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March 31, 2005
Re-mix as a design process
A personal "Aha!" moment in Delhi was the realisation that re-mix is not just about new music and vj-ing. Re:mix also signals a broader cultural shift away from the narcissistic obsession with individual authorship that have rendered everything from art to management so tiresome in recent times. (In architecture circles the concept of "recombinant design" has been doing the rounds, but re-mix is a much better word). Our visiting re-mixer at Doors 8, the modest but amazing Juhuu (Juha Huuskonen), ran a fantastic workshop on VJing in Delhi; he is also behind an event in Helsinki (14-17 April) called PixelACHE which is about this broader cultural shift. "Dot Org Boom (as the event is called) is the non-profit version of the Dot Com Boom (RIP) says the site. "The essential ingredients of this rapidly growing phenomenon are open source community, open content initiatives, media activist networks, and myriad NGOs around the world. PixelACHE Festival will bring together a diverse group of artists, engineers, activists, architects and designers to discuss and develop the future of Dot Org Boom". The four programme strands are: VJ Culture and Audiovisual Performances; Experimental Interaction and Electronics; Interactive & Participatory Cinema; and a Particle/Wave Hybrid Radio Workshop. The media art collective Juhu works with, katastro, has also helped produce a book called Demoscene: the art of real time which looks very interesting and yes I would like a copy.
Posted by John Thackara at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2005
Doors 8 Holi party pix
The first 61 Holi party images are online. As Bhagwat Shah explains: "amongst India's innumerable festivals, Holi ranks as the most colourful. It celebrates the arrival of spring and death of demoness Holika, it is a celebration of joy and hope. Holi provides a refreshing respite from the mundane norms as people from all walks of life enjoy themselves. In a tight knit community, it also provided a good excuse for letting off some steam and settling old scores, without causing physical injury". Thus ended one of the most memorable of all Doors parties.
Whoops,
and here
is
the
second bunch
Posted by John Thackara at 06:23 PM | Comments (1)
"Small is not small"
A session at Doors 8 on service design for emerging economies left a tricky question unanswered: how do we determine when is a market is ‘emerging’ - and when it has emerged? And, is it possible to design the relationship between small pilot projects, as potential tipping points, and large scale system or market change? Ezio Manzini half answered that last question a day later with the observation in his keynote that “small is not small”. Even small design actions are political today, he said, because anything that shapes connectivity and information architecture inevitably impacts on knowledge and value – and therefore power.
Posted by John Thackara at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)
March 29, 2005
Doors 8 proceedings
So here's the deal: You probably had a perfectly good reason not to come, and you were of course missed, but those of us who made it to Doors 8 are pretty comprehensively wiped by an amazing week. The concluding Holi party slowed our turnaround time further, so you'll have to wait a few days for presentations to be be posted here. Someone in Delhi guessed that 200,000 photos were taken at Doors 8 - but we have no idea where most of them will end up. Some will be posted here. Keep an eye on Flikr. And please, send us the url if you know where else they (or blog entries) are: editor@doorsofperception.com
Posted by John Thackara at 11:14 AM | Comments (1)
Acoustic interlude
Ten days offline, but not in silence. From my New Delhi lodging house in Defence Colony I heard no airconditioning roar or traffic. What I did hear was: Pigeons fidgeting in the metal box above my window that used to contain the airconditioning unit. The long moans of freight train horns as they slowly cross the city. Dogs fighting. Monkeys monkeying. Birds, I think cranes, that miaaow like cats while swooping overhead. Countless insects that shout loudly at each other. People sweeping leaves off their drive. Other people saying “ssshhhh” in an effort to persuade cows to move out of the way. Sometimes they do. There are also the cries of street traders on a variety of bikes: the man with eggs; the man with the pink and red fruit; the knife sharpener man; the man with brightly coloured brushes and feather dusters who looks like a huge electrocuted parrot as he moves with his wares up the street. Later I hear there is a mattress rumpling man, but I had no need of his services.
Posted by John Thackara at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2005
Jugaad and its limits
Indian users of technology-based devices cannot rely on formal networks of distribution, support and maintenance: these are often incomplete, unimaginative or unrealistically priced. They therefore turn to the temporary fixes or ‘jugaads’ carried out by Indian street technicians. An army of pavement-based engineers and fixers keeps engines, television tubes, compressors - and a thousand other devices – working long after their prime. Right outside the Doors 8 office here in Delhi, for example, hundreds of tiny workshops, plus sole traders sitting on on the street, sell (and fix) the countless hardware peripherals that keep office life running. Everything from toner cartridges to USB sticks is available, and gloomy but bustling basements contain amazing arrays of ancient monitors, terminals and motherboards awaiting repair. Mind you, a jugaad for my rapidly diminishing connectivity has stymied even this army: my webmail has now gone on strike in solidarity with my cable connection at home - so I now believe myself to be orchestrating this global event using sms. Seems to work fine.
