Shared food - week 44

This week we have contacted different people who work with bee farming, growing association (Kolonilott), gardening in inner courtyards, urban farming and people with knowledge about drones. This week we have changed our concept and idea after the critic we got in the meeting.  We have done some changes in the project plan. Our original plan was to grow on roof tops but after thinking and discussing it we realized most of the roofs in stockholm are not flat which makes it very hard to manage any crops there.  Instead of growing on rooftoops we have investigating other options like all the unused spaces in the city, for example inner courtyards, park, walls of tall buildings, windows and balconies. We realized this it would be a greater possibility that this would work in the future.

Our next step is that we will have interviews with the people that we have contacted. One of them is Marika Delin who is a garden architect and have worked a lot with creating inner courtyards. We will also have a discussion with people that are responisible for urban farming in Detroit as well as visiting bee urban in Stora Skuggan and possibly other places in Stockholm where urban farming is carried out today. We will continue our research by trying to find historical infromation about Stockholm’s arcitectual history and also agricultural knowledge. We will prepare our presentation for the critique on the 7th and start looking into what we will do for our presentation on december 17th.

We have not ran into any major challenges this week. We were a bit worried in the beginning that having only 4 people in our group would be a disadvantage, but as we have continued working we are satisfied with having a smaller group. Since this week was examination week we have been busy with other courses and haven’t been able to meet as much as we wanted. However we have used the application Slack in order to stay in contact and move forward with our project.

Our reflections:

We would like to use drones in our project, but we are not sure if we can justify why it would be better to use them than being without them.

Another question we have been thinking about is how much technology do we need to include in our project? Is it enough with perhaps an application to coordinate/share the work/food in the growing process?

Is this what our windows will look like in the future?

Some inspiration from Jan Formark’s lecture in September

Another picture for inspiration from Jan Formark’s lecture in September

The future of sustainable shared economy - week 44

Our idea:

With a system that produces electricity for several usages and outlets the distribution of energy could be described as uneven. When the production is high, or when a household is on vacation, it may be an overflow of electricity. Instead of wasting the excess electricity, or sell it for a small amount to a big power company, our idea is to create a platform where a household can choose where the overflow should go. We think that every household/company have some kind of address for the electricity, so the receiver of the electricity could easily be chosen. This system could be applied both on a national and a global level. The overflow could be delivered to a friend, a hospital, a company or any other organization in the world.

The excess from a household may not be a lot, but millions of household sharing a small part of their sustainable electricity  will make a greater difference. Several power plants that produce unsustainable energy could be closed, and by time we can make sure that all energy comes from a sustainable energy source.

Process: The process so far has consisted of research, brainstorming and preparation. After our meeting with Daniel and Malin we got some tips about people who work on similar projects on KTH. One of the persons of interest is Elina Eriksson who works with Greenleap. We tried to book a meeting with her this week but unfortunately she was out of town this week. To prepare for the meeting we have read about smart grids, energy sharing, motivation for sharing and the future of energy. On monday we are going to meet with her to further discuss her work and our ideas. We have also contacted Cecilia Katzeff, professor and researcher in the field of energy design, to see if she has time to meet with us. We also aimed to do phone interviews with some energy companies to get a better idea of how the market looks today and how they think it will look in the future, this was more difficult than expected. We have called a couple of companies but haven’t gotten through to the right people yet.

We have also made a detailed plan for the mid-crit next week and booked group meetings for the upcoming weeks. We have also looked at the energy market in Sweden today by looking at energy companies, such as Vattenfall, Egen El and Fortum. By doing this we have got an insight of what the challenges and motivations are with people producing their own energy.

What we will do: After the meeting with Elina on monday and with further reading this weekend we will have created a platform of information to build and concretize our idea upon. Since our idea is based on a energy, a subject that can be difficult to understand, we recognize the importance of visualizing the idea in a easily understandable way. Before the presentation next week we will therefore create mock up designs of our application and also visualize the current and future scenario.

