Innovation and the Knowledge Economy: Issues, Applications, Case Studies Paul Cunningham and Miriam Cunningham (Eds)

IOS Press, 2005 Amsterdam ISBN: 1-58603-563-0

Sustainable Workstyle Scenarios for Ambient Intelligence

Jesse MARSH Atelier Studio Associato, Via XX Settembre 70, Palermo, 90141, Italy Tel/Fax: +39-091-6253378, Email: info@atelier.it
Abstract: Broad-reaching technology paradigms such as Ambient Intelligence require us to envision future social, organisational and cultural impacts in order to steer development in the direction of sustainability. To this end, workstyle scenarios, as compared to script-based or modelling approaches, better highlight the contrasting lifestyle implications that could result from current trends. Four such scenarios are developed for Ambient Intelligence, in relation to different possibilities for the organisation of knowledge (centralised vs decentralised) and time awareness (kronos vs kairos). Of the four, the Slow Business workstyle appears to be the most sustainable, and there are already indications of its emergence among micro-firms. Finally, its implications for the development of Ambient Intelligence are explored in relation to the three main components: ubiquity, personalisation and intelligence.

1. Introduction
As Information Society Technologies become ever more pervasive they both enable and provoke deep transformations in our social structures: the way we work and communicate, the way services are managed and delivered, etc. It is of critical importance for business and policy decision-makers to be able to create images of the futures that can result from these changes to guide their actions. In addition, consensus on believable futures provides the main rationale for short-term decisions that purport to steer events in desired directions. Once-futuristic metaphors such as the distance university, the information highway or virtual organisations have had an important role in driving organisational innovation to date, since they have given people models to refer to a sense of direction when making immediate technology adoption choices. The concept of Ambient Intelligence - defined as the convergence of ubiquitous computing, intelligent systems and context awareness carries this approach forward: according to a recent publication [1], the term can be considered a landmark for giving direction to ITC research over the coming five-ten years. There are a range of approaches to scenario building, each tuned to different purposes. Broad reaching foresight exercises aim to help policy makers develop long term global strategies [2]. In other cases, negative trends are extrapolated into the future to generate public support for remedial action [3]. In the industrial sector, roadmap projects often employ screenplay-like descriptions of technology usage to develop coherent functional specifications or define research agendas [4]. Recent efforts to describe Ambient Intelligence often rely on day in the life scenarios, for example in a home of the future [5]. While they help us picture the type of situations that may be enabled by Ambient Intelligence, and highlight concerns to be addressed, they lack the central drive of the broad picture policy scenarios: evaluating options. Put simply: are there different directions that Ambient Intelligence could take, and is one better than the other? Can Ambient Intelligence contribute to sustainable development or will it lead to increased consumption and inequity? Will industry mould new products and services to emerging and desirable trends or simply re-market existing patterns of working? Copyright 2005 The authors

2. Objectives and Method

The objective of this paper is to explore Ambient Intelligence from the lifestyle and workstyle perspectives, placing the emphasis on broad patterns of behaviour and its consequences for our economic, social, cultural and environmental systems. It provides a preliminary definition of contrasting Ambient Intelligence based workstyles that highlight implications for sustainable development: desirable and undesirable futures that could equally result from current trends. The method builds on an analysis of current scenario-building work in two arenas Ambient Intelligence and that of the link between IST and sustainable development as the baseline for focusing on the lifestyle and workstyle concepts. Two aspects affecting the potential evolution of workstyles, time and knowledge, are then analysed in relation to the possibilities opened up by Ambient Intelligence. Four scenarios generated by variations on these two aspects are briefly described, and one Slow Business is analysed as the outcome probably closest to the objective of sustainability. The likelihood of its emergence is then investigated in the context of, inter alia, trends identified in micro-firm networks adopting broadband and illustrative case studies. Finally, implications for future validation are suggested as a way to ensure the successful development of a common vision and strategy for sustainable workstyles.

