A ticket to the TED Global conference in Oxford next week costs $4,400. Which is only right and proper: the calibre of speakers is exceptionally high. Mind you, the provison of “really big world changing ideas” is very much a guy thing in TED-land: I count seven women out of [continue …]
A few days ago I commented that managers have not thought through the potential of RFID systems to give customers far more information about about a product’s history than might be comfortable – at least, for the company selling it. A forthcoming book flagged by Institute For the Future, does [continue …]
During the years Doors of Perception has been staging encounters in India, I don’t think anyone uttered the words ‘solidarity economics’. We’ve had many conversations about bottom-up globalisation, about complementary currencies, and about how design can enable resource-sharing services to emerge. But we have not been immersed in the [continue …]
The Sustainable Everyday project is a platform for knowledge collection and sharing among creative communities and innovative citizens.The website includes a catalogue of promising case studies,a lab of scenarios-in-progress, and information about a travelling exhibition. The latter has reached Paris, where it opens tomorrow at Centre [continue …]
Indians are the world’s biggest bookworms, reading on average 10.7 hours a week, twice as long as Americans, according to a new survey. This is welcome news for me because I just heard that an ‘eastern economic edition’ of In The Bubble is to be published later [continue …]
Do come to the “Global Design Critical Debate” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on 14 October. There will be two introductions – by Rem Koolhaas and John Thackara. Then a panel discussion chaired by Joe Kerr will include Professor Leslie Sklair, Vice President for Global Sociology, London [continue …]
We need a new word for the insulting behaviour of politicians. I refer to their habit of turning up late to a conference, reading a banal speech to a room full of experts in the subject, and then leaving before hearing what anyone else has to say. The latest insulting [continue …]
What happens when citizens are able to ‘read’ product-specific information directly from a package’s RFID tag using a camera phone? Few business people that I’ve met have thought the consequences through. The widespread deployment of RFID tags is seen mainly as a way to improve the efficiency of supply webs [continue …]
This large hacker’s festival (3,000 participated last time) happens every four years in The Netherlands. It started with “The Galactic Hacker Party”, also known as the “International Conference on the Alternative use of Technology, Amsterdam”. Themes this year: freedom of speech, government transparency, computer insecurity, privacy, open software, open standards [continue …]
Is this happening a lot? I’ve been sent a map,”The Creative Map of Arnhem and Gelderland”. (It’s a pleasant area in the west of the Netherlands). The map plots the street address of every member of the creative class. It informs me that a fine artist named Stolker lives in [continue …]
I like the sound of the Romanian pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. The artist Daniel Knorr is responsible for an installation called European Influenza: the Pavilion is left empty, with only the traces of past exhibitions remaining. Sadly, not all critics have taken the hint: one burbles [continue …]
Philips boss Gerard Kleisterlee has a keen supporter in Tony Blair. Blair wants to channel far more of Europe’s budget to high-tech companies like Philips, and is campaigning against the “anomaly” that the EU spends 40% of its budget on farmers, who make up just 4% of the European workforce, [continue …]
Philips has blamed “poor consumer sentiment†for limiting its plans for growth. Gerard Kleisterlee, Philips’ CEO, told the Financial Times (16 June page 21) that “Europe is suffering from a weakened consumer retail environmentâ€. Wrong, Mr K. Europe is not suffering, it is recovering from the false consciousness peddled [continue …]
The catalogues published by design schools when students graduate are frequently over-designed, under-edited, and consequently hopeless as communication tools. A welcome exception is MAID from the industrial design masters programme at Central Saint Martins in London. I was able to find out from it what the tutors and students [continue …]
