A Fantastic Finale to a Fantastic Course

Unfortunately, this evening saw our last session with the "Trendspotting and Future Thinking" course. As presentations delivered by the fifteen groups went underway, I appreciated the creativity possessed by my classmates.

To be honest, as we rehearsed our presentation with my group prior to today's presentation, I thought ours was going to be quite superior in terms of how it is delivered. I have to admit to my arrogance since I now realize I have taken my classmates for granted, because this evening I witnessed at least a dozen presentations that were mind-blowing. Performances, movies, voice recordings, music, scents, pop corn, and finally, wine, all made our day.

We, as group 5, were quite unfortunate since we had many problems with sound. Including the rehearsals, the most problematic take we had was our actual presentation. But that's what usually happens right? If you are more curious about the research behind our project than you can go to our group's blog 1train1time.blogspot.com

I think the highlight of the evening was the revelation of Magnus' Borat fetish. Our extremely down-to-earth and humorous course director did not miss this chance to disclose even more about himself. He followed with a videoclip of him singing songs from the movie "Borat", in Slussen.

Speaking of the genius behind this course, I would also like to voice all the appreciation I have been hearing, along with my own, for Caroline's efforts. If it wasn't for our lovely course assistant; and our course director Magnus, who captivated most of us--who were there just to check out what this course was going to be like--in the very first session, these 8 weeks would not be the unforgettable experience that we now know they are.

This is not goodbye! See you in the future!

Incorporating Virtual Reality In Time-Oriented Train Travel

Despite the fact that we're so close to our presentation on the 16th, we keep the no holds-barred passion for our great interest on the subject of "the future of trains". In this regard, I would like to point to a couple of ideas I have stumbled upon recently.

The first one is from a documentary called "Zeitgeist: Addendum". A very big part of this documentary was dedicated to ideas about building a better future. Of course, transportation had its place in this part, and below is a short videoclip from that documentary, which talks about future possibilities in train transport.



What we see in this video is amazingly similar to the ideas we have been discussing in our group. It provides information about the technological infrastructure that is available even today, but just not in common use. Things like these require a paradigm shift, in the sense of re-evaluating the systems that we have been sticking with up to now, abandoning the ones that do not work well enough to meet our expectations, and finally replacing them with the ones that will enable a much more positive future. Simple as that.

Rolf Hughes, our professor in the department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack, told us today about the recent research projects carried out at KTH. He was talking about a simultaneous online music-making experience. This was accomplished using fiber optic cables, linking musicians in Sweden to their counterparts in the United States. This idea reminded me of what Mark Smith had told us a few days ago, saying in the future, virtual reality will enable people to choose their own personal experiences during the course of their physical travel. Given the sophistication of virtual reality even today, all these ideas get even easier to conceive of. To link all these again to transportation, it will not be an issue to figure out how one gets from 'point A' to 'point B' and what environmental effects they will be exposed to. "One thing that might still be of concern will be time", Mark Smith said as he agreed with us.

After this inspirational last-minute input, I am looking even more forward to Thursday's presentation!

Mark Smith on "Human Logistics"

Today, two other members of my project group (Adrian and Mikihisa) and I were in the KTH Wireless Lab in Kista. We had a meeting with Mark Smith, a professor in the Department of Communication Systems at the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan. We were there to generally talk about our project "The Future of Trains", but the chat was so good that we did not realize how the two hours went by.

Mark has been working with SL to provide them with a new approach to urban transport, for which he coins the term "Human Logistics". To explain his approach better, he said that companies like SL should focus on getting its passengers from 'point A' to 'point B' without them having to figure out anything. He pointed to the mistake made by most companies today to be very vehicle-oriented (e.g. our subway trains are very durable) or specifically-service-oriented (e.g. our buses run on time). Contrary to this approach, he noted that most passengers do not actually care too much about all these details, they rather want to get where they want to get, during which, for some, the priority is price, and, maybe, duration for others. Thus it is important to have a very well-integrated system that is also informative to a great extent.

Another very interesting point brought up in our conversation was about the issue of privacy and trust. CCTVs, phone-tapping, RIFDs and internet privacy are all hot topics of our day. There is very little doubt that information about almost everyone in this world is being gathered at certain points to certain extents. Mark looked at this from a unique angle saying if corporates, states, companies, etc. used at least parts of this information they gather for the convenience of their services and thus for the comfort of their target audience, then the situation will become more of a "win-win" nature for both sides of the debate. Thus the dystopia of the "Big-Brother" state could maybe be reversed in this way. In the context of travel, this perspective might inspire many innovations yet to be realized.

