[Doors-Report] DOORS OF PERCEPTION REPORT - Doors 8 Delhi Special

[doors-report at list.doorsofperception.com]

Doors of Perception Report
January 2005
By John Thackara

This newsletter is free, but every two years we use it to publicise 
the Doors of Perception conference. This issue is one of those: it's 
half about Doors 8 in Delhi. If you are not interested in that event, 
or in making it happen, skip the first stories and scroll down to 
Other News.

BETWEEN DISASTER AND DAILY LIFE
The tsunami has brought tragedy and disaster to millions of people. 
We believe the best way for Doors 8 to respond is by looking for ways 
to empower people with the knowledge, tools and they need to rebuild 
their own lives and communities. This brings our theme, "infra", 
sharply into focus. We will reshape Doors 8 in response to the 
disaster in three ways. First, we will organise a session to evaluate 
the design challenges revealed by the disaster. We are therefore keen 
to hear from people in, or going to, areas affected who can brief us, 
first-hand, on some of those challenges. Second, we will prioritise 
the part of agenda that asks: how best shall we share design 
knowledge when and where it is most needed? Alex Steffen from 
worldchanging.com, and Jimmy Wales from wikipedia, will join our 
discussion on this issue. Thirdly, we will free up more time for 
Project Clinics when the expertise of delegates coming to Doors 8 can 
be applied to the development of future projects.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/

WHY "INFRA"?
Doors of Perception 8 runs from 21-26 March at the Habitat Centre in 
New Delhi. Designers, grassroots innovators and entrepreneurs will 
discuss "INFRA: platforms for social innovation, and how to design 
them". What infrastructures are needed to enable bottom-up, edge-in 
social innovation - and how do we design them? Doors 8 will address 
these two questions from a variety of angles over five days:
  - Plenary think-piece presentations;
  - Project Clinics;
  - A social innovation bazaar;
  - One-to-one conversations;
  - An exhibit of 100 years of media artifacts from India;
  - Encounters and exchanges in the city and around.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/

WHAT'S THE TAKEAWAY?
Your takeaway from Doors 8 will be next-generation service concepts, 
plus the connections and capabilities you need to implement them. In 
the post-event survey that followed Doors 7 on "Flow" we asked 
delegates: "Did you take away any insights that will inspire your 
work?" They answered: "No, alas, none" (3%); "Yes, one at least" 
(43%); "Yes, more than one" (54%). To the question," how many people 
are you happy to have met at Doors?" they replied: "Zero" (8%); "1-4" 
(54%); "5-10" (29%); "More than 10 people" (9%). They also mentioned 
as valued takeaways: critical design thinking; inspiration from other 
fields of work; high-level discussions on design and social networks; 
and "the willingness of the entire group to be challenged".

STREET LEVEL INNOVATION
One session at Doors 8 will look at the street as a site of 
innovation. Sixty percent of the population in many Asian cities 
lives in shantytowns: what can we learn from how they innovate to 
survive? We'll hear about migrants' lives in Chinese cities, and 
compare New Delhi street life with the ways that New York is trying 
to breathe life back into its over-sanitised streets. The British 
story of Up-My-Street.com will help us appreciate how hard it is to 
add service quality to locality.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/speakers.html

ETHNOGRAPHY AND ETHNICITY
Now that 'tech' has ceased to be a driver of innovation on its own, 
some advanced companies are using ethnography in an effort to make 
their innovation processes more people-centered. Designers from 
Motorola, Intel, HP and Nokia will explain at Doors 8 how they use 
social research in the design of services and devices. In discussion 
we'll ask, how meaningful is the ethnographic knowledge they're 
using? How does this approach to innovation compare to the kinds of 
bottom-up creativity found on the street?

TOOLS FOR CITIZEN SERVICES
The difference between social services provided by the state, and 
services enabled by the state but implemented by citizens, is 
pertinent in disaster relief. We will also explore the transition to 
what Ezio Manzini calls 'enabling services' in the context of health 
systems in the North. Hilary Cottam and Robin Murray will describe 
their "Touching The State" work in the UK. We will also see the 
results of a project commissioned by Hugo Manassei at Nesta, and the 
National Health Service, in which young service designers explore new 
ways to support "journeys of care".

MONEY AS MIDDLEWARE
Sixty percent of the work done in the world is "non-market". Among 
the enabling infrastructures now emerging are Local Economy Trading 
Schemes (LETS), alternative currencies, and so-called open money 
systems. Most of these local schemes are manually administered. But 
service designers Live|Work will bring us news of web- and 
wireless-enabled non-market infrastructures for sharing knowledge, 
tools, space, time and other resources. Sunil Abraham will describe 
Indian barter systems as benchmarks for these new service concepts. 
And Margit Kennedy will explain how complementary currencies 
influence traditional ones.

