[Doors-Report] Doors of Perception Report: Reflecting On Doors 8

[Doors Report]

Doors of Perception Report
April 2005
Reflection On Doors 8 In New Delhi
By John Thackara

IMPLICATIONS OF "INFRA"
People take different things away from a conference. Much of the 
value is created in situation-specific encounters than cannot easily 
be shared. But second-hand information is better than none, so we've 
put most of the presentations given at Doors 8 online, together with 
a few hundred photos. If you know of other photo collections or blog 
entries, please send us the url: <editor at doorsofperception.com>.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/

REDESIGNING DEVELOPMENT
One takeaway from Doors 8 was an understanding that enabling 
platforms for social innovation need to meet three criteria: they 
should creatively engage the people they are intended for; they 
should help people to evaluate the new against the old; and they 
should help local people retain control over their own resources. Big 
corporations may have a role to play here as providers of enabling 
platforms - but not as the proprietors of of finished products or 
services. The challenge is to design system architectures that promote 
local leaderships, and that keep power, knowledge, and the value 
generated, at local level.

JUGAAD: THE NEW CREATIVE CLASS
A majority of the population in many Asian cities lives in shanty 
towns which make urban planners anxious. Although perceived as 
problem areas by bureaucrats, these areas are also sites of intense 
social and business innovation. We learned in Delhi that they play a 
crucial role in keeping the city and its economy running. Indian 
users of technology-based devices cannot rely on formal networks of 
distribution, support, and maintenance: These are often incomplete, 
unimaginative or unrealistically priced. They therefore turn to the 
temporary fixes, or 'jugaads', carried out by Indian street 
technicians. An army of pavement-based engineers keeps engines, 
television tubes, compressors and other devices working. Outside our 
office in Delhi, for example, hundreds of tiny workshops, plus sole 
traders sitting on on the street, sold (and fixed) the countless 
hardware peripherals that keep office life running. Everything from 
toner cartridges to USB sticks was available, and bustling basements 
contained amazing arrays of ancient monitors, terminals and 
motherboards awaiting repair. The irony is this: many bureaucrats 
(and property profiteers) in Asia want to get rid of these so-called 
suitcase entrepreneurs; but in the North, proponents of 'creative 
cities' are desperate to foster a comparable level of small-scale 
industries and street-level productivity.

SMALL IS NOT SMALL
Our discussions of service design for emerging economies left a 
tricky question unanswered: how do we determine when is a market is 
'emerging' - and when it has emerged? Is it possible to design the 
relationship between small pilot projects, as potential tipping 
points, and large scale system or market change? Ezio Manzini half 
answered that last question with the observation that "small is not 
small". Small is also not neutral. Small design actions have become 
political, Manzini explained, because anything that shapes 
connectivity and information architecture inevitably impacts on 
knowledge and value - and therefore power. For Chris Downs and Ben 
Reason, we are "less in a transition than in a u-turn: we have to 
design for less, rather than more", and shift our attention from the 
individual user's needs, to the social use of a service or 
system. Tilly Blyth cautioned us to remember that social innovation is 
usually unintended: "The history of interaction between 
technoloigical change and social change should be part of the policy 
and innovation process -  but is not".

RE-MIX AS A DESIGN PROCESS
One "Aha!" moment in Delhi was the realisation that re-mix is not just 
about new music and vj-ing. Re:mix also signals a broader cultural 
shift away from the preoccupation with individual authorship that has 
rendered art (and management) so tiresome in recent times. In 
architecture circles, the concept of "recombinant design" has been 
doing the rounds - but re-mix, as flagged by Joi ito, is a better 
word. One visiting re-mixer at Doors 8, Juhuu (Juha Huuskonen), ran a 
terrific workshop on VJing in Delhi. Juhu is also behind an event in 
Helsinki (14-17 April) called PixelACHE which brings together new 
media explorations of this cultural shift.
http://www.pixelache.ac/2005/front.php

CITY AS D-SCHOOL
The foreigners among us arrived in New Delhi at the same time as 
Condoleeza Rice. She was in town to sell F16s and nuclear power 
station technology. We were 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 fanned out 
across the city. Debra Solomon's Nomadic Banquet team checked out 
street food and food distribution systems. Jogi Panghaal led a group 
exploring the city's markets. Juha Huuskonen taught a group how to 
VJ. Jan Chipchase engaged in guerilla ethnography... somewhere. The 
idea was to experience the city as a design school in practice. Later 
on, Tony Salvador from Intel made a persuasive case that the massive 
microchip company takes the work of ethnographers and anthropologists 
seriously."We're trying to understand how to connect local with 
global knowledge. To do that we have to think about local knowledge 
ecosystems, not just about devices". Salvador showed us a case study 
in which ex-pat Kashmiris, now working in the US, send family members 
a coupon for a goat. The goats looked unaware of their fate.

