August 29, 2010

From philanthrocapitalism to an eco-social economy

(Summer re-run: first published July 2009)

This scary hand smashing through the wall to get you is the logo of last month’s Insead conference on social entrepreneurship. Its slogan was “Reaching For Impact”.

I’ve written critically here before about the assumptions that underly “design for development” - so I won’t repeat the whole argument.

And as I said here we are all emerging economies now.

So let’s just say that I’m troubled about the term “design for social impact” when the desired impact is on someone else’s turf, not on the designer’s own.

The language of Nesta’s new “Re-boot Britain” programme also strikes me as off-key. A complex society in transition is not best imagined as a faulty machine.

But both social impact, and rebooting, are thin-blooded when compared to the concept of “philanthrocapitalism” that’s celebrated in a new book.

It chronicles a new generation of "social investors" that is using big-business-style strategies and “expects results and accountability to match”. The philanthrocapitalists, a web of wealthy, motivated donors who have “set out to change the world” include Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, George Soros, Angelina Jolie, and Bono, among others.

The project of philanthrocapitalism is not incoherent, and the way they work is often transparent and well organized. The Gates Foundation, for example, seems to bevery professionally run. My doubts concern the assumptions that underly the philanthrocapitalists' key aim, which is to provide capital to the large number of informal micro-enterprises that account for nearly half of GDP in low income countries (compared to just 13 percent in rich countries). The propositon is that low-income countries typically suffer from a "missing middle" in which “poor access to inputs” leaves “a massive economic gap in small and medium-sized enterprises.”

The "missing middle" is a real enough problem - but it won't, for me, best be filled by the imposition of a capital-intensive and growth-oriented economy – the economy, in other words, that we have now.

A new publication from The Young Foundation in the UK, Social Venturing, describes a different kind of economy – a social economy – that is more socially and informationally intensive than capital intensive.

Social ventures have a huge gap to fill. In the UK - admittedly an extreme case - state spending on public services is likely to shrink by a staggering 20-40 percent in the coming years as the bill for the financial bailout comes due.

In the coming social economy, the role of national governments in countries like the UK will unavoidably change, and radically - away from the point-to-mass delivery of centrally-produced and paid-for services: hospital operations, kilowatts of electricity, or welfare payments to those qualifying for them.

For a whole range of problems, the Young Foundation authors argue, this mass delivery model is ill-suited. “It finds it difficult to deal adequately with difference and complexity, or with conditions or situations that are difficult to routinise”.

The study of living systems suggests models of how a social economy will work, they write. But a social economy will still depend on some technology. Distributed networks will be used intensively. Relationships will be sustained by the intensive use of broadband, mobile and other means of communication.

But a social economy will be radically less resource-intensive than the one we have now. There is an emphasis on collaboration and on repeated interactions, on care and maintenance - rather than one-off consumption, commodified transactions, or too much focus on fixed assets.

A key ingredient in a social economy is “relational capital”. This is both the knowledge and trust built up between a venture and its users and suppliers, and the relationships between a venture and its staff and circle of volunteers.

Conventional accounting takes little account of this intangible capital, yet in all social ventures it is the foundation of their strength and of their distinctiveness.

For social ventures, writes Robin Murray, “there is rarely a steady state, rather the shaping and reshaping of a cloud”.

I know from long experience that shaping clouds can be demanding, and is best not done alone. A key role in the social economy will therefore be played by new kinds of places, platforms and organisations that enable people to connect and coordinate with each other more easily and convivially than is possible now.

These places are already being prepared, as is shown by the enthralling growth of The Hub. This remarkable social enterprise - a global community of people from every profession, background and culture – is creating places on four continents that enable access to space, resources, connections, knowledge, experience and investment.

In addition to places and platforms like The Hub, time and trust are also core values of a social economy. Relational capital grows slowly. It takes time for people to know and trust each other. This process cannot be rushed.

The centrality of time in a social economy raises hard questions about philanthrocapitalism and its “big-business-style strategies”. Time is seldom allowed for, let alone paid for, in an efficiency-minded corporation. One has to question whether a rules-based approach to organisation, with its its “demand for results”, and accountability to the centre, is best-suited to social venturing.

As Robin Murray puts it, “The distributed systems of a social economy handle complexity not by standardisation and simplification imposed from the centre, but by distributing complexity to the margins – to households and service users and in the workplace to the local managers and workers.

“Those at the margins have what those at the centre can never have – a knowledge of detail, the specificity of time, of place, of particular events".

All this is exciting stuff. But the social economy, as described in these publications, has one crucial limitation: it’s too human-centric.

A social economy, by definition, is an economy by and for human beings. It does not embrace the idea that looking after natural ecosystems, and the biosphere as a whole, needs to become the starting point, the raison d’etre, of sustainable economic activity.

With the coming of the social economy, many positive developments, that have been brewing for decades, begin to converge. But it is only half the story…

Danger and opportunity: crisis and the new social economy, by Robin Murray

Social venturing, by Robin Murray, Julie Caulier-Grice and Geoff Mulgan is published by The Young Foundation.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2010

Unplugged - or unhinged?

(Summer re-run)

I'm reading reading a moving and important book by Sharon Astyk called "Depletion and Abundance: Life On The New Home Front".

Uniquely among recent books on life after the Peaks - energy, protein, biodiversity etc - Astyk does not write to scare us all witless.

She does not write about elaborate ways to fix The Economy. She does not even furnish a shopping list of green tools and equipment that we can all buy as evidence that we are Doing Something.

(This latter prohibition is a particular disappointment to Kristi and me: we've been compiling a shopping list of high-end fruit dryers, choucroute kits, and grain grinders, that we were about to send to our friends before Christmas).

On the contrary, Astyk writes about the benefits that can come (and will come, for most of us) from being poor in material terms.

She proffers practical advice on how best to live comfortably with an uncertain energy supply; prepare children for a hotter, lower energy, less secure world; and generally how to survive and thrive in an economy in crisis.

This shocking approach clearly freaked out the the New York Times: they ran a patronising story in their Fashion and Style section about Astyk's work and life.

The Times even dug up a so-called "mental health professional" - a Dr. Jack Hirschowitz - who was happy to describe Astyk's "compulsion to live green in the extreme" as a kind of disorder.

There is no recognized syndrome in mental health related to the "compulsion toward living a green life" but Hirschowitz - a professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, for goodness sake - said that "certain carborexic behaviours might raise a red flag.

"The critical factor in determining whether something has reached the level of a disorder is if dysfunction is involved,” he said. “Is it getting in the way of your ability to do a good job at work?".

Aaah:work. That would be the activity that makes tens of millions of people do depressed that they have to be medicated by people like Dr Hirschowitz just so they can carry on doing it?

And that would be the work whose trainees - ten per cent of all American school-age boys - are now doped up to the gills with psychoactive drugs by Dr H and his colleagues to make them pay attention?

Rather than fight The Economy, or try to fix it, Astyk seems to be suggesting that we simply ignore it - that we unplug. It's a very un-male, un-macho solution - which is why the book is subversive.

Astyk may have unplugged, but she's not the one who's unhinged.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2010

Traditional knowledge: the dilemmas of sharing

I learn from Kris de Decker's excellent Low Tech Magazine that an International Traditional Knowledge World Bank (ITKI)has been launched.

It's an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.

Someone has done a lot of work to set this project up. There are well-considered lists and taxonomies; the site is filled with enticing graphic icons; and when you dig down for case studies, it is clear that some of the people involved are expert on different aspects of traditional knowledge.

I fear, however, that this bears all the hallmarks of a well-intentioned project that will grind slowly to a halt - for three main reasons.

First, in terms of its governance, the project is hopelessly top-heavy. It's sponsored by the United Nations -a cumbersome environment at the best of times. Then, in the interests of "outreach, efficiency and visibility", the UN has "framed the project within an "intergovernmental setup". It would be hard to imagine a less flexible architecture for what is basically a publishing project.

My second concern is this: traditional and tacit knowledge does not lend itself to being codified, organized by knowledge managers, and put into an encyclopedia. It is is socially-owned and used. Like flowers that wilt when cut and put in a vase, indigenous knowledge tends to degrade quickly when removed from its context.

ITKI sounds similar to a project in India that is based at a business school. There, researchers have documented more than 40,000 examples of indigenous knowledge, and put them in a database. But because so few small farmers and craftspeople use databases in their daily lives (to put it mildly) it's not much used.

This is why even a wiki would not be the complete answer. Wikis may be peer-to-peer, but they are still media, rather than the real thing.

In terms of media platforms, some kind of Yellow Pages or Craig's List, that connects people who need to know, with people who can help them, is the more promising way to go. Such a person-to-person connection machine would be even more powerful if it were to incorporate user ratings of the knowledge suppliers involved.