3. State of the Art

3.1 The ISTAG Scenarios One of the more influential studies in developing the vision of Ambient Intelligence is that commissioned by the IST Advisory Group and published by the IPTS in February 2001 [6]. The analysis develops four screenplay scenarios: Maria the Road Warrior, Dimitrios and the Digital Me, Carmen: Traffic, Sustainability and Commerce and Annette and Solomon in the Ambient for Social Learning. For each, socio-political factors, business and industrial models and technology requirements are described in order to highlight the main implications for research in the 6th Framework Program. These scenarios are indeed compelling and thought-provoking: Dimitrioss D-Me engages in phone conversations with his wife while he is sipping coffee with a colleague at work, and Annettes ambient welcomes Solomon by asking for the name of another ambient that knows his learning needs. The studys discussion of socio-political implications often identifies social issues that will require attention; privacy, security and trust are the main concerns, but sustainability aspects are also accounted for, especially with Carmens shared transport service. In the context of this paper, however, the drawback of the ISTAG study is in the apparent inevitability of the scenarios. Although their purpose is to identify areas for technology research, the impression is that this is what the future will bring us and if we dont like it our only option is to hit the off-switch. 3.2 The IS-SD Research Strand A strand of research with a more problematic, policy-option approach takes the broad view of the relationship between the Information Society and Sustainable Development (IS-SD). Initiated in 1994 with a report from a DG XIII Working Circle [7], this work explored conceptual frameworks for the IS-SD link through a series of Guidelines issued by the GAD Concertation Chain in the ACTS Program [8]. These concepts were then operationalised through a series of initiatives. While the ASIS project built towards a high-level Alliance for a Sustainable Information Society [9] the ISIAS initiative [10] established local workgroups to define sustainable Information Society Copyright 2005 The authors

visions for their regions. The large-scale TERRA 2000 project [11] developed analytical scenarios and models of present and future developments in order to support policy debate and decisions aimed ultimately at optimising the contribution of Information Society Technologies to Sustainable Development. While these efforts clarified important policy choices to be made at the regional, European and global levels, they take a broad picture stance that is difficult to relate to the Ambient Intelligence concept, which places the user, i.e. the human being, at the centre of the future development of the knowledge-based society. A step in this direction was instead taken in the ASSIST project [12], which developed the concept of immaterialisation of consumption as a key area where IST can make a substantial contribution (perhaps the only real one) to reducing resource use. The argument is that even a substantial decrease in consumption through more efficient product life cycles or transport schemes (as in the ISTAG Carmen scenario) will only lead to incremental environmental benefits. Immaterialisation, as with for example downloading an MP3 file for listening to music on an existing computer, instead causes a switch moment drop to zero material use. 3.3 Lifestyles and Workstyles

As in the case of MP3, it soon becomes clear that the shift towards immaterialisation is more a question of patterns of individual behaviour than one of global agreements, of consumption more than production. Yet, as the Oslo Declaration on Sustainable Consumption [13] states: Efforts to develop consumption systems that are markedly more efficient and effective are still largely unknown and to date there have been few practical steps toward realizing their implementation Such research must systematically integrate efforts to promote improvements in quality of life, to distinguish long-term structural trends in consumption patterns, and to identify the social mechanisms and cultural aspects of consumer behaviour. One could argue that on the contrary there has been almost too much research on cultural aspects of consumer behavior in the field marketing and product-oriented lifestyle studies. The aim here has not traditionally been to save the planet but to sell products and services, and lifestyle marketing has gained a strong grip on defining the value systems of current generations, to the chagrin of writers such as Naomi Klein [14]. Returning to the sphere of IST-induced innovation, the ASSIST project carried out an analysis of why i-mode was so successful compared to the WAP platform launched in Europe at about the same time: DoCoMo plus i-mode (and the thousands of services and companies included in it) make an Integrated Lifestyle Package. The driver is 'a fun experience' that is, a wholly immaterial outcome. How they achieved success was by taking a Total Lifestyle Approach. The danger with this analysis is that it tends to view a group or individual exclusively in terms of consumption, as a carry-on effect of its marketing origin. We can balance this view, and in addition get closer to the target world of much of the IST program, if we consider lifestyles and workstyles as complementary concepts on which to base sustainable industrial strategies. While this latter is also a much abused term, a sound definition is put forth by Eberhard Wenzel in his work on health at the workplace [15]: By individual workstyles, I refer to the occupational and organizational patterns of behavior and action of a person, by which normative expectations regarding workplace- and occupation-related efficiency are met. Individual workstyles Copyright 2005 The authors

