DOORS OF PERCEPTION REPORT
OCTOBER 2008
By John Thackara

TRIBAL CURRENCIES
Reading blogs about the financial crisis feels like watching one of those
reality car chase programmes in which you wait, guiltily, for the felon - or
in
this case, the global financial system - to crash. It's hard not to be
mesmerised by reports that even the failed $700 billion plan did not address
the
true scale of the global problem. One insider blogger - Illargi, at
Automatic
Earth - reckons that "the global shadow banking system, the source of
perhaps
$800 trillion in outstanding derivatives is shaking on its foundations, and
will
inevitably tumble." Part of me hopes the crash is real because a meltdown
would
deflate an economy which will otherwise eat the biosphere alive. But a crash
would also cause enormous hardship, including to one's own nearest and
dearest.
Besides, rooting for collapse puts you on the same side as the loony-tune
end-days crowd - and that's not a club I want to join. It's all very
complicated. A healthier response, I'm sure, is to get out of the house and
look
for positive things to do. As often mentioned here, there's an awful lot of
regenerative activity out there - only most of it is below the radar. A lot
of
people are busy designing and deploying complementary currencies, for
example.
If this week's news is not persuasive enough, the need for complementary
currencies is well-explained by the Open Money Manifesto. (And whilst you're
at
it, do re-read Margrit Kennedy's paper at Doors of Perception 8. That one
lecture - in Delhi in Spring 2005 - was when I, for one, first realised that
the
mainstream money money system was going to run off the rails in the major
way
that's happening now). For my part, I plan to become an active user of
complementary currencies starting on 7 October: I'm giving a talk that day
at
the University of Brighton - and I'm hoping to be paid in Lewes Pounds.
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2008/09/open_money.php
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/

CITY ECO LAB
Speaking of positive things to do, City Eco Lab opens in 45 days from now.
To
recap: this two-week-long market of sustainability projects in St Etienne,
France, is the pilot of a scalable, reproducable event, at the level of a
city-region, that will materially accelerate its transition to
sustainability.
As with Dott07 which we programmed in England last year, citizen co-design
of
projects are at the core of City Eco Lab. In that spirit, Francois Jegou is
working with AMAP to finalise scenarios of ways to improve community
supported
agriculture systems. Avinish Kumar is collecting sounds and images of
bicycle-based merchants in Delhi for an installation on the delights of
de-motorised transportation. Mathieu-Benoit-Gonin is working on a composting
event, and Clare Brass from SEED, in the UK, is putting together a
presentation
of neighbourhood-level composting services. Magalie Restallo is designing a
prototype vital flows dashboard for an eco-quartier in St Etienne. Five
schools
from the region are measuring their ecological footprint (using an adapted
version of the Dott 07 calculator); they will begin designing solutions
during
City Eco Lab itself. Hugo Bont and Olivier Peyricot are building their urban
fish farming demo. Emanuel Louisgrand is designing an urban garden toolkit.
Bethany Koby and Ellie Thornhill are devising novel ways to select and
exchange
software and organisationals tools Ezio Manzini, and Allan Chochinov, the
editor
of Core77, are preparing their keynote talks for 19 November. So if all this
money stuff gets just too much for you, come and say hello.
http://www.doorsofperception.com/mailinglist/archives/2008/09/city_eco_lab_7
0.php

LONDON BURNING - AND FLOODING, AND DRYING
Fifteen per cent of London is at high risk from flooding due to global
warming -
an area that includes 1.25 million people, almost half a million properties,
more than 400 schools, 75 underground and railway stations, 10 hospitals,
and an
airport (London City ). According to the draft of the London climate change
adaptation strategy, an estimated 160bn British pounds worth of assets is at
stake. That doesn't sound so much after the last few days. This dry but
gripping
document does not deal with the causes of climate change - it focuses on
effects, arguing that "even if all global greenhouse gas emissions could be
stopped today, the immense inertia in Earth's climate systems means that
changes
to our climate for the rest of this century are unavoidable". Preparing for
these inevitable changes is not an alternative to reducing our greenhouse
gas
emissions, it says, but a "parallel and complementary action." An immense
amount
of innovation will be needed to retrofit buildings and infrastructure with
equipment to enable greater water and energy efficiency. Even more important
than these hard actions will be soft ones - the design of services to help
Londoners meet daily life needs in new ways,
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2008/09/london_burninga.php

