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This year’s Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference has as its theme, ‘Technology, Safety, Community’. The event, says the website, confronts the ‘challenge for technology to make people feel safe again’. The agenda sounds uncontroversial, but you have to ask if the resulting design effort will make anyone materially safer, or [continue …]

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 [continue …]

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 [continue …]

I was flattered to receive a seasonal message today from Professor Dr. Nikolay V. Kirianakithe – the President, no less, of the International Sensors and Traducers Association. I’ve always fancied myself as an amateur traducer, but had not realised my efforts had been recognised at such a high level. [continue …]

Never mind about tarmac-covered land and the fate of the planet – what about sales of my book? I’ve been jolted awake by a reference in Future Now to a research paper that describes the use of an “Epidemics-Type Aftershock Sequence model to track how information about a book [continue …]

I was once involved in a project called Presence in which we were given quite a lot of EU money to investigate how the social needs of elderly people might be met by the Internet. One of our test sites was a small village in Italy, called Peccioli. When our [continue …]

This blog is part of the build-up to Doors of Perception 8, which takes place in New Delhi next March and is on the theme, “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 [continue …]

The reports of last Friday’s Project Leaders’ Round Table, which we organised together with Virtual Platform, are now online here.
We’ve posted summaries, most of the project presentations, a bunch of pictures, and a text called “Conclusions”. The latter text, I now realise, contains more questions than answers. [continue …]

(click on the image for an image collection.)
On Thursday and Friday, 18-19 November, 60 people met in Amsterdam for the Project Leaders’ Round Table. Our aim was to learn from each other about success factors in design research projects. We heard about projects that were based [continue …]

“The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration – that is to say, its supposedly ‘softer’ parts – are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement” says the economist Paul David in a draft paper [continue …]

In yesterday’s email newsletter, under the headline Sending the acorn, not the tree, we directed you to a .pdf of the Doors 8 poster — that was not there.
Apologies for the inconvenience. Please try again; it should now work. (It’s in “Download” on the right of [continue …]

The theme of Doors 8 is “Infra”, which we interpret to span both hard and soft aspects of infrastructure in a networked society. Infra therefore includes people as well as systems. Now we keep reading that, in Europe alone, there’s a shortage of 1.5 million information technology workers. A question [continue …]

“Avoidance of difficulty or unpleasantness. Disavowal of extreme situations. Retreat into distraction. These appear to be the hallmarks of the fast-encroaching New Dark Ages”. No, these words are not about the U.S. election results. They’re a comment by Anne Marie Willis, editor of Design Philosophy Papers, on the state of [continue …]

Gloom-and-doom mongering can be self-indulgent for the mongerers, and de-motivating for the mongereed. All credit therefore to Adbusters for breaking that pattern with a brilliant come-back issue. It’s about “The Day The World Ends”, and contains some great writing. “”The collapse was only a problem so long as we thought [continue …]

Am I the last person to hear the expression “on brand” used in the context of design? It was one of several expressions that I heard for the first time at the World Creative Forum in London a couple of weeks ago. Another novelty, for me, was the description of [continue …]

When an IVR/Speech (Interactive Voice Recognition) system does not meet a customer’s expectations, they become frustrated and hang up or “zero out” to a live agent. According to Forrester Research, customer satisfaction levels with IVR systems fall in the 10 percent range, compared with a satisfaction rate of approximately 80 [continue …]

Welcome to the website and weblog for Doors of Perception 8. The box on the right of your screen lists all the usual notices and announcements you’d expect for a Doors event. The top box, “What & Why”, is an introduction to the event — why we’re doing it, what [continue …]

What are the key success factors in setting up design research projects? In November 2004, jointly with Virtual Platform, we organised a meeting in Amsterdam for sixty project leaders from 10 countries to discuss this question. When inviting participants, we focussed on projects that [continue …]

A lecture given to the Design Recast conference organised at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht by Jouke Kleerebezem.
Trying to get a grip on design is rather like trying to grab hold of a shoal of herring. Orca whales do this by blowing upside-down funnels of air bubbles from [continue …]

If the throw-away society is over, how do we design for longevity in products and services? Eternally Yours, a Dutch foundation, organised a round-the-clock, 24-hour event to look at this timely question. Eighty different projects, case studies and scenarios – all dealing with time in design – were [continue …]

Can you imagine a way to enable novel and exciting interactions in public space, using new technologies? A first prize of ten thousand euros was at stake in Fused Space , an international competition organised by the Dutch design foundation Premsela to [continue …]

Doors of Perception’s John Thackara was a member of start-up team (and of the Steering Committee until the end of 2003) that established Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. This new research institute in Italy was supported by Olivetti and Telecom Italia. The Institute’s Director was [continue …]

In December 2002 I chaired a seminar in London, organised by the Design Council, which brought together 100 academics, designers and business people to discuss: “how to get the most out of academic design knowledge”. The Design Council will publish a formal report soon (I will link it from here) [continue …]

An interview for the October 2002 edition of Domus Magazine with Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of UN Studio

For thousands of years, most buildings and products were designed for a single purpose – but our task is becoming more complicated. We are confronted by the need to design hybrid [continue …]

When traditional forms of work and daily life disappear from a locality, what is to take their place? In Spark!, multi-disciplinary design teams from five countries, together with local officials and citizens, conducted design scenario workshops in five very different European locations: Narva-Jõesuu in [continue …]

