March 16, 2008

From MySpace to fakespace: How close are we to travel without moving?

This is my talk from yesterday in Helsinki at Pixelache University. There are pix here

Could the biosphere be saved by six glass lamps, six speakers, 36 ultra bright leds, six diy mono amplifiers, a diy arduino-based six channel led dimmer, a six channel soundcard, a midi controller, a midi interface,one computer, and a max-msp application ?

It all depends on how radical and open-minded we are prepared to be in the search for alternatives to physical travel.

Traveling without moving has become an economic and environmental imperative. Matter is more expensive than energy; energy is more expensive than information; it is cheaper to move information, than people or things. So what is to stop us moving less, and and tele-communicating more?

Telecommunications companies have invested heavily for years in telepresence systems with the aim of reproducing as closely as possible the sensation of 'being there'. Hewlett Packard describe their system, Halo as "the ultimate collaborative environment... a telepresence solution that brings meeting attendees from around the globe into an environment that feels as if they are in the same room".

The entertainment industry has also been busy - motivated by the fact that people will pay theme park operators a dollar a minute to experience sophisticated simulations. The small-screen computer games industry is already bigger than Hollywood; social website proprietors are also keen to add functionality; so big money is at stake.

Presence researchers are testing myriad ways for us to interact with virtual worlds in this 'fakespace' race: Computerized clothing that recognizes physical gestures; accelerometers that track movements of the body; sensors that track eye movements (first developed by shop designers); joysticks that allow interaction with 3-D magic wands; feedback systems that measure force, pressure, or vibration; remote operation systems that translate human movements into the control of machinery.

With so-called haptic interface devices, you feel the motion, shape, resistance, and surface texture of simulated objects.Telerobotic manipulators, that incorporate actuation, sensor, and control technologies, permit us to achieve dexterous manipulation of virtual objects.

Sound is also being designed for "acoustigraphic" environments in which 3-D sound is combined with stereoscopic vision to help you hear the sounds of traffic in the distance and wind rustling the leaves of nearby trees. A Displaced Temperature Sensing System enables you to feel the temperature of a remote location - real or unreal - as if you were there.

Down the line, technology developers that tiny micro-lasers will scan pictures directly onto the retina of the eye - an effect already experienced by military pilots. A company called Cyberware has developed 3d whole-body scanners which create representations of people - avatars - that can act for corporeal people in "inhabited information spaces". The business plan is that you'll be scanned in AvatarBooths - as happens now with passport photographs in railway stations. Having digitised your body, you'll send it out into cyberspace where it will meet and hang out with other avatars. (The project was was nicknamed Immortality R Us by fellow researchers).

Other developers dream of scaling up such effects to create virtual electronic crowds. A project in Europe called eRENA focussed on information spaces inhabited jointly by audience members, performers, and artists: they would explore, interact, communicate with one another and participate in staged events.

Remote sensing may also be used to create immersive representations of otherwise inaccessible places. Real-time sonar and acoustic tomography data could become a display of undersea terrain and objects. An acoustigraphics library would stream the noises made by fish into the mix.

BEING THERE - - - NOT

Evelina Domnitch (who is here at Pixelache) and Dmitry Gelfand directly convert sound into lightwaves by employing a phenomenon called sonoluminescence. They create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices.

The problem with these intriguing ideas is that it would never occur to telcos to develp them. Despite five decades of effort, the promise of virtual presence ushered in by the of the videophone, which was launched with much kerfuffle by IBM at the 1964 New York World's Fair, has not been met. Huge investments in virtual environments, mobile communication and biosensors have delivered modest results at best. Tele-presence communication has not matured as an experience, nor as a market.

Even its advocates remain unimpressed: The head of videoconferencing of a large British TelCo told me that he and his colleagues avoided used their own system if they possibly could.

A reality check for technology optimists: whilst high bandwidth videoconferencing has strugggled, simpler forms of remote communication have boomed - POTS they call it in the telecoms trade, or "Plain Old Telephone Service". Two billion people now have handsets because they want POTS - not because they want virtualty. The lowest bandwidth communication, texting, enjoys the highest volume by far.

TelCos are needlessly obsessed with Being There-ness in a literal sense. As MediaLab rsearcher Skip Ishii points out, the human eye has something like 40 million receptors in it. Many millions more receptors are to be found in our ears, up out noses, in our skin and on our tongues. (There are dense clusters of receptors elsewhere on the body, too - but this is a family readership, so I will not dwell on those).

Even if you could capture the smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of a place, digitise them, and send them down a wire - you'd still never get near the sensation of Being There. Why? We'd just know, that's why. Our minds and our bodies are one intelligence.

Subliminal perception, perception that occurs without conscious awareness, is not an anomaly, but the norm. As Tor Norretranders has explained, most of what we perceive in the world comes not from conscious observation but from a continuous process of unconscious scanning. During any given second, we consciously process only sixteen of the eleven million bits of information that our senses pass on to our brains. The conscious part of us receives much less information than the unconscious part of us.

This is why technology simply cannot and will not recreate what it is like to be in a meeting with people somewhere else. People, who have bodies, cannot inhabit virtual space. Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor, puts it more poetically: "Tele-hugs won't do it."

The fact that we inhabit bodies, and not networks, frustrates games designers. They complain about the "uncanny valley" dilemma. Game designers once hoped that crisper 3-D graphics and faster response-times would deliver a more realistic experience. In the event, higher bandwidth and faster speeds does nothing to increase our sense of an environment being 'real'.

The uncanny valley effect was explained by a robotics engineer, Masahiro Mori, to explain why almost-human-looking robots scare people more than mechanical-looking robots. The uncanny valley of Mori’s thesis is the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting.

Cognitive pyschologist Andy Clarke, author of Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again adds that the biological brain is populated by a vast number of what he calls hidden 'zombie processes.' These underpin the skills and capacities in which successful behaviour depends.

"Being embodied is our nature as earth-born creatures” says the English philosopher, John Gray. But our infantile enchantment with digital communication blinds us to this fact. Our tendency to undervalue embodied knowledge is one of the root causes of the sustainability crisis.

OUT OF THE SILOS

Telepresence sucks. It's an insult that telcos should expect us to meet in hideous sterile rooms in front of huge screens.

But sustainabiity demands that we compromise; the biosphere cannot support the perpetually growing movement of goods and bodies around the world. We have to make the best we can of mediated presence.

So we have to keep on trying. But there are more interesting tasks for design than the use of brute bandwidth to achieve 'Being There' verisimilitude. The communication quality of cyberspace can be enhanced by artful and indirect means.

A first task is to escape from our disciplinary silos. Engineers try to coax more bandwidth out of pipes. Psychologists study communication behaviours. Philosophers talk about embodiment. Artists make beautiful interfaces. But they barely know that each other exists - let alone pool their knowledge and resources.

Some designers have tried out a more poetic and multi-dimensional approach. Twelve years back, in The Poetics of Telepresence, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby looked at the potential of fusing physical and telematic space. They asked, why should videoconferencing always be face to face? why limit contact to speech, or sight? They proceeded to use radio to trigger heat devices remotely, and proposed other techniques to evoke, and not just replicate, the shared experience of the remote body.

Half a decade ago in Italy, design researchers in a project called Faraway also looked at long distance communication between loved ones who are physically distant, but emotionally close. The team explored what happens when gesture, expressions, heartbeat, breathing, alpha- and beta-rythm informnation are incorporated into long-distance communication. The idea was to increase the sense of presence of a loved person over distance - but indirectly.

Replicating heartbeats is not the only way to go. Seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin marveled at the capacity of the aura of an original art work to spur our imaginative engagement wth a situation. Or think how much the religions achieve with the use of icons as aids to devotion; if lumps of bronze help millons of people commune with a deity, surely we can enhance telepresence using other kinds of objects.

Think of photographs. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote about kissing the picture of one's beloved. "When we kiss a photograph, we do not expect to conjour up a spectacular manifestation of the person in the picture represents - but the action is nonetheless satisfying".

Evolutionary psychologists believe that magical ways of thinking may be hardwired into us, and cite as evidence the human capacity to invest inanimate objects with meaning...souvenirs, heirlooms, chldhood toys, objets d'art, dolls, totems, talsmans, and charms.

It's probably a matter of timing. Here we are at Pixelache, and the world needs artful telepresence more urgently than before. Can we please get on with it? Now!

Posted by John Thackara at 05:22 AM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2007

Global place - or is it a hat?

The following is the text of my lecture at the Global Place conference in an unseasonably warm Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Joshua Kauffman has posted an excellent summary of the event here).

THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT

Some of you may know Oliver Sacks' book “The man who mistook his wife for a hat”? It's about people afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations - and in particular a man who looks at something familiar (his wife) but perceives something completely different.

Well, I’ve become one of those people!

It happened to me most recently at Madrid’s new airport. One minute I was admiring Richard Rogers’ gorgeous roof, and the play of light upon curves.

But I suddenly stopped perceiving these effects as aesthetic. In place of elegant forms and vistas, I started to contemplate the vast amount of energy embodied in the artefacts, structures and processes that surrounded me.

A big new airbus, taxiing in to park, made me wonder how many thousands - millions - of pounds of matter and energy must have been used to build it.

Beside me was an elegant concrete pillar. It looked benignly tree-like with a gently curving trunk and branches, higher up, that supported a soaring roof.

But how many carbon dioxide emissions were generated during its fabrication? A ton of CO2 is emitted for every ton of concrete that ends up in a pillar - or the miles of concrete apron that stretched, in Madrid, in every direction.

Millions of tons of concrete visible to the eye. Millions of tons of emissions out of sight.

Then there was the noise. I don’t usually notice the background hiss and hum of these great modern spaces. But this time my cognitive filters seemd to fail. I became aware of an ambient, angst-inducing roar.

All that air-conditioning, cooling huge volumes of empty space, blowing gales of out hot air to goodness knows where in the sky.

Eight per cent of the world's total electricity supply is used to cool buildings in the United States.

Then there was the light! There was a bank of large plasma screens. On the screens, ads were playing - but all I could think about was their greed for electricity.

Did you know that flat screens use five times more power than the bulbous ones they replace?

And that’s just the power they use. Cathode ray televisons contained mostly air. These new plasma screens are packed densely with complex materials whose manufacture is highly energy intensive.