represent a complex system of mutually determining variables, the change of which will only be achieved, if their interdependencies are taken into account. By collective workstyles, I refer to socially, culturally, historically, technologically, politically and economically developed patterns of action, which are related to specific occupations and which are developed during vocational training and the first years of occupational socialization. This integration of the individual and the collective dimension in the analysis is particularly useful for this investigation. Indeed, achieving sustainability through Ambient Intelligence will involve a balance of individual creativity and institutional and organisational innovation in collectively developing new workstyles.

4. Four Workstyle Scenarios

The ISTAG study identifies two axes structuring the differentials between its four scenarios: goals (economic and personal efficiency versus sociability/humanistic drivers) and actors (communal versus individual as the user orientation driver). In this paper, I propose to follow a similar approach, using axes more oriented to the goal of evaluating the sustainability dimensions of workstyle scenarios. 4.1 Knowledge and Time

In this preliminary attempt, I suggest differentials that aim to highlight some key issues of sustainability, especially in the cultural dimension [16], probably the key determinant in shaping both individual and collective workstyle innovations. The first axis concerns the organisation of knowledge the main component of added value for European policy at least mapped between the extremes of centralised versus distributed. In the first case, the economy is divided according to producers and consumers of knowledge engaging in monetised transactions [17]. The distributed model on the other hand empowers individuals to produce and share knowledge as well as consume it, and places value on the collective social capital thus gained. The second axis deals with time, which though a recurring term in descriptions of the Information Society is oddly enough rarely itself the subject of reflection [18]. Drawing on Barbara Adamss work on time awareness [19], we can identify the extremes of kronos (emphasizing the properties of time) and kairos (a well-defined time opportunity). Kronos is part of a first group of time-related words identified by Adams, which also includes objective time, natural time, clock time, linear time, cyclical time and others. Kairos instead captures the more cultural dimension of time, and is grouped with terms such as social time, timescape, rhythm, time orientation, time perception and so forth. While organisational models and individual choices along these axes represent the main element of uncertainty, with a clear impact on the development of future workstyles, the technical scenario for Ambient Intelligence can in principle be seen to reinforce possible developments in either direction. For instance, there is an increase in the potential for quantitative time management (kronos) in that the environment is ubiquitous not only in space but in time as well: always on, always ready. In parallel however, services such as RSS and podcasting point to new kairos-like communication models somewhere between the synchronous and the asynchronous: a radio interview becomes available to a listener the morning its aired, but she prefers to download it to her iPod over breakfast and hear it at a more appropriate time, for instance while riding the subway. Along the knowledge axis, we can say that centrally broadcast messages ranging from corporate memos to advertising video clips are likely to be even more pervasive and invasive the more connected we are. The fact that user profiles, location filters and the like may in theory make that information custom fit to our current situation is likely to only Copyright 2005 The authors

increase the overload, as is currently the case with much direct marketing. In parallel, however, there is greater potential for the distributed production of knowledge, not just by single users finding appropriate tools for self-expression available at the right time in the right place, but also potentially by peer-to-peer networks of knowledge creators collaborating according to the models being experimented in the Open Source community. 4.2 Four Workstyle Scenarios
KNOWLEDGE ORGANISATION
HYPER EMPOWERMENT (BLACKBERRY) KRONOS DISTRIBUTED SLOW BUSINESS (BLOGSPHERE) KAIROS

