Comparing Business Development Paradigms

In a posting to localfoodsystems.org on Feb 04, 2010, Steve Bosserman introduced the idea of “Production Centered Local Economies”, and “People Centered Local Economies”. This article synthesizes Steve’s coining of those terms, and uses concepts developed by Sam Rose, Paul Hartzog and Richard C Adler of Forward Foundation to further explain the differences between these economies, from a business development perspective.


Product centered business supply chain development

Fig 1.

Product centered  supply chain business development depends on:

• unlimited growth
• exclusive access to resources
• artificial scarcity around actually abundant resources (1)
• people filling roles in a linear system
• hoarding of surplus

This way of operating focuses on what is being produced, and requires people to be largely fixed into roles to serve the linear supply chain model (see Fig. 1) . People and natural systems are generally considered to be “resources” that are raw materials and labor for production and distribution, end-points consumption. Linearity in this production model leads to seeking more raw materials for more production/distribution/consumption. The organization in this system is around the assumption of unlimited growth. All actors in this system are all seeking unlimited growth at the same time. The competition around unlimited growth tends to lead to a focus of finding and capturing the largest “markets” before others find and capture it. Markets for product-centered supply chain business development tend to look at statistics and averages of different factors of people and resources, in order to identify the largest markets. This is depicted in the “bell curve” normal distribution graph on the left side of Fig. 2 below:

Fig. 2In product centered supply chain business development, when systems reveal a “power law” distribution when ranking quantity and frequency, actors tend to ignore the “tail” and focus on on the “head” of the “power law” distribution.

What is emerging? What is Collapsing?

We (Forward Foundation) believe it is reasonable to assume that unlimited growth, without transformation of waste into “food” (2) for the system, cannot be sustained.  It is plausible to conclude that currently struggling, and in some cases collapsing industrial systems (3) that are focused on production/products over people are, in decline. Most of our existing efforts in economic development tend to be focused on shoring up/preventing this collapse. Resources, time, energy are directed towards activities that are still focused on product-centered development, which is a development that requires ever more resources, ever more growth. As this growth declines, people leave geographic areas and relocate to where the growth is perceived to be happening. However, the systems they leave behind are still firmly fixed in product-centered development. This decline is represented by the blue line in Fig. 3 below:

Fig. 3

This collapsing product-centered economic development activity tends to focus on creating “employment”, attracting business who bring “jobs” to an area. Communities are focusing on preventing the collapse of an unsustainable system, and are ignoring what is *emerging*. What is emerging is represented by the green line in Fig. 3 above. We are calling this “people centered business network ecosystem development”.

People centered business network ecosystem development

“People centered” means that control of infrastructure, access, distribution, resources, and co-governance are now on the scale of the individual person. When an individual person with this empowerment reaches their individual carrying capacity to operate, they will tend to reach out to others who are operating like them, and a connection-based network will emerge. Economic development here targets individuals operating as self-employed independents who network together. Independents, small businesses, community groups, working together, with government, higher education, and larger business are the new economic driver. The more control people have an on individual scale of infrastructure, access, distribution, resources, and governance, *and* the more connectivity there is between those people,  the that more growth happens in “people centered economic development”.

When control of infrastructure, access, distribution, resources, and co-governance are now on the scale of the individual person, a new way of coopertive co-managing of existing resources, and surpluses of production tends to emerge. That new way of co-managing is known as “Resource Sharing“.

To quote from http://forwardfound.org/blog/?q=resource-sharing-grounding-21st-century-economy:

“The absolutely essential understanding to be absorbed here is that commons management (cooperative co-manageent of resources) is not primarily a technical problem but a social one and that the key ingredient in the solution is information transparency. Therefore, implementation requires a thorough grounding in both social dilemmas (Kollock) as well as technology design.”

In other words: Production centered supply chain economic development can rely on technology alone to manage systems. People centered business network ecosystem development requires the engagement of all of the people in all areas of management.  Technology can help, and it can primarily help by helping people to access and see the landscape of the systems they are participating in, who is connected to whom, and how? What are the real limits to resources you are using with others? What is actually scarce, what is actually abaundant, and what decisions can you make together with others based on that information?

