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The Strategic Prototype "Crime-sourcing" and the Science/Science Fiction behind it
Abstract
Science fiction prototyping (SFP) and crowdsourcing are among a range of promising methodologies that are set to transform all spheres of human landscape be it science, business or social. This paper exploits the SFP and crowdsourcing methodologies and presents “crime-sourcing”, a prototype designed to explore futuristic crowdsourcing ideas. Its purpose is to provide a fictional scenario that speculates how crowdsourcing could be blended with future technology to develop a “crime-to-conviction” model. This scenario takes the cyber-space concept of crowdsourcing and then transfers it to a hybrid cyber/physical business model context. The story aligns itself with Zuckerman's doctrine that while there is human tendency to “flock together” in crowds, most of our social ties, online or offline, are only with a small set of people with whom we have much in common. The paper concludes with a discussion on contribution of this paper to crowdsourcing theory and the challenges that need to be overcome if prototyping is to become an established foresight methodology.
... (Rumpala, 2014). related to higher education, which means that the design enables a much more participative reflection (Graham & Mehmood, 2014). The aim is to involve the participant in the discovery and solution of problems, instead of just inviting participants to show them (Greyson, 2016) In this sense, dystopias are stories that provide warnings on things that might happen if humans are not careful. ...
Future studies face several problems in terms of desirable scenarios, the misuse of probabilities and tools that do not adequately manage uncertainty. To address this, it is important to privilege procedures that enable the identification of breaking points and black swans, such as disciplines that prioritize the description of dystopias as a catalyst for future actions. In order to verify whether this is possible, this paper analyzes the use of dystopias as a means to better reflect about the future, to then establish whether Science Fiction and Speculative Design enable a better description of these possible dystopias, thereby facilitating the identification of a dystopic future for a university. To this end, we describe a case study that enabled imagining and materializing a university in 2035 using a logic that is totally dystopic. The results obtained show that Science Fiction and Speculative Design are capable of producing dystopic inputs that help warn against future risks and threats. From the case study we can conclude that a dystopic process enables the identification of a wide range of actions and provides a vision of the future. In this sense, a non-traditional process that privileges the construction of dystopias may be useful for planning an organization’s future.
... Some prominent examples are science fiction prototyping (SFP) [27], Zygotics [28], diegetic prototypes [29], and design fiction [30][31][32]. There are instances where solutions to the problems have arisen from science fiction in the fields of business [33], education [34], engineering, finance [35], and solutions in the form of innovative ideas inspired from science fiction writings or other types of creative arts [36][37][38][39]. There have been efforts toward making the speculative enactments of the future envisioned through fiction, which we know as design fiction. ...
The objective of this work is to position speculative fiction as a broader framework to stimulate, facilitate, and study engineering design ideation. For this, we first present a comprehensive and detailed review of the literature on how fiction, especially science fiction, has played a role in design and decision-making. To further strengthen the need for speculative fiction for idea stimulation, we further prototype and study a prototype workflow that utilizes excerpts from speculative fiction books as textual stimuli for design ideation. Through a qualitative study of this workflow, we gain insights on the effect of textual stimuli from science fiction narratives on design concepts. Our study reveals that the texts either closely related to the problem or consisting of the terms from the design statement boost the idea generation process. We further discover that less directly related stimuli may encourage out-of-the-box and divergent thinking. Using the insights gained from our study, we pose critical questions to initiate speculative fiction-based design ideation as a new research direction in engineering design. Subsequently, we discuss current research directions and domains that will be necessary to take the technical, technological, and methodological steps needed for future research on design methodologies based on speculative-fictional inspiration. Finally, we present a practical case to demonstrate how an engineering design workflow could be operationalized by investigating a concrete example of the design of automotive user interfaces (automotive-UI) through the lens of speculative fiction.
... It can solve various problems in the application of BDT, including large data volumes, the difficulty of guaranteeing quality, strong hybridity, and complex endogenous relationships among data. Therefore, the technique of machine learning is especially suitable for the open and complex giant system of urban space, and has been applied into crime analysis (Graham & Mehmood, 2014), social network identification (Zhang et al., 2011), resident behavior (Bentley et al., 2014), housing price forecast of income (Wu et al., 2018), and traffic flows . Those applications suggest BDT is a promising technique to probe into city industrial space. ...
The notion of path dependence provides a useful perspective to understand the dynamics of industrial space. However, it is much developed on institutional and technological aspects. This paper proposes the idea of spatial path dependence, arguing that previous spatial distribution of economic activities and associated factors in a given industrial space shall affect current and future ones. Availing of big data technology, the spatial distribution is quantified, and spatial path dependence is examined by means of standard deviation ellipse and machine learning method for information service and its sub-sectors in Beijing during the periods of 2008 and 2013. The analysis shows an existence of spatial path dependence for those industries in the two periods. The dominant factors are screened out, which are differ in different sub-sectors and in different periods, but contribute to the same or similar spatial path. The findings call for the attention of the existing situation for industrial spatial planning, and new emerging “people-oriented” factors in influencing the spatial layout of information services industries.
