Five Ideas That Matter

We are not frequent posters – opting instead to get a post up here when we have an observation that helps the underlying argument. Hope that explains the radio silence.

Over the past week or so I’ve been trying to think how to get back to the core argument. This goes something like:

There are profound changes underway in the economy and society and they are taking place at a point where a set of new ideas meets a set of new practices. We think we can understand the probable success of the new practices by understanding the power (emerging popularity) of the ideas.

The image is of the Sintesi concept car from Pininfarina. The picture  is an example of new fabrication technology (one of the big ideas in auto) that represents one of these joining points in ideas and economic activity. It offers up an example of how resilience (a key element of new ecological metaphors or bioconsciousness)  and personalisation and customer-driven configuration (the ability to create or hack what I wish to) meet. Here is a couple more images:

So the obvious question is – why is it so interesting? The answer lies in the involvement of Materialize, who specialise in Freeform Manufacturing. Here’s how they describe their speciality:

Freeform Manufacturing uses additive technologies (also referred to as 3D printing technologies), fully automated processes that don’t require molds and thus allow a virtually unlimited freedom in design. Today, these technologies are increasingly used in the production of concept cars. Gradually, this production method will be applied for the production of final cars as well.

I came across the Pininfarina example at 3D Print. The link is this: desktop fabrication that can power the design and data output to make complex objects, cheaply, is upon us. Materialize’s facilities are desktop factories writ large.

In fact the DeskTop Factory project and others are aiming at providing that facility.

The interesting development (or evolution) in personal fabrication (well not quite personal but certainly local at $5000 a pop) is self reproduction in fabbing technologies.

Inevitably that idea is driven by an open source community. I think we are going to be surprised by what can be self-made and at the cost. The dream of self-fabricating things like autos is definitely one for the future but how absurd sane or is it?

I had the pleasure a few years back of seeing a few of the micro-cars created by impoverished engineers in the 1940s. For the most part I was looking at German microcars. They were made out of whatever an engineer could find in the rubble. Here’s an image from the Museum of MicroCars (mostly models from the 1940s and 1950s). MicroCars were homemades and they were production models. Their distinguishing feature was a skilled engineer who knew the product’s totality.

We might never get back to that but future production systems offer an opportunity for people to reinvent their interests and rebuild their communities. The term “bubble car” by the way seems to come from the aircraft cockpit inspiration for these early post War designs. Finally – talking about aircraft cockpits here are two pictures of the 1953 Messerschmitt KR175,

If I was a CEO or leader of a significant organisation, my response to claims that my company is threatened by, say Chinese competitors or climate change or indeed recession, would be, no: it is either safeguarded or threatened by my ability or inability to understand the changing patterns and dynamics of social interaction.

Everyone around me is equally affected by how people’s intentions change and what that says about their shared thought processes – the mutual future we are always building. Not understanding the speed with which people now recreate futures is why politicians are failing.

There is good harmless fun trend projecting and a couple of years back pure blogging listed a bunch of sites that do it well.

You can review those sites here. And we will review them all here soon.

My apoplectic response to apocalyptic trend spotting and critique goes something like this. Here is a dead easy futures portfolio.

1. The recession will last for a hundred years and you are all going to die. Pessimism sells well – in fact the author of Buyology Martin Lindstrom has shown the science of buying and selling is at one with fear. There is no shortage of futurology that tells folks it is all getting worse and will continue to do so until you listen to me.

2. The second version of futurology goes like this – Gen A (it could be x, y or z) is the ultimate slacker generation and determined to prove its slackiness is purer than the slackers who came before them (the mathematical formula is Gen = n [tusg]p where p = the present and tusg = the ultimate slacker generation.

3. The third category of doom apocalypse thinking is a combination of arguments that all say the condition of the world spells a sticky end soon. Climate, ascent of China, population growth, health care spending.

Behind each of these arguments lies a formulaic response which goes something like – if we get smarter, if we rely become more creative, adaptable, flexible, innovative (innovation is the new progress) then we can just overcome these problems.