Group 4 working process

Challenges encountered: The project is suppose to be designed for a future within 15-20 years, but the energy industry is changing very slowly due to the existing energy grid and how it is built into our societies. Also, we found out that the research area of wireless power is rapidly evolved and have been discussing if we should move away from the “smart grid area” into investigating the wireless power field further. In addition, there are already people working on our initial idea, which means we need to work harder to find our own niche. Energy issues is sometimes difficult to understand so we need to visualize our idea in an easily understandable way.

Bellow follows some questions that are central for our projects.

1. How do we expand renewable energy access to people who cannot install renewable energy on their own properties?  2. How do we make the sharing beneficial for the users?  3. How do we make it flexible enough so participants can customize the service? Who do they want to share their energy with? What kind of renewable energy do they want to use? etc.   4. The energy market is pretty slow changing. How do we use the existing energy programs to build for the future.

Future of Piracy - week 44

What we have done: 

Since the project plan review meeting we have held four rather long meetings where we have analyzed the status of piracy at the moment from every aspect of it: economical, social, political, technical. Between each meeting we kept digging up and reading more articles that would help us support our theories or create new ones. We have thought about possible scenarios and different possibilities and solutions of our research topic in the future. Among others we have thought about a service, a platform or a device useful for our project, that helps people to get contents through piracy when considered not fair (quality/price).

What we will do: 

We will meet and interview some people involved in sharing economy or music/movie/software industry that can be affected by piracy, considering that develop the service that we will decide to adopt.

Challenges encountered:
We have had to discuss about what side that piracy has to take. We took a look on the psycological aspect, if it’s good for people and how affects behaviors; how bad is for companies in the end counting the potential revenue, the avarage of selling compared the illegal downloads; what can be pirated, the quality of pirated stuff depending on the kind of media.

We discussed what piracy is now, what it implies and how it is done: stealing, copying, reproducing or hacking. The differences between profit and no profit, sharing and stealing, the line between legal and illegal, piracy for “good” (sharing) or “bad” (just hacking and stealing datas to companies). After this we tried to imagine what is left to be pirated in the future.

Changes in the project:

Core issues:

1. At the moment we define piracy as stealing content, which you were supposed to pay for, but you don’t (copyright infringement).
2. Music and movies aren’t pirated that much anymore since good (reasonably priced with most desirable content) streaming services exist. The same will happen soon in games and software area, we believe.
3. Fighting piracy through legislation is useless. [2]
4. Piracy should work like a guard in order to prevent companies from increasing prices and/or lowering quality of content.
5. Politicians should try and make piracy a beneficial tool for society rather than try to kill it.
6. Pirates will hack contents and define themselves as “commoners”.

We have currently have 4 possible directions which we can go with:

• we can go further with hacking
• we can think of services which make usage of pirate content senseless (something like Spotify in software industry)
• we can still work on piracy in countries where streaming services are prevented from development for other reasons than price or quality (Russia, China)
• piracy in 3D printing -  will physibles be a pirated thing in the future and is that the same as software piracy or something different? [3][4]

Resources:

[1] http://www.foster.washington.edu/centers/facultyresearch/Pages/piracy-upside.aspx

[2]http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/02/03/you-will-never-kill-piracy-and-piracy-will-never-kill-you/

[3] http://www.geek.com/news/the-future-of-piracy-is-physical-objects-1461549/

[4] https://thepiratebay.se/browse/605/0/7/0

FUTURE OF TRUST, week 44

What we have done?

This week we have been refining our initial concept, by brainstorming and dicussing ideas. Previously concept was not clear enough, we have continued to develop and define our ideas and concept into one clear and concise vision. The vision centres around human-robotic augmentation in 10-20 years time, and how this augmented future acts as a facilitator of trust in the sharing economy.

What we will do?

Our next step is to establish contact with experts in several fields relating to our theme and conduct interviews or gather information to get additional insight. By doing this we are hoping on refining our vision further and get other’s views on our problem. Running parallel we also need to start plotting the scenes, narrative/script and scenarios in order to create a video for the final presentation in December.

Challenges encountered?

The rather broad topic is sometimes difficult to frame and needs some clear decision making. Initially we found that we were searching too broadly to really address any specific problem/interest and had to re-evaluate our niche entry point into the topic of trust. As a consequence, we therefore ditched our idea to conduct focus groups and interviews since the insights might be not as helpful as we expected. Instead, we plan to hold interviews with experts of certain fields like surveillance (Baki Caciki), sharing economy (Mattias Jägerskog) and future technologies (Gadi Amit, Amal Graafstra) to really get a grasp of the effects of our future scenario.

