Nomadic Banquet
A reminder that among numerous archives of Doors 8 stuff not on this site is Debra Solomon’s Nomadic Banquet. We are still receiving presentations and other material which will be posted here in due course.
Wireless Philly
Digital Cities Convention (May 2-4 in Philadelphia) is part of “a global thought-leadership series to accelerate the adoption of broadband wireless technologies for economic and social development worldwide”. According to a piece in muniwireless.com, Philadelphia was chosen to launch the Convention in light of Wireless Philadelphiaâ„¢, an ambitious [continue …]
One for the birds
Science tells us birds sing to attract mates and defend territories. But why do some birds make only a “peep” and others sing ornate songs that go on for hours? An intriguing event in New York on 16 April brings scientists together with musicians and poets to [continue …]
Gates memory project
Bob Stein writes to inform me of a fascinating experiment in creating a collective memory of an ephemeral event – albeit one which promises to be the most photographed art work ever. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park was dismantled after a brief run of just sixteen days. [continue …]
Open letter to Dr Solomon Benjamin
Dear Solly,
My attention has been drawn to your post of 28 March on the Sarai Commons-Law mailing list.
I am usually pretty relaxed about criticism. After all, if our events failed to provoke discussion and disagreement, they would be feeble events indeed. One reason I was so happy to be [continue …]
Sorry, Stefan
I owe an apology to Stefan Magdalinski, from whitelabel.org, who was one of the star turns at Doors 8 (and has nice words to say about the event in his blog). In yesterday’s emailed Doors Report, I managed to omit a “not” and thereby render a sentence [continue …]
It arrived!
Four years since I started work on it (not counting the ten years of Doors events it draws on) I received the first printed copy of my book. You won’t beleve what a relief it is that it’s finally done. Thanks [continue …]
Conference pictures
Pre-Conference workshops. 46 images.
Day 01 Conference. 18 images.
Day 01-b Conference. 49 images.
Day 03 Conference. 69 images.
Re-mix as a design process
A personal “Aha!” moment in Delhi was the realisation that re-mix is not just about new music and vj-ing. Re:mix also signals a broader cultural shift away from the narcissistic obsession with individual authorship that have rendered everything from art to management so tiresome in recent times. (In architecture circles [continue …]
Doors 8 Holi party pix
The first 61 Holi party images are online. As Bhagwat Shah explains: “amongst India’s innumerable festivals, Holi ranks as the most colourful. It celebrates the arrival of spring and death of demoness Holika, it is a celebration of joy and hope. Holi provides a refreshing respite [continue …]
“Small is not small”
A session at Doors 8 on service design for emerging economies left a tricky question unanswered: how do we determine when is a market is ‘emerging’ – and when it has emerged? And, is it possible to design the relationship between small pilot projects, as potential tipping points, and large [continue …]
Doors 8 proceedings
So here’s the deal: You probably had a perfectly good reason not to come, and you were of course missed, but those of us who made it to Doors 8 are pretty comprehensively wiped by an amazing week. The concluding Holi party slowed our turnaround time further, so you’ll have [continue …]
Acoustic interlude
Ten days offline, but not in silence. From my New Delhi lodging house in Defence Colony I heard no airconditioning roar or traffic. What I did hear was: Pigeons fidgeting in the metal box above my window that used to contain the airconditioning unit. The long moans of freight train [continue …]
Jugaad and its limits
Indian users of technology-based devices cannot rely on formal networks of distribution, support and maintenance: these are often incomplete, unimaginative or unrealistically priced. They therefore turn to the temporary fixes or ‘jugaads’ carried out by Indian street technicians. An army of pavement-based engineers and fixers keeps engines, television tubes, compressors [continue …]
City as d-school
I have arrived in New Delhi at the same time as Condoleeza Rice. She is in town to sell F16s and nuclear power station technology; I am in town to sell the idea that design for social capital is a better investment. While Condi shows powerpoints to air force generals, [continue …]
Enabling simultaneity
Until now, we’ve said we could not accept credit card payments for Doors 8 at the door on the day. Now we got a machine, so we can. See you there!
How digital rights management will harm the developing world
India-bound Michael Coburn draws my attention to a paper by Cory Doctorow on how Digital Rights Management will affect the developing world. The piece is written for an International Telecommunications Union report aimed at telecoms regulators in national governments around the world; they are trying to figure out which DRM [continue …]
Edda scissorhands
A wondferful profile by Lynn Barber in Sundays’s (UK) Observer features the career of ‘The Scissor Sister’ or ‘human Google’ Edda Tasiemka who, after 55 years, is selling her amazing cuttings library and retiring. ‘Whizzy management types are fond of telling us that nowadays you can find everything [continue …]
Design in development (cont.)