... Furthermore, and claims that the reflection phase should be a collaborative process and they introduced the 'Interactive SFP' (ISFP) method, where participants can collaboratively create, assess and reflect on future technologies in order to capture and understand the future from different perspectives. Graham (2013) and Graham and Mehmood (2014) take this study further and use 'crowd-sourcing' as a means to evaluate the social and economic ramifications of business models through the fictional narratives. ...
Science-Fiction Prototyping (SFP) is a method that applies mythical narratives in the form of novels, comics or animated videos to encourage disruptive innovation and to help to discover the positive or negative consequences of future technologies. This research project investigates SFP as a potential design tool that could help start-up entrepreneurs to
innovate or develop new technologies. The study aims to explore whether the process can improve entrepreneurial skills such as creative and critical thinking, and whether it is a useful technique to identify new markets, product features or technologies. Furthermore, the study observes if the current global pandemic has any effect on the created stories written by aspiring and start-up entrepreneurs.
The study applies both qualitative and quantitative (mixed) research methodology in order to answer the suggested hypotheses. The study is distributed online in a form of a survey that consisted of three main parts: (a) Pre-Questionnaire to gain insight of the key statistical data
such as participants’ perception of future innovation; (b) Writing Tasks, where respondents were asked to write short fictional stories and (c) Post-Questionnaire for the purpose to test if the SFP method has improved the partakers’ creative thinking capabilities. The gathered data is analysed with different methods, such as coding on NVivo-12,
Qualtrics Analytics and SPSS for statistical information.
25 people took part in the study, which from after the reliability check, 20 responses were qualified for the quantitative and 24 for the qualitative data analysis. The study found positive results on the improvement of creativity and the majority of participants were able to identify product features, technologies and new markets. Although, most of the partakers
believed that future innovations are driven by external factors such as economy or politics, COVID-19 on the other hand did not have any influence and connection to the created narratives.
... Here, at least some of the objects we investigate are potentially wholly imaginary. Invoking SF in a futures thinking/research context is not novel (de Cock, 2009;Livingston, 1971;Miles, 1993;Skeates, 1997;Suvin, 1972), yet much of its contemporary application tends to SF prototyping (SFP) or experimenting with the future as creative extrapolations of the present, along some existing technological dimension Graham & Mehmood, 2014;Nelder, 2013;Roberts & Middleton, 2014;Stahl et al., 2014). In a similar vein, we acknowledge the idea of the Creative Fiction Prototype (CFP) as inclusive of both a hard, science-based SFP and a 'softer' conceptual prototyping of social and economic issues (Graham, 2013;McCullagh, 2013;Nelder, 2013). ...
This conceptual paper is inspired by a critical and counterfactual application of science fiction. Although both science fiction and counterfactuals in futures studies are not uncommon, this paper sets out a theoretical position for a critical perspective on their use. A critical counterfactuals method is proposed, in which a device of fictional news headlines provides a set of counterfactual vignettes-small scenes from the future-used to explore the emergence of an extant concept of entrepreneurship. In order to assign relative truth values to science fiction vignettes, a truth-table is used to examine coherence between the counterfactuals and a range of projected future moments, based on three dimensions of an uncertain future history. This approach is argued as overcoming several limitations of fictional scenarios/vignettes in counterfactual analysis, including the indeterminacy intuition: the accepted wisdom that impossible or wholly implausible scenarios are unfeasible. In reporting on an initial study, the paper draws conjectures about a future entrepreneurship, highlighting the method's potential in delivering new insights into how future education and support policies might better develop entrepreneurship for a sustainable economy.
... Linking science fiction with the structuring of prototypes (which are part of Design), enables the generation of more concrete results. It introduces real physical objects that require the participation of users, therefore facilitating their emotional and intellectual commitment (Graham & Mehmood, 2014). The prototype is a story where a product is described in a fictional way, which is not what actually is intended to be built, but rather just an example of what one hopes to build someday (Bell et al., 2013). ...
Purpose
This paper aims to propose a new strategic foresight process that combines aspects from science fiction, speculative design and tools linked to organizational processes, first, to generate potential new services and products and, second, to reduce problems associated with the construction of low-impact and irrelevant scenarios for decision-making processes. As a new proposal, it invites reflection and debate.
Design/methodology/approach
After reviewing the literature on the key concepts that represent the essence of strategic foresight, as well as the traditional processes to reflect on the future, a proposal for a new hybrid, integrative foresight process that allows moving from imagination to the materialization of scenarios will be presented.
Findings
The new hybrid process makes evident the need to articulate strategic foresight with other areas of knowledge and management tools to build scenarios with greater impact on decision-making and greater added value from strategic foresight to organizational processes.
Originality/value
The proposed integrative model articulates tools that already exist, but the originality of the proposal lies in that there are no models that integrate science fiction, speculative design, and other organizational tools in a single process.
... As such, the paper confirmed that data visualisation techniques provide further mechanisms for cross-national crime scientists to better integrate space and time crime variables in their crime analyses. In Graham and Mehmood (2014), the authors explore the crime-sourcing approach as a newly emerging method in fighting against criminal activities. They introduce what called the strategic prototype of what they called 'crime-sourcing' and the science fiction behind it. ...
