Chris posted a link to the story of stuff 20 min video last week. I am re-blogging for two reasons. First it is a really well put together video and a great information piece covering many of the issues I hear the Drivers of Change researchers talking about in a CONNECTED way. Second, the story of stuff website is an excellent example of making it really easy for other people to use your work such as the section on *host a screening* or the provision of embeddable video like this:

Voting closed on the poptech voter after 4500 votes cast...

Chris was at Poptech 2007 last week. Great blog coverage at blogginglive and a nice post by Ethan Zuckerman. Chris used the DoC voting app to canvass opinion on current drivers. The top votes (today) with 85 are Peak Oil and Climate Change with US Fascism taking 59...

The Aurora is huge, a giant skyscraper fallen on its side floating in the sea. It reminded me of one of the concepts developed at a Hotel of the Future event we held in Lausanne a few years ago. I must find out what the staff to guest ratio is but there are staff everywhere (and the majority are Indian)

Amusing opening keynote by Michael Portillo. *A game of two halves* refers to his life before and after his *most humiliating moment* of losing his seat in 1997.I like his basic theme that most people will catastrophically fail at some point yet life still continues and often life is richer as a result (*never trust anyone who has always been successful*!!) Great anecdotes about his Dad and his uncles fighting against each other in the Spanish civil war leading to his father becoming a refugee in England and his time spent with Margerat Thatcher - especially the moment he saw in her eyes that she realised she made a mistake on the day she resigned (he suggested that had she spoken to all the ministers personally the would have supported her - the fact that she didn't was her *arogant* mistake

Left Southampton and awoke to sunrise coming in through window - N49.4299 W2.4994 - Saint Peter Port, Guernsey in the distance - an unexpected observation: even in the flat sees this huge ship still rocks.

Excellent keynote by Tim Collins (Rules of Engagement: A Life in Conflict) if sometimes a little frightening when you realise what he has done in his career to date (i found myself wanting to ask him what it was really like to go into an SAS mission in Sierra Leone... it looked so far removed from this Irish guy in a suit telling jokes on stage)
I liked his description of the 6 characteristics defined by Templar (responsible for British acitivity in Malaysia in the 1950's) that he used when he returned to lead the Royal Irish Regiment after his time in the SAS.
1. prioritise - you have to understand what it is that you are expected to deliver - nice example of Templar camping outside Churchills office until he was told what to do...
2. organisation - what are the roles required to achieve the mission
3. people - excellent descritpion of how the German commander Von Hammerschmidt (sp?) placed his staff in terms of whether they were bright or stupid and lazy or industrious. The bright and lazy are ideal candidates for the leadership (have the ideas but are too lazy to implement it so they are good at delegating), the stupid and lazy are the ideal workers (they just want to be told what to do so that they can then eat and sleep) and the bright and industrious are good as staff sergeants (the middle management who are capable of translating the message between top and bottom and are hardworking enough to go and speak to everyone and make it happen). You have to be careful of the stupid and industrious since they can often cause havoc in any organisation...
4. spirit
5. instructions on daily basis - keep feeding back on progress towards priority
6. let them get on with it.

John Perry, SCALA - how to achieve an energy efficient supply chain
20-25% of delivery vehicles on the roads are run empty (even given the increase in back haul traffic)
KM travelled per pallet - exponential curve showing upto 13km for primary / secondary BUT upto 50km for tertiary (ie the local delivery) the implications here are that local delivery may not be as efficient in terms of number of miles driven (hence increased carbon footprint) according to current practice

We ran two workshops both went well - hoping to post data (along with all research to date) on an external site soon.

In relation to Collins talk, overheard and useful: outcome - the objective that we desire - strategy is the plan for what you will do (in your control) to achieve the outcome.

Amongst others, also met Jonathon Clark (marketing for friends reunited), Sally Uren (Forum for the Future), Chris Arnold (DMA), David Magliano (headed up Londons pitch for the 2012 Olympics), Rob Smith (Go mad thinking), Mark Allat (Conservative way forward), Justin Suter and Matt Hobbs (IBM global consulting) and Richard Wilding (Cranfield)

Andrew Walkingshaw - *sketching* data by creating simple query interfaces based on structured data repositories. Had similarities to the Bricks framework. Generated quite a discussion around how and who should be marking up the content. I liked one of Tim O'Reilly's comments *you need to create the context for a set of interactions* and then gave an example of not just asking parents to contribute to a wiki about baseball games, rather provide them with a system that has all the structure of the little league games, info on who is playing when etc, and then *allow* the parents to upload information such as commentary, photos, organisational data etc *what ever they choose*. Just sitting and listening to all the real examples being cited had my head racing with ideas that i would love to implement on the internal Arup investment and technical news websites.