LOW ENTROPY URBANISM
"What would architects design, if they did not design buildings?" My
question is
not a rhetorical one. The inputs and outputs of industrial society are wildy
out
of balance - and that includes its buildings and infrastructure. We have
reached
the end of a brief era in which we could burn cheap fossil fuel, and despoil
ecosystems, mindless of the consequences. We need to re-imagine the built
world
not as a landscape of frozen objects, but as a complex of interacting
ecologies:
energy, water, mobility, food. Our life-sustaining ecologies, especially,
need
to be nurtured, not swept away, built over, or diverted. The need for new
buildings will be rare. Sometimes the design choice will be to do nothing".
Do
you find this abstract to be tendentious piffle? I'm developing this talk at
three events this Autumn, and would welcome your critical participation.
University of Brighton, 7 October; Arc en Reve in Bordeaux, 9 October;
Megacities conference in Amsterdam, 28 October.

OTHER EVENTS

SOLUTIONS INSPIRED BY NATURE
The annual Bioneers conference helps identify breakthrough solutions to the
global ecological and social collapse imperiling our world. In their own
words,
bioneers are "social and scientific innovators from all walks of life and
disciplines who have peered deep into the heart of living systems to
understand
how nature operates, and to mimic nature's operating instructions to serve
human
ends without harming the web of life". The programme of this year's meeting
in
California is indeed amazing. There will be sessions on Green Cities; Using
Fungi to Help Save the World; Politics and Environment; Seed Saving and
Biodiversity Gardening; Resilience Thinking; Re-Naturing Education; National
Green Plans; Pachakuti Mesa Shamanism; Large-Scale Climate Initiatives;
People
and Stuff; Digital Media and Distribution Innovations; Knowing Our
Foodsheds;
Herb Walks; Biomimicry and Traditional Indigenous Knowledge; Watershed
Guardians; Latin American Agroecology; Sustainable MBA Programs; Slow Money;
Local Living Economies; the Greening of Medicine. And that's just the formal
programme. Candidly, it looks like too much to digest - but I'm still sorry
not
to be going. Maybe the event is best thought of as a kind of Woodstock of
one
planet living, not as a conference. 16-19 October, San Rafael, California.
http://www.bioneers.org/node/2617

RETHINKING SCHOOL LUNCH
One way to handle the excessive richness of the Bioneers meal would be to
have
just one course. The first day includes a workshop by the Center for
Ecoliteracy
which developed the award-winning Rethinking School Lunch program. They're
now
launching a nationwide eco schools campaign to make K-12 education relevant
to
the environmental and social challenges of the next several decades. The day
kicks off with keynotes by internationally recognized educators Fritjof
Capra
and David Orr. (If the Center for Ecoliteracy is reading this, we they will
touch base with the Dott 07 schools programme in the UK, France and
Australia).
Thursday, October 16, 2008
http://www.bioneers.org/program
http://www.dott07.com/go/school/eco-design-challenge/

OIL-FREE SWEDEN
I don't understand the concept of "sustainable technologies": There are ways
to
inhabit the biosphere sustainably - or not - and both ways can be enabled
(or
not) by technology. No technology, on its own, can be "sustainable". Even
six
months ago, such pedantry would not have deterred enthusiasts for a eco-tech
market projected to be worth $800 billion by 2015 - not counting renewable
materials and alternative energy retrofitted to existing infrastructures. I
do
not argue that wind, solar, biomaterials, bio-energies, green buildings,
sustainable mobility, smart grids, water filtration, and energy monitoring
products and technologies are all useful - it's just they are tools - and
tools
that will be hard to pay for in the times ahead. (The machine tool industry
is
in free fall in the markets right now). Speakers at Sustainable Innovation
08,
who seem mostly to be research and policy types - not red-blooded tech
entrepreneurs - may choose to disagree. Besides, the conference is in
Sweden,
which is a good place to find out about all this... stuff. The country plans
to
be world's first oil-free economy within 15 years, and is making good
progress:
Renewable energy consumption now surpasses the 40 per cent mark.
27 - 28 October 2008, Malmo University, Malmo, Sweden
http://www.cfsd.org.uk/events/tspd13/index.html

INDIAN DESIGN EDGE
Can India assume leadership in the world of design? A new book, Indian
Design
Edge, by Dr Darlie Koshy, takes a "hands on, minds on" approach to this
question.There are design case studies, historical milestones, policy
perspectives, industry insights, and scenarios. A foreword by Ratan Tata,
one
India's industry titans, is added evidence that mainstream design is now
taken
seriously by mainstream industry. I hear that Dr Koshy is about to leave his
job
as Director of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. We wish him
well:
he has been a generous host of several Doors of Perception meetings in India
over recent years - a series which began at NID in 2000. In all our India
encounters, the design edge that most inspired us was the sheer variety of
"less
stuff, more people" services - a quality that the rest of the world needs
now to
re-discover. It will be fascinating to see what direction NID takes next.
http://rolibooks.com/lotus/lotus-collection/-/indian-design-edge/

