A quick (12 minutes, on average) scan of design and innovation
By John Thackara
April 2004

QUALITY TIME AT HIGH SPEED?
Today's high speed train (HST) travel is a marvel of speed and
profligate resource consumption. It is transforming the experience of
space and time of 13 million travellers who already use it each year -
and of citizens who live in places where the trains deign to stop.
Enormous infrastructure projects are under way, but we have not made
space for reflection on the cultural consequences of it all. To fill
this gap, the High Speed Network Platform, an association of 15 European
regions, and Urban Unlimited, a planning firm, have asked Doors of
Perception to organise a cultural expert workshop on the theme, "quality
time". The aim is to develop project ideas for services and situations
that connect people, cultural resources, and places, in new
combinations. The workshop is full, but we'll bring you the results in a
later edition.
http://www.hst-network.net/

ELECTRONIC SIGHT
The maximum speed of the HST right now is 300-350 km/hour (200+ mph). It
will end up at 500 (300 mph). At these speeds a train needs eight
kilometers to stop with the brakes full on. If another train is
approaching, you need 16 km. This is why train drivers have to rely on
electronic sight instead of looking at the world with their own eyes.
(Rens Holslag told us about this at Doors 4 on "speed").

BLOCKHEADS IN HYBRID SPACE
The consultants charged with finding a way to modernize Britain's
crumbling west coast railway line thought they'd hit on a magic bullet:
a white-hot software solution - "blocking" - that would allow the huge
task to be completed cheaply. There was just one problem: blocking had
never worked in the real world. A Guardian writer, James Meek, spent a
whole year investigating the saga of "incompetence, greed and delusion"
behind Britain's biggest public works project. It's a terrific piece of
journalism about a complex subject - and a salutary reminder that the
integration of cyberspace and real space will always be fraught with
more problems than technology marketers acknowledge.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/transport/Story/0,2763,1183210,00.html

DESIGN AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE
The Bonholm Rooster, a superior kind of chicken, is a star product on
"Food Island". So is the legendary white salmon, a ghostly creature that
passes quietly by this misplaced Danish island (it sits between Sweden
and Poland) only in winter months. This desolate but fertile spot was
the location for the final workshop in Spark!, a service design project
in response to the question: when traditional industries disappear from
a locality, what is to take their place? (Nexo, on Bonholm, is one of
dozens of Baltic and European fishing ports where industrial fishing has
become unsustainable). A conference in Oslo, an 5 and 6 May, will review
the lessons learned in this experiment, reflect on the concept of
"territorial capital", and begin the design of new projects for the
future. Innovation experts Charles Leadbeater, Ezio Manzini and Bert
Mulder (plus your correspondent) will lead discussions at the event,
which will be run on along Open Space lines. A few places remain open
for!
participation by interested designers and place developers. It's free,
but you have to register before 20 April.
http://www2.uiah.fi/virtu/spark/conference.html

DOORS OF PERCEPTION 8
In the normal course of events our next conference would be due to take
place towards the end of this year. We are not quite ready to make an
announcement but, if you receive this newsletter, you will be the first
to hear.
http://www.doorsofperception.com/Mailinglist/

DOORS EAST 2005
The same goes for the next Doors East. A week of workshops and
encounters will take place in India in February or March next year; we
will announce place and dates to this mailing list.
http://www.doorseast.com/

PRADA'S PRANG
Conceived as the first on a series of "epicentre" stores that would
"revolutionize the luxury experience", Prada's $40 million Manhattan
flagship, designed by Rem Koolhaas, has turned into a "high-priced
hassle". The March edition of Business 2.0 chronicles a series of
failures in the store's state-of-the-art technology: fitting room doors
that fail to open; touch-screens that remain blank; custom-made PDAs
that don't get used. Although the words high-tech hubris spring to mind,
we should probably thank Pravda for turning themselves into a gadget
test bed. We also sympathize with their lust for automation: Prada shop
assistants are usually so obnoxious that even faulty touch screens would
be preferable. But we hope the debacle is not blamed on Ideo, who did a
lot of the interaction design. The New York store has been inundated by
far more visitors than expected, and it sounds as if delicate kit has
simply been overwhelmed. Had Koolhaas consulted museum professionals
before p!
ressing ahead, they'd have told him that only industrial-strength
interfaces survive the depredations of a cultural public.

