Advance Program - Plenaries -- Opening Plenary

Edge Effects: The Design Challenge of Pervasive Interface

Tuesday, 08:30 - 10:00

John Thackara
Doors of Perception, Amsterdam

In biology, the edge effect is the tendency for a greater variety and density of organisms to cluster in the boundaries between communities. As in nature, so too in a networked economy: variety, density and interaction are success factors. The trouble is that most of us work inside traditional environments, not between them. Stuck in boxes, we miss what's going on at the edge. My talk is about two edge developments that are transforming our work: pervasive computing and social agendas for innovation.

Products, it is said, are frozen software. Pervasive computing begins to melt them. Almost everything man-made will soon combine hardware and software. There are already twelve computer chips for everyone on the planet; within ten years there will be millions of them, everywhere - all talking to each other. You will look at the garden, and the garden will look at you. How do you design that?

Industry would like to know. We can make amazing things, technically, but are often at a loss to understand what to make. Technological leadership is expensive to achieve and short-lived. Something extra is needed to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage: the social contexts in which products and services are used. People are social, and social context is the key to successful innovation. This is easy to say and hard to do. The interaction of pervasive computing with social agendas for innovation represents a revolution in the way our products and our systems are designed, in the way we use them - and in how they relate to us. We need to re-think our work as the real-time management of highly complex real-world environments in which users become the subject, not the object, of innovation.

John Thackara is Director of Doors of Perception, the conference and knowledge network based in Amsterdam. Until November 1999, he was Director of the Netherlands Design Institute. Mr. Thackara studied philosophy and journalism before working in book publishing and journalism. He was editor of Design, founder and managing director of Design Analysis, and Director of Research at the Royal College of Art. Among his books are: WINNERS! How Today's Successful Companies Innovate By Design (Gower/BIS ,1997) and The Edge Effect (2000, forthcoming). His website is http://www.thackara.com.