Tea, trust, and hacking – how Birmingham is getting Smarter

October 3, 2012 14 Comments

(The Custard Factory in Birmingham, at the heart of the city’s creative media sector)

As I described in my last article on this blog, the second meeting of Birmingham’s Smart City Commission last week addressed the question: “what will make Birmingham a Smart City, not just a place where a few “smart things” happen?

A large part of our discussion was concerned with the way a city-level Smart initiative can engage in and enable the communities and individuals who are already creating innovations in the city.

Nick Booth of Podnosh told the Commission about his work running social media surgeries in Birmingham. Nick helps these conversations to take place across the city’s communities; their purpose is to share an understanding of the power that social media can offer to communities to share resources more effectively and create social value. Nick and the volunteers he works with were recently honoured by the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, with a “Big Society Award” in recognition of their work.

Social media is not the answer to all the challenges of Smarter Cities; but it still has tremendous unrealised potential to contribute to them. I’ve written many times on this blog about the fundamental changes that internet and social media technologies have caused in industries such as publishing, music and video over the last decade; but there are still many communities who are not yet making full use of them.

The physicist and biologist Geoffrey West’s work has shown that the nature of human social behaviour creates a feedback loop that will lead to ongoing growth in the size and density of city populations; and this in turn will create ongoing increases in the consumption of resources. As I remarked recently, there’s a growing consensus that we cannot continue to consume resources at the rate that this growth suggests. The solution, according to Professor West, is to create changes in the way that social and urban systems work. He is not prescriptive about what those changes should be; but in my view we have already seen enough examples of the use of social media to create sustainable systems to suggest that it could be at least part of the solution. Examples include Carbon Voyage‘s system for sharing taxis;  the business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets in sustainable food production operated by Big Barn and Sustaination; and the Freecycle recycling network.

(Photo of a Social Media Surgery held in Birmingham by Nick Booth. The surgeries have now spread across the UK and to five other countries).

The social media surgeries that Nick runs in Birmingham are helping communities to create similar innovations for themselves. What makes them work is the personal philosophy that’s applied by those who engage in them: a willingness to “turn up and have something to offer” in an informal conversation.

In answer to the question “what could make Birmingham a Smart City?”, Nick went so far as to reply “having more conversations over cups of tea”.

Nick’s comment reminded me of one of the quotations from Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai that appears in Jim Jarmusch’s film “Ghost Dog“:

Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige’s wall there was this one: Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Master Ittei wrote: Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

The point is that behaving “lightly” and taking the trouble to go to meet people in the environments where they are comfortable are profoundly important components of the approach that makes social media surgeries work. They create trust, and invite contribution and co-creation. And they encourage those who receive help at one surgery in turn to offer help at another.

Several of us came together in Birmingham last weekend for another conversation to create value in the city: the “Smart Hack” organised by Gavin Broughton at Birmingham Science Park Aston – an example of the increasingly common “hackathons” in which developers contribute their time and expertise to create new “apps” for the cities where they live. I was really pleased that IBM helped to fund the facilities and catering for the event.

(As a brief aside: the word “hacking” can mean many things; but when it is used by computer programmers in this context, it means using technology in a clever and innovative way to solve a problem. It is a very positive activity. Some programmers would even describe the astonishing technology innovations that made it possible to land on the moon in 1969 as “hacks”, and would consider doing so to be a demonstration of their deep respect and admiration for the scientists and engineers involved).

Following a series of introductory provocations about Open Data and Smarter Cities technologies, about thirty of us discussed the challenges and opportunities facing Birmingham that such approaches could apply to. Within a short time, an idea had been proposed which seemed viable – could an “app” be created to connect charities that distribute food to catering services who might have leftover food to spare?

(The discussion group at #SmartHack in Birmingham photographed by Sebastian Lenton)

The importance of addressing wastage and efficiency in urban food systems is something that I’ve written about before on this blog. The idea the Smart Hack team created was carefully formulated as a way to reduce food wastage that would be compliant with food safety and hygiene legislation. A smaller team of 10 or so coders subsequently spent Saturday and Sunday building an app based on the idea, fuelled by beer and pizza – and by their own willingness to contribute to their city.

In Birmingham’s Smart City Commission we discussed how conversations such as social media surgeries and the “Smart Hack” lead to innovation; and asked whether they represent a “soft infrastructure” for Smarter Cities in which it is just as worthwhile to invest as the “hard infrastructure” with which we are perhaps more familiar – open data portals, network infrastructure and so on. I certainly think they do. I’ve spent today at the “Smart Infrastructure” summit organised by IBM and the Start Initiative having a similar discussion focussed on challenges, opportunities and communities in Glasgow, and the same thinking seemed to apply there.

(Coders at work at the Birmingham “Smart Hack”, photographed by Sebastian Lenton)

This approach of engagement through conversation also offers cities a chance to deliver new “hard” infrastructures for Smarter Cities that are better suited to the needs of communities, innovators, citizens and businesses: by becoming a “listening” city, and by understanding and then removing some of the barriers that make it hard for small organisations to create successful innovations. That might mean investing in broadband or wireless internet coverage in areas that don’t have it; making public sector procurement processes more open to small businesses; or simply helping communities to win funding to build better places in which to come together to communicate and create ideas, such as the new “Container City” incubation facility for social enterprises in Sunderland.

The European Union recognised the importance of supporting social innovation this way in a recent report, “Empowering people, driving change – social innovation in the European Union“, and the European Commission’s president José Manuel Barroso will launch a social innovation competition on 1 October, the “Europe Social Innovation Prize“. The Guardian newspaper in the UK wrote an interesting article about these annoucements, and offering several other examples of the power of community-based social innovation.

If we are really going to make our cities “Smarter” and more successful, then we must allow all of the individuals and communities in cities to participate in that process. The way to start doing that is through conversations that build trust and create the environment for inclusive innovation. Tea, trust and hacking. It’s what will make Birmingham – and every other city – Smarter.

(This article and the events it describes are the result of the activities of many people, several of whom appear in the photographs I’ve used by Sebastian Lenton: Nick Booth of Podnosh; Gavin Broughton; David Roberts of DropletPay; James Cattell who following his great work on Open Data for Digital Birmingham has recently joined the Government Digital Service; Andy Mabbett; Oojal Jhutti of iWazat – who first suggested the idea for the food “app” at the “Smart Hack” event; and Andy Cowin of Sanfire who has forgotten more about creating innovation through conversations than I’ll ever know. I also owe a deep debt of thanks to Tom Baker and his colleagues at Sunderland City Council for introducing me to some of the amazing social innovators in Sunderland at the start of our work on Sunderland’s “City Cloud” – they have been an inspiration to me ever since).

