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June 29, 2005

Solidarity economics and design

During the years Doors of Perception has been staging encounters in India, I don’t think anyone uttered the words ‘solidarity economics’. We’ve had many conversations about bottom-up globalisation, about complementary currencies, and about how design can enable resource-sharing services to emerge. But we have not been immersed in the lessons of Latin America where so many alternative economic practices emerged during the 1980’s and 1990’s. These were survival-based responses as the effects of corporate globalization began to hit people hard. (The term “solidarity economy” is the English translation of economia solidária (Portuguese), economía solidaria (Spanish), and economie solidaire (French)). Noting that few materials on solidarity economy are available in English,the American writer and activist Ethan Miller last year posted an excellent solidarity economics primer.“How do we start to imagine—and create—other ways of meeting each other’s economic needs?” he asks. “Solidarity economics is an organizing tool that can be used to re-value and make connections between the practices of cooperation, mutual aid, reciprocity, and generosity that already exist in our midst”. Miller repeats a lesson we have tried to stress in South Asia too: alternative economic models are already being implemented if we only choose to look for them. Creative and skilled people have designed, and are testing, everything from shared meals and Community Supported Agriculture, to Carpooling and Seed Exchange. Before you jump on my head yes, I know, a lot has been written in English, too. But the word green does not resonate for me like the the word solidarity. I raise all this because I could use some help preparing for these two events.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:32 AM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2005

Sustainable everyday at the Pompidou

The Sustainable Everyday project is a platform for knowledge collection and sharing among creative communities and innovative citizens.The website includes a catalogue of promising case studies,a lab of scenarios-in-progress, and information about a travelling exhibition. The latter has reached Paris, where it opens tomorrow at Centre Pompidou as part of a new exhibiiton called D-DAY. The show lasts until 17 October 17.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:58 AM | Comments (0)

India-bound Bubble

Indians are the world's biggest bookworms, reading on average 10.7 hours a week, twice as long as Americans, according to a new survey. This is welcome news for me because I just heard that an 'eastern economic edition' of In The Bubble is to be published later this summer in India.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:04 AM | Comments (3)

June 27, 2005

Koolhaas and Thackara vs Queen Maud of Norway's frocks

Do come to the "Global Design Critical Debate" at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on 14 October. There will be two introductions - by Rem Koolhaas and John Thackara. Then a panel discussion chaired by Joe Kerr will include Professor Leslie Sklair, Vice President for Global Sociology, London School of Economics; and the writer Sukhdev Sandhu; his book 'London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City' was recently published. The four of us have to compete for your attention with a V+A exhibit entitled "Style and Splendour: Queen Maud of Norway's Wardrobe, 1896-1938". The big debate is in the V+A Lecture Theatre (near the Silver Galleries) on 14 October 2005, 14h-16.45h. Email: bookings.office@vam.ac.uk or telephone + 44 (0) 20 7942 2211
If Maud's frocks prove too enticing, you can always attend a lecture I'm giving at the Royal Society of Arts , also in London, on 12 December. My topic: "Solidarity economics and design: life after consumerism".

Posted by John Thackara at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)

June 26, 2005

What shall we call this kind of behaviour? Patrochuting?

We need a new word for the insulting behaviour of politicians. I refer to their habit of turning up late to a conference, reading a banal speech to a room full of experts in the subject, and then leaving before hearing what anyone else has to say. The latest insulting cameo appearance is described by Jonathan Marks who attended a conference in Amsterdam called Creative Capital. Two senior politicians "didn’t stick around for anything more than their speeches... looking at the body language of the audience during (one) speech there was a mixture of sadness and anger…what did this have to do with what they had been discussing the last few days?". Some combination of 'parachuting' and 'patronising' perhaps? 'Patrochuting politicians'? Please do better.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2005

