Doors of Perception 8 in New Delhi 21-26 March 2005
"Infra: platforms for social innovation and how to design them".
New speakers announced.
Plus other news.
By John Thackara
February 2005
STREET-LEVEL INNOVATION
A majority of the population in many Asian cities lives in shantytowns,
which make urban planners extremely anxious. These places also contain
very few members of the 'creative class'. But although perceived as
problem areas by bureaucracies, these areas are also sites of intense
social and business innovation: the activities of so-called suitcase
entrepreneurs are one of the ways cities like Delhi and Kolkota are so
-- creative. Solomon Benjamin will tell us more about this at Doors 8;
he studies the complex relationships among these city locations, and the
activities they contain.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/speakers.html
HIT THE STREET EARLY
A number of location-based workshops will take place in and around Delhi
before Doors 8. In Nomadic Banquet (led by Debra Solomon, culiblog.org)
guests walk or take auto rickshaws from course to course, and discover
the city's street food vendors. The workshop will use Delhi's existing
food systems as a point of departure, the idea being to use locative
media to enhance the relationship between vendors and hungry people.
Juhuu (Juha Huuskonen, juhuu.nu) will do something on VJ-ing in the
city. Usman Haque (haque.co.uk/) runs a workshop on open source
architecture. Jan Chipchase will show how Video Diaries might be used in
service design. And Christian Nold will conduct locative media
experiments. 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. An equal number of places is available for
Indian and international delegates. Enquiries: joost@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/speakers.html
WHAT WILL IT BE LIKE FOR YOU?
What might everyday life be like in a sustainable society? How would we
work, move, and take care of each other? When Francois Jegou and Ezio
Manzini looked around the world for hints of what's to come, the picture
that emerged was that of a 'multi-local city...a city in the shape of a
network of places endowed with totally new characteristics". At Doors 8,
Jegou will run a workshop on project observation.
http://www.triennale.it/triennale/sito_html/quotidiano/eng/home_.html
INFRA OF SHARING
Marko Ahtisaari, recently appointed Director of Design Strategy for
Nokia, together with uber blogger Joichi Ito, a Vice President of
Technorati among many other projects, have teamed up to lead a special
session (on the evening of Wednesday) on the 'infra of sharing'.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/speakers.html
DESIGNERS - OR DOCTORS?
During Project Clinics at Doors 8, experts will evaluate real world
projects and help teams refocus their work. The Clinics will feature
pairs of live projects - one from the North, one from the South. Groups
of experts will provide project leaders with feedback and suggestions.
(We organised a similar event in Amsterdam in November).
http://static.doorsofperception.com/2004roundtable/conclusion.html
DANGER ZONE?
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 2,095 km, or 1,301 miles. That's similar to the
distance from Boston to Miami, Amsterdam to Athens, or Tokyo to Beijing.
The real danger is that you'll miss this great event and kick yourself
so badly that you end up covered in bruises.
WRONGLY-DEVELOPED DESIGN?
I've been asked to give a lecture on 'design in development' at a
conference in Amsterdam on 8 March. I'm uneasy about the word
'development': it implies that we advanced people in the North have the
right or even obligation to help backward people in the South 'catch up'
with our own advanced condition. No, it doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm
more in tune with the anonymous author of Bolo Bolo, "P.M", for whom the
North is 'wrongly developed'. Standing still is not an option for
either North or South, but I'm looking for a better word than
development to use in my talk.
http://www.businessindevelopment.nl/article-1012.2250.html
FLAGRANT PUFF FOR BUBBLE
A green-coloured book has appeared on the Doors 8 home page. The book is
called 'In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World' and will apparently
be published by MIT Press in April. Doesn't it make you sick when people
with inside connections get their work plugged in such a flagrant way?
http://www.thackara.com/inthebubble/index.html
OTHER NEWS
SAVE THE GIROUD VERIFIER!