Changes in the project?

In our first project proposal we focused on finding out what trust means. As diving deeper into the topic and getting feedback from Daniel and Malin we found out that trust has too many definitions and dimensions we could not possibly cover. Our new project direction leads to depicting a future scenario of how the sharing economy could look like when trust is implemented and ensured in a system using human-robotic technology. The future vision we want to create is not too positive, moreover a criticism of how the sharing economy could affect people in a way that it limits privacy than fostering freedom. In other words, we have concentrated our efforts into really developing and fully exploring a future scenario, as opposed to our old idea of explaining what the concept of trust is.
We have also been talking about what should be needed to bring back the old village concept, where everyone trusted each other, or at least knew who they could trust and not. This way of thinking was introduced to us by Daniel and Milad. When discussing this we concluded that the most important factors were knowing other´s history and background or being acquainted with the person through relatives or friends. These factors provide us with answers to the most essential functions of our future vision.

Resources

Brainstorming session with Post-It notes! Positive and negative aspects of exploration in the future scenario.

Other?

We watched a great tv show on Channel 4 in the UK called Black Mirror about a future scenario with human-robotic augmentation for the memory so the person never forgets a day of their life. The outcome of the show was depicted rather negatively.

The future of learning

What we have done this week, what we will do next week, and the evolution of the process.

This week we decided to take the thoughts and discussion points which we had with Daniel and Malin into our own process. The main theme of our week has therefore been to narrow down the project due to the sprawling aspect of our initial thoughts. We moved away from our gamification/education idea which was based around making the education system more motivational, interactive and collaborative. Now we have a different perspective in mind, that is separated from education. Learning isn’t just done by the school bench, but also in our everyday lives through the information we partake in. This shift has been instrumental in how our project will be formed. We have started on an idea to immerse people in information, that is relevant. Big data mining is not only a trend but a reality for tailoring media content today, why not tailor information? With the emergence of “wearables” as one of the major things that large actors in media/IT sectors focus one we have decided to have this as one of the main aspects of our project. A future where big data mining and wearables are more advanced and built in to our daily lives is the starting point of our idea; information immersion for people to make them more knowledgeable, without them wanting to be more knowledgable. The concept is based also around Serendipity, i.e. gaining knowledge (learning) as a bi-effect of our daily lives. Imagine using a Google Glass-esque product that is more advanced that can, not only see what you are seeing but also being connected to all others using it to create a knowledge bank based on different users knowledge and experience. In the same way that Wikipedia is pooling our knowledge on different subjects, we see that this would pool so much information and render it to you as relevant information when you are passing by, let’s say Cologne Cathedral and give you relevant information such as its height (157 meters) and what year the building of it commenced (1248). It doesn’t end there however. With advanced voice recognition you can ask questions, like: how does the inside look? and you will get photos and videos from people using this product on the inside so you might not have to go in if you’re in a hurry. This real time collaboration is key. We think that this is a very interesting and perhaps promising idea, and we are going to explore it more in the weeks to come.

The next step of the project is to look into what kinds of technologies exist today and what is needed to make this vision possible. Have there been tries to get something like this? What were the challenges?

We haven’t had any major challenges internally yet (I hope that I didn’t jinx that..) or with any external entities, if you don’t call the feedback given from Daniel and Malin at the group meeting as a challenge really.

All in all, it feel that we have some ground to stand on in the project at the moment. We face some challenges in keeping the scope intact and not letting the project entail every thought that is good. There is perhaps a risk of “going too far” and letting this vision become too large to be plausible in a 10-20 year time frame. The time frame is really defining of what the project becomes. It would be easy to say “in the future you connect a cable to your brain and download all the information in the world”.. Without a time frame of when this would happen. So keeping it in the timeframe and realizable is key.