Josh Koarer and Jon Durant - Incorporating science into social networks. An interesting conversation around citizen science and Josh's idea of subscribing to feeds made by / on behalf of animals at your local zoo (I would definately campaign for that - how cool would it be to get rss or twitters from your favourite bear / penguin / lion...) would probably encourage me to return to the zoo more aswell. Really liked Jon's theme around making the context of science accessible in the built environment. He gave the example of the physical / virtual signposts along the gene-mile in Cambridge. I mentioned the BBC's coast work and urban tapestries project.

Henry Gee - what is sci fi for? Last and really interesting session. Henry works at Nature and amongst other things is responsible for the future article on the back page - he has been soliciting one page sci fi stories from the scientific community and has been getting them at the rate of one a day - wow. It is not about visions of the future, rather a reflection on our current pre-occupations. His biggest plea was for people to write stories not scenarios...

Other notables / things to look up:
Josh Knauer of MAYA: making sensor nodes for home energy monitoring and on sale at home depot
Sara Winge at O'Reilly (conceived with Tim the FOO camps) loved the DoC cards - copies are in the post!
Ditto with Frank Rijsberman at google.org - amongst other things he was very interested in our 2007 cardsets around water, climate change and the 2008 poverty set.
Simon Quellen Field *light tube man* has a cool science toys website
scifoo prototypes on JoVE
Arnab Chatterjee (Shell Amsterdam) interesting work on innovation and gamechanger
Convergence discussion with Denise Caruso and Kim Stanley Robinson. In biotech (DC) how do you assess the risks and how do you *project* 21st century regulation. Risk analysis not cost analysis - see Denise book *intervention* for stories on transgenic food and what the FEA did. Also (KSR) the morph from capitalism to socialism may be occuring due to an increased convergence around economic, social and environmental analysis (see Joseph Schumpeters creative destruction).
Nature scifoo
flickr scifoo
technorati posts and photos
http://www.connotea.org/tag/scifoo
google blog search
and a scifoo facebook group

All in all a fantastic event - many thanks to Tim O'Reilly and the team for the invite.

154 sessions to choose from - hmmm, how do i do that...

Visual Garage - We'll Fix Your Graphs and Visuals with Felice Frankel. Interesting session. Managed to present and get feedback on the Bop visualisations and had some great (if severe) comments. But that is what was great - an open honest critique of what i presented since the room genuinely wanted to help people do stuff better. Wish there was something like her Image and Meaning workshops in the London area. Had a few conversations post session with Tamara Munzner, an infovis expert at Uni British Columbia in Vancouver. She also recommended looking at prefuse

Listening to the World: Voices from the Blue Deep - Chris Clark - great presentation on the convergence of comp sci, maths and nature. He is using the sensors measuring energy in the mid pacific between Hawaii and USA. The military uses this for obvious tracking purposes. Chris has been given access to the data to track *biological objects* which has led to an understanding that type n whales communicate over hundreds of miles. The males *sing* to attract mates. The vis of the data was pretty cool it showed different energy bands (Hz) on the y axis and time on the x. At the top was lots of shipping data and during a few months in the latter half of the year was a very distinct band of *singing*. The speeded up (25x) audio sounded pretty cool. Group also discussed data logging bird activity over space and time and issues around the NSF funded NEON air quality monitoring project in 11 locations across the US (to granular to generate accurate results...?)

Computable Data/Mathematics - next was a demo by Mathmatica guru Theodore Gray, some really nice demos showing very simple and visual programming, worth a browse through

100 dollar laptop demo - Ted Kaehler - pretty nifty little machine and looks great. Had some excellent software written in smalltalk to encourage a very visual, object oriented approach to programming - again website worth a browse.

Freebase Demo - Danny Hillis - convergence of data: we do not necessarily know how our data will be used. Freebase is a framework and application for hosting and sharing data, and a tool for presenting data across mulitple datasets from one source.

Micro-UAVs - Chris Anderson - making sub 1000 USD autonomous aircraft using model planes and phone / camera / gps units. amazingly cool and done with his 9 year old son... see his posting at the long tail blog (yes he did write the book)

Finally was a silent observer during the howtoons sessions - not sure if this was the jet lag setting in or because my brain could not fire as quick as everyone else in the room - amazing, buy the book when it is out in November and i just hope the howtoons party bags make it onto the internet.