Filed under Urbanism Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Four avatars of the metropolis: technologies that will change our cities

August 20, 2012 6 Comments

(Photo of Chicago by Trey Ratcliff)

Many cities I work with are encouraging clusters of innovative, high-value, technology-based businesses to grow at the heart of their economies. They are looking to their Universities and technology partners to assist those clusters in identifying the emerging sciences and technologies that will disrupt existing industries and provide opportunities to break into new markets.

In advising customers and partners on this subject, I’ve found myself drawn to four themes. Each has the potential to cause significant disruptions, and to create opportunities that innovative businesses can exploit. Each one will also cause enormouse changes in our lives, and in the cities where most of us live and work.

The intelligent web

(Diagram of internet tags associated with “Trafalgar” and their connections relevant to the perception of London by visitors to the city by unclesond)

My colleague and friend Dr Phil Tetlow characterises the world wide web as the biggest socio-technical information-computing space that has ever been created; and he is not alone (I’ve paraphrased his words slightly, but I hope he’ll agree I’ve kept the spirit of them intact).

The sheer size and interconnected complexity of the web is remarkable. At the peak of “web 2.0” in 2007 more new information was created in one year than in the preceding 5000 years. More important, though, are the number and speed of  transactions that are processed through the web as people and automated systems use it to exchange information, and to buy and sell products and services.

Larger-scale emergent phenomena are already resulting from this mass of interactions. They include universal patterns in the networks of links that form between webpages; and the fact that the informal collective activity of “tagging” links on social bookmarking sites tends to result in relatively stable vocabularies that describe the content of the pages that are linked to.

New such phenomena of increasing complexity and significance will emerge as the ability of computers to understand and process information in the forms in which it is used by humans grows; and as that ability is integrated into real-world systems. For example, the IBM “Watson” computer that competed successfully against the human champions of the television quiz show “Jeopardy” is now being used to help healthcare professionals identify candidate diagnoses based on massive volumes of research literature that they don’t have the time to read. Some investment funds now use automated engines to make investment decisions by analysing sentiments expressed on Twitter; and many people believe that self-driving cars will become the norm in the future following the award of a driving license to a Google computer by the State of Nevada.

As these astonishing advances become entwined with the growth in the volume and richness of information on the web, the effects will be profound and unpredictable. The new academic discipline of “Web Science” attempts to understand the emergent phenomena that might arise from a human-computer information processing system of such unprecedented scale. Many believe that our own intelligence emerges from complex information flows within the brain; some researchers in web science are considering the possibility that intelligence in some form might emerge from the web, or from systems like it.

That may seem a leap too far; and for now, it probably is. But as cities such as Birmingham, Sunderland and Dublin pursue the “open data” agenda and make progress towards the ideal of an “urban observatory“, the quantity, scope and richness of the data available on the web concerning city systems will increase many-fold. At the same time, the ability of intelligent agents such as Apple’s “Siri” smartphone technology, and social recommendation (or “decision support”) engines such as FourSquare will evolve too. Indeed, the domain of Smarter Cities is in large part concerned with the application of intelligent analytic software to data from city systems. Between the web of information and analytic technologies that are available now, and the possibilities for emergent artificial intelligence in the future, there lies a rich seam of opportunity for innovative individuals, businesses and communities to exploit the intelligent analysis of city data.

Things that make themselves

(Photo of a structure created by a superparamagnetic fluid containing magnetic nanoparticles in suspension, by Steve Jurvetson)

Can you imagine downloading designs for chocolate, training shoes and toys and then making them in your own home, whenever you like? What if you could do that for prosthetic limbs or even weapons?

3D printing makes all of this possible today. While 3D printers are still complex and expensive, they are rapidly becoming cheaper and easier to use. In time, more and more of us will own and use them. My one-time colleague Ian Hughes has long been an advocate; and Staffordshire University make their 3D printer available to businesses for prototyping and exploratory use.

Their spread will have profound consequences. Gun laws currently control weapons which are relatively large and need to be kept somewhere; and which leave a unique signature on each bullet they fire. But if guns can be “printed” from downloadable designs whenever they are required  – and thrown away afterwards because they are so easy to replace – then forensics will rarely in future have the opportunity to match a bullet to a gun that has been fired before. Enforcement of gun ownership will require the restriction of access to digital descriptions of gun designs. The existing widespread piracy of music and films shows how hard it will be to do that.

3D printers, combined with technologies such as social media, smart materials, nano- and bio-technology and mass customisation, will create dramatic changes in the way that physical products are designed and manufactured – or even grown. For example CocoWorks, a collaboration involving Warwick University, uses a combination of social media and 3D printing to allow groups of friends to collectively design confectionery that they can then “print out” and eat.

These changes will have significant implications for city economies. The reduction in wage differentials between developed and emerging economies already means that in some cases it is more profitable to manufacture locally in rapid response to market demand than to manufacture globally at lowest cost. In the near-future technology advances will accelerate a convergence between the advanced manufacturing, design, communication and information technology industries that means that city economic strategies cannot afford to focus on any of them separately. Instead, they should look for new value at the evolving intersections between them.

Of mice, men and cyborgs

(Professor Kevin Warwick, who in 2002 embedded a silicon chip with 100 spiked electrodes directly into his nervous system. Photo by M1K3Y)

If the previous theme represents the convergence of the information world and products and materials in the physical world; then we should also consider convergence between the information world and living beings.

The “mouse” that defined computer usage from the 1980s through to the 2000s was the first widely successful innovation in human/computer interaction for decades; more recently, the touchscreen has once again made computing devices accessible or acceptable to new communities. I have seen many people who would never choose to use a laptop become inseparable from their iPads; and two-year-old children understand them instinctively. The world will change as these people interact with information in new ways.

More exciting human-computer interfaces are already here – Apple’s intelligent agent for smartphones, “Siri”; Birmingham City University’s MotivPro motion-capture and vibration suit; the Emotiv headset that measures thoughts and can interpret them; and Google’s augmented reality glasses.

Even these innovations have been surpassed by yet more intimate connections between ourselves and the information world. Professor Kevin Warwick at Reading University has pioneered the embedding of technology into the human body (his own body, to be precise) since 2002; and in the effort to create ever-smaller pilotless drone aircraft, control technology has been implanted into insects. There are immense ethical and legal challenges associated with these developments, of course. But it is certain that boundaries will crumble between the information that is processed on a silicon substrate; information that is processed by DNA; and the actions taken by living people and animals.

