(Inez, South Korea) My campaign to lighten up the global economy,as a key aspect of the transition to sustainability, suffered two morale-sapping reality-checks this week. Firstly, UNCTAD announced that the weight of cargo carried on the world’s sea lanes rose 4.5 percent in 2004, and the capacity – [continue …]

(Seoul) “That was quite an eye-opener. I thought design was only about MP3 players and mobile phones”. Hee-Beom Lee, Korea’s minister of commerce industry and energy, was not being ironic. Most industry ministers I ever met spend their days trying to boost high-tech. But for Mr Lee the opposite holds [continue …]

(Seoul). In my car from the airport I am disconcerted by what sounds like someone drowning a dog in a bucket of water. It turns out to be the ringtone on my driver’s mobile phone. The traffic here is worse than ever so he probably has time in jams to [continue …]

Doors of Perception is to be part of a year-long festival of social innovation and service design, in the UK, called Designs of the Time, or Dott. Throughout 2007, the whole North East region of the UK will explore ways we can carry out familiar, daily-life activities in new [continue …]

As the author of a book on the subject, I’m disconcerted to see that a sniper has shot the main speaker at Complexity and Design in the eye. Is our subject that controversial?

“I’m exhausted just writing about this” says Thomas Friedman on page 170 of The World is Flat. The book does move swiftly along, but I’m sure its author is perked up by today’s news that he has won $50k as winner of the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs business book [continue …]

I’ll be in Seoul next week (to speak at Design Korea 05) and would be delighted to meet any friends (or friends-of-friends) of Doors, who are also going to that event, or who are in town, the evening of Wednesday 30 November. Go to the Grand InterContinental Seoul, 159-8 Samseong-Dong, [continue …]

This is the title of a lecture I’m giving at the Royal Society of Arts in London on 12 December. It seems a good oppportunity to reflect on the lessons we learned at Doors 8 earlier this year in Delhi. I plan to talk about those lessons in the [continue …]

How’s this for a sublime location? A media arts festival in Huddersfield next week called Ultrasound takes place at Bates Mill. No, not motel: it’s a traditional nineteenth century industrial complex. The performances of electronic music, software production, new technologies, and audiovisual stuff, take place in the Blending Shed.

I’ve received the following invitation from Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Ängeslevä and other friends at V2 in Rotterdam. The text is so well-crafted, and the project is so insane, that I’m simply reproducing it here as is.
“The urban rock dove (columba livia) is part of every cityscape. More hated [continue …]

I learned at the university of Cincinnati last week that 98 percent of all US households containing babies use some disposable diapers, and that an American child can run through 8,000 to 10,000 of these products before becoming fully toilet trained at age three or later. This is [continue …]

Only in America: ethics has become a business. In the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, passed in 2002 in the wake of financial scandals such as Enron and Tyco, a lot of companies are struggling to cope with the complexities of compliance. As James Hyatt writes in BusinessEthics.com “corporations are [continue …]

“Quick-serve restaurants are having a tough time keeping the fast in fast food, as menus become more complicated. At San Diego-based Jack in the Box restaurants, for instance, it takes an average of 228.9 seconds – 3.8 minutes – to get burgers out the drive-through window after an order is [continue …]

One third of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions come from residential households. Householders could reduce this by making their houses more efficient, generating their own energy, switching suppliers, or simply switching off. But power bills are confusing, energy use is invisible, and installations are tedious. The RED team [continue …]

Britain’s unhealthy obsession with formal education appears to be stressing out the country’s youngest children. A recent story in The Guardian reports that toddlers starting at nursery, after being at home since birth, experience high levels of stress in the first weeks after separating from their mothers, [continue …]

The nuclear lobby is trying to portray nuclear power as the inevitable solution to Britain’s future power needs. But their campaign has been dealt a potentially lethal blow by a schoolboy called Peter Ash. The young inventor attached a generator to his hamster’s exercise wheel and connected it to [continue …]

I received the extremely sad news from Helsinki that Jan Verwijnen has died, following a serious illness, at the age of 56. Many Doors people will know of Jan as leader of the Spark! project that we participated in not long ago. Sparkl! was an inspirational experience that [continue …]