CONNECTIVITY AND GEMUTLICHKEIT
One way to hear more about the Prada story is to head for Vienna. Ideo's
CEO, Tim Brown, is closing keynote speaker at the world's leading forum
on human-computer interaction, CHI. (It stands for Computer-Human
Interaction). 24-29 April, Vienna.
http://www.chi2004.org

CULTURE AS A GATED COMMUNITY
When rich retirees in Palm Beach shut themselves away in gated
communities, the rest of us mock. But a gated community has now appeared
in liberal Amsterdam. A tunnel under the Rijksmuseum, one of the most
important arteries in the city for pedestrian and bicycle traffic, has
been closed in a high-handed way for a five-year rebuilding programme.
The retreat of official culture from the public domain seems
unstoppable.
http://www.studiokoning.nl/Foto_2/Tunnel_Rijksmuseum.htm

TOP OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Richard Florida calls them "the creative class". Former US Labor
Secretary Robert Reich called them "symbolic analysts". Management guru
Peter Drucker dubbed them "knowledge workers". British policy makers
talk about the "cultural industries". The US Department of Labor
Statistics lumps them all together as "information". Whatever the
definition, there's a lot of them about - 30 percent of the US
workforce, by Richard Florida's reckoning. This newsletter has long been
uneasy about the concept, mainly because of the implication that anyone
who is not a "creative" is not, well, creative. A new survey of boom
towns in North America attributes these cities' success to the presence
of the creative class - public relations specialists, communication
analysts, advertising sales agents, and the like. The survey is probably
most useful as a checklist of places the rest of us uncreatives - who do
"routine commoditized tasks" - can avoid like the plague.
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/1,17863,591952,00.html

TRACELESS TRAVEL
The average tourist uses as much water in 24 hours as a villager in a
developing country uses in 100 days. Before we even get there, our
flights add to the 600 million tons of carbon emissions that come from
aircraft each year. If you multiply those indicators by rising tourist
numbers, the result is yet another grim eco trend. In 1950, there were
about 25 million international tourist visits; by 2020,1.6 billion of us
will go lemming-like on our hols each year - carbon emitting and water
guzzling as we go. The good news is that many of us wish to travel
lightly: eco-tourism already accounts for about one in five trips
worldwide. As with "organic" food, tour operators tend to play
fast-and-loose with definitions of "eco" - so before you book, check out
these informative sites.
http://www.responsible-travel.com
http:/www.planeta.com

BEWILDERED IN BILBAO
"The city as interface" is a core theme at ciber@rt, a new media fest in
Bilbao that features artistes Blast Theory, Parasite, and Simone
Michelin from Brazil. Media artists do a great job helping us look at
the world in new ways, but we sometimes wish they would just do it, and
not talk about it. The conference programme threatens us with
computational sociology, "neuronal communities of post-modern art" and
"synaptic cartography". We pity whoever has to translate that stuff into
Catalan. Bilbao, 23 to 30 April 2004. http://www.ciberart-bilbao.net/

WIRELESS - OR CLUELESS?
Mind you, engineers can be worse. An event called Eye For Wireless
offers, for a mere $1,200, to teach you "How To Build WiMax into Your
WiFi and Hotzone Over WLAN Strategy". We often wonder if the world can
absorb any more knowledge about mobile and wireless technology. To judge
by the flood of announcements we receive, researchers are like hamsters
racing round the inside of a wheel: their energy and output are
impressive, but the purpose of it all remains unclear, unappetising, or
sinister. Another event, MobiSys, promotes Location-Aware Mobile
Advertising, a System to Detect Greedy Behavior in Hotspots, a Sensor
Network-Based Countersniper System, an Electronic Shepherd, and "Hood: A
Neighborhood Abstraction for Sensor Networks". Mobisys, June 6-9,
Boston. Eye For Wireless, San Francisco, April 22 - 23.
http://www.eyeforwireless.com
http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/2004/

TALENT SPOTTING IN BRNO
There's too much visual communication in the world, but if you're one of
the people responsible, here's a chance to improve its quality and
originality. The International Biennale of Graphic Design in Brno is off
the commercial track (the site barely mentions the word "creative") but
there are always surprises and delights to be found among the show's
5,000 posters, books, magazines, newspapers and websites.16-17 June,
Brno, Czech Republic. http://www.bienale-brno.cz/2004/en/index.html