My third reservation concerns ITKI's business model. It appears to be dependent on funding from institutions. I could not see a reference to its beneficiaries paying to use it. If it is true that people do not value what they don't have to pay for, then this asymmetry will impede ITKI's sustainability in the longer term.

The mistake on these occasions is to be trapped into an either/or mind-set: either centralized database, or contextual knowledge; either top-down, or bottom-up; either academic research, or vernacular field work; either a wiki, or a mailing list; either publicly-funded, or private.

The understanding and use of traditional knowledge will depend on all these elements - in different combinations at different times.

Traditional knowledge is an ecology of actors and resources. It will never be possible to categorize them all, nor to make them all work neatly together. We nonetheless need to foster connections between many of these actors - and look for ways in which different kinds of expertise can complement each other.

I don't know who should play the role of librarian / broker / co-ordinator in the traditional knowledge ecology. The least we can all do is remain respectful and open-minded to different approaches - and make connections among them on a tactical basis when the opportunity arises.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:24 AM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2009

High entropy? Moi?

When I first came to Tokyo, fashionable parts of the city would be lined with hundreds of heavy taxis sitting in queues with their engines running, for hours on end. Every powered item was always on, 24/7. Tokyo Metropolitan Government has passed a law against idling cars - but this hall of mirrors atrium is a reminder that high entropy Tokyo will not disappear without a struggle.

This picture is by way of context for my lecture yesterday at the International Design Symposium which was held to mark Musashino Art University's 80th anniversary.

Here below is what I said.

[I've borrowed here from a fantastic book I read on the way here: The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle and Andrew Simms. Review of that to follow - but buy it now.]

Kosa-san, esteemed colleagues,

I will talk today about the emerging green economy - and, within that, the role of art and design.

But first, a word of background.

Peak energy. Peak credit.. Peak climate change. Each of these challenges is daunting on its own.

Taken together, they mean that business- as-usual is over - for good. The old ways will not return.

Yes, there are “green shoots” - but they are not the same old plants.

They are the first sign that new economic and social life forms are emerging.

I believe that we have arrived at what complexity researchers call an “inflection point”. After forty years of talk and prevarication, we have arrived at a moment of profound transformation in the economy.

I believe our instinct for survival is taking hold.

I say survival, because the old economy - the economy in which Gross Domestic Product is the only measure of success – has become, in the words of the True Cost campaign, a doomsday machine”.

The traditional economy can only survive if it keeps growing, to infinity; and yet it wants to grow to infinity in a biosphere whose carrying capacity is finite.

That’s what makes the old economy a doomsday machine. Running after GDP, we ensure the destruction of the biosphere for economic reasons.

It’s madness.

The economist Lord [Nicholas] Stern was talking at the People's University of Beijing last week.

Stern, an insider’s insider, a key architect of the global status quo, stated the unthinkable: “we have to question whether we can afford future growth”.

Can’t afford to grow! What an extraordinary thing for a former World Bank chairman to say!

But what choice did he have? do we all have? The basic operating system of the economy is broken.

The good news is that a replacement economy – a green economy – is now emerging.

It has a new operating system. Rather than strive to make the most profit, regardless of the consequences, the green economy sets out meet human needs, whilst also protecting the capacity of natural systems to support life.

For business, and design, this new economic framework changes everything.

Before this financial crisis, a new product or service was launched, somewhere in the world, every three minutes.

Nearly all these new products involved the in-efficient use of energy, water, and natural resources.

Each product – emember: a new one every three minutes - contributed to the 70 million tonnes of C02 that is emitted into the earth’s atmosphere, every 24 hours, as a result of human activity.

Most of these products, and the environmental impacts that accompanied them, involved input from designers and the creative industries: concepts, artifacts, communications, packaging, shops, malls.

All these had, as their direct outcome, un-sustainable consumption. Without the creative industries, the economic doomsday machine could not function.

Design is not uniquely responsible, of course. The digital revolution, too, has played a part.

The digital economy was added to, but did not replace, the industrial economy. The result of adding a digital layer to the industrial economy was to amplify energy and resource use in the global economy - tenfold.

Digital communications also added a new layer of insulation – a kind of blindfold - between human beings and the biosphere.

Thanks to the the internet, and later with social networking, we became more connected to each other - but *less* connected to the natural systems on which all our lives depend.

Technology separates us from direct experience of the world. It therefore blinds us to the consequences of our destructive economic behaviour.

So: If we can no longer carry on designing and producing stuff mindless of the consequences, what, then, should our focus be?

The emerging 'green economy' is based on a simple principle: we all live and work within a system whose carrying capacity is finite.

The business opportunity, in this context, is develop the new services and infrastructures to meet daily life needs in radically lighter ways.

A key concept here is Ezio Manzini's idea of enabling solutions - solutions that re-assert human agency in our systems-filled world.

A core task of design, in this emerging green economy, is to make it easier to share resources –
resources such as energy, matter, time, skill, software, space, or food.

This green economy, you will note, is not principally about smart machines, such as electric vehicles, or wind turbines.

The most important resources in the green economy are people.

Even when machines are part of a green solution, people matter.

For example, efficiency in buildings, or in transport systems is determined by intensity of use, and by load factors - for example, of vehicles - not just by energy and material costs.

Shared patterns of use are as important as low energy propulsion systems.

A huge design effort is also needed to create and optimise tools.

Tools are needed to help us for perceive, understand the world in new ways.

The aim, in the green economy, is "radical transparency"- a situation in which we all know the true environmental, health, and social costs of what we buy.

The keyword here: True Cost.

Another keyword here is social innovation.

The green economy I am describing is not a future dream. It already exists.

Social innovation is all around us. Even if the old economy, the market economy, does not recognize them, every community contains assets in the form of people and their skills and their culture.

By some accounts, there are one million grassroots environmental organisations out there. The website Wiser Earth, alone, lists 120,000 of them all over the world.

The better-known examples have names like “Post-Carbon Cities” or “Transition Towns”.

The Transition Towns movement, especially, is, for me, hugely significant.

Transition initiatives, which only started to emerge a couple of years ago, are multiplying at extraordinary speed.

More than 200 communities in Europe and north america have been officially designated Transition Towns - or cities, districts, villages - and even a forest.

A further 800 communities around the world are "mulling it over" as they consider the possibility of starting their own Transition Initiative.

Transition groups have started to appear in Japan, too. Check them out.

The transition model - I'm quoting their website - “emboldens communities to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the eye".

But they don't just look: Transition groups break down the scary, too-hard-to-change big picture into bite-sized chunks.

They develop practical to-do lists; put those items in an agreed order of priority; and then start to work on the priority tasks they’ve agreed on.

Their focus is the notion of *resilience*.

“Fui so” in Chinese: the capacity of a system to adapt to change, to rejuvenate.

In a green economy, resilience means the capacity of a place-based community to survive without the profligate energy and resource consumption we have become used to.

Transition groups deal with this in a most practical way. Each group asks a simple question: "for all those aspects of life that our community needs, in order to sustain itself and thrive, how will we do, if the worst case scenarios, that we fear, come to pass?

The Transition model is powerful because it brings people together from a single geographical area. These people have different interests and capabilities, but are united in being dependent on, and committed to, the context in which they live.

A second reason the Transition model works is that it uses a process of setting agendas and priorities - the "open space" method - that is genuinely inclusive of all points of view.

The green economy is not being made by clever guys staring at computer screens.

The green economy is not being made in shiny expensive buildings protected by guards.

No: the green economy is being made wherever people are growing food in cities.

The green economy is where people opening seed banks, or teaching young people how to forge links direct with farmers in Community Supported Agriculture schemes.

It’s being made where communities are removing dams, and restoring watersheds.

Anywhere you find car-share schemes, or off-grid energy pilots – there is a green economy hotspot.

You’ll find the green economy wherever people are launching local currencies – nine thousand examples at last count.

in their own version of the green economy, 70 million Africans are exchanging airtime - not cash. Non-money trading is exploding.

Thousands of groups, Thousands of experiments.

For every daily life support system that is unsustainable now - food, health, shelter, journeying – alternatives are being tried.

In the green economy now emerging, some aspects of resilience are technological solutions.

Other solutions are to be found in the natural world, thanks to millions of years of natural evolution – fir example, using plants to clean water.

But most resilience attributes are social practices - some of them very old ones, that have evolved in other societies and in other times.

So, before we start designing new services and systems from scratch, we need to ask first: has anyone addressed a similar question in the past? How might we learn from, adapt, and piggyback on their success? or failure, come to think of it.

Last week, for example, I received a new book by Azby Brown – Just Enough - which describes how Japanese society confronted multiple crises of energy, water, fuels, food, and population – 200 years ago.

Japanese society in the Edo period met these challenges because it was conservation-minded, waste-free, and valued wellbeing with the minimum of resource consumption.