So I’m the man who mistook a concrete pillar for a threat to the world! But do you know what? I reckon my cognitive confusion in Madrid had just cause.

I read a text by Rafael Buitrago about our aesthetic and visceral responses to landscape. (My fellow speaker Anne Spirn, who I met in the break, told me Buitrago is an ex-student of hers).

The ways we respond aesthetically to our environment, Buitrago (and Spirn) argue, may be derived from psychology that evolved to help hunter-gatherers make better decisions: when to move, where to settle – to chase or not to chase - in varying situations.

Environmental stimuli as diverse as flowers, sunsets, clouds, thunder, snakes, and predators, activate response systems of ancient origin.

I’m a frequent flyer, not a hunter gatherer. But I’m sure now that feeling the creeps in Madrid was some residual survival instinct being triggered. Not by an inherited fear of snakes - but by a learned fear of degredation to the biosphere and the threat it poses to us all.

Many climate change activists complain that "climate pornography” - the promotion of apocalyptic climate change scenarios - is counter-productive. Climate porn, for one British think tank, “offers a thrilling spectacle, but ultimately distances people from the problem'.

These critics are right. To do things differently, we have to perceive things differently - but not be immobilised by fear, or guilt. We need to be startled out of our complaency, but in such a way that we feel motivated to take meaningful action.

A lot of people seem to have started. Paul Hawken reckons that over one million organizations, populated by 100 million people, are engaged in grass roots activity designed to address climate and other environmental issues. This worldwide movement of movements flies under the radar, he believes, but "collectively, this constitutes the single biggest movement on earth”

These one million grass roots organisations are just one part of the story. Many big organisations, too, are re-thinking fundamental principles of their business. For many multinationals, the consequences of climate change for the very existence of their business has moved from the realm of “future scenario” to be a real and present danger.

Let me give you some examples I’ve heard about just during the last month:

I heard about a top five logistics and parcel delivery company for whose CEO sustainability is the key driver of the company’s future.

I was told that one of the world’s largest shipping ports has decided it must render its operations carbon neutral within a decade. How, I have no idea – but it sounds as if they are completely serious.

A major European airport, I learned, is studying how it might feasibly prosper if air travel ceased to be an important part of its business.

Whole countries are getting serious about massive transformational change.

Sweden, for example, has made it national objective to be independent of oil within a decade.

Switzerland has set a target of becoming a "2000-Watt society". That’s one third of the 6000 Watts of energy consumed by each of its its citizens today on food, goods, heating and cooling buildings, mobility and so on.

The most dramatic shift, for me, is emerging in Britain – until now, a byword for of wasteful consumerism.

The recent publication of the Stern Review Of Climate Change Economics - by a former World Bank chief economist - marks a step change in government responses.

It’s not just that Stern's conclusions correspond broadly to what environmentalists have been saying for fifteen years. The fact that the report was commissioned by The Treasury, which control’s the nation’s taxation and money - is also key. Money is at stake: Something must be done!

Stern paves the way for so-called “external” costs to be counted properly for the first time.

(Notoriously, economists describe as”external” costs things like energy, water, minerals, the biosphere as a whole - that, until now, have not been properly counted as part of the game. We used energy to exploit resources – but did not pay the full price of the energy or the resources).

A government can use fiscal measures to make these so-called “external” costs internal costs, payable by the producer. Matter and energy flowing through the economic system will have to be paid for at full price - rather than taken for granted as a freebie. The Stern review provides an economic justification for dramatic changes to the ways we live.

RESOURCE EFFICIENCY AS DESIGN OPPORTUNITY

There’s a truly gigantic design opportunity here. We have to re-design the structures, institutions and processes that drive the economy along. We have to transform material, energy and resource flows that, unchecked, will finish us.

In this new design space, the boundaries between infrastructure, content, equipment, software, products, services, space, and place, are blurred. Compared to physical products, or buildings, sustainable services and infrastructures are immaterial. They are adaptive in time and space.

So it’s a huge opportunity, but a new kind of design practice is needed to exploit it.

First: This new design practice is more about discovery, than blue sky invention. Many of the answers we need already exist. We need to become global hunter-gatherers of models, processes, and ways of living that have been learned by other societies, over time. We have to find those examples. Adapt them. Recombine them.

Just as biomimicry learns from millions of years of natural evolution, we can adapt the social innovation of other times and places to our present, ultra-modern needs.

For example, a lot of people already know how to live more lightly than we do. Hundreds of millions of poor people practise advanced resource efficiency every day of their lives. That’s because they are too poor to waste resources like we rich folk do.

Design schools should relocate en masse to favelas and slums. These informal economies are sites of intense social and business innovation.

A second key feature of the new design practise: it is less about control, more about the devolution of power. A good test is whether a design proposal will enable people to retain control over their own territory and resources.

A third feature of the new design practice: it does not have to think Big,or act Big, to be effective. On the contrary: we have learned about the behaviour of complex systems that small is not small. Small design actions can have big consequences, and these can be positive.

If someone builds a bus stop, in an urban slum, a vibrant community can sprout and grow around it. Such is the power of small interventions into complex urban situations. Read Small Change by Nabeel Hamdi for more inspiring examples of the power of designing small.

Item four: The new design practise looks for ways to replace physical resources with information. The information part is knowing where something you need to use, is. If you can locate a thing, and access it easily, you don't have to own it.

Think of cars. Most of them are used less than 5% of the time. It’s nonsense. 600 cities now have carsharing schemes? The same goes for buildings. In a light and sustainable economy we will share resources - such as time, skill, software, spaces or food - using networked communications.

We don’t have to design sharing systems from scratch. Many already exist. Local systems of barter and non-monetary exchange, such as Jogjami, have existed in India for at least 500 years. A cooperative distribution system called Angadia, or "many little fingers", enables people to send goods over sometimes vast distances without paying.

They just need to be internet enabled.

The fifth and hardest aspect to master of the new design practice is whole systems thinking.

The best example I heard recently is from an entrepreneur called Paul Polak, who helps people in developing countries develop more effective water distribution systems. Paul reckons the design and technology of a device, such as a pump, or sprinkler system, is not much more than ten percent of the complete solution. The other ninety percent involves distribution, training, maintenance and service arrangements, partnership and business models. These, too, have to be co-designed.

I began this morning by describing the curious perceptual delusions that I experienced, whilst staring at a concrete pillar in Madrid Airport.

I may be nuts, I said, but could there be method in my madness? The ability to perceiving disorders in the environment has helped a lot of creatures survive.

Besides, millions of people seem to share my unease. I suspect there are quite a lot of you in this room.

Big companies, and governments, are also readying themselves for transformational change. I promise you that strange bedfellows will be teaming up in the near future.

Eugenio Barba calls this “the dance of the big and the small”.

I don’t mind if you choose to dance. I’l be satisfied if, just once this week, you slap a concrete pillar and start to wonder…..

end

COMMENT FROM ROBERT HOLLIER

John,

I very much enjoyed this post - thought-provoking, yes, but written in a positive and energetic style. Lots of arresting ideas to ponder.

And I really think you ought to strive to get wider distribution for this piece.

Fyi, I tried to post this comment on the blog but kept getting incomprehensible (to me) error messages.

RH
robert.hollier@b1.com

Posted by John Thackara at 10:32 PM | Comments (1)

December 24, 2006

The dance of the big and the small

(Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich from Worldchanging asked some people to send them an end-of-year reflection. Here below is mine. They are both coming to Doors 9, by the way).

Suppose Bill Gates were to purchase six and a half billion copies of Worldchanging, have them translated into the world’s major languages, and then give a free copy to every citizen of the on the planet. Would the challenges we face disappear?

I don’t think so. Reading, writing, and discussing are important precursors to meaningful innovation – but they do not, of themselves, change material reality.

On the contrary. Although hundreds of millions of people are now demanding that “something must be done” to avert climate change, they – we – are confronted by a debilitating cacophony of often contradictory ideas and solutions.

Think, for example, of buildings and energy. Passionate advocates of different technologies insist to us that each has the ideal solution: Wind turbines, nanogel insulation, hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels, wood-chip boilers. How can each one be the answer?

Or take energy infrastructure. One group of innovators insists that each building can become its own power station. Another says that micro-generation is only viable when 50 houses do it as a group.

As many organisations offer advice as there are technologies to choose from. In the North East of England, for example, when we set out (in Designs of the time ) to reduce the carbon footprint of a single street, we encountered 20 organisations already busy trying to help people save energy.

We’re swamped by innovation, but starved of meaning. So what steps should we take, and in which order?

I believe the solution is to scout the world for situations where the question has already been addressed - whatever the question may be. The Danish theatre director Eugenio Barba describes this as “the dance of the big and the small”. We need to be global hunter-gatherers of models, processes, and ways of living that already exist.

In the same way that biomimicry learns from millions of years of natural evolution, we need to adapt lessons learned by other societies to our present, ultra-local needs.

Where there are gaps, we can invent stuff. But let's ease up on inventing for it’s own sake: it delivers as much smoke, as solutions.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2006

Re-designing the game

(The following is the text of my lecture at today's Competitiveness Summit in London.

"I have been asked to address two questions this morning.

The first: Is UK competitiveness imperilled by developing countries catching up and overtaking us?

And question two: How best shall we use our creativity and innovation to stay ahead in the game?

My answer to question 1 is that it is the wrong question, as I shall explain in a moment.

But I will answer Question 2 - by telling you about a project in North East England, called, Designs of the time, or Dott. I will explain the ways in which Dott reframes competition as a race for energy and resource efficiency in our everyday lives.

I will conclude with suggestions on how the lessons of Dott might usefully inform the ways we think about competitiveness at a national level.

A] CHANGING THE GAME

Question 1: Is our competitiveness imperilled by developing countries catching up with us?

My answer is No, because, in so-called developing countries, but also here in the north, the rules of competition are changing – profoundly, and irrevocably.

We are all emerging economies now.

The publication of the Stern Review of climate change economics, by a former World Bank chief economist, marks a radical change in the rules by which we compete.

Before Stern, we measured our competitiveness against bizarre criteria. The country with the highest growth, and productivity, went to the top of the league.

But the application of bizarre criteria leads to bizarre - and unsustainable - results.

High growth, as an abstract measure of success, meant that last year a new product was launched every 3.5 minutes.

