Ubiquity and sustainability could turbocharge each other. Ubiquity enables revealed backstories, observed flows and shared services, making it easier to live well at a minimum of expense and ecological impact. Sustainability, particularly in the form of compact urbanism with bright green innovation, concentrates human interactions with each other and networked systems, making it easier to suffuse daily life with the sort of intelligence that allows data to be gathered, shared and connected. The Net and the public square, as Castells wrote, are symbiants.
That symbiosis makes informatics -- the understanding of how people use technology to interact with information -- a critical field in sustainable design. And if you're looking to get a nice, quick taste of the cutting edge of informatics, I really enjoyed Matt Jones and Tom Coates' presentation, Polite, Pertinent and Pretty, (tho' I describe below why there's a fourth P they missed).
In a talk exploring their own work, Matt and Tom look at the proliferation of data sources in our lives: personal sensors, direct reporting, environmental sensors, bureaucratic files, attention records, networked objects, and "ambient information" about our daily habits, etc. Because these sources can be connected into a web of data though services and APIs and "in this connected space, every piece of data you can open up can be combined with everything that already exists," there are phenomenal opportunities available to help people understand their lives and choices in new and empowering ways. There are also unprecedented ways for businesses and governments to invade our privacy, to spy on us, to dominate public data for private gain, and generally make life worse -- perhaps dramatically worse.
How do we make sure that the systems we're building and supporting increase openness, choice and citizen empowerment? Enter the three P's:
Politeness, in this context, means not only aware of the social niceties, but a radical bias towards openness, or as Adam Greenfield says, "Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use, capabilities, etc."
Pertinence essentially contains the expectation that the user gets the truth, the useful truth and the truth in time to matter: that the choices we make are informed by the best possible understanding of the situation, and that the evolution of that understanding ought to be up to us to shape. [I'm wildly extrapolating on their argument here.]
Prettiness is not only about the aesthetics of the user experience (though I'd argue those are not in any way trivial, and that Bucky was right about beauty), but even more so, about the crafting of user experiences that allow people to meaningfully engage with masses of data and complex systems in ways that are simple and compelling (for instance, through good visualizations). Playful and pleasing ways of making visible the invisible, of revealing what's going on a large scale, behind the scenes, over time.
The importance of these three qualities shines through especially bright when we begin to think about the spread of product-service systems and product loops through our lives.
PSS offer enormous potential sustainability benefts. Indeed, I'd argue that it will be impossible to deliver sustainable prosperity without the widespread adoption of shared/sharing systems. But they can also have a real downside, for PSS rely on a more intimate connection with their users, and where that intimacy is not backed by protected relationships, real disaster can result.
Consider ZipCar's takeover of FlexCar, for example. Many FlexCar users made serious life decisions -- about whether to own a car and where to live, for instance -- based in some large part on the availability of FlexCars in their lives. When ZipCar began making arbitrary changes to the means and extent of that availability (removing cars, raising rates, changing policies) without any warning or discussion whatsoever, former FlexCar customers (who had treated FlexCar as much as a community as a business) realized that they in fact were not community members in any meaningful way, and that their involvement with car-sharing was unprotected by any meaningful ownership or rights.
So, I would add a fourth P, "Protection."
If we are going to interact with companies in intimate ways -- in ways that impact our deepest life choices -- those interactions ought not only to be held to a higher standard of transparency and public accountability; they ought to be safe-guarded in formal ways as well by having corporate decision-making structures that protect the user rights of the people involved.
Some of these protections might involve legislation and regulation; legally protecting users' privacy and data ownership, for instance. Some might involve business ethics, codes of practice and certification systems enforced by NGOs. Some might involve new forms of corporate chartering and governance. Some might involve actual ownership by and participation of the users themselves.
Because all commerce involves power and money, creating a marketplace expectation of protection will not be painless. It'll take a consumer rights movement to make this happen. PSS companies which refuse to do business in an appropriate manner ought to be not just avoided, but identified and penalized. As much energy ought to go into weeding out bad PSS as rewarding good ones, especially now, when the concept is just taking root, and the market could easily adjust to an expectation of privacy abuse and exploitation.
What's at stake, after all, is how we'll live in a bright green future, and whether the creation of sustainable prosperity will support individual liberties, protect privacy, guard the commons, promote social mobility, shrink the gap between rich and poor and make our lives more beautiful... or, whether we'll be selling out our democratic and economic rights in the name of a better future.