Historically, growth in Internet coverage and bandwidth and the progress of digitisation technology led to the disintermediation of value chains in industries such as retail, publishing and music. As evolving human/computer interfaces make it possible to digitise new aspects of experience and expression, we will see a continuing impact on the media, communication and information industries. But we will also see unexpected impacts on industries that we have assumed so far to be relatively immune to such disruptions: surgery, construction, waste management, landscape gardening and arbitration are a few that spring to mind as possibilities. (Google futurist Thomas Frey speculated along similar lines in his excellent article “55 Jobs of the Future“).

Early examples are already here, such as Paul Jenning’s work at Warwick University on the engineering of the emotional responses of drivers to the cars they are driving. Looking ahead, there is enormous scope amidst this convergence for the academic, entrepreneurial and technology partners within city ecosystems to collaborate to create valuable new ideas and businesses.

Bartering 2.0

(Photo of the Brixton Pound by Matt Brown)

Civilisation has grown through the specialisation of trades and the diversification of economies. Urbanisation is defined in part by these concepts. They are made possible by the use of money, which provides an abstract quantification of the value of diverse goods and services.

However, we are increasingly questioning whether this quantification is complete and accurate, particularly in accounting for the impact of goods and services on the environments and societies in which they are made and delivered.

Historically, money replaced bartering,  a negotiation of the comparative value of goods and services within an immediate personal context, as the means of quantifying transactions. The abstraction inherent in money dilutes some of the values central to the bartering process. The growing availability of alternatives to traditional bartering and money is making us more conscious of those shortcomings and trade-offs.

Social media, which enables us to make new connections and perform new transactions, combined with new technology-based local currencies and trading systems, offer the opportunity to extend our personalised concepts of value in space and time when negotiating exchanges; and to encourage transactions that improve communities and their environments.

It is by no means clear what effect these grass-roots innovations will have on the vast system of global finance; nor on the social and environmental impact of our activities. But examples are appearing everywhere; from the local, “values-led” banks making an impact in America; to the widespread phenomenon of social enterprise; to the Brixton and Bristol local currencies; and to Droplet, who are aiming to make Birmingham the first city with a mobile currency.

These local currency mechanisms have the ability to support marketplaces trading goods and services such as food, energy, transport, expertise and many of the other commodities vital to the functioning of city economies; and those marketplaces can be designed to promote local social and environmental priorities. They have an ability that we are only just beginning to explore to augment and accelerate existing innovations such as the business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets in sustainable food production operated by Big Barn and Sustaination; or what are so far simply community self-help networks such as Growing Birmingham.

As Smarter City infrastructures expose increasingly powerful and important capabilities to such enterprises – including the “civic hacking” movement – there is great potential for their innovations to contribute in significant ways to the sustainable growth and evolution of cities.

Some things never change

Despite these incredible changes, some things will stay the same. We will still travel to meet in person. We like to interact face-to-face where body language is clear and naturally understood, and where it’s pleasant to share food and drink. And the world will not be wholly equal. Humans are competitive, and human ingenuity will create things that are worth competing for. We will do so, sometimes fairly, sometimes not.

It’s also the case that predictions are usually wrong and futurologists are usually mistaken; so you have good cause to disregard everything you’ve just read.

But whether or not I have the details right, these trends are real, significant, and closer to the mainstream than we might expect. Somewhere in a city near you, entrepreneurs are starting new businesses based on them. Who knows which ones will succeed, and how?

Filed under Science & Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The amazing heart of a Smarter City: the innovation boundary

August 13, 2012 23 Comments

(Photo of a mouse by pure9)

Innovation has always been exciting, interesting and valuable; but recently it’s become essential.

The “mouse” that defined computer usage from the 1980s through to the 2000s was an amazing invention in its time. It was the first widely successful innovation in human/computer interaction since the typewriter keyboard and video display which came decades before it; and it made computers accessible to new communities of people for the first time.

But whilst the mouse, like the touchscreen more recently popularised by the iPhone and iPad, was a great innovation that increased the usability and productivity of personal computers, it wasn’t really necessary for a greater and pressing purpose. Its benefits came later as we explored its capabilities.

We now have a greater purpose that demands innovation: the need to make our cities and communities more sustainable, vibrant and equal in the face of the severe economic, environmental and demographic pressures that we face; and that are well described in the Royal Society’s “People and the Planet” report.

We have already seen those pressures create threats to food and energy security; and in recent months I’ve spoken to city leaders who are increasingly concerned with the difference in life expectancy between the most affluent and most deprived areas of their cities – it can be 10 years or more. There are much worse inequalities on a global scale, of course. But this is a striking local difference in the basic opportunity of people to live.

Barnett Council in North London famously predicted recently that within 20 years, unless significant changes in public services are made, they will be unable to afford to provide any services except social care. There will be no money left to collect waste, run parks and leisure facilities, clean streets or operate any of the other services that support and maintain cities and communities. I have spoken informally to other Councils who have come to similar conclusions.

All the evidence, including the scientific analysis of the behaviour and sustainability of city systems by the Physicist Geoffrey West, points to the need to create innovations that change the way that cities work.

But where will this innovation come from?

I think innovation of this sort takes place at an “innovation boundary”: the boundary between capability and need.

When a potentially transformative infrastructure such as a Smarter City technology platform is designed and deployed well, then the services it provides precisely embody that boundary.

This idea is fundamental to the concept of Smarter Cities, where we are concerned with the capability of technology to transform cities. Technology vendors – including, but not limited to, my employer IBM – are sometimes expected to use the Smarter City movement as a channel through which to sell generic technology platforms. As vendors, we do deliver technology platforms for cities, and they are part of the capability required to transform them. But they are not the only part – far from it. And they must not be generic.

(A smartphone alert sent to a commuter in a San Francisco pilot project by IBM Research and Caltrans that provides personalised daily predictions of commuting journey times – and suggestions for alternative routes.)

As I hope regular readers of this blog will know, I often explore the role of people and communities in transforming how cities work. A city is the combined effect of the behaviour of all of the people in it – whether they are buying food in a supermarket, traveling to work, relaxing in a park, planning an urban development or teaching in a school. No infrastructure – whether it is a road, a building, a broadband network or an intelligent energy grid – will have a transformative effect on a city unless it engages with individuals in a way that results in a change of behaviour. Work by my colleagues in IBM on transportation in California (pictured, left) and on water and energy usage in Dubuque, Iowa provide examples of what can be achieved when technology solutions are designed in the context of individual and community behaviour.

The innovations that discover how technology can change behaviour are sometimes very localised. They can be specific to the nature, challenges and opportunities of local communities; and are often therefore created by individuals, entrepreneurs, businesses and social enterprises within them. The “civic hacking” and “open data” movements are great examples of this sort of creativity.

But this is not the only sort of innovation that is required to enable Smarter City transformations. The infrastructures that support cities literally provide life-support to hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals. They must be highly resilient, performant and secure – particularly as they become increasingly optimised to support larger and larger city populations sustainably.

