Doors of Perception Report

Design steps to one planet living

December 2007

by John Thackara

 

TOOLS FOR SUSTAINABILITY: SAO PAULO WORKSHOP

Imagine that you have the attention of 100,000 designers and architects.

Which five tools, business models, platforms, or applications, would you badly

want them to know about - and use? The use of the tool should enable citzens

to enjoy an aspect of daily life in a radically resource efficient way.

The purpose of this Doors of Perception workshop in Sao Paulo is to identify

and document tools, from Brazil and Sao Paulo, that may be added to a global

inventory that will be presented at an event in France in November 2008.

Thursday 6 December (14h-19h) and Friday 7th (10-13h).

Rua Ferreira de Araujo 741, Pinheiros, Sao Paulo.

http://www.cbb.org.br/

The workshop is free but please register in advance:

fabiosouza@..., and john@...

 

CITY BIKE SYSTEM IN PARIS

The Velib city bike system in Paris is getting a lot of international media

attention of late. It's an important first step toward creating a high

quality, low cost, low carbon new mobility strategy for your city.

Want one for your city, too? This New Mobility Policy Brief is

a mayor's guide to City Bike Strategies.

http://www.citybike.newmobility.org

 

DOTT MANUAL NOW ON SALE

Dott 07 was a year of community design projects in North East England that

explored what life in a sustainable region could be like - and how design can

help us get there. We called its publication a manual (rather than a book,

or a catalogue) because it's about practical ways for people either to join

Dott projects themselves, or to do something similar where they live.

At 100 pages, and fully-illustrated in colour with real people,

the Dott Manual is wildly under-priced on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dott-07-Manual-John-Thackara/dp/1904335152/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195572368&sr=8-1

or http://tinyurl.com/2xgdmw

 

DOTT PODCAST

Should design schools be closed down? How do you make community-based design

interesting? Your correspondent enjoyed this short conversation with

Neil McGuire which is now available on wodcast.org.

http://www.wodcast.org/wodcast_webarchive/wodcast_thackara.mp3

 

MY MOBILITY MARK OF CAIN

Andreas Zachariah, the son of a pilot and an air stewardess, has developed

a magical piece of software that automatically tracks my travel carbon

emissions. On GPS-enabled mobile phones it identifies and evaluates

the different forms of transport used as one moves about from A to B.

It then outputs the aggregate carbon footprint of your travel to the device.

(Wikipedia tells me that Cain's curse is his "inability to cultivate

crops and the necessity that he lead a nomadic lifestyle."

It's true: I'm a carbon criminal).

http://www.carbonhero.net/Intro.html

http://www.dott07.com/

 

ONE PLANET LIVING - ONE SMALL ISLAND AT A TIME

The UK's National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) has

announced a 1m pound (1,4m euros, $2m) prize fund to reward people working

together on new approaches to saving energy. The competition is open to

groups "based mainly in the UK".  You have until 29 February 2008 to enter.

http://www.biggreenchallenge.org.uk

 

CHANGING THE CHANGE

Ezio Manzini is chair of a conference called Changing the Change that's part

of Torino World Design Capital 2008. "It's a design research conference with

a focus more on results than on methodology" Ezio tells me, "with an emphasis

on what design research can do for sustainability". There will be also be an

international summer school. Do you have good paper on a very interesting

initiative? The deadline for submission of abstracts and draft visualisations

is 21 January 2008. Torino 10 -12 July 2008

http://www.changingthechange.org

 

LEAPFROGGING SCORE

Europe's Score! network involves 28 institutions and several hundred

professionals in a programme to promote "radical change, system innovation

and paradigm shifts" in policy and business as regards sustainablility.

Their March conference is about eco-design, supply chains, marketing,

sustainable business models, base of the pyramid economies, leapfrogging.

It's at Les Halles des Tanneurs, a refurbished 19th century tannery.

10 and 11 March.

http://www.score-network.org

 

KITCHEN BUDAPEST

Kitchen Budapest, a new media lab, which opened in June, is doing fascinating

work: a robot lawnmower that reproduces photographic images on the landscape;

an intelligent autonomous raft that's still floating down the Danube; a local

network for displaying local videos; and a web 2 platform called GETS that  

that enables local level service exchange. Three months on, their first

catalogue is already online and and is also available upon request in printed

form. Kitchen also have residency openings for such programmes as "Pimp My

Gadget" for next year. Kitchen has to be one of Europe's livliest labs.

http://www.kitchenbudapest.hu/hu/2007summerpdf

 

LANDLINES

Is there something in the soil?

http://www.thecumbrianetwork.co.uk/landlines-1

http://www.eikongraphia.com/?p=2094

 

DEVICE ART IN NO-TIME

Global interaction designers discuss the design of interactive systems -

web and desktop, mobile, consumer electronics, digitally enhanced

environments, and more. Some great keynoters include Alan Cooper,

Sigi Moeslinger, Bill Buxton, and Malcolm McCullough. Matt Jones talks

about "designing in no-time" and Regine Debatty proposes "device art".

http://interaction08.ixda.org/

 

WANTED: PESKY DESIGN CRITTERS

Alice Twemlow writes with news of a new graduate program in design criticism,

the first of its kind in the U.S., that will begin at the School of

Visual Arts in New York in Autumn of  2008 "with a stellar faculty

and an innovative curriculum".

http://designcriticism.sva.edu

 

DRIVE-BY GRAFFITI

Floor van Keulen and Rene Oey made drawings and texts and projected

them from a car via a video beam onto houses, factories, empty walls

and passing traffic.

http://www.stadsgezichten.com/index.htm

 

TRIPPING IN MANCHESTER

Like many northern cities, Manchester is changing fast. Do you want to

critique the implications of "regeneration"? Are you passionate about the

possibilities of inventive walking and drifting? TRIP wants to hear from

people with ideas and practices to do with psychogeography, neogeography,

deep topography (for people who are up themselves?), locative media,

and collaborative mapping. Manchester, 19-22 June 2008.

http://trip2008.wordpress.com/

 

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