Design av
Samverkande System

Background

This course is inspired by the emergence of applications of a new kind, such as: Amazon.com; GPS art, orienteering, and discovery ; E-street ; IT-hockey ; the SMS/WAP based FriendFinder; etc. The interaction between the individual and the collective is a common theme for these applications, i.e. the social aspects of the application are in focus. Also significant is the fact that some of these applications have emerged (all three GPS applications) from individual use of the technique, in the same sense that the web publishing of personal information emerged from Tim Berner-Lee's ideas of making the research databases at CERN available for researchers everywhere in the world.

This course introduces the concept of Emergent Interaction System. An EIS is defined to consist of an environment in which a number of actors share some experience/phenomenon, and in which part of the interaction among actors in the system emerges via a shared feedback loop. Data originating from the actors and their behaviour is collected and used to compute a feedback, which is delivered into the environment. The defining requirement of emergent interaction to occur is that this feedback has some noticeable and significant effect on the behaviour of the individuals and the collective. Something emerges in the interactions between the individuals, the collective, and the shared phenomenon as a result of introducing the feedback mechanism. The immediate effect of emergent interaction may be enhancement (see section Background where the term of enhancement is discussed) of the individual experience - with resulting effects on the individual's behaviour, choice of action, and so on. The immediate effect can also be some kind of change in the observed, shared phenomenon. In particular the feedback might in effect establish some kind of collective control of it. The ultimate effect could also involve some kind of organising and controlling of the collective. 'Organization', need not imply uniformity and regularity, it could just as well be to diversify or even randomise behaviours.

Systems in which people interact in a shared feedback loop already exist. What is new with the emergent interaction concept is a unified approach to such systems, and an agenda that seriously addresses the task of designing EISs. This is made possible and necessary by the new information technology. Computer, communication, and interface technologies crucially change the conditions and possibilities.

• First, the amount and variety of data that is possible to collect, and the speed of collection increase radically.
• Second, the new information technology offers completely new possibilities to design and control the feedback function and thus ultimately the behaviour of such systems.
• Third, the feedback loops can be speeded up many orders of magnitude to match the 'natural' time scales of individual and collective behaviour, thus also making the existence and importance of such systems more easily recognisable.
• Fourth, in this new time scale, with these new capabilities, there are great opportunities as well as possible hazards that we so far only can guess about.
  

Welcome!