This study aims to: 1) to explore the benefits of adding a spatial GIS layer of analysis to other existing visualisation techniques; 2) to identify and evaluate the patterns in selected crime data by analysing Chicago's open dataset; 3) provide a better understanding of patterns and prediction of crime trends within the selected geographical location. We conclude that Chicago seems to be on course to have both the lowest violent crime rate since 1972, and the lowest murder frequency since 1967. Chicago has witnessed a vigorous drop in most crimes types over the last few years in compares to the previous crime index data. Also, Chicago crime naturally upsurges during summer months and declines during winter months. Our study results align with previous several decades of studies and analysis of Chicago crimes, in which the same communities of highest crime rates still experience the mainstream of crime.
Keywords: spatial distribution, geographic information system, GIS, crime analysis, visualisation tools, GIS techniques, data visualisation, crime mapping
... As such, the paper confirmed that data visualisation techniques provide further mechanisms for cross-national crime scientists to better integrate space and time crime variables in their crime analyses. In Graham and Mehmood (2014), the authors explore the crime-sourcing approach as a newly emerging method in fighting against criminal activities. They introduce what called the strategic prototype of what they called 'crime-sourcing' and the science fiction behind it. ...
... The platform can be what it literally is, an enabling digital platform for interactions, or it can play a more substantial role in the project itself (Kaganer et al., 2013;. For example, platforms can be used for data collection or as a methodology for prototype development and research (e.g., Graham and Mehmood, 2014;Koivisto, 2012;. A platform can play a more engaged role when it assumes an intermediary role and supports managing (rather than just enabling) projects. ...
Fueled by the development of Internet-based platforms that provided its technological foundation, and the need for an agile and uniquely skilled workforce, crowdsourcing has grown from the grassroots, with a burgeoning body of research investigating its many aspects. To gain insight into organizational crowdsourcing as a strategic IS sourcing phenomenon, this paper thoroughly reviews the literature to identify both areas of saturation and gaps, with a focus on the strategic organizational context. Pulling together knowledge on specific aspects of crowdsourcing, we first offer a high-level analysis of definitions to reveal rather broad coverage of various activities involving the crowd, many of which do not involve sourcing. We further build on the literature to establish boundary conditions and clarify the focus on crowdsourcing. This is followed by an in-depth critical analysis of selected studies published in top IS and general management journals to date. Through this review, we identify key themes that emerge out of the crowdsourcing literature and synthesize the literature to chart a more focused research path moving forward. Guided by our analysis, we offer a road map for future research that brings together fine-grained insights from existing crowdsourcing studies towards developing a high-level, macro-perspective of the crowdsourcing phenomenon and its strategic impact.
... Smart society is an extension of the smart cities concept, "a digitally enabled, knowledge-based society, aware of and working towards social, environmental, and economic sustainability" [13]. Many new smart city applications are being developed, see e.g., knowledge learning and management [13], green computing [14], future applications [15], healthcare and life sciences [16][17][18][19], smart farming [20], disaster management [21], autonomous driving [22], and IoT-based smart applications [23]. ...
High performance computing (HPC), big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are playing a key role in enabling smart society systems to sense the cities and other environments at micro-levels, detecting events, making intelligent decisions, and taking appropriate actions, all within stringent time bounds. Social media have revolutionized our societies and are gradually becoming a key pulse of smart societies by sensing the information about the people and their spatio-temporal experiences around the living spaces. The aim of this work is to develop data management and analysis techniques for smart societies. Specifically, we use big data, machine learning, and other platforms including Spark, MLlib, Tableau, and Google Maps Geocoding API, to study Twitter data for the detection and validation of spatio-temporal events in London. We empirically demonstrate that physical, virtual, and conceptual events can be detected automatically by analyzing data. We find and locate congestion around London. We detect the occurrence of multiple events including “Underbelly Festival,” “The Luna Cinema” and “London Notting Hill Carnival 2017,” their locations and times, without any prior knowledge of the events. An architecture of our big data analytics tool based on Spark for the detection of spatio-temporal events is provided along with the details of the main system components using six algorithms. The event detection pipeline has been enhanced using a methodology to automatically validate the factuality of the detected events. We also provide a comparison of three machine learning methods, support vector machine, logistic regression, and Naïve Bayes for event detection.
... Numerous other smart city technologies and systems have been proposed, for example, related to mobile computing [85], emerging applications [86], healthcare and life sciences [25,51,69,82], information systems [41,87], and IoT-based smart applications [59]. Moreover, smart mobility is a key dimension of smart city designs and operations [88]. ...
