Corporation organized a workshop to explore technology’s role in the work environment. they used the term CSCW to describe their findings

Office Automation, an earlier approach to group support, had ran out of steam. The problems were not just technical but understanding human requirements. OA practitioners needed more info on how people worked in groups.

CSCW: it started as an effort by technologists to learn from economists, social psychologists, anthropologists, org theorists, educators etc/ it became a place for system builders to share experiences and tell others about tech constraints through tele-videoconferencing, collaborative authorship applications, electronic mail.

CSCW draws from all rings and from preexisting development culture. There is however, a great interest in small groups applications. Product developers focus more on human-computer interface/ Organizational system developers fixate on functionality.

The greatest challenge of CSCW is being multidisciplinary: it represents a merging of issues, approaches, languages, making sense is a lively process. It can be frustrating when the others are ignorant of work one considers to be basic. Participants from different domains use the same terms in subtly different ways.

 

References + Image

Grudin, J., 1994. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: History and Focus. In Journal Computer, Volume 27 Issue 5, May 1994, Page 19-26, available here

Coping with the monsters of technology

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TECH MONSTERS

The explanation runs as follows. Technological innovation is a rich source of new phenomena. These phenomena have to be appropriated to make them fit into our lives and practices. The appropriation process has various aspects, because new technology has to fit into diverse existing orders: social, technical, organizational and others. During the appropriation process both technology and existing social and technical orders are mutually adapted, as a central insight of Science and Technology Studies (STS) tells us. However, new technology also has to be attuned to cultural order, since our perception of technology is mediated by our cultural categories and contemporary myths regarding nature and what it is to be human. Domestication of new technology is a process in which cultural imagination and technological change are intertwined. (Smits: 499)

Smits detects four types of approaches:

  • exorcism: it demonizes the monsterns and hence expels them from engineering education
  • adaption: it reduces the monsters to rational problems
  • embracement: when we fully accept the monsters as part of reality and are
    engulfed
  • assimilation: portrays the technological monsters in their cultural context and in that way reveals the opposite as uniting rather than absolute (only in MODE 3 knowledge)

 

References

Smits, M., Taming monsters: The cultural domestication of new technology. In Technology in Society 28 (2006) 489–504

Borsen, T., Botin, L., 2013. Hybridity and Social responsibility. In Proceedings from the 41st SEFI Conference, 16-20 September 2013, Leuven, Belgium

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