PROJECT CLINICS
What does it mean in practice to design a platform for social 
innovation? To find out, we have scheduled two days of Doors 8 for 
Project Clinics. In these clinics, experts gathered together for 
Doors will evaluate real world projects and help their teams refocus 
them in light of the lessons learned in the conference. By way of 
introduction Tilly Blyth, the new curator of computing at London's 
Science Museum, will put this question into historical context. Jan 
Chipchase, who uses live video as a medium for street-level 
innovation in Tokyo, will demo this technique.

SHARING DESIGN KNOWLEDGE
Someone, somewhere, has probably designed some of the services or 
situations that we will need in a sustainable society - so why repeat 
things? Novel ways to share food, move around, or care for each 
other, often already exist. But a lot of social innovation is not 
picked up on the radar screens watched by service designers in the 
North. And when need arises - such as with the tsunami - the North is 
often ignorant of what people affected actually need. So they do 
things with the best of intentions like drop the wrong kind of food. 
The question arises: can websites and wikis help us learn about, and 
share, living contextual knowledge? Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia and 
Alex Steffen from Worldchanging will discuss this with grassroots 
innovators.

DO YOU WANT TO DO GOOD?
Doors 8 is not about aid or development in a paternalistic sense. 
It's about collaborative value creation among peers. Don't come to 
'do good' but to learn about shared-use models of communication, and 
new ways of using - and paying for - devices and networks. Doors 8 is 
taking place in India because, with one fifth of the world's 
population, it's an ideal place to explore what it will mean to 
design tomorrow's services that use people more, not less.

CULTURE, or CAPITALISM?
We would dearly love to invite you all to come to Doors 8 for free. 
Sadly, we can't do that, and must ask you to pay to participate. For 
young designers and design students, who the event is really for, the 
registration can be expensive. Some complain that we have become too 
"commercial". But commerce is not the reason you have to pay. Doors 8 
is a not-for-profit event. Indeed, it will be subsidized by the Doors 
Foundation. A Dutch government subsidy pays for about 20% of the 
direct costs of Doors' activities - conference, website, professional 
workshops - but the balance has to be paid for by sponsorship and 
ticket sales. Doors 8 is sponsored by Nokia, HP, Intel, Nesta, and 
some generous private sponsors - but their support means that the 
event goes ahead, not that we make a profit. If we charged you for 
all our costs, and all our time, and charged you a commercial rate, 
you'd be paying four times more.

RECYCLE THAT ENDOWMENT
We sympathize with MIT. It seems the value of the university's 
endowment has dropped by a cool billion dollars during the stock 
market 'correction'. If you know to whom that missing billion went, 
please ask them to recycle one percent of it to Doors. With that as 
an endowment, we can expand our work, and reduce ticket prices.

HOW DID THEY KNOW?
When we asked the one thousand people who came to Doors 7 on Flow, in 
2002, how they first heard about the event, they replied:
- "Someone told me in person": 42%
- "Someone sent me a personal mail": 9%
- "Doors email newsletter (this one)": 19%
So word-of-mouth means everything to us in promoting Doors 8. If you 
know of people who could benefit from going to Doors 8, please tell 
them now.
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/


OTHER NEWS

WEB COLLISION SPACE
In his new book 'Information Politics on the Web' Richard Rogers says 
that the Web can be a "collision space" for official and unofficial 
accounts of reality and, as such, an excellent arena for "unsettling 
the official". Tools developed by Rogers, such as the celebrated 
issue tracker, can be used in a new information politics involving 
competition between the official, the non-governmental, and the 
underground. For Jodi Dean, Rogers' book is "light-years ahead of 
other research". And Bruno Latour celebrates the fact that "finally, 
someone investigates the Web's ability to express, renew, and disrupt 
the age-old tools of political expression." Rogers is Director of 
govcom.org in Amsterdam
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10329&ttype=2

GLOBAL ATTENTION GAP
Ethan Zuckerman a researcher at Berkman Center for Internet and 
Society at Harvard Law School, is researching what he calls the 
Global Attention Gap - the tendency of major media outlets to report 
more thoroughly on rich nations than on poor ones. Ethan's current 
project - Global Attention Profiles - creates graphical portraits of 
where different media sources are focusing their attention,  and 
demonstrates correlations between these distributions and economic 
and population statistics.
http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman/

FLYING FISH FIASCO
Freight transport is an important source of air pollution, CO2 
emissions, and noise, as well as causing countless injuries and 
deaths by accidents. Freight transport is out of control in the sense 
that it has been growing faster than the economy, by 0.8% per annum, 
since 1985. Flying fresh salmon from Norway to Japan is an example of 
excellent logistics performance and crazily misplaced priorities that 
characterize this mobile economy. Two Danish researchers describe "A 
crazy case of flying fish", in the latest issue of the excellent and 
always fascinating journal, World Transport Policy & Practice.
http://www.eco-logica.co.uk/WTPPdownloads.html