Companies all over the world innovated like crazy, and competed like mad, to bring out some new ….thing….at ever increasing rates.

Did we need a new product every 3.5 minutes?

I don’t think so.

On the contrary: survey after survey demonstrates that we are in despair at the flood of often pointless products we are told will make us happy.

What beckons in an era of perpetual growth? New product simultaneity? Reality that will contain only new products?

Measuring competitveness against the yardstick of productivity leads to other forms of strangeness.

You must have heard the story: the highest degree of productivity is exhibited by a cancer patient going through a divorce.

Very smart.

What’s especially mad about productivity, as a measure of success, is that so-called “external” costs – energy, water, minerals, the biosphere as a whole - are not properly counted as part of the game.

The theory of productivity is that we produce more with less.

But we don’t. We use energy to exploit resources; and we don’t pay the full price of the energy or the resources we use to do so.

Excluding external costs from the score sheet means we completely ignore the impact of our game on the playing surface. And guess what. The playing surface has become worn. And the ball has started to bounce in alarming ways.

(A laboured cricketing metaphor is pretty much a requirement in any speech made in England).

This is what is important about Stern. He is paves the way for a new scoring system.

Under new rules, which the UK Chancellor’s pre-budget statement yesterday started tentatively to portend, will be introduced progressively faster as cultural and poiitcal pressure for action builds.

One of the few things a government can do, when the people demand that it does something, is use fiscal measures to make these so-called “external” costs internal costs, payable by the producer.

This is the heart of what a “high value, knowledge-based economy” means.

It’s when matter and energy, flowing through the economic system, have to be paid for at full price - rather than taken for granted as a freebie.

Who will be competitive then?

B DOTT 07

Some commentators responded quickly to Stern. They proclaimed lists of the crucial actions that government must…. take…. now.

What governments must, or can do, top-down, is a modest part of the story.

There are limits to any government’s power to tell people how to behave. Especially, if these edicts boil down to the command: consume less!

This leads me to Designs of the time – Dott 07 – and the second question I was asked to address: How best shall we use our creativity and innovation to stay ahead in the game?

Dott 07 is about creating demand for new and more sustainable ways to live.

(Dott is an initiative of the Design Council and a joint venture with the Regional Development Agency, One North East).

Next year, throughout the North East of England, different communities have been challenged to address the question, “how do we want to live?”

Grass roots communities are taking the lead in experiments to change the ways they deal with daily-life issues.

These issues range from energy use in the home; to how we move around; how we look after older people; how we can grow food in cities.

One Dott project is called LOW CARB LANE.

More and more of us would like to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, especially at home. To save money, if not to save the planet.

But how to do it?

Wind turbines? Fuel cells? Solar panels? Nano-gell insulation? Wood-chip boilers? There are so many competing technologies claimed to be the magic cure-all solution.

It’s imposible to decide what to do.

It’s also hard to pay. Most people cannot afford to shell out thousands of pounds just to be good.

Low Carb Lane tackles tackles these challenges head-on, in a real street: Castle Terrace, in Ashington.
The community will explore the potential to achieve warm and comfortable homes in ways that reduces their carbon footprint - and also save them money.

Helped by an an innovation and design team from Dott, they will look at ways to modify everyday patterns of activity; choose more efficient appliances; add insulation; generate their own power.

Everything from energy saving lightbulbs, to high-tech meters; solar hot water; and off-grid generation; will be considered as a whole.

We’ll see if Personal Energy Passports might work for the citizens of Castle Terrace.

We’ll explore the idea of a Green Concierge Service to help citizens choose which solutions, if any, are best for them.

Seventy five schools across North East England are also tackling the energy issue head-on.

Year eight students have been given a tool by Dott to help them map the carbon footprint of their "school as an ecosystem".

Once they have identified which aspects of their school’s energy and resource life are wasteful, they will propose re-designs to make their school more resource and energy efficient.

The 50 best schools will progress these plans the help of professional designers. The best designs will be put forward for awards at the Dott Festival next October.

Low Carb Lane, and our schools project, both respond to the big energy picture.

But these projects must deliver practical improvements to the daily lives of real people in real places.

What’s key is that these small actions just might, as tipping points, have big consequences.

Another Dott project, called Move Me!, tackles the need for mobility and access in a rural community.

The question posed by Move Me! is this: How can we improve peoples mobility, and access to services, without adding more cars or building new roads?

Scremerston County First School, in Northumberland, is the focus for this project.

The Move Me! project will look at the school community’s total mobility needs – including un-met ones - and explore how they can be better served by combining existing services, in smarter ways.

In policy terms, our subject is transport intensity, rural access, and resource efficiency.

In Dott terms, we are seeking practical ways to improve daily life for one community, in one place.

The idea is that if we can improve things for real people, in one school - the tools, methods and services we develop for Scremerston can be scaled up and multiplied.

This is why we say Dott is in the acorns business,

A third Dott 07 project is called Urban Farming or: “I grew it my way”.

Food is a huge energy challenge.

From farm to plate, depending on the degree to which it has been processed, a typical food item may embody input energy between four and several hundred times the food energy that enters our bodies.

As much fat from fast food outlets is clogging up the sewers of our cities -- as is clogging up the arteries of our citizens.

Or take an iceberg lettuce in Harvey Nicholls food hall: for every calory that we eat, it takes 120 calories to grow it, pack it, fly it over the Atlantic, and display it under bright flattering lights in an open-fronted refrigerator.

Totally mad.

In Dott, we decided to take practical steps to slash the distance between what we eat, and where it is grown.

Based in Middlesborough, our Urban Farming project is helping local citizens grow their own food in small, medium, and large urban growing spaces.

These will range from window boxes, to larger planter boxes, and low-sided skips.

A Meal Assembly Centre will be established where growers will be helped to prepare their produce in a week’s worth of meals.

The project will culminate next September, in a ‘Meal for Middlesbrough.’

All the individuals, schools, businesses, farms and communities will take part.

A fourth Dott 07 project is called ALZHEIMER 100.

It asks: What practical steps are needed to improve daily life for people with dementia and their carers?

Dementia affects 750,000 people currently in the UK. This is expected to rise to 810,00 by 2010 and 1.8m by 2050. Two million sufferers means five million people directly affected.

It’s a huge - but largely hidden - issue.

As with the other Dot projects, we will investigate every day problems experienced by particular Alzheimer’s patients and carers in real situations.

Dott has teamed up with Alzheimers Society branches throughout the North East to find out what new products and services might be needed tackle these specific problems.

We will enable people with Alzheimers and their carers to document a “day in our life”. These day-in-my-life presentations wlil become opportunity maps that mark practical things to be fixed.

Where new with support systems, or devices, are needed, we will make design proposals.

We don’t yet know what the outcomes will be, but early meetings have considered concierge or “porterage” service; a time sharing system for carers and volunteers; and a buddy system for people with Alzheimer’s enabled by GIS technology and wearable computing.

C LESSONS OF DOTT 07

The first public events of Dott 07 are not until next March. But Dott 07 has been in preparation for over a year, and a number of lessons pertinent to today’s discussion are already evident.

The first lesson we have learned in Dott is that creativity and innovation are all around us. People are busy - dealing innovatively with daily life - in all manner of creative ways.

Everywhere we look.

Paul Hawken reckons that worldwide, over one million organizations, populated by over 100 million people, are engaged in grassroots activity designed to address climate and other environmental issues.

"Collectively this constitutes the single biggest movement on earth, but but it flies under the radar" he writes.

Our job in Dott, we now realise, is not to create innovation it from scratch. Our job is to discover and accelerate existing grass roots innovation.

A second lesson from Dott is about networks, connections, and alliances.

Some of our public commission projects involve ten or fifteen different partners. Public ones and private ones. Big ones and small ones. Academic ones and business ones. In Dott’s public commission projects, we seem to have them all!

Bringing together new players, in new combinations, is exciting. Importing inspirational examples from other domains is dynamic. Looking “outside the tent” for new ideas has fantastic potential.

But it takes an awful lot of time and social energy to build the shared understanding, and trust, without which these new alliances and relationships would not flourish.

Our conclusion, a year into Dott: Innovation is as much a time issue as it is a money issue, or a technology one.

The third big lesson we are learning in Dott concerns leadership, and that over-used word, “vision”.

We are finding, in Dott, that posing a question - “how do we want to live?” – motivates people in ways that telling them how to live, does not.

We do not stand over people and demand: “what sacrifices will you make to save the planet?”. On the contrary, Dott is about open-ended conversations about how we want to live.

Our ambition is that out of these conversations – and others that are happening throughout the region - a shared vision of region-wide and sustainable renewal will emerge.

It’s a vision in which people take control of how they want to live. Not a vision imposed, top-down, by those with technlogies to sell, or policies to impose.

D CONCLUSION

I said at the start that there are two ways to compete:

Either we run faster and faster - under existing rules - wear out the pitch, and then, whilst looking backwards, run slap into a rock. The rock of climate change.

Or we re-design the rules of the game.

The old game was all about productivity, growth and continuous acceleration. We played it – and played it well in the UK - as if resources were limitless. As if carrying capacity of the planet didn’t matter.

In the new game, resource constraints, the carrying capacity of the biosphere, are all that matter.

Given that 80 per cent resource efficiency, or the lack of it, is determined at the design stage, the new scoring system presents design with a gigantic challenge.

I’m not so starry-eyed that I expect humankind to get all lovey dovey and co-operate our way to sustainabliity.

Let’s face it: We humans are rapacious and competitive by nature.

But when new rules turn “external” costs into internal costs....

When matter and energy flowing through the economic system have to be paid for....

Well, we’ll just have to be rapacious and competitive in new ways.

Some of these new ways bare being tried out in Dott. So I look forward to seeing you at the Dott 07 Festival next October, somewhere on the bands of the River Tyne.

