The future according to Microsoft

Institute for the Future's Vivian Distler says:

At last month's Mix08 conference, Microsoft played a video created by its Office Labs to share their vision of the future of personal health management It features ubiquitous integrated displays, instant sharing of information, projecting displays, and other advances in natural interface interactions.

A little digging turned up some background on the video, by Dr Bill Crounse, Microsoft’s Worldwide Health Senior Director:

This is the third [Health Future Vision] video we have produced here at Microsoft. It has been my pleasure to work closely with Ian Sands and his Industry Innovations Group (IIG) to bring these videos to life. What's particularly interesting is how accurate the videos have been in predicting future industry trends and how technology will influence the way we work. Perhaps that's because IIG does so much internal and external research before producing one of these videos. We also base them on technology that is either currently available but not widely implemented, or on technology that is being actively pursued in the labs at Microsoft Research. In any event, everything you see in the video is based on technology that is available now, or is very likely to be available within a 7 to 12 year time frame.

Our newest Future Vision Video also captures the essence of healthcare industry trends that I've been following and writing about for the last few years. This includes the rising tide of consumerism in healthcare, the retail movement, commoditization of services, information everywhere, and globalization.
[...]
I think the video accurately reflects the kind of consumer-directed, quality and price transparent, knowledge-driven healthcare delivery system we'd all like to see. And while this is just a video, it certainly captures the essence for how information technology will help transform medical practice to better connect people and data, facilitate improved collaboration, and better inform everyone involved.

~Bill Crounse, "Future Vision: Microsoft knowledge driven health", HealthBlog, 2 August 02007

So, a few points of interest about this clip.

First, the release: this was not officially distributed by the company for public consumption (as Crounse notes); instead it was ripped from the Mix08 conference webcast and posted to YouTube by a user. Not quite sure what to make of that fact, but it piques my curiosity about the company's strategy for these sorts of futures visualisations. Also, I don't know where -- or whether -- the previous two videos can be found, but if they are already (or later become) available, I'd like to hear from anyone who can point me to them.

Second, the genre: I don't recall noticing the phrase "concept video" before today (that's how this piece is described by Long Zheng at his tech blog I Started Something, one of the top sources of hits to the YouTube clip) but that term also describes several other odds and ends recently dredged up here at the sceptical futuryst (the Morph, the Charmr), so we now have another way to scan for futures videos of this type.

And last, but by no means least, the content: I can't comment on this in too much detail right now, but to my mind, the scenario this video portrays is profoundly soporific. Everything is as spotless and anodyne as in Huxley's Brave New World (or for that matter, Kubrick's 2001 -- the grim joke there being that the computer HAL proved the most recognisably human character in the film.) Sure, those blobjects look cool, the user interfaces are fluid and pretty, the houses are tidy... but the experience it all evokes is (to me; feel free to disagree) D-U-L-L.

Dr Crounse: "I think the video accurately reflects the kind of consumer-directed, quality and price transparent, knowledge-driven healthcare delivery system we'd all like to see."

Tonto to the Lone Ranger: "Who's 'we', paleface?"

Several years ago, working for the United Kingdom's National Health Service coordinating a symposium on the futures of healthy communities, was really the first occasion I'd had to think about the underlying values and practices of Western medicine. My academic background had been in the history and philosophy of science, and in law, rather than in medicine or healthcare. During that project, I found that the organising concept of "healthy communities" (which had been attached to it before I came aboard) lent itself very well to engaging the idea of health as an emergent property of a community ecology, rather than as a product of merely instrumental bodily interventions. I came to suspect that our chronic medical ills, and probably our social ones also, relate to a simplistic, mechanistic worldview. When bodies and institutions are designed and maintained principally by engineers and scientists, the world looks very different from how it can where other views hold sway.

So, back to the video: certainly, I think we should concede that, if the clip's evocation of healthcare were to be broadly realised, it would represent a great improvement over many people's current experience of hospitals. But that may say more about the troubled state of the Western medical paradigm than it does about the shiny, but essentially shallow, vision proposed by Microsoft.

Now, I found while reading up on the health video that Microsoft's Industry Innovations Group has also tried its hand at imagining the future of banks, with the following result:


(Found via Microsoft and the Future blog.)

Same vibe. These videos show us doing the same things more efficiently, not doing different things. The near future is much like today, if you live in an advertisement: everything is clean, there are no crowds or other inconveniences, and -- hey presto! -- you have more, and cooler, gadgets (-- again with the gadgets!) These clips are unobjectionable and, arguably, boring -- by design. They aim to reassure (with our help, your life in the future will be simpler, smoother, more elegant) in exactly the way we should expect from a massive enterprise with most to gain from maintaining a steady course. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not Microsoft-bashing -- after all, it is a technology company, whose function is not to tell us what the future should be, but to find ways to realise visions and priorities that we describe for ourselves.