I do not propose that we try to go backwards in time. And I am not promoting Edo as a lifestyle choice, a product you buy from a catalogue.

No: as Azby Brown writes in his book, Just Enough is valuable as a mentality, as a framework for acting in the world - not a list or rules and prohibitions.

The green economy is not a prison camp. It’s a garden.

ADVANCED DESIGN EDUCATION

I have spoken about the emerging green economy.

I have talked about the necessity to account for the True Cost of a whole system in everything we design.

I have spoke about the concept of “resilience” as a keyword in the society now emerging..

I have also argued that social innovation – and especially Transition Towns – are more important sites of innovation than technology labs - or design studios.

If these ideas sound a long way from the traditional concerns of art and design – well, that’s because they are!

But it’s not just design that’s facing profound change.

A green economy means profound change for all professions, all businesses, all cities and regions.

But a question has been posed to us: what is an “Advanced Design Education” and how to we deliver it?

My first response to this question is that “Advanced Design Education” already exists – only not by that name, and not in one place.

In my travels around the world, I have been encountering what Im tempted to describe as “transition design schools” !

Some of these schools, or research sites, have an environmental agenda, but also have art and design in their culture.

In parallel, so-called “green MBAs” are beginning to be offered, which also have a design component. Two interesting examples, again in the US, are Bainbridge Graduate Institute and the Dominican University.

Other ventures are further ahead of traditional design.

What these all have in common is that they operate in three complementary modes:
- the mode of the live project in a real place;
- the creation of a marketplace to connect ideas and projects together in viable enterprise;
- the cross-pollination of models, tools and experiences from other places, and other times.

I would also mention my own organization, Doors of Perception, in this context.

Five years ago, we stopped organizing big international conferences to focus on in-situ events.

For a city or region, we:
- scope for and map resources, especially people and natural resources who would not otherwise be visible;
- we bring the most interesting projects together, and run design clinics to find out how each project can be helped;
- finally, we often help each project pitch for support in a kind of Dragon’s Den game, with the aim of launching them as a social enterprise.

Our model, City Eco Lab helps a regions speed up its engagement in the green economy.

This, for me, is one new form of advanced design education.

CONCLUSION

Until recently, it has been it’s too hard to try these experiments in mainstream universities, or business.

But as I said at the start today, these are new times. The moment is right for what Eugenio Barba calls “the dance of the big and the small”.

Big institutions need fresh input and thinking.
Small, edgy projects yearn for scale, reach, and impact

For me, “advanced design education” is about making new connections, and starting new conversations
Advanced design education is not much about dreaming up original content in a lab, or studio.
Advanced design education, for me, is about getting out of the tent – going to where the action is.

Art and design have a lot to offer.

The ability of the artist to help us all perceive the unseen, or the invisible, is vital as we reframe the tasks and priorities of the economy.

Artists can sensitise us to systems, and their behaviour, and thereby help us engage with the biosphere as a systemic whole - in which human beings are a co-dependent part.

In many cultures, this has been the work of artists for thousands of years. The idea of art separated off from daily life is literally unknown in so-called “un-developed” cultures.

Design skills, too, are needed, right now, out there where the green economy action is.

Design is needed to help create tools. Tools for perceiving, seeing, understanding, conversing.
Tools for sharing resources, organising people, and exchanging time.

As Professor [Tony] Jones reminded us yesterday, artists and designers are workers!

So, put them to work!

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

May 28, 2009

What should Aalto University do, and be?

A major new university is to be named after the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto. Aalto University which opens in 2010, is the result of a merger between the Helsinki School of Economics (Finland's top business school, with 4,000 students); the University of Art and Design (one of Europe's top design and art schools, with 2,000 students); and Helsinki University of Technology (the main technical university, including the country's principal architecture school, with 15,000 students).]

Four hundred people are already busy preparing the new university, but I was asked to speak at symposium in Helsinki called "Beyond Tomorrow" about what the new university should do, and be.

Here is what I said.

The University has stated that it will will "make a positive contribution to Finnish society, technology, economy, art, art and design, and support the welfare of both humans and the environment".

I propose that Aalto University should stand for something more precise than this: an unconditional respect for life, and for the conditions that support life.

Such a commitment would be stronger than the hippocratic oath sworn by doctors. Young doctors promise to "prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment - and never do harm to anyone." Unambiguous respect for human life here - but no mention of the rest of life!

An unconditional respect for life would also be clearer than the proposed scientific oath that has been circulating since 1995. In this text, scientists would commit to "minimise and justify any adverse effect our work may have on people, animals and the natural environment". The natural environment is mentioned, which is a step forward - but the proposed commitment here is to minimise adverse effects, not stop them altogether.

Aalto University, in contrast to these ambiguous earlier attempts, could now acknowledge the biosphere as a systemic whole in which human beings are a co-dependent part.

An ethical position along these lines was first first championed by the American forester and ecologist Aldo Leopold, in 1949. Leopold proposed what he called a "land ethic" that would guide "man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it".

http://gadfly.igc.org/papers/leopold.htm

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community" wrote Leopold. "It is wrong, when it tends otherwise". ["Biotic community" here is another name for what we now call the biosphere]

Leopold argued that harm was frequently done to natural systems because of our culture's belief in its separateness from, and dominion over, nature. This myth of apartness dulls the sense of responsibility that would follow if we felt ourselves to be co-dependent members of natural community, he wrote.

This sense of apartness is not universal. Hundreds of millions of our fellow humans in other cultures worship nature now. We tend to call them "pagans" or "undeveloped" - but nearly all of them, unlike us, live sustainably.

There are a lot of tress one could hug in Finland, but an ethic based on an unconditional respect for life, and for the conditions that support life, does not mean the abandonment of science or engineering.

On the contrary: it's because of what science has taught us about the biosphere, and about the complexity and precariousness of nature -- things that we did not know at the start of the modern age -- that the time has come to re-define the ethical basis of the academy.

Measured against this clear principle - respect for life, and for the conditions that support life - many of the things that Aalto University could do, that until now have been taken for granted, become a "maybe":

Innovation is a maybe. Innovation is a right thing to do when it is informed by a commitment to preserve the integrity of the biosphere. When that commitment is absent, innovation can have profoundly negative consequences. The carbon economy is the result of innovation. The financial crisis is the consequence of innovation. Need I say more?

Fostering creativity is a maybe. Last year, a new product was launched somewhere in the world every three minutes. Most of these products involved the inefficient use of energy, water, and natural resources. Each product thereby contributed to the 70 million tonnes of C02 that is emitted into the earth’s atmosphere every 24 hours as a result of human activity.

Most of these products, and the emissions that accompanied them, involved input from creative professionals. Creatives dreamed up concepts, designed artefacts, and deployed a glittering array of communications, packaging, and retail settings. $400 billion was spent on advertising and marketing alone - a global flowering of narratives, images, symbols, and forms that had, as their outcome, unsustainable consumption.

I've read that Aalto University stands for a student-centered culture, too. Well, maybe! For me, a student-centered culture is no better than a professor-centered culture, or a technology-centered culture, unless this culture is suffused by an unconditional respect for the biosphere.

Multi-disciplinarity, too, is a maybe. Being active in international networks is a maybe. It is not a virtue to work across disciplines, or across national boundaries, unless the purpose, the ends of that collaboration, are predicated on...unconditional respect for the biosphere.

Collaboration with industry? That's another maybe, too. Nokia is of course an amazing success story. But this story has its dark side. Although a mobile phone may weigh 100 grams or less in your hand, the total environmental footprint of a mobile phone adds up to 75 kilos, per phone, per year. [That number is calculated by adding up the resources needed to mine the heavy metals used in electronics, manufacture the handset, fabricate its computer chip and battery, build masts, run servers, manufacture the packaging, fit out and operate shops, and so on].

Nokia, on its own, sells a million of these small but not so innocuous artefacts every day, day after day. A million a day x 75 kilos per unit per year? Do the maths!

Universal mobile connectivity will be a necessary infrastructure in a sustainable economy - but it has to become a zero waste and zero emissions infrastructure. How, I don't know - but that has to be the target.

Industrial artefacts don’t have to be technological, to have a big footprint. Paper, for example, is just as important to Finland's economy as the mobile phone. But the manufacture of a single sheet of A4 paper, as used in my laserpinter, requires ten litres of water. Not for the packet, for one single sheet.

In a country like Finland, with its 188,000 lakes and 265,000 square kilometres (100,000 square miles) of trees, the footprint of paper is not an obvious priority....but globally, these ratios are critical.

Innovation, technology, economics, design. These activities tend to be celebrated as ends in themselves - but they are not, of themselves, virtuous. They are means to an end. If that end incudes unconditional respect for life then - but only then - these activities are worthwhile.

You may argue that this is to state the obvious: That of course Aalto University will respect life, and the conditions that support life.

