Design Grammars for Health and Care
Health and wellbeing are properties of social-ecological systems - so how you design in those?
Relocalising? 100 Locally Needed Skills
From fish smokers to button makers - there's so much to do.
The Five Skills Of A Resilience Impresario
How to develop a shared vision among multiple stakeholders - and the other capabilities we need.
Design for Good: Eight Rules of Engagement
So you want to do good? Here's how to avoid the sloppy assumptions that can underly 'design for development'.
Eight Commons Design Principles
Rules that would prevent us from over-harvesting the Commons.
12 Principles Guiding An Holistic, True Cost, Economy
When and how to choose between ownership, stewardship, and partnership.
The Dementia Care Economy
Yesterday’s G8 Dementia Summit made much of the fact that millions will now be spent in a race to identify a cure or a ‘disease-modifying therapy’ for dementia. The likely outcome will be the creation of a Dementia Industrial Complex – and the mass production of un-met expectations.A better way for [continue …]
Ecuador, Open Knowledge, and ‘Buen Vivir’: Interview With Michel Bauwens
“The global economy treats nature and material resources as if they were infinite, and knowledge as if it was scarce. We have to swap those two around”. (Michel Bauwens). Audio interview below the fold.
Having enshrined the rights of nature in its constitution (*) Ecuador is now exploring how this principle, [continue …]
20 Elements Of Green Infrastructure
What is a 'living system'? Here are 20 elements of a green infrastructure.
28 Ways In Which Food Systems Are a Design Opportunity
127 calories of energy are used to grow a lettuce for each calory we eat. One bottle of ketchup entails 52 transport and process stages. Does that sound sensible?
Desert of the Real
http://www.doorsofperception.com/?attachment_id=5172
Ten answers from Brisbane
My hosts last week at the Asia Pacific Design Library in Brisbane (which, on reflection, is probably the finest new library I have been in) asked me a few questions before our xskool:
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
A: When I’m on the road, which [continue …]
The Ethics Of Innovation In 25 Common Sense Commandments
"We will deliver value to people — not deliver people to systems" - and 17 other easily followed rules
Ways Of Knowing
[Photograph: Hans Sylvester]
Interni and the Be Open Foundation are publishing a book, called Gallery Of The Senses, that explores the ways we experience the contemporary world through sight, hearing,smell, taste, and touch. It then asks: Are we missing a sixth sense? Here is my contribution.
Humanity’s troubles did not begin with [continue …]
Speed? What Speed? Prisoners of Speed, by Ivan Illich (Part 3 of 3)
In 1996, Ivan Illich agreed to speak at Doors of Perception in Amsterdam on the theme of ‘speed’. The philosopher-educator surprised us by bringing along two fellow speakers: Sebastian Trapp, [continue …]
Speed? What Speed? The Belly-Dance Drummer, by Matthias Rieger (Part 2, of 3)
In 1996, when Ivan Illich agreed to speak at Doors of Perception in Amsterdam, our theme that year was ‘speed’. The philosopher surprised us by bringing along two fellow speakers: Sebastian Trapp, a field biologist, and Matthias Rieger, a musicologist. Their contributions are as fresh today as twhen we heard them in [continue …]
Speed? What Speed? The Falcon, by Sebastian Trapp (Part 1 of 3)
Reflecting on the ways that swallows move about the earth reminded me of the time, in 1996, when Ivan Illich agreed [continue …]
Flyways
As an artefact, the swallows’ nest is not exactly the Taj Mahal. It’s a ramshackle structure, made of mud pellets and straw, that’s stuck crookedly to the wall. But it seems to suit them well – or rather, the surrounding habitat does.
[continue …]
Connecting With The Other
A hand, a map, a story: In each of 30 photographs made by Céline Boyer, a cartographic fragment of someone’s country of origin is projected onto the subject’s own hand. Cities, seas, rivers, roads and borders are glimpsed.
[continue …]
Between Sorrel And Supertanker
In what ways can design help people interact with living systems in ways that help both of them thrive? And, what small practical steps might one take to test the effect of small actions on the system as [continue …]
Ten Power Laws Of Innovation
"Don't think 'new product' - think social and ecological value". Plus nine other rules.
Ten Features of Ecological Law
Why we need Ecological Law and what it would contain
Relocalising? 66 Universals of Culture
What human cultural needs have stood the test of time?
Ten Ways To Redesign Design Competitions
Exhibits and competitions should be a means to an end, not the end itself. What would be a worthwhile end?
Of Change Labs and Living Systems: Doors of Perception Newsletter, July 2013
CONTENTS
On Getting Out Of The Tent
Xskool in Sweden: Design Within Living Systems
How To Use A Fringe-Dwelling Change Agent
Most-Read Stories
Recent Publications
Doors at 20: On getting out of the tent
Nearly twenty years ago, in November 1993, the year the web was invented, the first Doors of [continue …]
Xskool, Sweden, August
[Above: somewhere on the island of Grinda in the Stockholm Archipelago., where FuturePerfect takes place 14-18 August).
