Sustainable Workstyles and

Ambient Intelligence
Jesse MARSH
Atelier Studio Associato, Via XX Settembre 70, Palermo, 90141, Italy
Tel/Fax: +39-091-6253378, Email: info@atelier.it
Abstract: Broad-reaching technology paradigms such as Ambient Intelligence
require us to envision future social, organisational and cultural impacts in order to
steer development in the direction of sustainability. To this end, workstyle scenarios,
as compared to script-based or modelling approaches, better highlight the contrasting
lifestyle implications that could result from current trends.
Four such scenarios are developed for Ambient Intelligence, in relation to different
possibilities for the organisation of knowledge (centralised vs decentralised) and
time awareness (kronos vs kairos).
Of the four, the “Slow Business” workstyle appears to be the most sustainable, and
there are already indications of its emergence among micro-firms. Finally, its
implications for the development of Ambient Intelligence are explored in relation to
the three main components: ubiquity, personalisation and intelligence.

1. Introduction
As Information Society Technologies become ever more pervasive they both enable and
provoke deep transformations in our social structures: the way we work, the way we
communicate, the way services are managed and delivered, etc. It is of critical importance
for business and policy decision-makers to be able to create images of the futures that can
result from these changes in order to guide their actions. In addition, consensus on
believable futures provides the main rationale for short-term decisions that purport to steer
events in those desired directions.
Once-futuristic metaphors such as the “distance university”, the “information highway”
or “virtual organisations” have had an important role in driving organisational innovation to
date, since they have given people models to refer to – a sense of direction – when making
immediate technology adoption choices. To some degree, the concept of “Ambient
Intelligence” itself – defined as the convergence of ubiquitous computing, intelligent
systems and context awareness – carries this approach forward: according to a recent
publication, the term “can be considered a landmark for giving direction to ITC research
over the coming five-ten years.” [1]
There are a range of approaches to scenario building, each tuned to different purposes.
Broad reaching foresight exercises aim to help policy makers develop long term global
strategies.[2] In other cases, negative trends are extrapolated into the future to generate
public support for remedial action.[3] In the industrial sector, screenplay-like descriptions
of technology usage can be useful to develop coherent functional specifications or define
research agendas.
Recent efforts to describe Ambient Intelligence often rely on such “day in the life”
scenarios, for example in a “home of the future”.[4] While they help us picture the type of
situations that may be enabled by Ambient Intelligence, and may highlight concerns that
need to be addressed, they lack the central drive of the “broad picture” policy scenarios:
evaluating options. Put simply: are there different directions that Ambient Intelligence
could take, and is one better than the other? Can Ambient Intelligence contribute to
sustainable development or will it lead to increased consumption and inequity?
2. Objectives and Method
The objective of this paper is to explore Ambient Intelligence from the “lifestyle” and
“workstyle” perspectives, placing the emphasis on broad patterns of behaviours and their
consequences for our economic, social, cultural and environmental systems. It provides a
preliminary definition of contrasting Ambient Intelligence based workstyles that highlight
implications for sustainable development: desirable and undesirable futures that could
equally result from current trends.
The method builds on an analysis of current scenario-building work in both the arenas
of Ambient Intelligence and that of the link between IST and sustainable development, as
the baseline for focusing on the lifestyle and workstyle concepts. Two aspects affecting the
potential evolution of workstyles – time and knowledge – are then analysed in relation to
the possibilities opened up by Ambient Intelligence.
Four scenarios generated by variations on these two aspects are briefly described, and
one – “Slow Business” – is analysed as the outcome probably closest to the objective of
sustainability. The likelihood of its emergence is then investigated in the context of, inter
alia, trends identified in micro-firm networks adopting broadband and illustrative case
studies. Finally, implications for future development work are suggested as a way to ensure
the successful development of sustainable workstyles.