When Chris and I started thinking abut metatrends one of the first things we noticed however is how well, how quickly and how imaginatively people are adapting to new circumstances. The brain and behaviour are the things we can change very quickly – curious fact, people continually talk about having attitudes and/or new ways of doing things in their DNA – my understanding is that genetic change takes about 40,000 years to work through in humans. Very little changes in our DNA – other than it becoming damaged or mutates.

It stands to a little bit of reason that change is therefore mostly social and interactive between people and the web is the place a lot of that interaction now takes place.

Here is a case in point During the recession the number of money saving blogs has been increasing as have their readers. This comes at a time when, the FT recently pointed out, old fashioned mutualism is dying out rapidly enough that Governments are trying to save it. American thrifts have had their day and European mutual societies got the high risk, high reward bug. Read all about it here.

By way of contrast we see a different mutualism growing. It is based around using the web as a source of mutual support and the primary weapon is not money but information.

Having said that, money is a focus of a new generation of peering systems, led of course by the ZOPA model. Even here in money, to date, information rules and includes the likes of wesabe and many more on that model.

In other words the adaptation of social DNA (the information repository for persistence) is well under way. We have written about it recently but only in private client papers. Hopefully we can approach the issue publicly soon. Understanding these trends and what they mean, before the opposition do is more important than the thought apocalypse.

We’re interested in ways of gleaning new insights from online data, and also in new ways of delivering those insights. So, our ears pricked up when we heard about a recently-launched iPhone application – called “Outbreaks Near Me” – based on MIT’s HealthMap resource.

From HealthMap.com

HealthMap monitors and maps semantic references to various illnesses through news reports and social media channels, giving users a potential early warning of outbreaks. It’s one among a number of interesting health data mashups that have cropped up, including Google Flu Trends – a similar initiative, which bases its findings on search trends, rather than media or blog comment.

Some are sceptical about the utility of these initiatives as standalone tools – false positives are an issue for example in both comment monitoring and search data. This scepticism is often justified, but we’re mainly interested in their contribution to metatrend analysis. Their value really becomes apparent when you look at combining the outputs from many different data sources together.

We can measure flu trends now by a combination of social media listening and aggregated search trends, but what else can we add to the mix? There have been successful attempts in the past to identify outbreaks through pharmacy sales data, and in the future technologies like FLIR (forward looking infrared cameras) might also have a contribution to make. More data, tighter insights, better value.

One of the key ideas for the next fifty years is resilience. It is a growing web meme. Resilience is a term that began life as a way of describing the life cycle of developing and declining eco-cultures. it has since passed into political dialogue.

One of the key ideas for creating greater resilience is local fabrication and that’s what we are interested in, in this post. You might think that sounds obscure (local? fabrication?) or you may already aspire to make your own Nike trainers at home, instead of paying $100 for them, a, to travel a long way and b, to look like everyone else’s Nikes.

Fans of ideas like “local fab” can follow up with Neil Gershenfeld’s work. Neil is a well known academic from MIT but the great thing about his thinking is it applies to Mumbai and to Manchester as well as to the village and the home. In the near future, we will be able to make many things locally that we now depend on acquiring from elsewhere. I am looking forward to making my first car. Follow this link to one of a number of art projects that use digital fabrication to highlight the potential beauty and complexity of locally fabricated artifacts.

Consider too that local fabrication and resilience are being enabled, first via microfinance and now via digital fabrication, building objects digitally and then fabricating automatically from that. Poverty has helped us find new ways to design and fabricate (the $100 computer movement surely gave us the $200 netbook and who knows what will happen to autos now there is the $2500 Nano). The $7 baby incubator is already out there in the field (Western versions cost $20,000)

In principle the local fabrication network has precedents in local print shops here in the West, which were taken away from the locality and were then brought back (via franchises such as SNAP and Prontoprint).

