In-Between Data-Nation Rikke Gram-Hansen Nicolay Boyadjiev Aslak Aamot KjÌrulff Gemma Ginty Michael Tornøe Alastair Parvin In-Between Economies
Archiland A/S
GoogleUrbanism & Strelka Institute for Media Architecture and Design
Diakron
Future Cities Catapult
Erhvervsstyrelsen (the Danish Business Authority)
Economies Architecture 00 & WikiHouse
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In-Between Economies, in collaboration with Rikke GramHansen and the Danish Business Authority, investigates how the open source movement and open data are reshaping the role of the public sector in the 21st century. What follows is a series of think pieces contributed by the speakers of the meetup event DataNation, held as part of Copenhagen Techfestival 2017.
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In-Between Economies is an interdisciplinary research platform situated at the intersection between economies and the built environment. Supported by a website, publications, and a series of conversations, In-Between Economies aims to establish a dialogue with both experts and the public to examine how both local economies and global markets impact and shape our built environment. In-Between Economies is Jack Minchella, Alice Haugh, Henry Stephens and Christine Bjerke. www.inbetweeneconomies.net
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Data-Nation In-Between Economies “A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetime. It’s large, it’s disrupted, its low cost and it’s compatible with our ideals of democracy. The question now is, are we going to let the programmers keep it for themselves, or are we going to press it into service for society at large?” — Clay Shirky Adapting its organisations and processes for the era of open source is the challenge facing the public sector today. At its root, open data and the open source movement is changing how and what we understand as value in society. It is reshaping how we communicate and collaborate by revolutionising the means of production and management philosophy, and it is demanding a new role of the public sector in tackling large scale problems. What does this mean for our established institutions, financial structures and social cohesion? These issues converge when we think about the ongoing
creation (and recreation) of the city. City leaders and national governments see big data and the smart city movement as a way to unlock the future of our urban lives. However, it is often pursued and paid for as a means of achieving efficiency and control, with the underlying assumption that every problem the city faces is measurable, quantifiable and solvable. If city development for the past 30 years was driven by the market logic of equating economics with the reliability of science, the algorithm holds the same promise for the smart city. This simply doesn’t fit with the messy, contested reality we live in. More to the point networked information and open source data is much more powerful than that, but only when the possibility to share and contribute is available to all. The brilliant Charlie Leadbeater once said that ‘open source…is one of the greatest competitive levers against monopoly’. In other words open source platforms 5
and organisations are a way of fighting concentrations of power in an effort to stimulate the innovation we need for the future. This is as true for products as it is for politics, and will have a huge impact on how are cities are governed, made and remade. If our 20th century public institutions were built around securing our human rights and tempering the market from the top down (through the welfare state, professional bodies and education), what do our institutions and infrastructure look like when everyone has the power to produce and reproduce? It’s about providing the platform for doing, rather than being done to. About the verb, not the noun. Our institutions, our insurance systems, our contracting are all reliant on a top down model of provision. Distributed ownership requires a new system of trust and certification, one that isn’t based on paper bureaucracy but rather responds in real time, and is accountable to all. For an incumbent private sector that looks like openly giving away intellectual property and investing in brand development. For the public sector it looks like opening up to risk, and letting go of a paternalistic model of control. In short, the public sector has a choice. It can respond 6
to the power of open data in one of two ways - by either mitigating exploitation or encouraging invention. In the best case scenario it does both. The question is how.
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Rikke Gram-Hansen is based in Copenhagen and has a background in Philosophy and Urban Studies. She has worked with open data and smart city projects as a special advisor for the City of Copenhagen and is now senior project manager at Archiland A/S, where she advises on strategic urban development.