Reading your lunch

What happens when citizens are able to 'read' product-specific information directly from a package’s RFID tag using a camera phone? Few business people that I've met have thought the consequences through. The widespread deployment of RFID tags is seen mainly as a way to improve the efficiency of supply webs - not as a way for customers to find out more about a product's history. But consider the following: The Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), together with the University of Kuopio and the Helsinki School of Economics, have developed a prototype for a service that can help people make better food choices by reading product-specific information directly from a package. The service shows the energy and nutrition information of food, and also offers the possibility to use a food diary and an exercise calculator. But that's just a start: that same infrastructure could be used to tell the readerphone-wielding citizen where the food came from, and when; how it was grown; what it was fed or sprinkled with; and so on. Finnish test groups experienced the pilot system as "rewarding". But vicious fights for information control between citizen groups and corporations are inevitable when they realise that RFID tags have the potential to give more of the game away than might be comfortable for some players.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:57 AM | Comments (2)

What the hack

This large hacker's festival (3,000 participated last time) happens every four years in The Netherlands. It started with "The Galactic Hacker Party", also known as the "International Conference on the Alternative use of Technology, Amsterdam". Themes this year: freedom of speech, government transparency, computer insecurity, privacy, open software, open standards & software patents and community networking. Plus independent media and networking in crisis areas and so called developing countries. One idea is to set set up a meshing experiment using thousands of laptops on the camp. It takes place "on a large event-campground in the south of The Netherlands" from 28 until 31 July 2005.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:46 AM | Comments (0)

June 21, 2005

On the map, off the wall

Is this happening a lot? I've been sent a map,"The Creative Map of Arnhem and Gelderland". (It's a pleasant area in the East of the Netherlands). The map plots the street address of every member of the creative class. It informs me that a fine artist named Stolker lives in Koningstraat, as does a graphic designer named Beltman; he (or she) lives just round the corner from a dancer named De Zeeuw. And so on; the map includes 4,386 names. The map is not the work of a lone crank; it is well-executed, and has been sponsored by the chamber of commerce, several local art schools, and by two national design organisations. Its blurb says the map aims to improve the visibility and accessibility of the creative sector - although to judge by the density of names they (it) are pretty hard to miss. If you think that I am whingeing endlessly, then do say so. Perhaps these mapping exercises are a modern form of trainspotting: pointless, but harmless. If that's your opinion, you'll probably enjoy the the map's festive opening party on Saturday. Curiously, I have not been invited.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)

Silent sneeze

I like the sound of the Romanian pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale. The artist Daniel Knorr is responsible for an installation called European Influenza: the Pavilion is left empty, with only the traces of past exhibitions remaining. Sadly, not all critics have taken the hint: one burbles that Knorr's piece is about "the process of European acculturation ...the question is how new cultures of assimilation, liberated identities, and options for action can emerge in the prospect of Europe’s future self-definitions." And so on. One probably should not mock: Knorr specialises in invisible artworks that exist only as oral information and narration. Besides, art critics in Venice have huge expenses to justify to their editors; writing nothing is not an easy option.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:37 AM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2005

Wide-screen but narrow-minded

Philips boss Gerard Kleisterlee has a keen supporter in Tony Blair. Blair wants to channel far more of Europe's budget to high-tech companies like Philips, and is campaigning against the "anomaly" that the EU spends 40% of its budget on farmers, who make up just 4% of the European workforce, at a time when China and India are presenting such a high-tech challenge in science and research. But as today's Guardian points out, a lot farmers and some of their green supporters want more subsidy and protection, not less. And, besides, 70% of French farmers voted no in the referendum. What's going on? The Guardian reckons that "rural life is of social, psychological and aesthetic importance to a vastly larger proportion of the continent's population" than just the farmers. I reckon that's just half the story. Many progressive, iPod-toting, globally-inclined people voted "no" to the European constitution because they judged a "yes" to be an endorsement of monopolistic technology and science. The hunger for subsidy of high-tech Europe (which includes agribusiness, by the way) is as boundless as its cultural vision is bleak. The high-tech Europe toted by Blair and Peter Mandelson is one which equates Europe's future with the size of its technology effort.Their vision, like Philips', is wide-screen but narrow-minded.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2005

