08/02/2021
The focus of the course will be on users and innovation, only secondly in digital media,
because digital media has been expanding thanks to the layer of data added to
services, which digitalisation contributed to greatly. Anything that uses data is digital
media. data is used as a medium to steer the application that we consider. We will talk
about how to have users and innovation in one sentence. It is special because in a lot
cases, innovation happens without users. How can we integrate users in innovation?
And why it is important to do so? The short answer is that users are the ones that use
innovation and we will see that we need users because they determine the success to
a certain extent of the innovation. They are not important only on the economic field,
but users are important as the main stakeholders, we want to consider them in
innovation because they can give us feedback and knowledge to steer innovation
towards success.
We will not talk much about usability, users are involved to see if something is easy to
use: if we start with a new innovation and there is no other example on the market, of
AI for example, no one knows the impact of it on the world. It is about things we
cannot predict and it is interesting to take users with us.
Users aren’t only shaping innovation, but also the opposite: ex distance learning There
are a lot of innovations that took place in the past years, and those shaped the way
we teach. Now it is more one-direction, there is no interaction.
WHAT IS INNOVATION?
What do we think about? If we ask people what innovation is, we think about
technology. We want to consider what innovation can be, depending on the definition.
There is linear and innovation as social change. we will try to subscribe to innovation
as social change, but the other innovation is also important. we need to see it as a
spectrum, meaning that any innovation process can be situated more to the left
(linear) or more the right (social change). there are pros and cons. We will see the
disadvantages of the often more narrowly perceived linear innovation and what
innovation as social change is, by referring to fashion.
Linear innovation, when people consider innovation generally they have this concept
in mind. As a society, this is how we think of innovation at large. There is a scientist
who has funding from somwhere, he invents things, has patents which are sold to
RandD and they build a prototype. This goes to other companies who buy it and they
finish it up and sell it. Then we buy it or download. That is rubbish. It is not that simple.
Only a minority of scientists reach the step where the patents are taken up by randd
companies who build prototypes. Yet, we think of scientists as people who constantly
create innovation. It is used to simplify things. It is easy to say that innovation is made
by one person and it is patent, because it would be difficult who has the right to sell,
who owns it. Ex. history of radio: many people got to that invention almost at the
same time, and that was problematic. ex. AI development programme which focus half
of their money in research, second half of the money goes in infrastructure,
investment needed to take the invention and take into society, companies to
experiment with AI, investment schemes so it is easier to enter the R&D phase of AI.
Then there is money left for creating ethical approaches. We want ethics by design: if
you are there with ethics from the start of innovation, there is no problem there. You
tell scientists to be careful with ethics from the beginning. The inventor of the
technology is not doing marketing, he has an idea that enters development, there is
packaging and then marketing.
Innovation as social change means that innovation happens when society starts using
it and it sticks. They start embedding it in their daily practise. According to Tuomi, we
,can only have innovation once that we see that practises are changing due to new
technologies entering our life. Practise is important because it is meaning making:
only because we give a meaning to a certain technology that it becomes innovation.
DEBUNKING LINEAR INNOVATION – an effect on writing history
It is an easy way of writing about technology or history. Cars running on fossil fuels are
the best, but that was the only thing we knew until a few years ago. Now we have
electric cars. Now we realise fossil fuels are not that good. Historicians that write
books write that because fossil fuels were not that good, we now have electric cars.
That is not true: they don’t consider alternatives. There are some possibilities for some
technologies to become dominant not because they are the best on the market, but
because the people who wanted to use them were more powerful than others. So it is
a game of power, not based on performance or efficiency. Another way of looking of it
is that a lot of tech were underdefined when they entered the market, and it is
because of users that started using it in an unespected ways that these technologies
took off. Ex. Telephone: it was preposterous to talk to someone while not being in the
same room; picture, Minitel in France, precursor of the internet, on the picture there is
a pornographic pict, because people started using it for that. That was not the
intended use. This shows the non linear way of technology. If you believe in linear
innovation, we can say that the inventor of the internet must have anticipated that it
might have been used for porn. It is a very naïve reasoning. There are big ethical
debates about self-driving cars and who they should run over first during an accident;
but when someone drives over people with a manual car, why aren’t we criticising the
people that invented cars? They must have thought about it. It is more complex: for
manual cars, we are willing to accept that there is a role for drivers, but people are not
willing to accept that for AI there is still a user and that this user still has responsibility.
When we think of new technologies, there is a huge amount of agency tight to the new
technology; while with old technology, we should not be calling that old technology
but simply means or tools, the responsibility is with the user. While with AI technology,
the responsibility is within the technology and the designer, as if they can predict
everything. No one can predict how their technology is going to be used. Engineers try
to change a technical problem, find a solution and then society starts using it.
We still use linear innovation as a mere model. Pic. American, Chinese, European, all
share the same model. Money goes to research, then you support development,
production and marketing. Sometimes you think the market will take care of its own,
when you have good research that enters the market right away. Usually that is not
the case: a lot of money has to be spent in applied research. From applied research,
we go to production and then marketing and it is in the use that we get the extra
benefit from societal use for all the money you put in. All the AI policy plans use the
same idea: money at scientists, development and marketing and get society benefit
with some delay. This is wrong, it is unguided as if fundamental researchers who
invent subcomponents, they hope that part will contribute to the state of the art. They
are indeed contributing to this large AI revolution. unguided: you throw money at
people and some of them will design things that are great, some will be great but not
used, some other won’t be great.