A preview of the Doors 7 conference written for Form magazine in Germany.
Chris Pacione did not set out to be the designer of a wireless service. On the contrary: the co-founder of BodyMedia took a communication design course at an engineering school – Carnegie Mellon University – and fully expected [continue …]

A chapter for the catalogue of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2002, edited by Deyan Sudjic (who was also overall Director of the event).
We have forgotten how to design for communication and interaction. We know how design messages, yes: the world is awash in print and ads and packaging and e-trash [continue …]

An international conference on ““Creativity and the City” was held in Amsterdam’s former gas works, Westergasfabriek. Westergasfabriek is the latest urban project to transform a former industrial site into a public and cultural amenity, and it wanted to share the lessons it has learned, and bring together comparable projects [continue …]

Doors of Perception’s John Thackara was the expert advisor to the Hong Kong Design Task Force (chair: Victor Lo) which developed a new innovation and research policy for the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The task force plotted plotting the best way for Hong Kong and [continue …]

John Thackara was a member until the end of 2004 of a four person think-tank developing concepts for its Director of a next-generation national childrens hospital.

The European Commission made ‘ambient intelligence’ a focus of its research programmes for 2001 to 2005. In official documents, the commission sometimes replaces the words ambient intelligence with the acronym AmI – to which I, as a philosophical joke, started adding a question mark – as in,
Am I?
We [continue …]

Doors of Perception was an advisor to this exibition and conference organised by Ezio Manzini at the Milan Triennale. “In tomorrow’s communities, an obsession with things will replaced by a fascination with events.” Manzini ran workshops in Brazil, China, and India to develop new design ideas for the show [continue …]

“Tourism is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal”. Guy Debord wrote that more than 40 years ago in The Society Of the Spectacle – and today’s mass tourism proves him depressingly right. Is there an alternative?

The answer [continue …]

The Bonholm Rooster, a superior kind of chicken, is a star product on “Food Island”. So is the legendary white salmon, a ghostly creature that passes quietly by this misplaced Danish island (it sits between Sweden and Poland) only in winter months.
Nexo, on Bonholm, [continue …]

Trillions of embedded systems are being unleashed into the world. What are the implications of a world filled with all these sensors and actuators? Some of the world’s most insightful designers, thinkers and entrepreneurs addressed these questions at Doors [continue …]

I was on the launch team that helped develop teaching and research programmes for Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. One outcome was the following statement, which was written collaboratively with Gillian Crampton Smith’s team in Ivrea.
* Interaction design determines how people interact with computers and communications. This is an issue [continue …]

Doors was responsible for vision building during the first research cycle of Convivio – the European Union network for social computing; its early members included Xerox, King’s College London, Philips, Deutsche Forschunhzentrum fur Kuenstliche Intelligenz, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Consorzio Roma Ricerche.

Doors of Perception was in a consortium that developed the initial specification and blueprint of an important new institution to be based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England. Our client was the UK regional development agency, One North East. Its title, at the time of our contribution, [continue …]

What would it mean to design for fast and slow speeds?

The High Speed Network Platform, an association of 15 European regions, and Urban Unlimited, a planning firm, asked Doors of Perception to organise a cultural expert workshop on the theme, quality time: design for [continue …]

The purpose of DoorsEast 1, a memorable week in Ahmedabad, was to accelerate the exchange of people, knowledge and experiences among Indian and European designers and internet entrepreneurs. We wanted to know: what can western interaction designers learn from Indian design and internet [continue …]

A strange thing happened to the ‘weightless’ and dematerialised economy we thought the Internet would bring. It never arrived – or it hasn’t yet. Finding ways of reducing wasteful flows of energy and matter in our daily lives remains an enormous opportunity for design.
Hence lightness, [continue …]

The lone genius is dead. Long live collaborative design. I was interviewed by Chee Pearlman for Wired. Chee wisely published less than the stuff that appears here, but, shucks, this is my column….
Interview for Wired. Questions by Chee Pearlman, who also interviewed Paola Antonelli, Tim Parsey, Bruce Sterling, Lee [continue …]

This is a story about the European funded project – Maypole – in which we (Doors folk) were part of the team.
Informal communication – sharing jokes, teasing each other, asking what kind of day you’ve had – is an important part of everyday life. Most families [continue …]

Article for The Guardian (UK) in 2000 based on my CHI lecture.

What happens to society when there are hundreds of microchips for every man, woman and child on the planet? What cultural consequences follow when every object around us is ‘smart’, and connected? And what happens psychologically when you step [continue …]

Domus Magazine asked me about design competitions and awards.
Question 1 – the idea of “good design”
Your question reminds me that years ago, the British Design Council used to proclaim that “good design is good business” . But it was always hard to define good design, let alone to demonstrate [continue …]

The Highlands and Islands Development Board, in Scotland, exists to help hundreds of small and medium sized companies, over a very wide geographical area, innovate new products, services, and business models. Doors helped their Inverness office stage design scenario workshops in which entrepreneurs from different [continue …]

Doors of Perception served until 2006 as a member of Virtual Platform. This advisory group to Dutch government on new media cultural policy.

E-Culture Fair was an international marketplace of creative and innovative concepts, processes and products in the field of new media. The emphasis was on new forms of communicating, learning, and playing in a broad social and cultural context. E-Culture Fair [continue …]