The Guardian is flogging an absurdly over-the-top watch on its website. Because the watch is radio-controlled, accuracy is guaranteed to “within one second in a million years”. The watch also boasts five daily alarms, a 1/100 second stopwatch, and world time. The Guardian promises that “you should never be [continue …]
Many of you probably know about Michael Darnell’s website Bad Designs – but it’s always growing, and always worth a re-visit. If there are other bad design collections out there, please let us know: we want to organise a Worst Design In The World Oscars. Meanwhile, because this [continue …]
Have cultural producers and designers become the stooges of property development? Guy Julier has invited me to stir things up in a talk at the inauguration on 2 March of DesignLeeds, a new research and consulting centre at Leeds School of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Invitations are available from [continue …]
Transhumanists believe in efforts by human beings to “reshape their inherited physical, cognitive and emotional identities by extending lifespan and enhancing human capacities”. I admit to a prejudice that transhumanists share this enthusiasm because they are all bald, bearded, and barking. But not all transhumanists are death-fearing loony-tunes [continue …]
The subject of car-free mobility sounds necessary but unappealing. But news reaches me of a sublime-sounding event called The Walking Project. It’s an exploration, on foot, of desire lines – the paths made by people who walk across fields in South Africa – and across vacant [continue …]
Harry Whittington, 78, was “alert and doing fine” after being shot by Vice President Cheney. The same could be said of US bloggers for whom the story has been a much appreciated gift.
To a car company, replacing the chrome wing mirror on an SUV with a carbon fibre one is a step towards sustainable transportation. To a radical ecologist, all motorised movement is unsustainable. So when is transportation sustainable, and when is it not?
Eric Britton, an expert on the subject, had the [continue …]
A fabulous-sounding event this Sunday is Aurora Feast. Heureka Science Centre, Vantaa, Finland, hosts a celebration of the mysterious, dynamic and whimsical Northern Lights. Recapturing of the mood of traditional feasts, Aurora Feast intertwines the spectacle of sights and sounds with talk and food. Artists and scientists will [continue …]
I thought I’d escaped from the quicksands of of learning-speak when I completed the chapter on learning (which nearly did me in) for my book. But no! A new tsunami of learning lingo is upon us. Teachers having been exhausted by years of enforced modernisation, the hapless victims this [continue …]
For service design, public services are an enormous opportunity – half the economy in most industrial countries. This seminar in Helsinki, on Friday 10 February, is about framing the welfare and care story as a series of design opportunities. Speakers include Ezio Manzini (on creative communities and active welfare); John [continue …]
SOM, the global architecture firm, believes that we are entering an age of comprehensive, pervasive, simulation of the physical world. It has appointed a Digital Design Director, Paul Seletsky, to develop its expertise in Building Information Modeling (BIM). With BIM, models of all a building’s physical components [continue …]
My lonely campaign against the concept and practice of “emotional design” is failing. I learned with horror this morning that an International Journal of Emotional Labour and Organisations has been launched, and that it is for people who study emotionology. A journal and an ‘ology in [continue …]
I’ve been called priggish for insisting that some issues deserve more design attention than others. The trouble is that we are not good at judging risk – especially long-term ones – as a society, and when big issues get overlooked at the expense of insignificant ones, we end up [continue …]
What are the key design tasks facing the new post-agricultural rural economies and settlements? A conference in the UK in September will map out a new role for the arts and design in response to new social, environmental and economic regeneration priorities. Among the strands and seminar topics currently being [continue …]
“Enjoy the future” raves British Telecom, in its Technology Timeline for 2006-2050. BT spoils the effect by warning of wildcards, that “may happen at any time”, that include “international financial collapse” and “the possible rise of a machine dictator”. I’m sanguine about the second of these problems: [continue …]
Africans are twice as optimistic as Europeans. According to a survey of 52,000 people around the world by Gallup International (reported in The Economist of 17 January), African people come top when asked if they expect this year to be better than last year. Asked to explain the apparent anomaly [continue …]
Is advertising a source of harmful emissions? Industry forecasts anticipate that advertising spending will break through the $400 billion mark this year. That’s $555 per person in the USA, (compared to $209 per head in France, $25 in Latin America and $8 in China). Those billions have just [continue …]
If humans can live in skyscrapers, why not pigs and fish? When the Dutch architect Winy Maas first proposed that 600 metre-high skyscrapers, filled with pigs, could supply most of Europe�s pork needs, he was accused of proposing �concentration camps for animals�. But why should agriculture be restricted to the [continue …]
On January 13, Donald Norman will receive an honorary doctorate from the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering in Delft. On January 12 a symposium will take place on how the human sciences infuse design, with Donald Norman, Josephine Green, Henk Janssen (Indes) and Paul Hekkert (IO) as the [continue …]
Emude, a consortium of design schools and research institutions – and Doors – has spent the last two years years looking at social innovation among creative communities in different parts of Europe. Having observed the emergence of what we call “active welfare” in many of these situations, we realise that [continue …]
A fascinating essay by Henry Jenkins explores the changing spaces of childhood. In the nineteenth century, children living on America’s farms enjoyed free range over a space which was ten square miles or more; boys of nine or 10 would go camping alone for days on end, returning [continue …]
Thanks to Europe’s most horrible company, Wanadon’t, our internet connection has again been down for days. So we have had to access our email by telephone. Your warmly-meant illustrated seasons greetings have taken literally hours to download. Next year, maybe think about sending us a poem?
An edited podcast of my lecture last week at the Royal Society of Arts in London is available online.
A typically excellent piece by Karrie Jacobs in next month’s Metropolis discusses “how hard it is to mount a really innovative contemporary industrial-design show these days. The problem–and it’s not specific to MoMA–is that the products one can find on the shelves of almost any store are likely to [continue …]
Having proclaimed the vital importance of education to the nation’s future, the British government is putting its money where its mouth is. It aims to rebuild or renew every secondary school in England over a 10-15 year period in a seventy billion pound programme called Building Schools for the [continue …]
My attention was drawn by offbrand to an article by Owen Gibson in The Guardian entitled ‘Shoppers eye view of ads that pass us by’. Owen used a recently developed set of spectacles, connected to a video camera and recording device, to monitor the quantity of marketing messages [continue …]
Now here’s a tale to warm the heart. Mine, anyway. An email arrives from Emil Groh, in Seoul. Two nights ago Emil was on the subway there when a friend he was riding with took a book out of his bag and recommended [continue …]
Design policy is itself a globalising industry. I arrived back from Korea to be greeted by my copy of the Cox Review of Creativity in Business. This startling document has been eagerly awaited by the design industry. Many creatives in the UK (as in other industrialised countries) fondly believe [continue …]
Do you need to send a memorable gift to your 25 most valued clients and friends? Of course you do. The good news is you don’t have to think about what to buy: Howard Rheingold in Strategy+Business magazine has included In The Bubble in his list [continue …]
(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 …]
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