COPING WITH COMPLEXITY (1) AUTONOMIC COMPUTING
"The complexity of large-scale computing systems is beginning to
overwhelm software developers and system administrators". IBM says so,
and it should know. An obvious solution would be to stop deploying such
systems - but then they'd go out of business. IBM's Plan B is to create
"systems that configure and manage themselves under human
supervision---an approach often called autonomic computing". IBM
concede, in an aside, that the introduction of autonomic computing "will
change the relationships between systems and people" and that "not a lot
is known about this kind of transformation in the human-computer
relationship". This seminar is for people IBM perceives to be
"stakeholders in the success of autonomic computing" -human science
researchers, computer science researchers, IT architects, product
developers, outsourcing practitioners, and (of course) consultants.
Others likely to be affected by a "transformation in the human-computer
relationship" - namely, the rest of hum!
anity - are not mentioned. Conference on the Human Impact and
Application of Autonomic Computing Systems (CHIACS2), April 21, 2004,
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/asr/chiacs

COPING WITH COMPLEXITY (2) THE SEARCH FOR CONTEXT
The business model is sublime: first you make the world too complex to
understand, then you organize conferences to figure out what to do next.
Here is another complexity event, again for computer scientists, this
time in Bath, England. The programme laments that "we are increasingly
faced with having to understand what is often termed 'context'". Is it
possible that we have a complexity problem because computer scientists
put "context" in inverted commas - as if it were a distant land, like
Xanadu? Bath, UK, July 12/13
http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~hci/Workshops/2004/complexity.htm

COPING WITH COMPLEXITY (3) SOCIAL BRAINS
A seminar on "Developing Social Brains", at the Salk Institute, features
research into neuroscience, machine learning, robotics, and
developmental psychology. One of the sessions is entitled "Learning to
Interact with Humans" - so don't be surprised if the guy sitting next to
you has metal legs, and bleeps.
Salk Institute, San Diego, California , October 20-22.
http://icdl.cc

YABBER YABBER
By the age of three, a professional person's child will have had 700,000
encouragements addressed to it, and only some 80,000 discouragements.
(Source: Polly Toynbee, in The Guardian, reviewing Meaningful
Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Betty
Hart and Todd R Risley, Brookes Publishing). Good: so we can tell the
little dears, without causing them undue trauma, not to make the world
so complex that we can't understand or fix it.

WANT TO BE A DESIGN METROPOLIS?
What is a design metropolis? Should a city aspire to become one? This
symposium casts a critical eye over the policies and programs of
Montreal, Saint-Etienne and other aspirant design cities, and will
compare them with established international design capitals. Francois
Barre (France) and Saskia Sassen (United States) are keynote lecturers
(as is your correspondent).There are also presentations from Antwerp,
Times Square New York, Lisbon, and Stockholm. The event will be a
small-ish affair for municipal and elected officials responsible for
urban, cultural and economic development and procurement policies,
government officials responsible for design and innovation policies, and
people in design organizations responsible for strategy development. The
New Design Cities, October 6 and 7, 2004, Canadian Centre for
Architecture, Montreal, Quebec. Contact: <mlacroix@...>

LEGGING IT
We're proud of our city. A poll of Amsterdammers asked: how do you go to
work? The answers were: public transport: 26.7%, Car: 28.3%, Bicycle:
29.8 %, Walk: 4.8 %, Scooter: 2.7 %, "I don't work": 7.7 %. (We do. We
walk)

HONG KONG DESIGN FUND
Hong Kong will launch a "DesignSmart" initiative with the creation of a
HK$250million (25 million euros) fund. The money will be used to nurture
start-up design ventures and for training. Industrialist Victor Lo -
Hong Kong's Mr Design - says the initiative also includes setting up a
Design and Innovation Centre to attract design talent from different
places. Lo says the HK authorities will also extend a profits tax
deduction to research and development expenses on design-related
activities.

LOUD DRESSER
Alyce Santoro has created a textile woven from 50 percent pre-recorded
audiotape and 50 percent cotton. This material has the texture of a
lightweight, shiny canvas with a subtle metallic lustre. The audiotape
retains its magnetism throughout the weaving process, and the fabric's
sonic potential can be revealed by running a tape head along its
surface. Yardage of Sonic Fabric is also being made available to
socially-conscious industrial, interior, fashion, and accessories
designers. If you have to ask "why?", you're not who it's for.
http://www.alycesantoro.com

SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT-SERVICE-SYSTEMS
Product development is changing. Many intangible services now include
physical products, and visa versa. Many of Europe's key researchers
belong to the thematic network that is organising this event. 3 and 4
June 2004 , Concert Noble, Brussels, Belgium.
http://www.suspronet.org