Smart city concept redefines the urban planning and development of the existing and new cities. It drives on economic, social, and environmental sustainability of a city and attracts citizens, professionals, and corporations to build sustainable living. It portrays a city that is operationally optimal and provides a space for innovation. This is achieved through state of the art physical, institutional, and digital infrastructure. This chapter addresses the challenges of the digital aspect of the smart city. Enterprise systems technology is widely used in the organizations and will be utilized in the Smart city systems conceptualization and implementation. Smart city systems definition has been derived by analyzing the smart city requirements. Enterprise systems technology has been explained and the latest ICT trends have been explored to develop the technological foundation of smart city systems. Finally, we introduce partial least square regression, a structural equation modeling method to explore interrelationships between different interdisciplinary constructs and show its application to studying smart city systems. From the digital perspective of smart city, it may be concluded that connectedness leads to integration and integration leads to dynamism and dynamism leads to smartness and cycle continues to realize the best in class smart city.
... NGOING population growth and urbanization are sparking a renewed desire to integrate technology into the design of city services, thus creating the essence of "smart cities". This renewed focus has resulted in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to scale up critical urban support for larger communities including transportation [1]- [3], energy systems [4], [5], crime-sourcing [6], [7], and emergency response [8]. ...
Smart cities use information and communication technologies (ICTs) to scale services include utilities and transportation to a growing population. In this paper, we discuss how smart city ICTs can also improve healthcare effectiveness and lower healthcare cost for smart city residents. We survey current literature and introduce original research to offer an overview of how smart city infrastructure supports strategic healthcare using both mobile and ambient sensors combined with machine learning. Finally, we consider challenges that will be faced as healthcare providers make use of these opportunities.
... According to the coproduction theory, citizens participate in the planning and implementation of public policies (Thomas 2013 ). Examples include crime prevention (Graham and Mehmood 2014 ) and the 311 hotline (Clark, Brudney, and Jang 2013 ;Minkoff 2016 ). Crowdsourcing studies show that products or services that include consumer participation in the production process can increase brand recognition, customer satisfaction, and loyalty (Baron and Warnaby 2011 ;Djelassi and Decoopman 2013 ;Kozinets, Hemetsberger, and Schau 2008 ). ...
Crowdsourcing has proliferated across disciplines and professional fields. Implementers in the public sector face practical challenges, however, in the execution of crowdsourcing. This review synthesizes prior crowdsourcing research and practices from a variety of disciplines and focuses to identify lessons for meeting the practical challenges of crowdsourcing in the public sector. It identifies three distinct categories of crowdsourcing: organizations, products and services, and holistic systems. Lessons about the fundamental logic of process design—alignment, motivation, and evaluation—identified across the three categories are discussed. Conclusions drawn from past studies and the resulting evidence can help public managers better design and implement crowdsourcing in the public sector.
... Big data is increasing the importance of the experts in the performance management (Lavertu 2015). Using the crowdsourcing, the criminal investigators can gather the data from populations (Graham and Mehmood 2014). Big data and smart cities can be highly significant for the supplier networks (Ö berg and . ...
The importance of data science and big data analytics is growing very fast as organizations are gearing up to leverage their information assets to gain competitive advantage. The flexibility offered through big data analytics empowers functional as well as firm-level performance. In the first phase of the study, we attempt to analyze the research on big data published in high-quality business management journals. The analysis was visualized using tools for big data and text mining to understand the dominant themes and how they are connected. Subsequently, an industry-specific categorization of the studies was done to understand the key use cases. It was found that most of the existing research focuses majorly on consumer discretionary, followed by public administration. Methodologically, a major focus in such exploration is in social media analytics, text mining and machine learning applications for meeting objectives in marketing and supply chain management. However, it was found that not much focus was highlighted in these studies to demonstrate the tools used for the analysis. To address this gap, this study also discusses the evolution, types and usage of big data tools. The brief overview of big data technologies grouped by the services they enable and some of their applications are presented. The study categorizes these tools into big data analysis platforms, databases and data warehouses, programming languages, search tools, and data aggregation and transfer tools. Finally, based on the review, future directions for exploration in big data has been provided for academic and practice.
... Several other works which are aimed at different applications of Smart Cities by implementing data fusion such as water management [177]- [179], social big data [180], smart power supply and management [181]- [183], intelligent traffic management [184]- [186], and smart healthcare [187]- [189] are introduced to take leverage from IoT infrastructure. Other works relevant to various services in smart cities or societies include emergency management systems [190], [191], [208], IoT-based proposals for improving cultural virtual reality based traffic event simulations [192], autonomic mobility systems [193], [194], urban logistics [195]- [198], location based services [199], multimedia performance analysis over networks for smart cities [200], [201], [203], crime-sourcing [204], community resilience [198], vehicular ad hoc networks that could be used for mobility and data forwarding (such as fog) purposes [191], [205], green computing for mobiles [206], cloudlets [207], artificial intelligence [208], intelligent mobility with social conscience [209], and location based services with data privacy [199], internet of cultural things and similar proposal [210]- [212], and city planning [8]. ...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to become one of the key technological developments of our times provided we are able to realize its full potential. The number of objects connected to IoT is expected to reach 50 billion by 2020 due to the massive influx of diverse objects emerging progressively. IoT hence is expected to be a major producer of big data. Sharing and collaboration of data and other resources would be the key for enabling sustainable ubiquitous environments such as smart cities and societies. A timely fusion and analysis of big data, acquired from IoT and other sources, to enable highly efficient, reliable and accurate decision making and management of ubiquitous environments would be a grand future challenge. Computational intelligence would play a key role in this challenge. A number of surveys exist on data fusion. However, these are mainly focused on specific application areas or classifications.
