Grand Challenge Labs
Teknik Övrigt
Johan Redström
2011-09-02 09:20, reviderat 2011-09-02 09:21
- experimental research environments working with grand challenges
At the heart of technology development lays processes of problem-solving. By creating new technologies, and by continuously optimising existing ones, research and development have provided amazing solutions to a very diverse set of problems. The usefulness and success of this approach can not be underestimated.
There are, however, things in life that do not quite qualify as a ‘problem’ to be solved. Consider the question ”How to build a good house to live in” as an example. In the 1960’s this issue was central to the development of welfare states such as Sweden as to cope with increasing urbanisation and a need to improve living conditions. Treating this as a more or less technical ‘problem’, the obvious way to go about ‘solving’ it was then to use the building technologies of the time in an efficient and rational way to create a solution in the form of massive housing projects.
However, as examples such as the Pruitt–Igoe in the US showed, this is not just a technical problem that can be solved: social, cultural and economical issues reaching far beyond the scope of building technology and rational city planning made many of these projects socially problematic to say the least. The problem is not just that people need a place to cook or sleep, but that we need a place to live. As a consequence, some of these projects are part of societal issues that we half a decade are still struggling to address. So much for a rational and quick technical solution.
While some of our past grand challenges were successfully addressed through this technological thinking and rational problem-solving, many of our current grand challenges will not. Questions such as ”how to achieve a more sustainable development” can not be reduced to a question of improved technology – it is already clear that if we do not also change the way we live, we will not be able to achieve this most necessary change. The same holds for issues such as how to actually live with all the technology that allow us to connect everything and everyone. To address issues such as these in the same technological and seemingly rational manner as the 1960’s housing problem was addressed is very likely to yield a similar result: technically functional but culturally problematic projects far from the usefulness that we think we will achieve.
To address issues such as these, we need a different philosophy as our starting point. We need to realise that there are important issues that are not problems for us to solve, but complex issues we need to understand. Technology plays an important part in this development, but it is not ‘technology development’. Products, systems, and services are present not as solutions to problems, but as instruments for initiating change in a design process driven by participation and interventions into everyday practices – and some things might even be created just to illustrate a possibility we need to see to shift our perspective, stage a discussion and see a new way forward.
This implies a shift from developing technology to solve given problems, to developing the processes necessary for turning grand challenges into new areas of research and development. It is important to understand that the coming about of such new areas is not just a matter of combining existing disciplines, i.e. finding new ‘applications’ for already existing research and technology under the disguise of inter-disciplinarity. On the contrary, this about the realisation of the experimental environments necessary for new research practices, new ways of thinking and doing, to emerge. Or, as Einsten put it: ”We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
-- Christina von Dorrien & Johan Redström, Interactive Institute
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