I was sorting through some old and priceless documents, such as the five year-old proceedings of a CHI (Computer Human Interaction) conference. In it I encountered a thesaurus that lists 137 terms that crop up in the papers selected for the event. The list runs from agents, to work analysis, [continue …]

Never mind about tarmac-covered land and the fate of the planet – what about sales of my book? I’ve been jolted awake by a reference in Future Now to a research paper that describes the use of an “Epidemics-Type Aftershock Sequence model to track how information about a book [continue …]

Land is a finite resource but we consume it as if it were limitless – especially for mobility.

John Whitelegg, a transport ecologist, reports that in Switzerland, the land allocation for road transport is 113 m2 per person – and for all other living purposes (houses/gardens and yards) it’s 20-25 [continue …]

I was once involved in a project called Presence in which we were given quite a lot of EU money to investigate how the social needs of elderly people might be met by the Internet. One of our test sites was a small village in Italy, called Peccioli. When our [continue …]

This blog is part of the build-up to Doors of Perception 8, which takes place in New Delhi next March and is on the theme, “INFRA: Platforms for social innovation and how to design them”. What infrastructures are needed to enable bottom-up, edge-in social innovation – and how do we [continue …]

I’m repeating a plug here (published before in our newsletter) for this memorable paper, by Simon Marvin and Will Medd, about the circulation, deposition and removal of fat in bodies, sewers and cities. “Our emphasis is on the metabolisms of fat across the different levels of bodies, infrastructures and [continue …]

The world is awash in reports, from think tanks and research companies, telling us what the next social or tech trend is going to be. Europe’s research policy makers had a good idea: aggregate the best of these, and see what picture emerges. They created the Fistera network [continue …]

I found some amazing new numbers in a 2004 survey of attitudes to consumption in the United States. More than eight out of ten Americans believe that society’s priorities are “out of whack” and 93 percent agree that Americans are too focused on working and making money and not enough [continue …]

The picture shows the number of fairs and markets per year, in 1732, in the Occitania region in the south of France (where I live). The small blobs denote three fairs per year, the biggest one, 13. I’ve decided to perceive the picture as [continue …]

There’s renewed interest in ensemble theatre as a form of organisation. A meeting of theatre directors and producers in the UK last month opened with this quote from Joan Littlewood, in 1961: ‘I do not believe in the supremacy of the director, designer, actor – or even of the writer. [continue …]

Back to the soft stuff. “Might social problems that communities confront be structured as the kind of knowledge creation and/or problem solving that the open source software community has found new ways to solve?”. So asks Pekka Himanen (author of “The Hacker Ethic”) and colleagues in a recent report. [continue …]

I know our focus in Doors 8 is supposed to be on social infrastructures, but interesting material on the hard kind keeps turning up, too. I found a report about rocks and rubble, for example, which describes a more sustainable system of resource management. The life cycle of construction [continue …]

The reports of last Friday’s Project Leaders’ Round Table, which we organised together with Virtual Platform, are now online here.
We’ve posted summaries, most of the project presentations, a bunch of pictures, and a text called “Conclusions”. The latter text, I now realise, contains more questions than answers. [continue …]

What is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a design research project? If we knew, we’d probably make more realistic budgets for things like co-ordination, and communication, that often don’t get paid for, even though we do the work. Or else, if we knew the true time costs, but [continue …]

One of the pre-Doors 8 field projects we’re supporting is an India leg of Debra Solomon’s ongoing quest to enable “nomadic banquets”. The idea is that people move round a city from street vendor to street vendor – each one being th best at, for example, dumplings, noodles, vodka martinis, [continue …]

“In our economy, everything has a price – but nothing, it seems, has a value. We find it hard to really tell whether the things we value are growing or dying”. So begins an excellent interview by Joe Flower with “anti-economist” Hazel Henderson. The yardsticks we have chosen to measure [continue …]

The Chinese government intends to build 1,000 new museums across the country by 2015.A scary piece by Elizabeth Casale in The Platform, an e-zine on cultural policy, says that with approximately 100 urban areas with a population of 1 million or more, China’s place-based cultural strategy favours buildings as a [continue …]

