IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

220 Chapter 10
What service designers refer to as sweet spots—instances in which real
value is created—occur at the intersection of latent social needs, open
systems, smart consumers, and smart companies. New services constantly
evolve. This is one reason why Lavrans Løvlie, a service designer with
Live|Work in London, prefers what he calls ‘‘topological’’ social scenarios
that enable people to become participants rather than audiences for a scenario
and imagine their own ways of engaging with services and products.
Løvlie and his colleagues use a technique called ‘‘evidencing’’ to create the
impression an imagined service might make—but without generating a
working prototype at an early stage. In a project on time banking for the
telecommunications operator Orange, for example, Live|Work mocked
up computer screens, paper invoices, magazine advertisements, reviews in
newspapers, and a range of other ‘‘touch points’’ that gave people an impression
of a service that did not yet exist. 25
Too many design methods can indeed limit innovation. Someone also
has to provide aesthetic stimulus—to throw wild ideas into the ring—to
provoke fresh thinking. Social critics and artists are good candidates for
this role. Avant-garde media artists, in particular, intervene on issues of networks,
the body, identity, and collaboration. Many of their ideas are exciting
and insightful in a way that methods-driven solutions are not. Design
can be a useful mediator in breaking down the isolation from one another
of artists, computer scientists, and users and in promoting the fruitful interaction
among them that may just yield the new concepts and applications
that are needed to fulfill the promise of the new technologies.
From Designing For to Designing With
We have learned by now that information technology changes the world
continuously. So do people when they use it. Anyone using a system—
responding to it, interacting with it, feeding back into it—changes it. Technology
has penetrated every aspect of our lives. Human, natural, and industrial
systems are irrevocably interpenetrated.
So where does this leave our relationship with complex systems—as
designers or as citizens? The story of the Netherlands and its water control
system is one example of where our relationships with technology may be
headed. The creation of new land out of water is a several-centuries-old
tradition in the Netherlands. The famous Delta Works, the biggest Dutch