Ever since learning about water mapping from Georg Bertsch and about watershed-based planning in Toronto from Chris Hardwick at Doors 9 on Juice last year, I’ve been aware that we talked a lot about energy but not [continue …]
My new year’s resolution is to stop writing sustainability to-do lists.
I’m supposed to be an expert, but it still gives me a headache trying to keep track of: the Triple Bottom Line; the Three Main Components (and Four System Conditions) of The Natural Step; the Five Capitals Model promoted by [continue …]
In 2007, I was asked by The Observer to write a short preview of the Dott07 Design Festival.
The following is the text of my lecture at the Global Place conference in an unseasonably warm Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Joshua Kauffman has posted an excellent summary of the event here).
THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT
Some of you may know Oliver [continue …]
It’s twenty years since Stuart Jane and I made this book for Thames and Hudson.
One of the bright young things whose work we put in a book for the first time was James Dyson. By 1986, his patented G-Force vacuum cleaner was being produced in [continue …]
This is my lecture to a conference at Westergasfabriek, in Amsterdam, called Creativity and the City, on 25 September 2003.
In Rajhastan, travelling storytellers go from village to village, unannounced, and simply start a performance when they arrive. Although each story has a familiar plot – the story telling tradition dates [continue …]
An internet sage once said that a web page never accessed does not really exist. Does the same logic apply to your design research? If nobody ‘gets it’, when you present your results, has anything been achieved?
I frequently see years of work by design researchers almost wasted because they do [continue …]
These principles were formulated for my keynote at the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference, The Hague, 2000:
1] We cherish the fact that people are innately curious, playful, and creative. This is one reason technology is not going to go away: it’s too much fun.
2] We will deliver value to people – [continue …]
How technology is altering the terrain of teaching. I rashly agreed to give a lecture to several hundred university teachers in Amsterdam….(This is the text of a speech given on September 6th, 2000, at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam).
I am most grateful – and not a little intimidated – by your [continue …]
My Articles of Association Between Design, Technology and The People Formerly Known As Users
(A chapter about i-cubed for If/Then).
In thermodynamics it is called entropy when a system becomes disengaged from its context, and runs out of energy. Entropy afflicts a lot of design ‘research’ today. Even though the world is changing in profound and exciting ways, a generation of young designers is missing [continue …]
(This is a chapter for a book published in 2000 (by 010) on Benthem|Crouwel – the wonderful architects of the -now gone – Netherlands Design Institute and, in their spare time, of Schiphol Airport)
Are buildings a liability?
The eminent Spanish economist Manuel Castells, whose first speech in Amsterdam was [continue …]
As well as being thresholds between land and air, modern airports are gateways to complexity. Through them, we enter the operating environment of global aviation, surely mankind's most complicated creation.
In 1990, Japan was at the height of its ‘bubble economy’. It popped, spectacularly, two years later. This text was originally published in The Listener, in the UK, in 1990.
In Tokyo, cement trucks sport the slogan, ‘Begin The Next’. Buy sellotape at the cornershop, and the bag carries a slogan: ‘Perhaps [continue …]
JOHNTHACKARA designing for life
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