(click on the image for an image collection.)
On Thursday and Friday, 18-19 November, 60 people met in Amsterdam for the Project Leaders’ Round Table. Our aim was to learn from each other about success factors in design research projects. We heard about projects that were based [continue …]

“The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration – that is to say, its supposedly ‘softer’ parts – are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement” says the economist Paul David in a draft paper [continue …]

For many veterans of early Doors of Perception conferences, Rick Prelinger’s talks were a highlight. Illustrated by American movie and advertising ephemera, Rick’s presentations featured American children, animals, farmers, industrial workers, superheroes, pioneers heading West, crash test dummies, and many others. Now Rick works at the Internet Archive and has [continue …]

It’s been a tough week. There’s a lot of anguish about. Do something small, like
this.

In yesterday’s email newsletter, under the headline Sending the acorn, not the tree, we directed you to a .pdf of the Doors 8 poster — that was not there.
Apologies for the inconvenience. Please try again; it should now work. (It’s in “Download” on the right of [continue …]

The theme of Doors 8 is “Infra”, which we interpret to span both hard and soft aspects of infrastructure in a networked society. Infra therefore includes people as well as systems. Now we keep reading that, in Europe alone, there’s a shortage of 1.5 million information technology workers. A question [continue …]

Will health systems bankrupt the west, drive medical staff to despair, and dissatify their users in perpetuity? The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (Nesta), together with the Health Modernisation Agency, both from the UK, are supporting a series of projects to do with service design for health [continue …]

“Avoidance of difficulty or unpleasantness. Disavowal of extreme situations. Retreat into distraction. These appear to be the hallmarks of the fast-encroaching New Dark Ages”. No, these words are not about the U.S. election results. They’re a comment by Anne Marie Willis, editor of Design Philosophy Papers, on the state of [continue …]

Last week I commented on the puerile computer game imagery being used in corporate advertising by firms like BT. Its now Unisys’ turn to insult our intelligence with its “3D Visible Enterprise” campaign. Every sentence is sententious. “It’s more predictable because it’s visible”. “Imagine any change, and know how it [continue …]

Gloom-and-doom mongering can be self-indulgent for the mongerers, and de-motivating for the mongereed. All credit therefore to Adbusters for breaking that pattern with a brilliant come-back issue. It’s about “The Day The World Ends”, and contains some great writing. “”The collapse was only a problem so long as we thought [continue …]

Am I the last person to hear the expression “on brand” used in the context of design? It was one of several expressions that I heard for the first time at the World Creative Forum in London a couple of weeks ago. Another novelty, for me, was the description of [continue …]

I’m delighted to report that Margrit Kennedy, a world authority on complementary currencies, has agreed to join us at Doors 8 in New Delhi. www.margritkennedy.de
Non-cash economic systems are, for me, where a genuinely new economy is being born. And where so-called emerging economies are in [continue …]

Bruce Mau has written to say he is “surprised” by the tone and content of my email newsletter piece last week about his new exhibiton, Massive Change.
What I said originally was:
“We will build a global mind. We will design evolution. We will eradicate poverty”. No ifs and no buts are [continue …]

Britain’s National Health Service has identified five “key dimensions of patient experience” – and time and speed issues dominate. The top two issues are first, waiting times for appointments, and access to services; and second, time given to discuss health/medical problems face-to-face with health care professionals. A third priority, [continue …]

When an IVR/Speech (Interactive Voice Recognition) system does not meet a customer’s expectations, they become frustrated and hang up or “zero out” to a live agent. According to Forrester Research, customer satisfaction levels with IVR systems fall in the 10 percent range, compared with a satisfaction rate of approximately 80 [continue …]

This won’t be news to film buffs but I’m interested in the lessons for design projects. The Danish film cooperative Dogme have developed an interesting model of work. Co-founders von Trier and Vinterberg developed a set of ten rules that a Dogme film must conform to. These rules, referred to [continue …]

Has anyone else noticed how the tv ads of tech companies are becoming indistinguishable from computer games? IBM, British Telecom and Hewlett Packard have all released TV commercials and print ads that feature young professionals floating, gravity-free, in abstract urban spaces. High altitude, low-bandwidth thinking in action.

