The chaos at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is an excellent example of what happens when the logic of finance interacts with the logic of large complex systems. As Will Hutton wrote at the weekend, shareholders in British Airways (its sole tenant) and BAA (which runs the airport) demand perpetually growing dividends. [continue …]

Killjoy environmentalists would have us stop shopping to save the planet. What a relief, then, to find a website, shopmodify.com, that teaches us how to shop and save the planet at the same time. I especially like their green shopping tips for Spring: “buy a hot eco-friendly [continue …]

This is my talk from yesterday in Helsinki at Pixelache University. There are pix here

Could the biosphere be saved by six glass lamps, six speakers, 36 ultra bright leds, six diy mono amplifiers, a diy arduino-based six channel led [continue …]

In the UK at least 20 local authorities have brought forward innovative answers to climate change. This roll call includes Woking, Kirklees, Barnsley, Nottingham, Braintree, and Merton. This cheering list is included in an excellent piece [continue …]

I’m running ths story again because the > Pixelache Uni final programme has just been publshed.
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OK, so you know and I know that air travel is simply not sustainable. But we do it anyway because we are hypocrites (I took 78 flights last year) [continue …]

Before we close the doors at Dott 07 for the last time, the final Dott 07 Explorers Club will take place in Newcastle on Wednesday 12 March. We will look back at Dott projects and discuss: what did we learn? and what happens next? We’ll have updates [continue …]

Emaar Properties has teamed up with Giorgio Armani to build and manage thirty Armani hotels and resorts around the world – one of which will be included in Burj Dubai, the the world’s largest skyscaper (above) that is now being built. As one of the world’s largest [continue …]

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 …]

Neil McGuire asked me in his Wodcast interview with me whether I meant it when I said that design schools should be closed down.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has recruited two Nobel economists, Amartya Sen of India and Joseph Stiglitz of the US, to advise him on changing the way French economic growth is calculated. “We must change the way we measure growth,” said Sarkozy, adding that “the way gross national product [continue …]

A gem from CryptoGram.“Surprising nobody, a new study concludes that airport security isn’t helping: A team at the Harvard School of Public Health could not find any studies showing whether the time-consuming process of X-raying carry-on luggage prevents hijackings or attacks. They also found no evidence to suggest that [continue …]

Further to my note yesterday on the UK going nuclear, my attention was drawn to Charlie Hall’s celebrated (in energy circles) balloon graph.

As Kurt Cobb explains, “it is not always obvious to modern industrial people that it takes energy to get energy. The more [continue …]

Yesterday’s announcement that Britain is to ‘go nuclear’ was a foregone conclusion, but is nonetheless a dispiriting reminder of the institutional inertia that stands between us and a radically lighter economy.

As Polly Toynbee points out in The Guardian today, “no voice in cabinet queried this decision. Faced with persistent [continue …]

Shopping for a snack in central London yesterday evening I counted an extraordinary 78 metres (256 feet) of chiller cabinets in one small central London branch of Marks and Spencer.
Marks and Spencer have made a laudable commitment to make all it UK and Irish operations carbon neutral within five years. [continue …]

In which I review City Eco Lab, the French design biennial I'm curating. The look-and-feel of the event will be more Bladerunner than Little House on the Prairie.

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 Sao Paulo before Christmas someone referred to me as a “doomer.”

I had not heard the word before, but was told that it describes sad, train-spotter-like people who can’t stop talking about peak oil, climate change, the instability of financial markets, the impending food crisis, and what John Michael Greer [continue …]

In Dott07’s Eco Design Challenge, more than fifteen thousand school students used custom–designed calculators to measure their school’s eco-footprint. They then ran projects to design lighter alternatives to the systems (food, water, transport, energy and waste) operating in their school. Many schools, with [continue …]

Last week I gave this talk at a seminar in Milan called Art For Business.
“On my way to this conference on art and business, two Erasmus University business school students (a Russian and a Dane) came to meet me in Amsterdam. They came from “Team Aesthetics” . We [continue …]

In the October issue of Blueprint its editor Vicky Richardson’s accused Designs of the time (Dott 07) of secretly buying 10,000 pounds worth of fruit and vegetables when our Urban Farming project in Middlesbrough “did not generate adequate grub for the guests”. Vicky declined to name the greengrocer for whom [continue …]

Doors of Perception’s director, John Thackara, was programme director of Designs of the time (Dott 07), a year of community design projects in North East England that explored what life in a sustainable region could be like – and how design can help us [continue …]

The house is cold, someone keeps turning the lights off, and the greywater toilet is blocked again.
As a way of life, sustainabilty often sounds grim. The media don’t help: they tell us we have to consume our way to redemption. The shopping pages are filled [continue …]

The Dott 07 Festival opens in 13 days time in Gateshead, England. It brings together the results of projects and events that explore what sustainable life in one region could be like – and how design can help us get there. North East England, as one of the birthplaces of [continue …]

Can transport and tourism ever be sustainable? The movement of people and goods around the world consumes vast amounts of matter, energy, space, and time – most of it non-renewable. Could transport intensity be de-coupled from economic progress – and if so, how?