Which is why we really need to figure out for ourselves what those visions and priorities ought to be. Pointing out some of the limitations and inbuilt blindspots of the continued-growth visions proposed by some of the entities responsible for shaping the conditions of possibility for our lives is just one way to begin a conversation which aspires to go much, much further.

It comes down to inventing and pursuing the future according to you.

Chocolate, beer, and futures

The photo above, which I took this afternoon, is of an innovative calling card sent by our colleagues at Pantopicon, a consultancy based in Antwerp, Belgium.* It's a door hanger with a detachable set of advertisements for hypothetical future products, such as personalised medical plants, and mood-responsive t-shirts ... all at bargain basement prices! (If you earn Euros.)

Like HRCFS, Nik Baerten and team assist a variety of clients both local and international to envision and pursue preferred futures, and like us, as we learned last year, they take advantage of the imagination-catalysing potential of expressing possibilities in a range of media (which they refer to as 'experiencable futures' or 'futures experiences').

Take this elegantly simple still shot, for example:


Or this video ad:

Pantopicon has also made the occasional foray into user-generated content in the form of FFWD>> with a series of themed photoshop contests around a twenty-year future. (The example below was submitted for the theme "transport" by Gareth Davies.)


While this example is a few years old now, multimedia open source futures is really coming into its own -- as suggested in yesterday's post about design concepts; but also evidenced by the popularity of photoshop sites such as Worth1000, and the terrific cross-platform alternate reality game World Without Oil (previously mentioned here). Anyway, I hope Pantopicon will continue to engage people in this type of visual futures thinking.

Regular readers of t.s.f. are also encouraged to check out their blog, A Thousand Tomorrows, which tracks similar themes and, while internationally oriented, gives a stronger sense of the pulse of futures work in Europe.

You know, they might technically live in a low country, but from what I can tell the Belgians somehow see further than most... ;)

Keep up the good work, guys!

* Actually, it was a New Year's greeting that has been sitting in Jake's mailbox for several months -- he returned to Hawaii yesterday from self-imposed exile for dissertation writing purposes. Aloha Jake.

Greener Gadgets

The line between thought-provoking artifacts from the future and actual technological developments sometimes becomes oddly blurred -- as noted, for instance, last month in a comment to this post, in relation to bionic contact lenses.

Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond (31 March, 02008) enthusiastically points out this cool entry from a recent design competition, Greener Gadgets...


The competition was co-organised by design blog Inhabitat, and sustainability consultancy Mark Alt + Partners, in cooperation with longstanding (since 01995) online magazine of industrial design, Core77. The comp launched on 26 December 02007, and culminated on 1 February at a conference in New York City. The design brief was as follows:

Core77 is inviting designers to explore the concept of "Greener Gadgets." Designs should seek to minimize the environmental impact of consumer electronic devices at any stage in the product lifecycle. Areas of sustainability to consider include:

1. Energy
2. Materials / Lifecycle / Recycling
3. Social & educational development

Participants are encouraged to consider their designs as part of the entire product ecosystem, and should think as holistically as possible. Designers may choose to focus their entries on a particular area of human enterprise (learning, playing, communicating, etc.), or a particular context (work, home, school, etc.), a particular material, or a specific device. Entries may also seek to create new paradigms for products and services.

Ultimately, we are looking for "great gadgets" of the greener kind.

As it happens, the first prize winner, EnerJar, an energy monitoring device, was among "not 'products' that can be purchased — but [...] a handy, downloadable DIY design that can be put together using a jam jar and other household objects."


Many of the other top entries selected, however, were not much beyond illustrated ideas. For example, the "Gravia" Gravity Based Kinetic Energy Lamp, second place getter, was described at the Inhabitat blog as "a fantastic concept - but one that has stirred up some debate across the blogosphere recently in regards to whether or not it is possible to build such a lamp right now with the technology that exists today."


Interesting, I think, that the comp's organisers used no categories differentiating the already here, from the near, from the way out. As a result, the entries range from witty branding ideas, through ambient reminders of environmental impact, to fully-blown sci-fi invention.

(Click through to Notable entries page for the sources of these selected images...)






(I'm reminded of the Forum for the Future's "Low Carbon Living" images, which spring from a comparable aspiration to think greener.)