END

Some other texts and resources:

HOW TO BE GOOD
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2006/07/how_to_be_good.php

ALTERNATIVES TO GELDOFISM (pdf.)
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/images/thackara_rsa_handout.pdf

SOLIDARITY ECONOMICS
Strategies for Building New Economies From the Bottom-Up and the Inside-Out by Ethan Miller
http://www.geo.coop/SolidarityEconomicsEthanMiller.htm

NEW INDICATORS
The percentage of people in Northern countries calling themselves happy peaked in the 1950s - even though consumption has more than doubled since then. Hazel Henderson has helped develop twelve quality of life indicators - new criteria against which to make decisions about what we innovate, and how. http://www.calvert-henderson.com/update-globalboom.htm

Posted by John Thackara at 08:37 AM | Comments (1)

November 20, 2006

Life as a spot

Remember all those books and reports about "the future of work"? Well, the future seems to have arrived. A new report from Orange called The way to work states that, of 28.5 million UK workers, 3.64 million (13%) are self employed, 7 million (24%) are part-time workers, 7% are freelance workers, and 11% are in businesses with no employees. Otherwise stated: 55% of the UK workforce does not have a job in the traditional sense of the word. The report does not mention the hundreds of millions of hours of unpaid, uncounted work done by parents and care givers. If their work were included in the total, the number of job-less workers would be nearer 80% of the total. Now there's a thought.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:10 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2006

Doing good at 8,000 feet

Podcast of an interview at 8000 feet with Chee Pearlman.

Posted by John Thackara at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2006

Global Place

A century ago, the planet was primarily rural; today it is half urban; and in twenty-five years it will be predominately urban. What does this mean for the design, production, sustainability and experience of our buildings and cities? For the sense of community and place? The University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning's centennial conference will bring together two dozen renowned architects, urban planners, researchers and scholars from around the world. The line-up features Homi Bhabha, Charles Correa, Kenneth Frampton, Liane LeFaivre, Saskia Sassen, Michael Sorkin, David Harvey, Susan Fainstein, Ken Yeang, Yung Ho Chang, Dan Soloman, Marilyn Taylor, Bish Sanyal, John Habraken, Arif Hasan, Phillip Enquist, David Orr, Anthony Townsend, Anne Spirn, Lars Lerup, Ricky Burdett, and your correspondent. Phew.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:58 PM | Comments (1)

October 31, 2006

Stern, Monbiot, and the tasks of design

The publication of the Stern review of climate change economics by a former World Bank chief economist marks a step change in government responses to the crisis.

It’s not just that Stern's conclusions correspond broadly to what environmentalists have been saying for fifteen years. The fact that the report was commissioned by The Treasury, which holds the keys to the nation’s money, is also key.

Money is at stake: Something must be done.

If something must be done, rather than just talked about, then design moves centre stage.

George Monbiot, responding to Stern in today’s Guardian, proposes a “ten point plan for drastic but affordable action" that the UK government could take now.

I thought it would be helpful to outline some of the design tasks that would be involved during implementation of such a plan.

STEP 1: PERSONAL CARBON RATION
At the heart of Monbiot’s plan is the setting of an annual personal carbon ration. Every citizen is given a free annual quota of carbon dioxide. He or she spends it by buying gas and electricity, petrol and train and plane tickets. If they run out, they must buy the rest from someone who has used less than his or her quota.

DESIGN TASK: The information and interaction design of such a rationing system.

STEP 2: NEW BUILDING REGULATIONS
Monbiot proposes the introduction of new building regulations that would impose strict energy-efficiency requirements on major refurbishments, and ensure that all new homes are built to the German Passivhaus standard which requires no heating system.

DESIGN TASK: Many technical components of low carbon emission building exist in embryo. If compelled to do so, big construction companies have the expertise and systems to implement them. What’s missing is a service to help private citizens, who already have a place to live, choose between competing claims. Myridad suppliers of passive and active heat and power systems, fuel cells, geothermal and the like all claim to have “the answer”. But a wind turbine on every roof, next to the satellite dish, is wildy inefficient compared to off-grid combined heat-and-power system installed and maintained by groups of families. In Dott 07, our Low Carb Lane project is about getting an entire community to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions through a range of practical measures. We want to create a “green street” by helping people make sense of the bewildering range of eco-friendly options they have. And at least 50 schools will take part in our Ecodesign Challenge.

STEP 3: BAN WASTEFUL APPLIANCES
would be a ban on the sale of incandescent lightbulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights and other wasteful and unnecessary technologies.This would be followed, he says, by a stiff "feebate" system for all electronic goods sold in the UK, with the least efficient taxed heavily and the most efficient receiving tax discounts.

DESIGN TASK: As with construction companies, consumer electronics companies could make their products more energy efficicient if they had to. Some are already trying to do so. But the personal ownership of devices will always be more wasteful than use–not-own. Services to help us use devices only when we need them - from cars to stereos to food mixers – are the more important priority. These services - their system architecture, the ways we access and use them, their touch points in daily life - all these need to be designed.

STEP 4: WIND FARMS AND HYDROGEN GRID
is to redeploy money now earmarked for new nuclear missiles towards a massive investment in energy generation and distribution. He favours very large wind farms, many miles offshore, connected to the grid with high-voltage direct-current cables; and a hydrogen pipeline network.

DESIGN TASK: both these solutions are large-scale engineering projects based on the persistence of a national power grid. They would entail huge investments of money and matter. For me, new paradigm design would focus on micro-generation systems at a local level.

STEP 5: NATIONAL COACH NETWORK
Monbiot proposes a new national coach network to replace most car train and airplane journeys. Journeys by public transport then become as fast as journeys by car, while saving 90% of emissions.

DESIGN TASK: In Newcastle, UK, a fleet of near-silent electric buses already glides around the city. Vehicles are not a design priority. To make a national coach system work, transport connections between homes, workplaces, shops and long-distance coach hubs would need to be seamless and painless. Integrated transport systems already exist in many places: Transport for London, for example, brings together 52 previously separate transport organisations.

STEP 6: CHANGE GAS STATIONS INTO BATTERY STATIONS
Writing in car-crazed UK, Monbiot assumes that private cars will be an inevitable part of a sustainable future. Yes, he wants the government to abandon its huge road-building and road-widening programme, but he then proposes that all chains of filling stations be obliged to supply leasable electric car batteries.“This provides electric cars with unlimited mileage: as the battery runs down, you pull into a forecourt; a crane lifts it out and drops in a fresh one. The batteries are charged overnight with surplus electricity from offshore wind farms”.

DESIGN TASK: this part of Monbiot's plan suggests a large amount of design work on new vehicles and battery exchange points. But this is a conservative solution. Better, surely, to
re-think the way we use time . One hour of mobility a day over a working year of 220 days adds up to a vacation missed of five to six weeks. Rather than enable long-distance patterns of movement at accelerating speeds, the more interesting design task is to enable local patterns of activity so we don’t have to move so much. Otherwise stated: Think More, Drive Less

STEP 7: CUT 90% OF FLIGHTS
As I was dismayed to discover a week ago, we have to reduce the number of flights, period. That means my flights, and your flights, not somebody else's flights. Monbiot demands a freeze on all new airport construction and the introduction of a national quota for landing slots, to be reduced by 90% by 2030.

DESIGN TASK: In the chapter on mobility in In The Bubble I was too scornful of mobility substitution as a design task, and too dismissive of the idea that telepresence—travelling on highways of the mind—could replace the highways of traffic jams, pollution, and road rage. "If the aim of travel were simply to exchange information, then we wouldn’t bother doing it", I wrote. "The trouble is—to state the obvious—that’s not why we do it. It’s that mind-body business: Experientially, there never will be a simulated alternative to actually “being there.” Even if you could capture the smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of a place, digitize them, and send them down a wire, you’d still never get near the sensation of “being there.”

Face-to-face communication is not the only type of communication that counts. The telephone, after all, is a form of virtual realty—and it’s a powerful medium that delivers a satisfactory sense of connection to billions of people everyday.

There are more interesting tasks for design than the use of brute bandwidth to achieve “being there” verisimilitude. The communication quality of cyberspace can be enhanced by artful and indirect means. In a project called The Poetics of Telepresence, British designers Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby looked at the potential fusing of physical and telematic space.

STEP 8: TURN FOOD SUPERSTORES INTO WAREHOUSES
Monbiot states that warehouses containing the same quantity of food and goods use roughly five per cent of the energy of a superstore. Out-of-town shops are also hardwired to the car, whereas delivery vehicles use 70 per cent less fuel. Monbiot therefore insists that the government legislate for the closure of all out-of-town superstores, and their replacement with a warehouse and delivery system.

DESIGN TASK: Our city farming project in Dott07 addresses this design challenge head on. It's one of many practical responses around the world to the realisation that food is a design opportunity.

The Stern review provides an economic justification for dramatic changes to the ways we live. The taxes, incentives and regulations to come will drive demand for sustainable solutions, which will have to be designed.

But we are not talking about a few design projects here. The transition to sustainability involves a new approach to innovation and new, post-consumerist models of development that will emerge from ongoing social innovation.

And about time, too.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:19 AM | Comments (2)

October 17, 2006

My long walk home

I chose a bad place to read George Monbiot's new book Heat - the transit lounge of Bangkok's new Suvarnabhumi Airport.

I already knew that flying is an indefensible way to travel because of its contribution to global warming. But I've comforted myself over the years with the idea that what environmentalists call a 'soft landing' could be achieved if people like me cut down our flights a wee bit every year.

'Heat' destroys my alibi. Long-haul flights produce 110 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger kilometre. According to Monbiot's numbers, a single passenger flying to New York and back produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. This is about the same as each of us will be entitled to emit in a whole year once a 90 per cent cut in emissions is made.

Monbiot says that a 90 per cent cut is needed by 2030 if the biosphere is to remain habitable for you and me. He arrives at this sobering figure as follows. By 2030, the total capacity of the biosphere to absorb carbon - its carbon sink - will be reduced from today's 4 billion tonnes, to 2.7 billion. By then, world population is likely to be 8.2 billion. By dividing the total carbon sink by the number of people, and spreading the load equally, Monbiot arrives at an average cut in the rich countries of 90 percent per person.

In the case of my flying behaviour, it's probably more than that. A single passenger going from the UK to Beijing and back in business class, as I am doing, emits probably four times as much carbon dioxide as someone going to New York and back in coach. I am probably using up four years' of my personal carbon allowance in 2030 within one single week.

And that's just if I count my time in the air. Sitting still, reading Monbiot's book, was also wasteful. Suvarnabhumi is a vast forest of concrete pillars and structural decks. Outside, endless acres of concrete apron spread into the far distance. It all looked very nice and modern until I read, in Chapter 10 of Heat, that the manufacture of cement emits a ton of carbon dioxide for each ton actually made and used.

