Why Our Design Festival Has No Things In It
In 2007, I was asked by The Observer to write a short preview of the Dott07 Design Festival.
Global place – or is it a hat?
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 …]
Not quite so new
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 …]
The post-spectacular city
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 …]
Does your design research exist? JT’s top tips for potent presentations
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 …]
Rules of engagement between design and new technology
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 …]
New geographies of learning
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 …]
The design challenge of pervasive computing
My Articles of Association Between Design, Technology and The People Formerly Known As Users
From science fiction to social fiction: a new vision for innovation and design
(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 …]
Designing the space of flows
(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 …]
Lost In Space: A Traveller’s Tale
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.
Tokyo: Begin The Next
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 …]