Two days ago I was in London to talk with design school tutors about the design competition concerning food information systems that the Royal Society of Arts is running together with Dott07. Today I learned from CalorieLab via SmartMobs that McDonald’s is now placing codes [continue …]
A couple of days ago I found myself in the town centre of Carlisle, in the north west of England, at 7am. The roads were empty except for a a large white truck whose driver was unloading packaged food into a shop. An incredible, raw-edged roar of noise came from [continue …]
If you look at the menu on the left, we’ve added a button labelled “Doors 9 on Juice”.
I was told last week that 250 new five and seven star hotels, 1,000 major new restaurants, and a second indoors ski slope three times bigger than the one just opened, will be completed in Dubai over the next next five to seven years. So that’s where all the designers [continue …]
Doors of Perception 9 takes place in New Delhi 28 February to 4 March 2007. The theme is “Juice: Food, Fuel, Designâ€.
We’ve extended the first deadline for submissions to 30 September.
Why “juice”?
(Most of the statistics that follow are taken from the miraculously useful and interesting website of [continue …]
Is service design the next big thing after e-everything? If the recent surge in books and conferences is a guide, service design is at least a meme – if not yet a mania.
The trouble is, it can’t possibly be new. Seventy percent of the UK economy is [continue …]
I was perplexed to find myself billed as a “designberater” at Monday’s Rosenthal Design Convention in Frankfurt. Now in my dictionary, berate means “to rebuke or scold angrily and at length”. That can’t possibly mean me, I thought, self-righteously. It turns out that the German [continue …]
After this I promise to stop obsessing about mad people running the world. But really. Today’s Guardian reports that Richard Granger, architect of the world’s biggest imploding IT project, compared the NHS project to a sled being pulled by huskies. “When one of the dogs goes lame, and [continue …]
Every time I open my computer these days another monstrosity makes me choke on my cocopops. On Monday it was reading the loony-tunes head of Saatchi and Saatchi talk about “war as a brand” (see below). Today I started to read Wally Olins – another eminence of design and communications [continue …]
I found it weird (in the story below) that brand marketing should be proposed as an appropriate response to climate change. Now I read in Mute that Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, last year advised the US Department of Defence on rebranding war. In a [continue …]
Ashoka Changemakers has teamed up with Habitat for Humanity to stage a competition, “How to Provide Affordable Housing”. Judges from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, and the International Housing Coalition, will review entries and select finalists. A public [continue …]
When Paul Barter posted a link to a video of a chaotic looking Indian intersection, back in April, it provoked debate on the merits of traffic discipline versus chaos. A discussion ensued on issues about shared space or “naked streets” approaches to streets and the public realm. The video [continue …]
Apropos the security situation in London: “Loss of life might have surpassed the 2,700 killed in the attack on the twin towers in New York five years ago. “This was our 9/11,” a British security source said.
It’s a good thing that a lot of people were not blown up [continue …]
How was the traffic on your vacation drive home this year? Any near misses? Twenty thousand citizens are killed in traffic accidents in Europe each year, so you probably saw more than one car crash or its aftermath.
For the European Commission, these deaths are a price we must pay for [continue …]
It’s twenty years since Stuart Jane and I made this book for Thames and Hudson.
One of the bright young things whose work we put in a book for the first time was James Dyson. By 1986, his patented G-Force vacuum cleaner was being produced in [continue …]
Did you know this? “In the old days, women exposed their adulterous husbands by marking their left and right socks”. I never heard this before. But this makes me a minority among Englishmen, I now realise, because they (we) have been ridiculed for decades for making love with our socks [continue …]
The new Coroflot, launched by Allan Chochinov and his colleagues this week, boasts a staggering 33,000 design portfolios and more than 135,000 registered users. Gross visitor numbers to Coroflot (and its sister site, Core77 ) are many times higher than that. A major attraction is Coroflot’s steady flow [continue …]
I’m at a Cursos De Verano (summer school) near Madrid. Just down the corridor, a bunch of senior generals are discussing the “army of the 21st century”.
Next to them, a some egg-head priests are discussing “the church of the 21st century”.