Posted by John Thackara at 07:34 AM | Comments (3)
March 18, 2005
City as d-school
I have arrived in New Delhi at the same time as Condoleeza Rice. She is in town to sell F16s and nuclear power station technology; I am in town to sell the idea that design for social capital is a better investment. While Condi shows powerpoints to air force generals, Doors of Perception design teams have fanned out across the city. Debra Solomon’s Nomadic Banquet team is checking out street food and food distribution systems. Jogi Panghaal’s group is exploring the city’s markets. Juha Huuskonen is teaching a group how to VJ; their results will be used in the party on Wednesday. Jan Chipchase is engaged in guerilla ethnography... somewhere. The idea is to experience the city as a design school in practice. Meanwhile, one of the team got bitten by a monkey, and a truck containing half the ‘Used In India’ exhibit broke down 1,000 km south of here. This last adventure has put India’s famed logistics flexibility (and curator Aditya Dev Sood’s calm demeanor) to the test.
Posted by John Thackara at 11:42 AM | Comments (2)
March 15, 2005
Enabling simultaneity
Until now, we've said we could not accept credit card payments for Doors 8 at the door on the day. Now we got a machine, so we can. See you there!
Posted by John Thackara at 01:06 PM | Comments (0)
How digital rights management will harm the developing world
India-bound Michael Coburn draws my attention to a paper by Cory Doctorow on how Digital Rights Management will affect the developing world. The piece is written for an International Telecommunications Union report aimed at telecoms regulators in national governments around the world; they are trying to figure out which DRM to adopt. Doctorow questions the "DRM hypothesis" that the public is dishonest, and will do dishonest things with cultural material if given the chance. Besides, he says, DRM won't work: 'there has never been a single piece of DRM-restricted media that can't be downloaded from the Internet today. In more than a decade of extensive use, DRM has never once accomplished its goal'.My own view is that anything that restricts the free flow of communication is obnxious in and of itself - but that the value of protected - and therefore frozen - content, is modest relative to live contact between humans, which is far more important. But we need to be vigilant on both counts.
Posted by John Thackara at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2005
Edda scissorhands
A wondferful profile by Lynn Barber in Sundays's (UK) Observer features the career of 'The Scissor Sister' or 'human Google' Edda Tasiemka who, after 55 years, is selling her amazing cuttings library and retiring. 'Whizzy management types are fond of telling us that nowadays you can find everything on the internet' writes Barber, 'but actually it is rare to find any newspaper stories over five years old or any magazine articles at all, whereas one quick phone call to an elderly German widow in the suburbs can provide precisely what you need. Almost every profile writer and biographer I know uses Tasiemka, and everyone who uses her raves about her'. Barber's story reminded me of the time I went to a meeting of librarians at MIT a few years ago. Even since Vannevar Bush had proposed his ideas about 'memex' in 1945, old-style librarians had been told repeatedly that they faced extinction. And yet, in 2000, with the internet in full swing, they discovered that their human-only information retrieval and recombination skills had become more valuable than ever. It's a lesson we will discuss at Doors in the session on how best to share design knowledge.
Posted by John Thackara at 09:17 AM | Comments (1)
March 12, 2005
Design in development (cont.)
A large meeting last week at the Tropen Institute in Amsterdam marked the launch of a new project, Dutch Design In Development (DDiD). Participants ranged from young designers struggling to make a living by importing textiles from Africa, to eco-tourism marketeers, and consultants who advise global companies how to behave responsibly. My own contribution was to complain that economists tend to define ‘development’ in terms of growth and productivity but ignore their impact on well-being. The day I spoke, a survey by the New Economics Foundation in the UK found that although the British economy has doubled since 1970, peoples’ satisfaction with life has barely changed - and their consumption of antidepressants has skyrocketed.
