Category: anticipation

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Practising tomorrows? PhD Thesis online

I’ve uploaded a PDF of my PhD thesis for people to download [2.1Mb PDF ] should anyone feel so inclined. I have had a finalised version for a little while and have been meaning to make it available but just haven’t got round to it before now.

This work was conducted between 2006 and 2009, with the substantive fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2008 in Silicon Valley. It principally focusses on the ways in which those involved in ubiquitous computing research development, in a corporate context, anticipate particular kinds of future. This work remains interesting and, I would argue, important because “the future” continues to figure as a significant frame of reference in the ways in which we discuss and relate to/through technologies. I have reproduced the abstract, with the inclusion of a key quote, below. Please do get in touch to discuss this work! [ sam (dot) kinsley (at) uwe (dot) ac (dot) uk]

Practising Tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) research is characterized primarily by a concern with potential future computational worlds. This notion of research by future envisionment has been a feature of ubicomp discourse and reasoning since it earliest days… Such visions, however, are interesting not just for what they say about the future but also for what they say
about the present. This seems to be particularly the case when it comes to normative social relationships.

Bell & Dourish Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision

The thesis describes the ways in which technological futurity is a complex array of performative and proactive dispositions towards the future that are irreducible to normative and deterministic understandings of ‘progress’. It takes ubiquitous computing as a significant case study because the future orientation practised in ubiquitous computing research and development is emblematic of the perpetual technological forecasting in which humanity engages. While ubiquitous computing has existed as an agenda for nearly 20 years it is still largely concerned with a future that has not (yet) been realised. In the context of ubiquitous computing the thesis argues that it is necessary to make the politics of anticipation, as the particular discursive and performative ways in which future-orientation is codified and conditioned, explicit in technology development. The thesis therefore enacts a critical framework that charts a discourse of anticipation, as the multiple means for articulating proactive future orientation, internal to which are anticipatory logics that structure and rationalise how such forms of futurity are practised.

The motivation and ambit of the research is to thereby describe a politics of anticipation as the ways in which the anticipation of technological futures is codified and contested, whilst performative and multiple. Empirically, the argument is made through the discussion of interviews conducted with a range of internationally significant practitioners of ubiquitous computing research and development, which were carried out in Silicon Valley, California, in 2008. Attending to discourse, logics and emergent politics of anticipation provides a means of making explicit how our ‘knowledge’ of technological futures is produced. It is therefore argued that we should attend to socio-technical futurity as inherently situated in the living present, with all of its associated concerns, and allow for the indeterminacy of the future.

Practising tomorrows? – Sam Kinsley’s PhD Thesis [2.1Mb PDF ].

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William Gibson: The Zero History of waiting for the Great Dismal

[Originally posted on the DCRC website: http://www.dcrc.org.uk/blogs/william-gibson-zero-history-waiting-great-dismal]

Last night I attended William Gibson’s Bristol Festival Ideas talk.  This blog post represents some reflections on Gibson’s relationship with futurity as it came through in the question and answer session.

William Gibson’s appearance at his Bristol Festival of Ideas talk was delayed by an unanticipated train incident, an apparent ‘anomoly’, as Gibson quipped, for trains are ‘never’ delayed in the UK. This was a fittingly unanticipated eventuality – for the evening proved to focus on the characterisation of the future. Launching straight into a reading of an entire chapter from Zero History. In an unexpectedly high pitched and quite raspy voice, Gibson recounts a section of the character Milgrim’s story. Expressing his witty and insightful eye for detail, in the world crafted by Gibson for Zero History, Cafe Nero is ‘a tasty alternate reality Starbucks’. Gibson’s protagonist is investigating military fashion on behalf of global marketing company, ‘Blue Ant’, not least because ‘military contracting is essentially recession proof’. Indeed, the author proclaimed, the bulk of the 21st century street fashion for men is the fashion of the middle of previous century’s military. This forms a part of the basis for the book’s narrative.
Continue reading “William Gibson: The Zero History of waiting for the Great Dismal”

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The desire to queue and the queue for desire – returning to the iPhone queues.

Queue for iPhone 4 in Liverpool, photo by Flickr user: newtc_uk

Queue for iPhone 4 in Liverpool, photo by Flickr user: newtc_uk

Today sees the launch of the Apple iPhone 4. As we have come to expect, there are/were queues snaking from the doors of the fruit-themed purveyor of techno-chic’s shops. Indeed, as Wired UK, have pointed out – people turn up and camp overnight to be in the queue. Two years ago, in sunny Palo Alto, California, I observed with fascination the concretisation of a trend – the cultural event of queuing for the new Apple [insert shiny new product here]. At that time it was the release of the iPhone 3G:

The release of a hotly anticipated product, especially one created by apple, now seems to provoke a trend: the hardcore turn up one or more days in advance and camp (literally) outside the shop, others arrive at dawn and join the throng. Media coverage ensues and many wonder what on earth the fuss is about. In conversation with other spectators and with some of those who have queued, it seems to me that the purchase of the device itself is only a part of the motivation – it is also, substantially, about being a part of an event. The experience of queuing for these prized item, and the stories one might attach, appears to have become culturally significant.