A large meeting last week at the Tropen Institute in Amsterdam marked the launch of a new project, Dutch Design In Development (DDiD). Participants ranged from young designers struggling to make a living by importing textiles from Africa, to eco-tourism marketeers, and consultants who advise global companies how [continue …]
Wanadon’t
It’s now ten days until Doors 8 and our cable has been down for 12 days. Thankyou, Wanadoo. Not. But enough of that company from hell. The good news is that the CKS team in Delhi is working brilliantly; some international people are already on their way to India; and [continue …]
A cure for the cable curse?
Ten days before Doors 7, our cable connection crashed and UPC were unable to fix it. Until, that is, I located the home phone number of UPC’s European CEO; I called him during dinner to share my thoughts on the matter. By a happy coincidence, our cable connection was restored [continue …]
Misleading on MBAs
Politicians, under pressure for some awful action, sometimes play a clever trick: they deny responsibility for a different action, that nobody had accused them of. The supporters of business schools are playing a similar trick at the moment. For two weeks running, The Economist has lambasted critics of business school [continue …]
What you will miss in fourteen days from now…
Doors of Perception 8 begins in two weeks from now – plenty of time to grab a flight and a visa. We have posted details of a pre-conference workshop on Emerging Economy Service Design. This complements a series of street-level workshops that now also include [continue …]
Have we unleashed a monster?
A full-page story in yesterday’s Financial Times (March 1, page 9) waxes lyrical about ‘reality tv for the boardroom’ – and goes on to describe the use of video footage to ‘reduce the growing distance between the corporate elite and consumers’. Executives in multinational companies, understates the FT, ‘often find [continue …]
Architecture as old media
Architecture used to focus mainly on the design of buildings. Nowadays, the spaces between them are also important. Applications such as geocaching make even small real-world spaces easy to locate and access; this transforms once marginal spaces into viable assets. A new variant of this theme, called [continue …]
Want to be a knowledge superpower?
According to an India survey in Britain’s New Scientist magazine, ‘if the sub-continent gets everything right it will have the third largest economy in the world by 2050, after China and the US. India is not yet a knowledge superpower, but it stands on the threshold’. Is this a [continue …]
New Poster
Today we publish a new Doors 8 poster designed by Abhishek Hazra. Please print it, post it somewhere prominent, and/or pass it on to individuals (not to whole lists) you think will consider helping us get the word out.
New media art at Doors 8
Bangalore Badarpur Border, curated by Pooja Sood at the Apeejay Media Gallery, explores the myths, landscape and imagery of Bombay. It features the work of Shaina Anand, (from Mumbai, trained in film in New York);Ashok Sukumaran (from Simla, trained in architecture in Delhi, and in Media Art in Los [continue …]
How to avoid time compression
Like the migratory patterns of Arctic Terns,the travel patterns of the Doors crowd are a perennial mystery.All we know is that people register later every time we do a Doors event. (At Doors 7 in Amsterdam, we sold a third of our tickets in the last couple of weeks). [continue …]
On natural and man-made disasters
The spectacle of Bono and other glossy celebs singing for tsunami victims was a somewhat quease-inducing sight on the box the other night. As P Sainath points out in indiatogether,”Number of homes damaged by the tsunami in Nagapattinam: 30,300. Number of homes destroyed by the Congress-NCP Government in Mumbai: [continue …]
Job going in Albertopolis
We don’t usually run job ads here, but Doors has a long history with the Interaction Design group at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, and they need a new head, so just this once we’re happy to pass the word along to you. One of [continue …]
Manna-ware
So Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Laboratory at MIT, is to bestow laptop computers on poor people for just $100. To the punters in Davos, where Negroponte was promoting his project, $100 probably sounded cheap: many were paying $100 an hour to be there. But in Mali, [continue …]
Little Boy: look at me!
I like to keep track of a possibly meaningless statistic: Googling ‘design’ + ‘homeland security’. Today’s total, at 1,310,000, is up 20,000 on a month ago. But I have a feeling the the security-through-fear bubble may be deflating. One sign that people may not be as scared as [continue …]
Fight this injustice!