3. State of the Art

3.1 – The ISTAG Scenarios

One of the more influential studies in developing the vision of Ambient Intelligence is that
commissioned by the IST Advisory Group and published by the IPTS in February 2001.[5]
The analysis develops four screenplay scenarios: “Maria the Road Warrior”, “Dimitrios and
the Digital Me”, “Carmen: Traffic, Sustainability and Commerce” and “Annette and
Solomon in the Ambient for Social Learning”. For each, socio-political factors, business
and industrial models and technology requirements are described in order to highlight the
main implications for research in the 6th Framework Program.
These scenarios are indeed compelling and thought-provoking: Dimitrios’s D-Me
engages in phone conversations with his wife while he is sipping coffee with a colleague at
work, and Annette’s ambient welcomes Solomon by asking for the name of another ambient
that ‘knows’ his learning needs. The study’s discussion of socio-political implications often
identifies social issues that will require attention; privacy, security and trust are the main
concerns, but sustainability aspects are also accounted for, especially with Carmen’s shared
transport service.
In the context of this paper, however, the drawback of the ISTAG study is in the
apparent inevitability of the scenarios. Although their purpose is to identify areas for
technology research, the impression is that this is what the future will bring us and if we
don’t like it our only option is to hit the “off-switch”.

3.2 – The IS-SD Research Strand

A strand of research with a more problematic, policy-option approach takes the broad view
of the relationship between the Information Society and Sustainable Development (IS-SD).
Initiated in 1994 with a report from a DG XIII Working Circle [6], this work explored
conceptual frameworks for the IS-SD link through a series of Guidelines issued by the
GAD Concertation Chain in the ACTS Program.[7]
These concepts were then operationalised through a series of initiatives. While the ASIS
project built towards a high-level “Alliance for a Sustainable Information Society” [8] the
ISIAS initiative [9] established local workgroups to define sustainable Information Society
visions for their region. The large-scale TERRA 2000 project [10] developed analytical
“scenarios and models of present and future developments in order to support policy debate
and decision aimed ultimately at optimising the contribution of Information Society
Technologies to Sustainable Development.”
While these efforts clarified important policy choices to be made at the regional,
European and global levels, they take a “broad picture” stance that is difficult to relate to
the Ambient Intelligence concept, which “places the user, i.e. the human being, at the centre
of the future development of the knowledge-based society.”
A step in this direction was instead taken in the ASSIST project [11], which developed
the concept of “immaterialisation of consumption” as a key area where IST can make a
substantial contribution (perhaps the only real one) to reducing resource use. The argument
is that even a substantial decrease in consumption through more efficient product life cycles
or transport schemes (as in the ISTAG Carmen scenario) will only lead to incremental
environmental benefits. Immaterialisation, as with for example downloading an MP3 file
for listening to music on an existing computer, instead causes a “switch moment drop” to
zero material use.

