Doors of Perception Report
January 2005
By John Thackara
This newsletter is free, but every two years we use it to publicise the
Doors of Perception conference. This issue is one of those: it's half
about Doors 8 in Delhi. If you are not interested in that event, or in
making it happen, skip the first stories and scroll down to Other News.
BETWEEN DISASTER AND DAILY LIFE
The tsunami has brought tragedy and disaster to millions of people. We
believe the best way for Doors 8 to respond is by looking for ways to
empower people with the knowledge, tools and they need to rebuild their
own lives and communities. This brings our theme, "infra", sharply into
focus. We will reshape Doors 8 in response to the disaster in three
ways. First, we will organise a session to evaluate the design
challenges revealed by the disaster. We are therefore keen to hear from
people in, or going to, areas affected who can brief us, first-hand, on
some of those challenges. Second, we will prioritise the part of agenda
that asks: how best shall we share design knowledge when and where it is
most needed? Alex Steffen from worldchanging.com, and Jimmy Wales from
wikipedia, will join our discussion on this issue. Thirdly, we will free
up more time for Project Clinics when the expertise of delegates coming
to Doors 8 can be applied to the development of future projects.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/
WHY "INFRA"?
Doors of Perception 8 runs from 21-26 March at the Habitat Centre in New
Delhi. Designers, grassroots innovators and entrepreneurs will discuss
"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 design them? Doors 8 will address these two
questions from a variety of angles over five days:
- Plenary think-piece presentations;
- Project Clinics;
- A social innovation bazaar;
- One-to-one conversations;
- An exhibit of 100 years of media artifacts from India;
- Encounters and exchanges in the city and around.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/
WHAT'S THE TAKEAWAY?
Your takeaway from Doors 8 will be next-generation service concepts,
plus the connections and capabilities you need to implement them. In the
post-event survey that followed Doors 7 on "Flow" we asked delegates:
"Did you take away any insights that will inspire your work?" They
answered: "No, alas, none" (3%); "Yes, one at least" (43%); "Yes, more
than one" (54%). To the question," how many people are you happy to have
met at Doors?" they replied: "Zero" (8%); "1-4" (54%); "5-10" (29%);
"More than 10 people" (9%). They also mentioned as valued takeaways:
critical design thinking; inspiration from other fields of work;
high-level discussions on design and social networks; and "the
willingness of the entire group to be challenged".
STREET LEVEL INNOVATION
One session at Doors 8 will look at the street as a site of innovation.
Sixty percent of the population in many Asian cities lives in
shantytowns: what can we learn from how they innovate to survive? We'll
hear about migrants' lives in Chinese cities, and compare New Delhi
street life with the ways that New York is trying to breathe life back
into its over-sanitised streets. The British story of Up-My-Street.com
will help us appreciate how hard it is to add service quality to locality.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/speakers.html
ETHNOGRAPHY AND ETHNICITY
Now that 'tech' has ceased to be a driver of innovation on its own, some
advanced companies are using ethnography in an effort to make their
innovation processes more people-centered. Designers from Motorola,
Intel, HP and Nokia will explain at Doors 8 how they use social research
in the design of services and devices. In discussion we'll ask, how
meaningful is the ethnographic knowledge they're using? How does this
approach to innovation compare to the kinds of bottom-up creativity
found on the street?
TOOLS FOR CITIZEN SERVICES
The difference between social services provided by the state, and
services enabled by the state but implemented by citizens, is pertinent
in disaster relief. We will also explore the transition to what Ezio
Manzini calls 'enabling services' in the context of health systems in
the North. Hilary Cottam and Robin Murray will describe their "Touching
The State" work in the UK. We will also see the results of a project
commissioned by Hugo Manassei at Nesta, and the National Health Service,
in which young service designers explore new ways to support "journeys
of care".
MONEY AS MIDDLEWARE
Sixty percent of the work done in the world is "non-market". Among the
enabling infrastructures now emerging are Local Economy Trading Schemes
(LETS), alternative currencies, and so-called open money systems. Most
of these local schemes are manually administered. But service designers
Live|Work will bring us news of web- and wireless-enabled non-market
infrastructures for sharing knowledge, tools, space, time and other
resources. Sunil Abraham will describe Indian barter systems as
benchmarks for these new service concepts. And Margit Kennedy will
explain how complementary currencies influence traditional ones.