The reality-fantasy spectrum collapses here, in a way I find quite delightful, I should add, juxtaposing products that seem immediately feasible at one end, through to ambiguously futuristic -- and perhaps impossible -- "design fiction" (Sterling's useful term) at the other.

Which is to say that, for most of the successful entries, this competition essentially comprised an ideational exercise. The stated evaluation criteria were: innovation, clarity of design, originality, form and presentation. I hope I can be forgiven for supposing (at first) that a "greener gadgets" design competition would involve submitting a feasibility statement, if not a functioning prototype. But as it turns out, entries required only three jpg images, telling the product's "story" at different levels (context, object, and details), plus a 500-word project description.

Now, I mention this not as a criticism, but simply as an observation which, may point to some implications for how we apprehend and experience technological (and, hot on its heels, social) change.

I'll explain.

With increasing numbers of people turning increasingly sophisticated (CG-enabled) design ideas loose in the mediascape, in some settings, the virtual (or hypothetical, or future) artifact and the real one have become exceedingly difficult to tell apart. Playful design concepts like the iRing (below) seem to appear more and more often in my meanderings around the web. Real or not? At a glance, there's no way to tell.

iRing | Design by Victor Soto | via Geekologie, 22 January 02008.

Not only are freelance designers engaging in this sort of public domain product development, but consultancies and big brands do too. The Nokia Morph and Adaptive Path's Charmr device are both examples recently blogged here.

A weird upshot of all this simultaneous availability of vividly imagined "future" products, in a context where rapid change has been normalised, is the subliminal (and occasionally, outright) confusion it can generate. When it comes to gadgetry, to someone without inside information, there can be a very blurry line between idea, concept, prototype, and fait accompli. Unless you pay close attention to what's happening at the cutting edge of technology -- and, to be fair, most people have enough other things going on in their lives that they don't -- it's pretty easy to mistake a hypothetical product for a real one. (The reverse is probably also true.)

For instance, a viral video temporarily set (certain excitable portions of) the geek community alight in February, because it appeared to herald the imminent arrival of an exciting new Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) from Samsung, the Korean electronics giant:



Tech news sites hastened to correct the misperception. In point of fact, the video had been produced by a college student in India for a class project.

We've been getting tipped all morning on a supposed Samsung P9 UMPC. Sorry Charlie, it's not the P9. It's not even from Samsung. As sleek and sexy as this crazy, detachable slider is, no amount of wishful thinking is going to make it more than a university design project.

~Engadget, 21 February 02008.

This ambiguity seems especially apt to occur with images (still or video) of stand-alone gadgets -- as opposed to their social or user contexts which may contain many more "moving parts", literally and figuratively. I'm referring here to the difference between depictions of gadgets themselves, and the evocation of how they change (or are changed by) their social context. As much as I rejoice in what seems to be increasing availability of ingenious possibilities, fodder for our collective imagining, compellingly and realistically portrayed -- especially when imbued with this "bright green" sensibility -- I have to say there seem to be a lot more of the former than the latter floating around.

The tendency to focus on technology itself is understandable: it's a complexity-reducing strategy for thinking about change that also plays well with our object-focused, consumption-driven economy. But "stuff" is not, I think, the true stuff of experience. Picking up on an trend noted by Allison Arieff (quoted in this recent post), I'd expect that over the coming years, the increasingly holistic, integrative, values-oriented efforts of designers -- particularly those concerned with user experience and interaction design -- will result in deeper engagement with evoking what change feels like, not just how its putative protagonist-objects look; as well as how it might occur, connecting outwardly, in complex contexts such as communities and families, as well as inwardly, addressing our interior or emotional states.

Product-centric -- and more particularly gadget-centric -- thinking surely affords some insight into the landscape of alternative futures, providing possible fragments of preferred (presumably sustainable, i.e. non-self-destructive) scenarios. But the key word is fragments; whereas the design challenge before us is systemic, complex, multi-dimensional, and massively distributed. No amount of gadgetry, however green, can substitute for addressing futures systemically.

Project Virgle: The New New World

Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

~Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes

Google and Virgin announce Mars expedition and colony

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and LONDON, England (April 1st, 2008) – Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Virgin Group today announced the launch of Virgle Inc., a jointly owned and operated venture dedicated to the establishment of a human settlement on Mars.

"Some people are calling Virgle an 'interplanetary Noah's Ark,'" said Virgin Group President and Founder Sir Richard Branson, who conceived the new venture. "I'm one of them. It's a potentially remarkable business, but more than that, it's a glorious adventure. For me, Virgle evokes the spirit of explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo, who set sail looking for the New World. I do hope we'll be a bit more efficient about actually finding it, though."

