Today’s New York Times places Jaron Lanier as a central voice contra-pundit to the extremes of discourse in the SOPA/PIPA copyright controversies. I’ve posted my thoughts directly in response to other articles. Jaron’s is one of the long-range views that actually comes from insight into multiple industries and the effects of poor decisions made a long time ago.
Essentially, yes, SOPA is bad and poorly written, as is all legislation in the Boehner house. What do you expect? To blame it all on “corporate evil” is misguided and hypocritical. It is easy for consumers demanding anything and everything for free , but free consumption has costs to producers. Jaron points out the devil’s deal the cheap consumer made a long time ago, and how that’s playing out now in the oscillation back to hard protections as encoded in these bills. I cite one quote in fair use from The False Ideals of the Web:
The adulation of “free content” inevitably meant that “advertising” would become the biggest business in the open part of the information economy. Furthermore, that system isn’t so welcoming to new competitors. Once networks are established, it is hard to reduce their power. Google’s advertisers, for instance, know what will happen if they move away.
This belief in “free” information is blocking future potential paths for the Internet. What if ordinary users routinely earned micropayments for their contributions? If all content were valued instead of only mogul content, perhaps an information economy would elevate success for all. But under the current terms of debate that idea can barely be whispered.
When faced with a near-term looming threat (SOPA) people respond as if their ethical stance was obvious. But Jaron is right – few people are arguing the merits of some control and what that would look like. Yes, industry lobbyists wrote bad law to protect corporate business models, but what if creative producers had a better ability to protect and sell their own work?
Kevin Kelly,Wired, Free culture have created an environment where a few people earn a lot and a milliion people create stuff for no return. In the past they would have sought some compensation – now we have a strong culture valuing free consumption. And it is not a generous culture. It is a cheap future in a world where IT has already swept through and streamlined our once-thriving creative and technical jobs in several technology waves.
Could we re-envision that future where creative people earned a living doing what they loved, and Google and Facebook were able to split some ad money to the content producers? Rather than selling our “free” work as advertising fodder? Lanier asks that we at least use this opportunity to question the values behind both sides valid points.
You know the Singularity is coming. Get ready for The Multiplicity.
The workshop entices participants to co-create a future in collaboration as an act of personal foresight. We take on the creation of possible personal scenarios that confront the future opportunities for humanity, positioning our inherent multiplicities as creative narratives to counter the technologically-determined future being called the “singularity.” When we think of the future, we tend to push a vague collection of dreams, possibilities and wishes out to a speculative point in the years following the nearest term. We can guess about the world in two years, we can create plans for 5 years, but 10 and 20 years challenge our personal vision.
As a Design with Dialogue session, we will engage in inquiry (Big Questions), exploration (co-creation with small groups into your questions), and co-producing (harvesting and learning together). People co-exploring make this a fun and personally enriching experience, never again to be repeated in the same way.
Grad students and even president Sara Diamond from OCAD University have been involved , along with the Design Exchange, with two major community events located (ironically enough) in the deco-era original Toronto Stock Exchange.
The goals of these sessions have been to evolve a common framing and voice for (meaning “with”) the diffuse and diverse core members of the movement.
What we seem to be missing are the connections between similar events in other Occupy communities. Pay attention to the shift of medium here – Occupy is an emerging and embodied social medium for civil change. It is not like the Arab Spring or other social media narratives. This is embodied (situated in place) and broadcasted (livecast) and not tweeted and FB’d to organize.
People are working things out F2F – not online – its a classic McLuhan media transformation in the making.
“And then Steve Jobs came back. Sure, he refocused the company on designing great products. But he also pulled off the corporate strategy that he succinctly described as “stopping all the crap.” As a B-school professor might say, he streamlined the product offering. And he did so not in a span of years, but months. Look how radically simple the product pipeline gets after 1996 …”
The growth of products supports the theory of the organizational values shift occurring over growth as a business strategy shifts from Explore to Expand to Exploit. Apple grew in size (if not relative market share) to satisfy what it believed the market wanted.
At the time Jobs returned, Apple had tipped over into a lagging strategy – exploit was about all they could do, its original innovation values had been supplanted.