From a brand point of view the apparent downside of local fabrication is either you resist and lose customers or you let people play around with your products and lose brand integrity. The idea that anybody can interfere with your product’s design and appearance has been brand anathema even though people have configured products forever (for example by hacking spoilers onto cars).

When Adidas commissioned an ethnographic study of online basketball shoe communities they found that most basketball shoe fans customised them anyway. Adidas now sells basketball customisation kits!

At the start of the skating phenomenon kids bought boards for $70. They now buy for $15-40 and customise. Sites like boardpushers.com have hollowed out the market for brand ads in Skating magazines, an early casualty of Skating customization.

The lesson for marketing is that brands too can be hollowed out by services that play to customers’ desire to express rich intent. And expression is becoming more important. It is not simply that people want to be in control, but that they are also eager to by-pass the brand in favor of creating highly personalised objects.

In the broader transition reflected in Metatrends, “personalization” is migrating production towards the local level and potentially contributing to what John Robb calls Community resilience, the ability of communities to retain strong positive identities through local economic interactions (which tend also to be socially richer than distant ones).

The momentum towards great community-level economic activity based around personal behaviour and preferences is arriving from different directions (here is John discussing resilience through Transition Towns). Perhaps the most powerful of these, ultimately, because it segues so well with personalization, will be personal energy identities, a concept of the new energy measurement company AMEE.

AMEE aims to measure all energy consumption on earth, down to the footprint of each of us. A huge undertaking is a huge understatement. The most fertile concept that AMEE brings to the green world is the idea that we will all in future wear and share our energy identities. That in turn will provoke more consumption of product that expresses our identity (which we do anyway), for example installing waste pipe hydro plants at home (which we will want to do because our identities will be green).

At the same time the “make” and “craft revivals (hack, knit, adapt) are spurring on local fabrication technologies (see tinker.it for on way the online creativity is being parsed to an offline environment). Added to this is the new and as yet little heralded open source hardware movement (see tinker.it partner Arduino and Chris Anderson’s robotics open hardware company, hardware hacking (www.hackerbot.com and widespread iPhone hacking – the iPhone has 20% of the Chinese smartphone market despite not yet being available there).

The mantra, if I’m not in it I won’t buy it is hip for kids who like to splice a vid or two. Grown ups, we say: if I haven’t hacked it or made it, I don’t want it. And “if I can’t see myself in it”doesn’t have to be limited to YouTube and other media hack-hubs. Seeing myself in the future of the green agenda is cool too.

Randomness enjoyed a new lease of life with the publication of Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb but it has a long tradition. Quite apart from the impact of Tabeb’s book randomness also features in soures as diverse as rap songs, YouTube videos and Scientific American. It is integral to popular understanding of Chaos theory. And it is hip. From the Spring Season of 2007 onwards, fashion moved towards the bizarre, confrontational, and obscure according to fashion trends site WGSN.

References on Timeline to Random come in at around one third of Collaboration but outstrips the online currency of the term “The American Dream” by about 50%.

According to the Guardian: “Random is the new order. It started with iTunes. But it’s not just in music that we’re welcoming more randomness into our lives.” Randomness is also a consequence of current warfare techniques, and they give us a daily reminder of it.

Randomness is closely associated with what is also referred to depression economics and a sense that there needs to be a wider renewal, a combination of precipitous economic decline and amoral and immoral behaviour by and within western democracies.

But we can also see it as an integral part of another shift, the transformation of peer-to-peer systems with their emphasis on co-production, community, productive feedback loops or collaborative filtering towards a person-to-person economy.

Geolocation and geo-specific systems trend activity increasingly towards the local. Fixmystreet.com, for example, allows people to upload information about street repairs which then uses the post code to relay the information to local authorities and put pressure to them for repair. LIFTSHARE is as name suggests a lift-sharing site, one of many to come. Interactive heat loss maps (in the UK local authorities are providing these are doing this – Haringey in London for example is taking images from low flying aircraft of all local buildings that illustrate their heat loss).