PROJECT CLINICS
What does it mean in practice to design a platform for social
innovation? To find out, we have scheduled two days of Doors 8 for
Project Clinics. In these clinics, experts gathered together for Doors
will evaluate real world projects and help their teams refocus them in
light of the lessons learned in the conference. By way of introduction
Tilly Blyth, the new curator of computing at London's Science Museum,
will put this question into historical context. Jan Chipchase, who uses
live video as a medium for street-level innovation in Tokyo, will demo
this technique.
SHARING DESIGN KNOWLEDGE
Someone, somewhere, has probably 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,
often already exist. But a lot of social innovation is not picked up on
the radar screens watched by service designers in the North. And when
need arises - such as with the tsunami - the North is often ignorant of
what people affected actually need. So they do things with the best of
intentions like drop the wrong kind of food. The question arises: can
websites and wikis help us learn about, and share, living contextual
knowledge? Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia and Alex Steffen from
Worldchanging will discuss this with grassroots innovators.
DO YOU WANT TO DO GOOD?
Doors 8 is not about aid or development in a paternalistic sense. It's
about collaborative value creation among peers. Don't come to 'do good'
but to learn about shared-use models of communication, and new ways of
using - and paying for - devices and networks. Doors 8 is taking place
in India because, with one fifth of the world's population, it's an
ideal place to explore what it will mean to design tomorrow's services
that use people more, not less.
CULTURE, or CAPITALISM?
We would dearly love to invite you all to come to Doors 8 for free.
Sadly, we can't do that, and must ask you to pay to participate. For
young designers and design students, who the event is really for, the
registration can be expensive. Some complain that we have become too
"commercial". But commerce is not the reason you have to pay. Doors 8 is
a not-for-profit event. Indeed, it will be subsidized by the Doors
Foundation. A Dutch government subsidy pays for about 20% of the direct
costs of Doors' activities - conference, website, professional workshops
- but the balance has to be paid for by sponsorship and ticket sales.
Doors 8 is sponsored by Nokia, HP, Intel, Nesta, and some generous
private sponsors - but their support means that the event goes ahead,
not that we make a profit. If we charged you for all our costs, and all
our time, and charged you a commercial rate, you'd be paying four times
more.
RECYCLE THAT ENDOWMENT
We sympathize with MIT. It seems the value of the university's endowment
has dropped by a cool billion dollars during the stock market
'correction'. If you know to whom that missing billion went, please ask
them to recycle one percent of it to Doors. With that as an endowment,
we can expand our work, and reduce ticket prices.
HOW DID THEY KNOW?
When we asked the one thousand people who came to Doors 7 on Flow, in
2002, how they first heard about the event, they replied:
- "Someone told me in person": 42%
- "Someone sent me a personal mail": 9%
- "Doors email newsletter (this one)": 19%
So word-of-mouth means everything to us in promoting Doors 8. If you
know of people who could benefit from going to Doors 8, please tell them
now.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/
OTHER NEWS
WEB COLLISION SPACE
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 used in a new information politics involving competition
between the official, the non-governmental, and the underground. For
Jodi Dean, Rogers' book is "light-years ahead of other research". And
Bruno Latour celebrates the fact that "finally, someone investigates the
Web's ability to express, renew, and disrupt the age-old tools of
political expression." Rogers is Director of govcom.org in Amsterdam
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10329&ttype=2
GLOBAL ATTENTION GAP
Ethan Zuckerman a researcher at Berkman Center for Internet and Society
at Harvard Law School, is researching what he calls the Global Attention
Gap - the tendency of major media outlets to report more thoroughly on
rich nations than on poor ones. Ethan's current project - Global
Attention Profiles - creates graphical portraits of where different
media sources are focusing their attention, and demonstrates
correlations between these distributions and economic and population
statistics.
http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman/
FLYING FISH FIASCO
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 salmon from Norway to Japan is an example of excellent
logistics performance and crazily misplaced priorities that characterize
this mobile economy. Two Danish researchers describe "A crazy case of
flying fish", in the latest issue of the excellent and always
fascinating journal, World Transport Policy & Practice.
http://www.eco-logica.co.uk/WTPPdownloads.html
LAND GRAB
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 m2 per person. The knowledge economy, far from
reducing our greedy consumption of land, accelerates it: the spread of
car parking around universities, hospitals and airports stimulate higher
levels of car commuting, demands for more road space, and hence land
take." Cars are only used for 2.8% of the time and then often by one
person; the rest of the time they are parked somewhere doing nothing.