TIME AWARENESS
ZAPPOLIS (BLOOMBERG) MOBILE PARTY (I-MODE) CENTRALISED

Using the above figure, let us now look at four workstyle scenarios that can be generated by the two axes, together with technology cases that illustrate how they relate to Ambient Intelligence. To the lower left, the Zap-Polis scenario results from an emphasis on clock time with the worker primarily acting on centralised knowledge. The image derives from the almost intentional information overload induced by teenagers zapping between television programs, and adopted as a model for serious business people by Bloomberg TV. The emphasis in this scenario is on the transmission of apparently appropriate knowledge in a hammering time-efficient manner, often with the hidden intention of influencing the actions of the individual, be it a global consumer or a sales representative. The Hyper-Empowerment scenario remains within the sphere of linear time, but here the individual is expected to generate knowledge with a high level of productivity. The Blackberry mobile office typifies this workstyle with individuals receiving and sending emails around the clock. Although caricatured in this description, this basic model drives much current thinking on the contribution of ICT to competitiveness and hence the industrial relevance of its requirements. It is increasingly being called into question, however, primarily for the levels of stress generated in the individual such that productivity may be quantitative but not necessarily qualitative (the Crackberry syndrome). The Mobile Party scenario is named after the hedonistic, lifestyle-oriented television advertising for 3G videophone services that essentially carries the i-modes total lifestyle concept further. Time here is the social time of kairos, but the organisation of knowledge is centralised, with the user a pure consumer (I dont consider a snapshot with Megan Gale to be knowledge production). As a workstyle, this scenario is at best relevant for activities with more of a relational than a knowledge production component, but is in any event unsustainable from a socio-economic standpoint. The fourth scenario, with a decentralised organisation of knowledge and a social awareness of time, is called Slow Business after the Slow Food movement [20]. The emphasis is on the quality of both time and knowledge, aiming to do the right thing at the Copyright 2005 The authors

right time more than many things in less time. A Sicilian saying describes the appropriate time for doing business as u tempo c e u friscu pure (theres enough time and the weathers cool as well). A technology paradigm close to this scenario is the blogsphere, where the personal is mixed with the professional, news with reflection, the timing of when one has something to say with the instantaneity of the RSS feed. While the boundary separating work from life is at risk with the Hyper-Empowerment workstyle, here it is the other way around: life invades work. 4.3 The Likelihood of Slow Business

The organisation of this matrix implies the Slow Business scenario is the more culturally sustainable, combining diffused, collective knowledge with socially differentiated time awareness. It is also the closest to the most sophisticated (and long-term) of the ISTAG scenarios: Annette and Solomons humanistic, community oriented social learning ambient. An additional argument in favour of the sustainability of Slow Business has to do with challenging the necessity of saving time at all costs, often a significant multiplier of resource consumption. Further, the distributed model of knowledge production can be linked to social and economic sustainability in terms of inclusiveness and resilience of production models, especially for networked enterprises. In the end, though, the link between the Slow Business scenario and economic competitiveness is counter-intuitive, if only because the Industrial Era has so embedded us in the virtues of clock time [21]. Perhaps, as has been the case with other counter-intuitive success stories such as the TCP-IT protocol or indeed the Slow Food movement, this scenario will emerge as a significant market over the coming years, driven if nothing else by individual and collective lifestyle/workstyle choices. Early signals are appearing amongst home-office workers and micro-firms (who, it should be remembered, generate nearly a quarter of all European yearly sales), arguably because they have greater autonomy in deciding what workstyles to adopt. The EURESCOM project PROFIT has been investigating the socio-economic dimensions of Ambient Intelligence, including user acceptance issues for the ISTAG scenarios. Their fieldwork identifies non profit-maximising lifestyle businesses [who] were particularly found to want to maintain strict boundaries [between work and home], since their businesses were formed to maintain their quality of life. [22] More broadly, the recently completed NEWTIME project [23] investigated the impact of moving to broadband on networks of micro-firms in five very different European contexts. In one survey, some 32% of owners cite support preferred lifestyle as their main business objective, outranking maximise profits by 10 percentage points. Two NEWTIME case studies illustrate the kind of preferred lifestyles that can appear, especially in the case of moving to broadband technology. One case involves a group of some 10 independent professionals in creative fields from graphics design to marketing, working as an ad hoc network within a shared facility in Denmark. Their implementation of a knowledge management/workflow system required a significant re-working of the initial structure to account for the multiplicity of possible roles and links in joint projects, as well as their different family organisations and individual time requirements. Another network in Cornwall reports that the most important advantage of installing a WiFi network in the joint office space has been the workstyle flexibility it enables, allowing them to change workspaces and to come and go from the office more easily. One can imagine such a group in a comfortably furnished shared work environment, signalling to co-workers (and potentially an Ambient Intelligence environment) their working mood need to concentrate, wanting to brainstorm, open to chat by opening up the laptop in, say, a secluded corner in the library, on the coffee table in front of the sofa or out on the patio. Copyright 2005 The authors