But I stress the word unconditional. If a commitment is unconditional, it does not mean "take account of"; or "pay due respect to"; or "move steadily towards". It does not mean "minimise adverse effects on nature", as it says in that proposed scientific oath - it means a target of no adverse effects.

Unconditional does not mean generating "less waste than any of our competitors" - it means a commitment to zero waste, and zero emissions.

Neither does an unconditional commitment to the biosphere mean adding environment courses to a curriculum that otherwise remains untouched.

Philosophers at Aalto University may argue that there is no logical reason to make this clear ethical commitment. Well, there's no logical reason why doctors swear the Hippocratic Oath - but they do so, anyway, because it is the right thing to do.

Others among you may worry that the watertight commitment, that I propose, would constrain academic and research freedoms. But the only freedom constrained by this commitment is the freedom to damage the basis of life - and for me, that's a freedom we have to live without.

Let me be blunt: If you are not for the biosphere, you are against it. Sitting on the fence is no longer an option. The belief that we exist outside the biosphere - a belief which as shaped our universities since the enlightenment - has had, as its objective result, putting the biosphere in peril.

Ethics apart, I'm certain that climbing off the post-Enlightenment fence will give Aalto University incredible competitive advantage. People all over the world are looking for leadership, for an institution to take a stand. People, energy and resources will flock to the first institution that makes this commitment.

RESILIENCE

An ethical commitment to the biosphere suggests a challenging new focus for Aalto
University's programmes of work. That focus is the notion of resilience.

Resilience is a notion shared by the worlds of ecology, science and engineering. Resilience is also a more evocative and energising word than "sustainability", which is such an unexciting destination.

Resilience is defined in The Transition Handbook as "the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance, and reorganize, while undergoing change".

In the context of Aalto University, striving for resilience means the development of the understanding, tools and skills that will enable us to flourish in the absence of the profligate resource consumption we have become used to.

Developing these assets - understanding, tools and skills - will involve a huge amount research, practice, and critical reflection.

Does an unconditional commitment to the health of the biosphere mean that designers should stop designing products? that architects should not design buildings? that engineers should not exploit finite resources and energy to embody their creations?

My question is not a rhetorical one. The inputs and outputs of industrial society are so wildy out of balance, that questions are raised about all its buildings and infrastructures. Business-as-usual, with a new brand name, is surely not an option for Aalto University.

In this context, even if the main focus of their work stops being the design of shiny new buildings and products, there is much work for architects and designers to do.

The architect and engineer's understanding of space, time, materiality, and process will be valuable as the focus of our innovation shifts to  closed loop systems.

Designers and architects are also needed to create and optimise tools:tools for perceiving, seeing, understanding, conversing; tools for sharing and organising and exchanging; nd yes, tools for making things!

The carrying capacity of the biosphere is nor limitless, but neither is it zero!

The ability of the artist to help us perceive the unseen, or the invisible, will also be vital as we reframe our tasks and priorities.

We need to re-imagine the built world not as a landscape framed by certainties, and populated by frozen objects - but as a complex of interacting ecologies: energy, water, mobility, food.

But the stuff we will still make –products, services, infrastructures – will be designed according to principles that are based on respect for life and conditions that support life: low-carbon, resource-efficient, and zero waste.

We need to reconceive Aalto University as part of a complex of regenerative people and institutions that operate in ways that are sensitive to context, to relationships, and to consequences.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:55 PM | Comments (4)

April 14, 2008

Space, time and childhood

"When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere. It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision. Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas's eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom. He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home". The contrast between Edward and George's childhoods was highlighted in a report which warns that the mental health of 21st-century children is at risk because they are missing out on the exposure to the natural world enjoyed by past generations. The report charts the change in attitudes iagainst the wanderings (or not) of four generations of the Thomas family in Sheffield, England.

The UK report echoes a paper by Henry Jenkins that explores the changing spaces of childhood. In the nineteenth century, children living on America’s farms enjoyed free range over a space which was ten square miles or more; boys of nine or 10 would go camping alone for days on end, returning when they were needed to do chores around the house. Henry did spend some quality childhood time in wild woods, but his son has grown up in apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots. Video games constitute his main playing spaces.

I was prompted to revisit these two stories by an appointment I have tomorrow to meet with French colleagues to discuss the participation of high school students in an eco-design project. As was the case in Dott07's Eco Design Challenge we'll probably spend a small part of the meeting on content and a large part searching for slivers of free time in the over-crammed curriculum.

I'm increasingly convinced: one of the most important design actions we can take for a sustainable future, if we're to have one, is to free free up lots of space and time for the follower generation to just get on with it.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:10 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2008

Design policy as ecocide

In the UK at least 20 local authorities have brought forward innovative answers to climate change. This roll call includes Woking, Kirklees, Barnsley, Nottingham, Braintree, and Merton. This cheering list is included in an excellent piece by Jonathon Porritt in Nesta's Annual Review. (His bit is on page 56).

Having reminded us that many good things are happening at a local level, Porritt goes on to warn that getting these innovative programmes mainstreamed across the whole of local government has proved a massive problem. "Politicians would have us all believe that they have 'got' climate change - but they absolutely haven't" writes Porritt. These local programmes have been launched "without the slightest encouragement from central government". He describes as 'eco-cidal" the conception of economic progress that is hard-wired into policy - and therefore shapes how governments spend our money.

A good example of ecocidal policy in action was an announcement last week concerning the Design Centre of the North (DCN). The regional development agency, One North East, has published a public call for tenders for organisations to run the new institution.

The word sustainability does not appear, once, in the accompanying text - despite the fact that 80 percent of the environmental impact of products and buildings is determined at the design stage.

How could this happen? The answer lies in the rules which determine how these government agencies work. A development project may only be funded if it contributes to growth, productivity, and "Gross Value Added." Otherwise stated, unsustainable business-as-usual. So although a project like DCN may be regional, the rules that determine its financing are set and enforced by central government (and often by the European Commisson) - the two centres of power where, in Jonathon Porritt's assessment, eco-cidal inertia is strongest.

The picture is not all black and white. This same development agency that's promoting a sustainability-free DCN was also the major funder (along with the Design Council) of Dott 07 - which was all about sustainability. And I must say, as its programme director, that both these stakeholders were exemplary and supportive partners.

The reasons a major public agency, which spends hundreds of millions of public money each year, can face in two opposite directions at once, are partly technical and partly cultural.

Technically, because it was not a capital or infrastructure project, Dott 07 could be run at arm's length. Design Centre of the North, as a capital project, had to be the subject of a laborious consultation process. This process, crucially, engaged only with parties with a vested interest in design: industry, design schools, the design profession, and so on.

Most of those consulted agreed that a new institution, set up to support their interests, but paid for by the taxpayer, would be a splendid addtion to the region's landscape. What a surprise.

The fatal flaw in this procedure was that sustainability was excluded as an interested party.

The cultural factor here is that many economic development officials are enchanted by a bright, shiny and high-tech vision of of the future."Sustainability" sounds boring compared to an all-things-new economy. Muddy food-growing allotments, or car-sharing schemes, are perceived as sad and backward remnants of a grim past compared to glossy buildings filled with all things bio and nano - and "design".

The DCN epsode is dispriting - but raging against a flawed system is seldom productive. I remind myself. A better use of one's life energy is to support the myriad exciting projects led by "improbable contenders" that, in Jonathon Porritt's words,"just get on and do stuff".

Professional design bodies and old-paradigm design schools will persist in dragging their feet - but they are baggage we can afford to leave behind.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:19 AM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2008

Should design schools be closed down?

Neil McGuire asked me in his Wodcast interview with me whether I meant it when I said that design schools should be closed down.

Posted by John Thackara at 12:27 PM | Comments (1)

May 11, 2007

How to teach no-product product design

In an excellent piece in Metropolis , Peter Hall argues that "design schools need to rethink how they teach product design." The subject is booming, Hall writes, and yet the world is filled with terrible products: cars that kill two people every minute; airport X-ray machines that consume more time than Tardis, and designer trains that are less reliable than the ones thay replaced and cost four times as much to ride.

Hall observes that design schools are responding to the crisis in three ways. Some are positioning product design as "a business(week)-friendly, innovation-focused process (IIT and Stanford); others focus on research rather than form-making; a third group produce sexy imagery of objects that are often more hypothetical than manufacturable". These conceptual products don’t guarantee an income, Hall concedes, but - like paper and digital architecture - can sometmes stimulate fresh thinking.

A fourth new approach to product design, for Hall, is "to shift gears to mapping those object-producing systems and using the data, arrayed in compelling visual form, to drive design change". That approach is evident in the service design sector; "opportunity maps" (a term I believe was first used by E-Lab ten years ago) are becoming a powerul way to help multiple disciplines work together. Interestingly, many of the best service desgners began life as product designers: their instinct is to make services work well, not just look good.

