PARTICIPANTS AND THEIR PROJECTS
Starbucks' food certification, Ellis Neder | Anna Aswad, Divya Chaturvedi | Water maps Georg-Christof Bertsch | John Thackara, Doors of Perception | Massive Change, Jennifer Leonard | Wikia Search, Jimmy Wales | groWorld, Maja Kuzmanovic | Plantot, Joystick + Jeanette Ramirez | Engineering the thrill, Brendan Walker | Context Connection in Foods, Arlene Birt | Magic Moments, Francesca Sarti | Urban Farming, Debra Solomon, Nina Belk & David Barrie | Kultivator, Malin Lindmark Vrijman & Mia Lindmark | Udipi: Lost tradition, cherished heritage, Sanjeez Shankar & John Vijay Abraham | Taltala Tales, Alok Nandi | Fair Tracing, Dr Ian Brown | Food delivery futures, Francois Jégou | Culiblog, Debra Solomon | CKS, Aditya Dev Sood | Biotechnology and informatics, Villoo Morawala Patel | Doors Round Table, Garrick Jones | Dott 07, Nick Devitt & Robert O'Dowd | farmsubsidy.org, Stefan Magdalinski | Farm City, Chris Hardwicke | Carboncare, Lisa Stockton & Wesley Richardson | The Dirt Café , Maria Wedum, Claire Hartten & Patricia Michelson | Food and Identity, Jogi Panghaal | Social objects, Ulla-Maaria Mutanen & Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino | Door's Innards, Jan Jaap Spreij & Kristi Van Riet | Beeline, Dawn Danby, Jyoti Stephens, Mary Rick | Portland (Oregon) Public Market, Ron Paul | Veg City, Sophea Lerner & Kaustubh Srikanth | Food Repositories: Social strategies for self control, Margaret Morris & Susan Faulkner | CO2 Low, Lucy Denham | Down the garden path, Linzi Deprez & Lorna Cochrane | Experiencing Brighton, Costas Costathens | Mick Douglas |
Mick Douglas
Mick Douglas is an Australian artist, senior lecturer at RMIT University and founder of tramtactic.net who makes hybrid-artform public domain projects that are collaborative, cross-cultural and transportative.
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Experiencing Brighton
Costas Costathens will present a walking route, combining spaces and devices, offering alter-ego viewing experiences of Brighton. The route incorporates eco-friendly features, where gravity and moving water represent the main sources of energy production.
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Local Tourism Down the Garden Path
The project involved re-thinking the garden shed to support a programme of flexible living, with enough space to accommodate six people. The idea of a sleeping “couchette” - of the kind you find on European trains - further inspired the design. The project grew out of an investigation of ways to promote and enable tourism alongside Route 75-cycle path in Edinburgh (Scotland).
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CO2 Low
CO2 Low is a system designed in collaboration with the Food Hall in Fenwick, a department store in Newcastle upon Tyne in England.
Food Repositories: Social strategies for self control
Stashing food with friends: out of reach out of mouth
It's hard to stop eating. And, rising obesity rates suggest it's getting even harder.
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Snack City Workshop
From digital snackfood as an interface to the city, to the participatory radio kitchen...workshop participants are invited to explore Delhi streetfood in the context of changes taking place across the city. Street snack surfing research and hands on DIY hybrid radio will be collectively cooked up into a performance radio cart as part of MWF and live_feed online broadcast with foodradio_network. We exchange recipes and we share ingredients, exploring models of open content and accessible technologies. Our recipes are in a state of constant variation as we experiment with the ingredients and utensils at hand. What is interesting about radio as a live network between remote locations is the location and not merely the fact that it is remote. Here and there have different flavors. Food, like sound, enters the body and indexes it in place and time. Listen globally, eat locally.
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Portland Public Market
In an era where over 90% of food sales in North America are controlled by a very small number of national grocery chains, establishing an independent venue for local merchants will create opportunities for sustainable agriculture to intersect with socially responsible commerce in a transportation-advantaged location. Ron Paul, chef, restaurateur and politician spearheads the effort in the city of Portland to create a daily, year-round public market to showcase the bounty of the Pacific Northwest.
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Beeline
Beeline is a food distribution system concept for fresh produce in the Northwest Pacific coastal region, designed to support local economies while cutting out the wasted money and transportation commonly associated with getting produce from farmers to retailers. By creating an online virtual marketplace for connecting farmers to retailers, Beeline optimizes food transportation energy by "carpooling" pickups and deliveries in a region and provides a robust information system for auditing each shipment's energy use. The system significantly reduces miles traveled and carbon emissions, eliminates warehouses and facilities, provides equitable markets for local food, and educates customers.
Doors' innards
The people without whom Doors would not exist.