Group: Trust and reputation systems

Week: 44

Since the start of the project work we as a group have been focusing a lot on which direction we are supposed to take in the broad subject of trust and reputation systems. We soon realised that the concept of an individual’s online identity/ies seems to be central. We started out brainstorming the area in it’s entirety and especially trying to understand and evaluate how existing trust and reputation systems work.The brainstorming session ended with the group members voting on their preferences. The two main areas of interest in regards to our project were (a) proposing a future which we want or don’t want, and (b) a product that could solve problems of tomorrow. We have been focusing on reading up on the field of online identities, trust and reputation systems.

The project leader has been in touch with the project leader of the other group working with future of trust to make sure that our ideas and projects do not collide.

Additionally we have been researching in order to find appropriate people from the field to interview. So, we have contacted some people trying to set up interviews in the following weeks. We have also decided on the people we want to contact in the future and some that we are considering to ask for advice, guidance or even interviews. At the moment we have booked an skype interview with Dan Benjamin (CEO) from eRated which is one of the services we found when creating the projectplan.

Going back to the future scenario, we decided that we should use personas as a starting point so that we can define the problems and the future scenario in a better way.

Last but not least, we discussed that existing reputation systems -in some platforms and networking sites, e.g. Airbnb- seem to work really well. People trust each others’ reviews and comments, thus enabling trust between strangers and collaboration in the digital commons and the sharing economy. Individuals in online communities are good at self-regulating, finding ways to punish free riders and rule breakers, and thus protecting the integrity of the systems.

As for the future we are planning to work on personas and scenarios to try to analyze the problems of today in order to create solutions for the problems of tomorrow. The task for the following week will be defining main issues and areas that we consider important. After that we will create and develop personas.

As previously mentioned, we have also planned to contact people to schedule interviews. In the next 2 weeks we are also going to contact some of the guests lecturers which we consider relevant to our field and try to set a date and time for an interview.

Regarding literature, we plan to start looking for information for the social capital, while we will continue our research on the reputational capital, trust, online identities etc.

During the following week we will focus on preparing our presentation for the mid-crit. Since our theme is pretty wide, we need to be well prepared as a group so that we can receive constructive feedback and make the appropriate decisions necessary for the future of our project.

The challenges we as a group are facing right now is to narrow down the broad and interlinked subjects of trust, reputation systems and online identities. We do need to narrow the project down to a smaller idea which is what we hope to achieve using the scenarios and personas in the next coming week. Besides that the group is working really well together and it seems that every member of the group does feel that he/she is contributing to the project as a whole. We believe that have a very solid structure on our documents and well aware of how to handle the internal communication.

Since this is the first progress report not much have changed considering the direction of the project. It should be mentioned that on our guidance meeting we were inspired by the aspect of a darker future scenario; of maybe not trying to create a future product in order to solve the problems of tomorrow, but to actually try to predict the future, either good or bad, as a consequence of the the future reputation system. We will thus build upon existing systems, working with limitations that they may have. This has lead to discussions concerning the future of surveillance and the collecting of data that is going on in our society today. The field in itself is, as we said before, huge and filled with possibilities. Below we have a image of sort of a timeline which we draw in order to approach the different possible directions of the project.



Timeline for the direction of the project

Resources

Books:

Botsman, R. and Roo, R. (2010). "What is mine is yours: How collaborative consumption is changing the way we live".

Rainie, H., Wellman, B. (2012). “Networked: The New Social Operating System”. United States: Mit Press.

chapter 9 : “Networked Information”

chapter 11 : “The Future of Networked Individualism”


Articles:

Beckenkamp, M. (2013). "Institutions and Trust in Commons: Dealing with Social Dilemmas" in The Wealth of the Commons, A World Beyond Market & State [online]. Available at: <http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/institutions-and-trust-commons-dealing-social-dilemmas>, [Assessed on 2014-09-10].

Kietzmann.J. et al (2011). “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media”, Business Horizons, 54, 241—251.

Websites (besides the ones mentioned in the Project plan 1.0) and platforms for reputation systems:

eRated (2014). eRated [online]. Available at: <http://www.erated.co/>, [Assessed on 2014-10-27].


DandyID (2014). DandyID [online]. Available at: <http://www.dandyid.org/beta/start>, [Assessed on 2014-10-27].