As we left the room to head to our 'disintegrated' transport systems which would take us home, our minds were thrilled by the bits of inspiration from the fantastic talk we had with Mark. It was hard to realize how the two hours just went by; maybe every traveler needs a Mark Smith to forget about time concerns!

Last, But Not the Least

Today we hosted our last guest lecturer Sven Tollmien from TrendOne in Hamburg. After giving us an update on the latest information about the coolest trends from all around the world, Tollmien then provided us with some paper and pen so that we could "draw the future". Therefore, this was a session that stood out with its ability to awaken the monster of creativity that's been asleep in us all.

One of the most interesting points Tollmien made was about the parallelism of the virtual and the real world experience. He noted that not all the developments in the field of virtual reality necessarily refer to a dystopia—as in virtuality being the only medium in which us humans will experience the world. A very good example he gave was a virtual soccer game, where players were virtually pursuing the location of a ball on their PDAs but, at the same time, also physically participating in this game by running after this ball. Another good example to this concept was the mall or museum assistants, which were, basically, PDAs that detect speficic spots in a space and provide instant information about them. With all these examples it could be concluded that a good part of the effort put into the development of virtual reality technologies will contribute to the enrichment of our real-life experiences.

A second main idea brought up in the lecture was the penetration of technology into the human body. Tollmien pointed to all the signs of the different ways technology and the human body are becoming one, making the former increasingly 'invisible'. From this point, he raised the question of the "Fifth Screen" and what it is going to be like. He showed some presumptions attempting to answer this question, one of which was a contact lens. Another example he showed us around the invisible technology debate was the "Voiceless Phonecall" which was really interesting, and of which you can find a video below.



The lecture ended as we were divided into groups of 5 to "draw what the future is going to be like". This activity was one of a foreshadowing nature in the sense that it provided a taste of what our classmates were able to do in terms of innovative ideation and presentation. "Expectations from Thursday's presentations are now even higher", as Magnus said!

On Wall-e

The whole Trendspotting & Future Thinking class was at the movies last night! You could see this as a lecture where popcorn was served, the chairs were more comfortable and you couldn't ask questions to the speaker. It felt good when I saw a friend in Hötorget who said "What a sweet course!" when I told him I was going to see a movie named "Wall-e" as part of a course.

The 90 minutes of time during which I watched Wall-e was a mix of high emotions; despair, ecstasy, pride, etc. It was surely great entertainment. The movie qualifies as a good one as far as the time it gets to watch it is concerned. I might even confess to having wet eyes at a scene or two.

However, I started reflecting back on what I've seen as soon as half an hour passed after I've seen the movie. For one thing, the makers of this movie had an obvious motivation to brainwash the audience about the superiority of the Apple products. Since the movie is set in the future, seeing the I-pod in a good condition where no other device has really survived, and hearing the I-Mac boot-up sound as Wall-e's waking-up signal, was clearly an Apple commercial: An advancement from the concept of "product placement" to "brand placement".

As I read some information about the movie prior to going to the theater to see it, I had observed that one of the most praised features of this movie was that two-thirds of it included no speech. And apparently the other one-third 'speechful' part counts the robot-talk as speech. I'm going to come back to this later.

I could not decide whether to look through the eye of a juvenile or an adult while trying to reflect on this movie. However, doing either, I found it really hard to be completely happy with Wall-e.

The two key notions rule the human life in this dystopia: "Axiom" and "Buy'N'Large". The movie seems to do a good job of scaring its audience with skyscrapers built using garbage, and "Buy'N'Large" is supposed to hit you in the face as the overruling slogan that has caused all this mess. But hey, welcome to green capitalism: The movie is launched as part of a whole package that includes a video game and toys made for its characters. Welcome to benign green consumerism: Do your job and contribute to Wall-e's cause by buying stuff! Well, I guess it is an "axiom" nowadays that any and everything comes with a market of its own, so maybe I'm being overcritical...