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Social Objects
Our interest is to develop tools and practices that would make the consumption of locally-produced and second-hand objects socially attractive on the web. In the Social Objects project we collaborate with local artists, public institutions and technology developers in order to study and conceptualize new ways in which locally produced goods, art, design, and craft can mediate and generate social relations between people on the web.
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Food and Identity
Senior Research Fellow, Doors of Perception, New Delhi. Jogi Panghaal graduated from the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India and went on to co-found Lifetools, which provided product design and communication design services to communities, both rural and urban, that needed design help. Projects included product design work with rural artisans and disabled children and communication design work with rural and urban communities, particularly women in the areas of health and HIV/AIDS. Jogi is a visiting teacher at NID, at Les Ateliers Paris, and at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. His research interests are in the area of cultural identity and design, and he has conducted educational programmes around this theme, and about food and identity.
The Dirt Cafe
The Dirt Cafe project connects designers, chefs, food specialists, medical researchers, economists, scientists, social entrepreneurs and others. The idea is to link specialists and influencers with those who question the status quo - and thereby give dimension to new and alternative scenarios. It draws on many precedents: the Coffee House, the Salon, Café Society and meetings under the Banyan Tree.
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Carboncare Food Information System
Lisa Stockton and Wesley Richardson are winners of the Royal Society of Arts / Dott 07 competiton to do with food information systems. Their investigation centered on food shopping, where they discovered that no clear universal system of knowing a product’s background exists yet. "By giving the consumer the means to make more informed choices, beginning with food shopping and growing to encompass energy consumption and travel amongst others, we see this as a way to readjust the balance of our cumulative carbon emissions".
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Farm City
Farm City is a proposal for a new kind of architecture that would enable cities to feed themselves. It is a skyscraper for living and farming. We are running out of land outside our cities to feed ourselves. Urban sprawl is consuming valuable agricultural land and agricultural lands are encroaching on sensitive wilderness ecosystems. Farm City is a project that creates agricultural area inside new housing towers.
Fair Tracing
The Fair Tracing project aims to help bridge the digital divide between Northern consumers and Southern producers by using tracing technology to enhance the Fair Trade model of trade. Digital tracing technology enables each individual product to be both given a unique identity and tracked throughout the value chain from producer to consumer. The information that may be attached to such a “tagged” product is virtually limitless, beginning with details of the product’s date and cost of creation, as well as its individual creator and his/her working environment and pay, through the various steps of its transport to the eventual point-of-sale to the consumer. At each stage of the product’s journey, information may be added and/or edited and, if the information is stored digitally on the internet, may be of various multimedia types. The ability to access this rich information at the point-of-sale will empower the consumer to make an informed comparison between competing products before finalising his/her purchase.
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Taltala Tales
Alok Nandi’s project Taltala Tales looks into several layers of everyday life in Kolkata, India, with cuisine as a transversal, cross-thematic, vehicle. “Bengalis are perhaps the greatest food lovers in the Indian subcontinent. Their cuisine, developed over the centuries, is based on a meticulous selection of local ingredients: rice, fish, meat, fruits, vegetables and a variety of spices.” Chitrita Banerji, in her book on life & food in Bengal, allows us to travel into the fascinating scapes of cuisine, and also of the city of Kolkata, a.k.a. Calcutta, where Bangla Ranna (cuisine) coexists with Firinghee Flavours; these Firinghees came from Portugal, Holland, ... with their cheese, their beer ...
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Udipi: Lost Tradition, Cherished Heritage
When one walks into an Udupi restaurant, the charm of pleasant, old ways seem to mingle seamlessly with the robust operations of modern times. As a heritage, and as part of modern culture, Udupi hotel practice makes for an interesting study where the past meets the present at very tangible and sensory terms. This is a documentation of a practice and a people that have been an important part of modern India and its cities.
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Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULS)
Andre Viljoen compares global examples of how food and urban development are intertwined. He is editor of the book ‘Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes’, (CPULs) which describes how spaces can be created for local people to grow food in a communal way drawing inspiration from places such as Cuba. The CPUL concept developed by Bohn & Viljoen Architects proposes a coherent and sustainable urban design strategy capable of reducing a city's ecological footprint while at the same introducing qualitative improvements to urban environment.
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Food delivery futures
François Jégou, director of the Brussels-based design research company SDS_Solutioning, was the co-producer with Ezio Manzini of the exhibition Sustainable Everyday. This collection of scenarios and case studies asked: what might everyday life be like in a sustainable society? How would we work, move, and take care of each other? The picture that emerged, was that of a ‘multi-local city…a city in the shape of a network of places endowed with totally new characteristics”. This initial scenario building work developed into the "Sustainable Everyday Project" platform of researches and program of events traveling around the world (see www.sustainable-everyday.net). SEP focused particularly on the potential of social innovation to generate new models of sustainable urban living: "solidarity purchase groups", "community based agriculture", "urban vegetable gardens" are suggesting new food delivery networks, promising in terms of sustainability. http://www.solutioning-design.net
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Culiblog
In 2004 Debra Solomon began publishing her independent (visual) research on culiblog.org a weblog about food, food culture, food as culture and the culture that grows our food. Culiblog is a resource about food systems, sustainability, food-related art/design and film, dished up to an urban-international readership, with a hunkering to see their favourite subject, food, in the context of culture.