The invention, design, deployment and operation of Smarter City infrastructures require the resources of large organisations such as technology vendors, infrastructure providers, local governments and Universities who are able to make significant investments in them.

The secret to successfully transforming cities lies at the boundary between local innovations and properly engineered platforms. “Smarter City” transformations are effective when new and resilient information infrastructures are designed and deployed to meet the specific needs of city communities. One size does not fit all.

A technology infrastructure is no different in this regard to a physical infrastructure such as a new urban highway. In each case, there are some requirements that are obvious and generic – getting traffic in and out of a city centre more efficiently; or  making superfast broadband connectivity universally accessible. But other crucially important requirements are more complex, subtle and varied. How can a new road be integrated into the existing environment of a city so that local communities benefit from it, and so that it does not divide them? What access points, support and funding assistance are needed so that communities can use superfast broadband networks; and what services and information can be delivered to them using those networks that will make a difference?

If we understand those requirements, we can design infrastructures that properly support the innovation boundary. Doing so demands that we address three challenges:

Firstly, we must identify the specific information and technology services that can be provided to individuals, communities, entrepreneurs, businesses and social enterprises to help them succeed and grow. I’ve referred many times to the Knight Foundation’s excellent work in this area; it has inspired my own work with entrepreneurs and social enterprises in Sunderland and elsewhere.

(Meeting with social entrepreneurs in Sunderland to understand how new technology can help them)

Secondly, we need to understand and then supply the heavily engineered capabilities that are beyond the means of local communities to deliver for themselves; but that which enable them to create innovations with real significance.

At the 3rd EU Summit on Future Internet, Juanjo Hierro, Chief Architect for the FI-WARE “future internet platform” project, addressed this topic and identified the specific challenges that local innovators need help to overcome, and that could by provided by city information infrastructures. His challenges included: real-time access to information from physical city infrastructures; tools for analysing “big data“; and access to technologies to ensure privacy and trust. As we continue to engage with communities of innovators in cities, we will discover other requirements of this sort.

Finally, the boundary needs to be defined by standards. Many cities will deploy many information infrastructures, and many different vendors will be involved in supplying them. In order that successful local innovations can spread and interact with each other, Smarter City infrastructures should support Open Standards and interoperability with Open Source technologies.

It will take work to achieve that, of course. It is very easy to underestimate the complexity of the standards required to achieve interoperability. For example, in order to make it possible to safely change something as simple as a lightbulb, standards for voltage, power, physical dimensions, brightness, socket shape and fastening type, fragility and heat output are required. Some standards for Smarter City infrastructures are already in place – for example, Web services and the Common Alerting Protocol – but many others will need to be invented and encouraged to spread. Fortunately, the process is already underway. As an example, IBM recently donated MQTT, a protocol for connecting information between small devices such as sensors and actuators in Smarter City systems to the Open Source community.

(The first “Local Gov Camp” unconference in 2009, attended by community innovators with an interest in transforming local services, held in Fazeley Studios in Birmingham. Photo by s_p_a_c_e_m_a_n)

In the meantime, the innovation boundary is an amazing place to work. It puts me in contact with the leading edge of technology development – with IBM Research, and with new products such as the Intelligent Operations Centre for Smarter Cities. And it offers me the chance to collaborate with the academic institutions and thought-leaders who are defining the innovation boundary through initiatives such as “disruptive business platforms” (see this work from Imperial college, or these thoughts from my colleague Pete Cripps).

But more importantly, my work puts me in touch with innovators who are creating exciting and inspiring new ways for cities to work; often in the communities that need the most help, such as Margaret Elliott in Sunderland; Mark Heskett-Saddington of Sustainable Enterprise Strategies; and the team at Droplet in Birmingham.

I count myself terrifically honoured and lucky to have the privilege of working with them.

Filed under Smarter Cities Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Can cities break Geoffrey West’s laws of urban scaling?

July 23, 2012 23 Comments

(Photo of Kowloon by Frank Müller)

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I recently read Geoffrey West’s fascinating paper on urban scaling laws, “Growth, innovation, scaling and the pace of life in cities“.

The paper applies to cities techniques that I recall from my Doctoral studies in the Physics and Engineering of Superconducting Devices for studying the emergent properties of self-organising complex systems.

Cities, being composed of 100,000s or millions of human beings with free-will who interact with each other, are clearly examples of such complex systems; and their emergent properties of interest include economic output, levels of crime, and expenditure on maintaining and expanding physical infrastructures.

It’s a less intimidating read than it might sound, and draws fascinating conclusions about the relationship between the size of city populations; their ability to create wealth through innovation; sustainability; and what many of us experience as the increasing speed of modern life.

I’m going to summarise the conclusions the paper draws about the characteristics and behaviour of cities; and then I’d like to challenge us to change them.

Professor West’s paper (which is also summarised in his excellent TED talk) uses empirical techniques to present fascinating insights into how cities have performed in our experience so far; but as I’ve argued before, such conclusions drawn from historic data do not rule out the possibility of cities achieving different levels of performance in the future by undertaking transformations.

That potential to transform city performance is vitally important in the light of West’s most fundamental finding: that the largest, densest cities currently create the most wealth most efficiently. History shows that the most successful models spread, and in this case that could lead us towards the higher end of predictions for the future growth of world population in a society dominated by larger and larger megacities supported by the systems I’ve described in the past as “extreme urbanism“.

I personally don’t find that an appealing vision for our future so I’m keen to pursue alternatives. (Note that Professor West is not advocating limitless city growth either; he’s simply analysing and reporting insights from the available data about cities, and doing it in an innovative and important way. I am absolutely not criticising his work; quite the oppostite – I’m inspired by it).

So here’s an unfairly brief summary of his findings:

  • Quantitative measures of the creative performance of cities (such as wealth creation or the number of patents and inventions generated by city populations) – grow faster and faster the more that city size increases.
  • Quantitative measures of the cost of city infrastructures grow more slowly as city size increases, because bigger cities can exploit economies of scale to grow more cheaply than smaller cities.

West found that these trends were incredibly consistent across cities of very different sizes. To explain the consistency, he drew an analogy with biology: for almost all animals, characteristics such as metabolic rate and life expectancy vary in a very predictable way according to the size of the animal.

(Photo of Geoffery West describing the scaling laws that determine animal characteristics by Steve Jurvetson). Note that whilst the chart focusses on mammals, the scaling laws are more broadly applicable.

