Notes from Lift Asia 2008

From September 4th to the 6th I attended the Lift Asia 2008 conference on Jeju (Cheju) island, South Korea. Some of the key goals for Lift include inspiring attendees to initiate and/or participate in positive technological change, harnessing market disruptions (ala Skype) and turning them into opportunities, and creating a platform for typically disparate fields to connect. If there was any rule during the conference, it was “No Commercial Pitches.”

Below is a hand-picked selection of my notes in chronological order from the event. If you’re curious for more details, I encourage you to leave a comment or Google search for key terms.

—Day 1—

Opening the event was Laurent Haug (Lift founder), who discussed some of the big changes in the fusion of technology and society he felt were coming in the next 5 years. These included:

• virtual money
 
• sustainable development
 
• networked cities (innovation hubs; sometimes more than nations)
 
• techno-nomadic lifestyles
 
• robotics and networked objects

The first guest presenter was Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design. Eric opened with a photo of Etienne-Jules Marey, a physiologist who was essentially the first to do motion capture in numerous domains (humans, birds, etc.). Stamen is of course very well known for their Digg Labs visualization work, which Eric shared next. Besides the Digg Labs work, they’ve done a cool “taxi-cab traceroutes” speed- and passenger-load overlay, and in the process discovered discontinuities due to data noise from GPS-data affected by tall buildings or overhead bridges. A house-construction annual progress visualization also demoed reminded me of the digital Life game sped-up.

Chang Kim from TNC / Textcube / OpenWebAsia was up next and discussed some current problems with social media. The main thread was the over-abundance of destination sites few of which are satisfactorily personalized. “The social graph is scattered everywhere,” and “online relationships don’t model real life” were common threads. Additionally, users’ content authoring and consumption domains are separate - which isn’t necessarily bad - but in many cases contributes to “social network fatigue.” Chang believes an easy solution would be to give users more control over what reaches them (different from control of data ala data-portability / OpenSocial effort, etc.).

David Birch jumped on stage next and gave an interesting overview and insight into Virtual Money and the cashless economy. I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been thinking about this topic for a while; living in Tokyo has spoiled me. In terms of a disruptive trend though, this is one topic to follow. Birch opened up with a cute advertisement by Schaeffer Pens from the early ‘80s. The ad was for a new line of pens used in futuristic credit-card scenarios (virtual or holographic cards, etc.) that the company likely wasted countless hours brainstorming and dreaming, only to miss the pen angle completely. i.e. “... if you make pens, you don’t predict PINs!” In other words, Schaeffer could only envision futuristic scenarios where pens were required; that’s a sure way to miss a disruptive trend.

Some interesting observations evidencing, driving, or forecasting a cashless economy:

• financial transactions in Europe: 27% in cash, 22% with cards, 16% as cheques, and 35% as credit / debit transfers
 
• Sweden has far more armed robberies b/c people prefer ATM withdrawals than using plastic
 
• the poorest people pay the highest transaction charges; i.e. “cash costs too much”
 
• most US cash is outside the US
 
• paper money is essentially an interest-free loan from the central bank
 
• in Japan, phones are the new wallet (especially for teens)
 
• in Latin America, money transfers via mobile-phone is the norm as the region is too large for banks to deploy ATMs evenly

If we assume cash goes the way of the dodo bird and mobile-phone / virtual money becomes the norm, who are the winners and losers?

Winners:

• Economic growth: estimated that GDP will go up by 0.5%
 
• Reduced crime; (but if criminals can’t steal money, will they stop being criminals?)
 
• Reduced tax evasion
 
• Banks: no more cash handling, filling ATMs, armed robberies, etc.
 
• Poor people: who currently incur the highest transaction charges for handling cash

Losers:

• minters; it currently costs the US mint 1.7 cents to make a penny (aka seigniorage)

To follow the development of cashless societies, check out the digital money forum blog.