LET'S SPLIT
Convivio, the European network for people-centric computing, is
organising an interaction design summer school in Split. The theme is:
Communities in Transition: Reinventing Hospitality. Convivio is a
European Commission-funded network of sixteen research institutions and
companies from nine countries (including Doors of Perception) .
www.convivionet.net/summerschool
As a taster, here are some pictures from last year's event in Rome.
http://www.daimi.au.dk/~alo/html/convivio.html

IS THIS TODAY?
A "space capsule" at Milan's Salone del Mobile has been furnished by
design researchers at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. There's a
classic Olivetti Lettera typewriter that sends email; interactive
wallpaper which, when touched, enables you to give commands to your
household appliances; an inflatable room for you to leave digital audio
graffiti in; and an old Fiat-500 car that "downloads" MP3 files when you
fill it up with fuel. 15 -19 April 2004, Milan Triennale, Palazzo
dell'Arte. The opening do is at 7pm on 14 April.
http://www.interaction-ivrea.it/en

KUBRICKALIA
Exhibits from the estate of Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999, are on
display for the first time at the Film and Architecture museums in
Frankfurt. The exhibition gives special emphasis to Kubrick's innovative
use of technical equipment; devices like the steadicam are explained.
There's also a lecture series, "Kubrick is Light". Until July 4, 2004.
http://www.stanleykubrick.de/

PLEASURES OF THE FLESH
Is there any difference between a product designed by a computer, and
one devised by a designer? In conjunction with arts venue de Vleeshal
(the meat hall) Premsela, the Dutch design organization, has organized
an exhibition called 'Alternate' to find out. Among the exhibitors is
The Institute of Artificial Art - an organization that consists of
machines, computers, algorithms, and human persons. The overall concept
of Alternate is by Dingeman Kuilman; the show is designed by (but not
in) Concrete.
http://www.vleeshal.nl
http://www.premsela.org

FAT CITY
"When cities spread out, so do waistlines and rear ends". For proof
visit Charleston, West Virginia, or Fort Wayne, Indiana: these cities
have North America's highest obesity rates and lowest population density
- both less than 3,000 people per square mile. Cities where people drive
everywhere contribute significantly to obesity. (Dan Ackman in Forbes
spotted these reports in the American Journal of Public Health and the
American Journal of Health Promotion).
http://www.forbes.com/2003/08/29/cx_da_0829topnews_print.html

SPAM FREE SUPERNOVA
An interest in decentralization brings people together for Supernova, a
California conflab. The heavier-hitting speakers include Ray Ozzie (CEO,
Groove Networks); Esther Dyson (Chairman, EDventure Holdings) Lawrence
Lessig (Professor, Stanford Law School) and ueber-blogger Clay Shirky.
Someone called Loic Le Meur, who sounds like a spammer, is in fact CEO
of Ublog. June 24-25, 2004 Santa Clara, CA
http://www.supernova2004.com/

TRANS-EUROPEAN PICNIC
In 1989, a Pan-European Picnic along the Austrian-Hungarian border
induced events leading to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. On May 1,
when ten new countries join the European Union, a two-day electronic
media arts and culture picnic - in and around the city of Novi Sad,
Serbia - will explore the changing cultural and artistic landscape
within and beyond this new conglomerate of competing cultures. Hosted by
kuda.org (motto: "free internet as free beer") in collaboration with
V2,Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam. This has got to be the
black tea shirt event of the year. April 30 - May 01, Novi Sad, Serbia.
http://www.transeuropicnic.org

DESIGN OF INTERACTIVE DIGGERS
"Have you designed an interactive system that is ground-breaking, fun,
unexpected?", an email asks. If you fancy yourself as a member of the
digger design avant-garde, then enter this competition. Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1-4 August 2004.
http://www.sigchi.org/DIS2004/

THEORY OF PLACE FOR INTERACTION DESIGN
Do websites burn? Someone should take a flame-thrower to the programme
text of this event in Sheffield: the art speak is so turgid that we dare
not even repeat it here in jest. (Oh all right, here's a sample:
"Fostering our imaginings of ecological selfhood"). But behind the
verbiage lurk some interesting speakers - among them Malcolm McCullough
who, in his new book, Digital Ground, proposes a theory of place for
interaction design. Sheffield Hallam University, 6-8 April 2004
http://www.pixelraiders.org

ON OFFF
"We are the true clowns" say the organisers of OFFF, a festival of
experimental audio and unusual video in Valencia. Clowns maybe, but it
looks intriguing. July 1 to 3, Valencia, Spain.
http://www.offf.ws/english/about.pdf

