What happened to the people who built the ruined temples of Angkor Wat, the long-abandoned statues of Easter Island, and the crumbling Maya pyramids of the Yucatan? In his new book Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed Jared Diamond suggests that the environmental crises [continue …]
‘Those who enjoy what they do never have to work any more’. An intriguing article by Sybrand Zijlstra (in a new Dutch publication called Morf ) reports that 80% of students graduating from Dutch art academies pronounced themselves to be satisfied with their education. This is a [continue …]
When I googled “homeland security” and “design” today I got 1,350,000 hits – up from 600,000 back in August. An editorial site called Embedded Computing Design comes top. ‘Many embedded devices are located in areas critical for homeland security’ the text intones, ‘from the power grid and [continue …]
On the heels of news that Media Lab Europe is to close, and that European IT research is failing (see below) comes a more cheerful message: Kaos Pilots in Denmark is to stay open. A new prospectus has been published with the announcement of a plan to [continue …]
Someone asked us if Doors 8 is near the tsunami danger zone. No, it is not. The distance from Delhi to Chennai (the Indian city where the tsunami hit hardest) is 2095 km, or 1301 miles. That’s similar to the distance from Boston to Miami, Amsterdam to Athens, or Tokyo [continue …]
A gorgeous 500 page gold brick of a book has arrived. Time In Design is based on a 24-hour conference by that name that took place last year in Rotterdam. But the conference proceedings (printed on gold paper) are just a start. The book ranges widely over what the editors [continue …]
According to Computer Weekly today, a high-level European Commission assessment panel has concluded that European Union research into information society technologies (IST) is failing, despite it spending more than a billion euros a year on the area. The panel said “more investment and less bureaucracy” are [continue …]
Am I alone in becoming terminally irritated by the macho posturing that passes for thought in business schools and their journals? An article about service design by Uday Karmarkar, in Harvard Business Review, is typical of the genre. “A tidal-wave of change bearing down on the services sector [continue …]
It’s sad news indeed that Media Lab Europe (MLE), the European research partner of MIT Media Lab in the US, is to close.
Neither of the Lab’s main stakeholders – MIT itself, and the Irish government – was prepared to fund the Lab once it became clear that [continue …]
Tristram Hunt’s terrific book about the rise and fall of the Victorian city in Britain is full of insights about about infrastructure. One reason for the decline of cities, for Hunt, was the failure to control housing densities. By 1897 the quaker inspired Cadbury Bounville estate was [continue …]
For much of 2004, the Doors of Pereception conference archive was inaccessible to the majority of our visitors. (The archive was built over a ten year period for browsers that became too clever and advanced to access material which we hadn’t touched….). Well, we’ve quick-fixed a new [continue …]
Googling design + ‘homeland security’ yields 1,290,000 hits on Google today – up from 600,000 last August. The fear factor is fast becoming a big business. But how significant and extensive are the actual threats? A timely seminar on 10 February at the Oxford Internet Institute examines [continue …]
Tech-filled “houses of the future” are usually grotesque but darkly entertaining, and MIT’s new one does not disappoint. Hundreds of sensing components are installed in nearly every part of Live-In Place Lab. The sensors are used to develop ‘innovative user interface applications that help people easily control [continue …]
Many architects are eager to help with post-tsunami rebuilding in Asia, but “now’s not the time for them to switch off their computers and rush for the next flight to Indonesia or Sri Lanka. They’d have little to offer, and would be just more mouths to feed. My advice to [continue …]
When potential students or project clients ask me which is the best architecture or design school, I usually give them the names of a few institutions but also insist: ‘don’t take my word for it, get hold of current students or researchers there, and ask them what it’s like’. Even [continue …]
“If you’re a manager at a company that’s going to compete globally by playing the innovation game, you’re going to have to learn how to innovate. When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design”. That was Bruce Nussbaum in Business Week , Tuesday, January [continue …]
There is still time for your company to sponsor Doors 8. We will use new resources from sponsors to improve the conference, and to enhance the Social Innovation Salon. We also want to provide travel scholarships to grassroots innovators with stories we want to hear.
