knowing

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

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 …]

(In December 2002 I chaired a seminar in London, organised by the Design Council, which brought together 100 academics, designers and business people to discuss: “how to get the most out of academic design knowledge”. Here are some half-formed thoughts (Philip Tabor) on the points that arose)
Designers and companies tend [continue …]

How will we learn when knowledge changes so fast? Will there still be a role for teachers, when students can learn for themselves? These questions faced 1,000 university teachers at OrO|OrO Teacherslab, a unique event organised in 2001 by the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (Amsterdam University [continue …]

At the invitation of Paola Anotonelli, one of the world leading design curators and an eminence at at MoMA in New York, I spent a most enjoyable year talking with her, Aura Oslapas (from Stone Yamashita), Bruce Mau, and Larry Keeley, about the future of work and what that future [continue …]

(1999)
Q] Do you believe a new century will spur different thinking in terms of architecture and design? Why or why not?
A] A new century, with 100 or 1,000 years stretching ahead, will prompt us to focus with dramatic new intensity on the consequences of design for the environment. [continue …]

Slides used in my lecture to an expert meeting at the European Commission in Brussels in 1999.
BE CRITICAL, BE HUMBLE (1)
* ICT is not content – it is a tool
* teachers are extremely suspicious of machines
* they are right to be so (radio, film, tv, VCRs, PCs)
* not to [continue …]