5. Implications and Conclusions

5.1 Development Implications To identify implications of these Slow Business workstyles for technology development, it may be useful to analyse the kinds of action patterns or social models that derive from the scenarios and thus some areas that can then be investigated from an industrial standpoint. This is of course the subject for future research and validation, but I suggest a preliminary framework could follow the three main technology concepts that converge to shape the Ambient Intelligence paradigm: ubiquity, personalisation and intelligence. The question of ubiquity is similar to our experience with the shift from dial-up to always-on Internet connections. Rather than a window of opportunity to be used as efficiently as possible, connectivity has become an attribute of the environment, influencing the potentials of time and space in that specific place. Rather than a simple off switch, the Slow Business worker will need services to manage time awareness in Barbara Adamss more nuanced ways: coordination, rhythm, anticipation, procrastination, allocation, and so forth. Spatial awareness will also require research into the kinds of tools required to manage inter-culturality, starting from Edward T. Halls proxemics [24]: what are the differences in human interaction between a WiFi-ed Starbucks in Chicago and sipping tea and playing backgammon at a sidewalk caf in Istanbul? Personalisation is currently conceived of in terms of profiles of an individuals functional or organisational aptitudes or at most data-mined aspects of taste and preferences. The Slow Business scenario brings the ethical dimension of working relationships to the fore; here, the implications have hardly been touched on to date, save in the hacker community [25]. The role of trust as a constituent element of social capital is increasing significantly in knowledge-based networks, and to most people, trust is less a question of encryption and more one of sharing similar values. A good case study here could be built on the workstyle of theatrical companies (often used as a metaphor for virtual enterprises), where mutual respect for different but complementary competencies is deeply coded in the organisation of work processes. Finally, we have intelligence or, more precisely, information that is presumed to be relevant as a function of the situational context. Of increasing importance, and this is tied to the question of ethics, is the authentication of knowledge and the evaluation of relevance (Googles page ranking software?). Alain De Botton in The Art of Travel has a wonderful chapter on curiosity, describing how he discovers whats really in a Piazza del Duomo - the people, details in the pavement and so on - quite differently from the information that the tourist guide deems useful such as its surface in square metres [26]. The physical environment is full of tacit, uncoded knowledge [27]; could the tools of Ambient Intelligence allow us to enter into a dialogue with our surroundings (or more usefully its multiple authors) to tap that knowledge? 5.2 Concluding Note

