In China, ‘battery-bikes’ are outselling cars by four-to-one. Pedelec sales are soaring in Europe, too. Is this the start of system-wide phase-shift in transportation? At a workshop in Delhi last year, during the UnBox Festival, I posed the following question to a group of 20 design, transport, and city development professionals: What new products, services or […]
Conflict and Design
An exhibition in Belgium poses a timely challenge: When confronted by such complex issues as an ageing population, resource depletion, migration, or growing impoverishment, how are we to balance the desire to do something positive, with the need to understand the back story before we intervene? The installation (shown above) consists of open books, in different […]
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Six Key Elements and Five Steps Of A Social Harvest Festival
A big part of social innovation involves connecting people with each other in ways that are inclusive, uncomplicated, inexpensive, and joyful.
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Shoe City vs Sole Rebels
Two radically opposed models of development are being born in Ethiopia at the same time. One is small, local, socially fair, and ecologically respectful. The other takes the globalisation of fashion to a new and more destructive level. No sooner had I posted a long piece on Politics And The Fashion System than two stories reached me from Ethiopia […]
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A Whole New Cloth: Politics and the Fashion System
In fashion, despite more than 400 eco labels, an incremental ‘do less harm’ approach has addressed the symptoms, but not the principal cause, of our difficulties: an economy based on perpetual growth in a finite world. A new and global ‘leave things better’ politics affirms our co-dependency with living systems and the biosphere. The Commons, and […]
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Design Grammars for Health and Care
Health and wellbeing are properties of social-ecological systems – so how you design in those?
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Twelve Service Design Resources
Books, networks, blogs, tools, events – and a wiki
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Design and Energy: Thirteen Great Writers
Including a physicist, a mathematician, an actuary, an ecologist, a stoic, and a Druid.
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Energy: Thriving On Five Percent?
In Sharing Energy In The City, EDF and the the French National Research Agency (ANR) have challenged designers to rethink the production, harvesting, distribution, use, exchange and consumption of energy in our everyday life. They asked me to submit this text as fuel for the discussion. The modern city has been shaped by the availability […]