It turns out that learning, tools for problem solving, and even designs and plans and software as static objects are *not* scarce. It is very easy to copy them, especially if they exist in a digital form, and it takes very little resource to store them, and make them available to others. Individual people who are making these items tend to have very little to gain by making them scarce, as they often lack the resources needed to create that artificial scarcity around designs, knowledge, software, information.  People tend to discover that there is more efficiency in sharing these creations, and working together to adapt them to immediate and long-term problems they are trying to solve (see: “Giving it away, making money” Bosserman 2008).  This sharing begets more sharing when done in a way that is equitable for the people and the systems people are part of. This sharing also opens up access to individuals to control of infrastructure, freedom of access, a plausible way towards collaborating around needed distribution, and co-governance around the sharing of resources.

Fig. 4Fig. 4 above is a simple model of a non-linear system, where actions that are happening in the system are mapped, instead of roles. Actions are the focus, because all individuals now potentially have access to any “role” as it might have existed in production centered development. I can now be a designer, a marketer, a shop worker, etc  Co-governed systems are “mapped” as a network ecology by looking at the resources that are shared, co-governed, or already exist as a “commons”, and who the participants are. Value exchanges, and economic activity are mapped based on actions, not roles of people.   Sharing what is learned, what is created, creates a way in which many others may engage, and those people now have multiple ways in which they may engage. This creates a new engine for *exponential* economic growth that is driven by people who all have access to control, and so work together to co-manage their new-found powers of control. The engine, at it’s core, is “making, sharing, using”.

Viewing a system through the lens of actions, and having access to transparent information, gives you a view into ever-more emerging ways in which you can adapt previously-shared solutions towards emerging problems. Each adaptation of solutions to problems refines the quality of solutions available for future problem solving. This generates wealth in the ecosystem, and so is accurately described as a “wealth generating ecology”.

Fig. 5

Note that people are in the center of this system depicted in Fig 5. People with access to information co-create and share knowledge about how to convert sources into energy, how to integrate food production into waste management, how to combine physical production output with cultural production needs, how to educate their children on operating in this emerging system. These people operate as independents, networked together, and also as members of multiple existing and new types of organizations that also are “making, sharing using” in this system. This system can adapt better to change over tie, because anyone can help adapt it. This system can manage resources better, because it gives a more accurate picture of what those resources are. This system can make better use of resources because it tends to share knowledge about how to allow the outputs of one activity to become the inputs of another. This opens the door for more people to share what is abundant, create cohesive with living systems instead of destroying them, and exchange equitably around what is scarce.

Notes:

1.“Artificial scarcity – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity.

2.McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to cradle. Macmillan, 2002.

3. “Financial crisis of 2007–2010 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.”en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932010.

Commons-based Economics as a Challenge to Classical Economics

This perspective was prepared by the Steering Committee of the International Commons Conference “Constructing a Commons (ICC) based policy platform organized by the Commons Strategies Group and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which took place in Berlin/Germany in November 2012. The ICC and was a major gathering of commoners from about 35 countries, representatives of social movements, political decision makers and commons research among them. (Michel Bauwens, David Bollier, Beatriz Busaniche, Silke Helfrich, Julio Lambing, Heike Löschmann)

The Commons as a Challenge for Classical Economics

A. The commons will not succeed in challenging contemporary economics and conventional institutional design unless it:

· challenges the core beliefs of underlying conventional economics and the behavioral correlations induced by prevailing institutional designs;

· reinterprets the meaning of property from private ownership to collective stewardship; and

· develops coherent concepts that are also empirically provable and convincing alternatives to the conventional numerical "bottom lines".

B. The inherent features of the commons are abundance and diversity.

· If we respect diversity and engineer for abundance, the commons continuously (re)-produce enough for all.

· Wherever we can – in case of nonrival resources and generosity – the product of the commons should be universally available; where we cannot – in case of rival resources – the product of the commons should be equitably distributed.

C. A viable society is based on cooperation and co-production rather than the classical division of labor that separates resource producers and providers from resource users, which treats nature, community and culture as exploitable externalities.

D. Markets are not the only source of wealth creation. The commons, which are responsive to popular, democratic voices and to the pressure on our biotic resources, can function as parallel economies to the cash economy, including subsistence and gift economies. Another promising way to do this is by developing community-based software platforms. Over time, such communication platforms can extend to new types of social exchange, for instance digital currencies, outside of national currencies and conventional markets. Such processes would strengthen resilient rural and urban communities and enable them to take the reproduction of their livelihoods into their own hands.

E. The whole economic system in modern societies deeply depends on the state, which creates entire industries and provides regulative structures. The demand for goods and services by the state is another example. In fact, public procurement and infrastructure development constitute the lion’s share of our economies. Therefore a shift towards commons-based public procurement is urgently needed. That includes, e.g., tax privileges for freely generated knowledge, information and infrastructures or bidding processes based on stipulated criteria that strengthen the participation of affected communities.