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The Hidden Life of Things Rikke Gram-Hansen As humans we take pleasure in seeing things from above. When we arrive in a new city we seek out the highest spot to enjoy a panorama view over the unknown territory, hence the attraction of the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Empire State Building in New York. In that same city, 33 years ago, the French philosopher Michel de Certeau rose to a spot that sadly no longer exists, the top of the World Trade Center, and his reflections on this panorama-seeking pleasure are as follows: “Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center […] is to be lifted out of the City’s grasp […]
It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eye. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god.” — Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) The panorama makes it possible for us to see the complexity of the city as a whole, or as de Certeau puts it: the opaqueness of all the activities in a living city seems to be transformed into a transparent text that is readable to us. This applies of course to tourists but also to architects and urban planners, who have the map as the central tool for looking (down) at the city. 9
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Copenhagen Media Center/ www.caecaccph.com/ Jacob Schjørring & Simon Lau 12
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The panorama might also provide us with a fitting metaphor for the internet. The development of the internet (of things) makes it possible to survey all actions and activities at once, and at a low cost connect everything – a similar pleasure to the panorama. The ubiquity of data and computing makes the invisible visible, all the information that is hidden to the eye becomes comprehensible when automatically collected and visualized – it becomes a transparent text.
way around these spaces, that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the strategy of the planner. Both users of physical spaces and users of virtual spaces have their own tactics, their own logic they employ that is different from the logic of the people planning or programming these spaces. People don’t stick to the official paths in the park or the character limit to a tweet - when they can take a shortcut or tweet images of text, sequential tweets or the like.
But beware, the transparent text is strong fiction. de Certeau himself points out that the image is an illusion far from the reality of the people who actually inhabit it:
de Certeau urges the strategist to move down from the ivory tower of the panorama, and so should the programmer perhaps move away from the screen, and look at the everyday context in which data is produced. Data is already the basis of a growing number of important decisions in society, government and business – but what we collect data on is also what we give visibility to. How do we ensure that it is a fair representation of everyday life that we make visible?
“The panorama-city is a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. […] The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down-below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins.” — Ibid. de Certeau’s errand is the everyday life, and he distinguishes between the strategies of the organizations, government, corporations planning and governing space, and the practitioners who live in it. The practitioners apply their own tactics in their 14
Read more in Gram-Hansen, R. (2017) DIGITAL SERVICES AND SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS, in “Internet of Things and Data Analytics Handbook” (ed H. Geng), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA
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Nicolay Boyadjiev is an architect and design strategist based in Moscow, where he is currently the Design & Education tutor of The New Normal Programme at the Strelka Institute for Media Architecture and Design.
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Project Runway (for Data-Nation) Nicolay Boyadjiev The design of an idea is also the design of its runway: the revealed, modified or entirely manufactured shared surface from which a project rises and onto which it softly lands – or crashes spectacularly – but at least upon which it registers. This runway represents the stage for the idea to take hold, but also implies the creation of a new territory, available to new and possibly unrelated ideas to emerge and find meaning. As such, it is always the display or proposition of a space of possibility, available for future use… Over the course of five weeks in Moscow from March 2016, I
collaborated with colleagues at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design on a project affectionately labelled “GoogleUrbanism, or The Story of how Google + The City can become #FriendsWithBenefits❤” (GU). Instead of a master plan or urban intervention, we proposed a new protocol and licensing model between Google and the city, where the profitable data and attention capital already “harvested” by Google from its users within the bounds of public space could generate royalties for the city (similar to mining rights), to be reinvested back into their spaces of 17
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origin and account for their continuous maintenance and improvement (similar to the toll road system). Simply put, every time Google makes money in public space, the city could take a cut and restores its public infrastructure.
frame a starting conversation about Data-Nation, as well as provide some of the necessary blueprints for the design of its corresponding project runway.
