technology - Tag Archive

Longevity: Now Available in Cans!

1 Reply Jonny Hankins

Through my work at the Bassetti Foundation (a Technology Bloggers partner) I have been fortunate enough to lecture at universities and schools about responsibility in innovation. At the Foundation we have a concept that we call Poiesis intensive innovation, and I try to put this idea into practice during my lessons. Poiesis could be thought of as the art or craft of being able to do something. It resides within an individual as well as an institution. It might be the ability to use a machine or piece of technology in a way that it was not necessarily designed for, or to use skills that could be seen as from a different field.

With Angelo Hankins as collaborator, I use my theatre training and secondary school teaching experience in a lecture called Longevity: Now Available in Cans! This lecture aims at getting students to think about the role of technology design in future-making, based on the idea that technological development plays a role in steering society and as a result the way we behave and experience life. We only have to think about the development of the internet, or its commercial development from an initial military role, to see how our lives have been changed by a few individuals who built the system we now use every day.

And I would say that they crafted these developments, or that they are crafting them as they develop.

During the lecture we present a (near future) drink called Longevity. The drink contains nanobots, a form of nanotechnology. The nanobots are really switches that can be turned on and off. These switches stimulate your body to produce different levels of adrenaline. The user downloads an app which they use to control their own adrenaline levels, offering the possibility to lower levels at night so that sleeping patterns can be made regular, and once asleep, levels can be lowered to such an extent that they go into a form of hibernation. This allows the body to rest more, offering the chance to live 30% longer!

The presentation brings in lots of topics for discussion related to how the introduction of such a product might affect society. Will it be fairly distributed? How will it change demographics? Which questions does it raise about marketing and claims about truth, values and life itself?

After the product launch, we have a sketch in which a great grandchild comes home to his/her grandparent to discover that they no longer want to take the drink. They say it is unnatural (currently 107 years old) and that all of their friends (including partner) have died. This means that they can’t look after the great great grandchildren any more, and this causes a conflict in the house. Are they just being selfish? What are societal and familial expectations.

The students then play with the props (pictured above) and improvise conversations, before reporting to the class. The idea is that the design process can be seen and decision-making moments can be talked about.

This game is not limited to schools and universities though. It makes a great party game. We have published an article which is free to download here that explains everything. It has a description of how to make the props, a fake video of the company announcement of its discovery, as well as notes so that anyone can use it anywhere. Everything is open access and free to use.

And I didn’t even mention the Happiness: Now available in cans! version. Dopamine on demand. With adrenaline!

So why not take a look and play it with your friends?

Critical Digital Infrastructure

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What the Experts Say

In April I wrote about the Critical Infrastructure Lab, before attending its launch party in Amsterdam.

The lab aims to create space to co-develop alternative digital infrastructural futures that center people and planet over profit and capital, by establishing a community around three infrastructural subtopics (geopolitics, standards, environment), producing a sound body of research and developing actionable policy recommendations and strategic insights.

The 2-day launch event was fantastic, and I wrote about it in a post here on the Bassetti Foundation website. My report is a series of points and take-aways from the event from my own perspective in which I try to highlight a few of the questions raised about digital infrastructure: How can we imagine people-centred infrastructure? Do we have to think in terms of infinite infrastructure? Could democratizing infrastructure be an approach? Other topics include migration research and tracking, open internet, standardization, and the role of infrastructure in conflict.

The Critical Infrastructure Lab also produced a report on the event, available to download here. This is a very different style of report, offering another overview of topics addressed, and it’s very thought provoking.

Through the link below you can download lots of interesting publications, including a working paper about a workshop carried out at a Limits 2023 event, called The Climate Crisis is a Digital Rights Crisis: Exploring the Civil-Society Framing of Two Intersecting Disasters. This is a description of a workshop about exploring the intersection of the climate crisis and digital rights, which again raises lots of questions as well as offering loads of information.

Publications and Media

This report talks about both the material and the immaterial impact of digital infrastructures and new technologies, from mining to waste, energy consumption to water use, which are material, but also digital rights, power, justice, and surveillance. Digital infrastructures are presented as being a tool to mitigate the impact of global heating and help in climate protection, but we need to view this position more critically.

The European Union state that “digital technologies could play a key role in achieving climate neutrality, reducing pollution, and restoring biodiversity”, leading to a kind of twin transition being born. They have promoted the right to repair (technology should be repairable), ecodesign and the Circular Economy Initiative, estimating that repairable products that are thrown away create 35 million tons of waste, waste 30 million tons of resources and produce 261 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in the EU every year.

And the production and life cycle of these goods sits within trade and political relationships that have existed since colonial times, raw materials taken from developing economies, used in wealthy economies, with the waste finding its way to other developing economies.

The Limits 2023 community dashboard offers lots of other papers too.

There is a lot to take from these documents, it’s thought provoking stuff and it is all open access.

Smart Pedestrian Crossings

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Climate Neutral and Smart Cities

As readers might remember, TechnologyBloggers has a partnership with the Bassetti Foundation. The Foundation participates in several European Union funded projects, and as I was learning about one of them, I discovered a connection with the city of Utrecht where I live.

One of the projects (MOSAIC) is funded through the EU Mission on Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities (Cities Mission), which aims to deliver 100 climate-neutral and smart European cities by 2030, while paving the way for remaining European cities to become climate-neutral by 2050. It works on a bottom-up approach which requires the participation of the entire local ecosystem and support from all governance levels.

It turns out that another project funded through the same mission is called IRIS, and one of the IRIS Project pilot Cities is Utrecht where I live, and so I went to see one of them, a smart pedestrian crossing with sound, air quality and traffic speed monitoring. Not only that but the white strips in the road actually light up as you approach and lights on the tops of the poles change colour according to the traffic situation creating the bright lit up crossing area in the photo above.

The crossing project takes in more of the area around it, with new street lights that can be dimmed or brightened and collect more data on the weather etc. The project was developed with the local population, the idea being that the local governance and urban management systems work with the people who live in the area to build and maintain the infrastructure that they feel they need.

From the MOSAIC website:

The mission presents a unique and unprecedented approach to the goal of climate neutrality. This new demand-led approach brings together all key stakeholders within a city, as well as the respective national/regional governments and the European Commission to work towards the same goal. The Climate City Contract provides a novel tool to ensure that all key actors – local authorities, private sector, academia, citizens/civil society – will work together towards the same ambitious goal via a joint strategy. The multi-sectoral and multi-actor dimensions will be key for the mission’s success.

The Cities Mission is therefore ideally placed to engage European citizens and stakeholders in the pressing global challenge of impending climate change, as it focuses strongly on the places where most Europeans live, work and move. While the overarching ambition of the mission relates to the issue of mitigating climate change, achieving success within this mission requires not only significant technological innovation but also a paradigm shift within the public sector, on local, regional, national and European levels, regarding the inclusion of the general public.

Check out the links in the article and the photos and video. A Rainy night in Utrecht.