Perhaps its the literature I’m reading at the moment, but I came across this website and alot of what is said rang true and echoed a warning.
The continued obsession of public transport planners both here and elsewhere with trendy new technologies may simply reflect the dominance of engineers within the profession. It is an engineer’s job to understand and develop technology, but planning a transport system often requires a quite different set of skills: skills that are all too frequently ignored in the rush to keep up with the latest technological marvel. Too often the emphasis is on technological inputs to the system, rather than the outputs that matter to passengers.
An interesting conversation was had today with Rolf Hughes on the subject time and travel, more specifically the ability to travel to another space, without actually having to be in that space.
Those clever people at KTH organised a concert entitled point 25 that was held at the KTH Learning Lab in Stockholm. 4 performers and an audience. Not unusual. Except that half the people present were performing / sitting in the Wallenberg Hall at Stanford, USA. Same Space. Different Place.
The real-time link up uses one of the fastest high-speed fiber optic broadband cables, and currently sports a meagre 0 point 25, delay (hence the name of the concert). It is a project that the Swedish governement is very interested in developing and implementing, as it has great probabilities for those who live in remote rural areas, and thus keep these areas thriving and reduce the strain on major cities.
Perhaps we are talking in the future more a form of virtual travel… but there are many social implications, such as the shake of a hand, a hug, direct eye contact, that are currently missing from the picture.
Everyone is probably aware of the growing trend of cycling. According to Transport for London, over half a million journeys are made by bike in London EVERYDAY! In 2000, 5.5 million pounds was invested in cycling, while a wopping 36 million has been invested in 2008.
Single speed and fixed gear bikes are taking urban cities by storm and the current ‘green thinking’ is getting everyone to hop onto their two wheels.
Of course, cycling has its dangers, which might be part of the excitement for some. For the serious casualties that cycling has incurred, silent monuments are popping up all over the world to commemorate their memory.
I first noticed these white bikes, or ‘ghost bikes’ in New York last year when I went to visit. Since then a few started to pop up in London and now have surfaced in more than 50 cities, from Vienna to São Paulo, Whangerei to Toronto.
The project has many origins, but is said to have started from individuals in the states, painting ‘dead’ or discarded bikes white in 2002, which sparked an idea in Patrick Van der Tuin, Missouri to leave a white bike chained to a place where he witnessed a woman cyclist hit by a SUV. The rest is history, and he iconic monument of the ghost bike has been adopted world wide.
I was having a conversation about the future of travel today, and one underlying theme kept recurring which was the necessity of networking; more specifically, the ability to change quickly between networks. This is something that seems to be a necessary factor for future transport, that perhaps we will still have various forms of transport, but that we will need to change between these forms seemlessly.
Coming back to this idea of time ruling travel instead of distance, I’ve been getting deeper into the mathematics of networks (phew) which I’m cunningly trying to skirt around while still trying to absorb the interesting bits. The work of Fabio Lamanna an his time=net.work is particularily interesting and relevant in his study of the berlin transportation network. Lamanna’s work is extremely inspired by the Hungarian scientist Albert-László Barabási and his book Linked: The New Science of Networks, which is interesting in that it formulates a mathematical formula for the growth and development of networks.
“Barabási has found that the websites that form the network (of the WWW) have certain mathematical properties. The conditions for these properties to occur are threefold. The first is that the network has to be expanding, growing. This precondition of growth is very important as the idea of emergence comes with it. It is constantly evolving and adapting. That condition exists markedly with the world wide web. The second is the condition of preferential attachment, that is, nodes (websites) will wish to link themselves to hubs (websites) with the most connections. The third condition is what is termed competitive fitness which in network terms means its rate of attraction.”
It is interesting to think of the future of the network of trains in a similar way to the current internet network. The ease at which I link to a new website now, may be how easy it will be in the future to link to a new travel destination. Incredibly conceptual I know, but something to discuss and think about surely.
The most expensive spy is always cheaper than the poorest army.”
Sun Tze / The Art of War
I haven’t mentioned any of the lectures coming out of this trendspotting course, maybe because none have deemed important or inspirational enough…. that is, until now.
Trendspotting is a power tool… You create the agenda when you tell others what will happen.”
Christina Cheng
I’ve had difficulty with this word ‘trendspotting’ since I started this course. It brings across in me connotations of manipulation - of information, of people, of truths - and of a flimsy consulting way out of properly dealing with situations. But then, of course, who said everyone needs to solve problems? If we could toss in the pot the term ‘researcher’ or ‘future researcher’ as an alternative, I would be much more the happier.