In the design of Data-Nation, what is interesting about GU is how its established conceptual runway can be adopted to disrupt the prevailing narrative through which architects leverage their unique design role in this context. Most of our current professional efforts are focused on reinforcing the established Smart City narrative, predicated on the dissemination of technology at the scale of the city in the name of efficiency and quantifiable optimization. But at this critical juncture in the evolution of our built environments, we would benefit from approaches to urbanism which challenge our preconceptions about the space of operation, and strategies at our disposal, for the design of future Smart-Cities, Data-Nations, Cyber-States, Compu-Planets and all other forthcoming hybrid monikers we may fancy…
Due to our lingering attachment to Enlightenment ideas, the strength and persistence of Orwell’s imagination for over half a century, and the social aftermath of uncovering the NSA’s PRISM program, our contemporary collective understanding of the concept of “surveillance” is currently very limited in its scope. This accounts perhaps for the banal and ineffective ways in which it’s often criticized in art and activism circles. In many cases, so-called “critical” works whose aim is to showcase the “terror” of surveillance mechanisms are not so much challenging its principle epistemology as they are fetishizing it for shock value (exemplified by Ai Weiwei / Herzog & de Meuron’s recent Hansel & Gretel exhibition). Similarly, most civic movements lamenting the loss of privacy rights are propelled by superficial and symbolic denunciations rather than long-term, strategic responses to the systemic process currently underway. Scholars have written at length about the tension between security and freedom in the city, but a crucial
GU was the product of several instincts and interests pooled into a semi-coherent context for its registry; beyond the project itself, I want to outline three of them below, as they may help to 20
1 — Surveillance is the New Black
part of the equation seems to be missing. The truth is, whatever our position towards the Big Brother-like, politically-driven forces of governmental scrutiny, state surveillance is nothing compared to the economically-driven monetization incentives led by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and every other platform whose profits are derived from the unilateral capture and anticipation of human behavior. Shoshanna Zuboff describes this process as Surveillance Capitalism, a “new genus” of capitalism predicated on its own systematic logic of accumulation. In this new environment, tracked users are neither consumers nor employees in traditional economic terms but rather act more as the raw material itself – the source of “behavioral surplus” – which fuels an incessant drive to include more users across more channels, services, devices, places and spaces. The data is used to feed new algorithmic and cognitive services (such as translation, visual recognition and predictive matching), capture new behavioral surplus and activate new streams of revenue. “Once we understand this equation, it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalism is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand.”1 Surveillance is not
a symptomatic excess-output to be opposed in populist terms but rather a systemic property of our new economic reality, and should therefore be considered seriously as a design parameter. Zuboff argues that Surveillance Capitalism threatens the very essence of our modern liberal order, which is defined by principles of self-determination centuries in the making…2 And there is no doubt the sanctity of the individual, ideals of social equality and autonomy of moral reasoning should be handled with care. However, as designers perhaps a new mental model, deliberately shifting human exceptionalism to a less central position, could be a step in the right direction. On the one hand, our myopic and anthropocentric humanism may be directly responsible for the irreversible damage we have inflicted on the planet in the name of freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. More practically and at the scale of the city, we ought to challenge the idea that the design of every urban object, interface and system should respond to an immediately intuitive human-centric relationship to our environment, rather than the invisible interdependencies and infrastructures which order our world. We stand to gain from diversifying our design repertoire beyond “human-centered design”, since when all you 21
have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail… This is why efforts to engage with Surveillance Capitalism at the level of the individual are often misguided, or at least incomplete. Experiments to pull individual online data together and offer dividends through its proceeds (Citizen.me, Datacoup, Digi.mi, etc.) aren’t really thriving, in part because in this system the returns at the scale of the individual are so marginal. Moreover, something like the notion of a Digital Labour Movement (“Data workers of the world unite!”) will remain problematic so long as our engagement with the apparatus of Google or Facebook is perceived at the level of “homo-economicus within a market” or “citizens within a city” instead of “users within a platform”. The generic universality of platforms makes them formally accessible to all detectable users (me, you, your pacemaker, a bench in the park, a driverless car…), their discrete identification is simultaneously heterogeneous and fluid, which is also what makes the project of a “Digital Bill of Rights” a complicated and incomplete solution.3 Architects should pay attention: if subjectivity within this system is a question of “addressability” (the ability of being recognized by the platform), perhaps space itself ought 22
