Alta Scuola Politecnica - Innovation and Society
N2
Can the user contribute to shape innovation and new technologies? How exactly?
USERS IN SHAPING TECHNOLOGIES toward a sustainable future
ROBERTA MOTTER
ABSTRACT This paper starts with a general overview on innovation and introduces the role of the user in shaping technologies as lead user and in collaborative community. The analysis is strict related to the complex and fluid contemporaneity and the problems that the world is facing (i.e. climate change, unsustainable economic model). After that it deals with how users can introduce novelty in technologies and why they usually freely reveal their innovations. It’s made the example of the health service where the involvement of group of non-experts is frequent and the different levels in which collaborative solutions work.The article concludes by showing the relation between this theme and the ASP project Green Move, where lots of links can be found.
CONTEXT OF INNOVATION Different characteristics of innovation can be determined: incremental (developed in time) or radical (completely new), top-down (from experts, decision makers, politicians) or bottom-up (from people directly involved in it), concerning technological issues or social cultural innovations and different are the involvement of the users according with these features. Using the innovation matrix, with on the horizontal axis the typology of innovation (technological-socio cultural) and on the vertical axis where innovation come from (top down-bottom up), we can identify 4 quadrants: in the upper left one the innovation concern public and private industries, in the lower left one there is the user innovation and common based peer production, in the lower right one the innovation is made by cooperatives and community projects, in the last quadrant (top down-socio cultural) we find social administrator (government) and social enterprises (private). Therefore we recognize that the user is able to innovate both in the technical and in the social field, as a lead user or within his community. Starting from the statement that we are living in a complex system, where every little change could create a huge rebound: “Butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in another location”. The phrase is about the Butterfly Effect related to Chaos theory of Edward Lorenz, that underline how a small change at one place, in nonlinear system, can result in large differences to a later state. This complex system is shaped by all the people involved in it, in which collaborative and open model implies the mass participation, “group of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects” (Thackara 2005). Our contemporaneity is not only complex but is getting more and more fluid. “The solidity of thing is melted in the fluidity of information” (Bertola and Manzini 2004), where everything is temporary and change quickly and the product becomes a sum of interactions for giving a specific result. In this paradigm people have to adopt new ways of doing everyday life activities and redefine constantly their goals. Quoting Thackara “the we here is important” because we are all involved now in designing our better future towards a social and ecological sustainability. We don’t need mere products in our life, but system of products and services able to satisfied our needs without consuming, having the access to solutions instead of owning stuff, using the natural energy flows, reducing waste, consumption and transportation, incrementing the efficiency and, the most important point, we need a cultural change “characterized from lightness as a cultural and technical measure of the change that we have to face” (Thackara 2005).
USER AS INNOVATOR The users, in this changing context, are able to innovate themselves and develop exactly what they want from information products, i.e. software, to physical products, i.e. extreme sporting equipment or mountain bike equipment (from a research of Von Hippel 2005). When the mass production doesn’t respond to the heterogeneity of many users, some of them, if they have strong interest and high resources, decide to develop by themselves or pay a custom manufacturer to develop it for them (Von Hippel 2005). The users’ ability to innovate is improved thanks to the quality of computer software and hardware and the easy access to specific tools and components due to their low cost and they large diffusion. Users no more want to be just a passive receiver of what the market propose, but prefer personalized solutions and have the possibility to customize themselves the product according with their needs, values and the context in which they live. To make an example the Design Research office of Philips has created a number of experience demonstrators to explore unfinished and open solution that can be completed by the user. Nebula is an alarm clock that project into the ceiling images downloaded by the user from the web. In this way every user has the possibility to decide what images he/she wants and has his/her own unique experience. Thus the users are directly involved in the designing stage at different levels to make better products and technologies, with the final aim to improve the quality of their life and not just to gain income as the companies do, “the lead users often go on to freely share their innovations so that other users can adopt, comment upon, and improve upon them” (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2006). Many innovations from lead users become attractive also for other users and they are actually commercialized by industries and manufactures. Analyzing the term lead user we can identify the verb to lead which means conduct, guide, but also reach a precise result. The leader it’s similar to the strategist that guides towards a defined result, that is to innovate a product or a system to improve the quality of life. He is able to recognize the needs, solves the problems in a pragmatic way building prototypes and tries their values. The innovation by lead users tends to be distributed rather than concentrated in few users; in fact users engage themselves in form of cooperation, forming communities joined in the network, which provide structures and tools useful to interact and share information. We can think for instance at the famous case of Wikipedia or little know Livemocha that is a free, collaborative and open source platform to learn foreign languages manages by the users, that while learning a language provide teaching on their mother language.
