Doors of Perception is helping to lead a  two week course at Schumacher College which runs from [continue …]

Should transport systems be designed to save time – or calories? Who should own mobility sharing platforms: private companies? cities? us? What kind of ecosystem is needed to support the sharing platforms we want? These three questions are the focus of a workshop in London  on 25 November. I’ve asked a three friends [continue …]

STREE. REPORTAGE SUR LE SITE DE GAL [continue …]

Today, Plymouth University very generously awarded me an honorary doctorate.  Here is my short statement to this year’s graduating class in Design, Architecture and Environment.

I nearly failed to get here yesterday, and I want to tell you why.

The road from my house to the city passes through a spectacular gorge. Several weeks [continue …]

Clare Cooper interview with John Thackara, 08 August 2014

John, why do you think so much attention is being paid to the ideas around the notion of ’the commons’ right now?

The commons is an idea, and a practice, that generates meaning and hope. Millions of people are busy in projects [continue …]

Today I’m proud to announce that my new book, How To Thrive In The Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today will be published by Thames & Hudson on 7 September; (the US edition comes out in December). Sample extracts from each of the ten chapters are here.
[continue …]

In myriad projects around the world, a new economy is emerging whose core value is stewardship, not extraction. Growth, in this new story, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. These seedlings are cheering, but [continue …]

Under what circumstances would we become mindful stewards of living systems, not just their expoiters? The Dutch artist Annechien Meier re-connects us – viscerally, and emotionally – with our social and ecological surroundings.

[continue …]

Ugly Indians don’t blame their fellow citizens, or politicians, or ‘the system’: They act first, and then they talk. They make it “our” problem, not “your” problem.

(Above: A forest skills workshop in Big Tree Country)

Last month I spent a day in a small town of 2,000 [continue …]

On Saturday 12 December, together with Mansi Gupta, I’m running a workshop at the UnBox Festival in Delhi.

We will develop the programme of [continue …]

Public performance in Kisangani. Image © Studios Kabako

Studios Kabako, a dance company from Africa, is the winner of this year’s 2014 Curry Stone Design Prize, an important international award. Using [continue …]

The family of swallows that spent the summer in the eaves behind my office here in France have headed south for the winter. Soon, as Christmas beckons, they’ll reach their destinations: Botswana, Namibia or South Africa. After just two months gorging on insects, they’ll begin the epic journey back. The [continue …]

AUTUMN NEWSLETTER
Xskool on Grinda
UnBox in India
Forthcoming events

XSKOOL ON GRINDA

Fifty designers, artists and architects spent a week at our Xskool on Grinda last month to explore two questions: What does this food system taste like? and, How does this forest think?

One team [continue …]

READING SMALL SIGNALS

We’ve invested huge resources over the ages to keep the man-made world, and nature, separate – but there are signs everywhere that those those priorities are changing. Working through the consequences of that is a challenge [continue …]

I spent the last two weeks in-and-around a care home in England that looks after people with dementia and terminal illness, and their families – including, this time, mine.

In four wings, each with 12 residents, 24/7 care is provided by teams of trained professionals who work [continue …]

People go hungry not because of a shortage of production, but because the food available is too expensive, or they lack the land to grow it on. In California, the prototype of a combined social, political and technical  solution has been launched which promises to unlock the food system crisis.

[continue …]

This is the text of my talk at the OuiShare Festival in Paris today. 

Did any of you wander around in a group last night – trying to agree on a place to eat?

Welcome to the sharing economy!

Sharing is hard! And that’s just about one meal.

Think about the food [continue …]

The Tending and Grooming Station (below) is a wondrous collection of combs, brushes and other obscure (to me) gadgets. They are used to primp and revive pre-loved sweaters and cardigans that have been disfigured by bobbles and pilling – those unattractive fuzz balls that appear when short fibers misbehave on woolen garments. 

[continue …]

A two-year project in Belgium proposes new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value. Its design objective: a networked mobility ecosystem 

The signs on the small van describe the services it supports: Taxi; Pick-up; Delivery; Assistance; Vendor; Security; Rental.

Seven [continue …]

A new scheme in England connects office workers with living systems by means of a ‘wild mirror’: each workspace is twinned with an equivalent area of ecosystem regeneration. 

[continue …]

On Friday 14 March I’m doing a talk and discussion in Dublin.

(Image: Richard Giblett)

To effect system-level change – in health, energy, food, or mobility [continue …]

In Sharing Energy In The City, EDF and the the French National Research Agency (ANR) have challenged designers to rethink the production, harvesting, distribution, use, exchange and consumption of energy in our everyday life. They asked me to submit this text as fuel for the discussion.

[continue …]

In China, ‘battery-bikes’ are outselling cars by four-to-one. Pedelec sales are soaring in Europe, too.  Is this the start of system-wide phase-shift in transportation?

At a workshop in Delhi last year, during the UnBox Festival, I posed the following question to a group of 20  design, transport, and city [continue …]

An exhibition in Belgium poses a timely challenge: When confronted by such complex issues as an ageing population, resource depletion, migration, or growing impoverishment, how are we to balance the desire to do something positive, with the need to understand the back story before we intervene?

