It was thanks to the new blog for Wikimania – the first international wikimedia conference which starts tomorrow in Frankfurt – that I learned about the latest exaggerated claim about contribution of mobile phones to knowledge.Cellphedia is billed as ‘the 1st Ubiquitous Social Encyclopedia…(it) creates the ability to [continue …]

For the past year a network of six design schools in different parts of Europe has been collecting real-life examples of social innovation for a project called Emude, in which Doors of Perception is a partner. A lot of work has still to be done analysing these stories to figure [continue …]

As designers and social innovators, should we take any notice of technology policy? Wouldn’t it be best to ignore the think-tanks and telcos, and concentrate on doing great projects in the real world? A 90% focus on projects would probably be healthy. But we also need to keep half an [continue …]

Creating and distributing podcasts doesn’t sound easy. As a potential producer, I’m hesitating. But Evan Williams (who started Blogger and therefore, presumably, helped start blogging) has co-founded Odeo as a one-stop site where non-technical people like me can find and subscribe to podcasts, and create new podcasts of their [continue …]

This podcast thing is a boon for bloggers. My interview with Carol Coletta, host and producer of the nationally-syndicated (in the US) public radio show Smart City Radio is now available online. I’ve said it once to Carol so I don’t need to say it again here: Apparently [continue …]

Outside Baghdad, and almost everywhere one might travel in the world, the risk of being killed in a road accident greatly exceeds the risk of being killed by a terrorist.

John Adams – Britain’s leading academic expert on risk, and author of a seminal book by that title – wrote a [continue …]

It’s so thrilling to be modern. My interview with Moira Gunn on the US radio show Tech Nation is now online and thereby downloadable as a podcast. The idea of podcasting Doors-type conversations is attractive, and I’d be interested to hear your response to the idea. (The complete [continue …]

I frequently warn of the dangers that lie ahead for the organisers of design conferences, trade fairs, festivals and biennials. A growing number of me-too events is competing for our attention, and there’s a real danger we’ll all switch off. Since I last wrote about the subject a month [continue …]

Half of all the energy consumed by human beings is used in or by buildings – but for the most part invisibly. Worldchanging has profiled a neat monitoring system by David Vogt at Kondra Systems that sets out to answer the questions: ‘how much [continue …]

The most important potential impact of wireless communications will be on the resource ecologies of cities. Connecting people, resources, and places to each other in new combinations, on a real-time basis, has the potential to reduce drastically the amount of hardware—from gadgets, to buildings—that we need to function effectively. The [continue …]

Overheard in The NYU Bookstore, Washington Place: Girl on cell: ‘So I went up to my Professor just now? And I was telling him I’ve chosen a country for my project. He was like,”Africa? That’s not a country.” I was like, “Come on, what was all that Live 8 [continue …]

A couple of weeks ago I reacted harshly when Philips, purveyor of high-end goggleboxes and hairdryers, blamed ‘poor consumer sentiment’ for the company’s disappointing results. Now, British economists are expressing ‘fears for consumer confidence’ following the July 7 bombings in London. ‘Some people may feel that conspicuous consumption is not [continue …]

I know it’s the silly season for news, but a tech story on BBC News today wins my prize for the year’s most witless tech waffle. Headlined “UK ‘could become hi-tech titan'”, the story refers to a report (unnamed and unreferenced) by consulting firm Deloitte that urges “swift [continue …]

Food ‘miles’ in the UK have risen dramatically over the past 10 years, are still rising, and have a significant impact on climate change, traffic congestion, accidents and pollution according to a report published yesterday, and reported in today’s Guardian. Food transport accounts for 25% of all the miles [continue …]

“The anthropologist starts by observing everyday life, with all its odd little patterns, and tries to work out how computers might fit into that”. (That was Gillian Tett in the FT). It sounds innocuous if you believe the insertion of computing into a daily life activity to be an ethically [continue …]

Is this true? Gary Yonge reports from New York in today’s Guardian that US newspapers are warning of threats to America from ‘Londonistan’. “Articles on front pages of newspapers across the country describe the UK as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism that threatens global security” writes Yonge; (the [continue …]