I don't know how many million tons of the stuff were used in Bangkok's new airport. Many. I would not be surprised if my use of that airport - for a few hours, just sitting there, on this one trip - used up another few weeks of my annual carbon ration.

A 90 per cent cut in emissions requires not only that growth in aviation stops, but that most of the planes which are flying today be grounded. We need to cut the number of flights by 87 per cent to meet Monbiot's target.

And he is adamant that this means me, personally - not someone else, out there. 'Writing, reading, debate and dissent, of themselves, change nothing he concludes, pitilessly. 'They are of value only if they inspire action. Progress now depends on the exercise of fewer opportunities. If you fly, you destroy peoples lives'.

Analysing the potential of energy efficiency, renewable resources, carbon burial, nuclear power and new transport and building systems, Monbiot unveils what works, what doesn't, what costs the least and what needs to be done to make change happen. He argues that answers are available and hope is not lost.

I am still in Beijing as I write this. It is going to be a long walk home.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:27 AM | Comments (1)

July 18, 2006

Power Laws Of Innovation

I'm at a Cursos De Verano (summer school) near Madrid. Just down the corridor, a bunch of senior generals are discussing the "army of the 21st century". Next to them, a some egg-head priests are discussing "the church of the 21st century". Our lot is doing innovation of the 21st century and I promised to post the following Power Laws before the Church and State guys leave town.

Power Law 1: Don’t think “new product” - think social value.

Power Law 2: Think social value before “tech”.

Power Law 3: Enable human agency. Design people into situations, not out of them.

Power Law 4: Use, not own. Possession is old paradigm.

Power Law 5: Think P2P, not point-to-mass.

Power Law 6: Don’t think faster, think closer.

Power Law 7: Don’t start from zero. Re-mix what's already out there.

Power Law 8: Connect the big and the small.

Power Law 9: Think whole systems (and new business models, too).

Power Law 10: Think open systems, not closed ones.

Posted by John Thackara at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)

May 31, 2006

Is the future old news?

Is it time to put the future out of our misery? Design can be valuable as a forecasting tool, and designers are great hunter-gatherers of ideas. We should develop that role further. But we should not just look ahead in time, and not just look for technology trends. In particular, we should look to nature for inspiration – it has been innovating for three billion years. We should also learn from other cultures beside western ones. And we should learn more from the here and now. Inspiring things are happening just outside the door. Read more in an article (5.4 Mb) written for the June Royal Society of Arts Journal.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2006

Alternatives to Geldofism: lecture notes and resources

A few weeks back I gave a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts in London entitled "Solidarity economics & design". The lecture was provoked by the sick-making antics of Bob Geldof and the assumptions he and others made about 'development'. I argued that the word 'development' implies that we advanced people in the North have the right, or even obligation, to help backward people in the South to ‘catch up' with our own advanced condition. And that No, this idea doesn't make sense. The concept of development is further devalued, I said, by the impoverished but destructive mindset of economics. "The North's purse strings are clutched by people who define development narrowly in terms of growth, jobs and productivity - and ignore broader measures of sustainability and well-being". Anyway, I prepared rather thorough (for me) lecture notes and a list of resources - and then forgot to put them online. So here they are now.

Posted by Kristi at 07:40 AM | Comments (4)

March 30, 2006

Biomedical downtowns

An intriguing story in next month’s Cluster magazine describes plans in China for the world’s first urban biomedical hub. Sascha Haselmayer, one of its advisors, writes that Fenglin Biomedical Centre will concentrate life science, medical care services, medical education, business incubation, and medical exhibitions, in the Xuhui district of Shanghai. Haselmayer says Fenglin is about “building a healthcare system that has to almost instantly provide for more than one billion currently unprotected people”. Fenglin can become a global biomedical hub, he says, that will “increase productivity, and speed up the process from scientific discovery to bedside product". Emerging trends such as lifestyle diseases, preventive medicine, and bio-informatics, have further stimulated interest from international partners. And there, for me, is where FMC is misconceived. It’s an urban development project, not a health service one. As I discovered in Korea a while back, biomedical clusters (here's a map of them) like Fenglin are popular with investors and multinationals. Large inflows of capital are attracted by tax breaks and what Haselmayer describes as “an inclusive yet visionary governance” that, in Fenglin's case, includes a Patenting Center to assist in interrnationalisation/localisation of patents. But the latest thinking on health favours the radical decentralisation of care - not its concentration, and not its technological intensification. A business model based on the privatisation of medical knowledge is also unlikely to benefit China’s population. Investors will probably get sick, too, when the wildly over-egged promises being made for biomedicine turn out to be chimeras.

Posted by John Thackara at 02:31 PM | Comments (1)

January 24, 2006

Brace! Brace! Have a nice day!

My lonely campaign against the concept and practice of "emotional design" is failing. I learned with horror this morning that an International Journal of Emotional Labour and Organisations has been launched, and that it is for people who study emotionology. A journal and an 'ology in one day: The fight is lost. A history of the field is also on the way. Someone called Christina Kotchemidova at NYU is working on a "social history of cheerfulness" - a domain that includes the practice of "drive-by smiling" by motorists. It seems (or so say emotionologists) that "we can work ourselves comparatively easily into the feeling we're aiming at simply by altering our facial expression". Emotionologists revere a professor called Arlie Hochschild who was the first to study "emotional labour" back in the 1980s. Hochschild's 1983 book "The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling" included studies of bill collectors and airline attendants, and introduced Emotion Systems Theory to an expectant world. Hochschild also provided today's emotionologists with the concept of "feeling rules" for those wishing to manage the emotions of others. Business, as you might imagine, loves this stuff - and to judge by the new journal, plenty of academics are happy (sic) to give them more of it. But Hochschild's account of flight attendants is, I must confess, quite gripping. Trainees were constantly reminded that their own job security and the company’s profit rode on a smiling face. They were told "Really work on your smiles" and "Relax and smile." "No ridicule" was another rule: The flight attendant was not to react normally, perhaps laughing at passengers, but to "present an image that will make the guests feel comfortable". And of course, no alarm or fright: One attendant said: "Even though I am an honest person, I have learned not to allow my face to mirror my alarm or my fright."

From now on, the same goes for me. Whenever I meet an emotionologist, I'll smile - gosh how I'll smile.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2005

Schools as gated communities?

Having proclaimed the vital importance of education to the nation's future, the British government is putting its money where its mouth is. It aims to rebuild or renew every secondary school in England over a 10-15 year period in a seventy billion pound programme called Building Schools for the Future (BSF). It's a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put the latest thinking on education into practice on a massive scale.

A lot of attention is being paid to the criteria which will determine how all these schools will be designed. On paper, head teachers and communities, and the architects and designers they work with, have some leeway to do things their own way. But their design space will be heavily circumscribed by public procurement procedures which determine how all this public money may be spent.

Traditional procurement policies would force local authorities to go with the lowest cost proposals for slightly better versions of the types of school that already exist. But there are positive signs that a broader definition of value for money, rather than just cost, will inform the BSF process. One powerful government agency, the Audit Commission, has stated that outputs such as the impact of new school projects on the local economy are as important as inputs, such as the money spent on them. And members of parliament, who are taking an active interest in the development of BSF procurement criteria, have involved expert organisations such as the Design Council to monitor and evaluate the first schools to be built.

A more worrying trend is the way technology and communication networks are procured as part of BSF.

Local education authorities are being encouraged to create a system-wide response, rather than one based on individual institutions. The idea is that by aggregating its resources, an authority may offer learners in its region a wider variety of courses and approaches than if every school determined its own offer.

The danger is that integrating groups of institutions into a single system will have the opposite effect - reduced flexibility and diversity – because of the way technology and communication networks are procured.

An initial two billion pounds has been allocated to information and communication technology (ICT) in BSF. Microsoft, for one, is making a big push to position itself as a preferred supplier. Based on the innocuous-sounding proposition that “ICT should be available to a schools as an industrial strength utility”, Microsoft has persuaded Kent Council Council to make its Learning Gateway platform a key part of its ICT infrastructure for multi-school systems.

”The best way to achieve industrial strength reliability is for the local education partnership to procure a full managed service from an expert partner” says the company. It’s best that a single supplier “will design, suppply, install and support a comprehensive ICT infrastructure and platform for learning”.

For me, Microsoft's offer is incompatible with an educational vision, repeated in dozens of policy pronouncements, in which “the unit of organisation is the learner - not the system”.

Microsoft's technology-based product, Learning Gateway, contains proprietory software products used within a closed system. It turns schools into the ICT equivalent of gated communities.

Forty years ago, Ivan Illich proposed that we should use existing technologies and spaces - the telephone, local radio, town hall meetings - to create learning webs through which learners would connect with their peers and with new contexts in which to learn.

“We can provide the learner with new links to the world,” said Illich, “instead of continuing to funnel all education through the teacher.”

Three decades later Tom Bentley of Demos made a similar point in Learning Beyond the Classroom: “We should think of learning as an ecology of people and groups, projects, tools, and infrastructures. We need to reconceptualize education as an open, living system whose intelligence is distributed and shared among all its participants”.

An open, living system. Not a closed, proprietory one of the kind being pushed relentlessly by technology companies like Microsoft and Oracle.

The trick they play is to scare customers such as local authorities or schools - who have lot of other things to think about - with the incredible complexity and cost of ICT systems. Then they say, "Leave the whole thing to us; we'll provide you with a turn-key solution and look after the whole thing for you”.

Technology is an important enabler of educational ecosystems - but in simple and relatively uncomplicated ways.

As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid write in The Social Life of Information: “Learning at all levels relies ultimately on personal interaction and, in particular, on a range of implicit and peripheral forms of communication that technology is still very far from being able to handle".

Yes, technology facilitates new kinds of interaction between teachers, students, and the external world. But as Sunil Abraham argued so cogently at Doors 8 this year, this kind of connectivity does not need to be complicated, or expensive. And it certainly does not need to be delivered within a closed system.

We already have an "industrial strength utility" - it's called the internet. If Britain's new schools are not based on open systems, this multi-billion-pound “once in a lifetime” opportunity will be needlessly constrained. Open information systems should be be a non-negotiable condition of BSF funding.