The above illustraton to Hall's piece, which I borrowed from Metropolis, is by Martin Lorenz. It's beautfully done, but I don't buy the way it puts designers at the centre of multiple systems and flows. Design thinking is key in the transition to a One Planet Life, but it won't all be done by laptop-toting Designers.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:29 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2007

India's new design policy

When I first visited India 20 years ago, the country had fewer design teachers for a population of more than a billion people than had Wales - whose population is three million. The supply of teachers seemed to be stuck because India had just one national public design school: the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad.

NID had (and has) extremely smart faculty and students. But their number - 400 or so per cohort - is tiny in comparison with the 60,000 elite students who attend the country's Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) - and who have played such a major role in the global IT boom.

It's good news, then India's new National Design Policy, which was published on Friday, decrees that four more National Institutes of Design, on the pattern of NID, will be set up in different regions of the country.

The new policy also encourages the establishment of departments of design in all IITs, the National Institutes of Technology (NITs), and in prestigious private sector colleges. The objective is to spread quality design education to all regions of India.

So far, so good. But I was shocked and dismayed to find no mention of climate change, sustainable development, or resource efficiency, in the press release describing the Cabinet's "vision for a National Design Policy."

The emphasis of the vision is on "making India a major hub for exports and outsourcing of designs." This does not sound like the basis for a post-waste, post-consumerist, sustainable economy.

Frankly, if it ignores sustainability, India's new design policy will make the global situation worse. A lot worse. 80% of the environmental impact of products, services and infrastructures is determined at the design stage, and India is a global industrial power.

Along with other friends of Indian design, I have been arguing for some years for a "leapfrog strategy" in which India jumps directly from a resource-guzzling productivist model to a more advanced, sustainable - and competitive - services-based model.

Doors has been arguing this case in India for six years. The focus of our first formal event in India, at NID in February 2000, was on the transition to a services economy. We expanded this discussion in Doors East in 2003, and at Doors 8 on Infra in 2005. The theme of Doors 9 on Juice , in two weeks' time, returns once again to the leapfrog idea, this time on the context of food and energy.

India's new design policy suggests that we have not argued well enough.

The leapfrog hypothesis is doing much better in China. Ezio Manzini, a pioneer of the idea, was on the front page of the Peoples Daily a few weeks ago on just this topic. Senior Chinese policy makers told us, then, that they are looking to develop a fundamental "transformation of our economic growth model". They said they expected design to play a crucial role in this tranformation.

On a third reading of last week's announcement from the Indian Cabinet, I discovered a nugget of hope near the bottom of the last page. Item xvi.11 of an Action Plan to implement the Policy says a proposed new India Design Council should "Take effective steps towards 'cradle to grave environment-friendly approach' for designs produced in India so that they have global acceptance as ‘sustainable designs’".

This reads more like an afterthought than a ringing endorsement for design's biggest opportunity in 200 years. But it's better than nothing.

Will India's design education fall further behind? I doubt it. India's designers are fast on the uptake. Give them the tools - in the form of the promised new institutions - and I'm confident they'll adapt them to the task of One Planet Economy design.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:32 AM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2007

Wanted: designer of a dreamy den or a tantalising tent

The culmination of Dott07’s year in North East England (where Doors is programming the content) will be a festival in October to celebrate the achievements, challenges and experiences of all those who have taken part in projects. Our dream for the Festival location is that it will inspire people to enter, and empower them, once inside, to engage with the stories and with each other on equal terms. In other words, the look-and-feel should be the opposite of a raucous trade fair or a self-obsessed art event. Keywords: encounter; participation; interaction; empowering; active, welcoming. When you leave you should feel inspired, not exhausted. Who do you think could do this best? Tell them to check out the Dott Festival Creative Tender

Posted by John Thackara at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2006

School out of school

Over the next 15 years, 3,500 UK schools will be rebuilt or refurbished in a seventy billion pound (110 billion euro) programme called Building Schools for the Future (BSF). The problem, as Joe Heapy explained to a meeting last week of the Dott 07 Explorers Club, is that "BSF is so huge, that most people within it are working to the limits of their experience". Besides, it's by no means clear that throwing money at buildings will make a vast difference. As The Economist comments this week, a crumbling edifice improves results, but as long as classrooms are decent—not too dark, damp, noisy, airless, hot or cold—further frills seem to make little difference. The paper quotes Elaine Hall, a Newcastle University education researcher who has studied past building programmes: “While improvements to schools where the buildings fell below an acceptable standard did have a significant impact upon health, student morale and student performance, the same could not be said once an adequate standard of provision was reached”. Hall's research seems to confirm my own unkindly-received assertion (on page 147-148 of In The Bubble) that "there's no need to purpose build huge numbers of schools and colleges". The more pressing challenge, surely, is to confront the dimishing spaces of childhood. Hence our search, in Dott 07, for a design challenge to do with "school out of school".

Posted by John Thackara at 03:53 AM | Comments (0)

July 19, 2006

The coming shake-out in design education

The new Coroflot, launched by Allan Chochinov and his colleagues this week, boasts a staggering 33,000 design portfolios and more than 135,000 registered users. Gross visitor numbers to Coroflot (and its sister site, Core77 ) are many times higher than that. A major attraction is Coroflot's steady flow of job postings, updated by the minute.

I'm convinced that sites like Core77 are going to have a huge impact on design education, and soon. A fast-growing gulf is opening up between the reputations of many design schools and universities, on the one hand, and the reality of what they are able to deliver to current students on the other.

Many design schools have been compelled by governments to expand student numbers. But they have been given diminishing resources per student to do so. The results of this are now being felt. Jeff Banks, a leading British employer of designers, writes about "design education meltdown" in the August issue of Blueprint. "Employers are asking if the degrees of graduates from design schools are worth the paper they're printed on", he writes.

Prospective students that I have met of late also ask whether it is worth going to design school. They know they will leave tens of thousands of dollars or euros in debt - at a time when the prospect of a highly-paid job, to pay it off, is by no means guaranteed.

Some respected universities are offering places to one in every two applicants to design programmes this year. Five years ago, the ratio would have been 1:7. How long before they have empty places? How many already do?

Many big-name schools in the US and Europe are kept afloat financially by the fees of foreign students, particularly at postgraduate level. This cash cow will evaporate fast if the reputations of big-name schools start to deteriorate. International students will not shell out premium fees for a devalued certificate.

Among Core77's discussions among design students, for example, comments like this are typical: "I am now studying master industrial design at (School X) and I definitely DO NOT RECOMMEND this school. You can ask the other 19 students of industrial master and other 50 students from other masters and they most of them will answer you the same".

Sites like Core77 enable prospective students to communicate directly with current ones. They compare the reality of life in a school to its reputation, and to the promises made in its marketing. Under-performing colleges - and there are many, including some with inflated reputations - are going to run into trouble. Soon.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2006

Social Silicon Valleys

The Young Foundation has published a manifesto for social innovation Written by a team led by Geoff Mulgan, Social Silicon Valleys compares the vast investments made each year in scientific R&D (nearly 12 billion euros of public spending on R&D in the UK alone) with the piecemeal and marginal investment that is made in social innovation. The pamphlet warns that addressing the most important challenges of this century – including climate change, ageing and chronic disease, as well as the prospects for sustainable growth – will depend as much on social innovation as new technologies. The publication is supported by the British Council as part of the preparation for an international conference in China with ministers and city leaders from Europe and China to be held in Beijing in October.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2006

Design transformation

What, in broad terms, is happening to design right now? According to a new paper from RED in London, we are experiencing two important shifts: Firstly, in where design skills are being applied; and secondly, in who is doing the designing. A new discipline is emerging, they say, that builds on traditional design skills to address social and economic issues. “Solutions to today’s most intractable issues – the rise of long-term health conditions, the impacts of climate change, the consequences of an ageing population - need to place the individual at their heart, and build the capacity to innovate into organisations and institutions”. I’m not comfortable with the words “transformation design” – they suggest a new-agey Dr Who – but it’s a well-written piece that explains cogently that old and new approaches to design can and need to co-exist.