My parents have been plagued by a rising volume of junk telephone calls from telemarketing outfits. Imagine my incredulity when I saw on the BBC this morning that one of the leading firms calls itself The Listening Company. One of the people we have to thank for the [continue …]
At deBalie in Amsterdam, a conference called Incommunicado is debating issues to do with information technology for development (ICT4D). I could not stay for today’s debate, organsed by Solomon Benjamin, on “culture and corporate sponsorship in the ICT4D context†– so I make this contribution remotely. Benjamin, quoting [continue …]
Another day, another new European city-region. Yesterday I was in Breda, one of five cities in the south of the Netherlands that are joining forces (and 1.2 million citizens) to form a new entity, Brabantstad. The format of the day was interesting. Delegates were grouped into three blocks – investors/property [continue …]
So who authored global warming? I have just read a heavy three-part story on the subject in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert called The Climate of Man. Kolbert writes that in the seventeen-eighties, carbon-dioxide levels stood at about the same level that they had been at two thousand [continue …]
An argument about authorship has once again overshadowed discussion of what matters about design. No sooner had Design Council director Hilary Cottam won the 2005 Design Museum Designer of the Year award, than an article by Deyan Sudjic in The Observer reported that an architect is furious [continue …]
One of the reasons I decided to live in France was attending a lecture by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who has just died at the age of 92. It was a rainy Monday evening five years ago, in February, in Montpellier – and yet more than 600 people crammed [continue …]
I learned recently that a new book is published every 30 seconds. I imagine at least that many new blogs are launched each day. Does the same rate of reproduction apply to conferences and events? I used to keep my own list of events until I discovered a bunch of [continue …]
The Argentine government has launched a competition to find a new use for its spectacular Palace of Mail and Telecommunications in Buenos Aires. One dearly hopes it will not become another bloated and tedious Gugghenheim – so maybe we should join the competition? Doors of Perception will provide an [continue …]
Build a bus stop in an urban slum and a vibrant community sprouts and grows around it. Such is the power of small interventions into complex urban situations. Small Change by Nabeel Hamdi is another of my ‘finds’ in Seattle’s anarchist bookshop – although on closer inspection the book [continue …]
We do realise that this blog is located, confusingly, at the website of a past event (Doors 8) – but we’re working hard to re-organise a family of Doors sites and things should be clearer in a week or so.
Understanding context – especially if the context is New York City – is easier said than done.
A Pimms-enhanced party at Demos, in London, was held to launch a new strategy for the organization called Building Everyday Democracy. According to the think tank’s director, Tom Bentley, “politics is fighting a losing battle against forms of theatre and spectacle that are more entertaining, and forms of conversation [continue …]
Every year the Institute For The Future publishes a map of the decade (ahead). The 2005 version is not yet online, but I was delighted to learn, during my visit to Palo Alto this week, that Jason Tester, an alumnus of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, is helping IFTF enhance [continue …]
Is there something in the air in this town? Seattle’s W Hotel has more features than I need and they don’t all work. A 64-page catalogue in my room lists an extraordinary array of services â€masterfully orchestrated to surround you with style, service and comfortâ€. A menu for pets is [continue …]
I surmise that the W Hotel in Seattle, where I am staying, has designed its lighting to foster chance encounters: everything is bathed in (but not much illuminated by) weak blue light. Seattle seems to be obsessed by social networks and biological models of economic activity. My driver today waxed [continue …]
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang blogged my talk at Ideo and made it sound much crisper and more interesting than the talk itself. Surrogate blogging sounds like a great businesss opportunity – and good for the environment, too, if it reduces the quantity of hot air entering the atmosphere.