Posted by John Thackara at 02:21 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2005

Doors of Perception Report: archive

A good friend mentioned last night that she enjoys Doors of Perception Report (the monthly email newsletter that accompanies this blog) but often puts it aside for later reading - "it's so dense" - and then loses the thing. This is why we made this handy archive.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:58 PM | Comments (1)

November 21, 2005

"Solidarity economics & design"

This is the title of a lecture I'm giving at the Royal Society of Arts in London on 12 December. It seems a good oppportunity to reflect on the lessons we learned at Doors 8 earlier this year in Delhi. I plan to talk about those lessons in the framework of solidarity economics.The word 'development' implies that we advanced people in the North have the right or even obligation to help backward people in the South to 'catch up' with our own advanced condition. No, it doesn't make sense. The concept of development is further devalued by the impoverished but destructive mindset of economists: The North's pursestrings are clutched by people who define development narrowly in terms of growth, jobs and productivity - and ignore broader measures of sustainability and well-being. If we are to exchange value with other cultures - rather than just take it, or act like cultural tourists - what do we have to offer? One idea proposed by Jogi Panghaal is that fresh eyes can reveal hidden value - and thus mobilise otherwise neglected or hidden local resources. Visiting designers can act like mirrors, reflecting things about a situation that local people do not notice or value. The negative side of this is the gruesome prospect, anticipated by Yves Doz at Insead, of global companies "harvesting lifestyles". Do come along if you're in London.

Posted by John Thackara at 12:05 PM | Comments (2)

September 11, 2005

The 'cellular church'

I carried two psychological burdens on the promotional tour for my book earlier this year. One was the knowledge that a competitor is published every thirty seconds; every day I was on the road, the ranks of new titles swelled by 2,880. My second burden was awareness that Rick Warren's 'The Purpose Driven Life' sold 500,000 copies a month during its first two years, and is projected to reach 100 million. I found it hard to accept that my own book might not sell quite so well. Now I at least know how Rick does it: He has built a 'Cellular Church' that is based on small groups for whom his book is a kind of primer. As Malcolm Gladwell explains in this week's New Yorker (12 September) Rick's small groups 'focus on practical applications of spirituality...not on abstract knowledge, or even on ideas for the sake of ideas themselves'.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

August 01, 2005

Does technology make us happy?

As designers and social innovators, should we take any notice of technology policy? Wouldn't it be best to ignore the think-tanks and telcos, and concentrate on doing great projects in the real world? A 90% focus on projects would probably be healthy. But we also need to keep half an eye on policy making because that's where priorities for research spending - and hence the projects we are able to do - are made.
Tech policy is not a pretty picture right now. After a few years in which social issues were visible on the agenda, tech-push is fighting back. In the European Union, for example, the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme contains a lot of tech but not much soc. The IST's aim is to 'master technology and its applications, and help strengthen industrial competitiveness'. Documents mention the need to 'address the main European societal challenges' - but the advisory group that interprets that statement, ISTAG, consists wholly of Big Tech and Big Research interests. (To compound the imbalance, ISTAG comprises 29 men and just four women). There once existed a panel of High-Level Socio-Economic Experts but they quietly disappeared in 2003, supplanted by an entity called eEurope. The main job of eEurope is to 'develop modern public services and a dynamic environment for e-business through widespread availability of broadband access at competitive prices and a secure information infrastructure'. Once again: a lot about tech and not much about soc. All Doors' friends report a similar pattern: proposals that don't put tech at their centre have little chance of success.
In the UK last week, a paper called Modernising With Purpose: A Manifesto for a Digital Britain by William Davies was published by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR). The manifesto begins promisingly with a complaint that ‘the strong focus on investing in technology, and measuring Britain’s most easily quantifiable assets, has left social resources, and less quantifiable assets, underdeveloped’. The manifesto demands that enduring cultural norms be protected, and insists on social and constitutional rules to guard against the constant possibility of harmful unintended consequences. Disappointingly, the manifesto is otherwise resolutely orthodox in the way that it casually equates modernisation with technological intensification. The ways we live and think now, for example, are described casually as 'obstacles to modernisation', and the manifesto finds it self-evident that future policy ‘anchors people to technological change’. 'We may have reached the toughest stage in the transition to a digitally enabled economy and government” writes Davies, “where the obstacles facing us are hardest to pin down or tackle, being psychological, cultural and local”.
Obstacles, or assets? A more inspiring manifesto would have located technology within a range of new ways to organise our daily lives - not made tech the starting point. It would have laid out a broader range of success indicators, and challenged us to find new ways to improve them. The good news is that a global boom in new indicators is providing us with new success criteria against which to make decisions about what we innovate, and how. An International Conference on Gross National Happiness took place in Canada in June, and even in the UK new ways to measure well-being and life satisfaction are also being discussed in UK policy circles. And I have to mention that my book, In The Bubble describes a range of daily life situations in which redesign is appropriate - sometimes using tech, but just as often, not.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:14 AM | Comments (6)

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 (1)

January 23, 2005

Study art and never be unemployed

'Those who enjoy what they do never have to work any more'. An intriguing article by Sybrand Zijlstra (in a new Dutch publication called Morf ) reports that 80% of students graduating from Dutch art academies pronounced themselves to be satisfied with their education. This is a surprise: endless reports describe art and design education as being in a mess. Among their older peers, only 2% of those with a degree in art or design consider themselves to be unemployed - which is even more surprising when one considers that the number of jobs available for artists is tiny.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:30 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2005

Design school reputations

When potential students or project clients ask me which is the best architecture or design school, I usually give them the names of a few institutions but also insist: 'don’t take my word for it, get hold of current students or researchers there, and ask them what it’s like'. Even that approach is limited: people inside one institution are not ideally placed to compare their own experience with that of their peers in other ones. Citation league tables are a guide, but tell only one part of the story. I’m struck, in this context, by a Pew report which states that 33 million people in the US have rated a product, service, or person using an online rating system. If reputation systems already help so many people buy books, movies and so on, how long can it be before such systems extend to big ticket purchases of things like a design education?. Design portal Core 77 already hosts a lively forum in which potential and current students exchange opinions about design courses and schools. So far, these exchanges are anecdotal, but someone soon will surely build a ratings system for them to use. Some colleges have already implemented online ratings of individual teachers, and many students are assessing themselves and each other. In 2003, Yale's online course evaluation system processed 24,000 evaluations in its first semsester alone. I'm not sure that many design school directors have thought through the consequences for their institution once online user ratings take hold. There’s a bibliography on the subject here.

Posted by John Thackara at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2005

Technology, safety, community

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 be directed to where the real problems lie. About 2750 people a day succumb to road traffic injuries, for example, but I don't suppose CHI will call for the abolition of the car: the car industry, after all, is among the world's leading users of information technology. 8,000 people die each day as a result of air pollution, but the CHI agenda does not explain how interaction design might deliver cleaner air. 30,000 people a day die from curable diseases; most of these unfortunates live in the developing world and cannot afford the prices charged by drug companies for remedies that might save them. The events and situations that kill people in the modern world raise complex and highly political issues, and it would not be fair to demand that CHI tackles them all. But CHI surely does have a responsibility to be critical on the safety question. Googling “Homeland Security” and "design" yields 1,250,000 results today - up from 600,000 six months ago. This is evidence, if it were needed, that the Age of Fear has become big business. The question is: do we want to be part of it?

Posted by John Thackara at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2004

Is the creative class driving people to suicide?

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 design team first visited the village they located some elderly people and told them proudly: 'we've come to help you with the Internet'. And the elderly people said: piss off; we do not need your patronising help, you designers you. Or words to that effect. We learned that elderly people in Italy are less socially isolated, and feel less in need of added-on connectivity, than almost anywhere else in Europe - apart from Greece and Portugal.

I was reminded of the Peccioli episode when reading Europe In The Creative Age One of its highlights is a league table of creative economies in Sweden comes top, followed by USA, Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and Belgium. What caught my eye were the league table's losers. Italy and Portugal, with less than 15 percent of their workforce in the Creative Class, are 'performing below the norm'; Greece, too (along with Spain and Austria) 'appears to be in a difficult position'.

Well, that depends on what you measure. I was reminded, when reading Europe In The Creative Age, of another league table published in September on the occasion of World Suicide Prevention Day. Now the two league tables do not match each other one-to-one but, on paper at least, suicide rates are highest where the creative industries are strongest. Suicide rates are higher, and the creative industries are stronger, in North America than in Latin America, and in northern European countries compared to southern ones. Industrialized countries tend to have a higher suicide rate, and much stronger creative industries, than poor, developing countries. India's suicide rate, for example, is half the global average - but her public relations industry is pitifully small.

Is there a connection? Where the creative industries are strongest, citizens do seem to be miserable as hell. As I reported a few days ago (see my story of 9 December, below) more than eight out of ten Americans believe that society's priorities are 'out of whack'; 93 percent agree that Americans are too focused on working and making money, and not enough on family and community; more than 8 in 10 say they would be more satisfied with life if they just had less stress; and 95 percent agree that today's youth are too focused on buying and consuming.

Tom Bentley, in his introduction to Europe In The Creative Age, writes that the rise of the creative class 'goes to the heart of what a shift to a new economy really means'. Surely the opposite is the case. The activities lumped together as creative industries are characterised by a Fordist, point-to-mass, one-to-many model of production: advertising, architecture, crafts, design, designer fashion, public relations, marketing, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, performing arts, publishing, and so on.

According to the British Council, in Nurturing the Creative Economy, the Creative Industries are 'those that have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent, and that have a potential for wealth creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property'.

The words that jump out at me here - Individual, Wealth Creation, Property - do not exactly smack of social solidarity.

Some will argue that I'm getting cause and effect mixed up. The authors of Europe In The Creative Age, for example, are good guys at heart: they devote considerable space to the proposition that tolerance is a necessary condition for competitive advantage. And another British think-tank, Comedia, argues that there is now 'substantial evidence that cultural activities help engender social and human capital, transform organizational capacity to handle and respond to change, and can strengthen social cohesion'.

That proposition may well be true. And it's not as if I'm arguing that culture or creativity are a bad thing. The problem is that policy makers and planners are interpreting the Creative Class / Creative Industries concepts in weird ways. I recently saw a map from TNO on which were plotted, ward-by-ward, the number of creative individuals in Amsterdam. Holland's national technology research organization has discovered that there are 223 artists in Zaanstad, and that 20.9 percent of the workforce in Hilversum is a member of the creative class. TNO does not mention that Hilversum is where the Big Brother format was invented and, all over Europe, city planners are drawing lines round derelict areas and labeling them creativity districts.

