Strategic Thinking and Design Initiative: Extended and Updated Report

Introduction 11 This report1 documents the Strategic Thinking and Design work that the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) engaged in from the fall of 2013 through the end of 2015. Fueled by the deep desire of the ARL membership to rise to the challenges facing higher education in the 21st century, and with grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Association engaged in an unprecedented project to reimagine the future of the research library and then reshape ARL, its organization, to help bring that future into being. This report is a collaborative effort. John Seely Brown, who wrote the prologue, inspired the Association to embark upon this journey. The architect of the process you see before you is Ann Pendleton-Jullian. Sue Baughman, David Consiglio, Lee Anne George, Susan Gibbons, David Gift, Kaylyn Groves, Tom Hickerson, James Hilton, Lori Jahnke, Anne Kenney, Wendy Pradt Lougee, Rick Luce, Carol Mandel, Jim Neal, Susan Nutter, Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Dawn Schmitz, Brian E. C. Schottlaender, Elliott Shore, Elizabeth Waraksa, Martha Whitehead, John Wilkin, and Amy Yeager shared their ideas and compiled, wrote, edited, and brought the work to fruition. Paul Soulellis designed this publication. The diagrams were a collaboration between Ann Pendleton-Jullian and Paul Soulellis. Our greatest thanks are to the 365 participants in the Regional Design Meetings and Design Studios who gave their time and best thinking to the Strategic Thinking and Design process. Much of the work described in this report was made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Strategic Thinking and Design Initiative: Extended and Updated Report

Introduction 11 This report1 documents the Strategic Thinking and Design work that the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) engaged in from the fall of 2013 through the end of 2015. Fueled by the deep desire of the ARL membership to rise to the challenges facing higher education in the 21st century, and with grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Association engaged in an unprecedented project to reimagine the future of the research library and then reshape ARL, its organization, to help bring that future into being. This report is a collaborative effort. John Seely Brown, who wrote the prologue, inspired the Association to embark upon this journey. The architect of the process you see before you is Ann Pendleton-Jullian. Sue Baughman, David Consiglio, Lee Anne George, Susan Gibbons, David Gift, Kaylyn Groves, Tom Hickerson, James Hilton, Lori Jahnke, Anne Kenney, Wendy Pradt Lougee, Rick Luce, Carol Mandel, Jim Neal, Susan Nutter, Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Dawn Schmitz, Brian E. C. Schottlaender, Elliott Shore, Elizabeth Waraksa, Martha Whitehead, John Wilkin, and Amy Yeager shared their ideas and compiled, wrote, edited, and brought the work to fruition. Paul Soulellis designed this publication. The diagrams were a collaboration between Ann Pendleton-Jullian and Paul Soulellis. Our greatest thanks are to the 365 participants in the Regional Design Meetings and Design Studios who gave their time and best thinking to the Strategic Thinking and Design process. Much of the work described in this report was made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

The Next Familiar

Using a speculative design foresight approach, this study explores the rapidly developing area of wearable, implantable and ingestible technologies, and how they might influence us over the next several decades. The authors have combined traditional research methods such as literature review and expert interviews; foresight methods, such as environmental scanning, trends analysis and scenario creation; and narrative, imagery and conjecture to produce an evocative account of future possibilities in the realm of the tools we keep and use close to and inside our bodies

The Mega-field of Science Fiction Film: Studying Fans' Negotiations of Cultural Value via Canonical, Art-house and Blockbuster SF Movies

Despite research on fans, relatively little is known about the mechanisms behind the negotiation of cultural value of genre texts by fan consumers. The overall image of fandom that emerges from the literature (for example Fiske, 1992; Jenkins, 2012) is as a fairly uniform social formation of audience members devoted to specific pop-/subcultural goods and therefore displaying quantities of appropriate capital enabling them to engage a given field. I will explore field structures that build on Bourdieusian field theory (Bourdieu, 1979, 1992, 1993; Jenkins, 1992) by showing a lack of specificity in terms of field boundaries, allowing me to theorise fandom in relation to what I term an SF “mega-field”. I focus on relationships between cinematic science fiction and fans who engage with texts displaying a spectrum of ‘quality’ signified by cultural value. To illustrate the negotiation of cultural value of texts by fans I examine three case studies: Alien (1979), Moon (2009) and Avatar (2009). These represent different qualities (canonical, art-house, blockbuster) and correspond to a palette of Bourdieusian tastes. I conduct empirical research using qualitative interviews with thirty-two science fiction fans who vary in terms of social background, gender, age, and level of engagement with the field. Drawing from my data, I theorize Bourdieusian-based phenomena such as intra-fandom distinctions whereby fans engage with texts via a “fan gaze” showing paradoxically “detached immersion”. I also show supportive evidence for the downward cultural mobility of the most elite audience, omnivorous fans, which expands on Bourdieu’s theorisation of social action. Furthermore, I explore fandom’s approach to generic SF texts by illustrating the fannish drive to canonise textual novelty in otherwise theoretically repetitive texts. By focusing on readings of texts in relation to personal pragmatics, I discuss SF canonisation via “innovative cliché” – a position-taking which splits and recombines the repetition and difference inherent to genre (Neale, 1980). Ultimately, this enables me to theorize the formation of an SF “mega-field” acting as an industrial tool for audience expansion. To this end, I describe the intermedial nature of cinema which allows me to theorise SF films, as they are valued by fans, as multifunctional generic texts with an appeal directed towards the widest possible audience

How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies: Alternative Futures and Uncertainty in Strategic Management

How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies tracks the transformation of scenario planning, a non-calculative technique for imagining alternative futures, from postwar American thermonuclear defence projects to corporate planning efforts beginning in the late 1960s. Drawing on archival research, the dissertation tells a history of how different corporate strategists in the second half of the twentieth century attempted to engage with future uncertainties by drawing heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory rational and intuitive techniques together in their developments of corporate scenario planning. By tracing the heterogeneity of methodologies and intellectual influences in three case studies from corporate scenario planning efforts in the United States and Britain, the dissertation demonstrates how critical and countercultural philosophies that emphasized irrational human capacities like imagination, consciousness, and intuitionoften assumed to be antithetical to the rule-bound, quantitative rationalities of corporate planning effortsbecame crucial tools, rather than enemies, of corporate strategy under uncertainty after 1960. The central argument of the dissertation is that corporate scenario planning projects were non-calculative speculative attempts to augment the calculative techniques of traditional mid-century strategic decision-making with diverse human reasoning tools in order to explore and understand future uncertainties. Consequently, these projects were intertwined with an array of sometimes contradictory genealogies, from technical postwar military planning practices to countercultural intellectual resources that questioned the technological imperatives of modern life. Yet, by the mid-1980s, corporate scenario planning efforts transformed from contemplative strategies for exploring uncertainties into a method associated with the capacities of thought leaders. It was through the rising thought leadership industry of the late-twentieth-century that scenarios gained legitimacy, enabling multinational corporations to rely upon the charismatic authority of scenario practitioners in the face of unknowable futures. In making this argument, the dissertation revises assumptions in the history of postwar science and technology and science studies that pivot on the importance of impersonal, calculative strategies and technical capacities in uncertain conditions

Seeing the City Digitally

This book explores what's happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life