Venice Insite Workshop

Transcript

1. Two kinds of innovation • better, faster, cheaper • new attributions of functionality
2. Innovation cascades • New kinds of artifacts • Transformations in patterns of social interaction (social organization) • New attributions of – Identity • Agents: what they do, how they do it • Artifacts: how they are made; how they are used, by whom – value
3. Positive feedback dynamics: exaptive bootstrapping – New artifact types designed to instantiate a particular attribution of functionality – Organizational transformations constructed to proliferate use of tokens of new type – Novel patterns of human interaction emerge around these artifacts in use – New attributions of functionality generated
4. Example 1: printed publicity • Printing with movable type -- Mainz, 1450’s Gutenberg, Fust -- and Schoeffer • From indulgences to books -- and political broadsides • 1460’s: from commissions to direct sales to customers • mid-1460’s: printed advertisements (Schoeffer’s catalogue, 1469) for traveling salesmen
6. Example 2: the rise and fall of the “Italian” ottavo in the 16th century grafico 5 IL LIBRO VENEZIANO: il formato e il volgare 0,0 5,0 10,0 15,0 20,0 25,0 30,0 35,0 40,0 45,0 1500-10 1511-20 1521-30 1531-40 1541-50 1551-60 1561-70 1571-80 1581-90 1591-1600 % FOL. Ita FOL. Lat 4° Ita 4° Lat 8° Ita 8° Lat 12° Ita
7. Aldo Manuzio: projects and relationships • The dream: Regenerating society through Greek philosophy • The society: Manuzio, Torresano, Barberigo • Manuzio and Pietro Bembo
8. Le Cose Volgare di Messer Francesco Petrarcha, 1501 • Redirection: reading as recreation • Reading what, how? • Some novelties: – Ottavo – Italics (Griffo) – Introduction + text, no comments – Punctuation: comma, period, apostrophe; non- Latinized spelling – Italian philology and the birth of a (dead) language Prose della volgar lingua, 1525
9. Some sites along the cascade • Ottavo italics bfc, failed monopoly • New format -> new public -> new contents (eg secrets, letters, almanacs) -> new roles (eg “poligrafi”, peddlars, book smugglers) • Debate on the identity of the Italian language (Castiglione and Machiavelli vs. Bembo); Aretino and a living language • The fall of the Italian ottavo: delocalization and the Counter-reformation
10. Market conventions • Markets -- locus of impersonal exchange activities price as principal communication medium • Market conventions aligned attributions about artifact functionalities and properties; agent role structures; modes of transacting
11. Market systems • A set of agents engaged with one another in recurring patterns of interaction, organized around an evolving family of artifacts • Market system functionality – Design, produce, buy and sell, deliver, install, commission, use, maintain artifacts in the family – Generate new attributions about artifact functionality – Develop new artifacts to deliver this functionality – Construct and maintain new agents and patterns of agent interaction to keep these processes happening
12. Market system structure • Competence networks • Scaffolding structures – interaction loci – cognitive scaffolds -- schema
13. Manuscript market system: Bologna, c. 1450 copy parchment client merchant copyist illustrator stationer university exemplar
14. Humanist manuscript market system c. 1450 copy Original ms parchment merchant client copyist collector illuminator And if the copy was ready before the client came to the shop??
15. Printed book market system, c. 1500 publisher mediators book fair author/editor text Fixed capital: press, forms, dies, characters Edition investment: paper,ink labor edition bookseller printer client labor
16. Organizing an innovation society – New artifact types designed to instantiate a particular attribution of functionality Engineering profession; R&D labs; industrial- university partnerships – Organizational transformations constructed to proliferate use of tokens of new type Advertising industry – Novel patterns of human interaction emerge around these artifacts in use – New attributions of functionality generated Marketing profession
17. Innovation society ideology • The principal policy aim: sustained economic growth, interpreted as a steady increase in GDP • The engine of this growth: innovation, the creation of new kinds of artifacts. • Which new kinds of artifacts have value is decided by the market • The price to pay for not innovating or for subordinating innovation to other values, like cultural enrichment or social justice: – competition at the level of firms and of national economies doom dawdlers to failure – descent into economic decline and social chaos.
18. Is the Innovation Society Sustainable? • Endogenous social-environmental crises • With impacts on increasing spatial and decreasing temporal scales
19. Antidepressants and the Depression Epidemic • 1950’s: Scientific medicine and the pharmaceutical industry antibiotics, clinical trials • Scientific psychiatry?? – Tranquillizers and psychic enhancers – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (1st ed 1952 130 pages, 106 disorders; 4th ed 1994 886 pages, 297 disorders; from etiologic and psychodynamical to behavioral) – Clinical trials and evidence-based medicine • Depression -- self-limiting, rare 1 in 40,000 • Neurotransmitters and the broken brain
20. The drug-disease cascade • Drug design – animals to molecules • New drugs to new diseases • The depression(s) epidemic – Diagnosis DSM checklist, GPs – US: 1 in 10, major cause of work disability – From acute and self-limiting to chronic and progressive • Do the drugs “cause” the disease??
21. Innovation policy • In the Innovation Society: priming the pump of invention; leaving innovation to “the market” • Alternatives? – systemic innovation policy mobilizing civil society – distributed innovation policy scaffolding structures to facilitate social innovation networks and projects