Democratizing AmI and the IoT: The Power and Influence of Social Innovation and Participative and Humanistic Design
Simon Elias Bibri · Atlantis ambient and pervasive intelligence · 2015
AmI and the IoT are said to hold great potential and promise in terms of radical social transformations. By virtue of their very definition, implying a certain desired view on the world, they represent more visions of the future than realities. And as shown by and known from preceding techno-visions and forecasting studies, the future reality is most likely to end up being very different from the way it is initially envisioned. Indeed, techno-visions appear to face a paradox, in that they fail to balance between innovative and futuristic claims and realistic assumptions. This pertains to unreasonable prospects, of limited modern applicability, on how people, technology, and society will evolve, as well as to a generalization or oversimplification of the rather specific or complex challenges involved in enabling future scenarios or making them for real. Also, crucially, techno-utopia is a relevant risk in such a strong focus on ambitious and inspiring visions of the future of technology. Techno-utopian discourses surround the advent of new technological innovations or breakthroughs, on the basis of which these discourses promise revolutionary social changes. The central issue with techno-visions is the technologically deterministic view underlying many of the envisioned scenarios, ignoring or falling short in considering the user and social dynamics involved in the innovation process. This has implications for the acceptance of technological innovation opportunities. This chapter aims to explore the power and seminal role of social innovation and participative and humanistic design—as one holistic approach—in sustaining the success of AmI and the IoT technologies, and to identify and address the great challenges involved in the process of embracing this approach. As increasingly a condition for technology development, democratization is seen as participation on a macro level. I argue that the continuity of AmI and the IoT will be based on the social dimension of innovation and, thus, the participative and humanistic dimension of design—i.e. the ability and willingness of people to use, absorb, or acclimatize to technological opportunities as well as their active involvement in the design process, coupled with the consideration for human values in the fundamental design choices. The primary intention is to provide insights and conduits to avoid technological determinism and unrealism associated with the AmI and the IoT visions and to highlight the tremendous value of the emerging approaches into and trends around technology design and innovation in addressing the complexity of AmI and the IoT contexts, enhancing related applications development, and managing the unpredictable future as to emerging user behaviors and needs in the contexts of AmI and the IoT. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.