IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

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enhance the kinds of daily life that we experience here and now. Of course
it’s true that new technologies give rise to new ways of living and organizing
that would not exist without them—and some of those changes are
benign. But they should be the result of human actions informed by intelligent
reflection on alternatives. Innovation is not a neutral activity. Many
innovation agendas are driven by technological determinism; they often
disguise creepy social agendas, too. ‘‘From The Matrix to Enemy of the State,
successful descriptions of the future have an ability to draw us towards
them, to command us to make them flesh,’’ complains the English writer
Harry Kunzru; ‘‘the effect of futurist fictions, projections and predictions is
to fuel our desire for a technology boom.’’ 21
Overblown research agendas, such as Europe’s Information Societies
Technology (IST) program, hog too much public money for technology
projects—but at least they are subject to discussion. Hollywood’s hymns
of praise to the machine do more damage because they paint reactionary
social futures as inevitable and dress them up as progress. ‘‘The worst culprits
are those apologists of the new economy,’’ writes Kunzru; ‘‘wearing
liberal and countercultural hats, [they] eulogize decentralization, nonlinear
causality, and the impossibility of control—but fail to explain why these
trends are so wonderful when centralized power, extreme social inequality,
and ecological devastation are increasing in the world.’’ 22
A better innovation approach is to switch attention from sciencedominated
futures to social fictions in which imagined new contexts
enrich an otherwise familiar world. Design scenarios are powerful innovation
tools because they make a possible future familiar and enable
the participation of potential users in conceiving and shaping what they
want.
The important point when envisioning scenarios of human activity is to
distinguish explicitly between what Ezio Manzini calls disabling and enabling
solutions. 23 Many of the frustrating and stress-inducing encounters
we have with service providers have been given an anodyne name in recent
times: the ‘‘self-service economy.’’ 24 The hallmark of such services is that
they take place with little or no human contact; the customer does the
work once done by an employee. This arrangement saves the service
supplier a ton of money but simply loads work onto—and steals time
from—the user. Nine out of ten people would rather talk to a person
when searching for advice or service on the Internet—so we need to demand
of providers that they put a person at the other end of the line.