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We all have ideas of what a better world looks like. But how do we actually make those visions a reality?
Technology has very much become an enabler for this better world over the past few decades, often making the impossible simple. But to make it work most effectively—and drive the maximum benefit for all of us—it needs to be used in the right way.
In the second of our blog series, we talked to Dutch artist and technologist Daan Roosegaarde to understand more about the need for purpose-driven technology, and how it’s changing our world.
At 16, Daan Roosegaarde told his parents he wanted to use art, science and technology to “upgrade the world around him”.
They were sceptical about his chances. But today, Rotterdam-based Roosegaarde is an artist, designer, technologist, and engineer—all at once, but definitely in that order.
Roosegaarde uses technology in the service of his work to make his ideas happen. And if the right technology doesn’t exist—and it usually doesn’t—he builds it himself.
“If we cannot imagine a better future, then we cannot create it,” he says. “My job is to dream and make it a reality, using design and technology as a tool to find a new harmony between people and nature and the world around us.”
To that end, among his many creations are 7m-high, smog-sucking towers in Beijing; the world’s largest lenticular image in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport; and a glow in-the-dark cycle path. Roosegaarde uses technology to create digital landscapes and large-scale, story-telling public art. Waterlicht’s LED-generated waves of light, for instance, bring home the real threat of rising sea levels.
Roosegaarde’s work is part-poetry, part-provocation, rooted in real science, but always reaching for the sublime. “Technology is great, design is great,” he says, “but it needs to be connected to beauty. Beauty is a really powerful way of helping people accept change. We should use beauty more as a strategy for change.”
Indeed, what feels like magic and illusion in his designs also work to alert us to actual solutions—take Urban Sun, a ring of UVC light which helps remove viruses, including coronaviruses, in public spaces. Or Spark, Roosegaarde’s dazzling organic alternative to firework displays. “We traditionally celebrate New Year with a cloud of toxic air, so we thought: ‘can we change that?’ We looked at fireflies and came up with the idea of replacing fireworks with thousands of floating bubbles which absorb or reflect light.”
Roosegaarde insists that technology is there to help us make things better. And much of the technology he uses is beautifully, elegantly simple. Why? The danger is, if we’re so dazzled by what technology can do, we might lose sight of our original ambition—or become so intimidated we shy away from actually using it. For Roosegaarde, the key is putting your purpose first and maintaining that focus.
The beauty of Roosegaarde’s “DIY” approach is that you don’t need to be a technical genius to apply it. New and innovative technologies are making it easier than ever for a wide range of people to build their own tools—ones that suit their needs exactly, whatever those needs may be.
This concept, and its ramifications, go well beyond the world of art, design, and even engineering. Low-code and no-code solutions—tools built by the end user with the help of code-based graphical interfaces and configurations, rather than “raw” code—mean that (almost) anyone can quickly create digital applications using simple drag-and-drop templates, and with little or no coding experience.
“Low-code app solutions are bringing endless creativity to tech development,” says Paul Hardy, evangelist, chief innovation officer at ServiceNow, the leading provider of cloud-based digital workflow technology. “These types of technologies empower all employees—not just traditional tech staff—to use tools to create solutions to their own problems; essentially, they can build whatever they need to make their job easier.”
Low-code development, like Daan’s work, puts purpose right at the forefront of technology. It means that teams can create apps, tools and solutions they really need, without having to rely on already-stretched IT teams. The apps that are created can then also be built or refined in response to fast-moving and shifting demands.
It’s exactly this kind of “development democracy” that was crucial for health services during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Teams were able to create new tech solutions quickly and easily in the face of overwhelming demand and time pressure caused by the crisis. Deryck Mitchelson, Scotland’s director of national digital and information security, has seen the potential of low-code app development first hand. As part of his role, Mitchelson runs Scotland’s digital health strategy, service, and infrastructure. He was tasked with implementing the country’s Covid-19 vaccine program.
Working with ServiceNow, and taking advantage of low-code solutions, Mitchelson and his team put together a new vaccine management platform in just six weeks.
“We just didn’t have time to start from scratch,” Mitchelson says. “We needed to create a solution that was as out-of-the-box as possible. We knew that ServiceNow was capable of offering something that was ready-to-go and easy to tweak, fast.”
The platform they created could handle the scheduling and recording of vaccinations for all of Scotland’s 5.5m population and that allowed them to book their appointments using a “citizen portal”.
The experience of health services during the pandemic proves that digital technology can be empowering, energizing and flexible. It can increase efficiency, reduce time-consuming bureaucracy, and allow teams more time to do the things they really need to do. It can automate where it makes sense, and open more space for human skills and ideas to flourish.
As Roosegaarde says, technology’s best use is not as a distraction from problems, but as a tool to address them. We all use incredibly powerful technology every day, and that power is now being opened up, becoming something we can work with and direct. A better future will be built on lots of little fixes, and we can all be part of that process.
“I don’t believe in utopia,” says Roosegaarde, “I believe in protopia, improving the world around us step by step.” Digital technology is now democratizing powerful tools to make profound, positive change, one problem at a time.
Discover more about how ServiceNow's low-code solutions are helping businesses here; if you're interested in Daan's projects, check them out here.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
