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I surmise that the W Hotel in Seattle, where I am staying, has designed its lighting to foster chance encounters: everything is bathed in (but not much illuminated by) weak blue light. Seattle seems to be obsessed by social networks and biological models of economic activity. My driver today waxed [continue …]

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang blogged my talk at Ideo and made it sound much crisper and more interesting than the talk itself. Surrogate blogging sounds like a great businesss opportunity – and good for the environment, too, if it reduces the quantity of hot air entering the atmosphere.

A half-page ad in today’s San Francisco Chronice features the words “Why do we work?” displayed over the photo of an assembly line worker’s hands, shifting a box.The text below begins with the strapline: “to keep the future growing”. A bank called Principal.com probably paid good money for this fatuous [continue …]

Amid the swirling damp mist of San Francisco I receive news of an intriguing event in Maastricht called Breath-taking. A series of lectures about air, art and architecture include heavier-than-air pieces from Francois Perrin (‘The geometry of climate’) and Peter Sloterdijk (‘Inspiration’). The website features a bursting blue bubble, [continue …]

I was disappointed when David Burney, a speaker at Doors 8 failed to show up at my book party in New York. Then I started seeing David’s face on all the television sets in town. It turned out that a landslide had blocked one of the main arterial roads [continue …]

If you, or someone you know, would like to meet the author of In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World – then read on. If you don’t, stop reading now because that’s all this entry is about.
TALKS, READINGS, SIGNINGS
NEW YORK Thursday 12 May.
6.30pm-8.30pm. Celebration drink to launch [continue …]

One of the thrills of my working year in 2004 was helping a UK team develop the concept and business plan for a new service design institute in Newcastle-upon-Tyne – my home town. One North East, a UK regional development authority, is nurturing a post-coal, post-iron, post-shipbuilding economy with great [continue …]

Our models – Joost and the Joostettes – are wearing theDoors of Perception 8 t-shirts, designed by Abhishek Hazra. Apart from being the most beautiful Doors t-shirt ever, this one is also destined to be the most valuable, too, as we only produced a limited [continue …]

“The end of oil is closer than you think. Oil production could peak next year. Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye”. A rollicking doomsday story in today’s Guardian, by John Vidal, revisits the so-called “peak oil” contoversy about whether a global peak to oil production is approaching. According to Vidal, [continue …]

Someone, somewhere, has designed some of the services or situations that we will need in a sustainable society – so why repeat things? Novel ways to share food, move around, or care for each other, already exist – but they are often off the radar [continue …]

According to the City & Guilds Happiness Index hairdressers are the happiest workers in Britain: 40 percent say they are very content in their job (giving their careers a score of ten out of ten). Next in the happiness stakes are the clergy (24 percent ), chefs/cooks (23 [continue …]

The US leg of my book tour for In The Bubble kicks off in New York on May 13. I’m speaking at an event called Malfatto: Imperfect Design for a Better World?. Material Connexion’s founder, George M. Beylerian, has invited an awesomely creative bunch of speakers: the architect/artist Gaetano [continue …]

Digital Cities Convention (May 2-4 in Philadelphia) is part of “a global thought-leadership series to accelerate the adoption of broadband wireless technologies for economic and social development worldwide”. According to a piece in muniwireless.com, Philadelphia was chosen to launch the Convention in light of Wireless Philadelphiaâ„¢, an ambitious [continue …]

Science tells us birds sing to attract mates and defend territories. But why do some birds make only a “peep” and others sing ornate songs that go on for hours? An intriguing event in New York on 16 April brings scientists together with musicians and poets to [continue …]

I owe an apology to Stefan Magdalinski, from whitelabel.org, who was one of the star turns at Doors 8 (and has nice words to say about the event in his blog). In yesterday’s emailed Doors Report, I managed to omit a “not” and thereby render a sentence [continue …]

Four years since I started work on it (not counting the ten years of Doors events it draws on) I received the first printed copy of my book. You won’t beleve what a relief it is that it’s finally done. Thanks [continue …]

Pre-Conference workshops. 46 images.