Today is no different. The phenomena of the queue remains and it seems it has, if anything, grown into the production of events that appear to hold some sort of cultural significance for a significant minority of the population. As Gene Becker tweeted:

So all the cool kids are standing in line today, it seems. How retro-charming. iPhones are the new Grateful Dead tickets?

Why do I blog this? Its interesting to observe how material things, ostensibly created as ‘tools’, can be invested with so much desire and enchantment that their cultural value becomes tied to a sense of anticipation. What’s the significance of these events? Will people continue to queue for future techno-baubles? I haven’t decided if I need answers to those questions…

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A brief history of the future of pervasive media – Talk at the Pervasive Media Studio

I will be giving a talk at the Pervasive Media Studio on Friday 14th May entitled ‘A brief history of the future of pervasive media’, which is broadly derived from my PhD research. The talk will be open to the public, so please feel free to come along! Here’s the bumpf:

Pervasive media, and the various forms of computing from which they are derived, stem from a tradition of anticipating future scenarios of technology use. Sam Kinsley’s PhD research concerned the ways in which those involved in pervasive computing research and development imaginatively envision future worlds in which they’re technologies exist.

This lunchtime talk examines the ways in which future people, places and things are imagined in the research and development of pervasive media. Examples taken from prospective pervasive computing research and development in the last twenty years will be explored as emblematic of such future gazing. The aim is to provide a broad means of understanding the rationales by which technological futures are invoked so that pervasive media producers can critically reflect on the role the idea of the future in their work. Such an understanding is important because a history of computing is in large part a history of places and things that were never created – a history of yesterday’s tomorrows.

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Remembering the future: PARC 1987 & Microsoft 2006

I was checking out the very engaging ‘Milestones‘ timeline on the PARC website and came across an image that evoked a sense of deja vu. The other place I had seen something very similar was in a Microsoft ‘Future Vision of Manufacturing‘ video. Here are the images:

Xerox PARC CoLab circa 1987

 

Microsoft Future Vision of Manufacturing collaborative screen circa 2006

The first image depicts the Xerox PARC ‘CoLab‘ collaborative workspace and tools research conducted in the late 1980s. Two people are working on the same sketch from different sides of the screen, which are actually located in different places. The second comes from the aforementioned Microsoft video. Two business men on different sides of the world discuss a wireframe of a proposed car seat, to be manufactured. Interestingly the Microsoft video came about 20 years after the PARC project documented in the first image.

Technology futures are not always novel, what is envisaged can have a significant heritage. Yesterday’s tomorrows can easily become today’s tomorrows with some deft recycling. As Picasso said: ‘good artists copy…’

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Ubiquitous Computing: Mark Weiser’s vision and legacy

This is a sub-section of the first chapter of my PhD thesis, its my attempt to reflect on Mark Weiser’s legacy in the field of ubiquitous computing.

2009 marked the tenth anniversary of the death of Mark Weiser, a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser has been identified as the ‘godfather’ of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp). In the years since his demise many of the ideas that Weiser championed have come to greater prominence. As Yvonne Rogers points out this influence has been felt across industry, government and commercial research, from the European Union’s ‘disappearing computer’ initiative to MIT’s ‘Oxygen’, HP’s ‘CoolTown’ and Philips ‘Vision of the Future’. All of these projects aspired to Weiser’s tenet of the everyday environment and the objects within being embedded with computational capacities such that they might bend to our (human) will. Within the research community, as Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish remark ‘almost one quarter of all the papers published in the ‘Ubicomp’ conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundational articles’.

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PhD: “Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation”

On Friday 26th February I submitted my PhD thesis, entitled “Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation“. I am now working as a Research Fellow in Digital Cultures, as part of the newly founded Digital Cultures Research Centre and the University of the West of England. [UPDATE: You can read the whole thesis here.]

Here is the abstract for the thesis:

This thesis describes the ways in which technological futurity is a complex array of performative and proactive dispositions towards the future that are irreducible to normative and deterministic understandings of ‘progress’. It takes ubiquitous computing as a significant case study because the future orientation practised in ubiquitous computing research and development is emblematic of the perpetual technological forecasting in which humanity engages. While ubiquitous computing has existed as an agenda for nearly 20 years it is still largely concerned with a future that has not (yet) been realised. In the context of ubiquitous computing this thesis argues that it is necessary to make the politics of anticipation, as the particular discursive and performative ways in which future-orientation is codified and conditioned, explicit in technology development. This thesis therefore enacts a critical framework that charts a discourse of anticipation, as the multiple means for articulating proactive future orientation, internal to which are anticipatory logics that structure and rationalise how such forms of futurity are practised.