The main prize of the UNESCO Digital Arts Award 2005 “City and Creative Media” goes to Indian artist Ashok Sukumaran, one of the featured presenters at Doors 8 in Delhi earlier this year. Sukamaran’s “poetic yet pragmatic” project, Switch, was selected out of 242 project proposals by an international [continue …]

The latest edition of the Dutch architecture magazine Archis is on the theme “doing almost nothing”. The new Archis (which is now published jointly with AMO, the research arm of Rem Koolhaas’s design office) includes a diatribe against people who “travel to conferences around the world to talk [continue …]

In this one-morning symposium on November 10, three eminent researchers discuss designing as form of research. Brenda Laurel, Gillian Crampton-Smith, and Kun-Pyo Lee will look at the ways design generates knowledge which can be used beyond the product at hand and thereby generate wholly new ideas. The event is hosted [continue …]

Where does the mind end and the world begin?

Until recently, philosophers tended to think of the nervous system as a glorified a set of message cables that connect the body to the brain. But philosopher Teed Rockwell thinks that the boundary between mind and world is a flexible one.

In his [continue …]

Does tourism kill the toured? An unexpected overnight in Barcelona at the weekend reminded me that cities should be be careful what they wish for. Barcelona is the most-quoted example in the world of a city that has used design and creativity to make itself attractive to tourists. But having [continue …]

I generally hate the Olympics but it does sometimes generate curious and interesting side events. Turin, which is hosting the winer Olympics, is hosting the the first electronic Town-Meeting in Italy. In “Young words happening” (great title by the way) young (under 35) people from all over the world [continue …]

I’m running a workshop at Experimenta in Lisbon this Friday on ‘designers in the age of fear’. The design research economy is being massively distorted by our inability to make sound judgements about risk and priorities. For example, Googling “design” and “homeland security” today yields a score of 10,900,000. Enormous [continue …]

“Quiet in class!”. Silent attention to Teacher’s every word was the required mode of interaction when I was at school. Only speak when spoken to. Teachers themselves were judged by the quietness of their workspace; a noisy classroom meant they were not in sufficient control. All that seems to be [continue …]

About one hour after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s article, I attended a small group meeting of Doors persons in London. I cannot report that we avoided discussions of abstract knowledge, or ideas for the sake of ideas – but we had a good time. Kristi van Riet made this mini-movie:
[continue …]

I carried two psychological burdens on the promotional tour for my book earlier this year. One was the knowledge that a competitor is published every thirty seconds; every day I was on the road, the ranks of new titles swelled by 2,880. My second burden was awareness that Rick [continue …]

The papers today say that rebuilding after Katrina will cost the same as the war in Iraq. In the unlikely event that so much money is forthcoming, what will it be spent on? Are new freeways and malls the wisest way to rebuild? Before firms like Halliburton start pouring concrete, [continue …]

If mobility is a new place, then this event is the place to be.

Capturing the Moving Mind is a conference on board the Trans-Siberian train. It’s about new forms of movement and control, war and economy, in the current situation. An opening discussion of the blurring borderlines between art, [continue …]

What might the Internet be like in 2010? Darren Sharp, whom some of you met at Doors 8 in Delhi, is co-author of a hefty new Australian report called Smart Internet 2010. An executive summary is here. The 2010 Report provides, in narrative form, a range of expert [continue …]

Two of the most striking images from New Orleans feature helicopters. In one shot, a helicopter is dropping 15,000 bags of sand onto rushing waters that will obviously wash them away. In the second, the president projects a concerned gaze onto the diaster from a similar height. Engineering to control [continue …]

A quck reminder about the conference Urban Screens being organised by Mirjam Struppek in Amsterdam in three weeks from now. Presentations address the growing acreage of large digital moving displays that increasingly pervade our public spaces. Can the mainly commercial use of these screens be broadened to include cultural [continue …]

A mesmerising shopping list of new ‘research infrastructures’ has been sent to the the European Commission by a committee of top scientists. These new toys – sorry, ‘tools’ – range from an Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) for optical astronomy, to a research icebreaker called Aurora Borealis, and a [continue …]

What exactly is an ‘information society’ and do we want to live in one? The European Commission has published a new plan, called i2010 for ‘the completion of a Single European Information Space’. The Commission proposes an 80% increase in funding for ICT research focused on areas [continue …]

