[Doors-Report] Doors of Perception Report June 2005

[Doors Report]

DOORS OF PERCEPTION REPORT
Notes on social innovation and service design
June 2005
By John Thackara

SELF-SERVICE ECONOMY: "CORPORATE COCK-UP ON A GRAND SCALE"
The abuse of Asian telephone centre staff by customers is symptomatic 
of corporate cock-up on a grand scale says Simon Caulkin of the 
Observer newspaper. Caulkin has sharply attacked "the lengths to 
which companies will go to avoid drawing the right conclusions in 
favour of the self-serving and expedient". Irate calls to call 
centers in India have contributed to turnover rates touching 60 or 70 
percent a year in some cases. Some call center operators have 
responded by offering staff psychological counseling and anger 
management courses. But, Caulkin points out angrily,"double 
alientation, of staff and of customers" is in fact to blame
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1499306,00.html

SMALL IS NOT SMALL
The anarchist bookshop next to the pier in Seattle never fails to 
yield interesting titles. I'm enjoying a book by Jim Diers called 
"Neighbor Power: Building Community The Seattle Way". In the 1990s, 
Diers helped Seattle neighborhoods face challenges ranging from gang 
violence to urban growth. Many of the stories he tells here concern 
small, local Tipping Point-like actions. Diers describes as 
'asset-based' the often-modest actions that enable communities to 
exploit resources - such as time, skills, or relationships - that 
would be too small or scattered to interest a global company.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0295984449/qid=1116831467/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-8480039-7737444?v=glance&s=books%3Cbr%20/%3E

BURN, BUBBLE, BURN
Business Week ran a brilliant story about the marketing strategies of 
Evangelical America. A traditional U.S. church typically has fewer 
than 200 members and an annual budget of around $100,000 - but the 
average mega church pulls in $4.8 million and a new one of those 
emerges every two days. Mega churches offer a great product - 
internal peace - and deploy the latest marketing techniques with 
great flair to sell it. As a hard-working book promoter myself, I was 
struck by the success of California pastor Rick Warren's book The 
Purpose-Driven Life: It has sold 23 million copies through a novel 
"pyro-marketing" strategy. I plan to apply this approach to "In The 
Bubble" right away.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_21/b3934001_mz001.htm

PLANET AS CRASH-RIG
"Many a garage inventor would argue that poorly designed, superfluous 
products are necessary by-products of the innovation process, not 
fundamental flaws in our design philosophy. Thackara deems it 
foolhardy, but maybe it's Darwinian". Fast Company, in reviewing my 
book, pinpoints a dilemma: how to combine trial-and-error innovation, 
on the one hand, with the precautionary principle -consideration of 
the consequences of design actions before we take them - on the 
other. Yes, it's a conundrum - but do we have any right to carry on 
treating the planet, our only home, as a glorified crash-test rig?
http://www.fastcompany.com/bookclub/reviews/0262201577.html

OF POLITICS AND PIMMS
A Pimms-enhanced party at Demos, in London, was held to launch a new 
strategy for the organization called "Building Everyday Democracy". 
According to the think tank's director, Tom Bentley, "politics is 
fighting a losing battle against forms of theatre and spectacle that 
are more entertaining, and forms of conversation and social exchange 
that are more meaningful to citizens. Without more direct citizen 
participation, the legitimacy of our political institutions will 
continue to decline". Democracy, for Bentley, should be understood as 
"part of a capacity for self-organsation" - and his pamphlet 
describes numerous neighbourhood-based models and institutions as 
infrastructures of distributed democracy. The Demos project is 
interesting, and timely, but somehow lacks cultural fizz. At the end 
of the nineteenth century, the promise of speed and simultaneity, 
amplified in popular and scientific culture, drove modernity along. 
The opportunity, now, to "build local democracy" feels a good deal 
less mesmerizing. A cultural- aesthetic transformation will be needed 
if the political strategy is to succeed. The Demos pamphlet is 
downloadable at:
http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/everydaydemocracy/

E BY GOV
The European Commission has launched the Good Practice Framework to 
collect and publishe eGovernment case studies. The first batch ranges 
from a "multi-channel Integrated Service System known as MISS" in 
Barcelona, to an Icelandic Student Loan Fund and several digital ID 
card projects. The organisers seem to be more interested in new tools 
for local government than in the ways they might be used because the 
site is light on critical discussion. But maybe that will come. The 
project is launched at a workshop in Brussels on 17 June.
http://www.egov-goodpractice.org

TOUCH ME!
What would it be like to send and receive hugs rather than text 
messages? Or stroke the TV to turn it on? An exhibition called Touch 
Me: Design and Sensation  opens next week at the Victoria and Albert 
Museum in London. Curated by Hugh Aldersey Williams, the exhibition 
features experimental designs that engage playfully with the touch 
senses. These include artifacts are from IDEO, Droog, Marcel Wanders, 
and MIT Media Lab - not to mention some "impossibly stylish" sex 
toys. 16 June - 29 August, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 
http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/Touch_Me/index.html

INTERACTION IVREA MORPHING
A brutal policy change by its main sponsor, Telecom Italia, has 
forced Interaction Design Institute Ivrea to move to Milan and 
effectively merge with Domus Academy. The two organizations describe 
the move stoically as "a great opportunity for growth", but the fact 
remains that the Ivrea team will be broken up and funding for the 
combined entity drastically reduced. Telecom's decision is 
short-sighted and represents a stupendous destruction of value: It is 
breaking up a hub, five years in the making, for a new community of 
practice in a subject area strategically crucial for telecoms. 
Interaction Ivrea's end of year show opens Friday 10 June in Turin at 
6pm at Via Porta Palatina 15.
http://www.interaction-ivrea.it/en/education/movetomilan/index.asp

ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE
Every year the Institute For The Future in Palo Alto publishes a map 
of the decade ahead. Jason Tester, an alumnus of Interaction Design 
Institute Ivrea, is helping IFTF enhance its maps by the development 
of 'artifacts from the future'. At Ivrea, the design of enticing 
representations of imagined futures was regarded as a core process. 
(The technique, called 'evidencing', was introduced there by the 
English service designers Live|Work).

