Apart from farming and tourism, what kind of work is available for young people in rural areas today? I talk with Shuchin Shu, an activist (with a Masters in Environmental Art) who heads the Yunhe Forest School in Zhonglu village in China’s Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Region.
A talk in Shanghai during the launch of Design Harvests 3, the urban-rural innovation programme. The idea of “designing for life” sounds meaningful – but what do those words mean in practice? Are there jobs are available in that space?
India’s Natural Farming movement is now active in 20 of India’s 29 states, and the Indian government has just launched an National Mission on Natural Farming. At this year’s Care, Value, Place #BITSDesignSchool at I asked, what practical acts of care might design offer to India’s Natural Farmers?
The following text is my keynote talk at last week’s World Design Cities Conference (WDCC25) in Shanghai. At that same event I was astonished - and delighted - to be awarded the Frontier Design Prize. This talk (video below) is a fair summary of the work being recognised by that award.
If sustainability is determined by the quality of our social and ecological relationships, how might AI contribute to the health of those relationships?
Trillions of dollars of climate finance need nature to be machine-like. But nature is not a machine. So how shall we proceed? In this 20′ talk, I ask: Can AI serve all of life, not just human life? And if so, how?
Emiliano Godoy discovers other reasons to produce than just feeding the economy. This text is my foreward to his new book El ABC del Diseño. It chronicles a 30 year career (so far) of learning-by-designing-and-making
In a soundscape called The Cave, it’s as if you are surrounded by crows and even interact with them. At different moments one hears the call of a solitary crow; a communal chorus; the sound of mass fluttering when they all take off at once; or the barely audible cheeps of what seem to be intimate conversations.
The presentations were organised into five threads: regenerative water systems; the social life of mobility; community-based recycling ; success factors in social design; and Community Managed Natural Farming
Plans are being made to plant billions of trees – but who will care for them, and how? One answer: Green infrastructure is as much social, as it technical. That lesson informed the design of these urban ecology tools, equipment, and experiences.
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 …]
Alastair McIntosh reminds us here that the World’s oldest book, the Epic of Gilgamesh, portrayed tension between the wild and the civilised. The Buddha taught the interconnection of all things. Plato depicted the world as being “a living god”.
These are curious times. Even as the world burns, sustainable finance and green capitalism are booming: Sustainability Reporting. Net Zero. Climate Finance. ESG. Green New Deal. By some estimates, assets invested with environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria now top £35 trillion. Why would investors put money into an asset [continue …]
(Keynote talk in China) A just transition will happen when we see nature differently, relate to nature differently, and understand the purpose of development differently. So, can AI foster new ways of knowing and being in the world? Can it be medium of attention; a medium of connection; a medium of relationship with the living world?
Can indigenous knowledges help us inhabit our own places in a more adaptive and responsive ways? Can connection with these kinds of lived experience help us redefine development, and progress, in our own situations? The text here is my introduction to "Tonantsintlalli - a Multidimensional Mother Earth" in Australia
What would it mean to practice design in the knowledge that the well-being of humans, and non-humans, is inter-connected? Here are the results of a design workshop at Milan Polytechnic: practical ways to make cities hospitable for all of life, not just human life.
Twenty landscape students were given an unusual design brief: regenerate the soils of the Camargue bioregion - its rhizosphere - as a biological, living entity. Do do this, they were told, by creating new associations between, people, animals, vegetation, and weather.
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
(My foreward to DEDI) Indigenous peoples have a closer relationship with the ecologies of their land than those who practice ‘production agriculture’. But their intimate, fine-grained knowledge can always be enhanced. For example, biodata collected from plants could be ‘heard’ by the farmer as music.
(I wrote this Prologue) Feeling powerless to change the course of events, the inclination to switch off can feel like self-defence. Karin Fink’s response is both nimble, and wise. Rather than re-draw the whole picture at a stroke, her focus in this book is on small connections, and how to enhance them.
“Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks” writes Gloria E. Anzaldúa. For her, life-centered design could as well be thought of as weaving, as walking. “We humans need to be nepantleras - bridge builders and reweavers of relationality” (My chapter in the new Bauhaus book).
Whether connecting schools to farms in France, daylighting rivers in Mexico, or rewilding grasslands in Patagonia, we’re learning how to ‘do’ biodiversity well. (This text was commissioned by the Swiss Ministry of the Environment, FOEN).
Manifesto For Utopias Are Over | Healing the Metabolic Rift | Sustainability, Design and Old Growth | Tour of the New Economy | When Value Arises From Relationships, Not From Things (A selection of articles reposted by P2P Magazine)
On the island of Bornholm, in the Baltic Sea, a curious figure is handing out small packages to strangers in the high street. The young woman is dressed in orange, water-resistant clothes that are dirty, smelly and oversized. (On why art matters so much)
We lack situated and embodied experiences - a sense of interdependency with living systems. I therefore propose a new Bauhaus Vorkurs, or Foundation Course. The course would foster ecological literacy, and a whole-systems understanding of the world. It would unite wisdom traditions from other places and times, with the latest insights of systems thinking and complexity science.
Hundreds of cities around the world are planting trees. But planting trees is just the start. A wide variety of activities and equipment - and a lot of knowledge-sharing - are involved in the management of tree popultions. Trees have to be climbed, pruned, inspected, and surveyed. All this involves equipment and services - most of which still need to be designed.
I’ve come to an inconvenient conclusion: production is not the purpose of life. I say inconvenient because many of us depend on industrial production to meet our daily life needs. But the perpetual search for new forms of production - whether ‘clean’, ‘green’ or ‘circular’ - is not where our future lies. (Interview with Valentina Croci of Domus Magazine)
I was asked, in an interview for Resilience, what it is that inspires my work, and what keeps me going.
1. Who/what has been your greatest inspiration? And why?
A: Rocks. And stones. I’ve always loved stones and rocky places – but it was only when I moved to south west [continue …]
John, why do you think so much attention is being paid to the ideas around the notion of ’the commons’ right now?
The commons is an idea, and a practice, that generates meaning and hope. Millions of people are busy in projects [continue …]
A new scheme in England connects office workers with living systems by means of a ‘wild mirror’: each workspace is twinned with an equivalent area of ecosystem regeneration.
There are times when you have to wonder whether ad industry persons totally, er, get it, on the matter of man’s disconnect with nature… and what to do about it.
This Aigle ad, which I tore out the Air France magazine, [continue …]
Something special is happening in France. A nationwide campaign will be launched next week by the Colibris movement for the 2012 Presidential Elections – but without a charismatic leader.
Shortly after my visit to Oslo I received this question from Andrea Siodmok: “what from Cornwall should the world know about?”.
The director of Dott Cornwall is preparing an exhibit to celebrate the achievements of this fascinating region in south west England, and wanted me [continue …]
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], 1993-2025
[continue …]