Architecture used to focus mainly on the design of buildings. Nowadays, the spaces between them are also important. Applications such as geocaching make even small real-world spaces easy to locate and access; this transforms once marginal spaces into viable assets. A new variant of this theme, called [continue …]

According to an India survey in Britain’s New Scientist magazine, ‘if the sub-continent gets everything right it will have the third largest economy in the world by 2050, after China and the US. India is not yet a knowledge superpower, but it stands on the threshold’. Is this a [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.

Bangalore Badarpur Border, curated by Pooja Sood at the Apeejay Media Gallery, explores the myths, landscape and imagery of Bombay. It features the work of Shaina Anand, (from Mumbai, trained in film in New York);Ashok Sukumaran (from Simla, trained in architecture in Delhi, and in Media Art in Los [continue …]

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 …]

The spectacle of Bono and other glossy celebs singing for tsunami victims was a somewhat quease-inducing sight on the box the other night. As P Sainath points out in indiatogether,”Number of homes damaged by the tsunami in Nagapattinam: 30,300. Number of homes destroyed by the Congress-NCP Government in Mumbai: [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 …]

So Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Laboratory at MIT, is to bestow laptop computers on poor people for just $100. To the punters in Davos, where Negroponte was promoting his project, $100 probably sounded cheap: many were paying $100 an hour to be there. But in Mali, [continue …]

I like to keep track of a possibly meaningless statistic: Googling ‘design’ + ‘homeland security’. Today’s total, at 1,310,000, is up 20,000 on a month ago. But I have a feeling the the security-through-fear bubble may be deflating. One sign that people may not be as scared as [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 …]

Usman Haque has posted an enticing description of his pre-Doors8 workshop on Open Source Architecture. Please remember that that you need to register first in order to take part in Usman’s workshop.

Online auctions are booming. The phenomenon has been been labelled the ‘march of the micro-sellers’. But could sites like eBay, with its 105 million users, be harbingers of a more important transformation, when individuals start to exchange time and services online? Wingham Rowan in the UK is developing the technical [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 …]

An article by Rob Blackhurst in the UK’s New Statesman states that “whilst think tanks and their policy wonks have proliferated, their influence on policy has declined sharply”. This piece has sparked a lively debate at the Demos blog about “how to stay influential and competitive, [continue …]

One of the North-South links we will explore at Doors 8 concerns the importance of un-designed urban areas as sites of social innovation. Half or more of the inhabitants of major South Asian cities like Delhi are ‘illegal’, but they are economically active, too. In Europe interest is growing in [continue …]

By 2020 globalization is likely to take on much more of a non-Western face. So says the US National Intelligence Council (NIC), a think-tank that advises the CIA on the likely course of future events. A new report called The Contradictions of Globalization says that Asia will “alter the rules [continue …]

I’ve been asked to give a lecture on ‘design in development’ at a conference in Amsterdam on 8 March. It will be an interesting opportunity to test the waters in Europe ahead of the main event of Doors 8 itself. I’m more than a little uneasy about the [continue …]

There’s a curious mismatch between the demand for design and art education among school leavers (see my story about “Study art and never be unemployed” below) and the reluctance of industry to fund research. Design Observer drew my attention to a claim in Fortune that, in the USA, [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 …]

When the Dutch word for urban planning, “planologie’, was first used in 1929, its literal meaning was ‘the study of surfaces’. Planners today work in a more multi-dimensional context – one that Luuk Boelens describes as ‘a motley assemblage of multiple times and spatial realities’. Urban planning is doomed [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 …]

Zaid Hassan writes with the polite suggestion, concerning our list of recommended books (see button on the right) that “perhaps a couple of Indian/Sub-Continent authors wouldn’t go amiss?”. Mea culpa:my first list is indeed horribly occicentric. Here are Zaid’s recommendations:
– Igniting Minds” by PJ Abdul Kalam (President of India).
– The [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 …]

On the heels of news that Media Lab Europe is to close, and that European IT research is failing (see below) comes a more cheerful message: Kaos Pilots in Denmark is to stay open. A new prospectus has been published with the announcement of a plan to [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 …]

According to Computer Weekly today, a high-level European Commission assessment panel has concluded that European Union research into information society technologies (IST) is failing, despite it spending more than a billion euros a year on the area. The panel said “more investment and less bureaucracy” are [continue …]

Am I alone in becoming terminally irritated by the macho posturing that passes for thought in business schools and their journals? An article about service design by Uday Karmarkar, in Harvard Business Review, is typical of the genre. “A tidal-wave of change bearing down on the services sector [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 …]

Tristram Hunt’s terrific book about the rise and fall of the Victorian city in Britain is full of insights about about infrastructure. One reason for the decline of cities, for Hunt, was the failure to control housing densities. By 1897 the quaker inspired Cadbury Bounville estate was [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 …]

Tech-filled “houses of the future” are usually grotesque but darkly entertaining, and MIT’s new one does not disappoint. Hundreds of sensing components are installed in nearly every part of Live-In Place Lab. The sensors are used to develop ‘innovative user interface applications that help people easily control [continue …]

Many architects are eager to help with post-tsunami rebuilding in Asia, but “now’s not the time for them to switch off their computers and rush for the next flight to Indonesia or Sri Lanka. They’d have little to offer, and would be just more mouths to feed. My advice to [continue …]

When potential students or project clients ask me which is the best architecture or design school, I usually give them the names of a few institutions but also insist: ‘don’t take my word for it, get hold of current students or researchers there, and ask them what it’s like’. Even [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 …]

A core element will be Project Clinics (on the Wednesday and Friday). In these clinics, experts gathered together for Doors will evaluate real world projects and, we hope, help teams refocus their work in light of the lessons learned in the rest of the event.
We organised a similar event in [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 …]

Our partner in the organization of Doors 8, Aditya Dev Sood, was in Phuket, by the sea, with 15 members of his family, on a post-wedding vacation, when the tsunami struck. Thankfully Aditya and his family, at least, are safe. So, too, so far as we’ve heard, are other friends [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 …]