The reason for this is that the performance of the thermodynamic, cardio-vascular and metabolic systems that support most animals in the same way are affected by size. For example, geometry determines that the surface area of small animals is larger compared to their body mass than that of large animals. So smaller animals lose heat through their skin more rapidly than larger animals. They therefore need faster metabolic systems that convert food to replacement heat more rapidly to keep them warm. This puts more pressure on their cardio-vascular systems and in particular their heart muscles, which beat more quickly and wear out sooner. So mice don’t live as long as elephants.

Further, more complex mechanisms are also involved, but they don’t contradict the idea that the emergent properties of biological systems are determined by the relationship between the scale of those systems and the performance of the processes that support them.

Professor West hypothesised that city systems such as transportation and utilities, as well as characteristics of the way that humans interact with each other, would similarly provide the underlying reasons for the urban scaling laws he observed.

Those systems are exactly what we need to affect if we are to change the relationship between city size and performance in the future. Whilst the cardio-vascular systems of animals are not something that animals can change, we absolutely can change the way that city systems behave – in the same way that as human beings we’ve extended our life expectancy through ingenuity in medicine and improvements in standards of living. This is precisely the idea behind Smarter cities.

(A graph from my own PhD thesis showing real experimental data plotted against a theoretical prediction similar to a scaling law. Notice that whilst the theoretical prediction (the smooth line) is a good guide to the experimental data, that each actual data point lies above or below the line, not on it. In most circumstances, theory is only a rough guide to reality.)

The potential to do this is already apparent in West’s paper. In the graphs it presents that plot the performance of individual cities against the predictions of urban scaling laws, the performance of every city varies slightly from the law. Some cities outperform, and some underperform. That’s exactly what we should expect when comparing real data to an analysis of this sort. Whilst the importance of these variations in the context of West’s work is hotly contested, both in biology and in cities, personally I think they are crucial.

In my view, such variations suggest that the best way to interpret the urban scaling laws that Professor West discovered is as a challenge: they set the bar that cities should try to beat.

Cities everywhere are already exploring innovative, sustainable ways to create improvements in the performance of their social, economic and environmental systems. Examples include:

(Photograph by Meshed Media of Birmingham’s Social Media Cafe, where individuals from every part of the city who have connected online meet face-to-face to discuss their shared interest in social media.)

In all of those cases, cities have used technology effectively to disrupt and transform the behaviour of urban systems. They have all lifted at least some elements of performance above the bar set by urban scaling laws. There are many more examples in cities across the world. In fact, this process has been taking place continuously for as long as cities have existed – see, for example, the recent Centre for Cities report on the development and performance of cities in the UK throughout the 20th Century.

That report contains a specific challenge for Birmingham, my home city. It shows that in the first part of the 20th Century, Birmingham outperformed many UK cities and became prosperous and successful because of the diversity of its industries – famously expressed as the “city of a thousand trades”. In the latter part of the Century, however, as Birmingham became more dependent on an automotive industry that subsequently declined, the city lost a lot of ground. Birmingham is undertaking some exciting regenerative initiatives at present – such as the City Deal that increases it’s financial independence from Central Government; the launch of a Green Commission; and investments in ultra-fast broadband infrastructure. They are vitally important in order for the city to re-create a more vibrant, diverse, innovative and successful economy.

As cities everywhere emulate successful innovations, though, they will of course reset the bar of expected performance. Cities that wish to consistently outperform others will need to constantly generate new innovations.

This is where I’ll bring in another idea from physics – the concept of a phase change. A phase change occurs when a system passes a tipping point and suddenly switches from one type of behaviour to another. This is what happens when the temperature of water in a kettle rises from 98 to 99 to 100 degrees Centigrade and water – which is heavy and stays in the bottom of the kettle – changes to steam – which is light and rises out of the kettle’s spout. The “phase change” in this example is the transformation of a volume of water from a liquid to a gas through the process of boiling.

So the big question is: as we change the way that city systems behave, will we eventually encounter a phase change that breaks West’s fundamental finding that the largest cities create the most value most efficiently? For example, will we find new technologies for communication and collaboration that enable networks of people spread across thousands of miles of countryside or ocean to be as efficiently creative as the dense networks of people living in megacities?

I certainly hope so; because unless we can break the link between the size and the success of cities, I worry that the trend towards larger and larger cities and increasing global population will continue and eventually reach levels that will be difficult or impossible to maintain. West apparently agrees; in an interview with the New York Times, which provides an excellent review of his work, he stated that “The only thing that stops the superlinear equations is when we run out of something we need. And so the growth slows down. If nothing else changes, the system will eventually start to collapse.”

But I’m an optimist; so I look forward to the amazing innovations we’re all going to create that will break the laws of urban scaling and offer us a more attractive and sustainable future. It’s incredibly important that we find them.

(I’d like to think Dr. Pam Waddell, the Director of Birmingham Science City, for her helpful comments during my preparation of this post).

Filed under Science & Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The simple idea behind Smarter Cities: take better-informed, more forward-looking decisions

July 11, 2012 6 Comments

(Photo by Tanakawho)

I’m sometimes staggered by the sheer breadth of topics that we concern ourselves with in working to make cities Smarter. We encompass technology, social systems, the individual motivation of citizens, financial models, and the really big challenges of demographics and sustainability in our thinking.

I’m also struck by the level of sophistication of some of that debate. This week, I finally read the great paper by Geoffrey West and colleagues on urban scaling laws, “Growth, innovation, scaling and the pace of life in cities“. The paper applies to cities techniques that I recall from my Doctoral studies in the Physics and Engineering of Superconducting Devices for studying the emergent properties of self-organising complex systems. (Translate that to “understanding the outcomes of the interactions between the 100,000s or millions of human beings with free will who inhabit cities” and I hope you can see the similarity).

The paper is a less intimidating read than it might sound, and draws fascinating conclusions about the relationship between the size of city populations; their ability to create wealth through innovation; sustainability; and what many of us experience as the increasing speed of modern life. It’s well worth reading, as are David Roberts’ recent thoughts on the same subject on the Birmingham Science City blog.

However, I like to keep my feet on the ground; and there’s a very simple way of thinking about what’s really important about Smarter Cities.

I’m not thinking of the challenges facing our cities and societies – I’ve touched on those in numerous other blog posts, especially here and here. Rather, I’m concerned with what I think is the straightforward elegance of the proposition that technology offers us to address them.

Technology has developed in recent years at an incredible rate in three ways that are relevant to this discussion. For a long time, IBM has termed them “Instrumented, Interconnected and Intelligent”.

“Instrumented” refers to our increasingly sophisticated ability to connect Information Technology systems with the physical world; whether that’s through sensors that measure the performance of environmental infrastructures; through integrating technology more closely with our own bodies; or through controlling the physical environment via technologies such as actuators and 3D printing.