I don't suggest that rise of the creative class drives people to suicide. What I do suggest is that this class is an integral part, if not the driver, of a consumer culture that makes most people pretty damn miserable. And many of the people who determine where resources are to go have got the wrong end of the stick.

Posted by John Thackara at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2004

Success Factors In Design Research Projects

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. And a lot of the knowledge exchanged at the event was tacit and not easily published on a website. But you'll get the feel of it all. We will apply the lessons we learned doing this event to the Project Clinics which will be a focus of Doors 8 in Delhi.
If you're interested in the design and management of design research projects, you may also find these earlier texts of mine useful:
Thermodynamics of Co-operation
From shelfware to wetware: where next for design research?
Does your design research exist?
Rules of engagement between design and new technology
Why is interaction design important?

Posted by John Thackara at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2003

Design-recast: the world as spread-sheet

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 underneath the shoal - somewhat like a martini glass - and then gulp the whole lot down in one go as the shoal swirls helplessly round. After the last couple of days, I can't decide whether I feel like a herring, or the whale...

Architecture and design have to change faster if they are to be effective, or even meaningful, in today’s context. We have filled the world with complex systems and technologies - on top of the natural ones that were already here, and social-cultural systems that have evolved over thousands of years. We live in world of human, natural, and industrial systems whose complex interactions are hard to comprehend. These systems are, by their nature, invisible - so we lack the clear mental models that we might otherwise use to make sense of the bigger picture. The design of Large Technical Systems, pervasive software, and the inaptly named 'ambient intelligence', is an almost unimaginably complex process. To be effective in such a context, design needs to be renewed, and transformed. But in what ways? And how?

In recent years we were told that these systems were 'out of control' - too complex to understand, let alone to shape, or re-direct. But 'out of control' is an ideology, not a fact. In architecture, in particular, this ideology fostered a kind of cultural autism, an absorption in self-centered subjective activity, accompanied by a marked withdrawal from reality.

But there is something we can do. It's called design: the "first signal of human intention".

If you look at the mainstream of architecture, the prospects for change look bleak. Many design professionals have retreated into denial and narcissism. Their projects deal mainly with appearances, and are fashioned to enhance the celebrity of their creators. More insidious are those designers who have adopted the language of complexity and networks – only to become craven servants of what Manuel Castells calls "The Automaton" or Alasdair Grey, in Lanark, "The Machine".

Exulting in forces ‘too big for us to control’, this second group has taken it upon themselves to amplify, to accelerate, the powerful forces unleashed by neo-liberal values (or the lack of them) and new technology. These designers don’t just go with the flow, they speed it up. The result is the glorification of fast cities, of extra large cities, and of 24-hour cities - a big interest in fast trains, and in high-end shopping - but little attention to social quality, learning, innovation, or sustainability.

Things are not much better in communication design. We do not know how to design communication. We know how to design messages, yes: the world is awash in print and ads and packaging and e-trash and spam. But these are all one-way messages, the output of a point-to-mass mentality that lies behind the brand intrusion and semiotic pollution that despoil our perceptual landscape. I’ll return to this issue later; right now I want to focus on two missing communication flows that need to be designed: social communication, and ecological communication.

That sad picture, for me, is the empty half of the bottle. But the bottle of design innovation is half-full - and rising. Profound change in design is already underway. Being bottom-up, and outside in, these changes are barely visible on the official radars of architecture - its media, schools, and professional bodies. But these changes are real.

I will focus on two axes in this transformation of the design process. The first axis concerns the understanding and perception of processes that shape today’s shifting urban conditions. The second axis is about modes of intervention - exploring new kinds of design moves in which we are blind to the precise outcome of particular actions - but militant promoters of the core values I mentioned above: social quality, learning, innovation, and sustainability.

Design for legibility

The emerging model of architectural and urban design incorporates what we know about the behaviour of biological organisms, the geometry and information processing systems of the brain, and the morphology of information networks. In order to do things differently, we first need to see things differently. We need to re-connect with the systems and processes on which we depend. We need to understand them, in order to look after them.

Many affective representations of complex phenomena have been developed in recent times. Physicists have illustrated quarks. Biologists have mapped the genome. Doctors have described immune systems in the body, and among communities. Network designers have mapped communication flows between continents, and in buildings. Managers have charted the locations of expertise in their organizations. So far, these representations have been used, by specialists, as objects of research – not as the basis for real-time design. That is now changing. Real-time representations are becoming viable design tools.

Representations of energy flows, for example, are now achievable. And a priority. All our design processes should aspire to reduce the ecological footprint of a city. Man and nature share the same resources for building and living. An ecological approach will drastically reduce construction energy and materials costs, and allow most buildings in use to export energy rather than consume it. Natural ecosystems have complex biological structures: they recycle their materials, permit change and adaptation, and make efficient use of ambient energy. Real-time representations of energy performance can help us move closer to that model in the artificial world.

I emphasize that I am not talking about simulations, here, but about real-time representations.

We should also visualize connectivity. Many of us here, I am sure, enjoy charts that map the number of people connected to the Internet, or the flows of bits from one continent to another. They make really sexy infographics. But I am not just talking about information as spectacle, or as porn. An active intervention in the architecture of connectivity means mapping communication flows in order to optimise them. We need to understand overlapping webs of suppliers, customers, competitors, adults, and children – to identify communication blockages and then to fix the 'plumbing' where flows don't work.

We also need to investigate change processes at a ground level. In a recent issue of Hunch, edited by my friend Jennifer Sigler at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, I lauded a project called Wild City which mapped the interactions between non-regulated processes (street traders) and existing city fabrics (the green market, or a department store). I’m not convinced that the researchers' initial research hypothesis was proved: they set out “to point out the undiscovered potentials of specific locations” - but, for me, that was not the main point. The Wild City project delivered new notational tools for perceiving ‘actors’ and ‘forces’ that previously did not figure - to use a fusty architectural term - in urban design notation.

A further design challenge would render more of these process representations visceral. Maurice Merleau Ponty, an early critic of blueprint thinking in architecture and design, said that we need to move beyond “high altitude thinking... towards a closer engagement with the world made flesh". And Luis Fernandez-Galiano, in his remarkable book Fire and memory, argues that we need to shift our perceptions “from the eye to the skin” - to develop not just an understanding but also a feeling of how complex urban flows and processes work.

Architects are not famous for being in touch with their feelings, so I do not anticipate fast progress on this particular front.

Sense-and-respond design

Evolution operates without prior knowledge of what is to come - that is, without design. But culture does not. The purpose of systems literacy in design is not to watch from outside. It is to enable action. We need to develop a shared vision of what we need to do, together, and how. We need to re-discover intentionality and learn, once we can read them, how to shape emergent urban and industrial processes.

A first step is learning how to think backwards from a desired outcome. To identify the things that need fixing, and to foster creativity in the search for new questions, we need to become expert at a process called ‘back-casting’ .We learned a lot about this technique during the 1990s at the Vormgevingsinstituut in Amsterdam. The trick is to develop scenarios of everyday life in the not-too-distant future: for example, a city in which 90 per cent of food is eaten within 50km of where it is produced; or a community in which fifty per cent of the teaching in a local school is done by people living in the area; or a health system based on peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing among hospitals, doctors, and citizens, enabled by the web. [The best book I know on such scenarios, by the way, is David Siegel's Futurize your enterprise. Our own book Presence: new media and older people is also pretty good].

We put these scenarios into workshops with professionals from mixed backgrounds, and asked them to work the consequences through backwards from then, to now. On that ‘backwards’ road, we developed the capacity to spot opportunities at the juncture between physical and virtual networks, and to imagine relationships and connections where none existed before (in much the same way that processes were visualised in Wild City).

Back casting and scenarios are neither fantasies, nor a new variety of theoretical onanism. Design scenarios are about the real world. We need to use as design tools, as the basis for real-world interventions to ‘steer’ complex urban transformations. Scenarios can help us connect an understanding of urban genetics with real-time actions to nudge ‘self’ organising systems in a desired direction.

[I should mention that design scenarios are quite different from autonomous or so-called intelligent design tools, such as genetic algorithms and cellular automata. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has shown that it is feasible to design self-generating code that can plot the lines of complex shapes, such as a boat hull. It was once thought that ‘intelligent’, generative design tools might help architects design the processes or codes, the ‘rules of the game’ or ‘shape grammars’, by which forms are generated, rather than the end product itself in detail. Researchers continue to look for ways to harness the formidable power of computers to do prototyping, modelling, testing and evaluation, thus compressing the time and space needed for products to evolve. For researchers like John Fraser this means designing the overall system: “you design the rules, rather than the actual individual stylistic detail of the product”.

But neither shape-generating algorithms, nor self-replicating software viruses, are appropriate for the continuous intervention in continuously evolving urban systems – for three reasons. First, because urban processes are not shapes. Second, because self-replicating software does not allow for sense-and-respond feedback. Third, because intelligent design tools are just that: tools. They can and do exist independently of the physical and social context without which a sense-and-respond design process is impossible.

In biology, they describe as choronomic, the influence on a process of geographic or regional environment. Choronomy adds value; a lack of context destroys it.

The irony is that while city and building designers have been flirting with semi-autonomous, evolutionary design processes, the most advanced software designers, who call themselves 'extreme programmers', are headed in the opposite direction – back towards human-steered design. Extreme programmers prefer to do it, than watch it. They have come to value individuals, and interactions among them, over abstract processes and tools. They find it more important to engage directly with working software, than to labour at the design of self-organizing systems. These principles are the basis of a new movement in software called The Agile Alliance.

As designers, we all need to be Agile. Our best intentions – for social quality, for sustainability, for learning, for play - will remain just that - intentions - until we complete the transition from designing on the world to designing in the world.

Natural, human and industrial systems are all around us – they are not below, outside, or above us. In design, if we are to take this new subject-object relationship seriously, we need to shift from a concern with objects and appearances, towards a focus on enhanced perceptions of complex processes - and their continuous optimisation.

We need to think of ‘world’ as a verb, not as a noun. We need to think of rowing the boat, not just of drawing it.