A decision to sponsor Doors [continue …]
Many employers will only pay travel and registration costs if an employee has been invited to present a paper. This crazy policy implies that nobody comes to learn – just to speak – and it leads to over-crowded conference agendas. The policy is a pain for us, too: We want [continue …]
A key question for Doors 8 is, how best shall we share design knowledge when and where it is most needed? Books, databases – or blogs – full of insights, tools and rules are a support, not the thing itself. The most important knowledge is embodied, and situated. There’s a [continue …]
A core element will be Project Clinics (on the Wednesday and Friday). In these clinics, experts gathered together for Doors will evaluate real world projects and, we hope, help teams refocus their work in light of the lessons learned in the rest of the event.
We organised a similar event in [continue …]
This year’s Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference has as its theme, ‘Technology, Safety, Community’. The event, says the website, confronts the ‘challenge for technology to make people feel safe again’. The agenda sounds uncontroversial, but you have to ask if the resulting design effort will make anyone materially safer, or [continue …]
Our partner in the organization of Doors 8, Aditya Dev Sood, was in Phuket, by the sea, with 15 members of his family, on a post-wedding vacation, when the tsunami struck. Thankfully Aditya and his family, at least, are safe. So, too, so far as we’ve heard, are other friends [continue …]
In his new book ‘Information Politics on the Web’ Richard Rogers says that the Web can be a collision space for official and unofficial accounts of reality and, as such, an excellent arena for ‘unsettling the official’. Tools developed by Rogers, such as the celebrated issue tracker, can be [continue …]
Freight transport is an important source of air pollution, CO2 emissions, and noise, as well as causing countless injuries and deaths by accidents. Freight transport is out of control in the sense that it has been growing faster than the economy, by 0.8% per annum, since 1985. Flying fresh [continue …]
The threatened flood of post-election refugees from the US to Europe did not materialise – but many of our US friends do still sound nervous. So we found the perfect Christmas gift: a high-level security system designed for maximum protection in various hostile environments. “With this unit you don’t have [continue …]
Speaking of glossaries, I found another one in a British report about People Centered Design (PCD). This glossary, which is much shorter than the CHI one I mention below, runs briskly from AHRB (Arts and Humanities Research Board) to UX. The latter stands here for User Experience – although [continue …]
I was flattered to receive a seasonal message today from Professor Dr. Nikolay V. Kirianakithe – the President, no less, of the International Sensors and Traducers Association. I’ve always fancied myself as an amateur traducer, but had not realised my efforts had been recognised at such a high level. [continue …]
I was sorting through some old and priceless documents, such as the five year-old proceedings of a CHI (Computer Human Interaction) conference. In it I encountered a thesaurus that lists 137 terms that crop up in the papers selected for the event. The list runs from agents, to work analysis, [continue …]
Never mind about tarmac-covered land and the fate of the planet – what about sales of my book? I’ve been jolted awake by a reference in Future Now to a research paper that describes the use of an “Epidemics-Type Aftershock Sequence model to track how information about a book [continue …]
Land is a finite resource but we consume it as if it were limitless – especially for mobility.