to be looked at through the lense of the user, turning the capturing of data / cognitive capital into a spatial problem and thus an explicit architectural concern. Perhaps Surveillance is the New Black: both the driver of our new economic reality and a parameter worthy of architectural fetish. Space is currently an underexploited medium in this system, and could be redefined as the site of extraction of this new raw material (the data and presence of human and non-human users alike), as well as the distributed site of manufacture, sale, use and ultimately taxation of processed cognitive and prediction products. The “data is the new oil” aphorism has become ubiquitous in recent years, but it has always been inadequate, since oil is the world’s most traded commodity by value while data is hardly traded at all as it’s much more profitable for industries to generate and use it in-house… Perhaps the analogy to mining is more revelatory, referring both to the act of extraction for processing by third parties, as well as addressing the confusion over who actually owns this new commodity: the site from which it was extracted. Consider for example the emerging debate about the ownership of data produced by autonomous vehicles; is it held by the carmaker, the supplier of the sensors,
the temporary passengers, the car itself?4 Why not the site-specific street on which it was harvested, operating as the de facto flag-bearer for the commons? More pressing than the shift of analogies are the repercussions of this shift on the Smart City narrative. Just like “the city as ecosystem” and “city as machine” which preceded it, our current “city as computer” paradigm is appealing because it is easily digestible, framing the messiness of urban life as programmable through sensors and input devices which are subject to rational order.5 But what’s lacking is critical perspective on how and why the city remains a polis. Data is currently treated as a given (the etymology of the term itself), essentialized and depoliticized into a hovering abstraction for “improving stuff”. If, via Surveillance Capitalism, the conversation shifts from “surveilling who?” to “capturing what from where?”, then the where could be imbued with a special purpose as the site of agency; Data-Nation’s physical point of reference for the withdrawal, commodification and jurisdiction of information in the digital age.
2 — Platform(n)ation Visions of mobilizing opensource data through “bottom-
up” engagement and decentralized decision-making at the urban scale are often valiantly championed under an evolution of the “city as computer” paradigm: the “city as a platform”. It’s a great tagline to capture the transformations currently underway, but not necessarily in the emancipatory tone with which it’s frequently being summoned. While there’s no doubt that contemporary platforms provide us with powerful analogies to make sense of new models and core functions of the city, one of their generic principles is that – unlike cities and states – they do not usually come with constitutions or enumerated rights, nor do they necessarily claim responsibility for the outcomes resulting from our participation within them. Before architects indiscriminately start cheerleading for their deployment as civic substitutes, there is value in reflecting on the properties and significance of platforms as design tools in the city. Platforms are institutional and technical forms of organizations which enables things to happen across them. They fix strict and standardized protocols, but are strategically agnostic with regards to outcomes: ends are a function of means.6 In their current form, platforms are sustained through the logics of network effects, 23
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generative entrenchment and the management of information flows. Most importantly, they constitute a political model and demand terms of participation which are different from those of states and markets. Platforms are not “almost-states” or “quasi-markets”; they represent a distinct category requiring its own topological design construct. Also contrary to some of the current discourse, it’s worth acknowledging that they are not intrinsically “better” or more egalitarian simply through their sheer existence: an admirably bottom-up, decentralized and opensourced process can lead to disastrous outcomes, just as a rich and bountiful heterogeneity of ends could emerge through a strict and invariable autocracy of means.7 In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton suggests that we are currently in the midst of a signal moment, witnessing the first tremors resulting from the grinding of two radically different logics of platform governance. This is a clash less of competing territorialities than of incompatible “competing totalities”, best exemplified by Google vs. China during the “First Sino-Google War” of 2009: “Between the ‘hackers’ of the People’s Liberation Army and Google there exists more than a standoff between the proxies of two state apparatuses; 26