F. There is a need to clearly identify and communicate the "success criteria” of the commons and/or a loose taxonomy of successful commons. But developing indicators for creative and productive commoning is notoriously difficult. It is therefore essential to contribute to the development of inclusive metrics that recognize key criteria for broader wealth creation.

The Commons Challenges the Market/State Duopoly

A. The commons is the third element, beyond market and state, which needs structural and intellectual support.

B. The commons offers a rich set of governance models, and its constituting nature strives for a new style of social appropriation and participation. Despite its diversity and its dependency on certain laws or state support, the commons tend to be stable and to facilitate social autonomy and effective resource management. Nonetheless, a successful commons is always the product of a continuous effort and struggle.

C. “The commons beyond market and state” does not necessarily mean without market and state, if we consider their rich history, enormous diversity and geographic dispersion. But it necessarily means that the people and their commons, supported by a partner state, become the core of wealth creation. It aims to create a vibrant ethical economy of new market forms that do not ignore natural and social externalities, but include them in their functioning logic.

D. Commoners transcend nation-state based citizenship and national civil societies. And their identity goes beyond that of passive consumer to responsible co-producer. Commoners are rooted in an enormous variety of mutually dependent communities. One of the core beliefs of the commons is the idea that the protection and creation of common wealth are not just beneficial to the commoners themselves, but to the local and global societies to which they also belong. A core belief in the commons is: I need others and others need me.

E: What we need is not just regulation by the state but greater responsibility of and accountability to affected communities regarding the criteria of human well-being. This is key. Instead of downsizing the state by strengthening the logic of the market, a commons-based policy campaigns for downsizing the scale and scope of the market by strengthening ‘commons institutions’. That means establishing institutions designed for acting as trustees for the commons and enablers of the commons. New social technologies and distributed networks – which must be based on sustainable energy use – can spur this process.

F. Global commons entail a new kind of multilateralism which empowers local people as global citizens and enables nation-states to collaborate more effectively to overcome global collective-action problems.

The Generative Logic of the Commons

A. For building commons we have to build resilient communities, which in turn need cooperative and deliberative forms of communication and decision making. The communities also serve as learning arenas for the unfolding of skills and the underlying attitudes and mindsets for commoning.

B. The commons as a self-organized form of peer-to-peer production follows its own logic. Peer-to-peer production assumes equipotency of its participants, is based on free cooperation, aims to the creation of common goods and seeks to serve the greatest good for everyone. We believe this mode of production can be at least as productive as models that ignore the commons. And in terms of addressing social wealth and the reproduction of diversity, commons-based production models can even be more successful than those based on command, control and/or selling.

C. Productivity cannot be simply an artificial measure of an enterprise’s performance; it must take into account all costs, including hidden subsidies, damages to the environment and other sorts of non quantifiable, non-market value that the commons routinely provides.

D. The commons is about taking one’s life into one’s own hands. Knowledge is key to do so, but knowledge is more than access to knowledge; and access to knowledge is something more than building technical infrastructure.

Rapid diffusion of knowledge and innovation to all who need it requires:

· the sharing of information, code, skills and design through universally accessible or community based platforms

· the skills for understanding and reflection and

· their appropriation for shaping our social habitats.

Conceiving knowledge as a commons guarantees a fair share of innovation, without the friction and suppression of sharing caused through excessive intellectual property regulations.

E. Institutional structures can articulate and make possible new commons, but they can also undermine the social connections and ethics that are indispensable to the commons. Therefore, a key challenge in devising effective commons-based policies is to balance these two concerns properly. The bureaucratization of the commons is not a commons, but a paradox to which we must be attentive.

For the success of a commons oriented politics, an alliance and an earnest exchange of experiences and know how between all those who work on the social, ecological, cultural and digital commons, is imperative.

October 31, 2010

via

Four Key Conditions for Successful Commons

"I have identified four key conditions for the successful management of shared environmental resources: 

1. information.
2. identity.
3. institutions.
4. incentives. 

I believe we can and should use this 4i framework as the basis for a plan of action to combat local and global environmental catastrophe."