Posted by John Thackara at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2006

Glo-learners

I thought I’d escaped from the quicksands of of learning-speak when I completed the chapter on learning (which nearly did me in) for my book. But no! A new tsunami of learning lingo is upon us. Teachers having been exhausted by years of enforced modernisation, the hapless victims this time round are Britiain's museums and libraries. Inspiring Learning for All (ILFA) promises to “transform the way in which museums, archives and libraries deliver and engage users in learning”. Government officials were unhappy, it seems, at ”a lack of knowledge about the significance of focussing on learning and the consequential need for organisational change in museums and libraries”. When broaching this failure with museum and library professionals, they were further perplexed by the “lack of a common vocabulary: For example libraries use the word "stock", museums "collections", and archives talk about "holdings"". These heinous crimes against language galvanised the government into five years of think-tankery. The result is a 'Measure Learning Toolkit' that will force (sorry, enable) museums, archives, and libraries to “gather evidence of their impact on broader learning agendas". Library staff are further commanded to “understand their role in the creativity agenda (and) have confidence that they are part of the creative world”. For recalcitrant librarians who insist that they’ve been doing this all along, a mind-control – sorry, measuring - system called “Generic Learning Outcomes” – or GLOs - has been invented; this will “transform the way that we to talk to users and visitors about learning”. Among a number of accompanying design proposals is the requirement that “the furnishing and layout of libraries should take account of the creative process, providing stimulus, surprise, random connections and different means of recording ideas”. It strikes me that that Glo-world uses vast numbers of words to state the obvious - and/or to describe, as an objective, something that already exists. My own take on it: a) Give me a dusty old library any day rather than one suffused with a profane Glo; b) go and hug a tree rather than worry about Glos; and c) Where there's a will there surely follows a way.

Posted by John Thackara at 11:05 AM | Comments (1)

November 23, 2005

The shooting of ECiD

As the author of a book on the subject, I'm disconcerted to see that a sniper has shot the main speaker at Complexity and Design in the eye. Is our subject that controversial?

Posted by John Thackara at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2005

Stress @ education

Britain's unhealthy obsession with formal education appears to be stressing out the country's youngest children. A recent story in The Guardian reports that toddlers starting at nursery, after being at home since birth, experience high levels of stress in the first weeks after separating from their mothers, and are still showing "chronic mild stress" as long as five months after their first day in the new environment. Remember, we're talking here about children as young as eleven months old. I repeatedly tell my British friends that in Switzerland, children don't go to school until they are seven years old - and yet the country scores third in OECD world rankings for educational attainment. Does anyone know of comparative data on stress among children (and their parents) in different countries? It would be instructive to compare the two league tables.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:17 AM | Comments (2)

October 23, 2005

Jan Verwijnen

I received the extremely sad news from Helsinki that Jan Verwijnen has died, following a serious illness, at the age of 56. Many Doors people will know of Jan as leader of the Spark! project that we participated in not long ago. Sparkl! was an inspirational experience that reflected Jan’s insatiable curiosity towards new phenomena. He read, studied and wrote incessantly to the very end; cities, their structures, and human lives in urban environments, were his main interest. Students will remember Jan as a discursive, critical and tireless teacher; colleagues report that when the rest of them went home after working hours, Jan would often move from his office to sit on the table corner and discuss with students sometimes well into the evening. In addition to his teaching, Jan conceived and executed many EU and TEKES projects (of which Spark! was but one). He published a number of books. And played a pathfinding role in several ground-breaking curriculum development projects. Among Jan's unfinished projects remain his doctoral dissertation, and a visiting professorship at the Estonian Academy of Arts. His colleague Eija Salmi, who sent me this sad news, concludes: “Jan always found it easy to get to know new people. He was so well-informed that it was always possible to find mutually interesting topics. He had friends all over the world. Though always a cosmopolitan, his wish was to be buried in Finland, near to his sons and those close to him. It had been good to work here, here he gave so much of his best. But his was a life cut too short”. Jan was buried on 21 October but a
memorial event will held 6 November 2005. Contact: inmemoriam@duvin.org.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2005

Design and the growth of knowledge

In this one-morning symposium on November 10, three eminent researchers discuss designing as form of research. Brenda Laurel, Gillian Crampton-Smith, and Kun-Pyo Lee will look at the ways design generates knowledge which can be used beyond the product at hand and thereby generate wholly new ideas. The event is hosted by the Technical University of Delft (Professor Pieter Jan Stappers) and is moderated by John Thackara. The symposium morning is open for all those involved in (interaction) design, including students, design and research managers, designers and researchers. Thursday November 10. Contact: Pieter Jan Stappers: email p.j.stappers@io.tudelft.nl

Posted by John Thackara at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2005

What innovation sounds like

"Quiet in class!". Silent attention to Teacher's every word was the required mode of interaction when I was at school. Only speak when spoken to. Teachers themselves were judged by the quietness of their workspace; a noisy classroom meant they were not in sufficient control. All that seems to be changing. Prowling school inspectors now like to hear the babble of group interaction in a classroom. I learned this at a fascinating Demos workshop in London last week. Entitled Open Secrets, the workshop brought toghether 50-odd senior managers from the forefront of public sector innovation in contexts ranging from schools and hospitals to the police. The fact that we met in a delightful primary school in south London, and not in some grim seminar room, added to an upbeat atmosphere. The UK is at a interesting juncture right now. After years of intense research, reflection, and a mountain of policy documents, a lot of people now have a good idea of how public services might be organised differently. But there's a palpable feeling now that insight and reports are the beginning, not the end, of the innovation process. Everyone is looking for ways to try things out in real situations.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:28 AM | Comments (1)

August 31, 2005

Toys for the boys?

A mesmerising shopping list of new ‘research infrastructures’ has been sent to the the European Commission by a committee of top scientists. These new toys – sorry, ‘tools’ – range from an Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) for optical astronomy, to a research icebreaker called Aurora Borealis, and a facility for antiproton and ion research called FAIR. The price tags are fair, too: they range from ‘less than 100 million’ euros, to one billion-plus. Its authors describe the list as ‘well-balanced’ even though just two of its 23 projects concern human beings. Can this have anything to do with the gender profile of European science? Women represent 27 percent of the scientific workforce in EU countries, but the proportion of women in senior research positions is extremely small. In Austria, for example, only 4 percent of full professors are female, compared to a (still not brilliant) 14 percent in the United States.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:14 AM | Comments (1)

August 30, 2005

Cooperative multiplatform warfare

What exactly is an 'information society' and do we want to live in one? The European Commission has published a new plan, called i2010 for 'the completion of a Single European Information Space'. The Commission proposes an 80% increase in funding for ICT research focused on areas where Europe has recognised strengths: nanoelectronics, embedded systems, communications, and 'emerging areas such as web-services and cognitive systems'. Now you probably knew, but I did not, that Europe is a leader in cognitive systems. To be frank, I had no idea what they are, or do. So I checked them out. They are 'artificial systems that can interpret data arising from real-world events and processes (mainly in the form of data-streams from sensors of all types and in particular from visual and/or audio sources); acquire situated knowledge of their environment; act, make or suggest decisions and communicate with people on human terms, thereby support them in performing complex tasks'. Sounds straightforward enough. But what might those 'complex tasks' be? A helpful collection of examples is to be found at the website of COGIS 06 , a watering hole of the cognitive systems crowd. To judge by the list of special sessions, an 'information society' will be a warlike one. The first topic on the list concerns 'cooperative multiplatform warfare', a condition that will feature 'the human control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles in collaborative missions'. Until, that is, they run amok. The Commission does say that social aspects of ICT are important in delivering public value. But it's not easy to judge from the budget breakdown how research spending on 'public value' compares with that on cooperative multiplatform warfare. Will someone from the Commission enlighten me, and thereby dispel my nagging doubts?

Posted by John Thackara at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2005

What they made and what they think

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

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

June 17, 2005

Now listen good

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

Posted by John Thackara at 11:29 AM | Comments (2)

May 04, 2005

Europe's institutional Spruce Goose

The European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, wants to create a European Institute of Technology to compete with MIT. According to one report, there's a belief that “Europe needs an institution capable of  bringing together its currently too-dispersed scientific and teaching excellence". Instead of creating one new institution, the EIT would be a network institution founded on about six of the best universities in the EU. Five of these would be responsible for coordinating the main areas of EIT work (chemistry/materials science, life sciences/biotechnology, physics/communication sciences, etc); the sixth would be responsible for making the EIT network function. My own view? This top-heavy monster has the appearance of a network organisation, but the body and brain of a Barosaurus. EIT is not needed, and will never fly. The European Research Area contains hundreds of tech-based universities and research labs; their workers intertact and network with each other continuously, and a new 'center' is the last thing this thriving ecosystem needs. Barroso makes life needlessly hard on himself (and the rest of us) by defining economic success only in terms of tech-based economic growth. His people frantically measure things like biotech patents to persuade themselves that more needs to be done. What Europe really needs is a European Institute of Well-Being, directed by this author, whose task would be celebrate the many facets of life in Europe that work perfectly well without clunky, expensive technology.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:51 AM | Comments (0)

May 01, 2005

Designing the Transformation of Rotterdam Harbour

This sounds like a fab summer engagement. Lucas Verweij, who Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design has been fortunate to land as its new Dean, is organising a summer school entitled 'Big and Beautiful, Designing the Transformation of Rotterdam Harbour'. The two week course takes place at one of Europe's more exciting locations, Rotterdam Harbour. Based in a listed former head-office building of RDM, one of the biggest dry-dock companies in Rotterdam, students will be accommodated in apartments close to the summer school venue, and will move around by boat. Peter Wilson, Martin Aarts and Aaron Betsky are masters.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2005