there is rather a fundamental conflict over the geometry of political geography itself, with one side bound by the territorial integrity of the state, and the other by the gossamer threads of the world’s information demanding to be organized and made useful.”8 In the tense race between states becoming cloud-based platforms vs. cloud platforms taking on more properties of a state, it is difficult to assess which one of these models is more likely or more desirable in the design of Data-Nation. Is a distributed, information gathering, NSA-like state the better “public” option, accountable at least in principle to some (flimsy) parliamentary limits? Or is Google’s universal ambition and cosmopolitan mission better suited to absorb the last instances of democratic state oversight into its own internal service offering? This should be more of a design question than an ideological one… Thinking through the lense of Google also helps to make apparent the unique properties of digital platform monopolies. Where Facebook leads in the fictional construction of individuation, Apple in the aestheticization of closed user/object interface and Amazon in the rationalized distribution of object commodities, it is Google’s seemingly benign ambition to “catalog all
information and make it useful”9 which best encapsulates the efficiency paradox ahead in the design of Data Nation. As a widely used and highly profitable search engine, Google is often (and sometimes successfully) accused of monopolization, although the mechanisms responsible for its hegemony are very different from monopolies of the past. Google doesn’t limit or hinder consumer choice by controlling supply, distribution or infrastructure; rather, it maintains control through the self-reinforcing tendencies of network effects and aggregation theory, which is why it is so effective in its service. In other words, it works better for its users because it asymptotes towards monopoly, or else it wouldn’t work at all. Similarly, are the optimization benefits advertised by the Smart City not by definition better served by a singular, seemingly-agnostic stockpiling regime which absorbs all opposition in the name of maximizing efficiency? The questions raised by the ongoing “platformation” are not about whether eventually states will become platforms or platforms will become states. This is surely a false dichotomy, as hybridization will probably come from both directions at once and multiple models will run simultaneously until new geopolitical entities
– unrecognizable under current definitions of states, markets, corporations and platforms – will emerge. However, this ongoing process can finally disrupt the habituated mental patterns with which architects frame their role within “the city as a platform”. Cities have citizens but platforms have users: a different structure requiring different types of client relationships. Working “for the public” and in the name of “the public good” are easy blanket statements in need of new definitions and allocation strategies to remain genuine and useful. This welcome realization is the first step towards a design practice which produces more than wishful thinking, or perhaps more accurately a different kind of wishful thinking…
3 — Idea Technology Part of architecture’s role today is to shed much of the self-imposed dogmas of the 20th century, with a particular focus on expanding our qualifications from the design of things (enclosures, widgets, formal compositions…) to the design of relations between things (systems, event chains, obligations, protocols…).10 We like to claim that we’re gifted generalists, capable of identifying potentials, seizing opportunities, optimizing strategies and so 27
on. But so far it seems the thinking required to do so is acquired almost haphazardly, more to do with personal predisposition than the training of a new design culture. The prototyping of Data-Nation calls for working with infrastructure and understructure, systems and mythology, combined efforts achievable only when we acknowledge that spatial design is at a crossroads of disciplines and conflicting interests. This shouldn’t be seen as a threat to a professional order (as currently the case), but more as a rebuttal of the magical properties assigned to “design thinking” and “solutionism” currently put forward by architects. To start, perhaps a sincere acceptance of the power of indeterminacy is in order. Whatever we do will have unintended consequences; if unforeseeable chain reactions are emblematic of the 21st century, a receptiveness to constructive ambiguity should be native to its designers. Working with uncertainty is clearly a feature of all creative practices, but what I’m referring to is something of a metamodern acknowledgment of ambiguity not only as a means but as an end in itself. Utopias and dystopias in architecture are repetitive and vain; the blurry line – or oscillation – between them is a much richer and productive site for exploration. 28
Bratton refers to emerging technologies as pharmakoi – simultaneously remedy and poison – and we can frame our proposals to integrate new ideas at the scale of our cities in the same way: any claim that evangelizes their positive or negative impact without articulating the inverse is either naive, incomplete or dishonest.11 Or as Keller Easterling puts it: uncertainty doesn’t have to preclude action.12 This in turn prompts a re-examination of our strategy of “being right” at every stage, and at the expense of someone or something else before. The modern impulse of designing in successive, dialectic, transcendental statements is likely a pathology inherited from the avant-garde, whose exaggerated criticality it may be time to let go in favor of less stern but more effective tactics. Easterling suggests that the avant-garde of ideas is analogous to the avant-garde of combat13, with the “new right” killing the “old right” establishing an unnecessarily violent context for the resolution of more nuanced objectives. In dealing with the interconnected and contested reality of Data-Nation, righteousness is at a disadvantage while indeterminacy and discrepancy may be assets: the basis for a more flexible practice, less interested in stoicism and internal consistency at any cost.