Centre for Knowledge Societies
Dr Aditya Dev Sood is CEO of Centre for Knowledge Societies (CKS), and co-producer of Doors 9. With foundational training in Design and Critical Theory at the University of Michigan, he recently completed his doctorate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology and South Asian Languages from the University of Chicago. He directed the Used in India media archeology installation and show. A former Fulbright scholar, he maintains a multidisciplinary interest in social research, technology and design. http://www.ict4d.info and http://www.cks-b.org/
Biotechnology & bioinformatics
Dr Villoo Morawala Patel, an agro-biotechnologist, is the Founder & Managing Director of Avestha Gengraine Technologies, India's leading fully integrated biotechnology & bioinformatics company. Avestha focuses on the convergence between food, pharmaceuticals and clinical genomics leading to preventive personalized medicine. Avesthagen has established world class, state-of-the-art laboratory facilities at the International Tech Park in Bangalore.
Doors 9 Round Table
Garrick Jones (UK, Ludic Corp), is on the programming team of Doors 9, where his main job is to orchestrate the Project Leaders Round Table. A musician and composer, based in London, he is also Visiting Fellow in the Institute of Social Psychology at London School of Economics.
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Dott 07
Dott 07 (Designs of the time 2007) is a year of community projects in North East England that explore how design can make a positive difference to our daily lives. Dott 07 enables communities and individuals to collaborate with designers in real-life situations. These projects are small but important examples of what life in a sustainable region might be like. One of the key Dott 07 projects is Urban Farming, whose team is also at Doors 9.
Competiton winners
Ten people have been selected to join us at Doors 9 after a two day judging session in London of the Dott, Doors of Perception, and Royal Society of Arts Design Directions competiton. Some 70 projects were submitted, many of them by multidiscipliary teams, from as far as the US west coast and Canada. Each project proposed a solution to a specific sustainability challenge to do with food, and/or tourism. The winners are:
- Wesley Richardson and Luisa Stockton (UK, Ravensbourne, food information system project);
- Lucy Denham (Northumbria University, Fenwicks project);
- Dawn Danby, Jyoti Stephens, Mary Rick (Canada/USA, “Beeline” project);
- Konstantinos Chalaris (Greece, and Brighton, walking wheel project);
- Jotis Moore (Farnham, end-of-the-line project);
- Lorna Cochrane and Linzi Deprez (Scotland, Napier U, Route 75 project).
We'll post details of the people and their projects along with the other Doors 9 participants over the coming days.
Kultivator
KULTIVATOR is an experimental cooperation of organic farming and visual art practice situated in rural village Dyestad, on the island Öland on the southeast coast of Sweden. By installing certain functions in abandoned farm facilities (including a white cube made of cow dung, for exhibition and gatherings) near to the active agriculture community, Kultivator provide a meeting and working space that points out the parallels between provision production and art practice, between concrete and abstract processes for survival.
Dott Urban Farming
Tomato plants flourishing on balconies, growing spaces sprouting in the streets, farmers looking at how to improve organic and sustainable farming. The Urban Farming project based in Tees Valley is aimed at getting the area growing, and eating their locally produced fresh food.
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Magic Moments
Magic Moments is a research study and a project intended to develop a network of kiosques in the city of Florence. With its focus on the fascination of food and on the power of food to create situations and relationships, the Magic Moments network encourages people to congregate within the town of Florence and re-animate these tiny food kiosques.
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Background Stories
“Background Stories” is a packaging-based communication system design which facilitates consumer awareness about the larger (social, environmental, political…) impacts of their foods, by making background information visible: Enabling consumers to understand the context from which their food
comes, and thereby, about their individual role in the bigger system. In the Long-run, such connection can lead to more socially and environmentally responsible purchasing decisions.
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Engineering the thrill
Can sustainable food be thrilling, as well as worthy? It has to be, if it's to take hold. Brendan Walker runs Aerial, a design practice specialising in the creation of tailored emotional experience. Brendan originally trained as an aeronautical engineer at Imperial College, London and worked for British Aerospace Military Aircraft for five years before undertaking an MA in Industrial Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art, London. For eight years Brendan combined his professional practice with working in the research studio of the Computer Related Design Department at the RCA – where he is now Senior Tutor of the Design Interactions Course. In that time he collaborated on several major international research projects. In recent years he has defined his own design research domain, chromo11: engineering the thrill, which was funded by both the AHRB and the Wellcome Trust.