... Finally, for session management to be effective, seekers have to develop new orchestration skills and also take on the role of "client" within the process (Nevo and Kotlarsky, 2014); they must inspire learning and creativity through feedback from professionals and experts (Kosonen, Gan, Vanhala and Blomqvist, 2014 Djurjagina and Leker, 2014); and set futuristic contexts in which ideas can be generated (Graham and Mehmood, 2014). ...
As academic and practitioner studies on crowdsourcing have been building up since 2006, the subject itself has progressively gained in importance within the broad field of management. No systematic review on the topic has so far appeared in management journals, however; moreover, the field suffers from ambiguity in the topic's definition, which in turn has led to its largely unstructured evolution. The authors therefore investigate the existing body of knowledge on crowdsourcing systematically through a penetrating review in which the strengths and weakness of this literature stream are presented clearly and then future avenues of research are set out. The review is based on 121 scientific articles published between January 2006 and January 2015. The review recognizes that crowdsourcing is ingrained in two mainstream disciplines within the broader subject matter of innovation and management: (1) open innovation; and (2) co-creation. The review, in addition, also touches on several issues covered in other theoretical streams: (3) information systems management; (4) organizational theory and design; (5) marketing; and (6) strategy. The authors adopt a process perspective, applying the ‘Input–Process–Output’ framework to interpret research on crowdsourcing within the broad lines of: (1) Input (Problem/Task); (2) Process (session management; problem management; knowledge management; technology); and (3) Outcome (solution/completed task; seekers’ benefits; solvers’ benefits). This framework provides a detailed description of how the topic has evolved over time, and suggestions concerning the future direction of research are proposed in the form of research questions that are valuable for both academics and managers.
... Mobile applications such as Citymapper [2] allows us to travel through the city using public and other transport modes providing near real-time information. Many other developments such as Internet of things (IoT) for smart cities [3], semantic web for smart cities data [4], smart emergency management systems [5], autonomic transportation systems [6], traffic-aware street lighting scheme [7], planning and land administration [8], strategies for smart cities [9], privacy-aware participation [10], crimesourcing [11], community resilience [12], smart grid and metering, and many other proposals [6], [13]- [22] are shaping our move towards the smart cities era. ...
Smart cities appear as the next stage of urbanization aiming to not only exploit physical and digital infrastructure for urban development but also the intellectual and social capital as its core ingredient for urbanization. Smart cities harness the power of data from sensors in order to understand and manage city systems. The most important of these sensing devices are smartphones as they provide the most important means to connect the smart city systems with its citizens, allowing personalization n and cocreation. The battery lifetime of smartphones is one of the most important parameters in achieving good user experience for the device. Therefore, the management and the optimization of handheld device applications in relation to their power consumption are an important area of research. This paper investigates the relationship between the energy consumption of a localization application and the strength of the global positioning system (GPS) signal. This is an important focus, because location-based applications are among the top power-hungry applications. We conduct experiments on two android location-based applications, one developed by us, and the other one, off the shelf. We use the results from the measurements of the two applications to derive a mathematical model that describes the power consumption in smartphones in terms of SNR and the time to first fix. The results from this study show that higher SNR values of GPS signals do consume less energy, while low GPS signals causing faster battery drain (38% as compared with 13%). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that provides a quantitative understanding of how the poor strength (SNR) of satellite signals will cause relatively higher power drain from a smartphone's battery.
... With fictional prototyping the user is made central to product or concept development. They provide a virtual reality in which the implications, problems and benefits of the technology can be explored (Graham and Mehmood, 2014). ...
Purpose
– The purpose of this technical viewpoint is to provide a commentary of how we went about using logistics prototyping as a method to engage citizens, science fiction (SF) writers and small- to medium- sized enterprises (SME’s). Six urban logistic prototypes built on the themes of future cities, community resilience and urban supply chain management (SCM) are summarized, together with details of the data collection procedure and the methodological challenges encountered. Our investigation aimed to explore the potential of logistics prototyping to develop “user-driven” and “SME” approaches to future city design and urban supply chain decision-making.
Design/methodology/approach
– This Boston field experiment was a case study investigation conducted between May and August 2013. Qualitative data was collected using a “mixed-method” approach combining together focus groups (MIT faculty), scenarios, prototyping workshops, interviews and document analysis. These story-creators could use the prototype method as a way of testing their hypotheses, theories and constrained speculations with regard to specified future city and urban supply chain scenarios.
Findings
– This viewpoint suggests that the prototyping method allows for unique individual perspectives on future city planning and urban supply chain design. This work also attempts to demonstrate that prototyping can create sufficiently cogent environments for future city and urban SCM theories to be both detected and analysed therein. Although this is an experimental field of the SCM theory building, more conventional theories could also be “tested” in the same manner.