- Mark van Vugt

The conversion of socially, economically, and politically produced problems into consumer items

"As neoliberalism converts every political or social problem into market terms, it converts them to individual problems with market solutions. Examples in the United States are legion: bottled water as a response to contamination of the water table; private schools, charter schools, and voucher systems as a response to the collapse of quality public education; anti-theft devices, private security guards, and gated communities (and nations) as a response to the production of a throwaway class and intensifying economic inequality; boutique medicine as a response to crumbling health care provision; “V-chips” as a response to the explosion of violent and pornographic material on every type of household screen; ergonomic tools and technologies as a response to the work conditions of information capitalism; and, of course, finely differentiated and titrated pharmaceutical antidepressants as a response to lives of meaninglessness or despair amidst wealth and freedom. This conversion of socially, economically, and politically produced problems into consumer items depoliticizes what has been historically produced, and it especially depoliticizes capitalism itself. Moreover, as neoliberal political rationality devolves both political problems and solutions from public to private, it further dissipates political or public life: the project of navigating the social becomes entirely one of discerning, affording, and procuring a personal solution to every socially produced problem. This is depoliticization on an unprecedented level: the economy is tailored to it, citizenship is organized by it, the media are dominated by it, and the political rationality of neoliberalism frames and endorses it.”

- Wendy Brown

Taxonomy of Commons

1. Inherited Commons – e.g. earth, water, forests – are heavily under attack and becoming scarce commons. It doesn't have to be this way i.e. in Switzerland, Austria, Japan they are well managed under an agricultural commons, and have been protected for hundreds of years by good collective arrangements between the farmers.

2. Immaterial Commons – e.g. Cultural, intellectual, enabled by the internet, makes it stronger and easier to do than before. Commoning in this sense can be abstract but when we do it around something we care about, whether its free software, open design or wikipedia this really creates a community of shared interest because its something that we all care about.

3. Material Commons – that we which we co create e.g. common stock, common machinery. Think of zip-car, owned by a company but why not have the community own it. Then there is the Commons Car, claimed to be the first open source car, now one of many such projects."

(via Michel Bauwens)

And now, a running list of commons:

Inherited Commons:

1. Atmosphere Commons ; Atmospheric Commons
2. Energy Commons ; Energy from the Perspective of the Commons‎
3. Environmental Commons
4. Food Commons ; Food as Common and Community
5. Hunting Commons
6. Infrastructure Commons; see also: Developing the Meta Services for the Eco-Social Economy
7. Land as Commons
8. Marine Commons
9. Microbial Commons
10. Petroleum Commons
11. Solar Commons
12. Water Commons

Immaterial Commons:

1. Aesthetic Commons [6]
2. Book Commons
3. Communication Commons
4. Cultural Commons [7]
5. Digital Commons
6. Educational Commons
7. FLOSS Commons: see FLOSS as Commons
8. Genome Commons
9. Global Innovation Commons
10. Global Integral-Spiritual Commons
11. History Commons
12. Information Commons ; Information as a Common-Pool Resource
13. Knowledge Commons ; Knowledge as a Commons
14. Learning Commons
15. Libraries as Commons
16. Media Commons
17. Medical and Health Commons
18. Museum as Commons
19. Music Commons
20. Open Education Commons
21. Open Scientific Software Commons ; Open Source Science Commons
22. Patent Commons ; Eco-Patent Commons
23. Psychological Commons

Material (institutional) Commons:

1. Employment as a Common Pool Resource
2. Financial Commons
3. Global Legal Commons
4. Household as Commons
5. Infrastructure Commons
6. Internet Commons
7. Labor Commons
8. Market Commons
9. Neighborhood Commons
10. NonProfit Commons
11. Taxes as Commons
12. Thing Commons
13. Urban Commons
14. Wireless Commons

via

Logic of the Market versus the Logic of the Commons

	Market	Commons
Focus	What can I sell?  Exchange value	What do we need?  Use value
Core beliefs	Scarcity	Plenty
	Homo oeconomicus	Homo cooperans
	It’s about resources (allocation).	It’s about us.
Governance	Market-State	Polycentric / Peer-to-Peer Governance
Decision making	hierarchical	horizontal
	Command (Power, Law, Violence)	Consensus, Free Cooperation, self-organization
Social relationships	Centralization of power (monopoly)	Decentralization of power  (autonomy)
	Property	Possession
Access to rival resources	Limited by boundaries & rules defined by owner	Limited by boundaries & rules defined by usergroups
Access to nonrival resources	Made scarce (to ensure profitability)	Open access (to ensure social equity)
Use rights	Granted by owner	Co-decided by user groups
Dominant strategy	Out-compete	Out-cooperate
Results
For the resources	Erosion  Enclosure	Conservation   Reproduction & Multiplication
For the people	Exlusion & Participation	Inclusion & Emancipation

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P2P Foundation and The 55 Theses

I am very happy to see that Triumph of the Commons: 55 Theses on the Future has made it to a place on the P2P foundation's wiki site.