I like to keep track of the total I get when Googling “design” + “homeland security”. The number six months ago was 1,310,000. Today, the score stands at 3,090,000. By a complete coincidence, the budget for Homeland Security rose to $41 billion by the end of 2004. Commenting on this [continue …]

The service design and art worlds are filled with amazing proposals for the civic use of wireless communications. But most of these will remain hypothetical unless efforts succeed to make wireless freely available – rather than a costly privatised utility. Esme Vos, Amsterdam-based editor of municipalwirelerss.com, is organising the first [continue …]

If you prefer interacting with people to gazing raptly at perspex building facades, you’ll enjoy the amazing street art festival in Chalon-sur-Saône, 21-24 July. Later on (23-25 September) Label Rue is a B2B street art festival in Ganges, South of France. Label Rue, a smaller [continue …]

A breathless email from Tony Perkins invites me to Stanford to watch lions eat Christians. Or so it sounds. Tony writes that his conference, Always On, is about “the sweet spots in the technology markets…where innovation is disrupting behavior and creating new business opportunities”. His website concludes, “come play [continue …]

A range of African NGOs and organisations has expressed frustration and concern in response to statements from G8 that world leaders would solve Africa’s problems with limited debt relief and increased aid. Writers and campaigners from a range of African countries have expressed their views in the Alternatives Commission for [continue …]

Someone told me (offline) that my reaction to Live8 yesterday was unduly critical. Isn’t it better for people to be charged up and optimistic about a big challenge, such as poverty, rather than overwhelmed and demotivated? It’s a tricky call. I still agree with George Monbiot that Live8 will have [continue …]

“Everyone is, suddenly, globally, politicised” froths an embarassing article about Live8 by Euan Ferguson in todays Observer. Puleese.The atmosphere this morning reminds me of Princess Diana’s funeral. The emotions released yesterday are heartfelt – but narcissistic. It feels good to feel. Watching a rock musician in a [continue …]

If you’re too damn mean to shell out a measly $4,400 to join those manly TED guys in Oxford, five pounds ($9) buys you access to BACKSTAGE.BBC.CO.UK Open Tech 2005 in London on 25 July. Organised by NTK (Need To Know), this event is about “technologies that [continue …]

A ticket to the TED Global conference in Oxford next week costs $4,400. Which is only right and proper: the calibre of speakers is exceptionally high. Mind you, the provison of “really big world changing ideas” is very much a guy thing in TED-land: I count seven women out of [continue …]

A few days ago I commented that managers have not thought through the potential of RFID systems to give customers far more information about about a product’s history than might be comfortable – at least, for the company selling it. A forthcoming book flagged by Institute For the Future, does [continue …]

During the years Doors of Perception has been staging encounters in India, I don’t think anyone uttered the words ‘solidarity economics’. We’ve had many conversations about bottom-up globalisation, about complementary currencies, and about how design can enable resource-sharing services to emerge. But we have not been immersed in the [continue …]

The Sustainable Everyday project is a platform for knowledge collection and sharing among creative communities and innovative citizens.The website includes a catalogue of promising case studies,a lab of scenarios-in-progress, and information about a travelling exhibition. The latter has reached Paris, where it opens tomorrow at Centre [continue …]

Indians are the world’s biggest bookworms, reading on average 10.7 hours a week, twice as long as Americans, according to a new survey. This is welcome news for me because I just heard that an ‘eastern economic edition’ of In The Bubble is to be published later [continue …]

Do come to the “Global Design Critical Debate” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on 14 October. There will be two introductions – by Rem Koolhaas and John Thackara. Then a panel discussion chaired by Joe Kerr will include Professor Leslie Sklair, Vice President for Global Sociology, London [continue …]

We need a new word for the insulting behaviour of politicians. I refer to their habit of turning up late to a conference, reading a banal speech to a room full of experts in the subject, and then leaving before hearing what anyone else has to say. The latest insulting [continue …]

What happens when citizens are able to ‘read’ product-specific information directly from a package’s RFID tag using a camera phone? Few business people that I’ve met have thought the consequences through. The widespread deployment of RFID tags is seen mainly as a way to improve the efficiency of supply webs [continue …]