3.3 – Lifestyles and Workstyles

As in the case of MP3, it soon becomes clear that the shift towards immaterialisation is
more a question of patterns of individual behaviour than one of global agreements, of
consumption more than production. Yet, as the Oslo Declaration on Sustainable
Consumption [9] states:
“Efforts to develop consumption systems that are markedly more efficient and effective are
still largely unknown and to date there have been few practical steps toward realizing their
implementation… this heretofore neglected dimension still requires comprehensive
investigation. Such research must systematically integrate efforts to promote improvements
in quality of life, to distinguish long-term structural trends in consumption patterns, and to
identify the social mechanisms and cultural aspects of consumer behavior and household
decision making.”
One could argue that on the contrary there has been almost too much research on
“cultural aspects of consumer behavior and household decision making” in the field
marketing and product-oriented lifestyle studies. The aim here has not traditionally been to
save the planet but to sell products and services, and lifestyle marketing has gained a strong
grip on defining the value systems of current generations, to the chagrin of writers such as
Naomi Klein [13].
Returning to the sphere of IST-induced innovation, the above-mentioned ASSIST
project carried out an analysis of why i-mode was so successful compared to the WAP
platform launched in Europe at about the same time:
“DoCoMo plus i-mode (and the thousands of services and companies included in it) make
an Integrated Lifestyle Package. The driver is 'a fun experience' that is, a wholly immaterial
outcome. How they achieved success was by taking a Total Lifestyle Approach.”
The danger with this analysis is that it tends to view a group or individual exclusively in
terms of consumption, as a carry-on effect of its marketing origin. We can balance this
view, and in addition get closer to the target world of much of the IST program, if we
consider lifestyles and “workstyles” as complementary concepts. While this latter is also a
much abused term, a sound definition is put forth by Eberhard Wenzel in his work on health
at the workplace [14]:
By individual workstyles, I refer to the occupational and organizational patterns of behavior
and action of a person, by which normative expectations regarding workplace- and
 occupation-related efficiency are met. … In other words, individual workstyles represent
what one could call work-related or occupational identity.
Individual workstyles represent a complex system of mutually determining variables, the
change of which will only be achieved, if their interdependencies are taken into account.
By collective workstyles, I refer to socially, culturally, historically, technologically,
politically and economically developed patterns of action, which are related to specific
occupations and which are developed during vocational training and the first years of
occupational socialization. They form a reservoir of shared values and normative
orientations towards his/her own professional group as well as to other professional groups.
This integration of the individual and the collective dimension in the analysis is
particularly useful for this investigation. Indeed, achieving sustainability through Ambient
Intelligence will involve a balance of individual creativity and institutional and
organisational innovation in collectively developing new workstyles.

4. Four Workstyle Scenarios

The ISTAG study identifies two axes structuring the differentials between its four
scenarios: goals (economic and personal ‘efficiency’ versus ‘sociability/humanistic’ drivers)
and actors (‘communal’ versus ‘individual’ as the user orientation driver). The generation
of sustainable workstyle scenarios can follow a similar approach but needs to identify the
appropriate axes.

4.1 – Knowledge and Time

In this preliminary attempt, I suggest differentials that aim to highlight some key issues of
sustainability, especially in the cultural dimension [15], probably the key determinant in
shaping both individual and collective workstyle innovations. The first axis concerns the
organisation of knowledge – the main component of added value for European policy at
least – mapped between the extremes of ‘centralised’ versus ‘distributed’. In the first case,
the economy is divided according to producers and consumers of knowledge engaging in
monetised transactions.[16] The distributed model on the other hand empowers individuals
to produce and share knowledge as well as consume it, and places value on the collective
social capital thus gained.
The second axis deals with time, which though a recurring term in descriptions of the
Information Society is oddly enough rarely itself the subject of reflection.[17] Drawing on
Barbara Adams’s work on time awareness, [18] we can identify the extremes of ‘kronos’
(emphasizing the properties of time) and ‘kairos’ (a well-defined time opportunity). Kronos
is part of a first group of time-related words identified by Adams, which also includes
objective time, natural time, clock time, linear time, cyclical time and others. Kairos instead
captures the more cultural dimension of time, and is grouped with terms such as social time,
timescape, rhythm, time orientation, time perception and so forth.
While organisational models and individual choices along these axes have a clear
impact on the development of future workstyles, the technical scenario for Ambient
Intelligence can in principle be seen to reinforce possible developments in either direction.
For instance, there is an increase in the potential for quantitative time management (kronos)
in that the environment is ubiquitous not only in space but in time as well: always on,
always ready. In parallel however, services such as RSS and “podcasting” point to new
kairos-like communication models somewhere between the synchronous and the
asynchronous: a new song becomes available to a music lover the morning it’s published,
but she downloads it to her iPod over breakfast and listens to it at a more appropriate time,
for instance while riding the subway.
Along the knowledge axis, we can say that centrally broadcast messages ranging from
corporate memos to advertising video clips are likely to be even more pervasive and
invasive the more connected we are. The fact that user profiles, location filters and the like
may in theory make that information custom fit to our current situation is likely to only
increase the overload, as is currently the case with much direct marketing. In parallel,
however, there is greater potential for the distributed production of knowledge, not just by
single users finding appropriate tools for self-expression available at the right time in the
right place, but also potentially by peer-to-peer networks of “knowledge creators”
collaborating according to the models being experimented in the Open Source community.

