I’m presenting a poster about my PhD thesis at the SSIT5 workshop at LSE. It’s the first time I’ll talk about my doctoral research in public! Here’s the short text from the poster:

The Practice of Innovation: How New Technology Gets Defined as Sustaining or Disruptive

My thesis is an ethnography about Nokia’s efforts to renew itself through corporate venturing. The proliferation of Nokia’s main product—the mobile phone—is extraordinary, and social scientists across the spectrum have recognized its implications as important. Still, the design and development practices of the mobile phone have been little investigated.

As the case of Nokia illustrates, these practices take place in corporations faced with the pressures to innovate and grow. Here, the technical and the organizational work through each other. In Nokia’s case, the historical context was one where the company had reinvented itself once before, and now faced a situation where it needed to do the same again. My interest centres on how innovation in this situation was performed by way of an institutional arrangement known as internal corporate venturing, which was linked with the notion of organizational ‘renewal.’ It was not just about coming up with the next new technology; it was about giving the organization a new life.

At the same time, the study is also about something much more general. Prevailing thinking on innovation assumes that new technologies are inherently either sustaining or disruptive to the organization. In aligning myself with the practice turn in social theory, I argue that the sustaining or disruptive character of innovation is not a given; it is achieved through practices of alignment that work on and through materials and stories.

I justify this argument by showing how the ventures at Nokia aligned themselves in relation to the company’s strategic narratives and other practices in the outside world. The work of alignment involved the ordering of materials to support the stories that the ventures told about themselves. A venture’s success in the internal competition for resources depended on its ability to make the materials speak for its potency in the context of prescriptive frameworks, which the management of the company mobilized to make resource allocation decisions. I discuss how these frameworks were reproduced and reconfigured, and reflect on how my own role as an ethnographer evolved from an apprentice, to a participant, to a commentator who responded with an alternate framework for conceptualising the relationship between the ventures and the main business. I suggest that coming to grips with interventions of this kind is practice theory’s most compelling promise, as well as its toughest future challenge.

Thanks to some configuration work by Marko after Dan Gillmor’s cancellation, we’ve now confirmed a new speaker for the next Aula klubi on April 12th, 6pm at Korjaamo in Helsinki. He is (drumroll) Aditya Dev Sood, director of the Center for Knowledge Societies, a research and design practice based in Bangalore and New Delhi. Aditya will speak about the devices and cultures of Indian street innovation. This should be a fun talk! Check out the details here.

It’s been a good week in Finland. Bright sunshine, walks on the ice, great food, friends with interesting new ideas. I had a chat with Chris about the various crazy ways how people are personalizing their mobile phones. Having thought about it for a few days now, it seems to me that clearly some of the personalizing works to give the gadget magic powers (to quote HobbyPrincess) by turning it from a standard commodity into an object with hidden personal meaning. Another form of personalizing is the ‘bubblegum fix,’ e.g. taping phones that are falling apart. Then there’s the ‘extra functionality’ category. I became aware of this when I spent a month loitering in Den Den Town in 1999. That’s where I first saw things like mobile phone antennaes that flashed when the call was active. Another such eye-opener was when a friend of mine taped a mic to his glasses to record interviews for his radio programme.

In my case, the ‘killer’ functional add-on would be a little pager on the key chain, with which I could locate my phone, wallet, moleskine, PowerBook charger, and Nokia ID badge. I seldom manage to leave home without forgetting at least one of the above but oddly, I never misplace my keys (perhaps because they’re always in my pocket).

Clearly, the demand for such an ‘object pager’ is growing. A few years back all we had to remember was the designers’ holy trinity of wallet, keys, and mobile phone. But now there’s also the iPod, the digital camera, and the Blackberry… people even forget their laptops: BBC News reported in 2001 that

Hurried travellers have left as many as 62,000 mobiles, 2,900 laptops and 1,300 PDAs in London taxis over the past six months …. Businesses now risk losing valuable or confidential information stored on handheld devices through the carelessness of their employees.

The problem with the existing key-finders etc. out there is that the firms who are making them think they’re in the gadget business. They’re not: they’re in the gadget personalizing business. The pagers look horrible and the fobs are totally uncool. Someone should do to the key-finder what Apple did to MP3 player: make it cool. Here’s one rough proposal (these slides are from spring 2004):
Download objectpager.ppt

Here are a few slides about a WiFi hotspot locator app, originated the day after last year’s eTech on a walk with Janne in Torrey Pines Park. I was reminded of our walk when I read this post on the Plazes blog by Stefan Kellner about how they set up Plazes after returning home from the very same conference. Luckily there are people around who’re making things not just slides :)
Download Yaula.ppt

Here’s a follow-up to my earlier post on complimenting weblog comments with lighter ‘gestures’: while at it, I made another mock-up. It’s a panel that offers post-specific interactions: ratings, del.icio.us bookmarking, quick feedback smileys, and the ‘send related link’ function.