Research limitations/implications
– By embedding logistics prototyping within a mixed method approach, we might be criticized as constraining its capability to map out the future – that its potential to be flexible and imaginative are held back by the equal weighting given to the more conventional component. In basing our case study within one city then this might be seen as limiting the complexity of the empirical context – however, the situation within different cities is inherently complex. Case studies also attract criticism on the grounds of not being representative; in this situation, they might be criticized as imperfect indicators of what transpires in other situations. However, this technical viewpoint suggests that in spite of its limitations, prototyping facilitates an imaginative and creative approach to theory generation and concept building.
Practical implications
– The methodology allows everyday citizens and SME’s to develop user-driven foresight and planning scenarios with city strategists’ and urban logistic designers. It facilitates much broader stakeholder involvement in city and urban supply chain policymaking, than current “quantitative” approaches.
Social implications
– Logistics fiction prototyping provides a democratic approach to future city planning and urban supply chain design. It involves collectively imagining socio-technical futures and second-order sociological effects through the writing of SF narratives or building “design fictions”.
Originality/value
– Decision-making in future cities and urban SCM is often a notable challenge, balancing the varying needs and claims of multiple stakeholders, while negotiating an acceptable trade-off between their competing claims. Engagement with stakeholders and active encouragement of stakeholder participation in the supply chain aspects of future cities is increasingly a feature of twenty-first century social decision-making. This viewpoint suggests that the prototyping method allows for unique individual perspectives on future city planning and urban supply chain design. This work also attempts to demonstrate that prototyping can create sufficiently cogent environments for future city and the urban SCM theories to be both detected and analysed therein. Although this is an experimental field of SCM theory building, more conventional theories could also be “tested” in the same manner.
... A recent issue of Technological Forecasting & Social Change explores the use of creative prototyping in forecasting projects for urban design, 3D printing, networked economy, robotics, and organizational developments, as well as theories for using tacit knowledge in forecasting while avoiding tacit biases. (Graham, Greenhill, & Callaghan, 2014) ''Crime Sourcing'' uses a short story to explore the workings of a crowd-sourced system for solving murders (Graham and Mehmood, 2004). In Futures, Bell Keywords: Scenarios Narrative Science fiction prototypes Creative writing Science fiction A B S T R A C T Scenarios are stories. ...
Scenarios are stories. In the diverse field of scenario planning, this is perhaps the single point of universal agreement. Yet if scenarios are stories, their literary qualities are often underdeveloped. Scenarios used in business and government frequently do not contain a relatable protagonist, move a plot toward resolution, or compellingly use metaphor, imagery, or other emotionally persuasive techniques of literature. In these cases, narrative is relegated to an adjunct role of summarizing the final results of the workshop. While this neglect of narrative may be reasonable in some contexts, the power of narrative should not be underestimated. Scenario planning methodologies can benefit from using diverse narrative techniques to craft compelling and infectious visions of the future. This article explores the relationship between science fiction and scenarios as story genres and investigates a creative story-telling technique, “Science Fiction Prototyping” (Johnson, 2011). While the method is promising, it is an ultimately problematic means to incorporating narrative into scenario planning.
This paper presents the current status of Indian smart cities and examines their preparedness and response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The study focuses on implemented & ongoing projects under the Smart City Mission of the Government of India, which have contributed significantly to controlling the pandemic along with other channels. The study finds that modern cities in both developed and developing countries were not well-prepared to deal with the emergency situations and struggled in providing a satisfactory response during the pandemic. The analysis of primary and secondary data has shown that digital surveillance and movement control through integrated control command centers (ICCC) were the most useful projects in monitoring the COVID-19 cases. However, the lack of technology integration in smart cities hinders the effective usage of implemented projects. Thus, the study recommends integrated network-based applications that include healthcare, essential services, mobility, and movement across smart cities in India. The proposed framework is expected to provide the much-needed alignment at the policy, objective, and implementation levels of smart city framework designs.
The passenger aviation industry has embraced electronic automation. Fully autonomous passenger flight is a near-future technical possibility, but questions remain regarding how potential air travellers might receive such a technological leap. This paper contributes to and expands the existing literature on public perceptions of autonomous flight, presenting the results of an exploratory study of non-expert anticipatory assumptions (AA). A new collaborative storytelling futures method was designed, combining the benefits of the functions of stories as anticipatory systems with the stronger participatory advantages of games. The study conducted three focus groups with self-selected public participants to generate participatory stories set in futures where autonomous aircraft were prevalent. The qualitative analysis of the stories demonstrates that non-experts situate their beliefs and attitudes towards new technologies within frameworks indebted to their present cultural and political context. Public perception of autonomous flight is determined by AA including technological failure, the trustworthiness of business and governments, and the climate crisis. Work remains to be done if relevant stakeholders wish to communicate potential positive effects of autonomous flight technology. This research demonstrates the value of collaborative storytelling as a highly adaptable method to generate futures involving a wide variety of technologies.