Local heat loss map, Haringey

The economy is being relocalised by these technologies and by the new sense of scale. In place of highly scaled companies we are observing highly scaled data, data on every person, data on every building, data on all consumption.

Randomness is a reflection of the rising person-to-person culture that the millennial generation is in part is forcing upon us, often by virtue simply of the communications and networking technologies available to it, and also by waning old media control and predictability. In place of the 30 second ad we are collectively being hit by some big numbers. 250 million Facebook members, 80 million blogs.

The command and control economy is replaced not by chaos but by data flows on a scale where randomness seems inevitable.

Randomness in addition to reflecting a new era and type of scale denies legitimacy to the institutional gatekeeper that previously mediated our communications. Peer to peer or person to person economies don’t need institutions like newspapers or banks. Banks are a typical example of an institution that is exposed to de-institutionalisation by person-to-person activity. Why do I need a bank to convey my money to another person? I can use a mobile phone.

Randomness reflects also the sense that in a person-to-person world nothing can be planned or controlled. It is increasingly a subject that throws up insights into success and failure. Randomness economics for example shows that winning streaks are normal statistical outcomes, a fact that applies to good corporate results as much as to baseball home runs

The “individualisation of society” meme has been popular since at least the 19th century. In previous generations individualisation was widely thought of as a negative, a tearing apart of community and a route to alienation. Now it is a kind of springboard for the creative life. Individualisation is closely associated with experiences that are more personalised or that help create a stronger personal narrative for a consumer. This is a curious transformation but a happy one.

Individualisation appears to fly in the face of the more collectivist notion that is undoubtedly out there.  Personalisation and individualization are significant not only because they embody the shift from product to service but also because of their impact on the supply chain. Zazzle.com, the online personalization service has a product returns ration below 1%.  The Consumer Electronics Association of American calculated a decade ago that returns were running at 20% of sales.

Online references to individualisation outnumber references to collectivism by about 2:1 so far in 2009. In comparison references to collaboration outnumber references to individualisation 200:1 in the same period.

The combination of American and non-American spellings of personaliZation exceed the number of references enjoyed by online community (1,960,000: 1.500,000) and taken together customisation, individualization and personalisation outnumber “online community” 4:1.

The rewards we get from what we do and buy have trended towards the financial and material for many years BUT are now trending towards the non-financial. The most obvious example is the unexpected but game changing momentum behind online reputation systems, review systems and collaborative filtering systems.

Terms such as good capital, spiritual capital index, spiritual capitalism, and ethical capitalism are negligible in quantity before the past decade.

For example “ethical capitalism” as a term is referenced around 7,000 times in Google Timeline, since 1880. Almost 5,000 of those references have come in the past 8 years, peaking during this crisis.

By way of contrast, Technorati records only 1 blog post tagged ethical capitalism in the three months prior to writing this article (March – June 2009) and a very low level of references to ethical capitalism within posts (the term “profit” outperforms ethical capitalism by around 3,000:1).

The prevalence of the term “profit” however needs putting in context , as the web is also alive with consternation around issues such as “progress” and “crisis of capitalism”. Currently the tag “progress” is closely associated with the tags “grant” and “loan”.  Over the past three months there have been approximately 50% more blog references to crisis than progress, an indicator of where the collective consciousness is moving.

The term spiritual capitalism  likewise begins to make an appearance towards the millennium and then retains strong interest on Timeline. 2009 is a peak, with spiritual intelligence gaining ground over the past week.

Bioconsciousness is a term we use to group ideas that draw for inspiration on biological processes. It obviously includes the concern over depleted ecological resources and the constraints on our ability to pursue traditional activities, as climate change becomes more debilitating.

BUT we also mean by it a broader change to biology and nature as exemplars for how we should live and work. Whereas trend analysis tells us we should be cautious of urbanisation and that it presents a real danger of economic and social disintegration, people are already engaging with new biological models for co-existence.