TELL ALL TO NOON
Noon Mongolnavin London to sing its stories on buses and let commuters enjoy
more about their dead time on a bus and re-sense stories on the city's
streets.
At the moment, Noon is collecting material from people who travel on buses
and
people who have been living in specific areas to "tell me some hidden
stories
that might never have been told". Are you ready to tell all? You need to do
so
before an an exhibition on 28 November - 3 December at Shoreditch Town Hall.
http://www.BusSoundtrack.com

BARELY LIVING TEXTILES
One of the autumn's more pretentious announcement has arrived from the
Textile
Futures Research Group. Asserting that "textile designers are uniquely
placed to
inhabit other design fields and cohabit with the world of science," they go
on
to promise that "unimaginable (sic) materials are being developed... for
applications such as spray on clothing and biocouture." For my money,
textiles'
future belongs to people who can make decent felt hats and slippers.
23 and 24 October, ICA, London.
http://www.tfrg.org.uk/magazine/current

THINK PUBLIC
Warm congratulations to thinkpublic, the social innovation design agency in
London: They've won the British Council's Young Design Entrepreneur Award.
Thinkpublic, formed in 2004 by Debora Szebeko, were one of our partners in
Dott
07, when they led the Alzheimer 100 project.
http://www.dott07.com/go/alzheimer100

21st CENTURY IMAGE SCIENCE
Second Life, Micromovies, Flickr, Virtual Reality, YouTube, Visual Music,
Scientific Visualisation, Google Earth: The range of ways we can produce,
project and distribute visual material is expanding - but how to manage
them? A
conference on Image Science, in Goettweig, is about the the inventory,
classification and historiography all these images concerning art, popular
culture and science. A list of heavyweight speakers includes Felice Frankel,
Barbara Stafford, and Peter Weibel. The exploding carbon footprint of the
server
farms needed to store all these images is not mentioned on the agenda - but
you
can always raise the issue during Q+A.
October 16 -18 , Goettweig.
http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/dis/goettweig2008

OPEN EVERYTHING
At the closing debate of Doors 8 in Delhi a questionaer asked Joi Ito, "is
nothing sacred anymore". Joi's answer - "open-ness" - has stuck with me ever
since. Another global conversation about the art, science and spirit of
'open'
has been moving round the world this past year; it involves "people using
openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy,
neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in". The next opportunity
to
talk about thinking, doing and being open is at the Young Foundation in
London
on 8 November. A Berlin event has also been proposed for early December.
http://www.openeverything.net

LONG LIVE THE CITY
Designer Michael Young, architect Jeffrey Inaba, designer Ilse Crawford,
architect and urban planner Jaime Lerner, horticulturalist Lisa White,
architect
Bjarke Ingels, architect Gert Wingardh, consumer insight director Shari
Swan,
zen buddhist teacher Sante Poromaa, sustainability designer John
Manoochehri,
and economist/politician and writer Antoni Vives, and Malmo director of
cityplanning Christer Larsson, are among the speaers at this year's Design
Boost
event.
16 October Malmo University, Sweden.
http://www.designboost.se/

DESIGN FOR SOCIAL IMPACT
I was critical, at the time it was announced, of a plan by the Rockerfeller
Foundation to convene a meeting about Design for Development. Their starting
point was "to bring together the world's best designers with people and
organizations that work on the world's most important and complex problems"
- an
objective that struck me as being too designer-centric, and too uncritical
of
the notion of "development". A report of the meeting at the Foundation's
Bellagio Center in Italy, in June. has now been published - and I have to
say
that my misgivings persist..The project has acquired a macho new title -
"Design
for Social Impact" - and there are repeated references to "the social
sector" as
if society, in all its complexity, is best understood as a market for design
services. The language reminds me of time I heard a senior person from Cisco
talk about "the sustainability space". It is also assumed, throughout the
report, that "the social sector" contains only NGOs - whereas, for a lot of
critics, NGOs are as much a part of the problem as the solution. Most
uncompofortable of all, for me, is that nowhere in the report can I find one
single mention of the lessons design might learn from other cultures.
http://www.dcontinuum.com/upload/Design4SocialImpact-tabloid.pdf
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=38773


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