The future as a design problem

An often unacknowledged yet foundational problem for design is how ‘futures‘ are recruited for design practice. This problem saturates considerations of what could or should be designed. We distinguish two intertwined approaches to this: ‘pragmatic projection’, which tries to tie the future to the past, and ‘grand vision’, which ties the present to the future. We examine ubiquitous computing as a case study of how pragmatic projection and grand vision are practically expressed to direct and structure design decisions. We assess their implications and conclude by arguing that the social legitimacy of design futures should be increasingly integral to their construction

Anticipating ubiquitous computing: Logics to forecast technological futures

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier. NOTICE: This is the author’s version of a work accepted for publication by Elsevier. Changes resulting from the publishing process, including peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting and other quality control mechanisms, may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Geoforum, 2011, Vol. 42, Issue 2, pp. 231 – 240 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.12.005Visions of the future predict spaces apparently teaming with ever more novel and pervasive technologies. Significant amongst such forecasts is the notion of ‘ubiquitous computing’ (ubicomp), understood as an affordance or capacity tied (in)to people, places and things. This article stages an encounter between the futurity of ubicomp and recent debates in geography around anticipation. So, first, the future orientation in ubicomp research and development (R&D) is investigated as a mode of anticipation. ‘Knowledges’, and ‘logics’ of anticipation are subsequently, and second, discussed as the conceptual apparatus that constructs and perpetuates the ‘proximate future’ of ubicomp. This analysis connects recent discussion about ‘anticipation’ in social sciences research with the methods of ubicomp research, which fits with an emergent agenda around futurity in human geography. Third, the conceptual articulation of ‘anticipatory logic’ is applied to the analysis of empirical investigations of ubicomp R&D to identify the specific logics of anticipation at play. This article accordingly examines the logics of anticipation that both support and destabilise the certainty with which the future is imagined within ubicomp. In conclusion, the multiple ways of anticipating a future world and the ways in which they discipline understandings of futurity are framed as a politics of anticipation

Big Data Privacy Context: Literature Effects On Secure Informational Assets

This article's objective is the identification of research opportunities in the current big data privacy domain, evaluating literature effects on secure informational assets. Until now, no study has analyzed such relation. Its results can foster science, technologies and businesses. To achieve these objectives, a big data privacy Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is performed on the main scientific peer reviewed journals in Scopus database. Bibliometrics and text mining analysis complement the SLR. This study provides support to big data privacy researchers on: most and least researched themes, research novelty, most cited works and authors, themes evolution through time and many others. In addition, TOPSIS and VIKOR ranks were developed to evaluate literature effects versus informational assets indicators. Secure Internet Servers (SIS) was chosen as decision criteria. Results show that big data privacy literature is strongly focused on computational aspects. However, individuals, societies, organizations and governments face a technological change that has just started to be investigated, with growing concerns on law and regulation aspects. TOPSIS and VIKOR Ranks differed in several positions and the only consistent country between literature and SIS adoption is the United States. Countries in the lowest ranking positions represent future research opportunities.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure

The palace is no fun - Disparate and diffuse ideological backgrounds of technologically augmented architectures