LAND GRAB
Land is a finite resource but we consume it as if it were limitless - 
especially for mobility. John Whitelegg, a transport ecologist, 
reports that in Switzerland, the land allocation for road transport 
is 113 m2 per person - and for all other living purposes 
(houses/gardens and yards) it's 20-25 m2 per person. The knowledge 
economy, far from reducing our greedy consumption of land, 
accelerates it: the spread of car parking around universities, 
hospitals and airports stimulate higher levels of car commuting, 
demands for more road space, and hence land take." Cars are only used 
for 2.8% of the time and then often by one person; the rest of the 
time they are parked somewhere doing nothing. Allocating land to such 
inefficient uses is bad value for money and bad prioritization given 
the many pressures on land" says Whitelegg.
http://www.eco-logica.co.uk/reports.html

EXXON SECRETS
Check out Exxon secrets, a new website designed for Greenpeace by 
Josh On and Amy Balkin. Their brilliant "They Rule" interface has 
been adapted for a database that tracks Exxon funding to a series of 
individuals and institutions that "have worked to undermine solutions 
to global warming and climate change".  http://www.exxonsecrets.org/

YES YES YES
The World Trade Organization has said it "deplores" the Yes Men, and 
George W. Bush has called them "garbage men". Why could that be?
http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/dow/

PLEASE RELEASE ME
Esther Dyson is preeminent among Internet gurus in understanding the 
value of embodiment - the proximity of bodies to each other - in 
today's network society. So we're happy to recommend Esther's annual 
conference, Release. It runs just before Doors 8, and in Arizona, but 
some of her delegates are rich and have their own G5s so persuade 
them to come on to Delhi and hitch a ride. Speakers include Marc 
Andreessen, Claiborne Barksdale, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Howard 
Gardner, and Anne Mulcahy. March 20 to 22, 2005, Scottsdale, Arizona.
http://www.release1-0.com.com/

TACTICAL TECH
The aim of the Tactical Technology Collective'is to advance the use 
of new technologies as a tactical tool for civil-society in 
developing and transition countries. The group, together with 
Mahiti.org, is organising Asia Source to bring together over 100 
people from 20 countries to increase the use of Free and Open Source 
Software (FOSS) amongst the voluntary sector in South and South East 
Asia. Asia Source is a seven-day hands-on workshop aimed at building 
the technical skills of those working with NGOs in South and South 
East Asia. Bangalore, India - Jan 28-Feb 04 2005.
http://www.tacticaltech.org/

SPACE AND TIME DESIGN FOR KIDS
An international symposium on the design of environments for young 
children will take place at Domus Academy in Milan and be combined 
with visits to schools in the city of Reggio Emilia in Northern 
Italy. It's a unique opportunity for architects to learn about the 
design philosophy and detail construction that supports the 
world-renowned approach to early years education developed by Reggio 
Children.
http://www.sightlines-initiative.com/sl/architecture&pedagogy.htm

CREATIVE CAPITALISTS
A two-day international conference in Amsterdam will examine the new 
interconnections between culture and economy. The speakers are a 
policy maker's dream team: Charles Leadbeater, Tony Blair's favourite 
futurist,; Charles Landry, founder of Comedia; Lawrence Lessig, 
chairman the Creative Commons project; Geoff Mulgan, T. Blair's head 
of policy; Luc Soete, one of the European Union's most influential 
internet eggheads; Pekka Himanen, director of the Berkeley Center for 
Information Society and author of The Hacker Ethic;  and 
uber-geographer Stephen Graham, author (with Simon Marvin) of 
Splintering Urbanism. Yes, they're all men: the creativity bubble 
seems to be a guy thing.
http://www.creativecapital.nl/

E-CULTURE ADVISORY
"Digital media have not only made in-roads in the way visual artists, 
musicians, designers, film makers and other cultural practitioners 
work - they have created a new context". Michiel Schwarz's insightful 
Dutch policy paper on "e-culture", that has just  been published in 
English, says stirringly that "the key here is not doing the old 
things with different tools, but rather 'to do other things'. Digital 
technologies and the Internet are opening the door to new forms of 
expression, changing the roles played by cultural institutions, and 
placing the audience and user increasingly centre stage". Which is 
all well-and-good, but the minister to whom the report was addressed 
also wants to abolish Doors of Perception's funding after 2005. Booo.
http://www.cultuur.nl/e-culture.


Author Info
Business site   http://www.thackara.com
Blog  http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/
New book  http://www.thackara.com/inthebubble/