Institute For The Future

"John Thackara, ""In the Bubble: Daily Life as a Design Opportunity"""

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Notes of a talk John Thackara just gave at IDEO. As usual, these should be read as my take on the talk, not a transcript.

Big idea. We used to think that innovation starts where technology starts. That's changing now. Innovation starts with groups of people who possess tools to link up with each other, to locate and track things, and to coordinate actions between people, objects, and places. The challenge for designers is to figure out how to do their work in ways that supports this trend.

Here's how.

Principles for doing design projects in daily life

Enable human agency. Design people into things rather than out of them. Take the "walking bus," in which parents walk groups of kids to school: this is an incredibly simple thing, but parents who organize it are basically forming smart mobs, using GPS to plan routes, mobile phones to coordinate ad hoc groups, etc.. With tools that enable human agency, genuine grassroots innovation becomes possible.

From science fiction to social fiction. The view of technology as something fantastic and futuristic-- and of futures that are technology-driven-- should be replaced by a vision of alternate social futures, or social fictions. Take Estonian potato farming. The food quality/quantity tradeoff (e.g. plenty available through corporate ag, but at the cost of quality) has driven creation of collaborative groups who are reorganizing food production and distribution, with effective results. Small-scale potato farmers are doing better, people who wish to be more connected to their food are able to be so; these groups are borrowing tools from DHL, FedEx, as well as other stuff.

Self-service > enable sharing. We all have needs to share stuff. Power drills are used for 10 minutes during their lifetime; cars are used for a few minutes a day; the result is huge inefficiencies in consumption. "The notion of sharing material resources is just exploding," particularly in Europe. People are designing sharing systems for space, equipment, time, services.

Sharing knowledge is also a big thing: Deborah Solomon's Nomadic Banquet (organized for Doors of Perception 8) gave people a chance to share inside knowledge about street food. They expected it to be a cellphone, Zagat's guide online kind of thing; but there are all kinds of social and cultural sensibilities surrounding street food that couldn't be accommodated by the technology. It turned out to involve issues natural resource allocation, distribution, packaging, storage, displays, streetscape, etc., etc..

High concept > deep context. "Going with a concept and trying to apply it to a context is a terrible way to do design.... Concepts predate the messiness and complexity of real-world situations," and don't take into account all the complexity of everyday social and cultural life. The "nature in the city" movement, for example, has morphed from large-scale efforts led by the Daniel Burnhams or Christopher Wrens, to self-organizing, small efforts on rooftops, brownfield sites, even dustbins converted to planters. In Europe, there's a tremendous variety in the rules these follow.

Think whole systems. "95% of design is still about objects in showrooms being admired for their objectness. I'd thought we'd destroyed that idea?" The result of a focus on objects is either bad products, or objects that are cool but hard to use.

Don't own, locate. I don't want to own a car, but I want to be able to use one when I need it." Car-sharing schemes in Europe are approaching critical mass: in Amsterdam, car services, mobile phone providers, and the city have worked together to create a pretty good system, but there's still lots to be done that could make the service easier to use. What these efforts point to is the possibility of reducing the sheer amount of stuff you need, and need to own, to have a good life.

Other bits

Starts by talking about the bad self-check-in kiosks in airports. The self-service economy is "one example of technology out of control," in which companies try to automate all kinds of things in the service economy.

The new book, In the Bubble : Designing in a Complex World, "started out life as an attempt to draw conclusions from Doors of Perception." Since 1993, the conference has been asking the question, "what is new technology for?" In the last five years, they've shifted from a tech-push focus, to looking first at daily life and its discontents, and working backward to technology; and in the course of so doing, things have come together.

Community mapping of local resources, and bottom-up cartographic exercises that allow small groups to generate information about their surroundings, is a good example of bottom-up innovation, but with some significant political implications.

Midwestern dairy farmers who want to expand their local markets are selling shares to neighbors, allowing them to share organic or raw milk with them (something that would otherwise be illegal, because of FDA rules).