A Framework for Assessing the Influence of Technological Innovation

Abstract

The illustrations of chapter 1 are ironic because their underlying infrastructures persist even as their justifying conditions seem to have eroded over time. Investment in infrastructure may enable innovation in a context at a given time and place, and yet the establishment of infrastructure also institutionalizes behavior that resists innovation, preserving an erstwhile newly achieved status quo. We note that the consumption activities associated with the daily commute to work or the walk in the park have become far removed from the experiences of our forebears for whom the infrastructures were initially conceived. So to assess the prospects for innovation in the presence of these infrastructures, we present in this chapter a simple framework for identifying five categories of influences that contribute to producing context that is relevant for understanding how a technology may be used, commercialized, or abused (not necessarily in that order). The framework, called the Star in the Pentagon (SIP),¹ is reasonably flexible in that it would enable a systematic analysis of historical fact or fiction, and it would inspire the conjuring of possible futures. We present and explain the framework as it might be applied to begin interpreting the illustrations of chapter 1.