So was this primarily a business strategy or product strategy? Was there any way Jobs (or anyone) could have foreseen the iPhone in 1997?
I’m completing the final sections of the manuscript for the two-year project researching and writing the Rosenfeld Media book Design for Care. A central theme weaving together the 8 chapters is systemic design, the adoption of a whole system (social cybernetic) approach to the complex design situations in healthcare. Variations in this thinking range from the medical competency of systems-based practice to the “whole human” perspective recently promoted by the emeritus U London professor BM Hegde. Where we must insist on systemic design is in the design of systems, specifically in the integration of enterprise level IT in clinical practice.
One of the more heavy-handed systems problems clinics and healthcare professionals face is the introduction and integration of electronic medical records (EMR) systems. While some of these systems are better than others, they can significantly divert clinical organizations from a patient-centered care model. They are a quite a boon to IT shops, as they are deploying everywhere due to the stimulus push for large institutions to capitalize on the 2009 HITECH Act incentive funding. HITECH pushes institutions to deploy EMRs for “Meaningful Use” requirements, which are fuzzy enough to include almost any uses of EMRs.
From a systemic design perspective, two thick issues emerge in this emerging automation landscape.
One, what are the unforeseen consequences of enterprise-level automation of deeply-routinized social and technical tasks?
Two, what are the human and social impacts of Meaningful Use?
In other words, how will EMRs affect the way patients are engaged in institutional care practices, given the way automation tends to separate human activity into transactions?
Overall, interaction and systems designers need to point out the answer to “what could possibly go wrong” – and we ought to have better options to promote when these systems arrive at a clinic near you and your work.
If you’re on the clinical side of healthcare design, you already know this is a wicked problem. If you’re on the consumer or vendor side, it may not yet be on your radar, but it should be. Two recent publications deserve your attention in this regard. I have posted about both of these on Design for Care, but these “communities” require the occasional reminder and prompt – which this newsletter is about.
Fred Trotter’s new O’Reilly book – Meaningful Use and Beyond – is a well-researched discussion of the IT, process and clincial practice issues involved in achieving meaningful use of EMRs. Fred is a well-rounded expert with consistent depth, but best of all his book is readable and sustains interest. The O’Reilly book can be bought as print and PDF/eBook together, so if you need to quote for a Monday meeting, you can get started immediately, like I did.
Conflicts between electronic and paper-based systems
Generation of new kinds of errors
Unexpected and unintended changes in institutional power structure
Koppel and Harrison developed the ISTA ( Interactive Sociotechnical Analysis) methodology, combining ethnographic observation and interview with sociotechnical analysis – detailed in the online guide. The framework is described in four dimensions:
ISTA combines a systems perspective with the empirical reality of on-the-ground research to formulate high quality observations. Their original research article on the process was published in JAMIA and this is their excellent formulation of the process otherwise locked up in the publisher’s article. We haven’t adopted the process in our Research Methodologies course at OCAD University yet, but the Winter term course may see this and related sociotechnical methods as toolkits for systemic design and foresight practice.
Design Dialogues invites you to examine ideas, new and old. Everything humanity creates is work-in-progress, and so is open to dialogue. Re-visions and re-views are welcome. Design Dialogues is for working out ideas, before they find their way into practice or in actual publications.
Innovators all face an urgent challenge to make the differences that must happen; there is no longer any status quo. Many of our trusted institutions & social contracts are now broken. Whether from fear or habit, our culture is not yet innovating democratically. We do not really know how to collaborate sufficiently to the task.
From healthcare to finance, politics to education, infrastructures & decision processes, we can & must reinvent our own futures. These social systems have evolved beyond their capacity to transform by management. Collaboration is insufficient - We truly need new ways of working, deciding, and organizing.
Of the many ways to collaborative intelligence, some demonstrably better than others. Dialogic design, based on systems thinking & design science, offers a validated way to create new understandings, design systemically, & act democratically on the deep drivers of a problem.
A community of practice meets for these dialogues in person every 2nd Wednesday in Toronto:
Art, science, and design are three ways of knowing, and in the field of action they inform each other. All modes must be recruited if we are to interfere & reinvent social systems. Your participation is required.