Bruce Sterling was up next and continued the poverty-theme by sharing his concerns about variations of poverty. In the past, the image of poverty was of peasants who tilled the soil. This is an “old poverty”, but now there is growing concern about a “new poverty” - namely, urban migration. Lagos, Nigeria, Sao Paolo, Mumbai - each is witnessing a migration of poor drawn by the wealth of the cities but without the tools to create their own.

On another thread, Bruce noted how there used to the notion of the “computer wealthy” - those with and without computers. But this doesn’t transfer to the mobile market. Millions of illiterate people are using cell phones. In India alone, there are 6 million new mobile accounts create each month. And as a pitch for thought to his Korean audience, Bruce noted there was no other place in the world with as much “electronic contrast” as North and South Korea. When NK collapses, who is going to do anything about this technology contrast?

The remaining presentations for the day were more for entertainment, so I sat back, listened, and enjoyed the show.

—Day 2—

The second day started off with a big bang by none other than Adam Greenfield. The topic - The “The Networked City: The Long Here, The Big Now”. The slides were mostly images with sparse text so it’s hard to re-capture, but the examples making his points were interesting. One was of a tower-bridge (in London?) with it’s own Twitter account. Sensors on the bridge would trigger a stream of twitters (“I’m going up to let My Angel through”; “USS MacArthur just passed by”, etc.). Another was the New York Talk Exchange, by the MIT SENSEable City Lab - a visualization of IP phone connections across the world. Each example pointed to data available in realtime, and persistent afterwards. i.e., “What is the city doing?” - that’s the Big Now.
There is a lot of demand for networked cities, which would provide data available locally, on demand, and in a way that can be acted upon. There is nothing as useful as information about the place when you’re in that place. Other kinds of addressable, scriptable, and query-able surfaces are generally seen as passive.

After Adam, Jeffrey Huang shared some really neat projects under the theme Interactive Cities. There were a ton of sub-themes throughout, including how architecture is a preview of the type of community, and how city environments influence either the passive consumer or empowered urbanite. After some discussion of theory, the projects Jeffrey shared were:

Listening Walls - an interactive wallpaper, where participants speak into microphones and the words are transcribed and projected onto a wall. In some environments, the microphones were visibly placed; in other environments, they were not so visible :)
Swiss House - Brain Drain
Airport Seesaw Chairs - this one was cool; basically a room of chairs each with some sort of hydraulics are placed in two separate airports. When someone sits in one, the respective chair in the other airport rises (or sinks). Wish I could see this in person, but didn’t catch which airports this was installed in!
Beijing Newscocoons - a physical cocoon-like malleable object that visualizes information, mostly news. data manipulates color and air pressure inside the object.

Yang Soo-In followed with a presentation on Living City. I thought this project was simple but very cool with some interesting real-world applications. Basically Yang’s vision is to use the facade of buildings as an interface to communicate with other buildings. He built robust outdoor sensors with Internet connections and placed them outside windows on the same side of a building. These sensors then sent weather, wind, and other information to another building across town. Seems simple, but the following vision really brought it home. Imagine a building in Beijing with such sensors, communicating with a building in Tokyo. When the yellow-sand season approaches and the Beijing building sensors detect the yellow stuff (pollen), they could signal the Tokyo building to check fan filters, close windows, turn on fans, etc. An automated way for close regions affected by similar weather patterns to warn each other. Many ways you could stretch this; very cool!

The rest of the day was a series of shorter, individual presentations, short pitches, demos, and the like. I started to tire from note taking so I focused on listening. I did take a video the MEGAphone project by Jury Hahn. This is a platform that allows people with mobile phones to dial in and control objects on a large public screen. Check these out, which she ran inside the conference room:

A few final interesting snippets and quotes from the conference:

Christian Lindholm:

What can digital nomads tell us about the future of mobility? [AC] power is the new water.

Frederick Kaplan:

Computers never really changed; rather, we changed the way we use computers

and

Interfaces will become more robotic

- in light of robots not having to look like robots ala Roomba, etc.