Darwinian innovation

My book isn't even out yet (the US publication date is on Friday; UK/Europe is at the end of May) and already someone has raised a sneaky question about its basic argument.Fast Company have a section in their book reviews called "Things We Didn''t Like" and they say: "Many a garage inventor would argue that poorly designed, superfluous products are necessary by-products of the innovation process, not fundamental flaws in our design philosophy. Thackara deems it foolhardy, but maybe it's Darwinian". This is a fair point: it won't be easy to combine trial-and-error innovation, on the one hand, with consideration of the consequences of design actions before we take them, on the other. My short answer to this dilemma right now? a) life wasn't meant to be easy; and b) yes this is a hard question, but we can't go on treating the planet, our only home, as a glorified crash-test rig.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:35 AM | Comments (1)

April 26, 2005

Europe's IST research priorities

A new survey of front-line researchers in 25 EU countries reveals surprising devations from tech policy orthodoxy. The so-called Fistera Delphi (it's a system for averaging the results of an opinon survey) asked experts, including this writer, to prioritise research priorities for 2010 and beyond. Strong endorsement was given to “Education and Learning” as an application area for IST that "contributes to the construction of a European knowledge society". (I voted against this, for reasons rehearsed elsewhere). But my vote seems to have counted on other issues: domains such as leisure and recreation, ageing, and security, scored much less well than the report's editors seem to have anticipated. This led them to comment, rather plaintively I thought, that "this result is rather surprising given the huge markets that exist around these areas". I was reassured that European IT experts don't buy the corporate push in these domains. Even more encouraging: "improving IPR protection" came last among the challenges proposed by the report's editors.

Posted by John Thackara at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2005

City as d-school

I have arrived in New Delhi at the same time as Condoleeza Rice. She is in town to sell F16s and nuclear power station technology; I am in town to sell the idea that design for social capital is a better investment. While Condi shows powerpoints to air force generals, Doors of Perception design teams have fanned out across the city. Debra Solomon’s Nomadic Banquet team is checking out street food and food distribution systems. Jogi Panghaal’s group is exploring the city’s markets. Juha Huuskonen is teaching a group how to VJ; their results will be used in the party on Wednesday. Jan Chipchase is engaged in guerilla ethnography... somewhere. The idea is to experience the city as a design school in practice. Meanwhile, one of the team got bitten by a monkey, and a truck containing half the ‘Used In India’ exhibit broke down 1,000 km south of here. This last adventure has put India’s famed logistics flexibility (and curator Aditya Dev Sood’s calm demeanor) to the test.

Posted by John Thackara at 11:42 AM | Comments (2)

March 06, 2005

Misleading on MBAs

Politicians, under pressure for some awful action, sometimes play a clever trick: they deny responsibility for a different action, that nobody had accused them of. The supporters of business schools are playing a similar trick at the moment. For two weeks running, The Economist has lambasted critics of business school education for suggesting that scandals such as Enron are the schools’ fault . After all, says The Economist, many bad–guy CEOs never even went to business school. Which is true, and utterly beside the point. The problem with b-schools is not that they breed black-hat bad guys, but that they train thousands upon thousands of future managers to regard human beings as discretionary costs – costs that can be eliminated by a bland-sounding technique, that they all learn by rote, called ‘restructuring’.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:36 AM | Comments (2)

February 09, 2005

On 'think and do tanks'

An article by Rob Blackhurst in the UK's New Statesman states that "whilst think tanks and their policy wonks have proliferated, their influence on policy has declined sharply". This piece has sparked a lively debate at the Demos blog about "how to stay influential and competitive, without drifting away from the very people whose lives your ideas are intended to benefit". Pitching in to this discussion, the Global Ideas Bank observed that "both Demos and New Economics Foundation style themselves increasingly as think and DO tanks". The diminishing power of pure thought to change social reality will be debated at Doors 8 - so for now I'll do some useless point-scoring: the Netherlands Design Institute (where Doors was born) called itself a think and do tank back in 1994 - as it shown on this prototype (by Zuper) of our first website . (I'm sure others used the term before we did: do tell me if you know when, and by whom).

Posted by John Thackara at 08:57 AM | Comments (1)

February 05, 2005

Design education (cont)

There's a curious mismatch between the demand for design and art education among school leavers (see my story about "Study art and never be unemployed" below) and the reluctance of industry to fund research. Design Observer drew my attention to a claim in Fortune that, in the USA, a master of fine arts (MFA) degree is in such demand that design schools can now be tougher to get into than Stanford or Harvard. While those schools' MBA programs accept roughly 7% and 12% of applicants, respectively, UCLA's MFA program admits just 3%. At the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), applications are up 50% over the past two years; they dropped more than 19% at Harvard and Stanford. Meanwhile, Media Lab Europe has closed due to lack of funding and design research everywhere is being squeezed by funding pressures. There is an argument that all design projects entail research -but my own impression is that the financial squeeze that's affecting institition-based research also applies to paid-for design: there's money for quick results, but not for investigation or reflection.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2005

Professor of flows

When the Dutch word for urban planning, "planologie', was first used in 1929, its literal meaning was 'the study of surfaces'. Planners today work in a more multi-dimensional context - one that Luuk Boelens describes as 'a motley assemblage of multiple times and spatial realities'. Urban planning is doomed to fail, says Boelens, when it persists in treating cities as stable units consisting of a centre, a periphery, and around it a rural area where 'spatiousness and peacefulness are the predominant chacteristics'. That may have been true when there were just 68,000 cars in the country, says Boelens, but such an approach makes little sense when there are seven million vehicles and the whole country is conceived as a logistics hub. Boelens is so committed to a multidimensional approach to planning that he wanted to be called a Professor of Fluviology, and to play 'Route 66' at his inauguration. But even the world's most planned culture was unwilling to countenance that much change in one go. The lecture (pdf) is available here

Posted by John Thackara at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2005

Kaos Pilots

On the heels of news that Media Lab Europe is to close, and that European IT research is failing (see below) comes a more cheerful message: Kaos Pilots in Denmark is to stay open. A new prospectus has been published with the announcement of a plan to make this unique institution, which is rather like a cross between Burning Man and a b-school, 'Scandinavia's most attractive and modern entrepreneurial program'. Kaos Pilots, which is 13 years old, lost a big chunk of state funding a year ago, but they have managed to fill the liquidity gap for now with support from the Tuborg Foundation and a dairy company. Earlier this week Kaos Pilots published 25 'Recommendations From Us to the World'. The list contains a lot of exclamation marks, and tends towards breathlessness - but what the heck, these guys are aviators. If the thought of going to HBS or Insead fills you with gloom, check them out.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2005

Why European IT research is failing

According to Computer Weekly today, a high-level European Commission assessment panel has concluded that European Union research into information society technologies (IST) is failing, despite it spending more than a billion euros a year on the area. The panel said "more investment and less bureaucracy" are required for success. Red-tape is indeed a problem: it can take 70 working days to complete an EC project proposal which - when a one-in-three success rate is factored in - means we at Doors used to employ a whole person just to make applications. But the much bigger problem than red tape is the EC assumption that designing an information society is only about tech. Last year, for example, we spent three months filling in a huge funding application for Doors East - an event whose entire agenda was devoted to social innovation in a network society using ICTs as support. Our application was turned down because our proposal contained 'insufficient technological content'. Doors has also been forced to stop participating in EC-funded programmes because of scale. Knowledge-sharing networks of excellence (of which we like to think Doors is a lively example) may only be funded by the EC if a network's member organisations have at least 50 (and preferably 100-200) PhD level researchers on their books. This number favours the dinosaurs of Big Science (who helped write the policy) at the expense of hundreds of grassroots organisations who have the ideas - and local connections - that the dinosaurs lack.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2005

More b-school tosh

Am I alone in becoming terminally irritated by the macho posturing that passes for thought in business schools and their journals? An article about service design by Uday Karmarkar, in Harvard Business Review, is typical of the genre. "A tidal-wave of change bearing down on the services sector should make you rethink your strategy and revamp your organisation" it begins breathlessly. A tidal wave of tosh would be more accurate. Karmarkar's big idea is that "the industrialisation of services" will somehow help service companies to "focus their efforts on overcoming the feeling of disembodiment and depersonalisation that technology has created between companies and customers". Karmarkar seems blissfully unaware that the industrialisation of services will make things worse for those of us who have to use them,not better. But what really bugs me is his his blithe assumption is that the technology that causes all this disembodiment and depersonalisation somehow deployed itself. But guess what, Mr K: It did not: It was deployed by an army of managers, many of whom were taught to do so at business schools like your own. (His article draws on "surveys and interviews with 300 senior IT managers" carried out by the Center for Management in the Information Economy at UCLA). "Will You Survive The Services revolution" by Uday Karmarkar in Harvard Business Review. July 2004.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2005

Fit, or fried?

