Societies at the edge

Participatory Systems Initiative

Homo Mensura(human being as measure of all things)

Homo Mensurabilis(measurable human being)

Humanitas Mensurabilis(measurable human kind)

New Paradigm of Human Experience

Communities of Systems and People

High Trust Low Trust

Participatory Surveillance

Evolving meta design paradigm

Potential to transform dynamics of power

To conquer > to maintain > to nurture

To control > to direct > to orchestrate

To follow > to deliver > to contribute

To delegate > to mandate > to participate

To make > to produce > to personalize

To craft > to design > to meta-design

How to design for the possibility to act and accept responsibility in complex network environments?

• design for trust: social acceptance, transparency, security, integrity, resilience, robustness

• design for autonomy: empowerment, self-management and emergence

• design for engagement: belonging, agency, co-creation

Health

Energy

Crisis

Food

Water

Transport

Merging Social, Technological, Ecological realities

YUTPA framework: Factors for measuring trade-offs for presence and trust in individual human experience

to be with You in Unity of Time, Place and Action

Trade-offs for trust and truth

Presence research

Things go wrong: Society at the edge

• Ubiquitous monitoring of behaviour

• Personal networks are transparent; power networks

are opaque

• One can be suspect until proven innocent

• Deviant behaviour is immediately detectable

• All devices have built in spyware, malware

installations via upgrades of software

• Invisible abuse of power and disdain of human rights

Liberties are at stake

• to communicate

• to do transactions

• to move

Who are future social scientists?

• Maximizing psychological input?

• Making social algorithms for big data?

• Defining deviant behaviour?

• Facilitating local-global interaction?

• Deconstructing data power?

• Designing engagement?

• Streamlining the masses?

Frame social sciences:

• For high trust participatory contexts?

• For low trust surveillance contexts?

Include systems dynamics:

• Locality of data

• Transparency of ownership

• Transparency of agency

• Trace-ability of data

• Identify-ability of data

• Trust

• Poly-centricity

• Power and governance

Social Layer

Distributed ICT

Infrastructure

Brazier 2011

Engage with art and design:

• Art as research

• Design as research

• Value sensitive design

Just in Time Technology

Humanitas Mensurabilis

Image: Mecky van den Brink

THANK YOU