The best bit about conferences is actually the time you get to spend with people over lunch, in the breaks and in the bar in the evening. The sci foo events are designed to so that all the time is spent doing those three things...

Arrive at Building 43, Google, Mountain View, looking forward to this invite only unconference. I did not quite understand how the completely open format would work but the answer was very well. Friday started with an introduction to the scifoo concept from Tim from O'Reilly and Timo from Nature, all 200 people introducing themselves using 3 tags that described them and then everyone adding session proposals to the big board. Even though i had not planned to propose a session i found myself volunteering to lead one. It was peculiarly participatory...

The evening ended with 4 great presentations (the only pre-planned parts of the agenda). The first by Drew Endy on the time being right for some real convergence between biology and technology - *creating biological building blocks that others can use, just like we do with lego* and showed the work of school kids who had made eau d'E. coli. as part of the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. Second up was Felice Frankel who showed some fantastic examples of communicating science through photography / imagery. Next up was Saul Griffiths introducing Howtoons (fantastic, am going to Amazon now to pre-order...) with an example from their next phase of work which is looking at communicating energy and climate change. Last up was Charles Simonyi recounting his experience of his *tourist* journey to the international space station earlier this year - also amazing - i liked the fact that when he came back down to earth he found it difficult to move his head under the new forces of gravity so all the first interviews show him being very *stiff headed*. Since Martha Stewart was also present she was asked about the food she had been asked to prepare for the space flight - curious.

I had not met a single person before the event but it was an amazing bunch of people, too many to mention so a list is added in this file, but i liked the fact there was 6 nobel laureates, some great sci fi authors (Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Bear), Tim O'Reilly, Linda Stone, Sergey Brin......

Jump to day 1 entry and day 2 entry

One of the most exciting emails this year came in a month or so ago - an invitation to Science Foo Camp from Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly) and Timo Hannay (Nature) at Google Plex in Mount View, CA. Have just had a quick look at the camp wiki and it already looks like some interesting sessions on data vis are being organised and I hope the demo of the Minimum UAV takes off (excuse the pun). Next step is book the flights and upload a session suggestion around sustainability interfaces in the built environment. Must also think about what gadget I could take to demo what we are thinking about.... looking forward to August...

Whilst in Helsinki i could not resist going to the Left Foot Company and getting measured for a pair of shoes. This was definately the most pleasant shoe purchase i have ever made. Extremely friendly (not pushy) staff, quick but thorough service and in a location that seemed like someones living room. You simply put on some gridded socks, stand on a table, watch as a camera rotates around your feet and hey presto - a 3D map of your feet. Many thanks to Piia for emailing me the screen shot of my feet!

Mass customisation has been a driver of change that has been appearing in many of our future of retail workshops. Nice to actually have some real experience of this... This also reminds me of the SizeUK project and a product offering from Bodymetrics.

btw i ended up going for the 5th Ave's with rubber sole...

The FII team have just completed an impressive briefing (I can be complementary since I was not involved...) at the Arup General Annual Meeting (150 of the firms directors). Chris did a brief intro talking about how "change is constant, context is variable - our work is about looking at our future contexts" and how we use an approach the focuses on "gut + heart + head - we think in that order. we have an idea about what is important, we focus on things we believe in, and finally we analyse to understand the implications of our assumptions".

Jennifer then introduced the DoC 2006 and DoC 2007 research. What i liked was the reminder about the context of the DOC 2006 cards, when you are so close to the project you sometimes forget. It is not a book, not a website but a box of ideas, inspiration and interest. It is being used by corporate R&D labs, schools, associations, product development groups etc and continues to be bought, via word of mouth, from the website. It was also nice to be reminded of what they are "a sifting of the state of research - it allows you to quickly learn the highlights so that you can focus on the issues." This acted as a nice segue into the introduction of the DoC 2007 cardsets which dive one layer down and focuses on 6 themes waste, demographics, climate change, energy, urbanisation, water.

Below are my notes from each of the overviews of the DoC 2007 cardsets.

Waste Rachel Birch
waste generation tends to align with GDP not population size...
18 tetra packs per person on the planet in 2005 where are they all now?
120 yrs for a modern energy from waste incinerator to generate the same amount of dioxins as londons millenium firework display.

