Illustration: Nicolas Feltons famous visualizations of his personal life, published in his annual Feltron reports

Again all this just confirms ancient knowledge, that human self understanding is a perpetual interaction with the present technological possibilities. And I will continue to follow humans dance with surveillance technology and data. As an entrepreneur I can only welcome the tendency as our little company /KL7 makes a living by making data meaningful and monitoring a competitive advantage for organizations.
More on self-tracking

Quantified self 

Discover Magazine on self-tracking

New York Times on self-tracking

In 2012, we’ll see increasing numbers of scientists, technologists, architects, corporations, and even governments looking to biomimicry—designing objects and systems based on or inspired by patterns in nature—as an efficient innovation strategy. Why? Often, nature can provide examples of energy-saving, environmentally-friendly solutions to a variety of technological challenges. These solutions have also been “tested” via billions of years of informal R&D—by animals, plants, insects, and other participants in the natural world who have come up with ways of harvesting water from fog, for example, or possess sleek forms that are more aerodynamic than traditional man-made ones. While bio-mimicry has been an emerging field for some time, in 2012 influential thinkers will begin to apply biomimetic principles on a larger scale, including the planning of new cities and the updating of urban infrastructures. In addition, experts will also begin exploring the pitfalls of biomimicry and will also share best practices, as more case studies are available. Frog Design

Well, I would surely hope so. I don’t know what ‘influential thinkers’ they are referring to but it sure sounds exiting. But unfortunately I have seen the same predictions for 2011, 2010 and probably before that. And when I investigated the state of biomimetic thinking in the summer 2010 (with the vague intention of turning my research into a more popular management book) I found that not much had happened since I left the research field in 2004. Examples are still primarily ‘structural’ – e.g. mimicking a butterfly’s wing or the lotus leaf’s repellant surface – not the vastly more interesting processual capacities of complex adaptive systems: intelligence, adaptivity, immune effects and self-healing, energy conservatism, cyclic resource circuits etc. This 2010 example from IBM is a little more interessting:

IBM Biomimicry Challenge from Smart Design on Vimeo

But I will definitely not abandon the subject and sooner or later I will write that general introduction to biomimetic innovation strategies.

Whatever made the ball suddenly roll I’m just happy that the momentum seems to build up. I will not however let the matter rest before more concrete political action has been taken.

I hope that 2012 will be more about creating value, defining new territories, developing ideas, helping others and eating a little less medicine.

Merry Christmas and a very happy new year to all of you!

As a sort of example of that counter movement one of more ingenious DIY’ers have created a display only viewable with polarized glasses? Funny and clever!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgN4r1YufcI

Even if you – at least for the sake of the argument – admit us the practical value of monitoring to obtain knowledge and thus give up on well-exercised arguments for the inbreachable privacy rights of people, there is still a question of ‘elitist’ ethics: “What allows you or your client” you might ask, “to decide what people ‘ought’ to do in your so called behavioral engineering approach?” That is, you might admit us the right to act ‘bigbrother’ to gain knowledge but not a normative ‘bigmother’ to achieve a certain behavior. That is a perfectly legitimate question. Let us deal with it once and for all.

In their book Nudge – Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness Thaler and Sunstein discuss this issue and argue at length for the legitimacy of ‘paternalism’. As long as it is liberitarian paternalisme leaving agents with a free choice. This basically means lowering the cost (mentally, cognitively, resource-wise) of making the ‘right’ choice not coercively forcing anyone. The basic argument is that humans – as opposed to the theoretical construct homo economicus – quite frequently make bad choices for a number of reasons. As such, humans needs little ‘nudges’ to make the right choices faced with complexity and insufficient information.

But what is our reason in /KL7? They are very different in origin but univocal in consequence: Humans simply need help to make the right choices in a lot of contexts as we tend to act against our own long term interests. The last couple of hundred years of thinking has been one long dethronement of human rationality. Let us have a look at some of the reasons for questioning mans ‘rationality’:

Philosophical: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx seriously questioned the merits of our explicit motives. Nietzsche was probably most brutal to our self-understanding when he claimed that all rationality is covered up irrationality: The true boss running the show is our hidden drives.

Cognitive: Cognitive science has amply demonstrated how bodily emotions and basically animal drives stands for a majority of actions and decisions.

Neurological: According to neurology rationality – or the frontal lobes in this terminology – can at best ‘orchestrate’ the symphony of impulses rather than originate or control them.

Biological: From biology we know how we are e.g. prone to eat as much sugar and fat as we can come across since such energy-rich nutritions are rare in nature. But we all know how cheap and available sugar and fat are in our modern world without our spontaneous reaction adapting.

Sociological: Humans are embedded in a social and cultural context often blurring the motivation and thus ‘rationality’ of personal choice.

