Every year the Institute For The Future publishes a map of the decade (ahead). The 2005 version is not yet online, but I was delighted to learn, during my visit to Palo Alto this week, that Jason Tester, an alumnus of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, is helping IFTF enhance [continue …]

Is there something in the air in this town? Seattle’s W Hotel has more features than I need and they don’t all work. A 64-page catalogue in my room lists an extraordinary array of services ”masterfully orchestrated to surround you with style, service and comfort”. A menu for pets is [continue …]

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 …]

The most entertaining challenger to Michael Bloomberg for Mayor of New York is the Reverend Billy , leader of the The Church of Stop Shopping. The Reverend has announced plans to conduct his entire campaign on premises of the Starbucks Corporation; he will offer 258 sermons in 258 locations [continue …]

The notion of collective intelligence, a term coined by the French philosopher Pierre Levy, continues to engage original thinkers. In France, Jean-François Noubel has published a paper called Collective Intelligence: The Invisible Revolution . And Michel BauwensI has sent me the draft of an essay on Peer [continue …]

A group of artists in California called Heavy Trash has launched a guerrilla war against gated communities, the self-contained housing estates that are walled off from the outside world but ring more and more American cities. In a stealth operation, carried out at dawn, a group of 20 architects, [continue …]

A trouble-maker sent me a copy of Richard Florida’s new book, The Flight of the Creative Class – hoping, no doubt, that I would be rude about it. Perish the thought. Florida’s new book has two virtues. First, Florida argues for “a broadening of the definition of creativity that [continue …]

The European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, wants to create a European Institute of Technology to compete with MIT. According to one report, there’s a belief that “Europe needs an institution capable of  bringing together its currently too-dispersed scientific and teaching excellence”. Instead of creating one new institution, the EIT would [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 …]

This sounds like a fab summer engagement. Lucas Verweij, who Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design has been fortunate to land as its new Dean, is organising a summer school entitled ‘Big and Beautiful, Designing the Transformation of Rotterdam Harbour’. The two week course takes place at [continue …]

As a system, mobility is locked into a mode of perpetual growth in a world whose carrying capacity is limited. The status quo policy of ‘predict and provide’ promises more travel (of people and goods), forever, but using new technologies and integrated systems to make mobility more efficient.

A second design [continue …]

My book isn’t even out yet (the US publication date is on Friday; UK/Europe is at the end of May) and already someone has raised a sneaky question about its basic argument.Fast Company have a section in their book reviews called “Things We Didn”t Like” and they say: [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 …]

A new survey of front-line researchers in 25 EU countries reveals surprising devations from tech policy orthodoxy. The so-called Fistera Delphi (it’s a system for averaging the results of an opinon survey) asked experts, including this writer, to prioritise research priorities for 2010 and beyond. Strong endorsement was [continue …]

We have posted several more of the presentations from Doors 8. Among these are a text from Ezio Manzini in which he develops his critique of “the tunnel that a mistaken idea of comfort, and an equally mistaken idea of economic growth, have driven us into”. He proposes a new [continue …]

Do mixed societies innovate more than homogeneous ones? How do new ideas and innovations emerge when people of diverse cultures interact? Comedia has launched an eighteen month project across cities in several countries called The Intercultural City to find out how interractions between cultures might be formed into [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 …]

A reminder that among numerous archives of Doors 8 stuff not on this site is Debra Solomon’s Nomadic Banquet. We are still receiving presentations and other material which will be posted here in due course.

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 …]

Bob Stein writes to inform me of a fascinating experiment in creating a collective memory of an ephemeral event – albeit one which promises to be the most photographed art work ever. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park was dismantled after a brief run of just sixteen days. [continue …]

Dear Solly,
My attention has been drawn to your post of 28 March on the Sarai Commons-Law mailing list.
I am usually pretty relaxed about criticism. After all, if our events failed to provoke discussion and disagreement, they would be feeble events indeed. One reason I was so happy to be [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.

A personal “Aha!” moment in Delhi was the realisation that re-mix is not just about new music and vj-ing. Re:mix also signals a broader cultural shift away from the narcissistic obsession with individual authorship that have rendered everything from art to management so tiresome in recent times. (In architecture circles [continue …]

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 …]

A session at Doors 8 on service design for emerging economies left a tricky question unanswered: how do we determine when is a market is ‘emerging’ – and when it has emerged? And, is it possible to design the relationship between small pilot projects, as potential tipping points, and large [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 …]

Ten days offline, but not in silence. From my New Delhi lodging house in Defence Colony I heard no airconditioning roar or traffic. What I did hear was: Pigeons fidgeting in the metal box above my window that used to contain the airconditioning unit. The long moans of freight train [continue …]

What does it mean to design a platform for social innovation?

Doors of Perception 8 on the theme of “infra” took place in New Delhi, India. The event involved designers and entrepreneurs from different parts of the world. [continue …]

Indian users of technology-based devices cannot rely on formal networks of distribution, support and maintenance: these are often incomplete, unimaginative or unrealistically priced. They therefore turn to the temporary fixes or ‘jugaads’ carried out by Indian street technicians. An army of pavement-based engineers and fixers keeps engines, television tubes, compressors [continue …]

I have arrived in New Delhi at the same time as Condoleeza Rice. She is in town to sell F16s and nuclear power station technology; I am in town to sell the idea that design for social capital is a better investment. While Condi shows powerpoints to air force generals, [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!

India-bound Michael Coburn draws my attention to a paper by Cory Doctorow on how Digital Rights Management will affect the developing world. The piece is written for an International Telecommunications Union report aimed at telecoms regulators in national governments around the world; they are trying to figure out which DRM [continue …]

A wondferful profile by Lynn Barber in Sundays’s (UK) Observer features the career of ‘The Scissor Sister’ or ‘human Google’ Edda Tasiemka who, after 55 years, is selling her amazing cuttings library and retiring. ‘Whizzy management types are fond of telling us that nowadays you can find everything [continue …]

A large meeting last week at the Tropen Institute in Amsterdam marked the launch of a new project, Dutch Design In Development (DDiD). Participants ranged from young designers struggling to make a living by importing textiles from Africa, to eco-tourism marketeers, and consultants who advise global companies how [continue …]

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 …]

Politicians, under pressure for some awful action, sometimes play a clever trick: they deny responsibility for a different action, that nobody had accused them of. The supporters of business schools are playing a similar trick at the moment. For two weeks running, The Economist has lambasted critics of business school [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 …]

A full-page story in yesterday’s Financial Times (March 1, page 9) waxes lyrical about ‘reality tv for the boardroom’ – and goes on to describe the use of video footage to ‘reduce the growing distance between the corporate elite and consumers’. Executives in multinational companies, understates the FT, ‘often find [continue …]