Climate Change Jake Hacker
arup journal article *a more balanced and clear / concise explanation of climate change. beats the stern report hands down* very nice complement from a colleague of one of our board directors.
three years ago thought scientific fact was the most important but actually belief is
carbon disclosure project - companies make a social statement by letting others see what their carbon footprint is

Demographics Francesca Birks
all this stuff about waste, climate change and energy is actually created by people - so what are the trends in demographic changes
in last 50 years population has doubled to 6 billion - if this continues as projected imagine what the tube in london will be like.
aging, migration and growth are all happening - the key is to understand the implications of this.

Energy Simon Roberts
Oil: played visualisation / auralisation of soldier death in iraq as background to presentation - *what are wars really about*
eroei energy return on energy investment - how energy generators work out the efficiency of their systems - oil, coal and gas are so much more efficient than alternatives.
Sweden - going oil import independent by 2020 - because economically they cannot rely on importing it.
the power of community - A film about how Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, faced the potential impact of Peak Oil, a term for the time in our history when world oil production will reach its all-time peak and begin to decline forever.

I will be starting research on the theme of Convergence for a 2008 cardset (look out for a category on this blog shortly). The brief is to look at the merging of sciences - biotech, genetech, health leisure, physical virtual - what are the trends and how will it impact the built environment.... so where to start, which FTSE 100 companies, which people to interview.... any and all suggestions welcome.

54000 responses to the survey - pretty good sample size... look at what the crowd of 18-21 year olds are saying about our world in 2031- thanks to Caf for the link.

A kind review of our Drivers of Change cards at Chip Overclock™ blog. Nice to be compared alongside Brian Eno, Tom Peters and IDEO.

Came across this report at Sponge a *sustainabilty development network for property and construction professionals in the UK* via the developing news blog. The MORI report commisioned by Sponge looked at the demand for zero carbon development. An interesting shift in public opinion reports that 64% of homeowners want sustainable features to be compulsory for all new homes but also they are willing to pay more for these features or services. Of interest: 44% don't know how much they spend on utilities per month; 40% of people were willing to pay up to £25 per month for sustainable features.

Engineering News Review podcast a conversation with Chris on the drivers of change research project.

The results from our Drivers of Change survey at the National Retail Federation Conference are up on the driversofchange.com site. Roll over the drivers to see how many votes were cast.

The Arup Foresight Innovation and Incubation team was invited to exhibit in a Design Studio at the National Retail Federation Convention & Expo (12th-14th Jan). The emphasis of the three-day studio programme was to raise awareness of the importance of design in retail.

Arup presence included an exhibit in the design studio reflecting our Songdo, Prada and Wal-Mart retail projects, an interactive Drivers of Change application surveying delegates opinion on what may drive change in the future of retail and Chris Luebkeman's keynote presentation to 2000+ delegates on "The future is over-sold and under-imagined"

The event at the Jacob K Javits Convention Center, New York City, is the biggest retail convention of its kind, all the big players in retail were there, from IBM, through Google, to Microsoft. The organisers of the event are very keen to see more input from design firms working in retail in future events.

More photos on foresightbydesign

Coming up in the pipeline of the *of the future* series of workshops is on the subject of station retail. We have started work with the Narrative Environments students at CSM to create a series of future narratives around this theme. First design crit was held today and work is progressing - research is being posted at the fii delicious account

Anterior Insight is a consumer–focused insight agency providing qualitative market research, forecasting and analysis of the impact that trends and consumer activity have on brands, product development, the potential for new services and business tone of voice. Their first newsletter has trends on retail.

VQR � The Futurist is the precursor to James Othmer's book.

One Day, That Economy Ticket May Buy You a Place to Stand - New York Times Charles forwarded me this link after our recent workshop on Airport Retail. Inevitably part of the discussion ended up around the future of airline interiors and the kind of services that may become available.

What i liked about this article was the standing *harnesses* if only they would make them horizontal for the same cost.....

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.

Chris Jofeh, Director, Ove Arup & Partners will be presenting on Drivers of Change to an audience at the R&D Society - all welcome - Tuesday 25 April 2006, 6.00pm http://www.rdsoc.org/06L4notice.html

Chris is passionate about the role of engineers in dealing with the challenges posed by the consequences of human activities. Until a generation ago many of these consequences were unforeseen or poorly understood. Now they are becoming all too clear. Four major drivers of change of the built environment are climate, energy, water and demographics.

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