Two spots for the June MeetUp are already filled – so don’t wait too long.
This year we also offer one scholarship discount ticket per session at 500€ for the whole week.
Application is easy: an email with 100 words about who you are, what you’re working on [continue …]
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 …]
This short talk is about an economy with caring for life as its centre, rather than extraction and production. I compare earth care to modern medical care, and suggest that looking is not the same as caring. I ask what design can learn from Care Ethics – and find inspiration [continue …]
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 …]
Ninety nine percent of life, it turns out, is invisible - so how do we design for that? My guest in this conversation is microbiome researcher Dr. Suzanne Ishaq, founder of the Microbes and Social Equity working group
(Keynote talk in China): Even before AI came along, “what’s good for humans” helped shape an economy that extracts vitality, as well as resources, from the planet’s living systems. This cultural disconnection – between the living world, and the economic one – explains why we either don’t think about rivers, soils, and biodiversity at all – or we treat them as natural ‘resources’ whose only purpose is to feed “the economy.”
Its publisher, Bloomsbury, describes designing designing as “one of the most extraordinary books on design ever written”. It’s therefore welcome news that – after a period out of print – this classic book has now been reissued. (That’s my copy in the photograph above; it just arrived). [continue …]
Social Food Forum | The Internet of Things and Earth Repair | Design Agenda for Bioregions | Peak Car | Re-wilding the Bauhaus | The City as a Living System (a selection of my texts selected for publication by Resilience magazine)
The word ‘transformation’ sounds uncontroversial - but does any of us has the right to transform somebody else’s life without them being part of the process? (An interview at Alison Clarke's Victor Papanek exhibition in Barcelona)
A cultural disconnection between the man-made world and the biosphere lies behind the grave challenges we face today. We either don’t think about rivers, soils, and biodiversity at all – or we treat them as resources whose only purpose is to feed the economy. This ‘metabolic rift’ – between the [continue …]
Peak Car | Cloud Commuting | Gram Junkies | Green Tourism | Caloryville: The Two Wheeled City | From Bike Chain to Blockchain | From Autobahn to Bioregion | A Tale of Two Trains | From My Car to Scalar | Is an environmentally neutral car possible?
The Design Museum in London opens at its new home this week with, as its centrepiece, an exhibition called Fear and Love curated by Justin [continue …]
I was asked to write a provocation for DAMN magazine in Italy.
1 Change and innovation are no longer about finely crafted ‘visions’ of some future place and time. Positive change happens when people reconnect – with each other, and with the biosphere – in rich, real-world, [continue …]
An interview with Jonny Gordon-Farleigh, the editor and publisher of STIR magazine. Current and back issues of the magazine are available in the online shop
Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Your new book, How to Thrive in the Next Economy, explores practical innovations in [continue …]
In myriad projects around the world, a new economy is emerging whose core value is stewardship, not extraction. Growth, in this new story, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. These seedlings are cheering, but [continue …]
Ugly Indians don’t blame their fellow citizens, or politicians, or ‘the system’: They act first, and then they talk. They make it “our” problem, not “your” problem.
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 …]
Why is it that shocking stories and images fail to change things? Are there different ways of knowing the world, than merely looking?
This is the text of my talk at the OuiShare Festival in Paris today.
Did any of you wander around in a group last night – trying to agree on a place to eat?
Welcome to the sharing economy!
Sharing is hard! And that’s just about one meal.
Think about the food [continue …]
The Tending and Grooming Station (below) is a wondrous collection of combs, brushes and other obscure (to me) gadgets. They are used to primp and revive pre-loved sweaters and cardigans that have been disfigured by bobbles and pilling – those unattractive fuzz balls that appear when short fibers misbehave on woolen garments.
A two-year project in Belgium proposes new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value. Its design objective: a networked mobility ecosystem
The signs on the small van describe the services it supports: Taxi; Pick-up; Delivery; Assistance; Vendor; Security; Rental.
Seven [continue …]
In Sharing Energy In The City, EDF and the the French National Research Agency (ANR) have challenged designers to rethink the production, harvesting, distribution, use, exchange and consumption of energy in our everyday life. They asked me to submit this text as fuel for the discussion.
In China, ‘battery-bikes’ are outselling cars by four-to-one. Pedelec sales are soaring in Europe, too. Is this the start of system-wide phase-shift in transportation?
At a workshop in Delhi last year, during the UnBox Festival, I posed the following question to a group of 20 design, transport, and city [continue …]
In fashion, despite more than 400 eco labels, an incremental ‘do less harm’ approach has addressed the symptoms, but not the principal cause, of our difficulties: an economy based on perpetual growth in a finite world. A new and global ‘leave things better’ politics affirms our co-dependency with living systems [continue …]
So you want to do good? Here's how to avoid the sloppy assumptions that can underly 'design for development'.
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 …]
“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 …]
http://www.doorsofperception.com/?attachment_id=5172
In 1996, Ivan Illich (above) agreed to speak at Doors of Perception in Amsterdam on the theme of ‘speed’. [continue …]
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. [continue …]
Exhibits and competitions should be a means to an end, not the end itself. What would be a worthwhile end?
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 …]
[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 …]
(Illustration: Sameer Kulavoor Ghoda Bicycle Project)
At a workshop in Delhi a few weeks back, during the [continue …]
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 …]
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 …]
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 …]
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 …]
[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 …]
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 …]
[Photography courtesy of Marc Adamus] Here follows the talk I gave last week at the Global Design Forum in London.
“Last week [continue …]
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 …]
For some Icelanders, in a country whose inhabitants have survived 1,100 winters without central heating, the environmental costs of aluminium smelting are worth paying [continue …]
Last week the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (which has a new director, Martin Roth) staged a conference about Design & Risk. (The [continue …]
[ This text is a shortened version of my talk at last month’s conference in Philadelphia on Architecture & Energy; proceedings of that event will be published as a book later this year. Whilst preparing the talk, and this text, I also prepared this Reading List for Mr [continue …]
I’d be surprised if many readers of this blog work for the fracking industry. Those charming people spend a lot on lobbying and public relations, sure – but their main aim in life is to remain obscure.
But food and drink? The branding, the packaging, the communications, the stores, the promotions, [continue …]
How best do you help a resilient economy emerge in a region that has one foot in ancient ways and traditions – its other in the world of global universities and nuclear power?
Left: “The Hill Farmer” by Bedwyr Williams. Right: a [continue …]
It’s easy for two people to look at the same information – such as this chart (above) about health costs – and perceive totally different things. What I see is an out-of-control Medical Industrial Complex that’s [continue …]
A splendid new book from Monacelli Press marks the coming of age of urban agriculture – at least for the design world. Carrot City: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture is a timely reflection on design and urban food systems, and on [continue …]
This text touches on: 'energy intensity in health systems' , 'peak fat' , '5% health in Cuba', 'the Quantified Self' , 'Design grammars for health and care' , 'doing what we know we need to do'.
JOHNTHACKARA designing for life
© The John Thackara blog and website is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at john [at] thackara [d o t com], 1993-2023