Buried under an avalanche of wonder

"Whenever we encounter some truly novel phenomenon, one that reinvents the margins of our world, an old hankering is awakened. At such moments we are like explorers of an unknown dimension: everything appears fresh to our eyes, each idea seems unprecedented, virgin, strange. In the face of this newly made universe, we may be tempted to exclaim, 'It cannot be!,' yet our protests soon lie buried under an avalanche of wonder."
- Engraved plate at The Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A.

How to Write Good: 23 Not Really Rules on Making Words into Sentences into Paragraphs

BERG: Artificial Empathy and The Increasingly Ambiguous "U" in "UI"

This is a version of a talk BERG gave at the “In Progress” event, staged by ‘It’s Nice That‘ magazine. See the comments thread on their site. Provocative and worth a read.


BEGIN...

Let me introduce a few characters…

This is my frying pan. I bought it in Helsinki. It’s very good at making omelettes.

This is Sukie. She’s a pot-plant that we adopted from our friend Heather’s ‘Wayward Plants‘ project, at the Radical Nature exhibit at the Barbican (where “In Progress” is!)

This is a puppy – we’ll call him ‘Bruno’.

I have no idea if that’s his name, but it’s from our friend Matt Cottam’s “Dogs I Meet” flickr set, and Matt’s dog is called Bruno – so it seemed fitting.

And finally, this is Siri – a bot.

And, I’m Matt Jones – a designer and one of the principals at BERG, a design and invention studio.

There are currently 13 of us – half-technologists, half-designers, sharing a room in East London where we invent products for ourselves and for other people – generally large technology and media companies.

This is Availabot, one of the first products that we designed – it’s a small connected product that represents your online status physically…

But I’m going to talk today about the near-future of connected products.

And it is a near-future, not far from the present.

In fact, one of our favourite quotes about the future is from William Burroughs: “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out…“

A place we like to ‘cut into the present’ is the Argos catalogue! Matt Webb’s talked about this before.

It’s really where you see Moore’s Law hit the high-street.

Whether it’s toys, kitchen gear or sports equipment – it’s getting hard to find consumer goods that don’t have software inside them.

This is near-future where the things around us start to display behaviour – acquiring motive and agency as they act and react to the context around them according to the software they have inside them, and increasingly the information they get from (and publish back to) the network.

In this near-future, it’s very hard to identify the ‘U’ in UI’ – that is, the User in User-Interface. It’s not so clear anymore what these things are. Tools… or something more.

Of course, I choose to illustrate this slightly-nuanced point with a video of kittens riding a Roomba that Matt Webb found, so you might not be convinced.

However, this brings us back to our new friends, the Bots.

By bot – I guess I mean a piece of software that displays a behaviour, that has motive and agency.

Let me show a clip about Siri, and how having bots in our lives might affect us [Contains Strong Language!]

Perhaps, like me – you have more sympathy for the non-human in that clip…

But how about some other visions of what it might be like to have non-human companions in our lives? For instance, the ‘daemons’ of Phillip Pullman’s ‘Dark Materials‘ trilogy. They are you, but not you – able to reveal things about you and reveal things to you. Able to interact naturally with you and each other.

Creatures we’ve made that play and explore the world don’t seem that far-fetched anymore.This is a clip of work on juggling robot quadcopters by ETH Zurich.

Which brings me back to my earlier thought – that it’s hard to see where the User in User-Interfaces might be. User-Centred Design has been the accepted wisdom for decades in interaction design.

I like this quote that my friend Karsten introduced me to, by Prof Bertrand Meyer (coincidentally at professor at ETH) that might offer an alternative view…

A more fruitful stance for interaction design in this new landscape might be that offered byActor-Network Theory?

I like this snippet from a formulation of ANT based on work by Geoff Walsham et al.

“Creating a body of allies, human and non-human…”

Which brings me back to this thing…

Which is pretty unequivocally a tool. No motive, no agency. The behaviour is that of it’s evident, material properties.

Domestic pets, by contrast, are chock-full of behaviour, motive, agency. We have a model of what they want, and how they behave in certain contexts – as they do of us, we think.