Day 01 Conference. 18 images.

Day 01-b Conference. 49 images.

Day 03 Conference. 69 images.

The first 61 Holi party images are online. As Bhagwat Shah explains: “amongst India’s innumerable festivals, Holi ranks as the most colourful. It celebrates the arrival of spring and death of demoness Holika, it is a celebration of joy and hope. Holi provides a refreshing respite [continue …]

So here’s the deal: You probably had a perfectly good reason not to come, and you were of course missed, but those of us who made it to Doors 8 are pretty comprehensively wiped by an amazing week. The concluding Holi party slowed our turnaround time further, so you’ll have [continue …]

Until now, we’ve said we could not accept credit card payments for Doors 8 at the door on the day. Now we got a machine, so we can. See you there!

It’s now ten days until Doors 8 and our cable has been down for 12 days. Thankyou, Wanadoo. Not. But enough of that company from hell. The good news is that the CKS team in Delhi is working brilliantly; some international people are already on their way to India; and [continue …]

Ten days before Doors 7, our cable connection crashed and UPC were unable to fix it. Until, that is, I located the home phone number of UPC’s European CEO; I called him during dinner to share my thoughts on the matter. By a happy coincidence, our cable connection was restored [continue …]

Doors of Perception 8 begins in two weeks from now – plenty of time to grab a flight and a visa. We have posted details of a pre-conference workshop on Emerging Economy Service Design. This complements a series of street-level workshops that now also include [continue …]

Today we publish a new Doors 8 poster designed by Abhishek Hazra. Please print it, post it somewhere prominent, and/or pass it on to individuals (not to whole lists) you think will consider helping us get the word out.

Like the migratory patterns of Arctic Terns,the travel patterns of the Doors crowd are a perennial mystery.All we know is that people register later every time we do a Doors event. (At Doors 7 in Amsterdam, we sold a third of our tickets in the last couple of weeks). [continue …]

We don’t usually run job ads here, but Doors has a long history with the Interaction Design group at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, and they need a new head, so just this once we’re happy to pass the word along to you. One of [continue …]

A kindly-looking gent called Jack Welch has drawn the short straw to beat all short straws. His new book ‘Winning’ has been selected by Fast Company to compete against ‘In The Bubble’ for that magazine’s book of the month selection. It’s cruel and outrageous that such an underdog – the [continue …]

What does a service design look like? How are we to represent and visualize such complex artefacts as a service, a scenario, or a strategy? Francois Jegou has been investigating this challenge together with Ezio Manzini in a project called ‘Sustainable Everyday: Scenarios of Urban Life’. They looked for examples [continue …]

The theme of Doors 8 – ‘Infra’ – is indeed rather broad. Today we’ve posted a list of adjacent organisations and projects that we’ve learned about in developing the programme. Doors 8 is about collaborative innovation – not about charity, aid, or top-down development – so we [continue …]

Speaking of infrastructure, I was shocked to read that Amsterdam’s museum of energy generating equipment and lifts – EnergeticA – is threatened with closure; there’s also a danger that its collection will be broken up. EnergericA is in an old power station and [continue …]

A 30 million euro scheme in London will make high speed broadband connections available to 20,000 people in a comparatively deprived area.The scheme will be accompanied by local online services such as community information, message boards, and voting mechanisms to enable referendums.’This is the most ambitious experiment of its kind [continue …]

Truck drivers already have to endure supervision by a tachometer which logs their speeds and driving times on behalf of myriad external authorities. Why not a tachometer for tomatoes, to monitor and make explicit food miles? Food distribution can be tremedously wasteful, but invisibly so. The concept of food dates [continue …]

Several pre-conference workshops will take place in and around Delhi before Doors 8 itself – especially on Friday 18 to Sunday 20 March. Participation in a workshop is by agreement with the workshop leader concerned, and you have to register for Doors 8 first, to be eligible to take part. [continue …]

We have updated the speaker profiles (there’s a button on the right of this screen). These should give you a better idea of the kind of people you’ll meet and interact with in Delhi. Our week together features a range of activities :
– plenary think-piece presentations (Monday and Tuesday);
– Project [continue …]