Can new technology improve the quality of public space? We know that technology changes the ways we use public space, but the most important ways tend not to have been consciously designed – they just happened. The widespread use of text-2-meet, for example, was not anticipated by the people who [continue …]

Only a month to go before the first Municipal Wireless Conference. Among the speakers lined up by organiser Esme Vos are Jonathan Baltuch, founder of a firm called MRI which creates economic development blueprints for municipalities; James Farstad, consultant to the city of Minneapolis’ citywide wireless project; Greg Richardson [continue …]

The one application of Ambient Intelligence that sparks the imagination of young designers seems to be wearable computing. An American designer, Natalia Allen, reckons there’s an emerging ‘fashion tech industry’, and a Canadian artist, Joanna Berzowska, is excited by the potential of what she calls ‘soft computation’: electronic textiles, responsive [continue …]

What are the dark scenarios for Ambient Intelligence (AmI) ? Five threats are identified in a report from a powerful European consortium: Surveillance of users; spamming; identity theft; malicious attacks (on AmI systems); and a cultural condition they describe as ‘digital divide’. The research consortium – whose members include the [continue …]

A plaintive request arrives from London: Diana Deal, conferences administrator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has been ‘deluged with emails’ about the Critical Debate between Rem Koolhaas and myself on 14 October – but it’s not Diana’s job to sell tickets. For that, please enter 14 Octobner at the [continue …]

What would it mean to organise live art events that did not require large concrete museums or that people travel long distances to particpate? In early 1980s Moscow, private apartments were turned into collective immersive experiences during a project called APTART. I learned about APTART, (which someone [continue …]

If you are worried about the cost of living, try this: The cost of the average cremation in Britain is expected to rise by up to £100 (160 euros) after a government announcement that it wants to halve the amount of mercury released into the atmosphere by crematoria. It seems [continue …]

A gift from Brenda Laurel has cost me dear. The eminent design professor at Art Center, in California, sent me a copy of a new report called ‘Tweens: Technology, Personal Agency, Engagement’. The result of a year-long research project sponsored by HP, the book is an intriguing portrait [continue …]

Is the collective intelligence of the web overrated? A couple of nights ago, 18 people turned up for dinner. We pushed three tables together and sat together around an irregular rectangle. It felt, to me at least, as if the shape and dimensions of the ad-hoc table did little to [continue …]

If we are to re-localise food, a new generation of information systems will be needed as support. Many of today’s food systems rely on closed networks in which access to information is controlled by entities (such as supermarkets) that are not keen on cooperatives and localisation. The good news is [continue …]

During my visit to the MIT campus a few weeks ago Doug Sery, my editor at MIT Press, pointed out two large and expensive-looking buildings that were being constructed to house neuroscientists. A generation ago, the glamour building on the block was MediaLab – so we should probably ask: What [continue …]

An eminent insects expert is to study aspects of biological and religious diversity in order to find ways of conserving the natural environment. Until recently Head of Entomology (the study of insects) at London’s Natural History Museum, Dr Dick Vane-Wright is the recipient of a NESTA Fellowship. ‘I suspect [continue …]

In the UK’s National Health Service, billions of euros (the published figure is two, the likely total is 15) are being spent in a new attempt to digitise and integrate patient medical records. Insiders tell me the latest project is doomed to fail, as did previous attempts, because turf-wars between [continue …]

It was thanks to the new blog for Wikimania – the first international wikimedia conference which starts tomorrow in Frankfurt – that I learned about the latest exaggerated claim about contribution of mobile phones to knowledge.Cellphedia is billed as ‘the 1st Ubiquitous Social Encyclopedia…(it) creates the ability to [continue …]

For the past year a network of six design schools in different parts of Europe has been collecting real-life examples of social innovation for a project called Emude, in which Doors of Perception is a partner. A lot of work has still to be done analysing these stories to figure [continue …]

As designers and social innovators, should we take any notice of technology policy? Wouldn’t it be best to ignore the think-tanks and telcos, and concentrate on doing great projects in the real world? A 90% focus on projects would probably be healthy. But we also need to keep half an [continue …]