Hilary Cottam is hoping to join us in New Delhi. She and Charles Leadbeater are writing a paper on “open welfare”. They observe: “The open model is not a traditional service delivery model. It relies on mass participation ion creation of the service. The boundary between users and producers is [continue …]

Architects frequently complain to me that the architectural models they make for competitions cost them tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. That’s curious, because one-tenth scale model of a person standing can be purchased for 75 cents – far less than the $5 it costs to [continue …]

Welcome to the website and weblog for Doors of Perception 8. The box on the right of your screen lists all the usual notices and announcements you’d expect for a Doors event. The top box, “What & Why”, is an introduction to the event — why we’re doing it, what [continue …]

What are the key success factors in setting up design research projects? In November 2004, jointly with Virtual Platform, we organised a meeting in Amsterdam for sixty project leaders from 10 countries to discuss this question. When inviting participants, we focussed on projects that [continue …]

What is a design metropolis? Should a city aspire to become one?
A symposium called New Design Cities was organized by Marie-Josée Lacroix for the Canadian Centre for Architecture; Doors contributed a speaker and communications support.
The event cast a critical eye over the policies and programs of Montreal, Saint-Etienne [continue …]

(This is the text of my closing keynote talk at the European Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Helsinki, 18 September, 2003.)
A few years back, I arrived in New York to meet my daughter Kate for a vacation. She seemed her normal sunny self but, as we chatted in the [continue …]

A lecture given to the Design Recast conference organised at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht by Jouke Kleerebezem.
Trying to get a grip on design is rather like trying to grab hold of a shoal of herring. Orca whales do this by blowing upside-down funnels of air bubbles from [continue …]

This is my lecture to a conference at Westergasfabriek, in Amsterdam, called Creativity and the City, on 25 September 2003.
In Rajhastan, travelling storytellers go from village to village, unannounced, and simply start a performance when they arrive. Although each story has a familiar plot – the story telling tradition dates [continue …]

This is the text of my closing keynote talk at the European Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Helsinki, 18 September, 2003.
A few years back, I arrived in New York to meet my daughter Kate for a vacation. She seemed her normal sunny self but, as we chatted in the [continue …]

(This is my lecture to a conference at Westergasfabriek, in Amsterdam, called Creativity and the City, on 25 September 2003)
In Rajhastan, travelling storytellers go from village to village, unannounced, and simply start a performance when they arrive. Although each story has a familiar plot – the story telling tradition [continue …]

If the throw-away society is over, how do we design for longevity in products and services? Eternally Yours, a Dutch foundation, organised a round-the-clock, 24-hour event to look at this timely question. Eighty different projects, case studies and scenarios – all dealing with time in design – were [continue …]

Can you imagine a way to enable novel and exciting interactions in public space, using new technologies? A first prize of ten thousand euros was at stake in Fused Space , an international competition organised by the Dutch design foundation Premsela to [continue …]

In which I talk to Winy Maas about the design of webs, networks and archipelagos of cities and regions. This story was published in July 2003 In Domus magazine.
Sustainable cities, working cities, are necessarily complex, heavily linked, and diverse. As the English writer Will Hutton has commented, just as local [continue …]

I was asked by the main Japanese design magazine, Axis, to write an ‘afterword’ for their special issue on Dutch design. I took the opportunity to reflect on trends in design policy in other countries.
Dutch design has enjoyed tremendous international success and prestige in recent years. Can it last?
One reason [continue …]

(In which John Thackara talks to Winy Maas about the design of webs, networks and archipelagos of cities and regions. This was published in July 2003 in Domus magazine)
Sustainable cities, working cities, are necessarily complex, heavily linked, and diverse. As the English writer Will Hutton has commented, just as local [continue …]

Our aim in DoorsEast2, in Bangalore was to learn how to design services, enabled by ICT, that meet basic needs in new ways – and to share this knowledge with citizens, education, industry, and professionals. This was our second international encounter in India. It [continue …]