My group is doing innovation of the 21st century and [continue …]
The avant garde of music and sound art is a good early indicator of social change; sound is a fluid and rapidly changing medium. That’s why this year’s Futuresonic looks well worth a visit. In three days of talks, demos and chat, an international crowd will explore how [continue …]
In this new book Karrie Jacobs travels America in a “quest for a house to call home in the modern world”. It’s not a conventional architecture book; rather, it’s an account of a road trip Jacobs took in 2003 — over 14,000 miles — to meet with architects and builders [continue …]
DOORS OF PERCEPTION 9: JUICE: FOOD, FUEL, MEANING
Food continuously circulates through the landscape into our homes and Bodies. It thereby organizes our calorific, symbolic and social energies. Juice, the essence of food, can also mean credit, electricity, access, flavor and love. The topic of food, as product as well as [continue …]
Allan Chochinov, editor of Core77, drew my attention to a remarkably cheap – in fact, free – way to increase patient satisfaction in hospitals. According to researchers at the Mayo Clinic, patients perceive that health providers (their term) who sit during an evaluation “are their bedside for longer [continue …]
What would it mean, in practical design terms, to make one household carbon neutral? We’ll discuss this at the next Dott 07 (Designs of the Time) Explorers Club meeting on 11 July. The event takes place at the Robert Stephenson Centre in Newcastle, UK. Many of the greenhouse gas [continue …]
At last week’s Aspen Design Summit 150 concerned designer-citizens explored ways that they might contribute to sustainable community development, education innovation, and social entrepreneurship. (Other reports are at Core77 and at unBeige.There are many images at Flickr
(Humbug check: I was an enthusiastic participant – and paid [continue …]
Too much media coverage of architecture focuses on the banal excesses of Shanghai and Dubai. The more interesting story these days concerns marginal, residual and abandoned spaces left behind when industry disappears. A new publication, Talking Cities is all about “Guerilla Architectureâ€, “An-Aestheticsâ€, and “Architecture on the Edge’. Later [continue …]
“Steel City awakens a longing for for authenticity in of a world where networks and technologies are no longer palpable. Steel City is a place of physical presence, the presence of body, of the haptic, of patina and aging. Steel City can be touched and feltâ€. Thus, poetically, Professor [continue …]
Doors of Perception 9 takes place in New Delhi, 1-4 March 2007. The theme is “Juice†and the subject is food, fuel and design. The encounter (we have stopped calling ourselves a conference) has several parts: A two-day Project Leaders Round Table for c30 people who will be invited after [continue …]
The Young Foundation has published a manifesto for social innovation Written by a team led by Geoff Mulgan, Social Silicon Valleys compares the vast investments made each year in scientific R&D (nearly 12 billion euros of public spending on R&D in the UK alone) with the piecemeal and marginal [continue …]
Jet Blue’s new credit card slogan wins my vote for the 2006 meaningless bollocks perpetrated by a creative agency award.
The way of thinking and acting that Slow Food proposes goes well beyond food and food systems. The idea of “slow†brings tradition to life, and links the quality perceived in products with the social and environmental quality of their production, and places of origin. An international seminar on the [continue …]
If a client offers you a budget of $1500 per person to design a large event for thousands of people, do you refuse? I don’t think so.
The environmental impact of large trade shows and conferences might be damaging – and the experience for those attending them may be impoverished – [continue …]
Is it time to put the future out of our misery?
Design can be valuable as a forecasting tool, and designers are great hunter-gatherers of ideas. We should develop that role further.
But we should not just look ahead in time, and not just look for technology trends.
In particular, we should look [continue …]
This has my vote for most sublime mobility project of the year.
A team of Karachi vehicle decorators has transformed a Melbourne tram to bring the experience of a journey on a W-11 Karachi mini-bus to the streets of Melbourne. Vibrant dancing colour in hand-cut [continue …]
Juha Huuskonen has invited Doors of Perception to run a two hour session as part of Mal au Pixel. The session takes place in Paris on the afternoon of Saturday 29 April – ie in a week from now. Juha and Aditya Dev Sood will be on the platform, along [continue …]
Sorry ’bout the silence this last week,; I’ve been on the road. Still am, but Allan Cholnikov has started a discussion about what we are trying to achive with the Aspen Design Summit here. You don’t have to register or sign in, and you can choose to receive email for [continue …]
Did we say that green design needs to be less sad and more glamorous?
