Selected projects since 2000
Acting somewhat like a film producer, Doors of Perception creates events and experiences that help its public and private sector clients search for new directions, connect with new partners, and embed new capabilities in their organizations …
City Eco Lab (2007-2008)
John Thackara was guest commissioner and producer of this two-week-long market of sustainability projects; it was the centrepiece event of the 2008 St Etienne Design Biennale. This scalable, reproducable event, at the level of a city-region, was created to accelerate its transition to sustainability. As with Dott07 in North East England (see below) citizen co-design of projects were at the core of the City Eco Lab events. The central area asked: what exactly is an “eco quartier” (neighbourhood)? Live projects on show dealt with energy, water, and mobility. City Eco Lab’s mobility zone was mainly about bicycles, and especially their potential use to de-motorise the distribution of 7,000 items of freight about the city each day City Eco Lab also featured a Club des Explorateurs (Explorers Club) in which a wide variety of groups met to discuss practical ways to enhance or scale up their projects. Companies, community groups and grassroots projects from across the Rhone-Alps region participated often together with international visitors.
/archives/2008/12/city_eco_lab_7.php
Designs of the time - Dott 07 (2005-2007)
John Thackara was programme director of Designs of the time (Dott 07), a year-long festival of social innovation and design which took place in the UK during 2007.Dott, an initiative of the UK Design Council and One North East, was about how an entire region might accelerate its transition to a less-stuff-more-people world. In Dott 07, communities across the region explored new ways to carry out familiar, daily-life activities - supported by design. School students right across the region undertook design projects to reduce the ecological footprint of 50 schools. They worked collaboratively with professional designers to do so.Young designers from 30 countries came to the region to work with local people on radical new forms of tourism: a twenty-first century B+B, wi-fi youth hostels, agri-tourism, and extreme sport nature parks.The climax of Dott was be a two-week Festival attended by more than 20,000 citizens of all ages. During the Festival the "Creative Community Awards" - or "The Commies" - were awarded for the first time. http://www.dott07.com/
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea
I was a member of start-up team (and of the Steering Committee until the end of 2003) that established this new research institute in Italy, supported by an independent aqssociation of major private companies brought together by Olivetti and Telecom Italia. My specific tasks were to help develop and articulate the institute’s basic concept and organisational form; define and articulate the roles of, and benefits to, industry sponsors; organize an international workshop of experts to refine the research programme; write job and person profiles for professors, researchers and students; create and implement launch phase communications and produce inaugural event; organize a workshop for researchers and industry on new business models for interactive products and services. For Panorama, the Institute was “a point of reference for the generation of new ideas and a new design culture.”And Francesco Gavazzi, in a cover story for Corriere della Sera, proclaimed that “at Ivrea, students design new ways of interaction between man and technology”.
Hong Kong Design Task Force
I 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 the best way for Hong Kong and China to move up the value chain from a product-based to a service-and-flow based economy. Following the report, Hong Kong launched a "DesignSmart" initiative with the creation of a HK$250million (25 million euros) fund.
Design and Innovation Research Centre (DIEC)
Doors was in a consortium that developed the specification and blueprint of an important new institution to be based in Newcastle in the North-East of England. Service design improves the effectiveness and efficiency of service delivery, but no institution currently specialises in the design and engineering of services. The project is still in development.
Convivio: a new vision for "social computing" in Europe
Doors was responsible for vision building in Convivio – an EU network for social computing whose members included such leading universities and companies as Xerox, King's College London, Philips, Deutsche Forschunhzentrum fur Kuenstliche Intelligenz, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Consorzio Roma Ricerche.
www.convivionetwork.net
Virtual Platform
Doors of Perception served until 2006 as a member of this advisory group to Dutch government on new media cultural policy.
www.virtueelplatform.nl
Time In Design (November 2003)
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 presented. Doors of Perception, and The Long Now Foundation, supported the event by helping with speaker selection and publicity. www.eternally-yours.nl
Quality time at high speed? (May 2004)
What would it mean to design for fast and slow speeds? Today’s high speed train (HST) travel is a marvel of speed and profligate resource consumption. It is transforming the experience of space and time of 13 million travellers who already use it each year – and of citizens who live in places where the trains deign to stop. 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”.
www.hst-network.net
Design and local knowledge (May 2004)
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. This desolate but fertile spot was the location for the final workshop in Spark!, a service design project in response to the question: when traditional industries disappear from a locality, what is to take their place? (Nexo, on Bonholm, is one of dozens of Baltic and European fishing ports where industrial fishing has become unsustainable). A conference in Oslo reviewed the lessons learned in this experiment, reflect on the concept of "territorial capital", and began the design of new projects for the future.
Want to be a design metropolis? (October 2004)
What is a design metropolis? Should a city aspire to become one? This symposium (which was supported by Doors) cast a critical eye over the policies and programs of Montreal, Saint-Etienne and other aspirant design cities, and will compare them with established international design capitals. The event attracted municipal and elected officials responsible for urban, cultural and economic development and procurement policies, government officials responsible for design and innovation policies, and people in design organizations responsible for strategy development.
Fused space
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 Fusedspace, an international competition organised by Premsela, and supported by Doors, to find inspiring applications for new technology in the public domain.
www.fusedspace.org
Amsterdam Medical Centre (AMC)
I 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
Creative Communities (Emude)
I was the advisor (on “how to be a hub”) to a European consortium of design and architecture schools (led by Ezio Manzini) that is developed a network of project observatories to track examples of social innovation using ICTs.
In Scotland, a design clinic for entrepreneurs
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 companies helped each other envisage radical scenarios and how they might be implemented.
Milan Triennale
I was advisor to this exibition and conference organised by Ezio Manzini at the Milan Triennale. A "catalogue of promising solutions" addressed questions that most of us confront: how to take care of people, work, study, move around, find food, eat, and share equipment.
www.edizioniambiente.it
Creativity and the City
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 from around the world. I supported the event with speaker suggestions and advance publicity and a keynote lecture, “The Post-spectacular city” which has been widely cited.
www.creatievestad.nl
For 1000 professors – life in the learning economy
How will we learn when knowledge changes so fast? Will there still be a role for teachers, when students can learn for themselves? These questions faced 1,000 university teachers at Oro/Oro: TeachersLab, a unique event organised in January 2001 by Caroline Nevejan for the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (Amsterdam University of Professional Education). Doors of Perception helped organise a three-day conference. Oro-Oro had a simple structure: information plus inspiration in the morning, hands-on practice in the afternoon – in a software environment designed by our partners in OroOro, Mediamatic. Each of the three days had a theme: ‘Seeking and Finding’; ‘Editing and Interacting’; ‘Teaching and Earning’. www.oro.hva.nl