Social Mention (2014). Social Mention [online]. Available at: <http://www.socialmention.com/>, [Assessed on 2014-10-27].

3D-printing - The future of disaster recovery W.44

Process summary: During the previous week we have held two meetings where we decided to change direction from our previous first hand idea to our second idea in lack of found inspiration on the first idea. We built the new project plan 2.0 after our change of direction. Also contacted 3D-verkstaden to get hold of a 3D-printer to the presentation, and divided work shares among us to the next planned meeting for the following week. Where we will look into our service limits and possibilities.

Process: We held a meeting 27/10 where we discussed our current project plans direction. It was at this stage just a scenario with a lot of proposed areas to look into, where the scenario built on a entirely new city built from 3D-printers and adopted for 3D-printers. Where we wanted to see what such a city could look like, possibilities we could find. We played with the idea that you wouldn't have to adapt to the old design structures and boundaries of current societies and construction methods. E.g. customization and diversity would be greater. Here we found several interesting areas for which 3D-printing technology are developing: Houses, transportation, recycling, production, food industry, biomimicry, printing biological materials, materials in development and lego structure. We started this meeting by deciding what areas we wanted to look into. Over the weekend after our first meeting with Daniel and Malin we had planned to pick one area the next week and look into those we found more interesting during the weekend, and then pitch ideas during our next meeting. We shrunk the list to two main areas and formed two ideas.

One where we used the same scenario with the 3D-city for 3D-printing where we wanted to focus on a sustainable city with recycling stations combined with 3D-printers, where everything could be recycled and resources where more valued.

And the other idea for which we would focus on modular building structures, where you would just replace a small part of a device when a better upgrade came out, instead of changing a whole device. Also when a product broke there would be easier to identify what broke in the device and just change that part.

We decided to combine these two concepts since both had a sustainable nish. After that we mailed 3D-verkstaden to book a 3D-printer for which we want to use on the presentation (since we only can borrow it for 2 weeks). We divided research areas to everyone to look into and booked another meeting for 29/10. Tease were the following research areas: modular production at the moment, future of modular businesses, Recycling, 3D-printed electronics, Open source systems, 3D-printing.

The next meeting we started to share our findings about our research areas and then started to discuss which idea we liked the most. We still had a lot of question marks such as, would it be a product, service or a system? What could the end result look like? We had a hard time visualizing what this project would look like in the end. We came to the conclusion that our idea was too vague because we couldn't visualize what it would look like in the end still after this research. We therefore decided to change direction once again to the very first idea we had before we formed the first project plan, since we could visualize what it could look like in the end and the need felt bigger for that service.

The scenario was to provide aid to exposed societies, to help and rebuild after a catastrophe with mobile 3D-printers. Which would be transported with helicopter or buss in a variety of different 3D-printers to help rebuild destroyed cities by recycling locally found materials. Open source would be used to put out current problem specifications concerning available materials and surroundings in form of vegetation/landscape and weather conditions. This way people could help design suitable solutions and contribute with knowledge in form of 3D-models. This way exposed societies could rebuild faster. Where villagers at the same time could help rebuilding, by gathering materials to recycle and reuse destroyed structure materials.

After finishing the project plan 2.0 we summarized a couple of question marks to think about until our next meeting:

• Should we narrow down even further to focus on either catastrophe areas or just poor third world villages, or keep focusing on both?
• How viable would 3D-printed structures be?
• What are the most crucial needs for exposed people after a catastrophe? how/In what orders will they get managed with 3D-printers?
• How would a complete execution of an expedition look?
• After a completed venture, would 3D-printer get replicated and left behind? who would manage it?
• Energy solutions?

We also planned another meeting for monday next week where we will handle the above mentioned problems and start planning what we will do the following week.

Resources:  
3D content: http://www.academia.edu/5862148/Current_Development_and_Future_Trends_of_3D_Printing_Materials_Market  
3D food: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101638702#.  
Recycling materials: http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/10/06/3d-reprint-plastic-waste/,
Printing Houses: http://www.wimp.com/printerhouse/

The bottom up revolution: 2084 - Share your life

Since we came together as a group, we have had two long meetings with brainstorm sessions. During our first meeting, we discussed several topics and came up with an idea that we all liked, and thought was worth investigating. We also spent some time on writing the details of our project plan.

