- New alliances
Risk and liability have long been the slow hands of design, silently shaping our reality; Standard Deviation is risk management methodology that helps realise radical futures by redesigning risk in the present.
Our lives are now shaped by new modes of sensing, interaction and exchange. As individuals, companies and cities champion perpetual innovation, are we overlooking the inherent uncertainties generated by each technological leap forward?
The Standard Deviation methodology helps clients contend with the uncertainties of a hyperconnected future by rethinking risk management from the ground-up. By deploying scenario planning developed through custom-built simulations and sensible intuitive judgements to define and measure future risks. In these scenarios, legacy conceptions of liability can no longer account for emerging complexities. Based on this position, we conceive and design new safeguards and indemnity mechanisms within smart infrastructures.
We've developed a new methodology for discovering and reshaping the risks future urban environments face. We correlate data from a huge range of sources to help map the long-chains of risk that span international, interconnected infrastructures we we use to populate a discovery tool we call the 'Risk Atlas'.
As we move into a new level of platform complexity and autonomy we see that this legal framework is becoming less capable of stabilising and defining the relationships between increasingly intelligent agents and their behaviours. If machine intelligence will likely play a significant role in shaping our societies - we have to ask - how is risk mitigated when such systems rely on digital abstractions, rather than legal ones, to interface with each other?
One part of the Standard Deviation Methodology is to design how and where to make strategic interventions across legal, economic and software paradigms in a given scenario.
One aspect of our methodology is to be able to make comparisons between cities based on future risk profiles so that new forms of future risk might be spread or shared between cities or regions that are not-geographically connected but related in other configurations.
A deviation graph is a risk tool we developed to analyse the examine the extreme risks that might develop under particular conditions. Our deviation graphs allow us to describe future urban scenarios in which certain critical factors, for instance rapidly accelerating construction technology or increasingly ‘cognitive demand’ placed upon citizens give rise to radically alternative urban regimes.
