Hello.
I'm Tineke Egyedi.
I am a senior researcher Standardization at the Delft University of Technology,
director of DIRoS, a company that focuses on standardization
research, and board member of the European Academy for
Standardization .
I am keenly interested in how standards affect the development and evolution of infrastructures.
I led the NGInfra Foundation project Standards and the flexibility of infrastructures on
which this lecture is based.
Let me begin by saying that most people think standards are things that freeze technology
development and prevent change.
And, there are good arguments to think so.
Let’s take GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications),
a standard first published by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
in 1990.
GSM is a well-known standard for mobile telephony
It was initiated in the early 1980s by a number of national Public Telephone Operators.
The idea was to develop a pan-European mobile network.
To allow this to happen, a European Directive was issued that reserved
special frequency bands for GSM.
GSM is now used almost everywhere in the world.
In the GSM standard, certain technological choices are specified
and frozen.
These choices are implemented in products, testing procedures etc..
Moreover, to support GSM uptake and use,
all kinds of arrangements and facilities are created.
That is, GSM becomes institutionalized.
You can imagine that, once its uptake reaches a critical mass,
a self-reinforcing process of entrenchment sets in.
Path dependency develops.
A radical change of technology becomes difficult.
For example, because of vested commercial interests or
because new technologies conflict with GSM-aligned regulation.
and GSM is not an exception.
This is what happens with all popular standards.
In fact a high degree of socio-technical entrenchment goes hand in hand with the wide adoption of
standards.
But in the coming two videos I want to invite you to take a different outlook and explore
how standards can function as catalysts of change.
More specifically, can standards increase infrastructure flexibility?
Can they even catalyze more radical infrastructure transitions?
I will use the ISO container for freight transport as a running example because it involves such
a straightforward technology.
Before I can start you need to know some more about standards.
There are many kinds of standards: standards for measurements,
nuts and bolts, clean drinking water,
food safety, building materials,
treatment of diseases, etc.
These standards are developed in committees, mostly by technical experts and representatives
of industry and government.
(Note that in such committees citizens and NGOs are often absent.) Such committees reside
under official standards bodies like the International Organization for Standardization (ISO),
governmental bodies, professional organizations,
industry consortia and to name some exclusively infrastructure-oriented ones:
the International Union of Railways (UIC) and the International Telecommunications Union
(ITU).
The list of organizations is endless.
This picture shows a festive moment during an event organized by the Bureau of Indian
Standards (BIS).
BIS is one of the 164 national standards bodies that are member of ISO.
It is important to note that these committee-based standards,
on which I will focus, differ from what we call de facto standards,
that is, products that become standard because they
have a dominant market share.
Think of the technology war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
The winner of this war, Blu-ray,
has become the de facto standard.
In contrast, committee standards are negotiated and agreed upon.
They result from an attempt to align interests.
They are meant to be used widely and therefore documented and publicly accessible.
That is, committee standards are designed – and,
as we will see, this is important if we want to ‘design
in’ system flexibility.
Developing standards is often quite difficult and lengthy.
Not least because competing companies are sitting at the table and the standard is likely
to be used in different operational contexts.
Committees must therefore compromise on interests and requirements.
Take the example of the standardization of freight container dimensions.
The standard was developed by an ISO technical committee.
While some key decisions were already taken in 1962,
it took until 1968 to publish it officially.
Now who participated in this committee?
First of all, ocean shipping companies (e.g.
naval architects), railway and road transport companies,
manufacturers of containers and container handling equipment,
shippers, etc..
These had very different interests and requirements.
But also various governments officials tried to influence the process.
For the size of the container had to comply with road regulation (allowable width and
lengths of transport vehicles), with the height of train tunnels
Moreover, most countries had an industry policy on transport
that supported their national champions.
The standard specifications should preferably meet the needs of these national transport champions
Indeed, all this underscores the highly interest-driven
political nature of most standards.
Earlier, I said that I would be focusing on committee standards.
But I need to even further narrow down my focus.
While measurement standards, safety standards,
quality standards etc.
are all relevant to infrastructures, I will focus on compatibility standards
(also called interoperability or interface standards).
These standards make subsystems compatible.
They specify how subsystems need to interface and/or interwork.
Why focus on compatibility standards?
Because they often constitute the core of an infrastructure
You could even say that they ARE the infrastructure!
Think, for example,
of the family of Internet protocols developed in the International Engineering Task Force
(IETF), and the GSM or ISO container standards.
Now, why are compatibility standards interesting
in the light of infrastructure flexibility?
Quoting David and Bunn, the authors of The Economics of Gateway Technologies
and Network Evolution, standards create: compatible complements,
which is when subsystems A and C can be used together,
as with a plug and a socket; and • compatible substitutes,
when subsystems A and B can each be used with C,
e.g.
when both a digital camera (A) and an external hard disk (B) can connect to the USB interface
of a computer (C).
Now let’s have a look at the following table.
You will recognize that a standardized interface need not be a designer’s first option.
Perhaps he or she prefers to connect subsystems by means of a dedicated gateway in a proprietary way.
Like the vendor-specific plugs for mobile phone chargers,
which makes the chargers non-exchangeable.
Compare this with the ISO paper format standard.
This standard is a generic gateway.
It specifies the paper sizes which paper processing machines (e.g.,
copying machines, telefaxes and printers) and office requisites
(e.g., folders,
computer software) work with.
Let’s zoom in and take a look at our running example,
the ISO container.
At the start of the ISO process containers of various shapes and sizes were being used.
But the committee decided not to use existing dimensions in order not to favour a particular
party and create a level playing field.
So it set the dimensions at 8 ft x 8 ft x 10/20/40 ft.
Indeed, these are modular lengths so that a 40 ft container
carrier would also be able to accommodate e.g.
two 20 ft containers.
Looking at the effects, it made containerized freight transport within
and across transport modes much more efficient.
It facilitated automated container handling in ports and storage areas.
But also: there was more room for shippers and their
customers to choose and combine transport modes.
In Europe, for example,
road, rail and inland shipping became substitutes
for containerized freight transport, as is captured in the figure you see on the screen.
Now let’s say your government has signed the Kyoto agreement and wants to reduce CO2 emissions.
The - intermodal - ISO container allows your country to shift its freight transport more
readily from road to rail and inland shipping.
That is, a standard,
if well-designed, can increase infrastructure flexibility.
Let’s take a brief break before digging a bit deeper.
In the next video I will address two follow-up questions:
Do certain standards characteristics increase infrastructure flexibility better than others?
And can standards also catalyze radical infrastructure transitions?
Thank you for your attention!
See you back later.