John Whitelegg, a transport ecologist, reports that in Switzerland, the land allocation for road transport is 113 m2 per person – and for all other living purposes (houses/gardens and yards) it’s 20-25 [continue …]
I was once involved in a project called Presence in which we were given quite a lot of EU money to investigate how the social needs of elderly people might be met by the Internet. One of our test sites was a small village in Italy, called Peccioli. When our [continue …]
This blog is part of the build-up to Doors of Perception 8, which takes place in New Delhi next March and is on the theme, “INFRA: Platforms for social innovation and how to design them”. What infrastructures are needed to enable bottom-up, edge-in social innovation – and how do we [continue …]
I’m repeating a plug here (published before in our newsletter) for this memorable paper, by Simon Marvin and Will Medd, about the circulation, deposition and removal of fat in bodies, sewers and cities. “Our emphasis is on the metabolisms of fat across the different levels of bodies, infrastructures and [continue …]
The world is awash in reports, from think tanks and research companies, telling us what the next social or tech trend is going to be. Europe’s research policy makers had a good idea: aggregate the best of these, and see what picture emerges. They created the Fistera network [continue …]
I found some amazing new numbers in a 2004 survey of attitudes to consumption in the United States. More than eight out of ten Americans believe that society’s priorities are “out of whack” and 93 percent agree that Americans are too focused on working and making money and not enough [continue …]
The picture shows the number of fairs and markets per year, in 1732, in the Occitania region in the south of France (where I live). The small blobs denote three fairs per year, the biggest one, 13. I’ve decided to perceive the picture as [continue …]
There’s renewed interest in ensemble theatre as a form of organisation. A meeting of theatre directors and producers in the UK last month opened with this quote from Joan Littlewood, in 1961: ‘I do not believe in the supremacy of the director, designer, actor – or even of the writer. [continue …]
Back to the soft stuff. “Might social problems that communities confront be structured as the kind of knowledge creation and/or problem solving that the open source software community has found new ways to solve?”. So asks Pekka Himanen (author of “The Hacker Ethic”) and colleagues in a recent report. [continue …]
I know our focus in Doors 8 is supposed to be on social infrastructures, but interesting material on the hard kind keeps turning up, too. I found a report about rocks and rubble, for example, which describes a more sustainable system of resource management. The life cycle of construction [continue …]
The reports of last Friday’s Project Leaders’ Round Table, which we organised together with Virtual Platform, are now online here.
We’ve posted summaries, most of the project presentations, a bunch of pictures, and a text called “Conclusions”. The latter text, I now realise, contains more questions than answers. [continue …]
What is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a design research project? If we knew, we’d probably make more realistic budgets for things like co-ordination, and communication, that often don’t get paid for, even though we do the work. Or else, if we knew the true time costs, but [continue …]
One of the pre-Doors 8 field projects we’re supporting is an India leg of Debra Solomon’s ongoing quest to enable “nomadic banquets”. The idea is that people move round a city from street vendor to street vendor – each one being th best at, for example, dumplings, noodles, vodka martinis, [continue …]
“In our economy, everything has a price – but nothing, it seems, has a value. We find it hard to really tell whether the things we value are growing or dying”. So begins an excellent interview by Joe Flower with “anti-economist” Hazel Henderson. The yardsticks we have chosen to measure [continue …]
The Chinese government intends to build 1,000 new museums across the country by 2015.A scary piece by Elizabeth Casale in The Platform, an e-zine on cultural policy, says that with approximately 100 urban areas with a population of 1 million or more, China’s place-based cultural strategy favours buildings as a [continue …]
(click on the image for an image collection.)
On Thursday and Friday, 18-19 November, 60 people met in Amsterdam for the Project Leaders’ Round Table. Our aim was to learn from each other about success factors in design research projects. We heard about projects that were based [continue …]
“The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration – that is to say, its supposedly ‘softer’ parts – are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement” says the economist Paul David in a draft paper [continue …]
For many veterans of early Doors of Perception conferences, Rick Prelinger’s talks were a highlight. Illustrated by American movie and advertising ephemera, Rick’s presentations featured American children, animals, farmers, industrial workers, superheroes, pioneers heading West, crash test dummies, and many others. Now Rick works at the Internet Archive and has [continue …]
It’s been a tough week. There’s a lot of anguish about. Do something small, like
this.
In yesterday’s email newsletter, under the headline Sending the acorn, not the tree, we directed you to a .pdf of the Doors 8 poster — that was not there.
Apologies for the inconvenience. Please try again; it should now work. (It’s in “Download” on the right of [continue …]
The theme of Doors 8 is “Infra”, which we interpret to span both hard and soft aspects of infrastructure in a networked society. Infra therefore includes people as well as systems. Now we keep reading that, in Europe alone, there’s a shortage of 1.5 million information technology workers. A question [continue …]
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