On our second meeting, we performed a brainstorm session in order to widen our concept and to come up with ideas to investigate. At this stage we decided not to focus on constraints that would limit our idea caused by technical difficulties or other problems - any idea would be possible. We wrote down all we could think of on post-it notes and after a few hours our table was covered with great ideas. Before we ended the session we sorted all ideas depending on topic or relation and created a piles of notes that with ideas that we needed to investigate further and another pile that had to be dealt with at a later stage. The investigations was then divided among the members of the group to work on out until the next meeting.

Some examples of what we are about to investigate further until then is what sensors have the possibility to measure today, how we should handle the issue with integrity and safety of personal data, what type of data bio-banks store and process today and what data they are interested in. Also what kind of technical problems/requirements our idea implies. When we have compiled and shared our individual investigations with each other, we will focus on and create a presentation for the mid-crit.

The meeting with Daniel and Malin helped us get some more concrete ideas and different point-of-views, and we also got some names of people to contact. Interestingly enough we got the feedback that the user survey we had been planning to do might not give us any useful information to work with. This was initially a surprise to us, but considering the perhaps controversial question we would have asked our interviewees “Would you agree to have a chip operated into your body, and then share all those details with the rest of the world” - might not have provided us with any useful answers. And more importantly - would we have changed our idea if it turned out that a majority of the people would have refused; no we wouldn’t have. The important lesson to learn from that - is what do you want to learn from your activity and what exactly are you planning to do with that information?

So far we have not encountered any trouble in our group. What could be a future challenge is that we might face difficulties finding time when everyone in the group is available and can meet up. We all take different courses and therefore have different schedules. To make the meeting planning easier, we had started a google calendar that’s shared among us. In the calendar, everyone has added when we have lectures in other courses. With the help of the calendar, we can easily see when there’s gaps in our collective schedule and therefore can set up meetings.

Outcome of brainstorming session

Phase 1:  

Focus on exercise:

• Personalised food intake - the right food for you and your body
• Personalised exercise
• Offer a Personal Lifestyle Architect (Personal trainer 2.0)

Weight/Body fat level

Biobank:

• What are they storing today
• What would they like to have

Technology:

How would the data get from the chip to the Database?
8G - When would the data be sent - at night/low traffic?

How can you access your own data?  

What should the sensor look like?

• bracelet?
• chip (what can you read from a chip?)
• can be charged by the bodily movements

Local storage?

• chip will talk to your mobile phone
• Mobile will talk to server when connected to WiFi

Emotional state:

• sms
• email
• voice level
• laughter
• muscle sensors /smiles

What do you eat?

• how can we measure this? Toilet?

Safety/ Data integrity

• Important and difficult question

What level of data should you share?

• only health data
• food intake
• level of happiness (via text analysis of sms/email)

What can you do in a hospital?

• what is interesting to measure?
• what can you measure at home instead?
• can you measure empathy (psychopaths)?
• can you measure happiness?

Research question:

• How should we put our question together? Needs to be short and clear.  

Data aggregation:

• cooperation between different sensors we are carrying with us
• Mobile phone
• Chip
• text analysis (sms/email/facebook/tweets)
• toilet
• can you measure happiness?

How to motivate people to join

• how can you set up goals for the user so that they feel good about the output they get from this service

Phase 2:

Focus on exercise as a motivation:

• Personal lifestyle guide helping with what types of food to eat, how to train, all in favour of improving one’s statistics/data.

Advertisement:

• crediting the users
• facebook
• “pink ribbon”
• beneficial for yourself
• beneficial for your family

What type of agency/company would we be?

• the state/hospitals
• organisation (e.g. Red Cross)
• business

Where is our base for growth, where do we begin?

• locally (Sthlm)
• locally (KTH)
• Sweden
• Europe
• Worldwide

Who pays?

• must be attractive enough to get somebody to pay initial costs
• payment plan?
• different subscriptions: bronze, silver, gold

Annual ranking, what’s your physical age?

• diploma

When should you be allowed to participate?

• at the age of 18

Choose what type of data you are willing to share:

everything/ health data / food intake