We’ll never know, truly of course.

They can surprise us.

That’s part of why we love them.

But what about these things?

Even though we might give them names, and have an idea of their ‘motive’ and behaviour, they have little or no direct agency. They move around by getting us to move them around, by thriving or wilting…

And – this occurred to me while doing this talk – what are houseplants for?

Let’s leave that one hanging for a while…

And come back to design – or more specifically – some of the impulses beneath it. To make things, and to make sense of things. This is one of my favourite quotes about that. I found it in an exhibition explaining the engineering design of the Sydney Opera House.

Making models to understand is what we do as we design.

And, as we design for slightly-unpredictable, non-human-centred near-futures we need to make more of them, and share them so we can play with them, spin them round, pick them apart and talk about what we want them to be – together.

I’ll just quickly mention some of the things we talk about a lot in our work. The things we think are important in the models, and designs we make for connected products. The first one is legibility. That the product or service presents a readable, evident model of how it works to the world on it’s surface. That there is legible feedback, and you can quickly construct a theory how it works through that feedback.

One of the least useful notions you come up against, particularly in technology companies, is the stated ambition that the use of products and services should be ‘seamless experiences’.

Matthew Chalmers has stated (after Mark Weiser, one of the founding figures of ‘ubicomp’) that we need to design “seamful systems, with beautiful seams”

Beautiful seams attract us to the legible surfaces of a thing, and allow our imagination in – so that we start to build a model in our minds (and appreciate the craft at work, the values of the thing, the values of those that made it, and how we might adapt it to our values – but that’s another topic)

Finally – this guy – who pops up a lot on whiteboards in the studio, or when we’re working with clients.

B.A.S.A.A.P. is a bit of an internal manifesto at BERG, and stands for Be As Smart As A Puppy – and it’s something I’ve written about at length before.

It stems from something robotics and AI expert Rodney Brooks said… that if we put the fifty smartest people in a room for fifty years, we’d be luck if we make AIs as smart as a puppy.

We see this an opportunity rather than a problem!

We’ve made our goal to look to other models of intelligence and emotional response in products and services than emulating what we’d expect from humans.

Which is what this talk is about. Sort-of.

But before we move on, a quick example of how we express these three values in our work.

“Text Camera” is a very quick sketch of something that we think illustrates legibility, seamful-ness and BASAAP neatly.

Text Camera is about making the inputs and inferences the phone sees around it to ask a series of friendly questions that help to make clearer what it can sense and interpret. It kind of reports back on what it sees in text, rather through a video feed.

Let me explain one of the things it can do as an example. Your smartphone camera has a bunch of software to interpret the light it’s seeing around you – in order to adjust the exposure automatically.

So, we look to that and see if it’s reporting ‘tungsten light’ for instance, and can infer from that whether to ask the question “Am I indoors?”.

Through the dialog we feel the seams – the capabilities and affordances of the smartphone, and start to make a model of what it can do.

So next, I want to talk a little about a story you might be familiar with – that of…

I hope that last line doesn’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet…

But – over the last year I’ve been talking with lot to people about a short scene in the original 1977 Star Wars movie ‘A New Hope’ – where Luke and his Uncle Owen are attempting to buy some droids from the Jawas that have pulled up outside their farmstead.

I’ve become a little obsessed with this sequence – where the droids are presented like… Appliances? Livestock?

Or more troublingly, slaves?

Luke and Uncle Owen relate to them as all three – at the same time addressing them directly, aggressively and passive-aggressively. It’s such a rich mix of ways that ‘human and non-human actors’ might communicate.

Odd, and perhaps the most interesting slice of ‘science-fiction’ in what otherwise is squarely a fantasy film.

Of course Artoo and Threepio are really just…

Men in tin-suits, but our suspension of belief is powerful! Which brings me to the next thing we should quickly throw into the mix of the near-future…

This is the pedal of my Brompton bike. It’s also a yapping dog (to me at least)

Our brains are hard-wired to see faces, it’s part of a phenomena called ‘Pareidolia‘

It’s something we’ve talked about before on the BERGblog, particularly in connection with Schoolscope. I started a group on flickr called “Hello Little Fella” to catalogue my pareidolic-excesses (other facespotting groups are available).

This little fella is probably my favourite.

He’s a little bit ill, and has a temperature.

Anyway.

The reason for this particular digression is to point out that one of the prime materials we work with as interaction designers is human perception. We try to design things that work to take advantage of its particular capabilities and peculiarities.