Speaking of infrastructure, I was shocked to read that EnergeticA,
Amsterdam's museum of energy generating equipment and lifts, is
threatened with closure; there's also a danger that its collection will
be broken up. EnergeticA is in an old power station and is full of
wonderful old gaugues and machines. Among its exhibits is an excellent
example of the Giroud Verifier - a device used (in 1789) to test the
purity of gas. I'd like to test this device on Amsterdam's cultural
bureaucrats: they have refused to rescue EnergeticA because it is too
commercial.
http://www.energetica.nl/Documentatie.html
PROFESSOR OF FLOWS
When the Dutch word for urban planning, "planologie", was first used in
1929, its literal meaning was 'the study of surfaces'. But planners
today work in a multi-dimensional context that Luuk Boelens describes as
'a motley assemblage of multiple times and spatial realities'. Urban
planning is doomed to fail, says Boelens, when it persists in treating
cities as stable units consisting of a centre, a periphery and, around
that, a rural area where 'spaciousness and peacefulness are the
predominant characteristics'. Boelens is so committed to a
multidimensional approach to planning that he wanted to be called a
Professor of Fluviology. Check out his inaugural lecture at 'downloads'
on his site.
http://www.urbanunlimited.nl
FOOD MILE TACHOMETER
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 tremendously wasteful, but
invisibly so.
ART: A JOB FOR LIFE
'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 only 2% of those with a degree in art or design
consider themselves to be unemployed.
http://www.morf.nl/index/-/en
MEDIA LAB EUROPE TO CLOSE
It's sad news that Media Lab Europe (MLE) is to close. MLE was on its
third director in as many years when the decision to shut up shop was
made - but these individuals were not the reason MLE failed. It was
doomed by a business plan written during the tech boom which they had to
implement during a tech bust. What will hurt MLE's 100 people most is
the knowledge that they were just getting going. It takes years to build
momentum in a research institute, and MLE had just started to carve out
its own agenda and an independent personality. It's a rotten business
that it had to stop right now.
http://www.medialabeurope.org/news/release.php?id=76
KAOS PILOTS
A more cheering message from Denmark: Kaos Pilots in Denmark is to stay
open. They lost a big chunk of funding from an unsympathetic government
last year, but a new prospectus has been published and bridge funding
secured. The plan to make this unique institution, which is like a cross
between Burning Man and a b-school, 'Scandinavia's most attractive and
modern entrepreneurial program'.
http://www.kaospilot.dk
TIME IN DESIGN
A gorgeous 500 page gold brick of a book called Time In Design has
arrived. It is based on a 24-hour conference by that name that took
place last year in Rotterdam. Printed on gold paper, the book ranges
widely over what the editors call 'cultural lifespan extension - ways of
designing and planning products so that their value is sustained and
they can be kept in use for a longer time'. Ed van Hinte, designed by
Thonik and Sander Boon, produced by the Eternally Yours Foundation,
2004, edit Time In Design.
http://www.010publishers.nl
MORE B-SCHOOL TOSH
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 in Harvard Business Review suggests that the
"industrialisation of services" will help overcome "the feeling of
disembodiment and depersonalisation that technology has created between
companies and customers". The writer implies that the technology causing
this disembodiment and depersonalisation somehow deployed itself. But it
did not: It was deployed by managers taught to do so at business schools
like Harvard's. "Will You Survive The Services revolution" by Uday
Karmarkar is in Harvard Business Review June 2004.
http://www.hbr.org
DON'T THEY LOOK YOUNG!
For much of 2004, the Doors of Perception conference archive was
inaccessible to the majority of our visitors. Some of today's browsers
had become so clever, multifunctional, and advanced. that they could no
longer access simple textual material,which we hadn't touched in years.
Sigh. Well, we've quick-fixed a new architecture and most of you should
now be able to re-visit classic moments in our history.
http://www.doorsofperception.com/Conference+Archive/
DESIGN SCHOOL REPUTATIONS
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 that approach is limited: people inside one institution are not
ideally placed to compare their own experience with that of their peers
in other ones. Citation league tables are a guide, but tell only one
part of the story. There's a gap here: 33 million people in the US have
rated a product, service, or person using an online rating system - but
not, so far as I can see, the big ticket purchase of a design education.
Design portal Core 77 hosts a lively forum in which students exchange
opinions about design courses and schools - but these exchanges are
anecdotal. Is there a ratings system for education out there that I've
missed?
http://www.core77.com/design.edu/
INNOVATION = DESIGN = AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOUR FIRM
"When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean
design". That was Bruce Nussbaum in the January 4 edition of Business
Week. There is still time for your company to sponsor Doors 8. We will
use new resources to enhance the Social Innovation Salon, and to provide
travel scholarships to grassroots innovators with stories we want to
hear. Note: Doors of Perception is a not-for-profit foundation so your
sponsorship may well be tax-deductible.
Doors 8 Blog
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/
New book
http://www.thackara.com/inthebubble/
Business site
http://www.thackara.com
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