NEXT GEN LEARNING DESIGN
The beta version of a searchable database covering "next-generation
learning design" has been launched. Check it out - but don't send your
comments to us, send them to: <jamesb@...>
http://www.ngf.org.uk

POETRY AND KNITTING BOOM
We happy to report that Simon Vinkenoog, the opening speaker at Doors 5
on "play", has become the Netherlands' "Dichter des Vaderlands" - a kind
of poet laureate - after an internet election. He told us at Doors 5
that "in any flourishing, living civilization, above all in archaic
cultures, poetry has a vital function that is both social and
liturgical. All antique poetry is at one and the same time ritual,
entertainment, artistry, riddle making, doctrine, persuasion, sorcery,
soothsaying, prophecy, and competition". We're not sure what it means,
but this poetry and knitting boom is quite fascinating.

GONE DOMING
Ravensbourne College will grow into a major UK centre for digital
content design when it occupies a big new building near London's Dome in
a few years' time. The eminent film-maker Jeremy Barr, a professor at
the school, calls the project "Gone Doming". In order to get the next
generation of students at the college thinking right, free software guru
Richard Stallman is to give a keynote lecture. Thursday 20 May 14:00h
till 16:30h, Amphitheatre, Ravensbourne College.
http://www.cubicgarden.com/copyright/

MINSKY MENTORS MACHINES
Marvin Minsky is one of the world's leading authorities in artificial
intelligence. He is striving right now (our email states) "to impart
common-sense reasoning capabilities to machines". We can't help thinking
that imparting common sense to computer scientists is a higher priority
- but then we're not at MIT. Design, Computing and Cognition, 17-21 July
2004, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/kcdc/conferences/dcc04/

BOOK OF THE MONTH: BETTER AND HAPPIER BUILDINGS
On August 31, 1935, Aleksei Stakhanov, a thirty-year-old miner working
at the Central Irmino Mine in the Donets Basin, hewed 102 tons of coal
during his six-hour shift. This amount represented fourteen times his
quota, and within a few days the feat was hailed by Pravda as a world
record. Anxious to celebrate individual achievements in production that
could serve as stimuli to other workers, the party launched the
Stakhanovite movement. Stalin captured the upbeat mood with the phrase,
"Life has become better, and happier too" - words that later served as
the motto of the movement. It's small surprise, then, that the authors
of Why is construction so backward? were not best pleased when we
described their new book (in our February newsletter) as "Stakhanovite".
Their book criticizes the low rate of production of new houses in the UK
- but this, they tell us, is an attack on the lack of innovation in the
building industry which we (Doors) should be pleased about. They have a
p!
oint: the widespread replacement of energy-wasting old buildings by
prefabricated, energy-saving new ones would indeed help the environment
more than the skin-deep conversions that feature in design programmes on
television. But Why is construction so backward? is deliberately
provocative on environmental issues; it insists, for example, that
"architects should not fear energy use (and) there is no reason to rush,
like lemmings, to reduce energy demand". The authors argue that energy
is in limitless supply, and that human beings can design and produce
their way out of environmental trouble - if, indeed, we are in any.
Their website also lambastes the Precautionary Principle. This states
(we paraphrase) "don't take a design step until you are confident that
it will not make things worse" - but for the book's authors, the
Precautionary Principle is "a serious attack on human daring and
development". We recommend the book highly as an antidote to the
political correctness that!
can afflict us all - but we still say Aleksei would have agreed with
most of what it says. http://www.soviethistory.org/
http://www.audacity.org/Why-is-construction-so-backward.htm

IVO IN TORONTO
We don't know how many Doors conference veterans live in or within reach
of Toronto, but we're sure all of you would want to know that Ivo
Janssen, our almost-resident master pianist, is playing in your city on
6 May. Ivo is playing music by Simeon ten Holt as part of a Dutch Music
Week organised in conjunction with CBC. It's at 8pm on 6 May 2004, Jane
Mallett Theatre, St.Lawrence Centre, Toronto. (The concert is not yet
online, but it's happening, we promise).
http://www.stlc.com/
http://www.voidclassics.com

DOORS' NEW ADDRESS
Our dedicated staff of software agents usually responds only to email.
But if you badly need to send us a hard copy document - for example, a
large cheque - please note that we have moved to: Honthorst-straat 2,
NL-1071 DD Amsterdam.
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