This master’s thesis is a comparative analysis of four case studies which represent ideologies of technologically augmented architectures. The first two case studies are an artist’s utopian vision of a city called New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys and the prescient cybernetic plan for the Fun Palace by architect Cedric Price, both taking place in the 1960s. These projects are then juxtaposed with two smart city projects under construction at the time of writing this thesis: Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and Songdo in South Korea. The goal of this thesis is to trace the ideological backgrounds of the aforementioned case studies and to explore the ideological development of this technological mindset . How are the projects presented by their background organizations and designers? What kind of values do they claim to represent and can these values be found in the actual designs? Do contemporary smart cities put civic life first or are there other motivations behind their conception? New Babylon was to be an environment for a nomadic human existence that would consist of infinitely variable spaces with controls to alter atmospheres. Fun Palace was an enormous machinic building, with cranes and other devices making it possible for visitors to rearrange every part of the structure. Neither projects would look the same from one day to the other, but would be everchanging in nature. The projects were never realized. The former remained one artist’s single most comprehensive project spanning more than a decade. The latter did file for building permits and had hundreds of people involved in its design process but eventually never got built. Masdar City and Songdo are so-called ubiquitous cities that share many qualities. They are both cities that are not retrofits of already existing urban fabrics, but are built from the ground up. Smart grids and infrastructures embedded with digital sensors are built into the fabric of the cities from the start. Both cities claim that this will not only provide for efficiency and controllability of resources and utilites, embedded technology and computation will also substantially cut emissions and create a better functioning civic environment. The research points out a difference between stated and unstated goals of the contemporary cases compared to the historical ones. All of the cases are envisioning environments where technology is embedded into the built environment, enabling new kinds of interactions between citizen and city. In the earlier cases the goal was to create environments for the creation of a critically engaged citizen. Most notably, they would put the citizens themselves in charge of their environments. In the contemporary cases the control is put in the infrastructural systems and their operators. At the same time, the legibility of the existence of these infrastructures is obscured. The shape of urban environments remains conventional and the underlying systems that sense, compute and enact on citizens behalf disappear from citizens’ perception. These layers of infrastructure and intensions, both visible and hidden, stated and unstated, suggest that there is more than meets the eye to the technological optimism of the smart city movement. Examining past visions of technologically augmented environments offer us a point of reflection for the values at play in these kinds of developments today.Tämä maisterin opinnäytetyö on vertaileva analyysi neljästä tapauksesta, jotka edustavat teknologisesti augmentoidun rakentamisen ideologioita. Kaksi ensimmäistä ovat 1960-luvulta: taitelija Constant Nieuwenhuysin utopistinen projekti New Babylon sekä arkkitehti Cedric Price Fun Palace, kauaskatseinen aikainen kyberneettinen arkkitehtuuriprojekti. Näitä projekteja vertaillaan kahteen tätä opinnäytetyötä kirjoittaessa rakenteilla olevaan älykaupunkiprojektiin: Masdar Cityyn Abu Dhabissa sekä Songdoon Etelä-Koreassa. Tämän työn tavoite on paikantaa edellä mainittujen tapausten ideologiset lähtökohdat ja selvittää miten teknologisesti orientoituneet ajatusmallit ovat kehittyneet. Miten taustatoimijat ja suunnittelijat esittävät projektinsa? Millaisia arvoja projektit väittävät edustavansa ja onko arvot mahdollista paikantaa itse suunnitelmista? Asettavatko nykyhetken älykaupunkiprojektit kaupungin elämän ja asukkaat etusijalle vai onko taustalla toisia motivaatioita? New Babylon oli ympäristö uudenlaiselle nomadiselle kulttuurille. Se koostui loputtomasti varioitavista tiloista joiden tunnelmia ja ’atmosfääriä’ oli mahdollista muokata. Fun Palace oli valtava konemainen rakennus, jonka osia kävijät pystyivät järjestelemään uudestaan rakennukseen sisäänrakennettujen nostokurkien avulla. Kumpikaan näistä suunnitelmista ei näyttäisi päivästä toiseen samalta vaan olisi jatkuvassa muutoksen tilassa. Projekteja ei koskaan toteutettu. Ensimmäinen jäi yhden taiteilijan merkittävimmäksi projektiksi jota hän työsti yli vuosikymmenen ajan. Jälkimmäinen eteni rakennuslupahakemuksiin asti ja sen parissa työskenteli vuosien saatossa satoja ihmisiä, mutta rakennustöitä ei koskaan aloitettu. Masdar City ja Songdo ovat nk. ubiikkikaupunkeja joissa on monia yhtäläisyyksiä. Molemmat kaupungit on rakennettu puhtaalta pöydältä. Kaupunkien pohjaksi rakennetaan älykkäitä utiliteettiverkostoja joihin on sisäänrakennettu digitaaliset seurantajärjestelmät. Molemmat kaupungit väittävät, että tämä mahdollistaa paitsi kaupungin resurssien tehokkaamman käytön ja kontrolloinnin, myös päästöjen minimoinnin ja paremmin toimivan sosiaalisen kaupunkiympäristön. Tutkimustyö osoittaa, että käsiteltyjen tapausten julki tuotujen ja tuomatta jätettyjen tavoitteiden välillä on eroja. Kaikissa tapauksissa rakennettuun ympäristöön integroitujen teknologioiden uskotaan tuovan mukanaan uudenlaisia vuorovaikutuksen mahdollisuuksia kaupunkilaisten ja kaupungin välille. New Babylonissa ja Fun Palacessa tavoitteena oli luoda ympäristöjä, joissa kansalainen voisi harjoittaa kriittisyyttä ja ennen kaikkea kontrolloida ympäristöään itse. Masdar Cityssa ja Songdossa kontrolli annetaan infrastruktuureille ja niiden operoijille. Samaan aikaan infrastruktuurien luettavuus häivytetään. Urbaanin ympäristön muoto säilyy entisellään ja taustalla toimivat sensorit ja algoritmit toimivat kansalaisten havainnoinnin ulkopuolella. Nämä kerrostumat infrastruktuurien ja tarkoitusperien kerrostumat, näkyvät ja piilotetut, julkituodut ja sanomatta jätetyt, ovat merkki siitä, että älykaupunkiliikkeen teknologinen optimismi kätkee taakseen muutakin kuin tekemiään lupauksia. Menneiden teknologisten visioiden tarkastelu tarjoaa heijastuspisteen nykyhetken kehityksen arvopohjan tarkasteluun

