Sustainable Workstyles and
Ambient Intelligence
Jesse MARSH
Atelier Studio Associato, Via XX Settembre 70, Palermo, 90141, Italy
Tel/Fax: +39-091-6253378, Email:
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, the way we 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 in order to guide their actions. In addition, consensus on believable futures provides the main rationale for short-term decisions that purport to steer events in those 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. To some degree, the concept of “Ambient Intelligence” itself – defined as the convergence of ubiquitous computing, intelligent systems and context awareness – carries this approach forward: according to a recent publication, the term “can be considered a landmark for giving direction to ITC research over the coming five-ten years.” [1]
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, screenplay-like descriptions of technology usage can be useful to develop coherent functional specifications or define research agendas.
Recent efforts to describe Ambient Intelligence often rely on such “day in the life” scenarios, for example in a “home of the future”.[4] While they help us picture the type of situations that may be enabled by Ambient Intelligence, and may highlight concerns that need 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?
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 behaviours and their 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 both the arenas of 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 development work are suggested as a way to ensure the successful development of 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.[5] 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: Dimitrios’s D-Me engages in phone conversations with his wife while he is sipping coffee with a colleague at work, and Annette’s ambient welcomes Solomon by asking for the name of another ambient that ‘knows’ his learning needs. The study’s 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 Carmen’s 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 don’t 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 [6], 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.[7]
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” [8] the ISIAS initiative [9] established local workgroups to define sustainable Information Society visions for their region. The large-scale TERRA 2000 project [10] developed analytical “scenarios and models of present and future developments in order to support policy debate and decision 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 [11], 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 [9] 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… this heretofore neglected dimension still requires comprehensive investigation. 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 behavior and household decision making.”
One could argue that on the contrary there has been almost too much research on “cultural aspects of consumer behavior and household decision making” 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 [13].
Returning to the sphere of IST-induced innovation, the above-mentioned 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. 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 [14]:
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. … In other words, individual workstyles represent what one could call work-related or occupational identity.
Individual workstyles 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. They form a reservoir of shared values and normative orientations towards his/her own professional group as well as to other professional groups.
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). The generation of sustainable workstyle scenarios can follow a similar approach but needs to identify the appropriate axes.
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 [15], 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.[16] 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.[17] Drawing on Barbara Adams’s work on time awareness, [18] 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 have 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 new song becomes available to a music lover the morning it’s published, but she downloads it to her iPod over breakfast and listens to 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 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
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 with the remote control, 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. 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 “Mobile Party” scenario is named after the hedonistic, lifestyle-oriented television advertising for 3G videophone services that essentially carries the i-mode’s 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 don’t 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.[19] The emphasis is on the quality of both time and knowledge, aiming to do the right thing at the right time more than many things in less time. 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.