Tech-filled "houses of the future" are usually grotesque but darkly entertaining, and MIT's new one does not disappoint. Hundreds of sensing components are installed in nearly every part of Live-In Place Lab. The sensors are used to develop 'innovative user interface applications that help people easily control their environment, save resources, remain mentally and physically active, and stay healthy'. The website says 'help' - but the details suggest...compel. Jason Nawyn, for example, is working on the use of so-called persuasive technologies to 'motivate behavior change' and (with Pallavi Kaushik) to extend a 'sensor-driven place and event-based reminders...encouraging a healthy life balance of work, entertainment, eating, etc'. I'm reminded (these houses are all basically the same) of the Electrolux future home I saw a while back: a poster boasted of a smart floor that, when an intruder was detected, 'turns on the lightning' (sic). The image of liberal Swedes electrocuting teenage burglars has remained with me ever since. Will MIT apply similar sanctions if I eat too much? Thanks to Institute for the Future for the lead.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2004

Weighed down by what we know

I was sorting through some old and priceless documents, such as the five year-old proceedings of a CHI (Computer Human Interaction) conference. In it I encountered a thesaurus that lists 137 terms that crop up in the papers selected for the event. The list runs from agents, to work analysis, and includes, in-between, such subjects as augmented reality, cognitive models, ethnography, help desks, input devices, metaphors, predictive interfaces, story-telling, tactile inputs, and usability engineering. As I said, 137 entries. Now CHI is for and about designers who care passionately about people - but you have to ask: is it possible to stay on top of this kind of burgeoning knowledge-base and still find time to get out of the house and mix with....real people?

Posted by John Thackara at 07:28 PM | Comments (1)

December 12, 2002

From shelfware to wetware: where next for design research?

(In December 2002 I chaired a seminar in London, organised by the Design Council, which brought together 100 academics, designers and business people to discuss: "how to get the most out of academic design knowledge". Here are some half-formed thoughts (Philip Tabor) on the points that arose)

Designers and companies tend to understand 'design research' as:
- technology scoping
- market research
- product development
- trend forecasting

Most of the academics at the meeting said that these activities were not "research" as they understood the term.

Other kinds of value can be created by design research. Among these:

- knowledge about new processes and methods - to the extend that they can be documented and codified. People running large organisations generally value process innovations more than outcomes. But this is not a uniquely academic research activity: internet service companies like Sapient, and management consultants, do process innovation all the time.

- case studies and best practices: everyone wants them, but there's a difficulty: a "best practice" is hard to document or make 'objective'. Practices, by definition, are rooted in a social and technological context.

- Intellectual Property Rights (IPR): old-thinking companies want it, but an obsession with IPR stifles innovation.

- reflection, criticism, and evaluation of bigger picture: these lofty activities are badly needed, and are traditional tasks for academe. The problem arises: how to share the insights so gained with people on the front line whose attitudes and behaviours we want to modify?

- develop new business models: business school academics were active in this field during the early dot.com boom: remember "pure-play" business concepts? Nearly all these platonic concepts failed - precisely because they were not rooted in a context.

- develop new ways of working: the same proviso applies. Academic research can draw our attention to new ways of working (or "WoW" as Philips' Josephine Green called it) - but I'm sceptical that academic research, by itself, can innovate methods out of context.

- understand people and communities: my tolerance for engineers and social scientists who claim to "understand people" is so low that I pass on this one.

- identify un-met needs and desires: the concept of an "un-met need" raises an equally large number of epistemological questions. That, too, is for another time.

It's worth noting, too, that there is no single "design process". Those words were used by different people to describe different steps:

- action research - iterative design in which build > trial > evaluate > learn > build repeat, continuously;
- scoping the domain - to identify broad-brush drivers and dilemmas;
- framing the initial question - on the basis that questions are more powerful than answers;
- assembling the actors - with an emphasis on the inclusion of people formerly known as users;
- obtaining resources - the process of designing and drafting project proposals, setting up projects, and co-coordinating them, is complex and very time-consuming;
- co-ordination and facilitation - the Sloan Business School's Centre for Co-ordination Science (sic) reckons that coordination should be allocated 30% of time and money resources in many projects - but never is;
- sharing results - will never happen if left to the end of the project.

If I reflect, after the meeting, on success factors for design research, four of these stood out for me:
- locate at least part of the project in a real-world context. I heard no convincing examples of purely theoretical design research.
- Design research should involve the innovative re-combination of actors among the worlds of science, government, business, and education.
- If the results (and value) of design research are to be shared effectively, communication and dissemination methods need to be designed (and budgeted) in at the start.
- there's an urgent (and so far not visible) need to develop peer-to-peer methods for research and investigations.

The list of barriers to the effectiveness of design research to emerge from the meeting was longer:
- limits of design knowledge; its epistemology (C Frayling);
- difficult to capture/represent - and thus share - a process;
(processes are often tacit and social, not objective);
- divergent ways of working (WoW);
- inadequate access to, or knowledge of, who is doing what;
- impoverished stores, or more properly flows, of knowledge and experience
- IPR/ownership issues stifle sharing;
- institutional constraints (professional associations, disciplinary divisions);
- funding bodies are too slow, too mono-disciplinary;
- lack of ways to measure effectiveness (Jamie Oliver story).

Conclusion

It was not clear to me, after the meeting, what the academy can or should do, that business cannot. I'm not persuaded that pure reflection, for example - "shelf ware", as wittily described by Rachel Cooper - can be effective, or meaningful, if it is divorced from practice. I also fear that stores of knowledge, put together by academic researchers, may be less useful - remembering the recent failures of knowledge management - than flows of knowledge. I also wonder whether academia can, or should, deliver the just-in-time-research that fast-moving industries seem to need.

In the end, it is probably not a matter of either-or (academic vs. worldly research) - but of both-and. But even a both-and conclusion raises tricky issues. Systematic collaboration between academics and practitioners implies institutional and attitudinal transformation. Does this transformation process need to be designed?

On this last point, I was fascinated to read a paper by Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law at New York University, about Linux and the nature of the firm. Free software, or open source software, is a fifteen-year-old phenomenon in the software world. But, according to Benkler, free software, although the most visible, is one example of a much broader social phenomenon, commons-based peer production - a new mode of production in the digitally-networked environment.
http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html

The central characteristic of this new mode of is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals - rather than market prices or managerial commands.

This would be a worthy subject for a follow-up meeting.

See also my piece, Does your design research exist? at
http://www.doorsofperception.com/In+the+Bubble/details/50/

Posted by John Thackara at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2000

Experimental school environments

Slides used in my lecture to an expert meeting at the European Commission in Brussels in 1999.

BE CRITICAL, BE HUMBLE (1)
* ICT is not content - it is a tool
* teachers are extremely suspicious of machines
* they are right to be so (radio, film, tv, VCRs, PCs)
* not to mention, "teacher-proof technology"
* our legacy: "ecstasy, disappointment, blame"

BE CRITICAL, BE HUMBLE (2)
* delivering content is not teaching
* teaching does not lead, per se, to learning
* connecitivity does not always foster collaboration
* schools resist - but schools also deliver

BUT BE POSITIVE
= helping to teach,helping to learn:
- basic skills: numeracy, literacy
- abstract concepts
- systems thinking
- social skills (collaboration)
- enhance personal experience
- connect "school" with real world

EFFECT vs AFFECT
* "interaction" vs learning
* sustained engagement
* self-initiated
* self-sustaining
* self-structuring

DO NOT BEATIFY BANDWIDTH
* telephone
* television
* camcorders & VCR s
* fax
* two tin cans and a piece of string

CLASSROOMS ARE NOT CAGES.
They are also:
- spaces
- places
- communities
- experiences
- processes

CONTEXT IS KING: EVALUATE THE LEARNING PROCESS
* when did technology add value?
* what exactly did it add?
* under what circumstances?
* what was the teacher / student’s role?
* how many of them were there?
* what resources were used?
* how much time was needed?

LEARNING MEANS...
* being told
* being shown
* seeking
* finding
* evaluating
* organising
* communicating, explaining

TOOLS FOR LEARNING (1)
* memory
* curiosity
* imagination
* collaboration

TOOLS FOR LEARNING (2)
* space (for reflection)
* time (for reflection)

TEACHERS ARE LEARNERS, TOO
* Teachers are isolated, so....
* Foster communication with other teachers
* Not just about tools, but also curriculum, pedagogy
* Enable informal techniques to be visualised
* Enable "lessons learned" to be shared

THE SELF, THE SENSES, AND THE WORLD
* taste
* touch
* smell
* sound
* sight

Posted by John Thackara at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)