A big part of this position is the ability to produce inviting narratives and grab the public’s imagination. To some extent, architecture actually used to be the biggest pitch-making industry in the world; how else to mobilize the massive monetary and material resources required to build something that may or may not exist in a single lifetime? Arguably today the role of cult-builders-in-chief has been passed on to Silicon Valley and the tech sector, who’ve mastered the crafts of spin and narrative and whose significant contribution to the rhetoric of the Smart City and “city as a platform” far outreaches their professional circle. There are reasons why radically transformative social projects are difficult to achieve: for one genuinely transformative ideas are difficult to come by, but even when they do, they often fail to scale beyond the isolated bubbles from which they spawn, limiting the network effects that would have allowed them to reach mainstream society. The project of Data-Nation is perhaps primarily the worldbuilding project of an adequate concept model, the possibility space to excrete instances and narrative views which fortify their shared conceptual model while denting the real world. Like the public space of the city, the public space of perception is an architectural project, and
narratives / fictions need to work hand-in-hand with the spatial products to which they are attached. Like physical things, ideas are also products of technology, but idea technology is fundamentally different from thing technology. First, unlike objects the diffusion of ideas in culture can have an impact long before they are even noticed or categorised. Second and more importantly, plenty of examples show that unlike broken things, broken ideas can have profound effects on the world even if they are false, as long as enough people believe in them.14 In other words, idea technology is much more powerful than thing technology: incomplete and false beliefs can become true by popular acceptance, and instead of good data driving out bad theories, bad data can change social practices until it becomes good data and the theories are validated… Perhaps architecture has always been idea technology, and the “data” part of DataNation may be the recipient of more of our faith than it ultimately deserves. The world is rationalized but isn’t rational, and more likely to be altered through the design of strategic interplay, user behavior, legal fiction and narrative spin than through buildings legitimized by “smartness” 29
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and statistical validation. In light of this, outputs from a relevant contemporary architectural practice should include non-spatial products with the deliberate disposition of having spatial consequences, and result in new forms of spatial activism with the deliberate ambition of implementing systemic change.
Based on: GoogleUrbanism, or The Story of how Google + The City can become #FriendsWithBenefitsâ?¤ http://googleurbanism.com/ Project Credits: Nicolay Boyadjiev Andrea Savard-Beaudoin Kirill Rostovsky Harshavardhan Bhat With the support of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design
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ZUBOFF: The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism Ibid. BRATTON: The Black Stack THE ECONOMIST: Data is giving rise to a new economy MATTERN: The City is not a Computer BRATTON: The Stack: On software and Sovereignty Ibid. BRATTON: The Black Stack Google’s Mission Statement BRATTON: On Speculative Design Ibid. EASTERLING: IIRS EASTERLING: No you’re not SCHWARTZ: Psychology, Idea technology and Ideology
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Aslak Aamot KjĂŚrulff holds a PhD degree in Mobilities and Action Research from Roskilde University, Denmark. He currently organizes a transdisciplinary research and arts organization called Diakron and teaches at Roskilde University. The core trajectory of his practice is to trace how concepts and ideas travel across and change cultures and disciplines, and look.
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Hybrid Organisations Aslak Aamot KjÌrulff Recording user traffic and storing data has become the world’s largest economic resource. Half of the global population are propagating this resource, by using free services such as email, storage, social media, navigation, or shopping provided by the internet giants we all know too well. Human users are trading with tech clusters and start-up cities around the world on a daily basis. Users are offered platform connectivity in return for giving their data and receiving advertisements. Platforms are offering a future that has already arrived, and the taxes are high.