A NEW MODEL Nowadays the market develops lots of devices that are more end in themselves than provide us a real high quality of life. “We have subordinated the interest of people to the ones of technology” (Thackara 2005). Therefore we have to re-establish the correct order, which means people before technology, and create in this way a more sustainable life, developing alternative paradigms of everyday life with a new combination of elements. Creativity is defined by Poincaré as “the ability to unite pre-existing elements in new combinations” that are useful and new for the contemporary time, so everyone could be creative and innovative in a social and technological way, because “Everyone designs” and “designing is what human being do”. So we don’t have to be affected by technology but being supported by it. To make an example the mass creativity is helped by the web 2.0 in which the users can create solutions and values by themselves become active, with their consequent responsibilities. In the social and economic history, in fact, we have passed from the model of the pyramidal and hierarchical society, originated with the industrial revolution, to a market pushed by technology during the 50-70s, based on the consumption of goods in which the user has been seen only as a passive consumer. From the 80s to the 2000 marketing and brands drove the economy, thanks to an emotional and aesthetics approach, and the user became more active. The last phase, our contemporaneity, is a transformation model where people and network are the fundamental main characters and the design become co-creation. This new trend is identified by Pinch as democratization of technology and I would say a democratization of the future. The importance of the users’ involvement in design stage is vital if we want to change the contemporary condition of crisis. In many languages, in fact, the word crisis has a double meaning: risk or opportunity. The opportunity we want to catch is the proposal of a future scenario, a vision, in which creative communities are able to invent, enhance and manage innovative solutions for new ways of living in a sustainable way. These groups of people are able to create answers to problems by the recombination of existing elements used in an innovative way, e. g. the utilization of normal technologies in an original way or transformation of existing technologies according with specific needs and personal values. An area in which the co-production is clearly visible is the medical research, “where patient organizations have become increasingly active in shaping the agenda of research in fields of their concern”. (Bucchi and Neresini 2007). For instance the case in which Thinkpublic helped, in 2005, the UK NHS (National Health Service) to get closer to its patients through a design process in which the staff’s members and the patients were called to co-design with the project team the improvement of the Head and Neck Cancer Service. These new social movements are characterized by the proposal of an alternative to the dominant vision of the world. On one hand they fight against the technology as the instrument for the dominant power for preserving the globalization, such as the mega-technologies, fragile system, imposed by the top and unable to re-organize itself when unexpected event occur (Manzini 2011). On the other hand they propose a socio-technical system
composed by small and local units, linked together by the network of the Internet, in which the technology is a support for the locality, creating a flexible globalization at the local scale, no more rigid and fragile. The social participation may occur at different levels of the project process: understanding the experiences to improve a product or a service through empathic conversation with the users, shaping interactions to propose new modes of collaboration and behaviors, co-creation with the users to explore new collaborative service models for having a cultural change and finally imagining new future scenarios with a community-centered approach (Meroni and Sangiorgi 2011). “Users are involved not only in the implementation of technologies but also in their design, and in developing knowledge that makes them possible” (Bucchi and Neresini, 2007).The co-design process is the key element for developing improved product-service system characterized by dematerialization and lightness, and based on the satisfaction of the users and not on selling of goods. In this paradigm we can recognize the shift of the designer’s role, from the individualist product designer to a “facilitator of change among large groups of people” (Thackara 2005). Different tools can be applied for the co-creation process: ethnographic research tools for better understanding people’s experiences, workshop with users to identify shared values and improved the weak points of projects, participation of the public in science forums and inquiries, co-creation through pilot projects and prototyping, the proposing of strategic scenarios for the future based on the expectations of the local community, consensus conference with selected representative of the public, creation of toolkit and platform to enable users in reaching their goals.
THE ASP PROJECT To conclude I would like to explain what is the users’ potentiality in my ASP project Green Move. Green Move is an ecological car sharing transportation system with ZEV vehicles in the city of Milano based on social network. The project is developing on three main areas: context, technology and users. The aim of the integrated offer is to create a service in the city that is easy accessible for users, sustainable in ecological term reducing pollution and traffic, able to integrate the public transportation and have the capacity to create a network of people that collaborate while using the service and become more eco responsible. One of the characteristic of a service is the inseparability which means that services need the presence of customers for the production of the service itself. Therefore users in this service are seen as key figures to make the system works. They can enjoy the
service as simply users or additionally decide to share they own zero emission car and have benefits from this.The social network is used through the user’s smartphone to create links between the user, the vehicle, the docking station, the control center and other users that can collaborate with a system of mobility credits i.e. if the user pick up another user and they travel together they have a reduction in the price in this way it’s possible to stimulate positive behavior among citizens. In this project working with the users is a fundamental step, especially for stimulating relevant changes in people lifestyle and this is possible thanks to the technology of smartphone that enable the behavioral shift toward sustainability and a social innovation. The point is creating a solution that respond to the problem of eco-mobility in the city, but also is desirable and delightful, using a user-centered design approach, where the technology is reinterpreted according with the user experience viewpoint. To conclude, “We” as users and, more important, as human beings have the possibility and the task to take part in the shaping of the technologies to orient the future toward social and eco sustainability, becoming more responsible of our present.
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