A sentimental education for Philips

Philips has blamed “poor consumer sentiment” for limiting its plans for growth. Gerard Kleisterlee, Philips' CEO, told the Financial Times (16 June page 21) that “Europe is suffering from a weakened consumer retail environment”. Wrong, Mr K. Europe is not suffering, it is recovering from the false consciousness peddled by your company. You have been trying to foist the consumer electronic equivalent of SUVs onto us - but we don't need them, and will not buy them.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:34 PM | Comments (2)

What they made and what they think

The catalogues published by design schools when students graduate are frequently over-designed, under-edited, and consequently hopeless as communication tools. A welcome exception is MAID from the industrial design masters programme at Central Saint Martins in London. I was able to find out from it what the tutors and students are thinking, as well as see what they had designed. I enjoyed Dane Whitehurst on tube travellers: “Amongs all the fashion accessories adorning the city slicker, the most common thing to be worn is the frown”. And Steve Sparshott writes entertainingly about the visit to London of the (apparently 1,300 strong) 2012 Olympics Inspection Committee. Whilst you're at it, get hold of the catalogue of the Textile Futures catalogue; it too contains beautiful and fascinating work.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:24 PM | Comments (1)

June 17, 2005

Now listen good

My parents have been plagued by a rising volume of junk telephone calls from telemarketing outfits. Imagine my incredulity when I saw on the BBC this morning that one of the leading firms calls itself The Listening Company. One of the people we have to thank for the plague of telemarketing is Martin Williams who, the firm's website explains, "helps define the customer Buying Experience, map the Customer Journey, and apply intelligence to the use of data in sales and prospect management". His colleague, David Murray, has had a "distinguished career... in high volume outbound programmes". The two of them report to Neville Upton, chief executive of The Listening Company, who is "the inspiration for the business". In the UK, there are two ways for people to fight back against the harassment and invasion of privacy perpetrated by these kinds of people. One is for sufferers to register with the Telephone Preference Service. The second is for concerned citizens to use the industry's own telemarketing techniques and engage its practitoners in discussion of the matter. The Listening Company: +44 20 8484 1000 NevilleUpton@listening.co.uk | martinwilliams@listening.co.uk | davemurray@listening.co.uk

Posted by John Thackara at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

One-dimensional Doors?

At deBalie in Amsterdam, a conference called Incommunicado is debating issues to do with information technology for development (ICT4D). I could not stay for today's debate, organsed by Solomon Benjamin, on “culture and corporate sponsorship in the ICT4D context” - so I make this contribution remotely. Benjamin, quoting as one example Doors 8 in Delhi (where he was a speaker), asks: “What is the agenda of these organizations? Is the electronic art they are exporting merely paving the way for the big software and telecom firms to move in, or should we reject such a mechanical, one-dimensional view?”. One way to resolve this pertinent question would be for Dr Benjamin to re-read what was written and what was
said before and during Doors 8. My reading is that people at Doors argued miltantly that technology is not, of itself, virtuous. It's what people do with it that matters - and what people do with new media is not for us in the North to dictate to the South. We went to compare experiences, not to download expertise. Doors was criticised at the time for associating with corporations (firms like Nokia and HP were sponsors) - but opinion on that among our critics seems to be softening. Some speakers at the opening event of Incommunicado argued that new strategies for develoment will unavoidably involve the private sector, so they (the companies) should be involved in discuission, not demonised and excluded. And a text published at Incommunicado called "The Delhi Declaration" proposes “the cultivation of hospitality and attention by practitioners towards people engaged primarily with discourse”, and for theorists and researchers to be “sensitive to the exigencies of practice and artistic creation”. I think all this means: let’s lunch. So we will.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2005

