The role of socio-technical experiments in introducing sustainable Product-Service System innovations

This is the pre-print version of the chapter published in 2015 by Springer in the book “The Handbook of Service Innovation” (edited by Renu Agarwal, Willem Selen, Göran Roos and Roy Green). The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6590-3_18Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability, but their implementation and diffusion are hindered by several cultural, corporate, and regulative barriers. Hence, an important challenge is not only to conceive sustainable PSS concepts, but also to understand how to manage, support, and orient the introduction and diffusion of these concepts. Building upon insights from transition studies (in particular, the concepts of Strategic Niche Management and Transition Management), and through an action research project, the chapter investigates the role of design in introducing sustainable radical service innovations. A key role is given to the implementation of socio-technical experiments, partially protected spaces where innovations can be incubated and tested, become more mature, and potentially favor the implementation and scaling up process

How the design of socio-technical experiments can enable radical changes for sustainability

Sustainability requires radical innovations, but their introduction and diffusion usually encounter the opposition of existing socio-technical regimes. An important challenge is, therefore, to understand how to catalyse and support the process of transitioning towards these innovations. Building upon insights from transition studies (in particular the concepts of Strategic Niche Management and Transition Management), and through an action research project (aimed at designing, introducing and diffusing a sustainable mobility system in the suburban areas of Cape Town), the paper investigates the role of design in triggering and orienting societal transformations. A key role is given to the implementation of socio-technical experiments. A new socio-technical system design role emerges: a role in which the ideation and development of sustainable innovation concepts is coupled with the designing of appropriate transition paths to gradually incubate, introduce and diffuse these concepts

The societal embedding of sustainable Product-Service Systems: Looking for synergies between strategic design and transition studies

Copyright @ 2014 Greenleaf Publishing.Eco-efficient Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability, but their implementation and diffusion is hindered by several cultural, corporate and regulative barriers. Hence, an important challenge is not only to conceive sustainable PSS concepts, but also to understand how to manage, support and orient the introduction and diffusion of these concepts. Building upon recent advances in the innovation studies field (in particular the contributions from transition studies) this chapter puts forward a conceptual framework for the introduction and scaling-up of eco-efficient PSSs. A key role is given to the implementation of socio-technical experiments: protected spaces where radical innovations can be tested, become more mature, and potentially challenge and change dominant socio-technical practices, habits and institutions. Starting from these considerations this chapter investigates the potential contribution that a strategic design approach can make to stimulating and supporting the societal embedding of eco-efficient PSS innovations. A new strategic design role thus emerges, a role in which the ideation and development of sustainable PSS concepts is coupled with the designing of appropriate transition paths to gradually incubate, introduce and diffuse these concepts. Starting from these considerations the chapter outlines and discusses the new design approach and capabilities required by strategic designers

Designing community care systems with AUML

This paper describes an approach to developing an appropriate agent environment appropriate for use in community care applications. Key to its success is that software designers collaborate with environment builders to provide the levels of cooperation and support required within an integrated agent–oriented community system. Agent-oriented Unified Modeling Language (AUML) is a practical approach to the analysis, design, implementation and management of such an agent-based system, whilst providing the power and expressiveness necessary to support the specification, design and organization of a health care service. The background of an agent-based community care application to support the elderly is described. Our approach to building agent–oriented software development solutions emphasizes the importance of AUML as a fundamental initial step in producing more general agent–based architectures. This approach aims to present an effective methodology for an agent software development process using a service oriented approach, by addressing the agent decomposition, abstraction, and organization characteristics, whilst reducing its complexity by exploiting AUML’s productivity potential. </p

Contextual Semantics for Radicalisation Detection on Twitter

Much research aims to detect online radical content mainly using radicalisation glossaries, i.e., by looking for terms and expressions associated with religion, war, offensive language, etc. However, such crude methods are highly inaccurate towards content that uses radicalisation terminology to simply report on current events, to share harmless religious rhetoric, or even to counter extremism. Language is complex and the context in which particular terms are used should not be disregarded. In this paper, we propose an approach for building a representation of the semantic context of the terms that are linked to radicalised rhetoric. We use this approach to analyse over 114K tweets that contain radicalisation-terms (around 17K posted by pro-ISIS users, and 97k posted by “general” Twitter users). We report on how the contextual information differs for the same radicalisation terms in the two datasets, which indicate that contextual semantics can help to better discriminate radical content from content that only uses radical terminology.The classifiers we built to test this hypothesis outperform those that disregard contextual informatio

Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence

Success in the quest for artificial intelligence has the potential to bring unprecedented benefits to humanity, and it is therefore worthwhile to investigate how to maximize these benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. This article gives numerous examples (which should by no means be construed as an exhaustive list) of such worthwhile research aimed at ensuring that AI remains robust and beneficial.Comment: This article gives examples of the type of research advocated by the open letter for robust & beneficial AI at http://futureoflife.org/ai-open-lette

On the design of design processes in architecture and engineering: technological rules and the principle of minimal specification

architecture, design process,technological

Ontology and medical terminology: Why description logics are not enough

Ontology is currently perceived as the solution of first resort for all problems related to biomedical terminology, and the use of description logics is seen as a minimal requirement on adequate ontology-based systems. Contrary to common conceptions, however, description logics alone are not able to prevent incorrect representations; this is because they do not come with a theory indicating what is computed by using them, just as classical arithmetic does not tell us anything about the entities that are added or subtracted. In this paper we shall show that ontology is indeed an essential part of any solution to the problems of medical terminology – but only if it is understood in the right sort of way. Ontological engineering, we shall argue, should in every case go hand in hand with a sound ontological theory