How do the current platform models bode for a future of ruptures? Cities are about to be on the move. Supply chains will reroute. And infrastructural connectivity will be destroyed, to ensure the passage of more basic planetary flows, like floodwater or desertification. Rather than rallying around the organizations that currently dominate internet traffic, could we look for other organizational and infrastructural models? Prompted by pervasive ecological, social and digital concerns, a lot of people are looking for new modes of engagement, employment, and 35
Rene Magritte, The Looking Glass (La Lunette d’approche) 36
belonging. From this starting point new crossings are established between different types of practice, from arts, science, academia, engineering, crafts and coding. This has sparked organisational forms that reach beyond current ideas of how corporations, state enterprises or civic movements work. Hybrid organisations come together around shared interests in order to discover new modes of working, thinking, servicing and distributing resources. At the same time, they develop frameworks for employment without profit maximization and platforms for gathering and establishing collaborations between communities of practitioners. The purpose of a research project conducted by Diakron has been to provide an overview of hybrid organisations and detail organisational insights, techniques and approaches. In the last four years Diakron has visited around 40 so-called hybrid organisations (such as The Long Now, unMonastery, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Open Source Ecology, Enspiral, Code for America) to become familiar with their organisational practices. To give an idea of the nature of such groups, here are two examples from the 40 visited. Enspiral is a cooperative that develops open source tools to run cooperatives,
decentralized organizations, social movements and distributed working groups. The organization is known for having developed some of the most sophisticated and and widely used democratic tools. The organization includes both education programmes, various consultancy branches, event management and so-called social venture hubs (alternative to startup hub). The organization consists of the components necessary to start and run digital projects efficiently (including judicial and financial services, strategic planning, process design, graphic design, and programming). These components are resources that are offered both as consultancy services for revenue and to be used internally within the organization by it’s co-op members to start and run social ventures. Plethora is developing a fully automated factory to be used by inventors, citizens and small businesses. The factory consists of CNC mills that are being reprogrammed by Plethora alongside robotic arms also developed and built by the organization. Access to production can be reached by installing an add-on Plethora-tool to most 3D animation software programmes, where pricing, production time, shipping time and ordering is handled on the user’s laptop. Inspired by the maker 37
movement, the factory aims to further the potentials of such a movement, by potentially giving everybody with a digital drawing “engineering superpowers� to design any part of a machine, robot, vehicle or device digitally and physically. The organization leverages start-up venture capital to anchor the potentials of fully automated industrial production in decentralized production facilities. The aim is to make hardware as easy to manufacture as software is to code.
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Dyke separating Liangzi lake and Niushan lake was destroyed to disperse floodwaters between the two lakes in central China’s Hubei province. 40
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Enspiral – Organizational Evolution 42
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Plethora – Machine Assembly Line 44
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Gemma Ginty is Urban Futures Lead at the Future Cities Catapult. She leads teams of designers and technologists developing scenarios and strategies for future urban environments. She has 12 years’ experience working as an Architect and Service Designer re-imagining city spaces and systems to respond to human behaviours and needs. Recent work includes a Smart Campus Strategy for the University of Glasgow, developing European Smart Cities project and creating a customer experience vision for Dubai airport. Gemma is passionate about the invisible layers and services that make cities more human focused and resilient.
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Changing Vocabulary of Governance Gemma Ginty
Nations are in a reactive place, grappling with new terminology and ways of understanding the world and places they govern.
towards embracing the experience of a total service solution.
We have new tools, systems and services that are offering a more open and on-demand experience, and are disrupting expectations of Government. Future Cities Catapult is concerned with the changing vocabulary of city making, from the platform, crowd, and predictive technologies, which all use a more open approach. This is allowing us to move from societal solutions limited to the confines of building institutions, 47
Smart Campus. Future Cities Catapult 48
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Big Bang Data Exhibition. Future Cities Catapult 50
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Tombolo Recipe Poster. Future Cities Catapult 52
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Michael Tornøe is a data analysis and section manager at Erhvervsstyrelsen (the Danish Business Authority) focused on open data initiatives and machine learning within government. Michael’s work involves testing effective regulation, digital solutions and open business data that help people better utilise government services and improve the way institutions interact with businesses and the public. The Danish government is one of the front runners in experimenting with digital solutions with the public sector, and in understanding how people can leverage technology to address the challenges of the digital era.
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Alastair Parvin is a designer with 00 (‘zero zero’), London. Although he trained and practices in architecture but his work extends outside its traditional framework to investigate the economic, social and technological systems behind it. He is a co-founder of the WikiHouse foundation, an open source construction platform which aims to use digital manufacturing to radically democratise the production of cities. He is currently working on the ‘Buildx’ initiative, a smart supply chain platform for building materials.Alastair is one of the leading thinkers and inventors in creating the future of democratic city planning and citizen-led development for resilient housing, infrastructure, neighbourhoods and cities.
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www.inbetweeneconomies.net
Graphic Design: Studio Atlant
Data-Nation