[continue …]

Two radically opposed models of development are being born in Ethiopia at the same time. One is small, local, socially fair, and ecologically respectful. The other takes the globalisation of fashion to a new and more destructive level.

No sooner had I posted a long [continue …]

In fashion, despite more than 400 eco labels, an incremental ‘do less harm’ approach has addressed the symptoms, but not the principal cause, of our difficulties: an economy based on perpetual growth in a finite world. A new and global ‘leave things better’ politics affirms our co-dependency with living systems [continue …]

Yesterday’s G8 Dementia Summit made much of the fact that millions will now be spent in a race to identify a cure or a ‘disease-modifying therapy’ for dementia.  The likely outcome will be the creation of a Dementia Industrial Complex – and the mass production of un-met expectations.A better way for [continue …]

“The global economy treats nature and material resources as if they were infinite, and knowledge as if it was scarce. We have to swap those two around”. (Michel Bauwens). Audio interview below the fold. 

Having enshrined the rights of nature in its constitution (*) Ecuador is now exploring how this principle, [continue …]

http://www.doorsofperception.com/?attachment_id=5172

My hosts last week at the Asia Pacific Design Library in Brisbane (which, on reflection, is probably the finest new library I have been in) asked me a few questions before our xskool:

Q: What does a typical day look like for you?

A: When I’m on the road, which [continue …]

Interni and the Be Open Foundation are publishing a book, called Gallery Of The Senses, that explores the ways we experience the contemporary world through sight, hearing,smell, taste, and touch. It then asks: Are we missing a sixth sense? Here is my contribution. 

Humanity’s troubles did not begin with [continue …]

In 1996, Ivan Illich (above) agreed to speak at Doors of Perception in Amsterdam on the theme of ‘speed’. [continue …]

In 1996, when Ivan Illich agreed to speak at Doors of Perception in Amsterdam, our theme that year was ‘speed’. The philosopher surprised us by bringing along two fellow speakers: Sebastian Trapp, a field biologist, and Matthias Rieger, a musicologist. [continue …]

Reflecting on the ways that swallows move about the earth reminded me of the time, in 1996, when Ivan Illich agreed [continue …]

As an artefact, the swallows’ nest is not exactly the Taj Mahal. It’s a ramshackle structure, made of mud pellets and straw, that’s stuck crookedly to the wall. But it seems to suit them well – or rather, the surrounding habitat does.

[continue …]

A hand, a map, a story: In each of 30 photographs made by Céline Boyer, a cartographic fragment of someone’s country of origin is projected onto the subject’s own hand. Cities, seas, rivers, roads and borders are glimpsed.

[continue …]

In what ways can design help people interact with living systems in ways that help both of them thrive? And, what small practical steps might one take to test the effect of small actions on the system as [continue …]

CONTENTS
On Getting Out Of The Tent
Xskool in Sweden: Design Within Living Systems
How To Use A Fringe-Dwelling Change Agent
Most-Read Stories
Recent Publications

Doors at 20: On getting out of the tent
Nearly twenty years ago, in November 1993, the year the web was invented, the first Doors of [continue …]

What are social-ecological systems? How do you design in them? What new skills do we need to do so? These three questions inform a Doors of Perception xskool that takes place in August as part of the  [continue …]

Packaged mass tours account for 80 percent of journeys to so-called developing countries, but destination regions receive five percent or less of the amount paid by the traveller. For local people on the ground, the injustice is absurd: if I were to pay e1,200 for a week long trek in [continue …]

By some accounts the world’s information is doubling every two years. This impressive if unprovable fact has [continue …]

I’m totally thrilled that my book has just been published in Spanish by my fabulous friends at Editorial Disegnio in Mexico City. Please tell everyone you know, once met, or vaguely heard of, who is Spanish-speaking, and who [continue …]

(Illustration: Sameer Kulavoor Ghoda Bicycle Project)

At a workshop in Delhi a few weeks back, during the [continue …]

In his new show at the German Architecture Center (DAZ) Matthias Megyeri has developed a design language for the artefacts of protection and security in public space.

Megyeri poses the question: does protection have to [continue …]

The UK government’s digital services platform, gov.uk, has won the Design of the Year award – and if I were running a big IT consulting firm grown fat on big government contracts, I’d be worried.

Gov.uk is a revolutionary web operation that governments around the world are beginning to [continue …]

Over the ages we’ve invested huge amounts of effort and energy to keep cities and nature separate. What would it mean if that were about to change? 

[continue …]

(Photo: Mapping a bioregion with plants – Joachim Robert Cyanotype workshop at FuturePerfect 2012)

In what ways can design [continue …]

[The chart above is from the online catalogue of cargo bikes at Nutzrad]

India’s many millions of bicycle and [continue …]

(Image from http://openwear.org/)

In recent months a working party in India, chaired by Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure & [continue …]