What Could Technologists Benefit From Learning?
Let’s say they’re working on mobile warning systems: they really know how to build the tech, but do they know what makes a good early response strategy?
This might be the weak point of our organisations: tech managers and engineers don’t study the social situation to which their products can or will apply.
The solution: people who bridge the gap between real-life and developers, by functioning like a nervous system, creating and distributing analysis and research.
Imagine, you can be building fire alarms without ever studying anything about a fire emergency situation. As practice, let’s analyse this situation. There would be all different kings of things we’d have to consider:
- Evacuation plans for the building would have to be created considering the building’s layout and how the building is used..
If we were an official who’s designing an evacuation plan for a fire emergency, we’d have to understand how people use this building. If we knew how the building’s used, we could properly plan their escape. If we didn’t know what the people usually do inside the building; where they hang out, at what times they take breaks, how many people usually occupy a single one room; wewouldn’t know where to put the fire extinguishers, which doors to designate as fire escapes…
Next, let’s assume we are a team of engineers who are designing products for fire emergency management. We’re designing fire extinguishers, and we can adjust everything from how their triggers work, to their overall shape and design. We can change the extinguisher’s weight, material, and propellant mechanism. What if knew more about fire emergencies? How would that change our design?
Let’s say researchers in our country find out that most of the fires break out in schools. If we knew about this information, we could maybe change our design with the newfound knowledge that kids might be using our product. We could look for ways to make the triggering mechanism more intuitive. We could prefer lighter alloys instead of industry weight materials, to allow for more handleability…
And that’s how we could improve our product.
If more people at a company studied what the social situation their products were targeting, they could build better technology. If we could bridge The Vision Gap, they could create better and more equal technology for all.
Engineers and designers can benefit a whole a lot more from their design if they studied the social situation they are building technology for.
Knowing the social situation, we don’t work in darkness. Knowing what you work towards, seeing the goal and seeing the system, allows for better, more efficent, and humane designs.
But why would we need to bridge the vision gap, has the process of inventing technology change, to the point that it creates more disconnection between the inventor and society?
To analyse that, let’s quickly compare the modern day inventors—the developers—and the archetype of the inventor.
The inventor archetype: Inventors are the driving force behind the invention—guiding it towards the solution they foresee.
That’s how inventors have always functioned. In today’s companies though, there multiple people who’re working towards a single solution. This solution does not belong solely to them, and they are guided by the visions of their company, their sub-group, and their own.
In certain cituations, this way of structuring invention can allow for a great divide to come between the inventor, and the real life situation that necessesitates an invention.
Imagine there was a single inventor instead—one person to study the social situation, analysing it to spot where changes can be made, and to came up with a solution… Of course, this one inventor would then need others to build this solution with. They would need to hire builders, other inventors, suppliers of materials, and even marketers to handle the distribution of their product. To bring these people together, the inventor would have to share their vision.
In this way, the visionary that was the inventor, was responsible for sharing their vision. That’s how they drew collaborators in.
Nowadays, you don’t need to share a vision to come under a single roof—the roof of a company. It’s as if the process of invention has been distributed among the employees of the company, without necessarily requiring them to share the company’s vision, or even know about the vision.
You can have people working in darkness, focusing on specific tasks and forgetting the rest. Such a high level of specialization benefits the process, but it also allows each group working within a company to get disconnected from the whole process.
What can we gain from knowing about the social situation? Is there any need to really be analysing social situations in depth?
Some would argue that the problems ask for solutions themselves, and that there’s no need to spread our focus too thin. By this view, a company would only need to pick problems as if they were picking apples, and only set their developers to work on the tasks that will produce solutions.
It is easy to observe that is approach is only reactive.
In modernising, in specializing, we must not forsake foresight. In essence, a good analysis of society—and the unique situations that arise in its dynamics—is essential for humanity to maintain its foresight. After all, inventors are part of this society, and they have the opportunity to take an active part in guiding its future.
Gap Bridgers handle this situation.
Gap bridgers are the people who bridge the Vision Gap. Their body of work is composed of analyses of both the tech, the market, and the social situation. They provide insight to tech leaders, and to just about anyone who’s involved in the development of a product. They make the resources available, by:
- First, analysing the social situation. They do this by following journalism and news reports, keeping up to date on government policies and regulations, and reaching out to the people—civillians— who are involved.
- Second, creating a database of knowledge. As a gap-bridger analyses a social situation, they become an expert on that topic—whether the situation is a fire emergency or hurricane evacuations.
- They are actively involved in creating the knowledge themselves: they do this by observing the situation first hand, and gathering information from the people who are affected by it—thus creating novel data.
- They can also create knowledge by forming their own theories and analyses. They make inferences about the social situation they’re studying, based on the body of knowledge they’ve created from research. In this way, they use already available data to create novel understandings.
- Third, they make knowledge available. Imagine the huge amount of reports an analyst—a gap bridger—reads about a social situation. A designer or an engineer would never have the time to go through those reports themselves, and nor should they need to! The gap-bridger shows them what’s important, by picking important bits from the pool of knowledge they’ve created—they filter knowledge and present what’s important .
Let’s make an analogy here: We are facing an overload of information in the modern world, and the best place to hide a tree, is in the forest… The gap-bridgers can point to the most important trees. What’s more, the gap-bridgers can bring you fruits from the forest: you don’t have to know what’s good or bad, it’s their job to know the forests of knowledge.
Now, let’s think about how each stage in the development of a solution would benefit from this wisdom:
- Developers: may spend less time re-building their solutions. If they knew the social situation, they could predict how the solutions would function in a real life situation, and foresee the ways they can fail.
- Designers: having learned of the social situation to its full extent, can design with the whole system in mind. By seeing what was invisible to them before—the big picture—they can spot the unique challenges that may arise. Instead of coming up with ad-hoc fixes, they can design whole approaches, that are mallable and alive.
This is why gap-bridgers are important: they illuminate blind spots through research and analysis, and then synchronize the whole system—the designers, builders, managers—with the society—the government, the citizens, and other companies—and give inventors strength, through foresight and unification.
Giray's Sandal 