Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The Community Library in Our Emerging Knowledge Economy

In early March, I participated in a presentation and discussion on The Community Library in the 21st Century along with Maxine Bleiweis, the director of the Westport Public Library. 

Libraries have been an integral part of civilization from our earliest history, including ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome.  Greek and Roman scholars came to their libraries to discuss issues and learn from each other.

Free, open public libraries were first established in communities across the UK and the US in the second half of the 19th century.  Along with the rise of public schools during the same period, they were an important part of the transition from the agricultural to the emerging industrial economy which required a more literate, better educated work force.  

From the 1880s through the 1920s, almost 1700 public libraries were built in the US, through the philanthropic efforts of industrialist Andrew Carnegie.  His Carnegie Library Grants promoted community libraries for self-education, which was particularly important during a time when the US was absorbing large numbers of immigrants from around the world.

Complexity and Design in Warfare

On March 11 I participated in a workshop in Washington, - Design Unbound, - organized by The Highlands Forum.  The workshop explored how design-oriented approaches can help us better understand and deal with the very complex problems we are increasingly encountering in all aspects of business, economies, government, public policy, military operations and society in general.

The Highlands Forum is an informal, cross-disciplinary group sponsored by the Office of the US Secretary of Defense.  Its mission is to explore new ideas and emerging trends that will help support high-level Department of Defense (DoD) policy and strategy.  It was organized in 1994 by retired US Navy captain Richard O’Neill, who continues to serve as its leader. 

The Forum holds several meetings a year, each centered on a specific topic, mostly related to information technologies and their impact on society.  Experts from government, industry, academia, and a variety of professions are invited to discuss their ideas on the subject - to be part of a kind of strategic conversation.  Some of the areas explored by the Forum are emerging technologies, organizational development, economic competition, and the changing concept of security. 

Over the past few meetings the Forum has focused on various topics related to complex systems, - how to best understand and manage them in the present, as well as predict and shape their future directions.  In this recent meeting we discussed how to apply the concept of design to address such complex systems and problems.

A Time of Institutional Recomposition

There is little question that our economy, our society and just about all our institutions are going through major structural changes mostly caused by the digital technology revolution that has been all around us for the past several decades.  Such technology-based structural changes are not new.  In her 2002 book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital:  The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, scholar and writer Carlota Perez puts our own turbulent times into a clear, historical perspective.

According to Perez, over the past couple of centuries, we have had a technology revolution every 40 - 60 years, starting with the Industrial Revolution in 1771, which was characterized by the emergence of machines, factories and canals.  This was followed by the age of steam and coal, iron and railways which started in 1829; steel and heavy engineering (electrical, chemical, civil and naval) starting in 1875; and the age of the automobile in 1908.  Our present information technology and telecommunications age, whose starting point Perez pegs at 1971, is the fifth such major revolution in that span.

To better understand the dynamics of a technology revolution, we should split it into two different periods, each lasting 20 - 30 years.  The installation period is the time of creative destruction, when new technologies emerge from the lab into the marketplace, entrepreneurs start many new businesses based on these new technologies, and venture capitalists encourage experimentation with new business models and speculation in new money-making schemes.  Inevitably, this all leads to the kind of financial bubble and crash we are all quite familiar with from our recent experiences.

After the crash, comes the deployment period, the time of institutional recomposition.  The now well accepted technologies become the norm.  New paradigms emerge for guiding innovation and for determining winners and losers in the marketplace.  Over time, these new paradigms significantly transform the economy and everything around it, as well as re-shaping social behavior and the institutions of society.

The Co-Evolution of Humans and our Tools

Tools have played a critical role in human evolution for a very, very long time.  As the Tools entry in Wikipedia observes: 

“Tools are the most important items that the ancient humans used to climb to the top of the food chain; by inventing tools, they were able to accomplish tasks that human bodies could not, such as using a spear or bow and arrow to kill prey, since their teeth were not sharp enough to pierce many animals' skins . . . The transition from stone to metal tools roughly coincided with the development of agriculture around the 4th millennium BC.  Mechanical devices experienced a major expansion in their use in the Middle Ages with the systematic employment of new energy sources: water (waterwheels) and wind (windmills). . . Machine tools occasioned a surge in producing new tools in the industrial revolution.  Advocates of nanotechnology expect a similar surge as tools become microscopic in size.”

Beyond extending our physical capabilities, tools have played a major role in the evolution of our brain and mental powers:  “Using tools has been interpreted as a sign of intelligence, and it has been theorized that tool use may have stimulated certain aspects of human evolution - most notably the continued expansion of the human brain.”