Allocating land to such inefficient uses is bad value for money and bad
prioritization given the many pressures on land" says Whitelegg.
http://www.eco-logica.co.uk/reports.html
EXXON SECRETS
Check out Exxon secrets, a new website designed for Greenpeace by Josh
On and Amy Balkin. Their brilliant "They Rule" interface has been
adapted for a database that tracks Exxon funding to a series of
individuals and institutions that "have worked to undermine solutions to
global warming and climate change".
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/
YES YES YES
The World Trade Organization has said it "deplores" the Yes Men, and
George W. Bush has called them "garbage men". Why could that be?
http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/dow/
PLEASE RELEASE ME
Esther Dyson is preeminent among Internet gurus in understanding the
value of embodiment - the proximity of bodies to each other - in today's
network society. So we're happy to recommend Esther's annual conference,
Release. It runs just before Doors 8, and in Arizona, but some of her
delegates are rich and have their own G5s so persuade them to come on to
Delhi and hitch a ride. Speakers include Marc Andreessen, Claiborne
Barksdale, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Howard Gardner, and Anne Mulcahy.
March 20 to 22, 2005, Scottsdale, Arizona.
http://www.release1-0.com.com/
TACTICAL TECH
The aim of the Tactical Technology Collective'is to advance the use of
new technologies as a tactical tool for civil-society in developing and
transition countries. The group, together with Mahiti.org, is organising
Asia Source to bring together over 100 people from 20 countries to
increase the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) amongst the
voluntary sector in South and South East Asia. Asia Source is a
seven-day hands-on workshop aimed at building the technical skills of
those working with NGOs in South and South East Asia. Bangalore, India -
Jan 28-Feb 04 2005.
http://www.tacticaltech.org/
SPACE AND TIME DESIGN FOR KIDS
An international symposium on the design of environments for young
children will take place at Domus Academy in Milan and be combined with
visits to schools in the city of Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy. It's a
unique opportunity for architects to learn about the design philosophy
and detail construction that supports the world-renowned approach to
early years education developed by Reggio Children.
http://www.sightlines-initiative.com/sl/architecture&pedagogy.htm
CREATIVE CAPITALISTS
A two-day international conference in Amsterdam will examine the new
interconnections between culture and economy. The speakers are a policy
maker's dream team: Charles Leadbeater, Tony Blair's favourite
futurist,; Charles Landry, founder of Comedia; Lawrence Lessig, chairman
the Creative Commons project; Geoff Mulgan, T. Blair's head of policy;
Luc Soete, one of the European Union's most influential internet
eggheads; Pekka Himanen, director of the Berkeley Center for Information
Society and author of The Hacker Ethic; and uber-geographer Stephen
Graham, author (with Simon Marvin) of Splintering Urbanism. Yes, they're
all men: the creativity bubble seems to be a guy thing.
http://www.creativecapital.nl/
E-CULTURE ADVISORY
"Digital media have not only made in-roads in the way visual artists,
musicians, designers, film makers and other cultural practitioners work
- they have created a new context". Michiel Schwarz's insightful Dutch
policy paper on "e-culture", that has just been published in English,
says stirringly that "the key here is not doing the old things with
different tools, but rather 'to do other things'. Digital technologies
and the Internet are opening the door to new forms of expression,
changing the roles played by cultural institutions, and placing the
audience and user increasingly centre stage". Which is all
well-and-good, but the minister to whom the report was addressed also
wants to abolish Doors of Perception's funding after 2005. Booo.
http://www.cultuur.nl/e-culture.
Author Info
Business site
http://www.thackara.com
Blog
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/
New book
http://www.thackara.com/inthebubble/