This large hacker’s festival (3,000 participated last time) happens every four years in The Netherlands. It started with “The Galactic Hacker Party”, also known as the “International Conference on the Alternative use of Technology, Amsterdam”. Themes this year: freedom of speech, government transparency, computer insecurity, privacy, open software, open standards [continue …]

Is this happening a lot? I’ve been sent a map,”The Creative Map of Arnhem and Gelderland”. (It’s a pleasant area in the west of the Netherlands). The map plots the street address of every member of the creative class. It informs me that a fine artist named Stolker lives in [continue …]

I like the sound of the Romanian pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. The artist Daniel Knorr is responsible for an installation called European Influenza: the Pavilion is left empty, with only the traces of past exhibitions remaining. Sadly, not all critics have taken the hint: one burbles [continue …]

Philips boss Gerard Kleisterlee has a keen supporter in Tony Blair. Blair wants to channel far more of Europe’s budget to high-tech companies like Philips, and is campaigning against the “anomaly” that the EU spends 40% of its budget on farmers, who make up just 4% of the European workforce, [continue …]

Philips has blamed “poor consumer sentiment” for limiting its plans for growth. Gerard Kleisterlee, Philips’ CEO, told the Financial Times (16 June page 21) that “Europe is suffering from a weakened consumer retail environment”. Wrong, Mr K. Europe is not suffering, it is recovering from the false consciousness peddled [continue …]

The catalogues published by design schools when students graduate are frequently over-designed, under-edited, and consequently hopeless as communication tools. A welcome exception is MAID from the industrial design masters programme at Central Saint Martins in London. I was able to find out from it what the tutors and students [continue …]

My parents have been plagued by a rising volume of junk telephone calls from telemarketing outfits. Imagine my incredulity when I saw on the BBC this morning that one of the leading firms calls itself The Listening Company. One of the people we have to thank for the [continue …]

At deBalie in Amsterdam, a conference called Incommunicado is debating issues to do with information technology for development (ICT4D). I could not stay for today’s debate, organsed by Solomon Benjamin, on “culture and corporate sponsorship in the ICT4D context” – so I make this contribution remotely. Benjamin, quoting [continue …]

Another day, another new European city-region. Yesterday I was in Breda, one of five cities in the south of the Netherlands that are joining forces (and 1.2 million citizens) to form a new entity, Brabantstad. The format of the day was interesting. Delegates were grouped into three blocks – investors/property [continue …]

So who authored global warming? I have just read a heavy three-part story on the subject in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert called The Climate of Man. Kolbert writes that in the seventeen-eighties, carbon-dioxide levels stood at about the same level that they had been at two thousand [continue …]

An argument about authorship has once again overshadowed discussion of what matters about design. No sooner had Design Council director Hilary Cottam won the 2005 Design Museum Designer of the Year award, than an article by Deyan Sudjic in The Observer reported that an architect is furious [continue …]

One of the reasons I decided to live in France was attending a lecture by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who has just died at the age of 92. It was a rainy Monday evening five years ago, in February, in Montpellier – and yet more than 600 people crammed [continue …]

I learned recently that a new book is published every 30 seconds. I imagine at least that many new blogs are launched each day. Does the same rate of reproduction apply to conferences and events? I used to keep my own list of events until I discovered a bunch of [continue …]

The Argentine government has launched a competition to find a new use for its spectacular Palace of Mail and Telecommunications in Buenos Aires. One dearly hopes it will not become another bloated and tedious Gugghenheim – so maybe we should join the competition? Doors of Perception will provide an [continue …]

Build a bus stop in an urban slum and a vibrant community sprouts and grows around it. Such is the power of small interventions into complex urban situations. Small Change by Nabeel Hamdi is another of my ‘finds’ in Seattle’s anarchist bookshop – although on closer inspection the book [continue …]

We do realise that this blog is located, confusingly, at the website of a past event (Doors 8) – but we’re working hard to re-organise a family of Doors sites and things should be clearer in a week or so.

Understanding context – especially if the context is New York City – is easier said than done.

A Pimms-enhanced party at Demos, in London, was held to launch a new strategy for the organization called Building Everyday Democracy. According to the think tank’s director, Tom Bentley, “politics is fighting a losing battle against forms of theatre and spectacle that are more entertaining, and forms of conversation [continue …]