Brabant bound

Another day, another new European city-region. Yesterday I was in Breda, one of five cities in the south of the Netherlands that are joining forces (and 1.2 million citizens) to form a new entity, Brabantstad. The format of the day was interesting. Delegates were grouped into three blocks – investors/property developers; policy makers and city government people; and members of the “creative class”. The idea was to stimulate interaction among the three groups and thereby to foster a “Creative Revolution”in Brabantstad. Some policymakers were irked that the creatives seemed more interested in Brabant’s pigs, than in nanotech; we then debated whether pigs are a knowledge-based industry. Mind you, I don’t think my own first proposal – that Brabantstad should create large design-free zones filled only with free WiFi – was well-received by the developers. We did agree, though, that ‘creativity’ in abstract is a hard thing to implement. Rather than simply assert that it is creative, I proposed that Brabantstad should select an interesting aspect of daily life (such as food systems); commission collaborative, real-world innovation projects; and thereby create new domain knowledge that could be branded “innovated in Brabantstad”. This food-related proposal seemed to go down better. The lavish (and therefore most un-Dutch) lunch served at the conference confirmed my prejudice that the farmers and Catholics in the south of the country are more hospitable than their Calvinist neighbours to the north.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2005

Chilling out

So who authored global warming? I have just read a heavy three-part story on the subject in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert called The Climate of Man. Kolbert writes that in the seventeen-eighties, carbon-dioxide levels stood at about the same level that they had been at two thousand years earlier, in the era of Julius Caesar, and two thousand years before that, at the time of Stonehenge, and two thousand years before that, at the founding of the first cities. But by the mid-nineteen-seventies, they had risen by as much as they did during the previous ten thousand years. In political terms, Kolbert concludes, "global warming might be thought of as the tragedy of the commons writ very, very large. It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing". Well, maybe. In my capacity as a bottle-half-full optimist, I reckon the cultural transformation necessary for a radical lighting of the economy is almost certainly under way. Whether it's enough change, and in time - well, it's too soon to say.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2005

Authorship and design

An argument about authorship has once again overshadowed discussion of what matters about design. No sooner had Design Council director Hilary Cottam won the 2005 Design Museum Designer of the Year award, than an article by Deyan Sudjic in The Observer reported that an architect is furious about the award, and that a head teacher has described it as "a victory of spin over substance". It's a great shame if people close to the story are upset, because the award to Cottam signals a shift away from the obsession with celebrity and authorship that so often renders discussion of design tedious. As director of the experimental RED team at the Design Council, Cottam has been working to redefine the role of design in daily life, starting with health and citizenship. Her work, which is always collaborative, involves the use of design to re-engineer the ways schools, prisons and public institutions - and the people who use them - relate to each other. The Design Museum's award website includes this prominent statement from Cottam: "All the projects are developed by a team which includes designers, other professionals from a range of disciplines, front-line workers and members of the public who, with me, are challenged through the design process to abandon their initial preconceptions and co-create something new and beautiful that works".

Posted by John Thackara at 04:13 PM | Comments (2)

June 13, 2005

Paul Ricoeur

One of the reasons I decided to live in France was attending a lecture by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who has just died at the age of 92. It was a rainy Monday evening five years ago, in February, in Montpellier - and yet more than 600 people crammed into the lecture hall to hear Ricoeur debate "moral man and neuronal man" with a science writer, Jean-Pierre Changeux. The crowd was remarkably mixed; every age and background seemed to be present. Ricoeur was the foremost living phenomenologist - an approach to philosophy that studies how a person's reality is shaped by their perception of events in the world. It's a field of study highly relevant to the ways designers shape our interactions with technology. I can't pretend to have understood all of that evening's three hour discussion - it was about the ethical implications of neuroscience - but it was the spirit of the evening that impressed me hugely at the time. Ricoeur was widely regarded as a giant of philosophy - but rather than try to show off, or score academic points, as would be normal in most academic contexts I have encountered, Ricoeur's questioners were respectful but not smarmy, well-informed but not opinionated, lively but thoughtful. The event exemplified the dialogue and respect for others for which that Ricoeur argued all his life - and practised until its end.

Posted by John Thackara at 12:49 PM | Comments (1)

June 10, 2005

Too many events?