Economical: Homo economicus, the notion of the perfectly rational, optimizing agent suffers badly in the famous ‘ultimatum game’ experiment. Emotions and our sense of fairness simply trumps rationality when it comes to accept an haphazardly uneven distribution of means: You rather have nothing than only $10 out of $100 if your partner takes the other $90.

Branding: We know that some of the most adored brands in this world act as filters of complexity by making a lot of choices on behalf of the customers. Apple, BMW, Google anyone? In design it is called minimalism, in branding identity and in everyday lingo we call it focus. Most people love brands preciselt for the choices they make on their behalf. This is more about emotional coupling than rationality. Add to this religion as an existential coupling that is also about narrowing the window of available actions and interpretations.

Rational impotence: We have worked long enough with health, traffic, smoking etc. campaigns to know that ‘what I ought to’ is totally decoupled from ‘what I will actually do’. If you conducted a multiple choice test with smokers, alcoholics or obese they would probably have most facts relating to their vice right. But sine this ‘rational’ knowledge is decoupled from emotionally based motivation changed behavior remains a fatamorgana.

Self-inspection: Last but not least; we know ourselves and our rational shortcomings too well. It is only too human. And just like you adjust for physical dysfunctions we think it is perfectly empathetic and ethic to help people behave constructively. As long as it’s not against their or others own long term interests (as deemed by themselves).

And what about the opposite: No intended or unintended influence? How about design, management, didactics or a message that does not willingly or unwillingly stimulate a certain behavior? Quite unthinkable right? You would not deny parents the right to enforce a specific kind of behavior on their offspring either (in general that is. There are extreme examples challenging our norms). So yes, KL7′s business model is to stimulate behavior that would not have arisen spontaneously in the same context. But we always make sure to make choices as transparent as possible by making the stimulation explicit or peoples behavior available to themselves through feedback and only support behavior that the agent herself would otherwise sanction or even cherish. As such we are proud of making peoples life a little better and apply our abilities to support consumerism, pushing around even more communication or add to the visual pollution of the world.

Well, just today in /KL7 I:
- am conducting a campaign with cameras monitoring a lot of drivers to learn more about their behavior to improve road safety. And the drivers? They love the idea. So much for the bigbrother cliché (as I predicted the demise of when I started bigmother.dk).
- I’ve had meeting with a potential client (public organization) on how to apply monitoring to gather social data to identify and data mine the roots and patterns of entrepreneurial ‘civic-mindedness’ in Denmark. The new critical capital for saving our welfare system bottom up.
- I’ve discussed using social tracking in companies to map social capital and improve workflows and productivity with a potential partner company.

Interesting times. Technology is no longer evil and alienating. Monitoring is OK for learning and as CareWare. The most requested consultants are the ones understanding technology, complexity, monitoring design and deployment. And strategies to remedy cognitive biases and common sense through data-based decisions, persuasive design (Nudging) and plain cognitive theory are hot management literature (Duncan Watts, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and even McKinsey Consultants). And oh, Harvard Business Review’s latest issue is dedicated to complexity and how to view business as a complex adaptive system (what you could call biomimetic management theory). We can call ourselves ‘social engineers’ in /KL7 without evoking dreadful associations. Perhaps all the years spend at university wasn’t wasted after all…Stay tuned as I explore the phenomenon of Bigmother’s renewed relevance.

We’ve got another lovely kid – Esther.

The new Danish Liberal party – Liberal Alliance – has tried to hi-jack the meme BigMother and re-stipulate it negatively as the all-encompassing, dank hand of the welfare state.

I’ve changed jobs a couple of times. From strategic consultant in Advice to cosmographic as strategic director and then started /KL7 (seven o’clock in Danish) together with a group of really great and talented people. /KL7 is in many ways a strategic design agency along the lines of Bigmother specialising meaningful, careful and mobilising technology based on monitoring and interaction design. We focus on effect and behavioural change and call our approach ‘social engineering’. Please come and visit us at /KL7

I’ve been going through stem cell transplantation this year and I’m hopefully soon fully rid of the leukaemia that I’ve been living with for six years. A tough ride (pictures are just before and during treatment) but there’s light at the end of the tunnel now.

So now that I’m out of excuses such as baby children, Danish monopoly on the meaning of BigMother, life-threatening illness or energy-consuming ‘employee-jobbing’ I will take up writing a little again (funny how ‘blogging’ would have sounded altmodisch if I had chosen that term)

Is there such a thing as citizen-friendly surveillance? Designers, filmmakers and architects are making art out of the technology that watches over us. Mindful of Google Earth, camera phones, over-the-counter spy gear, reality TV, terrorist-conscious politicians and security-obsessed corporations, these interactive auteurs put their own spin on a surveillance-saturated global culture. Is New Voyeurism the next genre?

Christian Möller’s ‘Mojo’

Via Anders

Sleevage is still in the building up phase so please allow for growth. I personally look forward to future visits for both encyclopedic info on covers as well as mere browsing around. If you have privileged information to share even better so.

Via Josh Spear