A half-page ad in today’s San Francisco Chronice features the words “Why do we work?” displayed over the photo of an assembly line worker’s hands, shifting a box.The text below begins with the strapline: “to keep the future growing”. A bank called Principal.com probably paid good money for this fatuous [continue …]
Amid the swirling damp mist of San Francisco I receive news of an intriguing event in Maastricht called Breath-taking. A series of lectures about air, art and architecture include heavier-than-air pieces from Francois Perrin (‘The geometry of climate’) and Peter Sloterdijk (‘Inspiration’). The website features a bursting blue bubble, [continue …]
I was disappointed when David Burney, a speaker at Doors 8 failed to show up at my book party in New York. Then I started seeing David’s face on all the television sets in town. It turned out that a landslide had blocked one of the main arterial roads [continue …]
The most entertaining challenger to Michael Bloomberg for Mayor of New York is the Reverend Billy , leader of the The Church of Stop Shopping. The Reverend has announced plans to conduct his entire campaign on premises of the Starbucks Corporation; he will offer 258 sermons in 258 locations [continue …]
The notion of collective intelligence, a term coined by the French philosopher Pierre Levy, continues to engage original thinkers. In France, Jean-François Noubel has published a paper called Collective Intelligence: The Invisible Revolution . And Michel BauwensI has sent me the draft of an essay on Peer [continue …]
A group of artists in California called Heavy Trash has launched a guerrilla war against gated communities, the self-contained housing estates that are walled off from the outside world but ring more and more American cities. In a stealth operation, carried out at dawn, a group of 20 architects, [continue …]
A trouble-maker sent me a copy of Richard Florida’s new book, The Flight of the Creative Class – hoping, no doubt, that I would be rude about it. Perish the thought. Florida’s new book has two virtues. First, Florida argues for “a broadening of the definition of creativity that [continue …]
The European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, wants to create a European Institute of Technology to compete with MIT. According to one report, there’s a belief that “Europe needs an institution capable of bringing together its currently too-dispersed scientific and teaching excellence”. Instead of creating one new institution, the EIT would [continue …]
If you, or someone you know, would like to meet the author of In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World – then read on. If you don’t, stop reading now because that’s all this entry is about.
TALKS, READINGS, SIGNINGS
NEW YORK Thursday 12 May.
6.30pm-8.30pm. Celebration drink to launch [continue …]
This sounds like a fab summer engagement. Lucas Verweij, who Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design has been fortunate to land as its new Dean, is organising a summer school entitled ‘Big and Beautiful, Designing the Transformation of Rotterdam Harbour’. The two week course takes place at [continue …]
As a system, mobility is locked into a mode of perpetual growth in a world whose carrying capacity is limited. The status quo policy of ‘predict and provide’ promises more travel (of people and goods), forever, but using new technologies and integrated systems to make mobility more efficient.
A second design [continue …]
My book isn’t even out yet (the US publication date is on Friday; UK/Europe is at the end of May) and already someone has raised a sneaky question about its basic argument.Fast Company have a section in their book reviews called “Things We Didn”t Like” and they say: [continue …]
One of the thrills of my working year in 2004 was helping a UK team develop the concept and business plan for a new service design institute in Newcastle-upon-Tyne – my home town. One North East, a UK regional development authority, is nurturing a post-coal, post-iron, post-shipbuilding economy with great [continue …]
A new survey of front-line researchers in 25 EU countries reveals surprising devations from tech policy orthodoxy. The so-called Fistera Delphi (it’s a system for averaging the results of an opinon survey) asked experts, including this writer, to prioritise research priorities for 2010 and beyond. Strong endorsement was [continue …]
We have posted several more of the presentations from Doors 8. Among these are a text from Ezio Manzini in which he develops his critique of “the tunnel that a mistaken idea of comfort, and an equally mistaken idea of economic growth, have driven us into”. He proposes a new [continue …]
Do mixed societies innovate more than homogeneous ones? How do new ideas and innovations emerge when people of diverse cultures interact? Comedia has launched an eighteen month project across cities in several countries called The Intercultural City to find out how interractions between cultures might be formed into [continue …]
Our models – Joost and the Joostettes – are wearing theDoors of Perception 8 t-shirts, designed by Abhishek Hazra. Apart from being the most beautiful Doors t-shirt ever, this one is also destined to be the most valuable, too, as we only produced a limited [continue …]
“The end of oil is closer than you think. Oil production could peak next year. Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye”. A rollicking doomsday story in today’s Guardian, by John Vidal, revisits the so-called “peak oil” contoversy about whether a global peak to oil production is approaching. According to Vidal, [continue …]
According to the City & Guilds Happiness Index hairdressers are the happiest workers in Britain: 40 percent say they are very content in their job (giving their careers a score of ten out of ten). Next in the happiness stakes are the clergy (24 percent ), chefs/cooks (23 [continue …]
The US leg of my book tour for In The Bubble kicks off in New York on May 13. I’m speaking at an event called Malfatto: Imperfect Design for a Better World?. Material Connexion’s founder, George M. Beylerian, has invited an awesomely creative bunch of speakers: the architect/artist Gaetano [continue …]
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