The motivation and ambit of this research is to thereby describe a politics of anticipation as the ways in which the anticipation of technological futures is codified and contested, whilst performative and multiple. Empirically, the argument is made through the discussion of interviews conducted with a range of internationally significant practitioners of ubiquitous computing research and development, which were carried out in Silicon Valley, California, in 2008. Attending to discourse, logics and emergent politics of anticipation provides a means of making explicit how our ‘knowledge’ of technological futures is produced. It is therefore argued that we should attend to socio-technical futurity as inherently situated in the living present, with all of its associated concerns, and allow for the indeterminacy of the future.

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Ironic vision of augmented (hyper)reality

Timo Arnall points out this video, by a masters student(!), that depicts a slightly nightmarish, yet amusingly ironic, vision of a possible future world with augmented reality, whereby you earn money by subjecting yourself to advertising and depend upon instructions from the system for even basic tasks.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

Augmented (hyper)Reality by Keiichi Matsuda

[via Timo Arnall & Berg]

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Social glue, or: What’s the ‘IMAP’ equivalent for social media?

The launch of Google Buzz has prompted me to raise some things that have been lurking in the back of my mind for some time. These thoughts began when the discussion about the ‘walled garden’ nature of facebook et al. emerged a couple of years ago and lead to the initiation of tentative steps towards interconnection and (that horribly overused word) ‘openness’ in the guise of ‘friend connect‘ and ‘facebook connect‘. Twitter was already sort of ahead of the game with their API, as the glut of applications for ‘tweeting’ attests.

Lots of talk on the interweb’s various locations for commentary centred on the social web, real-time web etc. being based in discrete platforms. This remains somewhat true today. We can certainly connect these services together and form extraordinary information gathering tools in the form of what Howard Rheingold usefully describes as ‘personal information dashboards’, using services such as netvibes and pipes in concert with the various APIs for the platforms we all use. However, this all takes quite a bit of effort at the moment [but! for a good tutorial, please check out Howard’s super videos: #1, #2, #3].

However, for the majority of internet users to usefully stick all of these various platforms and applications together there needs to be a much lower threshold of effort to achieve the desired results. Jyri Engstrom, co-founder of Jaiku and one of the big brains apparently behind ‘Buzz’, articulates the argument well here:

Most of the conversation over the last 24h has been centered around predicting if “Buzz will kill” this or that service. This debate starts from the assumption that Buzz and the rest of the social web are mutually exclusive. It’s arguably fair to assume so, considering all the social networks we’ve got so far are silos. To no longer assume everyone has to be using the same branded system to talk to each other is disruptive to the tech biz discourse, which is obsessed with turning everything into a war over which company is “the one”. So much so that the alternative is almost unthinkable. If the new standards succeed, in 2015 we’ll look back and shake our heads like we shake our heads today at the early days of proprietary phone networks and email systems. The thought that you couldn’t call, text or email people just because they happen to be on another phone operator or email client is laughable. Doubly so for the social Web. The reason many of the current commentators miss this point is that they are, in the immortal words of Walt Whitman, “demented with the mania of owning things.” (borrowing that quote from Doc Searls)

What are these ‘new standards’ then? Well, if we’re to take our cue from Google they consist of the development of the various existing data formats for syndication: extensions of Atom and RSS, such as activity streams and mediaRSS. There may well be families and hierarchies of such data formats and I’m sure hundreds, if not thousands, of developers are already working on creating these things. But I’m still left with this question: what if I don’t want my stuff (information, pictures, etc.) always held on servers owned by Google, facebook etc? What if I’m happy for such ‘stuff’ to be transient? Which of course such companies don’t want because your ‘stuff’ is incredibly valuable and they want to mine it for all its worth. Nevertheless, my half-formed thoughts are: what’s the equivalent to IMAP for social media?

To my mind, the missing ‘glue’ for the social networking ecosystem is the missing service architecture to allow all of us to host our own streams and tie together the various bits of our rapidly growing, perhaps increasingly ‘public’, ‘digital identity’. Social media could easily be distributed, just as blogs and ‘web 1.0’ are. What’s to stop a community creating something like wordpress or drupal for activity/social streams? If the standards suggested by Google really are that versatile then all that is necessary is to create a system that imports/exports using them. Search would be renewed in its importance, but companies/services like twitter could remain successful by facilitating that search functionality and helping users subscribe to one another’s feeds/streams.

A couple of years ago I thought about it in terms of a ‘meta-platform’ or ‘platform for platforms’, but we’ve kind of seen these, in the form of friendfeed and their ilk. Now I think, well, it could all still happen over port 80 with web traffic – it just needs an architecture to allow people to stick things up on their own servers and interconnect. If we take what Jyri says (above) seriously, it seems to me the logical step is to really set the social web ‘free’ and build the elements required to allow people to host their own activity streams. Maybe this is already happening. To build on Jyri’s theme of looking to a future and to paraphrase Alan Kay: “the best way to predict the future is to [build] it”. Go to it!!