With the rapid surge of M‐Health and smart city systems, the need to accommodate sensors and actuators to achieve effective automation turns out to be imposed, for an efficient machine‐to‐machine communication to be maintained. In this regard, the key elements necessary for a successful M‐Health system to take place are discovered to be the power consumption and interoperability maintaining factors. In this context, the present study is conducted to devise a special elderly tracking and monitoring system, closely connected to a walking stick device. The proposed design involves a cane cased transmitter node, enabling to send data related to the position and the state of the elderly to a base station, through implementation of the LoRa technology. The latter would then apply the message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol to interact with the environment once a fall proves to take place. For the purpose of evaluating the advanced design associated coverage range and power consumption rate, as enhanced via LoRa network, several experimental tests have been administered. The achieved results appear to reveal that the suggested architecture recorded average covered area turns out to be of the rate of 6 km².
The fictional prototype uses imaginative narratives based explicitly on science fact as a design tool in the development of technology. Through traditional research and development we begin to define and understand what a technology is. This is the typical work that is going on in industrial labs and universities all over the world. Usually this work continues iterating itself until the technology is refined to such a point that can be productized and incorporated into an existing product. Fictional prototyping adds a step in the technology development process. It asks how the technology will be used. It provides a virtual reality in which the implications, problems and benefits of the technology can be explored. Its purpose is to facilitate the development of firm level “meta narratives” on future innovation and its social and humanitarian impact. http://www.fccrnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/SFP-Framework-Impact-paper-1V3.pdf
The technology of "big data" has profoundly changed our life and society, and advanced scientific research. By taking social and human activities as main data source, this technology is of great potential of applications in human and economic geography. Drawing on recent progress in research, this article analyzes the new applications of big data to the research of urban hotspots, functional areas and boundaries, transportation and consumption behaviors and social geography. Based on these analyses, this article articulates the roles of big data in enriching data sources, adding new research themes, bringing new research paradigms, and stimulating the research of coupling to human-spatial research in human and economic geography. However, the technology of "big data" still needs improved, especially the "bias" issue in collection and the attributes of data. It also needs appropriately positioned in the application in human and economic geography because big data cannot replace the data that are collected from field work, or be applied without proper theoretical grounding and hypothesis,and replace the independent thinking of researchers and decision processes. These factors limit the application of big data, which requires more efforts on big data infrastructure development as well as exploration of human and economic geography. Acknowledging the opportunities and roles of big data application, human and economic geographers should emphasize the following to advance the research of this filed: exploring new data sources and paying closer attention to database construction inhuman and economic geography, establishing a research paradigm towards big data applications, facilitating cross-disciplinary and cross-domain research to strengthen the study of human-nature relations, and emphasizing the research towards human behaviors and demands.
This fictional story uses technological advances in the fields of sensor technology, personal area network communications, and ambient assisted living, to explore the possibilities for future assisted health and wellbeing. It occurs in three time frames: past, present and slightly into the future (Sept 2011). Most of the hardware mentioned in the story is working, either in everyday life or is under development by companies for specialist sports and leisure applications. However the sensor to predict acute myocardial infarction is speculative and may be seen as the 'holy grail' of sensors, facilitating prediction of adverse events, and allowing preemptive treatment. Communication within the personal area network and to/from the Internet, realizes the concept of an "Internet of Things". As always the software struggles to catch up with the hardware, in order to provide a usable and reliable system. The software is depicted as a set of communicating intelligent agents, under the control of a dubious 'virtual' coach, and this introduces uncertainty and mystery. The story unwinds during the Berlin marathon 2011, a fitting setting to test whether stress can be assessed using ambulatory technology. Hans Fallada's novel, "Alone in Berlin" set in the 1940's and David Bowie's Berlin trilogy of alternative music recordings, produced in the late 70's, provide ominous and foreboding backdrops to the story.
Timely and cost-effective analytics over “Big Data ” is now a key ingredient for success in many businesses, scientific and engineering disciplines, and government endeavors. The Hadoop software stack—which consists of an extensible MapReduce execution engine, pluggable distributed storage engines, and a range of procedural to declarative interfaces—is a popular choice for big data analytics. Most practitioners of big data analytics—like computational scientists, systems researchers, and business analysts—lack the expertise to tune the system to get good performance. Unfortunately, Hadoop’s performance out of the box leaves much to be desired, leading to suboptimal use of resources, time, and money (in payas-you-go clouds). We introduce Starfish, a self-tuning system for big data analytics. Starfish builds on Hadoop while adapting to user needs and system workloads to provide good performance automatically, without any need for users to understand and manipulate the many tuning knobs in Hadoop. While Starfish’s system architecture is guided by work on self-tuning database systems, we discuss how new analysis practices over big data pose new challenges; leading us to different design choices in Starfish. 1.
Experimentation, a form of problem-solving, is a fundamental innovation activity and accounts for a significant part of total innovation cost and time. In many fields, the economics of experimentation are being radically affected by the use of new and greatly improved versions of methods such as computer simulation, mass screening, and rapid prototyping. This paper shows that a given experiment (and the related trial and error learning) can be conducted in different "modes" (e.g., computer simulation and rapid prototyping) and that users will find it economical to optimize the switching between these modes as to reduce total product development cost and time. The findings are confirmed by a large-scale empirical study of the experimentation process in the design of integrated circuits containing either (1) electrically programmable logic devices (EPLDs); or (2) application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). In comparing their different experimentation strategies for analogous design projects, I found that the former (EPLD)-an approach that utilizes many prototype iterations-outperformed the latter (ASIC) by factor of 2.2 (in person-months) and over 43 percent of that difference can be attributed to differences in experimentation strategies. The implications for managerial practice and theory are discussed and suggestions for further research undertakings are provided.