Posted by John Thackara at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2005
Wanadon't
It's now ten days until Doors 8 and our cable has been down for 12 days. Thankyou, Wanadoo. Not. But enough of that company from hell. The good news is that the CKS team in Delhi is working brilliantly; some international people are already on their way to India; and others have actually started to think seriously about going. We are a just-in-time friendly outfit: by all means just turn up and register on the day - but if you do that, please note that for international delegates we only accept cash or euro traveller cheques on the door. Your own next step can be simple: a) come to Delhi; or b) if you really can't make it, tell one person you like and trust to come in your place - and offer to pay 50% of her or his costs.
Posted by John Thackara at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2005
A cure for the cable curse?
Ten days before Doors 7, our cable connection crashed and UPC were unable to fix it. Until, that is, I located the home phone number of UPC's European CEO; I called him during dinner to share my thoughts on the matter. By a happy coincidence, our cable connection was restored later that evening. Now, with less than two weeks to go before Doors 8, the same thing has happened. Our ADSL connection went down eight days ago - and remains down as I write. Friends and colleagues have spent much of last week and this telephoning a succession of persons at what is described with some exaggeration as the Wanadoo "help desk". This morning, a new voice said: "yes, now that you mention it, we have had major problems in Toulouse for some time". So that explains it. If you know the CEO of Wanadoo, take this advice: don't go near him/her during the next few weeks. I have wished really hard for this person to be visited by a plague of pustering sores and a painful parasitic infection.
Posted by John Thackara at 10:52 AM | Comments (1)
March 06, 2005
Misleading on MBAs
Politicians, under pressure for some awful action, sometimes play a clever trick: they deny responsibility for a different action, that nobody had accused them of. The supporters of business schools are playing a similar trick at the moment. For two weeks running, The Economist has lambasted critics of business school education for suggesting that scandals such as Enron are the schools’ fault . After all, says The Economist, many bad–guy CEOs never even went to business school. Which is true, and utterly beside the point. The problem with b-schools is not that they breed black-hat bad guys, but that they train thousands upon thousands of future managers to regard human beings as discretionary costs – costs that can be eliminated by a bland-sounding technique, that they all learn by rote, called ‘restructuring’.
Posted by John Thackara at 10:36 AM | Comments (2)
March 05, 2005
What you will miss in fourteen days from now...
Doors of Perception 8 begins in two weeks from now - plenty of time to grab a flight and a visa. We have posted details of a pre-conference workshop on Emerging Economy Service Design. This complements a series of street-level workshops that now also include 'exploring market cultures of Delhi' with Jogi Panghaal and something on 'social robots' with Roher Ibars. The website is also online for the special new media exhibit at Apeejay Media Gallery,Bombay, Badarpur Border. We all go to the opening of that on the Tuesday evening. The Doors of Perception party is on the Wednesday evening. If you don't feel a terrible anxiety at the thought of what and who you might miss by failing to come Doors 8 - well, lucky you.
Posted by Kristi at 01:26 PM | Comments (1)
March 02, 2005
Have we unleashed a monster?
A full-page story in yesterday’s Financial Times (March 1, page 9) waxes lyrical about ‘reality tv for the boardroom’ – and goes on to describe the use of video footage to ‘reduce the growing distance between the corporate elite and consumers’. Executives in multinational companies, understates the FT, ‘often find themselves doing business in places they know little about’ (but) ‘corporate reality tv enables highly paid executives to cross the class divide and get a glimpse into the lives of regular people – that is, their consumers’. In one example cited, Singapore-based Ogilvy RedCard videos ‘the secret lives of consumers’ – for example, by following young Japanese women into bathrooms at discos, where they are seen to reapply makeup a lot. ‘Video research has struck a particular chord with executives at pharma companies’ the story concludes; ‘they are intrigued with witnessing suffering’.The thought of corporate leaders ‘crossing the class divide’ by watching videos of sick people in distant lands is not a pleasant one – but do we share some responsibiity for this grotesque outcome? At Doors events over recent years, we’ve showcased what designers call ‘video ethnography’ as a promising but uncontroversial tool for interaction designers. Indeed, we’re running a workshop on the subject in Delhi as part of Doors 8. The FT story is a wake-up call: video ethnography is not a neutral activity: we must be much more critical about the way it’s used, and by whom.
Posted by John Thackara at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2005
Registration deadline, not
The Age of Simultaneity wins: we have abolished the registration deadline. You can register up until the event itself subject to the following two requirements:
1) from today, we can only deal with email registrations:
2) if you arrive in Delhi on the day, we can't take credit cards, so bring dollar or euro travellers cheques or cash.
Posted by John Thackara at 07:01 AM | Comments (0)