MIRROR WORLDS
These street-level workshops sparked a debate about ethics and 
ethnography. By what right do we swan around a city capturing 
information about peoples lives? If we are to exchange value - rather 
than just take it, or act like cultural tourists - what do we have to 
offer? Alok Nandi made the point that ethnographers - and for that 
matter documentary film makers - have been wrestling with this issue 
for decades, and why don't we ask them about the issue? (We will). 
Nandi was critical of the "dive bombing" method in which people land 
in places cold, and start filming things that they see, but have no 
way of understanding.(A British professor, Jonathan Gosling, refers 
to this as "The Mir Experience" - dropping in on another galaxy from 
within one's own spaceship). Jogi Panghaal countered that fresh eyes 
can reveal hidden value and thus mobilise neglected local resources. 
Visiting designers can act like mirrors, reflecting things about a 
situation that local people no longer notice or value. Shamefully, 
too many visiting designers promise local people they will do this, 
but never get around to sharing their conclusions and documentation.

FROM INFRA DIG TO INFRA-THIN
Upon arriving in Delhi, Garrick Jones told me how intrigued he had 
been by the Duchamp-related theme of Doors 8. Marcel Duchamp's 
concept of "infra-thin" - an "invisible and intangible separation 
between two things, a space in which the possible impies the 
becoming" - struck him as highly appropriate. I was forced, at this 
point, to confess to Garrick that the Duchamp reference was new to 
me. The original inspiration for the theme had been shiny green 
consruction diggers in The Netherlands that sport the words "Bam 
Infra". These words had perplexed me for years.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0422/is_2_86/ai_n6140252

GLOBAL EDUCATION
At a meeting of people from universities, design and architecture 
schools, we heard that the London School of Economics is receiving 
30,000 applications a month from China.

EX-ARCHITECTURE
A surprising number of presenters introduced themselves as 
"ex-architects". The ExArchs included Marco Susani, who develops new 
services for Motorola; Margrit Kennedy, who redesigns money systems; 
and Usman Haque, who makes structures that float and emote. A British 
contingent of service designers included four ex-architects who 
design health situations. Industrial ecologist Ezio Manzini designs 
knowledge-sharing projects. And Aditya Dev Sood, another ExArch, 
nicknamed his panel session "architecture as old media". An 
ex-planner from Bangalore, Solomon Benjamin, told us that only ten 
percent of the population of Delhi lives in a master-planned area; 
probably fewer live in a building designed by an architect. Among the 
ExArchs engaged by the complex relationships among city locations and 
the activities they contain were media artists Ashok Sukuraman and 
Usman Haque: both talked about site-responsive media interventions as 
a way to enrich the experience of people in places. Maybe they're not 
Ex-, after all.

LOCALITY AS INTERFACE
Actually building a location-based service, and making it pay as a 
business, is easier said than done. Stefan Magdalinski shared some of 
the lessons he learned developing upmystreet.com, a service platform 
based on the real patches of inhabited land connoted by Britain's 1.7 
million postcodes. The reality of information flows at this 
ultra-local level eludes the big infrastructure providers, said 
Magdalinski - and he left the project himself when its P2P ambitions 
did turn into a sustainable business. (For all you bloggers out 
there, Magdalinski gave us one of the week's more memorable factoids: 
fewer than one percent of a website's visitors usually contribute or 
comment - and people usually only start contributing after they have 
been visiting a site for three years).

UNDERNEATH THE FREEWAY
Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix, who are MapOffice in Hong 
Kong, previewed their stunning new book, 'HK Lab 2'. It contains 
photography, maps, and writing about the Special Administrative 
Region and China's Pearl River Delta. When not working in the 
informal economy, a floating population of more than 15 million 
migrant workers sleeps in dormitories so small that there is no room 
to accumulate consumer goods. As a result, new patterns of living, 
consuming, and play have emerged; these challenge traditional notions 
of efficiency, order, and creativity in city design. Buy a copy of 
the book at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/9628604082/002-5092540-8956860

AND UNDERNEATH NEW YORK
The problem faced by Tim Tomkins, who runs the Times Square Alliance 
in New York, is that his city has been rendered clean - but 
culturally barren. In retrofitting creative disorder to the streets 
of Manhattan, Tomkins seeks to accomodate both creators and 
observers. Meanwhile New York's hard infrastructure design supremo, 
David Burney, used fabulous visualisations of New York's underground 
infrastructures to remind us that his city's water consumption, at 
1.5 billion gallons a day for 8 million people, is unsustainable - 
just like New Delhi's. The good news is that 40 percent of New York's 
solid waste is now being recycled, and the city will save nearly $50m 
a year just by installing energy efficient traffic lights.

SYSTEMS OF CARE
Returning to soft infrastructures, a contingent of service designers 
seemed comfortable in their new role as enablers, rather than 
providers, of a service - in this case, health. Jennie Winhall and 
Chris Vanstone from RED, at the UK Design Council, presented a 
persuasive design methodology for public services. We then saw the 
results of a six month project commissioned by NESTA and the National 
Health Service, from four design firms, that examined the potential 
for patients with long-term health conditions to co-produce and then 
lead their own 'journey of care'.The idea was to make the experience 
of different actors visible to all stakeholders in a storyboard 
format that pinpointed moments when communication blockages are most 
likely to occur. (The presentations for this part of Doors 8 are not 
yet online, but will be soon).

