Kari-Hans Kommonen
26th April 2002, Leidschendam, The Netherlands


The research group at the Media Lab (University of Art and Design, Helsinki UIAH ) is a member of the IST network CHIPS (Consumer hybrid Information Products and Services). It started last year and is due to run for 30 more months. His group is conducting a survey of relevant developments in the world, while offering ideas and insights that they believe in. They chart directions that they think will grow in importance and issues to monitor so that we can think about opportunities and strategies. The group focused on ‘hybrid’ technologies, defined as combining some physical and digital elements – e.g. mobile phones, PC, embedded digital chips and software in artefacts.

They considered 3 kinds of convergence:

• convergence of the technology platform (rendering different devices compatible),
• convergence of media (such that all media can be delivered on the same platform),
• convergence of industries.

They speculated that existing activities will be challenged by activities and actors coming from converging fields.

Computers can emulate other digital devices via software (e.g. a phone, a TV). It is increasingly easier and cheaper to build (in effect) a PC and then use software to make it emulate, say, a phone, afterwards building a physical design around this.

• This means that an ICT’s characteristics are less determined by hardware.
• This leads devices to lose their identity.
• The differences between different devices lies in the software running upon them.
• All devices are increasingly using the IP (Internet Protocol) platform.
• There are less hardware based limitations: it is simply a design decision whether to have a phone behave like a TV or not and less a matter of technical constraints.
  

The research group views devices as having a digital dimension (in addition to a physical dimension) and a mental dimension – i.e. ideas about the way things are. If we take the institution of banks for example, it has all 3 dimensions – the concept of a bank, the physical bank premises, and money in the digital dimension.

The group’s report outlines trends and challenges (including research challenges):

• Increasing seamlessness. There is a decline in boundaries between technologies.
• Open strategies. Open source and related strategies are challenging the future value of intellectual property, challenging current business strategies.
• Enabling social innovation. One current problem is when a product design does not allow users to innovate, to domesticate the product, to create their own benefits. For example, the mobile phone enables social innovation in that users can invent benefits in natural language – phoning to co-ordinate, to find out information etc. The same is true for e-mail. But when users have to manipulate software it is often technically too difficult to use to create one’s own benefit. We have to ask how easily can people create new ‘applications’ or activities or function (e.g. buying a film ticket).
• Growing emphasis on software design challenges. This occurs as we are moving away from hardware design to software design.
• Beyond the interface. The main interest people have is in achieving a goal. The interface is merely a kind of language to do so. A disproportionate amount of interest is currently spent on the interface compared to the functionality that lays behind it.
• Digital Ontologies. Each piece of software has a model of the world built into it. But currently all the models are different, the software in different devices have different ontologies. The more we have compatibility between ontologies, the more seamlessness can grow. We should be aware of and look at these ontologies
• Imperative of Broad Context and Transdisciplinary Competences. (a) We have to take into account more and more things when innovating (e.g. human rights, privacy, cultural conventions) and (b) we have to develop transdisciplinary skills – we have to be able to get into the other discipline, not just ask something of someone from another disciplinary.
• Consumers become customer partners. This refers to the way that the power of networked consumers can grow as they form smart markets and negotiate with businesses in a new way. Consumers who are organised to form networks become more powerful, as in the current business-to-business market.
• Political and social sensitivity of IT development. All areas of IT have social consequences – it is harder to claim that hardware is a value-free.