With the ever growing pressure from investors, competitors, and consumers to identify the new, new thing, is there a place for long-term technology research?
This was co-written by Nino Panes and Weiwei Hsu.
Insights from interviewing technology researchers
We spent 10 weeks interviewing ~30 technology researchers, and a few topics surfaced as important factors in conducting long-term technology research. While some may be more obvious than others, we have summarized them here for you:
Research responsibilities
- Being a technology researcher or a researcher does not mean your only job is to do good research. Being a technology researcher also means being a good storyteller, able to sustain the project financially (which can be very mind-boggling), and, essentially, defending for the argument you are standing for.
Funding sources
- Streams of funding come from different places, and it is important for researchers to know their options. Networking is one of the key elements in having research funded. Funding doesn’t always come in the form of monetary value either.
Research transparency
- Over and over, our interviewees stated that there has been a huge push from investors to create a public-facing approach to funded research. This is something that researchers rarely have the bandwidth to worry about.
Unyielding Commitment
- What people often forget is that long-term technology research requires curiosity, dedication, and motivation. It is different from commercial products where research is focused on crafting user experiences, satisfying practical needs, and making incremental changes to them (our apologies for over-generalizing here). Projects focused on long-term technology research must come from the researcher’s heart; it should be something that the researcher just cannot stop thinking about.
Meaningful Events
- Meeting people who share similar values and finding potential collaborators isn’t necessarily easy. One-off themed events (or short conferences) where a group of people each invite 2–3 of their friends have actually worked really well for meeting potential collaborators and friends. Events that have a repeating theme are great, but those events tend to have a different agenda and rarely do they continue to generate the valuable conversations needed to progress further.
Funding Research vs. Funding Researchers
- One of the most interesting findings we had as a group is that most funding and support goes to the researcher and not a research topic. Stakeholders are often more concerned with who is doing the research than what the research actually is. Several experts in the field voiced multiple times the value of a “charismatic tech researcher”.
- But how would the world discover researchers if they don’t ever share their research and research process?
- When conducting technology research, especially long-term technology research, researchers often face difficult challenges: financial, motivational, and collaboration-related challenges. Researchers who are transparent about their processes benefit from making an ask or a request to the larger world, but only if they’ve built an audience for themselves already.
The world is no longer suited for researchers toiling away in an obscure laboratory. There is information overload and research work needs to be disseminated in an easily digestable manner.
White papers are of the past. It’s time to tear down the walls of laboratories and create transparent ones for people to be able to see through. It is a powerful idea to think aloud and have the public listen.
Reframing
- When speaking with non-technology researchers, most found that the topic of “long-term technology research” to be abstract and hard to pin down. So instead, we phrased the concept as having a “long-view of technology”.
〰️ Three Explorations 〰️
During the semester, we explored three different potential paths for long-term technology research. All three of the explorations have one thing in common — sharing. The concept of sharing emerged in three forms: sharing the actual project, sharing the vision, or sharing the technical details.
Sharing research progress can be beneficial in many ways. Research conducted behind the curtains often leads to an uncaring public. How can one care if one isn’t aware? Unless there is a guaranteed source of funding (either government, corporation, or university), sharing of progress to the public is vital to building an audience.
“Just imagine asking for help, but no one knows to listen to you or understand why you need help.”
1 Exploratorium meets SFMOMA for technology research
- We have the Computer History Museums in Mountain View that celebrates the impact computers have had in transforming our very own existence, why not a museum for modern (technology) research? The proposed museum will have a front-end where technology research projects are exhibited — and in ways appropriate — to be explored by visitors. The back-end will involve a technology research network conducting continuing long-term research.
2 GitHub meets Patreon
- The ability to simultaneously share future visions as well as the technical details can be powerful. Currently, technical repositories don’t have mechanisms that offer the mental support that a researcher would need, while crowdfunding platforms aren’t easy to share process and progress unless your creations are inherently stories.
3 A podcast for long-view research
- The simple gesture of discussing technological long-views is rare. The sole act of doing so will inadvertently bring about future actions. In our fast-paced consumer culture, where organizations are tasked with things that have deadlines or immediate financial values of proof, it can be fairly difficult to visit long-term goals frequently. We find the notion of interviewing and sharing technology researchers who have made visible and invisible contributions a very meaningful and possible path.
〰️ Next Steps 〰️
One of the most empowering things technology researchers can do is build an audience for themselves. We believe in the power of storytelling and thinking in public. Currently, we are working on launching Telescope: an interview series that expose how technologists hold and practice long-term thinking. This project has two main goals:
- To present to the larger world a more cohesive and optimistic perspective on technology
- To bring attention to technologists who are thinking in the long-term, and assist them to think and research in public
〰️ Thank you 〰️
If reading this got you emotional in any way, please tell us so.
During the course, our project was confronted with questions and doubts after questions and doubts more than anything else. Don’t get us wrong, the exploration was very rewarding and we are very happy with the path we chose. But this is a question that will take multiple years to answer with the help of a larger community.
There were several friends, technology researchers, and teachers that helped us as we struggled, and offered lively discussions with us. We are extremely grateful for their fast responses to our requests and we wholeheartedly enjoyed our conversations with them. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to:
Adam Lukasik, Andrew Harrison, Anonymous, Barry Katz, Christina Wodkte, Dave Blakely, Glen Chiacchieri, Graham Plumb, Haakon Faste, Hugh Dubberly, Irwin Sobel, JD Beltran, Kate Rutter, Katherine Ye, Kimberly Felker, Irwin Sobel, Matt Ganeucho, M Eifler, Michael Nielson, Phil Martin, Rafi Ajl, Sara Dean, Scott Minneman, William Felker.
*While they have generously offered their time and thoughts, this does not equate to them endorsing our project. Any lack of clarity in this writing should only be associated with us alone, not the people listed above.
**This was a research project by Alex Shon, Nino Panes, Kailen Swain, and Weiwei Hsu.