Christina Cheng who gave todays lecture spoke about trendspotting as starting a discussion; a discussion to make people aware of the changes that could occur around them. Interesting to make a parallel between this and Experience Design, where one motive of humanitarian experiences is to raise awareness and start a discussion around a topic. And Cheng seems to be trying to do this through the experience of presentations and workshops.
Her talk was good. It was different than the others. It was provocative, but not in the glaringly obvious and seemingly ungrounded ways the previous lectures have been. She spoke about how she goes about persuading people to listen to her research; how she orders her slides and the 5, well acutally 6, rules on how she goes about delivering her information:
1. Start on familiar ground then blow them away
2. Make it their business translate trends into everyday models
3. Go Practical hands-on examples; ’stomach’ knowledge
4. Inspire to change Point to solutions; not just the problem
5. So-what analysis What can you do with this situation
6. BE NICE trendspotting challenges people
In a similar way to how Al Gore uses each presentation of “An Inconvenient Truth” to gain feedback on how to make it more effective, so too Cheng seems to be subtly trying to find the best way to break-through to companies and corporate ways of thinking. This is perhaps the best skill any persuader should have; the ability to use another’s language to get through to them; not to assume that the other parties should or would be interested in the same things that you are.
I did want to ask if she found that the role of the media made her job of persuading any less easy and also how she remains objective throughout her research. When human beings love to find patterns in things, it must be difficult to remain objective in your pattern searching. I remember a newspaper article published in the Guardian on scientific findings that mobile phone signals were interrupting the communication signals of bee’s and thus setting them off on wild goose chases with the ultimate result of the hive breaking down. The next day, the Guardian withdrew the article and declared the information was wrong. Individually the facts were correct, yet the pattern to link these elements was weak.
This sort of false information doesn’t help our skepticism, and I would expect, make a trendspotter’s message all the more difficult to get across. And here I am, already being skeptical towards trendspotting. But, if we use Cheng’s rule #1, we could perhaps persuade by starting with an example in the media everyone knows, then turn it on it’s head with concrete research and information.
On a rather separate and distinct note, Cheng introduced her talk by talking about environmentally aware and ‘cradle to cradle’ design, articulated poetically by William McDonough on his ted talk (see below)
This is where many of the skeptics stood up and held up their hands in protest. It’s all well and good talking about environmental responsibility but how does your work reflect this? How does it really make a difference? Well perhaps, if I step out of my skeptic skin for a bit, I could say that reaching corporations is perhaps the most difficult group to reach. If something is not economically viable, then it does not fit into their vocabulary. Yet if you can start the suggestions of how to make, or save, money and be environmentally responsible, suddenly that gives people meaning in their work and could set a seed for responsible development.
Yet in the future, will we even have these large corporations? I’ve been talking to an anthropologist about the future of economy. If our economy of money falls, what will replace it and what new jobs and roles would be created within this society? How would that society be structured? Surely large heirarchical corporations that follow old systems and fail to innovate themselves will become extinct when the environment (economic, social and environmental) changes.
I’m sure many companies are aware of this, and perhaps this is why there is such a high demand for ‘expensive spys’.
It seems that as we become more connected; more globalised, the time it takes to get somewhere by train is taking longer. Take Stockholm to Amsterdam for instance. A decade or two ago, it was possible to go directly from Stockholm to Amsterdam with just one change, in either Copenhagen or Hamburg. Now, if I wanted to travel by train to Amsterdam, I would have to change 3 times and the trip would last longer than 17 hours. (Sounds like one of those high school maths problems is coming up doesn’t it.)
So as we create faster and faster trains, the distances we travel can be further, yet we still need to stop on the way to make the trip economic to say the least. Therefore, could an idea be proposed whereby the future of travel will reach a terminal time similar to terminal velocity? For example, the time it took the slow local train to reach the city center would also be the time it took the fast train to reach the other side of the world. Distance would no longer be measured in time. It would take the same, or similar, time to get anywhere you wanted.
How would this change the notion of the place where you lived? What would the world look like if this was the case?
Finally something that makes sense in regards to transport in Britain. A year ago, I was shocked to hear the percentage of taxes spent on improving the roads in Britain in comparison to the railway network. I am especially for the expansion of the amazing eurostar to link to further parts of Britain. And what poetic justice, to use the money gained from toll and congestion charges over road transport and put it towards the railways!