4.2 – Four Workstyle Scenarios

KNOWLEDGE
ORGANISATION DISTRIBUTED

HYPER SLOW
EMPOWERMENT BUSINESS
(BLACKBERRY) (BLOGSPHERE)

KRONOS KAIROS

TIME
AWARENESS
MOBILE
ZAP-
PARTY
POLIS
(I-MODE)
(BLOOMBERG)

CENTRALISED

Using the above figure, let us now look at four workstyle scenarios that can be generated by
the two axes, together with technology cases that illustrate how they relate to Ambient
Intelligence. To the lower left, the “Zap-Polis” scenario results from an emphasis on clock
time with the worker primarily acting on centralised knowledge. The image derives from
the almost intentional information overload induced by teenagers zapping between
television programs with the remote control, and adopted as a model for serious business
people by Bloomberg TV. The emphasis in this scenario is on the transmission of
apparently appropriate knowledge in a hammering time-efficient manner, often with the
hidden intention of influencing the actions of the individual, be it a global consumer or a
sales representative.
The “Hyper-Empowerment” scenario remains within the sphere of linear time, but here
the individual is expected to generate knowledge with a high level of productivity. The
Blackberry mobile office typifies this workstyle with individuals receiving and sending
emails around the clock. Although caricatured in this description, this basic model drives
much current thinking on the contribution of ICT to competitiveness. It is increasingly
being called into question, however, primarily for the levels of stress generated in the
individual such that productivity may be quantitative but not necessarily qualitative.
The “Mobile Party” scenario is named after the hedonistic, lifestyle-oriented television
advertising for 3G videophone services that essentially carries the i-mode’s total lifestyle
concept further. Time here is the social time of kairos, but the organisation of knowledge is
centralised, with the user a pure consumer (I don’t consider a snapshot with Megan Gale to
be knowledge production). As a workstyle, this scenario is at best relevant for activities
with more of a relational than a knowledge production component, but is in any event
unsustainable from a socio-economic standpoint.
 The fourth scenario, with a decentralised organisation of knowledge and a social
awareness of time, is called “Slow Business” after the “Slow Food” movement.[19] The
emphasis is on the quality of both time and knowledge, aiming to do the right thing at the
right time more than many things in less time. A technology paradigm close to this scenario
is the blogsphere, where the personal is mixed with the professional, news with reflection,
the timing of when one has something to say with the instantaneity of the RSS feed. While
the boundary separating work from life is at risk with the Hyper-Empowerment workstyle,
here it is the other way around: life invades work.

