How a designer wrote a concept for privacy and only started to talk about it 10 years later
You might wonder, why a design talks about privacy and the Internet of Things - and even claims to have a concept for that. The creation of the concept was not by intent, at least not in the beginning. The beginning was my graduation from KISD in 2006. As part of my graduation work, I wanted to design something around Smart Cities, helping to cope with the always growing traffic and mobility needs. While diving into the available technologies, I recognized, that barely anyone looked at the systemic danger of total surveillance or complete communication overflow. So, I started to write down, what would be necessary to tame this wonderful ubiquitous computing future - making it as humane, as pioneers like Mark Weiser hoped it to be. In the end, the list of pre-requisites had grown into a book and became eventually my master-thesis.
After my graduation from KISD, I put the concept aside as I couldn't find anyone to be interested in it. A senior researcher from IDEO even told me, that I'm just way ahead and would need to wait at least 5 years to find someone seriously interested. It would be 10 years. In 2016 Konstantin Weiss became Co-Chair of the Euro IA Summit and heasked me to propose a talk about that concept I had once told him about. My proposal got accepted and since then I had various opportunities to present it: EuroIA 2016 Amsterdam, App Days Cologne, IA Summit 2017 Vancouver, IA Konferenz 2017 Berlin, UX Day 2017 Mannheim. Now, people are interested. But still it seems like a long way to go.
The presentation
There are currently two language versions (with slight variations) of my slides available:
If you want me to present my concept at your event, please get in touch.
What's next?
I want to rewrite my initial book. While creating the talk on Privacy by Default I realized, that I didn't get everything right in the first try or missed out some aspects. Meanwhile, I wonder if someone would be interested in a design for privacy workshop, and I'm about to create one - if someone shows interest.