I’m not sure if anyone here remembers the Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot?

The Newton was an incredible technological attainment for it’s time – recognising the user’s handwriting. The Palm instead forced us to learn a new type of writing (“Graffiti“).

We’re generally faster learners than our technology, as long as we are given something that can be easily approached and mastered. We’re more plastic and malleable – what we do changes our brains – so the ‘wily’ technology (and it’s designers) will sieze upon this and use it…

All of which leaves me wondering whether we are working towards Artificial Empathy, rather than Artificial Intelligence in the things we are designing…

If you’ve seen this video of ‘Big Dog’, an all-terrain robot by Boston Dynamics – and you’re anything like me – then you flinch when it’s tester kicks it.

To quote from our ‘Artificial Empathy’ post:

Big Dog’s movements and reactions – it’s behaviour in response to being kicked by one of it’s human testers (about 36 seconds into the video above) is not expressed in a designed face, or with sad ‘Dreamworks’ eyebrows – but in pure reaction – which uncannily resembles the evasion and unsteadiness of a just-abused animal.

Of course, before we get too carried away by artificial empathy, we shouldn’t forget what Big Dog is primarily designed for, and funded by…

Anyway – coming back to ‘wily’ tactics, here’s the often-referenced ‘Uncanny Valley’ diagram, showing the relationship between ever-more-realistic simulations of life, particularly humans and our ‘familiarity’ with them.

Basically, as we get ever closer to trying to create lifelike-simulations of humans, they start to creep us out.

It can perhaps be most neatly summed up as our reaction to things like the creepy, mocapped synthespians in the movie Polar Express…

The ‘wily’ tactic then would be to stay far away from the valley – aim to make technology behave with empathic qualities that aren’t human at all, and let us fill in the gaps as we do so well.

Which, brings us back to BASAAP, which as Rodney Brooks pointed out – is still really tough.

Bruno’s wild ancestors started to brute-force the problem of creating artificial empathy and a working companion-species relationship with humans through the long, complex process of domestication and selective-breeding…

…from that point the first time these kind of eyes were made towards scraps of meat held at the end of a campfire somewhere between 12-30,000 years ago…

Some robot designers have opted to stay on the non-human side of the uncanny valley, notably perhaps Sony with AIBO.

Here’s an interesting study from 2003 that hints a little at what the effects of designing for ‘artificial empathy’ might be.

We’re good at holding conflicting models of things in our heads at the same time it seems. That AIBO is a technology, but that it also has ‘an inner life’.

Take a look at this blog, where an AIBO owner posts it’s favourite places, and laments:

“[he] almost never – well, make it never – leaves his station these days. It’s not for lack on interest – he still is in front of me at the office – but for want of preservation. You know, if he breaks a leg come a day or a year, will Sony still be there to fix him up?”

(One questioner after my talk asked: “What did the 25% of people who didn’t think AIBO was a technological gadget report it to be?” – Good question!)

Some recommendations of things to look at around this area: the work of Donna Haraway, esp. The Companion Species Manifesto.

Also, the work of Cynthia Brezeal, Heather Knight and Kacie Kinzer – and the ongoingLIREC research project that our friend Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is working with, that’s looking to studies of canine behaviour and companionship to influence the design of bots and robots.

In science-fiction there’s a long, long list that could go here – but for now I’ll just point to the most-affecting recent thing I’ve read in the area, Ted Chiang’s novella “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” – which I took as my title for a talk partly on this subject at UX London earlier in the year.

In our own recent work I’d pick out Suwappu, a collaboration with Dentsu London as something where we’re looking to animate, literally, toys with an inner life through a computer-vision application that recognises each character and overlays dialogue and environments around them.

I wonder how this type of technology might develop hand-in-hand with storytelling to engage and delight – while leaving room for the imagination and empathy that we so easily project on things, especially when we are young.

Finally, I want to move away from the companion animal as a model, back to these things…

I said we’d come back to this! Have you ever thought about why we have pot plants? What we have them in the corners of our lives? How did they get there? What are they up to?!?

(Seriously – I haven’t managed yet to find research or a cultural history of how pot-plants became part of our home life. There are obvious routes through farming, gardening and cooking – but what about ornamental plants? If anyone reading this wants to point me at some they’d recommend in the comments to this post, I’d be most grateful!)

Take a look at this – one of the favourite finds of the studio in 2011 – Sticky Light.