Biomimicry, or the use of nature to inspire and instruct on sustainable organisational processes or physical design, is becoming more popular. On the Timeline there are relatively few references to biomimicry even up to 2009. However in the past 12 months there are over 20,000 web page references to the term with nearly 2,000 of these coming in the past week.

As we more readily accept the idea of eco-systems guiding human activity the growth of business eco-systems is also worth looking at. Surprisingly the use of the term “business ecosystem” seems to have peaked in 2006/7 and currently runs at less than a 5:1 ratio biomimicry:business ecosystem. Nonetheless it is not a negligible term.

“Community” is a newly revived term that competes with “eco-system” as the way to describe how people interact around businesses. There are an incredible 2 billion uses of the term community on the web (in other words more than Google can measure from its 8 billion pages) but if that is restricted to “online community” about 1.5 million of these were used in the past 12 months. The United States is the main home of people searching the term “online community”.

We want to work out whether people in the developed economies and maybe also in not so developed economies have moved so far away the idea of democratisation as a motivating factor, that we might as well drop the term.

A yes or a no to that question is equally interesting.  Below is our first stab at understanding it. We know, we know, we have a long way to go but every journey starts with…..

We see democratisation in web conversations as very much as an emerging meme that may not actually pass the emergent phase.

The long term trend towards a more democratic way of conducting relationships (Government to citizen, business to customer) is an established part of the intellectual fabric.

The first surprise, looked at from a Meta-trend standpoint, however is that ideas around democratisation get very little currency within the blogosphere and only limited currency on Google. This is particularly the case with changes to work hierarchies. The flattening of hierarchy, and with it the development of a more democratic workplace, is surprisingly under-played on the web, despite being a buzz in academic business literature.

A search phrase like “democratizing work” , though it gets approximately 250 Technorati returns for the past three months, are not at all relevant to the workplace but are more likely to cover “making democratisation work” rather than “democratizing work”. Technorati returned no posts that used the tag “democratization of work” in the past three months.

The idea that gets real traction on the web is the idea of collaboration. Ranging from inter-firm collaboration. industry-wide collaboration and University-industry collaboration and collaboration tools, collaboration has considerable purchase on the minds of people in business (strangely once again it is Singapore and India that lead in collaboration search terms in the short term – the past 12 months). On the Timeline, references to collaboration during the past decade outnumber all previous references by a factor of 4:1, though this is obviously in part because the density of data is also increasing.

Nonetheless, when you look at trends, the way that democratisation is making sense to people, the way they are absorbing and exchanging ideas around it, is through the language of collaboration.

Brands, politicians and newspapers still rely on polling to find out what people think. Yet people express themselves all day long on the Web.

To tap into their memes we reviewed megatrend predictions from a variety of sources: futurists, market research, advertising agencies, banks, technologists and trending websites. That is the basis of the first Metatrend paper

The megatrend predictions were, overwhelmingly, made in the period 2005 – 2009. They are not disposed solely towards a crisis-driven viewpoint and they typically draw on economic determinants such as age, demographic patterns, health patterns, urbanisation and its consequences, technological innovation and geopolitical shifts.

We subjected these to a typical social media analysis, which means reviewing a variety of social uses of key terms around blogs, tweets, comments and search.

The diverse, sectoral and broad megatrends we reviewed show that most futurists are talking a common language that doesn’t necessarily reflect the true nature of change, nor a popular perspective on it.

The common language says:”The fast developing economies globally will create further demand for oil and food resources that require significant breakthroughs to accommodate. Add in urbanisation and an aging population. The needed breakthroughs will not be possible in an oil economy. Coupled to the profound impact of negative ecological conditions, the established economies must draw on all their ingenuity to compete against low cost competitors or risk profound and disruptive change to the established way of life.”

The question for those working with social technologies is whether the analysis of behaviours around the Web can provide a different perspective and maybe a platform that leaders can use to inspire and transform enterprises and society. That is what we are hoping to answer on this site.