Mycelium does not grow to order. It grows according to conditions that are unique to each context: temperature, moisture, earthworms, termites, other insects, microorganisms, precipitation levels, and myriad other factors. Caring for the land involves attuning to these multiple rythms of a landscape
The presentations were organised into five threads: regenerative water systems; the social life of mobility; community-based recycling ; success factors in social design; and Community Managed Natural Farming
It’s not about more data or less - it is about the social contexts in which data is collected, discussed, and acted upon. The same lesson applies, I think, to discussions about ‘nationwide’ and ‘local’. We need to operate at both scales.
The uniqueness of place is hard for systems thinking to cope with. Systems thinking aspires to be – well, systematic. But blueprints, canvases and method cards are thin on the ground – literally – among place-caring practitioners. How can this mismatch be fixed?
Background reading for a workshop: "Design an urban ecology tool, equipment, place, or experience, that will enhance the interdependence of all life in practical ways".
The ecological turn is about reconnection with living systems, and each other, through the unique places where we live. For design, signals of this transformation take many forms - as I learned last month in Shanghai.
1. TOM MURPHY – DO THE MATH
If you suspect, but cannot prove, that modern life simply does not add up, you’ll love Tom Murphy’s work. His focus, as a physicist, is to understand whether the impossibility of indefinite physical growth – for example in energy, food, or manufacturing – means that economic [continue …]
“How do I finish a book on design that I began before the pandemic?”
“How can I do meaningful work if my job is just about tech?”
“With so many crises converging, what does it mean to do foresight work?”
“Where can my skills be socially useful?”.
“Should I quit my job? Academic research [continue …]
Our Meetup of July 2023 is sold out - but we're thinking of hosting another one later in the year
Alastair McIntosh reminds us here that the World’s oldest book, the Epic of Gilgamesh, portrayed tension between the wild and the civilised. The Buddha taught the interconnection of all things. Plato depicted the world as being “a living god”.
Agriculture and food are not just about production and consumption - they are about relationships, too
Microbes and Social Equity | Tools for Changemakers | Multi-Species Cities | Design for Planet School for Village Hosts | Meetups/Retreats | Offsites for Teams |
Mutual aid. Local money. Collaborative care. Alternative futures are being created around the world -. but not, for the most part, in plain sight. David Bollier’s new book – Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead – brings dozens of social projects like these to [continue …]
What would it mean to practice design in the knowledge that the well-being of humans, and non-humans, is inter-connected? Here are the results of a design workshop at Milan Polytechnic: practical ways to make cities hospitable for all of life, not just human life.
Rewilding AI | Bioregional design | Social Food Atlas | Back to the Land Reader | Meetups and Residencies chez nous
Totally thrilling news has reached me from the Netherlands: my book Plan B: Ontwerpen in een Complexe Wereld [Plan B: Designing In A Complex World] has been selected by the influential magazine de Architect as their best architecture book of the year. I [continue …]
UnBox, a three day festival in Delhi, in February, brings together creative collectives from around India. One of these groups, Clay Futures, will brainstorm scenarios to do with sustainable, medicinal, and air filtering bentonite – hence the picture above.
Doors of Perception’s role in [continue …]
If it is true that the world’s information base is doubling in size every 11 hours then a lot of eco-design information, that could be valuable for professionals, presumably goes un-noticed, and thus unused.
In the past month alone, for example, I’ve come across two paper-based design tools that would [continue …]
Here is a late addition – number 20 – to our story of last week: 19 reasons to be cheerful after Copenhagen.
Instructions: cut-to-fit; spray with water; bubbles face inwards. Done.
(thx Miranda, for the new word)
Doors of Perception helped to organize Four Days Halifax – a time-compressed mini-festival whose aim was to help the city get its hands muddy in a green economy
Our starting point in Four Days was that many elements [continue …]
The term ‘planned obsolescence’ was coined in the 1950s but has never been more relevant. Our desire to possess the latest style can mean more in landfill, and more children in China and India sifting through toxic waste. But some argue that a fast turnover [continue …]
Together with Banny Banerjee, the new Director of Stanford University’s ’Design For Change programme, we ran a professional design clinic on the theme of “off-grid water”. Our Stanford clinic focused on entrepreneurs in the Palo Alto region who were developing tools [continue …]
“What would life in a sustainable world be like?” Together with The Planning Center, we organized this workshop in Southern California for participants from grassroots organizations. Each presented case studies in which they use resources in a creative, original way.
Jules Dervaes is a pioneer [continue …]
Many of us are confronted by a painful dilemma: the only way to reduce our ecological footprint of flying is to stop flying – and yet we feel we need to travel for our work, and to see loved ones. Can modern transport and tourism ever be sustainable? After all, [continue …]
In Dott07’s Eco Design Challenge, more than fifteen thousand school students used custom–designed calculators to measure their school’s eco-footprint. They then ran projects to design lighter alternatives to the systems (food, water, transport, energy and waste) operating in their school. Many schools, with [continue …]
Global food systems are becoming unsustainable in terms of environmental impact, health, and social quality. Up to 40 percent of the ecological impact of an ‘advanced’ city can be attributed to its food systems.
But what to do?
Doors of Perception 9 – on the [continue …]
If you are a design or architecture student, or recently so, we have teamed up with the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and Designs of the time (Dott07) to offer travel-included scholarships to Doors 9 for the winners of this year’s RSA Design Directions competition. The two themes [continue …]
AIGA, the US professional association for design, and IDCA, the International Design Conference at Aspen, invited John Thackara to chair the Aspen Design Summit.
Conceived as “a new type of gathering for a new century”, this celebrated event brought design-minded leaders from around the world to Aspen, Colorado to make positive, [continue …]
A few weeks back I gave a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts in London entitled “Solidarity economics & design”.
The lecture was provoked by the sick-making antics of Bob Geldof and the assumptions he and others made about ‘development’.
I argued that the word ‘development’ implies that we advanced people [continue …]
Someone, somewhere, has designed some of the services or situations that we will need in a sustainable society – so why repeat things? Novel ways to share food, move around, or care for each other, already exist – but they are often off the radar [continue …]
What does it mean to design a platform for social innovation?
Doors of Perception 8 on the theme of “infra” took place in New Delhi, India. The event involved designers and entrepreneurs from different parts of the world. [continue …]
What are the key success factors in setting up design research projects? In November 2004, jointly with Virtual Platform, we organised a meeting in Amsterdam for sixty project leaders from 10 countries to discuss this question. When inviting participants, we focussed on projects that [continue …]
Our aim in DoorsEast2, in Bangalore was to learn how to design services, enabled by ICT, that meet basic needs in new ways – and to share this knowledge with citizens, education, industry, and professionals. This was our second international encounter in India. It [continue …]
“Tourism is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal”. Guy Debord wrote that more than 40 years ago in The Society Of the Spectacle – and today’s mass tourism proves him depressingly right. Is there an alternative?
The answer [continue …]
The Bonholm Rooster, a superior kind of chicken, is a star product on “Food Island”. So is the legendary white salmon, a ghostly creature that passes quietly by this misplaced Danish island (it sits between Sweden and Poland) only in winter months.
Nexo, on Bonholm, [continue …]
JOHNTHACKARA designing for life
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