FROM SPRAWL TO SMALL
Azby Brown has written a pertinent book for these sprawl-afflicted 
times."The Very Small Home" describes 18 residential buildings built 
within the past five years in Japan by leading architects such as 
Tadao Ando and Shigeru Ban. http://www.amazon.com/

WHY MATTER MATTERS
The latest issue of Design Philosophy Papers is on the theme 
'De/re/materialisation'. Lead papers include Tony Fry & AM Willis on 
Ecologies of Steel. The current issue is available free for 
approximately 8 weeks.
www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/journal.html

INSTITUTIONAL SPRUCE GOOSE
The European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, wants to 
create a European Institute of Technology to compete with MIT. The 
EIT would be a network institution founded on six of the best 
universities in the EU, according to one report we've seen (see url 
below). But wait: the European Research Area already contains 
hundreds of tech-based universities and research labs whose workers 
interact and network with each other continuously. A new 'centre' is 
the last thing this thriving ecosystem needs. It would be nice if 
European firms would support our existing design institutions more. 
Hasso Platner, founder of SAP, is giving tens of millions of dollars 
to Stanford's new D-School. A even better idea would be a 
networked-based Institute of Well-Being, directed by this author, 
whose task would be celebrate the many facets of everyday life in 
Europe that work perfectly well without clunky, expensive 'self 
service' technology.
http://www.ostina.org/html/bridges/article.htm?article=1215

VOTE FOR REVEREND BILLY
The most entertaining but also thoughtful challenger to Michael 
Bloomberg for Mayor of New York is the Reverend Billy, leader of the 
Church of Stop Shopping. The Reverend has announced plans to conduct 
his entire campaign on premises of the Starbucks Corporation; he will 
offer 258 sermons in 258 locations in the five boroughs of the city. 
Reverend Billy is banned from Starbucks worldwide, possibly because 
he describes the firm as a "community-destroyer". Or maybe it's 
because a 40-strong gospel choir that sings "Put That Latte Down" 
often accompanies him at his Starbucks manifestations. The book is 
recommended, too: "What Should I Do If Reverend Billy Is in My Store?"
http://www.revbilly.com/
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-1565849795-0

CREATIVE CLASS ESCAPES FROM GHETTO
Richard Florida's new book, The Flight of the Creative Class, argues 
for "a broadening of the definition of creativity that will ennoble 
and encourage the everyday efforts of ordinary occupations...from 
housekeeper to fieldworker". By extending the concept of "creative 
class" to cover most of the US population, it seems to me that 
Florida has abandoned the notion that a discrete creative class 
exists. This is a welcome change of position. The book ends with a 
ghastly-sounding proposal for a "Global Creativity Commission", but 
it also argues powerfully that diversity and immigration are good for 
America. Citing many examples of foreign-born entrepreneurs who have 
played central roles in the US economy - from Goggle's Sergey Bring, 
to Vend Kola of Sun Microsystems - Florida argues that "the real 
foreign threat to the American economy is not terrorism; it's that we 
may make creative and talented people stop wanting to come here".

OF FOODSHEDS AND LOCAVORES
I was in San Francisco a week too early to attend World Environmental 
Day when 100 mayors are brainstorming about environmental problems 
worldwide. But according to Olivia Wu in the San Francisco Chronicle, 
four Northern California women are viewing these global issues 
through the prism of their own kitchens. Calling themselves the 
Locavores, the women are passionate about eating locally and have 
devised a way to show others how to do that, too. With San Francisco 
as the centre, they have drawn a circle with a 100- mile radius from 
the city, and are urging people to buy, cook and eat from within that 
"foodshed" in a month long challenge in August called "Celebrate Your 
Foodshed: Eat Locally." (Thanks to Debra Solomon for this lead).
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/01/FDGF7CV4KP1.DTL

SO MANY BOOKS
A well-meaning friend gave me a copy of Gabriel Zaid's "So Many 
Books" to read while on my book promotion tour."A new book is 
published every 30 seconds" Zaid begins. During 34 days on the road, 
this statistic was never far from my mind. Several of my stops were 
at large bookstores where the vanity of expecting one's book to be 
noticed, let alone read, amid literally acres of new titles, would 
have been sad if it were not also laughable. But the second half of 
Zaid's book kept me going, and cheerful. He counsels writers to 
reframe the purpose of their of their work - away from commanding the 
attention of millions, to starting conversations, some of them small, 
that will end...who knows where.
http://www.thackara.com/inthebubble/index.html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/158988003X/ref=ase_fastcompanycom/104-1968686-7973538?v=glance&s=books