Anticipating ubiquitous computing: Logics to forecast technological futures

Visions of the future predict spaces apparently teaming with ever more novel and pervasive technologies. Significant amongst such forecasts is the notion of 'ubiquitous computing' (ubicomp), understood as an affordance or capacity tied (in)to people, places and things. This article stages an encounter between the futurity of ubicomp and recent debates in geography around anticipation. So, first, the future orientation in ubicomp research and development (R&D) is investigated as a mode of anticipation. 'Knowledges', and 'logics' of anticipation are subsequently, and second, discussed as the conceptual apparatus that constructs and perpetuates the 'proximate future' of ubicomp. This analysis connects recent discussion about 'anticipation' in social sciences research with the methods of ubicomp research, which fits with an emergent agenda around futurity in human geography. Third, the conceptual articulation of 'anticipatory logic' is applied to the analysis of empirical investigations of ubicomp R&D to identify the specific logics of anticipation at play. This article accordingly examines the logics of anticipation that both support and destabilise the certainty with which the future is imagined within ubicomp. In conclusion, the multiple ways of anticipating a future world and the ways in which they discipline understandings of futurity are framed as a politics of anticipation. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd

Mobile agent platforms in ubiquitous computing applications and systems (a literature review)

Technology revolution has been occurred rapidly over the last past thirty years According to the moor’s law power of microprocessors double every eighteen months. And also a parallel increase can be observed in some other technological sectors such as network communication, bandwidth, storage, capacity. These remarkable trends make us to predict that in future computer will become considerably smaller, cheaper and more pervasive. These result a creation of small things that can access the internet in order to optimize their intended purpose. It gives birth to new technology trend called “Ubiquitous computing”. Ubiquitous computing is an emerging technology that brings new dimensions to distributed computing. It uses a wide variety of smart, ubiquitous devices throughout an individual’s working and living environment. When it comes to ubiquitous computing, mobile objects and mobile agents are forerunners. Mobile agents are considered a very interesting and emerging technology to develop applications for mobile and distributed computing. Since they present a combination of unique features, such as their autonomy and capability to move to remote computers to process data there and save remote communications, they can be widely used in ubiquitous computing. Many mobile agent platforms have been developed since the late nineties. In this millennium era they are now influenced in many aspects of technology such as localization of technology, internet connection, voice recognition etc. This literature review focuses on Mobile agent platforms in ubiquitous computing applications and systems

From flowers to palms: 40 years of policy for online learning

This year sees the 40th anniversary of the first policy paper regarding the use of computers in higher education in the United Kingdom. The publication of this paper represented the beginning of the field of learning technology research and practice in higher education. In the past 40 years, policy has at various points drawn from different communities and provided the roots for a diverse field of learning technology researchers and practitioners. This paper presents a review of learning technology-related policy over the past 40 years. The purpose of the review is to make sense of the current position in which the field finds itself, and to highlight lessons that can be learned from the implementation of previous policies. Conclusions drawn from the review of 40 years of learning technology policy suggest that there are few challenges that have not been faced before as well as a potential return to individual innovation

Investigating heuristic evaluation as a methodology for evaluating pedagogical software: An analysis employing three case studies

This paper looks specifically at how to develop light weight methods of evaluating pedagogically motivated software. Whilst we value traditional usability testing methods this paper will look at how Heuristic Evaluation can be used as both a driving force of Software Engineering Iterative Refinement and end of project Evaluation. We present three case studies in the area of Pedagogical Software and show how we have used this technique in a variety of ways. The paper presents results and reflections on what we have learned. We conclude with a discussion on how this technique might inform on the latest developments on delivery of distance learning. © 2014 Springer International Publishing