What are social-ecological systems? How do you design in them? What new skills do we need to do so? These three questions inform a Doors of Perception xskool that takes place in August as part of the [continue …]
Green Tourism: Why It Failed And How It Can Succeed
Packaged mass tours account for 80 percent of journeys to so-called developing countries, but destination regions receive five percent or less of the amount paid by the traveller. For local people on the ground, the injustice is absurd: if I were to pay e1,200 for a week long trek in [continue …]
Trust Is Not An Algorithm: Big Data Are Hot, But They Also Miss A Lot
[Illustration from http://www.hhs.gov/open/initiatives/hdi/]
By some accounts the world’s information is doubling every two years. This impressive if unprovable fact has [continue …]
Diseñando Para un mundo complejo. Acciones para lograr la sustentabilidad
I’m totally thrilled that my book has just been published in Spanish by my fabulous friends at Editorial Disegnio in Mexico City. Please tell everyone you know, once met, or vaguely heard of, who is Spanish-speaking, and who [continue …]
Cycle Commerce As An Ecosystem
(Illustration: Sameer Kulavoor Ghoda Bicycle Project)
At a workshop in Delhi a few weeks back, during the [continue …]
Paranoid But Pretty
In his new show at the German Architecture Center (DAZ) Matthias Megyeri has developed a design language for the artefacts of protection and security in public space.
Megyeri poses the question: does protection have to be inconsistent with harmony and beauty? His answer is a family of padlocks, chains, fences, [continue …]
What Makes A Change Lab Successful?
The UK government’s digital services platform, gov.uk, has won the Design of the Year award – and if I were running a big IT consulting firm grown fat on big government contracts, I’d be worried.
Gov.uk is a revolutionary web operation that governments around the world are beginning to [continue …]
The Ecozoic City
Over the ages we’ve invested huge amounts of effort and energy to keep cities and nature separate. What would it mean if that were about to change?
[continue …]
Artefact as Campfire: Where People and Living Systems Meet
(Photo: Mapping a bioregion with plants – Joachim Robert Cyanotype workshop at FuturePerfect 2012)
In what ways can design [continue …]
Cycle Commerce: The Red Blood Cells of a Smart City
[The chart above is from the online catalogue of cargo bikes at Nutzrad]
India’s many millions of bicycle and rickshaw vendors embody the entrepreneurship, sustainable mobility, social innovation, and thriving local economies, that a sustainable city needs.
As an [continue …]
An Open Design School for India
(Image from http://openwear.org/)
In recent months a working party in India, chaired by Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure & [continue …]
Healing The Metabolic Rift: Designing In Social-Ecological Systems
The term metabolic rift describes the alienation between humans and nature that opened up with the growth of the the modern economy. Could the growth of [continue …]
Speaking at Doors of Perception: a few hints
Allow one hour of preparation for every minute you will be on stage - plus other easy-to-follow rules.
German Government Think-Tank Supports Fringe Change Agents
Good news from Germany: A ‘global transformation of values has already begun’. It’s proving tough to leverage changing attitudes into sustainable behaviour – but a transition to a more sustainable society ‘would be welcomed by a significant part of world society’.
In a 400-page report called World in Transition: A [continue …]
Venice: from Gated Lagoon to Bioregion
Computer rendering by Christian Kerrigan.
Rachel Armstrong, who develops synthetic biology applications for the built environment, believes it could be possible to grow an artificial limestone reef [continue …]
From Autobahn to Bioregion
[Above: for CRIT, Mumbai may look a mess – but the city enjoys ‘high transactional capacities’]
The big Audi that collected us from Istanbul airport [continue …]
Transition Dogville
In Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville (below) there is almost no set. Buildings in the town are represented by a series of white outlines on the floor. Dogville was a to-the-limit exercise in what von Trier calls ‘pure cinema’ – a commitment to use only real locations, and no special effects [continue …]
How To Manage a Constellation
The map below is of the Baltic Sea. Over the last hundred years its ecosystems have been poisoned almost to death by outputs from a multitude of industries and farming activities in the nine countries that surround it. These deadly flows are shown on the complicated chart below: [continue …]
Old Growth
[Photography courtesy of Marc Adamus] Here follows the talk I gave last week at the Global Design Forum in London.
“Last week [continue …]
Bill Moggridge
Devastating news reaches me that Bill Moggridge has died.
Many readers here will know that Bill Moggridge had been director [continue …]
Transition: How to Start, In 12 Steps
The Transition movement prefers 'steps' to 'plans'. Here are 12.
Top Down Nature
A huge urban master plan in southen France gets serious about nature as a project. In Bordeaux 55,000 (above) the city of Bordeaux (CUB) has [continue …]
Why Bill Gates Needs To Listen To More Gamelan Music
Ritual as Feedback in Bali
The unique social and ecological nature of regional watersheds was the focus of a mesmerising presentation by Stephen Lansing at last month’s poptech conference in Iceland. His key point: Bali’s subak water management system is a “coupled social-ecological system”.
Balinese farmers have been growing rice [continue …]
The Other Green Economy
[Photo taken by the author at Instituto Inhotim, Brazil].
People the world over are divided between radically different conceptions of their future: resource-intensive production on the [continue …]