4.3 – The Likelihood of Slow Business

The organisation of the above matrix implies that the Slow Business scenario is the
more culturally sustainable of the four, combining diffused, collective knowledge with
socially differentiated time awareness. It is also the closest to the most sophisticated (and
most long-term) of the ISTAG scenarios: Annette and Solomon’s humanistic, community
oriented social learning ambient.
An additional argument in favour of the sustainability of Slow Business has to do with
challenging the necessity of “saving time” at all costs, often a significant multiplier of
resource consumption per unit of service. Further, the distributed model of knowledge
production can be linked to social and economic sustainability as well, in terms of
inclusiveness and resilience of production models, especially for networked enterprises.
In the end, though, the link between the Slow Business scenario and economic
competitiveness is counter-intuitive, if only because the Industrial Era has been so
embedded in the virtues of clock time.[20] Perhaps, as has been the case with other counter-
intuitive success stories such as the TCP-IT protocol or indeed the Slow Food movement,
this scenario will emerge anyway over the coming years, driven if nothing else by
individual and collective lifestyle/workstyle choices.
Early signals are appearing amongst home-office workers and micro-firms (who, it
should be remembered, generate nearly a quarter of all European yearly sales), arguably
because they have greater autonomy in deciding what workstyles to adopt. The
EURESCOM project PROFIT has been investigating the socio-economic dimensions of
Ambient Intelligence, including user acceptance issues for the ISTAG scenarios. Their
fieldwork identifies “non profit-maximising ‘lifestyle businesses’ [who] were particularly
found to want to maintain strict boundaries [between work and home], since their
businesses were formed to maintain their quality of life.” [21]
More broadly, the recently completed NEWTIME project [22] investigated the impact
of moving to broadband on networks of micro-firms in five very different European
contexts. In one survey, some 32% of owners cite “support preferred lifestyle” as their main
business objective, outranking “maximise profits” by 10 percentage points.
Two NEWTIME case studies illustrate the kind of ‘preferred lifestyles’ that can appear,
especially in the case of moving to broadband technology. One case involved a group of
some 10 independent professionals in creative fields from graphics design to marketing,
working as an ad hoc network within a shared facility in Denmark. Their implementation of
a knowledge management/workflow system required a significant re-working of the initial
structure to account for the multiplicity of possible roles and links in joint projects, as well
as their different family organisations and individual time requirements.
Another network in Cornwall reported that the most important advantage of installing a
WiFi network in the joint office space was the workstyle flexibility it enabled, allowing
them to change workspaces and to come and go from the office more easily. One can
imagine such a group in a comfortably furnished shared work environment, signalling to
co-workers (and the intelligent ambient) the type of “working mood” one is in – need to
concentrate, wanting to brainstorm, open to chat – by opening up the laptop in, say, a
secluded corner in the library, on the coffee table in front of the sofa or out on the patio.

5. Implications and Conclusions

5.1 – Development Implications

In order to identify implications of these Slow Business workstyles for technology

development, it may be useful to analyse the kinds of action patterns or social models that
derive from the scenarios and thus some areas that can then be investigated from a
functional standpoint. This is of course the subject for future research, but I suggest a
preliminary framework could follow the three main technology concepts that converge to
shape the Ambient Intelligence paradigm: ubiquity, personalisation and intelligence.
The question of ubiquity is similar to our experience with the shift from dial-up to
always-on Internet connections. Rather than a window of opportunity to be used as
efficiently as possible, connectivity has become an attribute of the environment, influencing
the potentials of time and space in that specific place. Rather than a simple “off switch”, the
Slow Business worker will need functionalities to manage time awareness in the more
nuanced ways thrown up by the temporal models suggested by Barbara Adams:
coordination, rhythm, anticipation, procrastination, allocation, and so forth. Spatial
awareness will also require research into the kinds of tools required to manage inter-
culturality, adapting individuals and their cultures to the specificity of place: what are the
differences between what happens in a WiFi-ed Starbuck’s in Chicago and sipping tea and
playing backgammon at a sidewalk café in Istanbul?
Personalisation is currently conceived of in terms of profiles of an individual’s
functional or organisational aptitudes or at most data-mined aspects of taste and
preferences. The Slow Business scenario brings the ethical dimension of working
relationships to the fore; here, the functional implications have hardly been touched on to
date, save in the hacker community.[23] The role of trust as a constituent element of social
capital is increasing significantly in knowledge-based networks, and to most people, trust is
less a question of encryption and more one of sharing similar values. A good case study
here could be built on the workstyle of theatrical companies (often used as a metaphor for
virtual enterprises), where mutual respect for different but complementary competencies is
deeply coded in the organisation of work processes.
Finally, we have intelligence, or more properly information that is presumed to be
relevant as a function of the situational context. Of increasing importance, and this is tied to
the question of ethics, is the authentication of knowledge and the evaluation of relevance
(Google’s page ranking software?). Alain De Botton in “The Art of Travel” has a wonderful
chapter on curiosity, describing how he discovers what’s really in a Piazza del Duomo – the
people, details in the pavement and so on – quite differently from the information the
tourist guide deems useful.[24] The physical environment is full of tacit, uncoded
knowledge [25]; could the tools of Ambient Intelligence allow us to enter into a dialogue
with our surroundings (or more usefully its multiple ‘authors’) to tap that knowledge?