A kindly-looking gent called Jack Welch has drawn the short straw to beat all short straws. His new book ‘Winning’ has been selected by Fast Company to compete against ‘In The Bubble’ for that magazine’s book of the month selection. It’s cruel and outrageous that such an underdog – the [continue …]
Service design notation
What does a service design look like? How are we to represent and visualize such complex artefacts as a service, a scenario, or a strategy? Francois Jegou has been investigating this challenge together with Ezio Manzini in a project called ‘Sustainable Everyday: Scenarios of Urban Life’. They looked for examples [continue …]
Open Source Architecture
Usman Haque has posted an enticing description of his pre-Doors8 workshop on Open Source Architecture. Please remember that that you need to register first in order to take part in Usman’s workshop.
Markets for “slivers of time”
Online auctions are booming. The phenomenon has been been labelled the ‘march of the micro-sellers’. But could sites like eBay, with its 105 million users, be harbingers of a more important transformation, when individuals start to exchange time and services online? Wingham Rowan in the UK is developing the technical [continue …]
Life in a swarm
The theme of Doors 8 – ‘Infra’ – is indeed rather broad. Today we’ve posted a list of adjacent organisations and projects that we’ve learned about in developing the programme. Doors 8 is about collaborative innovation – not about charity, aid, or top-down development – so we [continue …]
On ‘think and do tanks’
An article by Rob Blackhurst in the UK’s New Statesman states that “whilst think tanks and their policy wonks have proliferated, their influence on policy has declined sharply”. This piece has sparked a lively debate at the Demos blog about “how to stay influential and competitive, [continue …]
The shadow city
One of the North-South links we will explore at Doors 8 concerns the importance of un-designed urban areas as sites of social innovation. Half or more of the inhabitants of major South Asian cities like Delhi are ‘illegal’, but they are economically active, too. In Europe interest is growing in [continue …]
Spooks: why you have to be in Delhi for Doors 8
By 2020 globalization is likely to take on much more of a non-Western face. So says the US National Intelligence Council (NIC), a think-tank that advises the CIA on the likely course of future events. A new report called The Contradictions of Globalization says that Asia will “alter the rules [continue …]
Wrongly developed design?
I’ve been asked to give a lecture on ‘design in development’ at a conference in Amsterdam on 8 March. It will be an interesting opportunity to test the waters in Europe ahead of the main event of Doors 8 itself. I’m more than a little uneasy about the [continue …]
Design education (cont)
There’s a curious mismatch between the demand for design and art education among school leavers (see my story about “Study art and never be unemployed” below) and the reluctance of industry to fund research. Design Observer drew my attention to a claim in Fortune that, in the USA, [continue …]
Save the Giroud Verifier!
Speaking of infrastructure, I was shocked to read that Amsterdam’s museum of energy generating equipment and lifts – EnergeticA – is threatened with closure; there’s also a danger that its collection will be broken up. EnergericA is in an old power station and [continue …]
Distribute then socialise
A 30 million euro scheme in London will make high speed broadband connections available to 20,000 people in a comparatively deprived area.The scheme will be accompanied by local online services such as community information, message boards, and voting mechanisms to enable referendums.’This is the most ambitious experiment of its kind [continue …]
Professor of flows
When the Dutch word for urban planning, “planologie’, was first used in 1929, its literal meaning was ‘the study of surfaces’. Planners today work in a more multi-dimensional context – one that Luuk Boelens describes as ‘a motley assemblage of multiple times and spatial realities’. Urban planning is doomed [continue …]
For a food mile tachometer
Truck drivers already have to endure supervision by a tachometer which logs their speeds and driving times on behalf of myriad external authorities. Why not a tachometer for tomatoes, to monitor and make explicit food miles? Food distribution can be tremedously wasteful, but invisibly so. The concept of food dates [continue …]
Pre-Doors8 workshops
Several pre-conference workshops will take place in and around Delhi before Doors 8 itself – especially on Friday 18 to Sunday 20 March. Participation in a workshop is by agreement with the workshop leader concerned, and you have to register for Doors 8 first, to be eligible to take part. [continue …]
Who will be who?
We have updated the speaker profiles (there’s a button on the right of this screen). These should give you a better idea of the kind of people you’ll meet and interact with in Delhi. Our week together features a range of activities :
– plenary think-piece presentations (Monday and Tuesday);
– Project [continue …]
More for your book list
Zaid Hassan writes with the polite suggestion, concerning our list of recommended books (see button on the right) that “perhaps a couple of Indian/Sub-Continent authors wouldn’t go amiss?”. Mea culpa:my first list is indeed horribly occicentric. Here are Zaid’s recommendations:
– Igniting Minds” by PJ Abdul Kalam (President of India).
– The [continue …]