“Interconnected” refers to the continued growth in the bandwidth and coverage of communication infrastructures, particularly the internet. Whilst very, very significant challenges remain – such as the lack of access to broadband connectivity of large swathes of the population, or the lack of cheap, low-power connectivity at ground level where the components of environmental infrastructures are located – in general, communication and connectivity have improved out of all recognition in recent years.

(IBM’s Watson computer challenges human opponents in the US TV quiz show Jeopardy)

“Intelligent” refers to our capability to make sense of the ever increasing volume of data made available by instrumented, interconnected systems. Computers can now process data to the extent that they can compete successfully against human beings in general knowledge TV game shows; predict the occurrence of crime; and help healthcare professionals make accurate diagnoses based on research literature they’ve never read. Throughout my life I’ve read a lot of science fiction that has predicted a lot of amazing things; but none of it foresaw anything as impressive as these achievements.

I can sum up all of this in a single sentance that encapsulates the value technology brings to Smarter Cities:

By making more complete and accurate information available to decision makers, we can enable them to take better-informed, more forward-looking decisions.

Simple common sense tells us that if we implemented that idea across city systems, we would improve any number of social, environmental and financial outcomes. Real examples of enacting that principle already exist in such diverse areas as preventative social care in Medway and enabling commuters to take better travel choices in California.

(The city operations centre in Rio de Janeiro provides the city’s management team with incredibly rich information on which to base decisions.)

A really exciting possibility for the future lies in the ability of local currencies and trading systems to enable consumers and citizens to take such choices more frequently throughout their everyday lives. Such systems can incorporate regional social and environmental impact in the apparent cost of goods and services. Whilst today that ability is limited to goods and services created within the scope of the trading system, in future the Open Data movement will increasingly make the social and environmental footprint of all goods and services transparent such that local trading schemes can incorporate them. For my money, that’s a truly exciting prospect for the future.

The challenge that prevents us from enacting this principle more frequently is implicit in my description of it. Providing more complete and accurate information has an upfront cost; but the financial returns that follow from “more forward-looking” decisions by definition are realised after some period of time. Worse; the organisational and budgetary structure of cities imply that the organisations responsible for those upfront costs are rarely the ones that are able to realise the consequent financial benefits.

In the last couple of points, my focus shifted from “social, environmental and financial” outcomes to “financial benefits”. The former might be the ultimate objectives of cities considering Smarter City initiatives; but they will only win investment funding where they can demonstrate short term financial returns for investors.

So in arguing that there’s a simple way to describe the core idea that underpins Smarter Cities, I’m not arguing that it’s a simple matter to secure the funding to implement it. However, securing such funding from decision makers and investors who are short of time and who are not from a technical background could certainly be made easier by communicating to them a simple idea that’s rooted in common sense.

And that’s exactly how I think we can and should describe Smarter Cities; so I’ll do it again for completeness: use more complete and accurate information to take better-informed, more forward-looking decisions.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Filed under Smarter Cities Tagged with , , , , , , ,

How cities can exploit the Information Revolution

June 9, 2012 6 Comments

(This post was first published as part of the “Growth Factory” report from the thinktank TLG Lab).

(Graphic of New York’s ethnic diversity from Eric Fischer)

Cities and regions in the UK face ever-increasing economic, social and environmental challenges. They compete for investment in what is now a single global economy. Demographics are changing with more than 90% of the population now living in urban areas, and where the number of people aged over 65 will double to 19 million by 2050. The resources we consume are becoming more expensive, with cities especially vulnerable to disruptions in supply.

The concept of “Smarter systems” has captured the imagination of experts as an approach to turn these challenges into opportunities for more sustainable economic and social growth; particularly in cities, where most of us live and work. Smarter systems – in cities, transportation, government and industry –can analyse the vast amounts of data being generated around us to help make more informed decisions, operate more efficiently or even predict the future.

These systems enable city planners around the world to design urban environments that promote safety, community vitality and economic growth. They can bring real-time information together from city transportation, social media, emergency services and leisure facilities to better enable cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, to manage major public events. They can enable transport systems to better manage traffic flow and reduce congestion, as in Singapore. They can stimulate economic growth by enabling small businesses to better compete for business in collaboration with regional trading partners, in systems such as that operated by the University of Warwick.

Government policies such as Open Data, personal care budgets and open public services will dramatically increase the information available to citizens to help them take well-informed decisions. This information will be rich, complex and associated with caveats and conditions. Making it usable by the broad population is an immense challenge which will not be addressed by technology alone. Data needs not only to be made available, but understandable so that it can inform better decision-making.

Where does Smarter city data come from?

Raw data for Smarter systems is derived from three sources: the city’s inhabitants, existing IT systems and readings from the physical environment.

Information from people has become more accessible with the continued spread of connected mobile devices, such as smartphones. Open Street Map, for example, provides a global mapping information service sourced from the activities of volunteers with portable satellite navigation devices. However, the quality and availability of crowd-sourced information depends on the availability and resources of volunteers, who cannot be held accountable for whether information is accurate, complete or up-to-date.

It is also important to understand data ownership and the associated privacy concerns. There is a difference between data freely and knowingly contributed by an individual for a specific purpose and information created as a side-effect of their activity – for example, the record of a person’s movements created by the GPS sensor in their smartphone.

The Open Data movement, supported by central government, will dramatically increase the availability of data from public systems. For example, efforts are underway to make NHS healthcare data available, with appropriate security measures, to Life Sciences organisations to reinforce the UK’s pre-eminent position in drug discovery research. However, the infrastructure required to make large volumes of data widely and rapidly available in a usable form will not be created for free. Until their cost is included in future government procurements – or until commercial systems of funding are created – then much data will likely only be made open on a more limited “best efforts” basis.

Furthermore, not all city data is held by public bodies. Many transportation and utility systems are owned and operated by the private sector, and it is not generally established what information they should make available, and how. Many Smarter city systems that use data from such sources are private partnerships rather than open systems.

Meanwhile, certain kinds of data are becoming far more accessible through the advancing ability of computer systems to understand human language. IBM’s Watson computer demonstrated this recently by competing and winning against world champions in the American television quiz show, Jeopardy! Wellpoint is using this kind of technology to draw insight from medical information held in similar forms. Its aim is to better tackle diseases such as cancer by empowering physicians to rapidly evaluate potential diagnoses and explore the latest supporting medical evidence. Similar technology can draw insight from case notes in social care systems, as Medway Youth Trust is doing, or from the reports of engineers maintaining roads, sewers, and other city systems.

