Yes, this blogpost is longer than normal but I wanted to create one holistic view. If you are not a big reader just scan the nice bits or go to the end

The Lift

The past week I was in Geneva, the city where HTTP/HTML or in other words the internet was invented. I visited Lift 08, a three day event to explore the social impact of new technologies. Together with Martin Kuipers I just let everything around me flood into my brain.

Lift 07 was a special event for us. Although I was not there, Martin’s enthusiasm triggered a whole process towards Lable. The ideas he brought back gave us the tools to finally knit together some thoughts of the past years. I had to go and see this Lift where foresighters came together.

Lift 08

This year was a 3 day event with 700 visitors from all over the world. The first day was full of community driven workshops at Geneva University with a Venture Night at the end. The second two days where full with talks on different subjects. Both days had also nice closures in the form of a cheese fondue and a nice party in the center of town.

There were many interesting people and I felt great having met some. Although looking around the conference room I felt many were addicted to being connected.

I chose to only open a dummy book and set myself in information absorb mode and tried to see a larger pattern. With everything around me you could smell the future, you just needed to look below the surface.

Online Environments

A big topic which was present in almost all talks where the online environments that are part of the latest technological hype. What are the implications of these environments and how could you make them succeed? How you could use them to teach people, and how to use them to change them?

We got for example an insight into the South Korean world of Cyworld. On how Koreans organized themselves online and how they depend on their mobile phone. Attention was the main currency and self branding the key. How almost-sync was the latest development towards real time intimacy. How Twitter was the western equivalent. South Korea is just miles ahead of these social communities. 98% of the 20s are on CyWorld.

The most interesting talk on this subject was by Pierre Belanger, owner of SkyRock. Although SkyRock is just another social network he described a future of social messengers. Where the social network became the new digital id of the future. He described a netamorphosis towards a net not centered around bandwidth but around code. A net that is not centered around one site but a multiform platform that could run on phones, instant messengers etc. E-mail is dead.

I immediately connected it to some other movements of people talking about Jabber as the next http. And he basically described the new backbone of the internet as a Social Operating System. Everything will center on chat. Two-way instead of one-way communication.

Connecting tech with people

There were also great talks about open social by Kevin Marks of Google and Grid Computing by François Grey of CERN. They both have methods of connecting the people and computers with information.

Open social is the glue for anything social centering around people/friends, activities and events and seems to also be the glue for the next generation of people.

The grid computing talk had some great insights on how to use people and their computers for science. How normal people became an important part by letting them be involved. This by being transparant and fun. A whole @home platform was born out of it that has much bigger cimputing power than any supercomputer in the world.

In everything you could feel online environments are on the verge of change. The current form is just a carriage without horses and we still need to evolve to the definite form.

Mobile phones

Most people in developing countries don’t have computers but they do have mobile phones. They share them, they connect with them. In China for example there are 4 people born per second, but 20 new subscribers of mobile providers per second.

The mobile is the most important connected device and it was interesting how Younghee Jung went out to those countries to let the people design the best mobile phone for themselves. It was very interesting to see the specific specific solutions for problems they live with. Like multi-simcard support, multiple address books, heart shaped phones, ultimate everything phone etc.

We also heard some insights on the future of the phone. How it would evolve to a simpler gateway to the world and that the phone contained the answer to future payment. How the iphone revolutionizes and by someone of Nokia how the iPhone is not the ultimate answer.

User Experience & Stories

A lot of talk was also about what story the technology is telling and the user relates towards it. The perception of a user completely relies on the story as they create context.

The most interesting was by Rafi Haladjian, one of the inventors of the wifi Rabbit Nabaztag. He told about setting up a platform called Violet built with ambient technology. A plarform with which you are informed non intrusively.

Why the rabbit:

If you can connect a rabbit you can connect anything.

He showed some great stuff like a future product of RFID stamps that a rabbit(or some other object) can sniff and after the object will react with something relevant. He saw only 2 or 3 objects connected to the rest of the world and saw a future we will connect the rest of the stuff in our homes.