I learned recently that a new book is published every 30 seconds. I imagine at least that many new blogs are launched each day. Does the same rate of reproduction apply to conferences and events? I used to keep my own list of events until I discovered a bunch of databases each of which contains thousands. The European Union's Information Society department publishes IST Events covering a huge range of possibly interesting subjects. The Digital Media Events Blog features almost daily business happenings in the digital media-online and wireless sector.Upcoming.org, a collaborative event calendar, features happenings on everything from blogs and books to singers and smokers. The privately compiled Ubicomp Events lists dozens of conferences to do with ubiquitous computing. The biggest collection or all - and home of the event-as-acronym - is hosted by the American Computing Society. Listed for just the first ten days in June are ICAIL05, JCDL05, CEMVRC05, FOMI05, and the no doubt not-to-be-missed TARK X-05. If TARK is too taxing, there's a conference on podcasting in Ontario, California, in November. In the old-style design world, festivals and biennials are breeding even faster. As their number grows, claims made for their uniqueness become ever more outlandish. The London Design Festival - billed last year as "the greatest creative show on earth" - was much derided at the time but will happen again this year. It seems to have absorbed the also portentously titled, and also underwhelming, World Creative Forum. A design biennial is planned for 2007 in Newcastle, and another up the road in Scotland. Denmark is ploughing a ton of money this year into an enterprise thrillingly titled Index which is also billed as a "summit for the world’s creative leaders" whose number apparently includes His Royal Highness Prince Frederik the Crown Prince of Denmark. There are hundreds more events out there - but is it a problem? Probably not, on balance, if the cities that commission these events find ways to make their events original, fresh, engaging and place-specific.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2005

Palace of everyday life, anybody?

The Argentine government has launched a competition to find a new use for its spectacular Palace of Mail and Telecommunications in Buenos Aires. One dearly hopes it will not become another bloated and tedious Gugghenheim - so maybe we should join the competition? Doors of Perception will provide an embryonic programme and business plan, but we need a design partner to add the look-and-feel (this is an ideas competition) of a Palace of Daily Life - a social innovation hub for the continent. Suggestions to editor@doorsofperceptionj.com

Posted by John Thackara at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)

Small is not small (cont.)

Build a bus stop in an urban slum and a vibrant community sprouts and grows around it. Such is the power of small interventions into complex urban situations. Small Change by Nabeel Hamdi is another of my 'finds' in Seattle's anarchist bookshop - although on closer inspection the book was not published out of a commune in Oregon, but by Earthscan in London. It nonetheless has a rich history. Born in Afghanistan of Iraqi parents, Hamdi studied architecture at the AA in London before spending a career in a huge variety of contexts helping with participatory action planning and the upgrading of slums in cities. Every page of Small Change contains an implied critique of old paradigm, top-down, outside-in, development thinking. Hamdi judges the approriateness of projects by the degree to which they evidence trust and mutual respect - but he is not moralistic. He demonstrates the wisdom of the street through cooly written and unsentimental case studies. It's worth buying the book just for the story about the pickle jars.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:20 AM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2005

By the way...

We do realise that this blog is located, confusingly, at the website of a past event (Doors 8) - but we're working hard to re-organise a family of Doors sites and things should be clearer in a week or so.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

Ethnography and service design (cont.)

Understanding context - especially if the context is New York City - is easier said than done.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2005

Of politics and Pimms

A Pimms-enhanced party at Demos, in London, was held to launch a new strategy for the organization called Building Everyday Democracy. According to the think tank's director, Tom Bentley, “politics is fighting a losing battle against forms of theatre and spectacle that are more entertaining, and forms of conversation and social exchange that are more meaningful to citizens. Without more direct citizen participation, the legitimacy of our political institutions will continue to decline”. Democracy, for Bentley, should be understood as “part of a capacity for self-organsation” - and his pamphlet describes numerous neighbourhood-based models and institutions as infrastructures of distributed democracy. The Demos project is interesting, and timely, but somehow lacks cultural fizz. At the end of the nineteenth century, the promise of speed and simultaneity, amplified in popular and scientific culture, drove modernity along. The opportunity, now, to “build local democracy” feels a good deal less mesmerizing. The same goes for the "everyday design" we pay attention to in Doors: there's always a danger of being worthy but dull. A cultural- aesthetic transformation will also be needed if political renewal is to have a chance.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)