SYSTEMS OF EXCHANGE: (1) MONEY
Ex-architect Margrit Kennedy delivered a stunningly clear analysis of 
why the world financial system is doomed.The bad news is that an 
horrendous crash is more likely than a soft landing.The good news is 
that complementary money systems are spreading fast in different 
parts of the world. Taken as a group, these experiments are evidence 
that we can do something, now. They also provide us with a real-life 
picture of what social  transformation from the bottom-up actually 
looks like. Non-cash exchange systems and complementary currencies 
are, for some, where a genuinely new economy is being born - and 
where so-called emerging economies are in many respects ahead of 
"developed" ones.
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/kennedy/english/

SYSTEMS OF EXCHANGE: (2) SOFTWARE
If a light and therefore sustainable economy means sharing resources 
more effectively - such as time, skill, or food - then economic 
systems for exchanging non-market work have to be part of the answer. 
Sunil Abraham, a leader of the Free and Open Solurce Software (FOSS) 
movement in South Asia, added software to that list. When discussing 
access, and the digital divide, the cost of devices is less crucial 
than Total Costs of Ownership including, especially, the costs of 
software. Because software is a $300 billion industry, its leaders 
find it hard to understand that, when 90% of Africans in rural areas 
live on between no and two dollars a day,tThe price of a typical 
basic proprietory software package would cost someone in South Africa 
the equivalent of $7,500 and in Vietnam, $48,000. 'Information For 
Development' Magazine (i4d) is an excellent monthly publication on 
these crucial issues; its sister magazine 'eGov' is also recommended. 
You can order them both online at:
http://www.i4donline.net
http://www.iosn.net
http://www.eprimers.org
http://www.fossfa.net
http://www.flosproject.org/report
http://www.mahiti.org

SHARING DESIGN KNOWLEDGE
How best shall we share design knowledge when and where it is most 
needed? Books, databases, or blogs that contain insights, tools and 
rules are a powerful support. But much important knowledge is 
embodied, and situated. How do we share that? Jimmy Wales, founder of 
Wikipedia, quoted some spectacular numbers to describe the 
effectiveness of large-scale co-operative voluntary work enabled by 
carefully designed internet tools: there are currently 400 million 
page views per month of Wikipedia's 1.5 million articles - in 200 
languages. The whole thing (if it is a thing) is doubling every three 
months. For Wales, the key ingredients in the design of the Wikipedia 
platform are: a policy of favouring results over process; flexible 
quality control using versioning and easy-to-use editing features; 
community features such as talk pages; and, above all, Wikipedia's 
Neutral Point Of View (NPOV). This last concept prompted a number of 
"now wait a minute!" comments from philosophical relativists in the 
room. Wales easily held his own with an explanation that Wikipedia's 
system of governance combines consensus, democracy, aristocracy - and 
absolute monarchy.

BEST PRACTICE IMPERFECTIONS
Wikipedia is a hard act to beat in terms of formal and recordable 
knowledge. But what about lived, everyday, embodied knowledge? 
Several knowledge-sharing designers  - Francois Jegou (Sustainable 
Everyday) Amrit Srinavasan (Paedia), and Kamil Vijay (Honeybee 
Network) - found this to be a challenging design issue. The Honeybeee 
Network, for example, has documented 48,000 rural innovations - but a 
lot of them are hard to transfer from one situation to another; the 
system doesn't scale. Kamil described how one plant, which farmers 
stated adamantly was effective at resisting a particular kind of 
pest, failed to reproduce the effect when tested in a lab. It 
transpired that what the plant did, in situ, was attract another kind 
of insect, which also only lived locally, and that that insect 
disturbed the pest insect's eggs. But the egg-disturbing insect had 
not been taken to the lab. And those are just bugs. Two Bombay-based 
designers, John and Sanjeev from Kudos, spent months living among and 
documenting street food vendors of Bombay. Their material was rich, 
and entrancing - but what to do with it?

IS NOTHING SACRED?
Marko Ahtisaari, reflecting on the infrastructure of sharing, listed 
what for him are today's 'primitives' of social experience: the gift; 
re-mix; 1:1 signalling; photostreams; and tuning out. Sanjay Khanna 
asked, in response to this analysis: is nothing sacred? Joi Ito 
proposed open-ness - and added that it is a condition of an open 
society that monopolies be broken up.

HEARD IN DELHI
>From my lodging house in Delhi I heard: No airconditioning roar. 
Pigeons fidgeting in the metal box above my window that used to 
contain an airconditioning unit The long moan of a freight train's 
horn as it crosses the city. Dogs fighting. Monkeys monkeying. Birds 
that miaaow like cats while swooping overhead. Loud insects shouting 
at each other. People sweeping leaves off their drive. Pedestrians 
saying "sshhhh" to cows so they will move out of the way. And the 
cries of street traders on a variety of bikes: the man with eggs; the 
man with the pink and red fruit; the knife sharpener; and the man 
with brightly coloured brushes and feather dusters who looks like a 
huge electrocuted parrot as he moves with his wares up the street. 
Later someone demonstrates the cry of the mattress rumpling man, but 
I have no need of his services.

http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/
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