An early “mashup” application using open data from Chicago’s police force

Information is also becoming more readily available from the physical environment. In Galway Bay, a network of underwater microphones is connected to a system that can identify and locate the sounds of dolphins and porpoises. Their location provides a dynamic indication of which parts of the Bay have the cleanest water. That information is made available to companies in the Bay to allow them to control their discharges of water; and to the fishing and leisure industries who are dependent on marine life. This Open Data approach is being used by cities across the world such as Dublin, Chicago and London as a resource for citizens and businesses.

Whilst advances in technology have lowered the cost of generating information from physical environments, challenges remain. From the perspective of a mobile telephone user, much of the UK has signal coverage. However, telephones are used one metre or more above ground level; at ground level, where many parts of our transport and utility infrastructures are located, coverage is much poorer. Additionally, mobile transmitters and receivers are relatively expensive and power-hungry. Cheaper, lower power technologies are needed to improve coverage, such as the “Weightless” standard being developed to use transmission bandwidth no-longer needed by analogue television.

Using and combining data appropriately

In order to make information from multiple sources available appropriately and usefully, several issues need to be tackled.

When computer systems are used to analyse information and take decisions, then the data formats and protocols used by those systems need to be matched. Information as simple as locations and dates may need to be converted between formats. At an engineering level, the protocols used to transmit data across cities using wired or wireless communications behave differently and require systems that integrate them.

The meaning of information from related sources also needs to be understood and adapted to context. Citizens who go shopping in wheelchairs need to know how to get between car-parks and shops with lifts, accessible public toilets and cash points. However, the computer systems of the organisations who own those facilities will encode the information separately, in ways that support their efficient management, not that support journey-planning between them.

The City of Portland in Oregon has gone further in a project to understand how information from systems across the city is related. They are now able to better predict the impact that key decisions will have on the entire city, years in advance.

Privacy and ownership of data may affect its subsequent use, often with terms and conditions in place for governing its access. Furthermore, safeguards are required to ensure that sensitive information cannot be inferred from a combination of sources. For example the location of a safe house or shelter being identified from building usage, building ownership and /or information concerning taxi journeys by the employees of particular council agencies.

The human dimension

Smarter systems will only succeed in improving cities if there is wide consumer engagement. To be of value, information will likely need to be timely and presented in a manner appropriate to consumer context. Individual behaviour will only change where personal value is derived as a result of new information being presented – a saving in time or money, or access to something of value to their family.

(Photo of traffic in Dhaka, Bangladesh, from Joisey Showa)

Many cities are experimenting with technologies that predict the future build up of traffic, by comparing real-time measurements to databases of past patterns of traffic flow. In Stockholm, this information is used by a road-use charging system that supports variable pricing. In California, commuters in a pilot project were given personalised predictions of their commuting time each day. Both systems encourage individuals to make choices based on new information.

Utility providers are exploring how information from smart meters can encourage water and energy users to change behaviour. A recent study in Dubuque, Iowa, showed that when householders were shown how their water usage compared to the average for their neighbours, they became better at conserving water – by fixing leaks, or using domestic appliances more efficiently. Skills across artistic and engineering disciplines are helping us understand how this type of information can be communicated more effectively. Many people will not want to study figures and charts on a smart meter or website; instead “ambient” information sources may be more effective – such as a glow-globe that changes colour from green to orange to red depending on household electricity use.

Systems that improve the sustainability of cities could also affect economic development. Lowering congestion through Smarter transportation schemes can improve productivity by reducing time lost by workers delayed by traffic. By making information and educational resources widely available, Smarter systems could improve access to opportunity across city communities. A city with vibrant communities of well-informed citizens may appear a more forward-looking and attractive place to live for educated professionals and, in turn, for businesses considering relocation. New York has improved its attractiveness since the 1970s by lowering the fear of crime. One of its tools is a “real-time crime centre” that brings information together from across the city in order to better react to crime and public order incidents. The system can even help to prevent crime by intelligently deploying police resources to the areas most likely to experience incidents based on past patterns of activity – on days with similar weather, transportation conditions or public events.

Success in delivering against these broader objectives is much more likely to be achieved where the cities themselves are more clearly accountable for them.

So where do we start?

Investments in Smarter systems often cut across organisations and budgets and many have objectives that are macro-economic, social and environmental, as well as financial. As such, they challenge existing accounting mechanisms. Whilst central government and the financial markets offer new investment solutions such as ethical funds, social impact bonds and city deals, so far these have not been used to fund the majority of Smarter solutions – many of which are supported by research programmes. The Technology Strategy Board’s investment in areas such as “Future Cities” and the “Connected Digital Economy” will provide a tremendous boost, but there is much to be done to assist cities in using new investment sources to fund Smarter initiatives – or to develop sustainable commercial or social-enterprise business models to deliver them.

Although progress can be driven by strong leadership, the issues of governance and fragmented budgets will need to be overcome if we are to take full advantage of the benefits technology can bring.

We live in an era of major global challenges – well described in the recent “People and the Planet” report by the Royal Society. At the same time, we have access to powerful new technologies and ideas to address them, such as those proposed by the 100 Academics who contributed essays to the book “The New Optimists”. When we focus those resources on cities, we focus on the structures in which we can have the greatest impact on the most people.

Already many forward-looking cities in the UK such as Sunderland and Birmingham are joining others around the world by investing in Smarter systems. If we can meet the technical, organisational and investment challenges, we will not only provide citizens, businesses and agencies with new choices and exciting opportunities; we’ll also position the UK economy to succeed as the Information Revolution gathers pace.

Filed under Science & Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Open Data isn’t free data

March 9, 2012 8 Comments

An early mashup using open data from Chicago’s police force

I support the principle of Open Data; and I’ve been creating commercial value from it since at least 2007, when as part of IBM’s Emerging Technologies team I developed scenarios to show how our customers could exploit it using early implementations of “Mashup” technology.

Here’s an example of what we were up to in those days, using alpha code for IBM Mashup Centre to integrate open data from Chicago’s public services with business data from insurance applications running in CICS. CICS is a transaction engine that’s now 43 years old and is used by 90% of Fortune 500 companies. When you take money out of a cashpoint, book an airline seat or renew your home insurance, there’s a decent chance CICS is involved somewhere. So there was (and is) vast economic potential in what we were doing.

But it’s not always straightforward to realise that value. It’s no accident we based our demonstration scenario in Chicago, which has long been at the leading edge of cities promoting Open Data. (It’s well worth catching up with how Chicago’s new CTO John Tolva is driving this agenda forwards, by the way). At the time, many other cities published similar data; but it wasn’t usable in the same way that Chicago’s was. It had been published in the form that was possible, cheaply, rather than in a form that was useful.

My point is: Open Data won’t deliver the value we all want it to unless we answer some hard questions. Such as:

Who will use Open Data, and why?

