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No new lists!

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 …]

2022-10-07T15:41:38+00:00January 2nd, 2008|most read|

Not quite so new

newbritishdesign.jpg
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 …]

2022-10-07T19:23:10+00:00July 24th, 2006|most read|

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 …]

2012-04-02T16:37:58+00:00September 27th, 2003|most read|

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 …]

2022-08-23T13:54:46+00:00November 12th, 2000|most read|

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 …]

2012-04-02T16:38:27+00:00September 22nd, 2000|knowing, most read|

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 …]

2012-04-02T16:40:11+00:00January 22nd, 2000|most read|

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.

2022-08-23T13:53:25+00:00January 22nd, 2000|most read, moving|

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 …]

2022-08-28T16:22:33+00:00January 22nd, 2000|most read, urban-rural|
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