PRODUCTION AS AN END IN ITSELF – AN ECONOMIC END
Most of the production as an end in itself used to be a Western perspective, but
maybe now it is global. Our entire economic system is geared toward innovation,
because it will create benefits, increase efficiency. That means we keep on increasing
,value, improving everything. That’s why banks lend you money, because they know
you will invest it and create value with it. Starting with the Enlightenment, we have
the concept of innovation connected to progress; and it has been progressing through
Capitalism. For many people, innovation has become its own motor. Innovation for the
sake of innovation and innovation for the sake of economic profit. A great illustration is
Silicon Valley, HBO series, we follow the start-up fight with other start-ups and big
companies: if we look at those stories of start-up, it is indeed about being the first,
attract investors and change the world. Innovation is therefore seen as an economic
entity in itself. A lot of start ups companies have only a start-up plan so creating
something that sounds cool and they are geared at selling as soon as possible. Eric
Bachmann owns an incubator and he only wants to attract inventors that invent
something that sounds cool so that he can attract investors to make a lot of money.
Innovation as social change means that true innovation happens when social
practises change (when a lot of users start doing something differently than before;
this is important because it means that innovators are not the ones causing innovation
to work, they make something, but it has to be taken and used by users. This practise
provides meaning to innovations. As Tuomi says, we can have a lot of innovation that
don’t work and they are not used anymore, they become an unidentified matter. We
don’t know what they mean or what they are used for). It also means that change
is no longer caused by the innovator. The practise can also be seen as
meaning and without menaning, any artefact reamains a pile of unidentified
matter.
FASHION AS SOCIAL INNOVATION – IT IS WHAT YOU ARE BUYING INTO
Fashion to most people is not innovation, because we use the same fabrics or models.
Yet, every year we have different fashion trends. These are innovative, sometimes
they are new, sometimes they bring changes to older styles. Fashion is important
because it allows to embed cultural categories, or meanings into artefacts. A lot of the
clothing are wore not because they are comfy but because they make you look a
certain person. Ex. currently we are wearing something comfy, but if we are asked to
go outside to a social meeting, we would change our clothes into something more
presentable. Clothing say something about you, that’s how we use artefacts in fashion,
to convey something about ourselves. It is a cultural category, it allows us to say to
which group we belong. When older people see him wearing in younger clothes, they
think it is not appropriate, it is not his cultural category. That is the main point of
Tuomi: innovation needs to have a meaning in orderd to be used. It is social meaning.
ex. picture: people who uses a Mac seems to convey something about you; it is
meaning making. A gamer would identify more with Playstation or do you personify an
Xbox. If you look at the two gaming platforms, there is no difference. The difference is
within who uses them. The difference between two different cars is within their social
meaning. the social meaning we attach to artefacts is something to create an identity,
meaning in life.
Good innovation that stick is always social, we always need a guaranteed uptake. Ex.
contact-tracing apps: in some countries, the uptake is high, not in Belgium. It depends
on the meaning we gave them. That is social again, because in many eu countries,
there are roughly different technologies being used, because it had been developed
from the same framework.
16/02/2021
WHAT IS INNOVATION?
, When is a technology useful to us? When it is not useful? Not using a technology tells
us a lot about it. A lot of answers are the same: not enough time, guilt not using it,
hope to change our behaviour.
Discussion on the assignment: technologies that stick in the group are technologies
embedded with our daily life (iphones and laptops) used for every activity that now we
have to do online, as connection to real life. We cannot do without anymore. Also,
many of those technologies combine different features and are related to information,
in storing them. Useful innovation is the one that helps us finding information, in our
studies for example. So they assist us in other tasks. Technologies are easy to use,
having fun using it. They answer to the biggest problems that we have, they make our
life easier. Innovation happens through social change, but also social change shapes
innovation (mutual shaping of technology, they start having a life of their own). Why
technologies don’t work? It is still time lacking to use technologies, it is not high
enough on our priority list. It is not enough important for us to actually use them.
There is a competition between technologies: If one technology already serves your
purpose, why get another one? Some technologies have been replaced simingly (they
are not really replaced: ex. Newspapers have not totally been replaced by digital
news).
Tuomi as a great theorist about innovation was telling us “Look, there are two
definitions of innovation. Too many people are focusing on the linear definition and it
is not satisying because it is not capturing everything, it is a naïve view of how
innovation happens”. There is another view which Tuomi subscribes to himself, he
talks about innovation as social change or social innovation. We have reached a
consense in the discussion on Canvas: some say social innovation is an innovation that
has a social value at hearts, motivated to bring societal change for the good (prof
agrees); another view is, looking at Tuomi, talking about innovation as social change it
is not necessarily tight to a societal call, it only refers to the fact that innovation can
happen when social change is going on, when people change their practises (literally
understood as changing how they are doing something; important because the reason
why someone uses a technology is because it solves a problem people are facing,
because it means something to you in your personal life. That refers to a practise. We
always use a technology, a strategy, a service to reach a certain end. So, technologies
are means that allow us to do something. It is interesting because it shows how we
cannot talk about technology without understanding what they should be used for. As
Tuomi says in the last part of his quote, “the practise can also be seen as meaning,
and without a meaning any artefact remains a pile of unidentified matter”. Without
understanding what a practise means and what it means to use an artefact, it remains
a pile of unidentified matter.
DRAW ME THIS ODRADEK – AN ILLUSTRATION OF MEANINGLESS TECH
“The worries of a houseman” (Kafka) – he talks about an object that the houseman
encounters in his flat. It calls itself the ODRADEK. It is a story that doesn’t lead to
anything, there is no plot. It is not clear what the object is, what it was used for and
annoys the houseman. He wonders if it will exist once he is dead, what does it do now?
What did it use to do? Kafka captured the idea of meaningless tech. there are objects
that we don’t understand what they do, and they illustrate how technologies become
meaningless as soon as we no longer understand how they should be used.
Game: describe an object but with no verbs, how it can be used and we have to guess
how we use it. Two parts of an object: egg shaped, half of an egg, ostrich, black,