The Virgle 100 Year Plan's milestones will include Virgle Pioneer selection (2008-2010), the first manned journey to Mars (2016), a Virgle Inc. initial public offering to capitalize on the first manned journey to Mars (2016), the founding of the first permanent Martian municipality, Virgle City (2050), and the achievement of a truly self-sustaining Martian civilization with a population exceeding 100,000 (2108).

~Google Press Center, 1 April 02008

A message from Richard Branson, posted on YouTube today:



(And another from Larry Page and Sergey Brin.)

All this is a little smug, to be sure, but quite ingenious.

And a lot of work went into this effort.

Here's the colonisation "plan" laid out for the next century...
An announcement about Virgle by Branson, at the official Google Blog...
Info on the application process for would-be astronauts (wherein Google tries its hand at a little Onion-esque parody, of multi-choice questionnaires)...
The discussion board -- a google group, of course...
And perhaps my favourite part of this, the prospectus for an "Open Source Planet":

Project Virgle comprises three equal partners: Google, Virgin and a diffuse network of talented individuals who want to participate in our mission. Tapping into this global network means organizing our venture around the model that will most efficiently liberate and reward individual knowledge, effort and creativity while creating strong incentives for investing companies.

In other words, from end to end, Project Virgle will be open source.

A post-post-industrial economy

What does "open source" mean in the context of a distant, planet-wide, century-long enterprise? Today's industrialized (and post-industrialized) (and, one imagines, post-post- industrialized) economies are sustained not so much by physical wealth as by advanced systems of shared knowledge whose marginal productivity grows as more is accumulated. "Shared," however, doesn't mean valueless; we see Virgle as a decidedly for-profit venture that will develop most efficiently via decentralized models of effort, authority and reward. If the first economic revolution was agricultural, the second industrial and the third digital, the fourth will be Open Source -- the birthing of a planetary civilization whose development is driven by the unbound human imagination.

Virgle is an undertaking of almost unfathomable complexity whose success will derive to a distressingly large degree from the amount of effort that is, or isn't, put into it. So we hope we don't come off as too sweatily desperate in embracing a philosophy that we believe will invest, literally and figuratively, an exponentially larger network of individuals in our success than would a traditional corporate structure. We want to engage, one might say, the Long Tail of human creativity. Instead of 5,000 people working 12 hours a day six days a week in exchange for a full salary and benefits, imagine 5 million people working a few hours a week in exchange for contribution-based equity in the form of shares in Virgle Inc and ownership of the land of which the colony will ultimately take some form of possession.

Christian Crews, who posted this to the APF listserv earlier today, added "I love this - I wish it were real - hell, they've got the cash!"

Exactly. It's interesting how possible this feels, what with private entrepreneurs taking a renewed interest in space tourism in the last several years -- as seen in the Ansari X Prize, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and so on.

On that topic -- the power of private entities to shape our collective priorities and achievements -- it's worth noting the reach that Google's thought experiments can command. The Branson video, posted less than 24 hours ago, has accrued 244,665 views, and the Brin/Page counterpart has logged 443,771. (Google "turned the lights out" on its website last weekend -- changing its signature plain white background to black -- to support Earth Hour, an energy awareness initiative of the World Wildlife Fund. I don't know how many millions of people were exposed to this message incidentally while searching the web, but I'd bet: lots.)

Anyway, back to Virgle, which is a terrific provocative, plausible futures-esque intervention, and grist to the mill for my thinking on the relationship between hoaxes, simulations, and scenarios, which I hope will be available in human readable form sometime later this month.

It's too bad, really, that April Fool's Day comes but once a year -- we could stand to exercise our imaginations a bit more often.

I read the news today, oh boy

This month, Wired magazine online includes a cute take on a newspaper of the future -- focusing on a U.S. election sixteen years hence -- dated 22 November 02024.

Screenshot of an interactive design by officevsoffice

From Wired 16.03 | Copy by Steve Bodow

It's an interactive Flash design, so you need to click through to the original to check it out properly...

It's cool, right?

Right?

Well, ok. I don't know why I'm not more enthusiastic about this: I'd really expect to like it more than I do. It's a future artifact, cleverly thought out, detailed, layered, with a lot of witty morsels to savour... So far, so good.

But as a futures artifact, maybe it tries to do too much. It's not that it isn't thoughtful, or clever, or satirically on-target -- it just, to my (undoubtedly hypercritical) mind, goes overboard. So densely packed is it, so thoroughly burdened with pop culture asides, news satire, tech-savvy smirks, and post-everything ironic wit that frankly it's a little tiresome.