5.3 – Concluding Note

As a preliminary exercise, the above suggestions aim more to provoke the imagination than
to set a research agenda. If there is the will, however, that could be the next step, building
on workstyle models such as those just described. An open mind is required to imagine the
possible workstyles that could emerge from Ambient Intelligence, and a clear sense of
direction will be required to steer its evolution in the direction of true sustainability, rather
than an exasperation of the familiar but inequitable, resource-consuming and hyper-stressed
workstyle models we have today.
As the above paragraphs suggest, however, it may be that sustainable workstyles are
already beginning to emerge spontaneously with the first signs of convergence in the
direction of the Ambient Intelligence vision. The social, cultural and organisational models
they develop may represent radical innovations, but they equally have deep roots in our
collective history. As we work to imagine what might be possible, we therefore should also
have a second look around us at what is already there.

References
[1] G. Riva et al, ed. “Ambient Intelligence: The evolution of technology, communication and cognition
towards the future of human-computer interaction”, IOS Press, from the Introduction published at
www.vepsy.com/communication/volume6.html
[2] National Intelligence Council, Mapping the Global Future, available at
http://www.cia.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2020.html#contents
[3] D. Meadows et. Al., The Limits to Growth, first Report to the Club of Rome, Universe Books, New
York, 1972.
[4] See Electrolux and Ericsson’s e2-home www.e2-home.com, Geiorgia Tech’s Aware House
www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ahri, or MIT’s house_n http://architecture.mit.edu/house_n
[5] “Scenarios for Ambient Intelligence 2010”, Institute for Prospective Technology Studies, Seville,
February 2001, and available at ftp://ftp.cordis.lu/pub/ist/docs/istagscenarios2010.pdf
[6] FAW, DG XIII/B "Working Circle", Contributions of the Information Society to Sustainable
Development, European Commission, 1994.
[7] http://www.cordis.lu/infowin/acts/analysys/concertation/chains/ga/desc_gad.htm
[8] http://www.faw.uni-ulm.de/asis/welcome.html
[9] http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/showcase/projects/isias/i_public.html
[10] http://www.terra-2000.org/
[11] http://www.cornix.co.uk/assist.htm
[12] Oslo Declaration on Sustainable Consumption, February 2005: http://www.oslodeclaration.org/
[13] N. Klein, No Logo: taking aim at the brand bullies, Knopf Canada, December 1999.
[14] E. Wenzel, Conceptual issues in worksite health promotion, in C. Chu and R.Simpson, eds, The
Ecological Public Health, from vision to practice, University of Toronto, 1994.
[15] J. Marsh, Cultural Diversity and the Information Society: Policy options and Technological Issues, PE
297.559/Fin.St., Brussels, July 2001.
[16] J. Rifkin, The Age of Access: the new culture of hypercapitalism, where all of life is a paid-for
experience, J.P Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.
[17] G. Morello, ed., Between Tradition and Innovation: Time in a Managerial Perspective, Fabio Orlando
Editore, Palermo, 1997.
[18] B. Adams, If your waste your time, you waste your life: the growing awareness of time and
temporalities, Conference on Leisure Futures, University of Inssbruck, 2004.
[19] http://www.slowfood.com/
[20] T. Paquot, The Art of the Siesta, Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd., 2003.
[21] http://www.eurescom.de/Public/Projects/P1300-series/P1302/default.asp
[22] http://www.newtime.org/
[23] P. Himanen, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, with a prologue by L. Torvalds
and an epilogue by M. Castells, Random House, New York, 2001 and E. Raymond, The Cathedral &
the Bazaar: musings on Linux and Open Source by an accidental revolutionary, O’Reilly, Sebastapol
California, 2001.
[24] A. De Botton, The Art of Travel, Penguin, 2003.
[25] M. Boisot, Knowledge Assets, Oxford University Press, 1998.