I’ve been sharing so many links about the current data-revolution on mail and now I thought you might as well benefit from the link collection:
The data turn in general
Google Quarterly about data. A great read with very interesting articles. The data guru Hans Rosling’s (pictured above) statement is kind of a /KL7 credo:
“The problem isn’t that specialized companies lack the data they need, it’s that they don’t go and look for it, they don’t know how to handle it.”
Big data
The term Big data is all over the place. Big data refers to the immense possibilities and challenges in increasing volume, variety, and velocity of data.
- New York Times introduction to Big data
- The Economist another introduction
- O’reilly Radar yet another
- McKinsey report about Big data
- World Economic Forum chose Big Data as focus in 2012
- And an interesting scientific paper on the productivity gains in DDD (Data-driven decision making) from Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT Sloan School of Management) et al.
Big data as developmental aid and philantropy
A testimonial to the the potential of data is the way large organization and authorities are now turning to data for social improvements:
- UN Global Pulse
- Google’s philanthropic use of data
- Add to that authorities in NYC, Washington and Kenya and now Århus in Denmark opening up for data to improve welfare, service and so on through increased transparency and bottom up innovation
Big data hype critique
Fast Company: Why Big Data Won’t Make You Smart, Rich, Or Pretty
Small data – self-tracking
We announced the first Danish Quantified Self event at Danish Design Center some days ago. You could call the tendency for athletes, professionals and patients to measure and monitor little experiments with how they train, work, feel, think as ‘small data’ since data is mostly personal. However, we will undoubtedly see big data and small data merge as big data starts including personal informatics (such as medico starts buying data from self-trackers for research):- Wired’s original article on Quantified Self from 2009
- The Quantified Self community
- The Eatery from Massive Health – a very good diet app and consumer example of the trend
- A recent commercial take on QS – from Nike: Turning running miles into capital
Reality mining
The incredibly interesting work of professor Alex Pentland at MIT called reality mining. The basic idea is that reality itself speaks revealing and interesting truths through data if we listen properly. The fine art of data interpretation (through enhancement, pattern recognition, and creative correlation). Read his book Honest Signals (a short introductory film) on extracting otherwise elusive social data with plain sensors and become a better data-wizard.
Data and design
“It is this ability to turn data into information into action that presents the most challenges.”
The quote is not ours but Wall Street Journal’s although the link from data to meaning/motivation to behavior is /KL7 to the core. Without human understanding (cognition, visualization, meaning, social processes) data will never make a change. A commonly remarked constraint on Big Data. Hence a lot of the largest companies are spending vast amounts on visualization of Data (Google and GE have created special departmenst for this). And then there are sites like Visualizing.org and CreativeApplications.net with a lot of great work.
Data, complexity, and cognition
I started many years ago with philosophy and a PhD in biomimetic design (it resulted in a blog about survaillance and data since all the rage was on ‘Bigbrother’ – hence I made a blog called Bigmother about ‘care ware’). Since a lot of thing have happened to what we are to do with increased dynamics and complexity. A couple of recent things (that I’ve blogged about at Bigmother):
- McKinsey affiliate Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth. Evolution, Complexity and the radical Remaking of Economics. A hardcore evolutionary argument on how creating value in general depends on complex thinking, dynamics and adaptivity rather than traditional static dynamic models.
- Yahoo’s chief scientist, former Columbia professor in sociology and PhD i network theory Duncan Watts’ latest book Everything is Obvious: Once you Know the Answer claims that long-term strategic thinking have to be replaced by an iterative data-driven approach. Common sense is not just sometimes off but ALWAYS wrong when it come to fairly complex matters and several steps of causality.
- The economist Tim Harford have just made a similar argument although more explicitly darwinistic in Adapt: Why succes always starts with failure. We need to be ‘always in beta’, to conduct ‘disciplined pluralism’ (variation + selection) and delegate power to the frontline.
- Gary Hamel, perhaps the most influential managerial theorist right now, claims in What Matters now – rather radically – that management is broke and we are better of with informed decision making in the front line. Why? Well, because of the dynamics and complexity of the modern world.
- Then we have the whole Nudge-trend. Thaler and Sunstein argues that we need to compensate for our insufficient cognitive capacities by designing the decisional context to ‘nudge’ us in the ‘rational’ direction without undermining liberty (or changing the incentives – too much).
- Like Watts, Thaler and Sunstein is building on psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s thinking that gave him the nobel prize in economy in 2002 and created the field behavioral economics. The basic argument is that our cognitive system was developed for and most constructive when dealing with well known and ‘simple’ decisions. We simply deploy our fast, spontaneous, associative faculties much more than we think – even when dealing with quite complex and important decisions. Kahneman’s latest book Thinking fast and Slow is a must read for everybody who new that Freud, Nietzsche and later embodied cognitive science was right about the hierarchy between rationality and emotional thinking.
- Something that even McKinsey is now warning top management and boards about by arguing for ‘behavioral strategy‘. Their version of depotenzising management is even mentioning future ‘automated’ (read AI) decision processes to compensate for our lack of cognitive ability when faced with complexity. Quite extraordinary.
- And practitioners such as designers have simply just started to deploy evolutionary thinking. Tim Brown of IDEO is now also proposing some sort of ‘Darwinism‘ as a design approach.
- Browns counterpart in Frog Design, Rob Girling is arguing that ‘designing for preferable outcomes’ (what we call behavioral engineering i /KL7) is the prime concern of 21′st design. Again the reason being our new knowledge on how challenged we are cognitively in a complex world stemming from cognitive science and behavioral economy.
- Lastly, the implicit theoretical foundation of A/B testing that e.g. Wired Magazine just covered is evolutionary to its bone. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and even the Obama campaign does nothing without systematically testing variations and selecting the best performing variants, whether it is the color, wording, placement, size or shape of the button.
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