An aspect of this density, clever and confusing at the same time, is the way it plays on multiple layers simultaneously. We're getting jokes about news content (including celebrities, journalists, international crises, American politics) as well as physical medium (the -- in 02008 -- newly minted wireless reading devices; platform convergence including the integration of CNN-like newsbar, and webpage elements like photo sets and vlogs); as well as the written form (quirks of the Wikipedia relating to its dubious contents; the ironic combination of user-produced content and the Wall Street Journal!) Ha! And presented on a later version of the Amazon Kindle -- clever! Ugggghhh. Et cetera. I give in. What's for dinner?

So much is going on here that I'm sure there's a bunch of jokes I simply missed. Which is fine. Much contemporary comedy, and The Simpsons really broke the mould here, relies on an abundance of layers to laugh at, from slapstick and sight gags through to highbrow political and historical references. But that kick-'em-while-they're-down strategy doesn't necessarily translate directly to webpages and flash animations. Unlike a medium with duration (such as video, or live performance) our attention seems to be assaulted all at once, not in sequence. And -- perhaps this is the laugh killer, or indeed the metajoke -- this flash design is a pain to navigate.

Now of course, I'm looking at this through my own biased, persnickety criteria. And this piece is, I concede, principally satire, not futures. Despite the resonance of those two that I thought about here not long ago, there may be a tension that I can't articulate yet between good satire and good futures work. You decide how well this particular example succeeds on each front. But I'll say one more thing about the futures aspect before the tirade subsides.

It's head writer of The Daily Show (a program I much admire) Steve Bodow who "lays out the scenario" here. But through all the clutter I have trouble discerning the scenario. It seems like almost everything that's happening today is still happening in this future, only more so. Which seems to amount to more noise than signal. I suppose that's its intention. Maybe it's too close to the apparently ubiquitous trend for comfort -- hypercomplexity and massively dense referentiality may ring too true to be really funny to me. I guess a simpler scenario would have been easier to follow, but funnier? I don't know.

With this, I betray my simplemindedness and raise a talking point for future future artifacts -- less can be more.

Whose movie are you in?

Today, as spring break came to its lamented but inevitable end, I finished reading a work I'd been wanting to get through for some time.  Robert M. Pirsig's Lila is a sort of sequel to his wonderful Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of my favourite books (Amazon; full text).  Pirsig employs, in both works, a hybrid structure which is part autobiography, part novel; part travelogue, part philosophical tract.  In the hands of a great writer, I find this use of travelogue-memoir as vehicle for other kind of investigation enormously effective (it's also used in Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, and Sven Lindqvist's Exterminate All The Brutes -- both of which books I love and recommend wholeheartedly).

So, I don't want to ramble on about this, but just pick out, for my own interest, really, a pair of related insights which jumped out at me from Lila, and to which I think I may want to return at some point:

When you enter a movie theater you know that all you're going to see is 24 shadows per second flashed on a screen to give an illusion of moving people and objects. Yet despite this knowledge you laugh when the 24 shadows per second tell jokes and cry when the shadows show actors faking death. You know they are an illusion yet you enter the illusion and become a part of it and while the illusion is taking place you are not aware that it is an illusion. This is hypnosis. This is trance. It's also a form of temporary insanity. But it's also a powerful force for cultural reinforcement and for this reason the culture promotes movies and censors them for its own benefit.

Phædrus thought that in the case of permanent insanity the exits to the theater have been blocked, usually because of the knowledge that the show outside is so much worse. The insane person is running a private unapproved film which he happens to like better than the current cultural one. If you want him to run the film everyone else is seeing, the solution would be to find ways to prove to him that it would be valuable to do so, Phædrus thought. Otherwise why should he get he get "better"? He already is better. It's the patterns that constitute "betterness" that are at issue. From an internal point of view insanity isn't the problem. Insanity is the solution.

~Lila, pp. 408-409.

There's an interesting contrast with an earlier passage where Pirsig (again, writing of himself in the third person as Phædrus, his narrator character) reflects on a meeting with Robert Redford in a New York hotel (described pp. 278-284), about turning his preceding book, the bestselling Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, into a film...

That's what was wrong with making a film about his book. You can't film insanity.

Maybe if, during the show, the whole theater collapsed and the audience found themselves among the stars with just space all around and no support, wondering what a stupid thing this is, sitting here among the stars watching this film that has nothing to do with them and then suddenly realizing that this film is the only reality there is and that they had better get interested in it because what they see and what they are is the same thing and once it stops they will stop too. . . .

~Lila, p. 367

Bear in mind that these are just brief asides in a very wide-ranging book.

Yet this metaphor of film as cultural script (or scenaric universe) contains something essential, it seems to me.