The transformation from designing for people, to designing with people, will not be easy. Anyone using a system - responding to it, interacting with it, feeding back into it - changes it. Complex technical systems – be they physical, or virtual, or both - are shaped, continuously, by all the people who use them. Think of Netscape, or Napster. In the world as a verb, it won't work to treat people as users, or consumers or viewers. We need to think of people - of ourselves - as actors.

As designers, our role is evolving from shaping, to steering; from being the ‘authors’ of a finished work, into facilitators who help people act more intelligently, in a more design-minded way, in the systems they live in.

Our business models in design also have to change. The idea of a self-contained design project – of 'signing off', when a design is finished - makes no sense in a world whose systems don’t stop changing. Design’s project-based business model is like a water company that delivers a bucket of water to your door and pronounces its mission accomplished. We need to evolve new business models for design - models that enable design to operate as a continuous service, not as manufacturing process.

One scenario, which we are discussing next week at a workshop on new business models in Ivrea, is a design economy based on service contracts, such as those used by big management consultancy firms.

Someone told me that every lecture should end with an answer to the question: what do I do with this information on Monday morning, when I go back to work? It's a reasonable question, but I can't answer it directly. Italo Calvino, however, tells a wonderful story - so I'll tell you his.” Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later, the drawing was not begun.” I need another five years,” said Chuang-tzu.The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect ever seen”.

For Calvino, literature was a search for knowledge.” My work as a writer", he said, has, from the beginning, aimed at tracing the lightning flashes of mental circuits that capture and link points distant from each other in space and time”. Might we not think of design in a similar way?

Maastricht April 2002

Posted by John Thackara at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2003

The post-spectacular city

This is my lecture to a conference at Westergasfabriek, in Amsterdam, called Creativity and the City, on 25 September 2003.

In Rajhastan, travelling storytellers go from village to village, unannounced, and simply start a performance when they arrive. Although each story has a familiar plot - the story telling tradition dates back thousands of years - each event is unique. Prompted by the storytellers, who hold up pictorial symbols on sticks, the villagers interact with the story. They joke, interject, and sometimes argue with the storyteller. They are part of the performance.

Hearing about these storytellers reminded how much we have lost, in the 'developed' world, of the un-mediated, impromptu interactions that once made cities vital.

We now design messages, not interactions. The world is awash in print, and ads, and billboards, and packaging, and spam. Semiotic pollution. Brand intrusion at every turn.

Our buildings are now about one-way-communication, too. Sports stadia, museums, theatres, science and convention centres. Such buildings do an accomplished technical job: they deliver pre-cooked experiences to passive crowds.

And whom do we have to thank for this semiotic pollution, for the catatonic spaces that despoil our physical and perceptual landscapes?

The "creative class". That's who's responsible. In the same way that mill owners optimised mass production, the creative class has optimised the society of the spectacle.

At least mill owners bequeathed us well-made industrial cities. The creative class will be less fondly remembered. Their legacy is meaningless, narcissistic cities.

Luckily, the era of the creative class is over. Point-to-mass advertising, onanistic art, and big-ticket spectacles, are over.

We are in a transition to a post-spectacular, post-massified culture. Our cities, from now on, will be judged by their capacity to foster collaboration, encounter, intimacy, and work. Much like cities used to be judged, before they fell into the hands of the creative class.

I'll explain more about these design criteria for cities in the second half of my talk. In the first half, I explain just why it would be foolish to dedicate our cities to 'creatives' and the impoverished, sender-receiver model that informs their activities.

SPECTACLES MAKE US BLIND

There are three reasons why it would be foolish to entrust the future of our cities to the creative class.

The first is its autism. Autism is defined in Webster as "absorption in self-centred subjective mental activity, especially when accompanied by a marked withdrawal from reality".

An example. A week ago I attended a meeting here in Amsterdam on the subject of "Hosting" The invitation posed an interesting question: ”What is the relationship between art biennales, and their host cities?" Many international art powerbrokers turned up for this meeting, which was hosted by an organisation called Manifesta. Ten or 12 of them sat round a table.

In the event, the meeting was a waste of time and space. All the curators and critics and producers discussed were 'viewers' and 'audiences' and 'publics'. They banged on endlessly about the business of biennales, but lacked any insight into the changing nature of business.

It dawned on me, as I struggled to stay awake, that Art has become most attractive to the interests it once ridiculed.

The tourism industry loves art because its events and museums are 'attractions'. Property developers love art because a bijou gallery lends allure to egregious projects. For city marketers, an art biennale bestows glamour, and an aura of intelligence, on a city.

"Our events are not summer camps", pleaded Franco Bonami, director of the Venice Biennale. (Mr Bonami invited more than 500 artists to this year's event). But he did not mention one single word about what, if anything, these 500 people had to say - or why the rest of us should care.

After two hours I had to leave. "Hosting" felt like a sales meeting for Saga Holidays.

So then I went to Japan where Prada, which is said to be 1.5 billion euros in debt, has lavished $87 million on a new Herzog and de Meuron-designed store, in Tokyo. Now for Aaron Betsky, (a previous speaker, Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute) the Prada building would be a right and proper thing to do. Shopping, he just told us, is the fundamental purpose of cities today.

For me, the whole Prada project smells like the last days of Rome. The Plexiglas exterior, which is like bubble-wrap, certainly stands out. The new shop is on the Tokyo equivalent of P C Hooftstraat. (Amsterdam's fashion street). I popped in for a look.

Ten minutes. Quite nice. Been there, done that.

Prada spent 87 million bucks on a clothes shop that contained nothing I wanted to buy, but that's their right. A creative consultant called Christopher Everard told The Economist that, "by using iconic architects, the label is building brand equity". Mr Everard's firm is called "InterLife Consultancy". I emailed him the suggestion that he change its name to "Get A Life Consultancy" - but he has not replied.

Besides, Pravda’s investment is chickenfeed, a mere grain of corn, compared to Tokyo's Roppongi Hills tower. This 800,000 square metre monster had just opened when I was there. No expense has been spared by Yoshiko Mori, its developer, to compensate local people for the sacrifice of their old neighbourhood to progress and creativity. Several traditional features have been retained, I was told, including a Japanese garden, a Buddhist temple, and a children's park.

When I visited Roppongi Hills, these human-scale traces of old Tokyo proved hard to find. They were hidden among the 200 shops, 75 restaurants, and a zillion square feet of office space and apartments that fill the building.

The Zen garden may be lost, but compensation and enlightenment await you at the top of the tower: the Mori Museum of Art.

A Who's Who of the global art establishment - including Nicholas Serota from the Tate, and David Elliot, its British Director - have joined this lavishly funded enterprise. Glenn Lowry from the New York MoMA is also on board, apparently unperturbed by his client's appropriation of the Moma name.

The museum opens next month with a biting and critical look at the modern society which begat it. The show is called, ”Happiness: a survival guide for art and life".

Only people with a 'community passport' are admitted to this Xanadu of art-as-happiness. The passport, curiously, closely resembles a credit card. But still: it gains you access to all those shops and restaurants and - piece de resistance - an orange bar designed by Conran Associates.

The art museum itself was not yet open when I visited, but six museum shops were. They were doing a roaring trade.

"Art, design and happiness" says the brochure, "the kind of place that we want to become".

Not of all of us, Mori-san. "Tourism - human circulation considered as consumption - 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. He would not have warmed to Roppongi Hills.

In much the same way that that tourism kills the toured, 'cultural industries' like museums-and-shopping destroy diversity and desolate their host environment. CIs are like GM crops: bland, tasteless, and a threat to the ecosystem.

I do not deny that the economic case for the creative class is strong. After all, designing all those spectacles is big business.

A new trade fair and exhibition in Philadelphia, which calls itself "Exp", announces itself as "The Event That Defines The Experience Industry". I didn't go to Exp, but I did go to the website. The middle-aged, white male speakers boasted a remarkable collection of jowls and bad haircuts. They promised to tell me, "how to gain a greater share of your guest's discretionary time and disposable income"; how to "destroy the myth that great experience need huge budgets" (sic); and, "how to surf the generational shift".

The website did not mention a session on how to speak English, but this omission did not deter the creative classes. They flocked to Exp - enthralled. no doubt, by its convenient clustering of four key themes: Corporate Visitor Centres, Retail, Casinos, and Museums.

The other big spectacle business is sport. Sophisticated Paris, in its bid for the Olympics, says that sport is replacing culture as an attractor in urban regeneration. "The role that investment plays in the Games of the 21st century will be comparable to that played by industrialisation at the end of the 19th century", burbles their bid.

Claude Bebear, chairman of the Paris Olympic Committee, does not think of sport as kicking a ball around a field. He thinks about twenty million dollar sponsorships, and the well-being of the people who provide the spectacle. Claude's plan for a sporty Paris features private road lanes for the exclusive use of athletes and officials. A travel time of 12 minutes, from bed to track, is promised to the muscle-bound sportspersons and their crypto-fascist paymasters. If the bed-t-track journey proves too taxing, an internet and electronic games centre will be provided to "help athletes relax and get in touch with the outside world". Le Moniteur, eds, 2001, Paris olympiques: twelve architectute and urban planning projects for the 2008 games, Paris, Editions du Moniteur

ACTION MAN

But I digress. I've made the point that pre-programmed cultural 'attractions' and 'experiences' are on the wane. The nightmare of "art and design as happiness" is nearly over.

And I should also stress that the "creatives" who make them are not personally to blame. They - we - are the symptom, not the cause, of a cultural affliction that touches us all.

So what are alternatives? This brings me to the second part of my talk.

Tor Norretranders, in his book The user illusion, explains beautifully what's missing from the mediated, specacular, dis-located, and disembodied experiences that blight our lives. Once we know what's missing, we can put it back.

"Most of what we experience we can never tell each other about" writes Tor. "During any given second, we consciously process only sixteen of the eleven million bits of information that our senses pass on to our brains".
In other words, the unconscious part of us receives much less information than the conscious part of us. We experience millions of bits a second but can tell each other about only a few dozen.

Humans, concludes Norretranders, are designed for a much richer existence than processing a dribble of data from computer screen, or a wide-screen display in Times Square.There is far too little information in the Information Age. Spectacles may be spectacular, but they are low bandwidth.

"I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action, over a life of consumption. Rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to produce and con