Exhibits and competitions should be a means to an end, not the end itself. What would be a worthwhile end?
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Green Tourism: Why It Failed And How It Can Succeed
Packaged mass tours account for 80 percent of journeys to so-called developing countries, but destination regions receive five percent or less of the amount paid by the traveller. For local people on the ground, the injustice is absurd: if I were to pay e1,200 for a week long trek in Morocco’s Atlas mountains, just e50 […]
Also posted in development & design, mobility & design
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Trust Is Not An Algorithm: Big Data Are Hot, But They Also Miss A Lot
[Illustration from http://www.hhs.gov/open/initiatives/hdi/] By some accounts the world’s information is doubling every two years. This impressive if unprovable fact has got many people wondering: what to do with it? Many big brands hope that the analysis of Big Data will give them a ‘360 degree view’ of customers: Who they’re interacting with, where they shop, how […]
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Cycle Commerce As An Ecosystem
(Illustration: Sameer Kulavoor Ghoda Bicycle Project) At a workshop in Delhi a few weeks back, during the UnBox Festival, Arjun Mehta and myself posed the following question to a group of 20 professionals from diverse backgrounds: What new products, services or ingredients are needed to help a cycle commerce ecosystem flourish in India’s cities, towns and […]
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What Makes A Change Lab Successful?
The UK government’s digital services platform, gov.uk, has won the Design of the Year award – and if I were running a big IT consulting firm grown fat on big government contracts, I’d be worried. Gov.uk is a revolutionary web operation that governments around the world are beginning to notice. Twenty four UK government departments […]
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The Ecozoic City
Over the ages we’ve invested huge amounts of effort and energy to keep cities and nature separate. What would it mean if that were about to change? The writer Thomas Berry described as the ecozoic the “reintegration of human endeavours into a larger ecological consciousness”. The ecozoic, Berry believed, would supplant the Anthropocene age, that […]
Also posted in city & bioregion
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Healing The Metabolic Rift: Designing In Social-Ecological Systems
The term metabolic rift describes the alienation between humans and nature that opened up with the growth of the the modern economy. Could the growth of bioregionalism, and research into ‘social-ecological systems’, be signs that the rift may be healing? And if so, what are the opportunities for design to contribute? [Picture: The Stockholm Resilience […]
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Venice: from Gated Lagoon to Bioregion
Computer rendering by Christian Kerrigan. Rachel Armstrong, who develops synthetic biology applications for the built environment, believes it could be possible to grow an artificial limestone reef underneath Venice using ‘metabolic materials’ – photosensitive protocells, engineered to be light averse. Her idea is to stop the city sinking into the soft mud on which its foundations […]
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Speed? What Speed? Prisoners of Speed, by Ivan Illich (Part 3 of 3)
In 1996, Ivan Illich (above) agreed to speak at Doors of Perception in Amsterdam on the theme of ‘speed’. The philosopher-educator surprised us by bringing along two fellow speakers: Sebastian Trapp, a field biologist, and Matthias Rieger, a musicologist. Their contributions are as fresh today as when we heard them in Amsterdam – so we are running […]