This event in October’s series of Dott [continue …]

Up to 30 percent of the ecological footprint of a city can be attributed to the systems which keep it fed and watered. But when the Mayors of the world’s 40 largest cities met recently to discuss sustainability strategies, food was not on the agenda. Why not?
Doors is organising a [continue …]

The term greenwashing applies when companies (or governments) spend more money or time advertising being green, than on investing in environmentally sound practices.
In business, greenwashing often means changing the name and/or label. Early warning signs that a product is probably toxic include images of trees, birds, or [continue …]

I was asked by Seung Yoon Lee, at Korean Design Research Institute, for a three line quote on “a new concept of mobility due to ubiquitous technologies”. (It’s for an upcoming issue of Asian Design Journal).
So I sent this: “Reducing the movement of matter – whether goods, or people – [continue …]

The next Dott 07 (Designs of the time) Explorers Club meeting on Thursday 14 July, to be held at the Robert Stephenson Centre in Newcastle. Our focus this month is Sustainable Tourism.

In terms of someone’s carbon footprint, a single holiday in New Zealand is equivalent [continue …]

How do European, American and Asian approaches to green design differ – and what we should learn from each other? Will technology save us, or is a social revolution more important?

I’m giving a lecture on this topic at Art Center, in Pasadena, on 5 [continue …]

In an excellent piece in Metropolis , Peter Hall argues that “design schools need to rethink how they teach product design.” The subject is booming, Hall writes, and yet the world is filled with terrible products: cars that kill two people every minute; [continue …]

I don’t know about you but I’m off mapping today (and hope to see many of you there ). While I’m away, here’s another of the Belsay projects, this one by Francesca Steele. Her work engages [continue …]

You missed a truly gorgeous day: The opening of Picture House at Belsay. Here is Dott’s Beckie Darlington playing with the installation by UVA, which (the image) I borrowed from Pixelsumo (Chris O’Shea) who has posted a ton more [continue …]

This is a big week for Dott. The Picture House exhibition at Belsay Hall Mansion opens with a Digital Dinner on Thursday. The exhibition features three projects curated for Dott by Juha Huuskonen / Pixelache: a new work from Golan Levin; Adam Somlai-Fischer & [continue …]

Roam, meet, share, map. There’s only a week to go before a gorgeous array of teams assemble in Durham for Mapping The Necklace (5-7 May). One group is interested in mapping the most beautiful cows in the park. Other teams will do [continue …]

Along, I suspect, with some of you, I failed to get into Ecologic studio’s blog (story below) but I did find this intriguing project for them by Slider Studio to “automate the process of mapping data from an environmental analysis software [continue …]

This was the most interesting exhibit for me at the Milan Furniture Fair. Hidden away in a small courtyard, “Aqva Garden” functions as a distributed rain collector and water storage system. Unlike conventional recycling systems, which tend to be hidden away in clunky boxes, Aqva [continue …]

For three years now Doors has been involved in a Europe-wide project called EMUDE (it stands for “Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions”. That’s European research for you!). A network of design schools, acting as ‘antennas’, has collected examples of social [continue …]

The Guardian reports on the threat to Delhi’s 300,000 street food vendors in the name of “hygiene” and “modernisation” ahead of the 2010 Commonweath Games. If you have any contacts in the Indian judiciary, please ask them to read about the [continue …]

Our friends at WorldChanging are running a series of think-pieces to celebrate Earth Day. My piece is about designers as hunter gatherers, and what we can learn from the explosive growth of cellular churches as we seek ways to expand the footprint [continue …]

I was looking for some data about the environmental impact of aviation and came across some good news! A website for us super-rich green folk called Helium lists luxury travel and real estate companies that promote eco-friendly travel. “You can spend over [continue …]

So you think you know what an English country house feels like? Well think again. Judith King for English Heritage and Dott 07 (with Juha Huuskonen) have invited experimental film directors, artists and designers to transform Belsay Hall in Northumberland with a series of cutting edge art and new media [continue …]

In 2007, I was asked by The Observer to write a short preview of the Dott07 Design Festival.

Which box does one belong in during these curious times? Jan Jaap Spreij sent me links to two excellent articles – on peak oil, and the future of industrial society – written by the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids [continue …]

Global food systems are becoming unsustainable in terms of environmental impact, health, and social quality. Up to 40 percent of the ecological impact of an ‘advanced’ city can be attributed to its food systems.
But what to do?
Doors of Perception 9 – on the [continue …]

In response to spam attacks we’ve had to turn off the comment function here. Apologies for that: If you’ve had a comment blocked, please send it to desk at doorsofperception dot com com and we’ll post it manually.

(COMMENT AT END: we’ve had to suspend comment function because of spam attacks)
You know what? I just don’t think Sunnyvale, California is the right base from which to save the world with Tech.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Architecture for Humanity have announced a $250,000 competition for the [continue …]

I hear from Nick “still in the US without air conditioning” Oakley that a Second Life avatar uses about as much energy as the average Brazilian. Lesson: even virtual worlds have a real carbon footprint. I told a similar story, this time about server farms, [continue …]

Are you shaping the tools or techniques that help other people shape their world? There is no job description for what you do. You mix dedication to social change, confidence with people and organisations, and technical knowledge or skills. You are part of a growing number of committed
people using innovation [continue …]

When I first visited India 20 years ago, the country had fewer design teachers for a population of more than a billion people than had Wales – whose population is three million. The supply of teachers seemed to be stuck because India had just one national public design school: the [continue …]