Looking at Wall-e as a movie that targets children, one still cannot do away with the possible issues it might cause in little minds. I'm sure pedagogues might provide further and better insight into these matters: For instance, the movie is set in an atmosphere where all the "humane" beings we see are ironically non-humans: Robots. The story runs the risk of strengthening kids' bondage to the material world, which should be the very thing that it criticizes. Take these with the fact that there's very little speech, most of which is digital speech anyways. Is this going to be helpful in anyway? Besides all this, don't you think little ones will annoyingly and constantly want to have a Wall-e toy, and possibly its psp game after watching this movie? And I'm not even mentioning the brand placement that aims to breed new Apple consumers. All these are lined-up as if the real motive is to create a niche market segment in which the "trendy" thing is to be environmentally-conscious.

I'm aware of the fact that this is Hollywood after all, and maybe not to be taken too seriously. However, some of the reviews you can come accross on the internet praise this movie in such a way that it is impossible to write a few paragraphs of your own in objection.

The Interdisciplinary Imperative

This evening Prof. Ronald Jones, who directs the MA programme I'm attending at Konstfack, delivered a lecture that was quite flattering for us experience designers among the audience. Humor aside, there lay two key concepts at the heart of Prof. Jones' speech: The Experience Economy and Interdisciplinarity. To better explain what he means about the former, he started with the example of a birthday cake.

Walking the audience through the shift that has occured in the last 200 years in economics and business, he noted that in the agrarian economy, the person who acquired the raw material for the ingredients, who turned them to ingredients and who at the end baked a cake with those ingredients was usually the same person. In the goods economy, the ingredients were now readily-available, so they were what customers bought to bake their own cakes. The services economy emerged as spare time became more valuable, now customers wanted to buy ready-baked cakes. Prof. Jones finalized his journey through history by saying today's circumstances set the stage for an experience economy, where people have even less spare time, so for instance, parents now buy birthday parties for their children, where the cake actually comes for free.

Prof. Ronald Jones went on by saying that the education system and the professionals it tailors—especially in the field of art and design—are not aware of this rapid paradigm shift. Making a clear distinction between the easily confused notions of mono-/multi-/trans-/inter-disciplinarity, he underlined that a need for new kinds of professionals, who can work in a trans- and/or an inter-disciplinary fashion, emerges from this paradigm shift. Prof. Jones articulated this phenomenon by saying that "professions are migrating away from conventional design tasks" and "interdisciplinarity is the most optimal impact in bringing rapid change to increasingly complex problems".

These two main key concepts reminded me of a book I read last summer, The Culture of The New Capitalism by Richard Sennett. Here, Sennett talks of three key challenges, which have to be overcome in order to fit into the profile of 'our era's succcessful person', two of which are directly relevant to Prof. Jones' arguments. Sennett says that today, successful professionals are not the ones that have mastered a certain skill, but rather are the ones who can easily adopt, and shift between, different skills according to their current needs, and that are quick to learn new things and curious to explore. Another relevant point he makes is that the high ability of managing one's time is key to the general success in that person's professional life.

As he finished off, Prof. Ronald Jones raised a very valid debate by asking the question: "Who is going to produce and control the new knowledge?" Considering the open-source artefacts of our time (e.g. Wikipedia) I'm sure the members of the audience found it very difficult to find a final answer to this mind-tangling question as they left the lecture hall.

Don Draper versus Benjamin Linus

An amazingly informative lecture was given, this evening, by the eloquent Piers Fawkes. I could not count how many very interesting examples he gave from the www, could anyone? As an overall summary, his talk was mainly about the startups and young entrepreneurs who make good use of the web to earn money out of what they love to do.

One of the many eye-opening statements he made related to the new individual entrepreneurs were that "corporations are under serious threat, especially by the creative class." He added by saying that "today's ad-man is still Don Draper", in order to substantiate his argument that "companies think of culture as a place to play in, not to belong to." As opposed to that kind of approach, he gave Benjamin Linus as an example for today's creator profile.

As a lecturer, Fawkes possessed some rare qualities; one of which was the genuine attitude of confessing to be not knowledgeable enough about certain topics, thus being humble enough to say "I don't know" or "I haven't actually thought of it".

Fawkes' closing remark was a question he would ask to companies that are on the pursuit of success: "In an era anything will be made by anyone at anytime, can you embrace and collaborate creator, the community and other companies to make things better?" This was also a summary for his company's general approach, which stands out ironically with the very subtle way in which it is put, encouraging businesses to delve into whatever their pursuit may be, instead of letting it go at scratching-the-surface.