Experimentation, a form of problem-solving, is a fundamental innovation activity and accounts for a significant part of total innovation cost and time. In many fields, the economics of experimentation are being radically affected by the use of new and greatly improved versions of methods such as computer simulation, mass screening, and rapid prototyping. This paper shows that a given experiment (and the related trial and error learning) can be conducted in different "modes" (e.g., computer simulation and rapid prototyping) and that users will find it economical to optimize the switching between these modes as to reduce total product development cost and time. The findings are confirmed by a large-scale empirical study of the experimentation process in the design of integrated circuits containing either (1) electrically programmable logic devices (EPLDs); or (2) application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). In comparing their different experimentation strategies for analogous design projects, I found that the former (EPLD)-an approach that utilizes many prototype iterations-outperformed the latter (ASIC) by factor of 2.2 (in person-months) and over 43 percent of that difference can be attributed to differences in experimentation strategies. The implications for managerial practice and theory are discussed and suggestions for further research undertakings are provided.
Since firms are knowledge institutions, or well-springs of knowledge, they compete on the basis of creating and using knowledge; managing a firm's knowledge assets is as important as managing its finances. A firm's expertise is acquired by employees and embodied in machines, software, and institutional procedures. Management of its core or strategic capabilities determines a firm's competitiveness and survival. Through decision-making and action, core technological capabilities can be built and changed. The author proposes to (1) help managers think about the knowledge-building consequences of their technology-related decisions and (2) provide academics materials usable in training managers to think about knowledge building. All aspects of product or process development must be viewed in terms of knowledge management and growth. Knowledge cannot be managed the same as tangible assets; to manage knowledge assets, one must understand them. Successful adaptation is an incremental re-direction of skills and knowledge. A set of four core technological competencies bestows competitive advantage on firms; these are the firm's skill and knowledge bases, physical technical systems, managerial systems, and values and norms that create a firm's special advantage. These may reside at any line-of-business level. Core capabilities must be managed to foster, not inhibit flow of critical knowledge. There is a dilemma: core capabilities are also core rigidities when carried to an extreme or when the competitive environment changes. Limited problem solving, inability to innovate, limited experimentation, and screening out new knowledge can undermine the development of competencies. Four key activities create and sustain flows of knowledge and direct them into core capabilities: (1) Integrated, shared creative problem solving across cognitive and functional barriers - shared problem solving achieves new level of creativity when managed for "creative abrasion." (2) Implementation and integration of new internally generated methodologies and technical processes and tools. These can move beyond merely increasing efficiency when managed for learning. (3) Formal and informal experimentation. Experimental activities create new core competencies that move companies purposefully forward and are guards against rigidity. (4) Importing and absorbing technological knowledge expertise from outside the firm. Technology alliances, for example, develop outwise wellsprings of knowledge (identify, access, use, and manage knowledge from external sources). Well managed, these enable companies to tap knowledge wellsprings consistently and continuously. Many dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors within firms inhibit these activities. These activities are oriented to present, internal, future, and external domains, and involve managers at all company levels and all functions. Specific managerial behaviors that build (or undermine) capabilities are identified. Managers must design an environment that encourages enactments of these four activities to create an organization that learns. Thereby, organizations and managers can create an atmosphere for continuous renewal; application to commercial ends is as important as managing it internally. The growth and nurturing of core capabilities (expressed in successful product development) requires learning from the market (understanding user needs), or feeding market information into new-product development. Identifying new product opportunities depends on empathic design, actual observed customer behavior, and technological capabilities. Technology transfer can also be understood as transferring technological capabilities to a new site, which is examined at four levels (assembly or turnkey, adaptation and localization, system, redesign, product design). Transfer of production development capability is illustrated with the cas
Whenever a business enterprise is established, it either explicitly or implicitly employs a particular business model that describes the design or architecture of the value creation, delivery, and capture mechanisms it employs. The essence of a business model is in defining the manner by which the enterprise delivers value to customers, entices customers to pay for value, and converts those payments to profit. It thus reflects management's hypothesis about what customers want, how they want it, and how the enterprise can organize to best meet those needs, get paid for doing so, and make a profit. The purpose of this article is to understand the significance of business models and explore their connections with business strategy, innovation management, and economic theory.
The business model concept offers strategists a fresh way to consider their options in uncertain, fast-moving and unpredictable environments. In contrast to conventional assumptions, recognizing that more new business models are both feasible and actionable than ever before is creating unprecedented opportunities for today's organizations. However, unlike conventional strategies that emphasize analysis, strategies that aim to discover and exploit new models must engage in significant experimentation and learning – a ‘discovery driven,’ rather than analytical approach.
Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R
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