It was also nice to have visited the discussion on the failures of ubiquitous computing the previous day. It seems that we are on the verge of creating smart houses, we only should make them start out dumb and grow their smartness for a more satisfying experience. It is all about making a growing emotional connection by growing an evolving story.

New ways of working

The Zentrale Intelligenze Agentur was a wow presentation for me and Martin. They described the way of working we as Lable were philosophizing about for the last year. I really feel that we are on the beginning of a new hierarchy less way of working. That people begin to see that hierarchy kills passion and creative/innovation efficiency. And now we were confirmed it is a global feeling.

Games are fun.

The game track was really fun. You should just see the entertaining Paul Barnett video if you have the time. He describes we shouldn’t build games anymore Vegas style by reproducing successes bigger, better, faster & stronger. Online games are just beginning and we don’t know yet what the rules are for them. We learn along the way and creating experience on how to set out a great story.

There was also a lot of talk about casual and more accessible games. People want more and more micro-sized content for quick experiences. How Facebook is also a game as it has a repeat until reward structure. Games should be a balance of Mechanics (rules of play), Dynamics (human interaction with rules) en Aesthetics (feel, design, emotion). Those last three just connected too good with our Lable vision of creating balance between Technology (structure), Human and Feeling. Those should be the main design rules of the future!

New view on location

Paul Dourish had some nice insights from aboriginals. How they looked very different to locations, territory, objects. Everything was defined by stories and their influence zones. This kind of thinking could make us very differently to navigation and location based information. He wanted to propose a new vocabulary for this tech: Nomad, pilgrimage, home, colony, asylum, diaspora, migrator etc.

Clash of Nature and Technology

Kevin Warwick, the human cyborg, was a show stealer. He described how he connected a ultra sound sensor to his arm neural system and how he gained a 6th sense of distance. That a human could just learn a sensor so fast. He also connected his neural system to his wive to create the first two brains in one neural system. How they shared the sense of moving hands. His brain was even connected to the internet to control a simple robotic arm thousands of miles away… Cyborgs are getting real… And it sounded like a real enhancement that did not sound scary anymore… But what about the spam you will get

We heard from Mieke Gerritzen how we should accept tech and how we should make it a part of nature. How everything is set to intertwine. How manipulating nature will become the next nature. I did not entirely agree because I think there is still lots to learn from current nature before we declare a next one. We should accept the golden ratio as the main ratio for growth and design.

Sustainability

We can’t continue to consume the way we are. A whole separate track was focused on the environment with key speaker Nobel Prize winner Andy Reisinger. The most head shifting tech featured was a space based solar array with power beaming to the earth as a way to solve future power problems. Also features were technologies to convert people to more sustainable ways of working by peer pressured social networks.

Foresight

We ended with some views on how to see the road ahead but where also warned to look at a higher level to see what other roads will cross this road. William Cockayne and Scott Smith took us on a ride on what a foresighter, like the main audience of Lift, should do to make good foresights.

A foresighter:

• Should be aware
• Scan Collect and Organize Patterns and deep currents and roles
  • Get out on the street
• Have a view but not ideologize
• Stay Grounded
  • Leave behind artefacts

These talks made me aware I am such foresighter. Not focusing on the now but the future by talking around and collecting information and feelings.

The Future

Scott left us with a quote of William Gibson:

The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

I think Lift changed that and created a place of were foresights are made visible. Foresights of a future where humans will live in balance with technology and feelings. A future where they would connect with each other and everything around them to create a more sustainable and efficient balance. We just need to digest everything around us to see how it should be done.

I recognized many pieces of my past journey and was confirmed I am on the right road. It is just about meeting the right people and making it possible.

Yes, it is all just about people.

Visit Lift site for more information. All talks can be viewed on tsr site.

Photo by mrtnk who was sitting besides me while taking photo. It shows the shoes of Lift organizer Laurent Haug opening Lift 08.