By profession I am a symposiarch – that is, someone who designs collaborative events, projects, and organizations. In these, designers, grassroots innovators, and citizens, develop new service concepts.
[I also help cities and regions build new institutions that enable designers, other specialists, and citizens, to learn and work together in new ways. This part of my work is described at Design Policy]
[I am also Director of Doors of Perception (Doors), a design futures network with offices in Amsterdam and Bangalore].
Below are some examples of my work as a symposiarch:
Quality Time At High Speed?
What would it mean to design for fast and slow speeds? I organised this expert workshop for the European High Speed Train Network about the concept of “quality time” and its consequences for city nodes. HST 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. Enormous infrastructure projects are under way, but we have not made space for reflection on the cultural consequences of it all. Our cultural expert workshop on the theme, “quality time”. Developed project ideas for services and situations that connect people, cultural resources, and places, in new combinations. High Speed Train
Spark! Design and local knowledge
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). Aconference in Oslo reviewed the lessons learned in this experiment, reflect on the concept of "territorial capital", and begin the design of new projects for the future. spark conference spark book
Skunk Space and Time
The results of our Project Leaders' Round Table, which was about success factors in design research projects, are now online. Presentations include “touching the state”, milk distribution chains in Latvia, bar code triggered videos in hospitals, high speed train scenarios, and service design in health systems. A text called Conclusions contains more questions than answers, but includes a call for “skunk space and time”. We will apply the lessons of this event to the Project Clinics, which will be a focus of Doors 8 in New Delhi. Project Leaders' Round Table
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 inFusedspace, an international competition organised by Premsela, and supported by Doors of Perception, to find inspiring applications for new technology in the public domain. Fused Space
Tomorrow's Services Today
The theme of Doors East in Bangalore was "designing tomorrow's services". A front page article in The Economic Times described it as "the most avant garde event that the IT world has ever seen - at least in India". We set out to learn how to design services, enabled by ICT, that meet basic needs in new ways. The leaders of 19 projects from Europe and South Asia joined a pre-conference workshop to swap experiences. 300 people from the words of software, design, policy, media, and grassroots projects came to the main event, on 11 and 12 December. Transcripts, photographs and reports are online. 2003 doorseast.com / projectexamples
Time In Design
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. The event experimented with a range of formats and tempos - from one-minute films, and 100-word lectures, to slow-food dinners and leisurely fireside chats. Doors of Perception, and The Long Now Foundation, supported the event by helping with speaker selection and publicity. 2003 Eternally Yours.