What happened to the people who built the ruined temples of Angkor Wat, the long-abandoned statues of Easter Island, and the crumbling Maya pyramids of the Yucatan? In his new book Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed Jared Diamond suggests that the environmental crises [continue …]

‘Those who enjoy what they do never have to work any more’. An intriguing article by Sybrand Zijlstra (in a new Dutch publication called Morf ) reports that 80% of students graduating from Dutch art academies pronounced themselves to be satisfied with their education. This is a [continue …]

When I googled “homeland security” and “design” today I got 1,350,000 hits – up from 600,000 back in August. An editorial site called Embedded Computing Design comes top. ‘Many embedded devices are located in areas critical for homeland security’ the text intones, ‘from the power grid and [continue …]

Someone asked us if Doors 8 is near the tsunami danger zone. No, it is not. The distance from Delhi to Chennai (the Indian city where the tsunami hit hardest) is 2095 km, or 1301 miles. That’s similar to the distance from Boston to Miami, Amsterdam to Athens, or Tokyo [continue …]

A gorgeous 500 page gold brick of a book has arrived. Time In Design is based on a 24-hour conference by that name that took place last year in Rotterdam. But the conference proceedings (printed on gold paper) are just a start. The book ranges widely over what the editors [continue …]

It’s sad news indeed that Media Lab Europe (MLE), the European research partner of MIT Media Lab in the US, is to close.
Neither of the Lab’s main stakeholders – MIT itself, and the Irish government – was prepared to fund the Lab once it became clear that [continue …]

For much of 2004, the Doors of Pereception conference archive was inaccessible to the majority of our visitors. (The archive was built over a ten year period for browsers that became too clever and advanced to access material which we hadn’t touched….). Well, we’ve quick-fixed a new [continue …]

Googling design + ‘homeland security’ yields 1,290,000 hits on Google today – up from 600,000 last August. The fear factor is fast becoming a big business. But how significant and extensive are the actual threats? A timely seminar on 10 February at the Oxford Internet Institute examines [continue …]

“If you’re a manager at a company that’s going to compete globally by playing the innovation game, you’re going to have to learn how to innovate. When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design”. That was Bruce Nussbaum in Business Week , Tuesday, January [continue …]

There is still time for your company to sponsor Doors 8. We will use new resources from sponsors to improve the conference, and to enhance the Social Innovation Salon. We also want to provide travel scholarships to grassroots innovators with stories we want to hear.
A decision to sponsor Doors [continue …]

Many employers will only pay travel and registration costs if an employee has been invited to present a paper. This crazy policy implies that nobody comes to learn – just to speak – and it leads to over-crowded conference agendas. The policy is a pain for us, too: We want [continue …]

A key question for Doors 8 is, how best shall we share design knowledge when and where it is most needed? Books, databases – or blogs – full of insights, tools and rules are a support, not the thing itself. The most important knowledge is embodied, and situated. There’s a [continue …]

This year’s Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference has as its theme, ‘Technology, Safety, Community’. The event, says the website, confronts the ‘challenge for technology to make people feel safe again’. The agenda sounds uncontroversial, but you have to ask if the resulting design effort will make anyone materially safer, or [continue …]

In his new book ‘Information Politics on the Web’ Richard Rogers says that the Web can be a collision space for official and unofficial accounts of reality and, as such, an excellent arena for ‘unsettling the official’. Tools developed by Rogers, such as the celebrated issue tracker, can be [continue …]

Freight transport is an important source of air pollution, CO2 emissions, and noise, as well as causing countless injuries and deaths by accidents. Freight transport is out of control in the sense that it has been growing faster than the economy, by 0.8% per annum, since 1985. Flying fresh [continue …]

I was flattered to receive a seasonal message today from Professor Dr. Nikolay V. Kirianakithe – the President, no less, of the International Sensors and Traducers Association. I’ve always fancied myself as an amateur traducer, but had not realised my efforts had been recognised at such a high level. [continue …]