There are too many Open Data sites that don’t attract users and activity; so the investment in operating them doesn’t result in the creation of new value. That’s a shame; and we should try to understand why it happens. Often, I think it’s because they focus on making as much data as possible available in whatever form it’s in.

The Knight Commission report “The Information Needs of Communities” emphasised instead the need to consult with communities to find out what they need, rather than to publish data in anticipation of innovation. They are now publishing further guidance on implementing their ideas to promote open government.

Obviously, the problem with the extreme of this position is that if we restrict our Open Data efforts to providing only that data which is proven to be required through extensive consultation, we will limit the opportunity for spontaneous innovation. So a balance needs to be found.

How much does open data cost?

My experience building Open Data scenarios for our early Mashup technology taught me that high quality open data in a useable form was very rare. That’s because it’s expensive.

If producing highly usable information from the applications that manage the world’s information was easy or cheap, a good part of the IT industry would disappear overnight (whether you think that would be good or bad: it hasn’t happened). If we want usable data, we’re going to have to find ways and reasons to pay for it.

The cost to public sector organisations of processing Freedom of Information requests will sometimes provide the business case for spending money to open up data, but not always. Recent Government initiatives to make Open Data a criteria of future procurements will bake the cost of it into vendor proposals; but that won’t address the cost of opening up data from existing systems.

Finally, there will be many cases where clear value can be derived from open data; but not by the organisation that bears to cost of creating or distributing it. In order to balance the need for open innovation with the need to flow cost and revenue between organisations in a reasonable way, commercial models such as “freemium” will need to be explored. The “Dublinked” Open Data portal is doing that, for example.

How do we access and use Open Data?

As William Perrin argued recently, we need to think about how Open Data will be used beyond the community of technologists. I’ve blogged before about the need for technology and information to be accessible; and the need for our education system to provide us with the skills to use technology to manipulate and understand information. Those are both big challenges that we won’t overcome any time soon.

Where do we go next?

The potential value of Open Data is too great for us to afford to be negative, cynical or apathetic. Software automation and information technology are changing the way that value is created in the economy (see work on this from Imperial College and McKinsey), and the concept of Open Data is crucial to providing access to that potential across all sectors of society. But we will only realise that value if we find ways to addressing the cost of providing usable information; and to invest in making it accessible.

Acknowledgement: I’d like to thank Simon Whitehouse for discussions leading to this post, and for the link to William Perrin’s article.

Filed under Science & Technology Tagged with , , , , , ,

Accessibility or Bust

February 28, 2012 7 Comments

(Photo: “Cable Confusion” by e-magic)

It’s been obvious since the 1990s that the communication and collaboration technologies that have evolved from the internet and mobile telephony are changing our planet – its culture, its environment and its economy. What’s differentiated those who’ve succeeded in applying those technologies from those who’ve failed is their ability to integrate them with society.

By society I mean people and the economy. People in the sense of the consumability and accessibility of technology; and the economy in the sense of adding value to the interactions between people. If technology isn’t consumable and accessible by people, and if it doesn’t add value to their interactions, it won’t be used.

James Watt and Matthew Boulton got this absolutely right in their industrial and commercial exploitation of the steam engine, which Jenny Uglow argued in her brilliant book “The Lunar Men” was the catalyst for the Industrial Revolution. Reuters got it right when they started a business using one of the original low-latency messaging technologies to distribute news around the world faster than anyone else – carrier pigeons.

We’re living through an era of acute financial, demographic and environmental pressures that we expect technology to rescue us from. The Internet of Things and Open Data will make information available to anyone, anytime to take better decisions, and use resources more efficiently. Internet entrepreneurs will continue to create innovative new business models. Cities everywhere will build digital industries to drive economic growth. The cost of transactions in public service and commerce will fall as delivery becomes “digital by default”.

Or will they?

People can only use information to take better decisions if they understand that information.

Take the transformation to open, digital, public services and personal budgets, for example, in UK public services. If individuals are to choose effectively which care services to purchase with their care budgets, then they need to be presented with comprehensible information that describes the range of services available to them. They need information describing what the services do; the quality of service outcomes and delivery; and who the provider of the service is. They need information describing who measures service quality, and how. They need information that describes whether they are eligible for the service, how much it costs, how to access it, and how to complain if something goes wrong. And that’s just for starters.

This is starting to sound like an awful lot of complicated information. Because we’re talking about social care, it needs to be presented to vulnerable people, who may have difficulty understanding it, and may not be able or willing to use digital technology.

Solving our problems using technology is not about Open Data, Open Source, or Agile Development or supporting the nation’s technology SMEs. All of those things are important, but they’re not enough. We need an acceleration of the rollout of broadband connectivity; we need to look at whether channels such as digital television and mobile can be used effectively; we need a really effective network of “living labs” to explore how people can interact effectively with these technologies; and we need to examine indirect user interactions with digital services, where a carer, a friend or a family member uses technology on behalf of someone else.

I’m exploring some of these issues in Sunderland, where the city has invested in broadband connectivity, Cloud computing, and a network of 39 “e-Village Halls” (see short articles on the Council’s website here  and here) which provide access to online information and transactions from community and neighbourhood centres in a trusted environment where help and advice are available. A few years ago, the Council ran a scheme called the “Let’s Go” Card where more than 2500 disadvantaged young people were given a smartcard with £33 a month to spend on leisure and educational activities that could be booked through an online portal. Many of the people in the scheme didn’t have direct access to the internet themselves; but they could get it through friends. The scheme was a huge success, with 94% of the eligible young people taking part.

The TSB’s Creative Industries KTN has looked recently at applying their expertise to the consumability of information provided by Smart Meters and other “Internet of Things” technologies; and I know of some other high-profile organisations who are developing similar plans. They’re starting to draw many private sector companies and Universities into their activities, and I think the results will be fascinating.

IBM’s own Andy Stanford-Clark has been interested in this subject for a while, and has explored the concept of ambient information interfaces which communicate information about domestic energy use in a non-technical way. And the NHS in the West Midlands is exploring effective ways to communicate healthcare information within a community of patients and employees through the NHS Local site. They have engaged a television production company, Maverick Television, to design the site using their expertise in communicating through technology. I hope that all of these initiatives will contribute to our ability to design smarter, digital city systems that we can all engage effectively in.

For me, this is the real shape of things to come. There’s been a lot of focus recently on improving the teaching of technology skills in the UK economy. But as I commented recently on this blog, to develop technology with real societal impact, we need to focus on a broader combination of technology, information, scientific, creative and entrepreneurial skills.

To put my money where my mouth is, I’m hoping to start a study project soon to explore that idea in more detail and create some recommendations for doing things differently. I’d be delighted to hear from anyone who’s interested in taking part.

Filed under Science & Technology Tagged with , , , , ,

Newer posts →