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farmsubsidy.org
Stefan Magdalinksi reports himself to be a "very happy bunny indeed". As reported in the Guardian of 22 January, a freedom of information campaign by journalists across Europe has paid off in spectacular fashion.Over the next two years, a ground-breaking decision by the council of ministers and the European Parliament will result in the biggest release of information held by governments to the public and the media since the creation of the European Union. (Stefan was instrumental in the creation of farmsubsidy.org which amplified the campaign to tremendous effect).
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groWorld
Maja Kuzmanovic's project groWorld connects the worlds of ecology, culture and technology. It joins the three 'forces' capable of transforming the world on human and ecological scale: design, farming (or bio-sculpting) and technology. These three strands of inquiry inform and support each other, aiming to forge new symbiotic relationships between the post-industrial human societies and the rest of the Earth.
Plantot
Barcelona-based Joystick create projects that focus on the relationship between us, as urban dwellers, and plants. They promote the usage of plants in public and private space "to get the public closer to small-scale urban agriculture as a way of reclaiming public space by the people who live it". Their new project, Plantot, is about the awareness and analysis of urban vegetation. It was selected iby the Centro Cívico Can Felipa to be developed during 2007. "We propose a research, that will be fomalised in a publication (printed and online), that invites citizens to look at trees planted in public spaces in a new way. We want to detect which trees are fruit-bearing, and when is their harvest season, to generate a map-calendar to invite people who use public space to make the most of these fruits that normally go to waste".
Starbucks food certification
Prior to the creation of this new system, Starbuck’s agronomy office manually organized the supply chain using paper records and Excel spreadsheets. Verifiers in Africa and South America would inspect a farm and create a farm report that was sent to the Agronomy office in Costa Rica, which then reviewed it and sent it on to Seattle where Starbucks is managed. The reporting process also had to be overseen by third-party managers at in Oakland to ensure that local coffee inspectors were adhering to company criteria. Sway Design was asked to simplify the workflow by creating a centralized, online location where each participant in the supply chain could come to upload information and view the overall status of a farm’s certification.
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Jawik Aswad
We were just wandering why till date in India mango only comes in May, oranges in April, authentic apple of Shimla only come soon after rains, coffee in south and tea in north, wheat in north and rice in south, to some level we could say that there still exists region and season based eating habits in India. There is no monotone in terms of food here. Giving another thought to travel in India, it’s just not the country with only mosques, temples and palaces it is also an exotic food arena, which has still been able to sustain bazaar regional glimpse in its cuisine. Food is strongly woven in the social fabric as Muslims and Hindus exchange their traditional dishes during the festivals. Food is shared between different communities or household in order to celebrate the festivities. Food is next to religion in India. There are hundred of festivals in the country and each festival according to region has its own traditional cuisine.
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Browsing for food? Wikia Search
Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, has a small new project: "to apply the ideas that have been successful in my creation of large scale wiki communities at Wikipedia and Wikia to the problem of search". Right now, when a search engine locates something for you, you have to make your own mind up about its quality or veracity. Imagine a seatch engine that found something for you *and* harnessed the collective intelligence of lots of people to describe and assess that...thing. Then imagine that the... thing... is something you might consider eating. Wouldn't that be handy?
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Massive Change
Jennifer Leonard is co-author with Bruce Mau of Massive Change - a book about the future of global design. In response to the question, "Now that we can do anything, what will we do?," Massive Change is a representation of the collective intentions and effects of those working towards the greater global good.
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John Thackara
John Thackara is a symposiarch who designs events, projects, and organizations. He is also the Director of Doors of Perception (Doors), a design futures network with offices in Amsterdam and Bangalore. Founded as a conference in 1993, Doors now connects together a worldwide network of visionary designers, thinkers, and grassroots innovators. This unique community of practice is inspired by two related questions: "we know what new technology can do, but what is it for?" and, “how do we want to live?”.
Water maps
Reflecting Waters is an intercultural / interdisciplinary project which Georg Bertsch started together with Yaarah Bar On at the Bezalel Academy Jersualem in 2006. " In Dehli we shall do a elementary city water map based on research and discussion and ask about the aesthetics of water" says Georg.
Worldchanging
Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich are the editors of Worldchanging (Executive and Managing, respectively). On their website, Worldchanging.com, and in their recently released book, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century, they -- along with a global team of contributors and collaborators -- explore and highlight emerging innovations for building a sustainable future. Worldchanging is about solutions; problems only get attention at Worldchanging to the extent it is necessary to explain and contextualize a particular new model or idea for doing better.