Brad Pitt, who has few reasons to be sad that we’re aware of, narrates a six-part television series on ecologically friendly architecture, called Design-e², which launches in June on PBS in the US.
The series challenges [continue …]
What, in broad terms, is happening to design right now? According to a new paper from RED in London, we are experiencing two important shifts: Firstly, in where design skills are being applied; and secondly, in who is doing the designing. A new discipline is emerging, they say, that [continue …]
More and more companies are using so-called “design ethnographers” to help them develop products in real-life situations (rather than in design studios). This has sparked debate about the ethics of using other peoples’ daily lives as raw material for product development. But is design ethnography new? At Doors 8 in [continue …]
Intel has launched a PC platform to meet the needs of rural villages and communities in India. The “ruggedized” Community PC is equipped to operate in a community setting while accommodating the varying environmental conditions prevalent in the country. Intel also announced an initiative called “Jaagruti†(“Awakeningâ€) to support [continue …]
Cluster is running a series of pieces on the spontaneous cities, favelas, bidonvilles and squatter cities that grow independently “creating their own networks without the help of traditional planning or design”. In the new issue Frederica Verona describes her visits to numerous dormitories, day centres, and soup kitchens in [continue …]
As noted yesterday, it makes me nervous that so much money is pouring into biotech clusters; the sector has bubble-like features and is based on a absurd proposition: that technology will help us cheat death. New and renewable energy is a surer bet for a region’s economic future. World leader [continue …]
An intriguing story in next month’s Cluster magazine describes plans in China for the world’s first urban biomedical hub. Sascha Haselmayer, one of its advisors, writes that Fenglin Biomedical Centre will concentrate life science, medical care services, medical education, business incubation, and medical exhibitions, in the Xuhui district of [continue …]
What will life be like when our growing economy overshoots its carrying capacity, degrades its resource base, and collapses? A gripping description of this more-likely-than-not outcome is included in a British government report about Intelligent Infrastructure Futures. Andrew Curry and colleagues developed four contrasting scenarios of life in 2050, [continue …]
Warm congratulations to one of our favourite and most respected newsletter-website things, Ninfomania aka Protein° Feed aka Protein° Supplement. Today, Protein celebrates it’s 300th issue, having first been published in September 1997 to 14 people. It is now enjoyed by an international audience of over 9,000 select subscribers. [continue …]
I’ll be in Washington DC for the nights of 29, 30, 31 March (for IDSA/Business Week jury duty). If you’re in DC (or know Doors persons there) we could meet for a Doors brunch on Saturday morning (April 1). Interested? Then mail me: john@doorsofperception.com
An international seminar on design, welfare and local development takes place in Milan on 28 March. The event concludes the two year Emude project (in which Doors is a partner) that explored social innovation in 10 European countries. Emude is a Europe-wide investigation into the phenomenon of people who, in [continue …]
The Situationists were early critics of the creative industries. They rejected the idea that art is a specialized profession, or that its task is to produce spectacles for consumption. The only time their leaders came to London (in 1961), one of them, Guy Debord, was to speak at the [continue …]
AV Festival 06 is the UK’s newest, and largest international festival of digital arts, music, games, film & new media. With the theme of Life, it explores what happens as expectations rise that we might be able modify and improve our bodies and/or minds. More than 90 events will take [continue …]
I have always assumed that sprawl is a Bad Thing. For Jane Jacobs, in ‘Dark Age Ahead’, urban sprawl is something that “murders communities, and wastes land, time, and energy”. Sprawl is frequently blamed for environmentally-damaging transport intensity, the collapse of communities, even obesity. But James Woudhuysen, for one, thinks [continue …]
As part of our preparations for Doors 9 in India next year (March 2007) there will be a small round table meeting of art curators and cultural producers in New Delhi in the afternoon of March 10. Representatives from funding agencies, cultural missions, art galleries, event spaces, museums, schools of [continue …]
JOHNTHACKARA designing for life
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