Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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Techno-social interaction

December 2002

It is obvious that today, technology is moving ahead so rapidly in terms of raw capability, that only a tiny fraction of possible applications and gadgets are actually produced. Technology is still accelerating though, while the numbers of engineers and their productivity is only increasing slowly. We can therefore expect this 'creativity gap' to increase rapidly over the next decade. Meanwhile, it is abundantly clear that many gadgets that are released do not succeed, because they don't match the market needs at the time. Often they do succeed when launched a bit later, with a slightly different form factor, or with different marketing campaigns. All this suggests that technology is easily made to fail if we don't properly understand the potential market and how to approach it. Furthermore, as technology capability expands the creativity gap, the ratio of the number of potential applications to the number that can be built increases. It is every more important to target the right sectors. If we can get better at identifying potential markets and appropriate campaigns, we will be able to make technologies that satisfy those markets. Technology will generally be able to provide a cost-effective solution to most perceived needs.

Trying to understand the dynamics of social needs is a critical input to this. Text messages work on mobiles, but not on land lines, even though many people don't have email access. Exactly why is this? Is it because people have more need for messages on the move, because they want to be cool, or because mobile comms is the first instance where telecomms has moved into Maslow's 'esteem' layer. Prior to mobile comms, there were no services in this layer, while the rest of his hierarchy was well populated. Having more functions on the mobile became a status, along with smaller size, better screens, ring tones, and being better at texting. SMS tapped into both the social needs and esteem layers, allowing people to feel part of a tribe and therefore cool, as well as demonstrating their relative status in that group by means of using a more expensive phone. The raw functionality is probably not that important until people have used it often enough for it to make itself indispensable as a part of their lifestyle. But this is guess work, we need proper study and evidence.

Also, basic human needs have remained relatively constant over the millennia, but the relative intensity of them varies tremendously over time. The need for food and shelter hardly register at the moment in my office, but in a short while I will be hungry and when I go out in the cold, I will quickly want shelter, then food, then social fulfilment, then some more self actualisation. It seems obvious to me that slower cycles of social need intensity change probably also occur. People may be made aware of a need simply by observing someone else fulfilling it for themselves. That appears to drive fashion, and technology is likely to be more fashion driven as the range of possibilities increases. So the question is: is there a way we can predict what the main driving social needs are likely to be next? And can we estimate the likely intensity? Is there a needs cycle? Today there is a decline in environmentalism as the key driver. Safety and litigation are key drivers of consciousness, and the need for security translates this into people avoiding running activities that might threaten their livelihoods when people sue them. But why did safety and litigation take off as key consciousness elements when they weren't earlier? What will come next as the focus of peoples' attention? What are the key interactions between social demographics, the previous needs cycle, fashion, and lifestyle that make a product fail one year and succeed the next. Basically, if we knew the answer to this we could predict the dotcom boom and bust and avoid enormous financial disaster. Most futurists predicted the bust for obvious reasons, but no-one knew exactly when it would start and how it would be triggered.

We have to learn to spot trends better (Faith Popcorn make lots from identifying and labelling short term trends), and work out from that what the likely cascades will be on other social factors, with resultant markets for particular technology applications.

So basically, technology is going to improve dramatically with huge potential range of applications. Unless we understand what to build and when and how to market it, we will continue to waste large amounts of money on developing the wrong things. Social factors are the greatest unknown, but are the greatest differentiator between success and failure (assuming that the product is sufficiently well designed and priced that other incompetence factors are eliminated). Getting a handle on social driving is more important than it ever has been. We should increase rather than decrease this kind of study.

I simply don't accept that this is impossible. Previously, engineers have paid too little attention to the social drivers that create the market for their product. Meanwhile, social scientists have too often ignored the impact that technology has once it enters a market. This is mostly virgin territory. If we understand social dynamics better, and can predict underlying technology capability (which we are very good at), then we can reasonably expect to predicts which technologies will both be developed and succeed in the marketplace, just by passing all possible technologies through a dynamic social needs filter. We don't have the tools yet mainly because no-one has tried to build them before. Let’s get on with it!