As a preliminary exercise, the above suggestions aim more to provoke the imagination than to set a research agenda. If there is the will, however, building on workstyle models such as those just described, to move towards industrial products and services that correspond to emerging sustainable markets that are not merely extensions of existing paradigms. An open mind is required to imagine the possible workstyles that could emerge from Ambient Intelligence, and a clear sense of direction will be required to steer its evolution in the direction of true sustainability, rather than an exasperation of the familiar but inequitable, resource-consuming and hyper-stressed workstyle models we have today. Copyright 2005 The authors

As the above paragraphs suggest, however, it may be that sustainable workstyles are already beginning to emerge spontaneously with the first signs of convergence in the direction of the Ambient Intelligence vision, especially in contexts where people rather than industry define markets. The social, cultural and organisational models they develop may represent radical innovations, but they equally have deep roots in our collective history. As we work to imagine what might be possible, we therefore should also have a second look around us at what is already there.

References
[1] G. Riva et al, ed. Ambient Intelligence: The evolution of technology, communication and cognition towards the future of human-computer interaction, IOS Press, from the Introduction published at www.vepsy.com/communication/volume6.html [2] National Intelligence Council, Mapping the Global Future, available at http://www.cia.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2020.html#contents [3] D. Meadows et. Al., The Limits to Growth, first Report to the Club of Rome, Universe Books, New York, 1972. [4] Examples are the Future Workspaces http://www.avprc.ac.uk/fws/ and COCONET http://coconet.telin.nl/ Roadmap projects. [5] See Electrolux and Ericssons e2-home www.e2-home.com, Geiorgia Techs Aware House www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ahri, or MITs house_n http://architecture.mit.edu/house_n [6] Scenarios for Ambient Intelligence 2010, Institute for Prospective Technology Studies, Seville, February 2001, and available at ftp://ftp.cordis.lu/pub/ist/docs/istagscenarios2010.pdf [7] FAW, DG XIII/B Working Circle, Contributions of the Information Society to Sustainable Development, European Commission, 1994. [8] http://www.cordis.lu/infowin/acts/analysys/concertation/chains/ga/desc_gad.htm [9] http://www.faw.uni-ulm.de/asis/welcome.html [10] http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/showcase/projects/isias/i_public.html [11] http://www.terra-2000.org/ [12] http://www.cornix.co.uk/assist.htm [13] Oslo Declaration on Sustainable Consumption, February 2005: http://www.oslodeclaration.org/ [14] N. Klein, No Logo: taking aim at the brand bullies, Knopf Canada, December 1999. [15] E. Wenzel, Conceptual issues in worksite health promotion, in C. Chu and R.Simpson, eds, The Ecological Public Health, from vision to practice, University of Toronto, 1994. [16] J. Marsh, Cultural Diversity and the Information Society: Policy options and Technological Issues, PE 297.559/Fin.St., Brussels, July 2001. [17] J. Rifkin, The Age of Access: the new culture of hypercapitalism, where all of life is a paid-for experience, J.P Tarcher/Putnam, 2000. [18] G. Morello, ed., Between Tradition and Innovation: Time in a Managerial Perspective, Fabio Orlando Editore, Palermo, 1997. [19] B. Adams, If your waste your time, you waste your life: the growing awareness of time and temporalities, Conference on Leisure Futures, University of Inssbruck, 2004. [20] http://www.slowfood.com/ [21] T. Paquot, The Art of the Siesta, Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd., 2003. [22] http://www.eurescom.de/Public/Projects/P1300-series/P1302/default.asp [23] http://www.newtime.org/ [24] E.T. Hall, The Silent Language and The Hidden Dimension, Doubleday, N.Y., 1959 and 1966 respectively, and Beyond Culture, Anchor Press, N.Y., 1976. [25] P. Himanen, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, with a prologue by L. Torvalds and an epilogue by M. Castells, Random House, New York, 2001 and E. Raymond, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: musings on Linux and Open Source by an accidental revolutionary, OReilly, Sebastapol California, 2001. [26] A. De Botton, The Art of Travel, Penguin, 2003. [27] M. Boisot, Knowledge Assets, Oxford University Press, 1998.

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