It is very beautifully simple. It displays motive and behaviour. We find it fascinating and playful. Of course, part of it’s charm is that it can move around of its own volition – it has agency.

Pot-plants have motives (stay alive, reproduce) and behaviour (grow towards the light, shrivel when not watered) but they don’t have much agency. They rely on us to move them into the light, to water them.

Some recent projects have looked to augment domestic plants with some agency –Botanicalls by Kati London, Kate Hartman, Rebecca Bray and Rob Faludi equips a plant not only with a network connection, but a twitter account! Activated by sensors it can report to you (and its followers) whether it is getting enough water. Some voice, some agency.

(I didn’t have time to mention it in the talk, but I’d also point to James Chamber’s evolution of the idea with his ‘Has Needs’ project, where an abused potplant not only has a network connection, but the means to advertise for a new owner on freecycle…)

Here’s my botanical, which I chose to call Robert Plant…

So, much simpler systems that people or pets can find places in our lives as companions. Legible motives, limited behaviours and agency can illicit response, empathy and engagement from us.

We think this is rich territory for design as the things around us start to acquire means of context-awareness, computation and connectivity.

As we move from making inert tools – that we are unequivocally the users of – to companions, with behaviours that animate them – we wonder whether we should go straight from this…

…to this…

Namely, straight from things with predictable and legible properties and affordances, to things that try and have a peer-relationship, speaking with human voice and making great technological leaps to relate to us in that way, but perhaps with a danger of entering the uncanny valley.

What if there’s an interesting space to design somewhere in-between?

This in part is the inspiration behind some of the thinking in our new platform Berg Cloud, and its first product – Little Printer.

We like to think of Little Printer as something of a ‘Cloud Companion Species’ that mediates the internet and the domestic, that speaks with your smartphone, and digests the web into delightful little chunks that it dispenses when you want.

Little Printer is the beginning of our explorations into these cloud-companions, and BERG Cloud is the means we’re creating to explore them.

Ultimately we’re interested in the potential for new forms of companion species that extend us. A favourite project for us is Natalie Jeremijenko’s “Feral Robotic Dogs” – a fantastic example of legibility, seamful-ness and BASAAP.

Natalie went to communities near reclaimed-land that might still have harmful toxins present, and taught workshops where cheap (remember Argos?) robot dogs that could be bought for $30 or so where opened up and hacked to accommodate new sensors.

They were reprogrammed to seek the chemical traces associated with lingering toxins. Once release by the communities they ‘sniff’ them out, waddling towards the highest concentrations – an immediate tangible and legible visualisation of problem areas.

Perhaps most important was that the communities themselves were the ones taught to open the toys up, repurpose their motives and behaviour – giving them the agency over the technology and evidence they could build themselves.

In the coming world of bots – whether companions or not, we have to attempt to maintain this sort of open literacy. And it is partly the designer’s role to increase its legibility. Not only to beguile and create empathy – but to allow a dialogue.

As Kevin Slavin said about the world of algorithms growing around us – “We can write it but we can’t read it”

We need to engage with the complexity and make it open up to us.

To make evident, seamful surfaces through which we can engage with puppy-smart things.

As our friend Chris Heathcote has put so well:

Thanks for inviting me, and for your attention today.

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FOOTNOTE: Auger & Loizeau’s Domestic Robots.

I didn’t get the chance to reference the work of James Auger & Jimmy Loizeau in the talk, but their “Carnivorous Robots” project deserves study.

From the project website:

“For a robot to comfortably migrate into our homes, appearance is critical. We applied the concept of adaptation to move beyond the functional forms employed in laboratories and the stereotypical fictional forms often applied to robots. In effect creating a clean slate for designing robot form, then looking to the contemporary domestic landscape and the related areas of fashion and trends for inspiration. The result is that on the surface the CDER series more resemble items of contemporary furniture than traditional robots. This is intended to facilitate a seamless transition into the home through aesthetic adaptation, there are however, subtle anomalies or alien features that are intended to draw the viewer in and encourage further investigation into the object.”

And on robots performing as “Companion Species”

”In the home there are several established object categories each in some way justifying the products presence through the benefit or comfort they bring to the occupant, these include: utility; ornament; companionship; entertainment and combinations of the above, for example, pets can be entertaining and chairs can be ornamental. The simplest route for robots to enter the home would be to follow one of these existing paths but by necessity of definition, offering something above and beyond the products currently occupying those roles.”

James Auger is currently completing his Phd at the RCA on ‘Domestication of Robotics’ and I can’t wait to read it.