When I browse weblogs, I would often like to be able to do one or both of the following two things quickly: 1) send rapid ‘gut reaction’ feedback (for instance a smiley) to the author, mostly to thank people for taking the time to write something I liked; and 2) offer a URL that points to something which I think relates to the topic. These reactions aren’t really comments; they are more like gestures that would let the author know that there are readers out there who appreciate the stuff even if they aren’t posting comments. Another reason why I think it’d be worthwhile to investigate ‘gestures’ is that weblogs and comments are literary formats which require a certain level of competence to author, and this makes it hard for those of us who haven’t developed a routine for this mode of expression (especially non-native English speakers) to participate in the blogosphere.
Here’s an attempt to illustrate what I mean, as a right-click menu photoshopped over the NetNewsWire UI.

This blog is starting to take shape now that I’ve engaged the help of friends to transfer the content from its previous home at aula.cc/jyri here to zengestrom.com. I decided to set up a new home for my stuff when I began moving the Aula site in its entirety from our old custom-built PHP platform to MovableType. That migration is still not finished; so much material has accumulated at aula.cc over the years that sorting it all out takes time.

A few words about this new zengestrom blog: I wanted to have a personal and friendly, down-to-earth sort of blog space. That was how I briefed Mikko Hyppönen, my graphic designer friend. His design makes use of a sketched portrait, which is from the pen of Nene Tsuboi.

I’m quite excited about the result. Yet here I am refurbishing a very infrequently updated blog in good faith while the reality is that my waking hours (and I suspect a good slice of my sleep too) are spent processing a wholly different set of narratives that should materalize not as a blog, but as a PhD thesis. What’s up with that? Even William Gibson suspended his blogging when it was time to do serious writing. In the ‘last postcard from Costa Del Blog‘ he wrote:

I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation.

On the other hand, there are authors who claim they could not write without a blog. In My Blog, My Outboard Brain Cory Doctorow maintains that

Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish … my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form.

How to locate oneself in relation to these professional scifi dudes? In my case, the nature of academic writing has proven to be quite blog-averse. My research is about the work practices of real people in a corporation, often covering them to a degree of detail that is quite intimate. Although this ethnographic material is in digital format, it is not online; I’ve spent over two years collecting it in in the form of field notes, recordings, transcripts, photos and video clips, and cataloguing it into a searchable ‘outboard brain’ on my PowerBook. The reworking and eventual publishing of this material requires care and also a degree of anonymising. Alongside this I also occasionally give talks about the social aspects of technology, which sometimes make for good blogging. But I haven’t blogged about them much either. I suspect the silence has to do with a personal migration of a sort: I feel like I’m drifting into new space, but I don’t yet quite know what kind of stories live there. Recently I’ve noticed that a couple of my peers are experiencing similar drifiting. Maybe it’s a sign of the times.

UPDATE: Dan has just informed us that he won’t be able to travel to Helsinki on the scheduled April 12th date! We’re currently searching for another speaker. We’re also looking into the possibility to reschedule Dan to a later date this year. Stay tuned…

Our guest speaker at the next Aula klubi on Tuesday, April 12 in Helsinki will be Dan Gillmor, who will talk about ‘The Rise and Importance of Citizen Media.’ From the summary:

The collision of technology and journalism is having profound effects on the three major constituencies of news: journalists, who are having to learn how to turn what they do into a conversation, not a lecture; newsmakers, the people and institutions journalists have covered, who are learning about an entirely new class of journalists but who have new options for getting their own messages out; and the former audience, which can get a better news report and participate in the journalism process as well.

When Dan spoke at Aula’s Exposure event in 2003, he was in the process of putting these arguments together. The outcome was a book titled We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, published last year by O’Reilly. Dan also practices what he preaches: at the turn of the new year he quit his job at the San Jose Mercury News to found Grassroots Media Inc., ‘a project aimed at enabling grassroots journalism and expanding its reach.’ Welcome to Helsinki, Dan. I’m looking forward to this.

We’re organizing the year’s first Aula klubi evening in Helsinki with Henry Jenkins from MIT as the guest speaker. He’s going to speak about the future of gaming. I get to slack this time, since Marko is taking care of most of the practicalities. For more information, have a look at the announcement. If you’re in town, hope to see you at Korjaamo 6 pm tomorrow!