The geographer Saskia Sassen is one of the sharpest analysts of the detail of globalisation - and I was able to see her speak on Thursday evening in London at an event organised by the RIBA ‘Building Futures’ programme. (I’ve posted before on her analysis of how different parts of government gain or lose from [...]
I blogged last week about the potential impact of expensive energy on the future shape of the internet. Now it turns out that Sun has already started changing the design of its computer systems to favour efficiency rather than performance because of energy costs. It seems to have moved them to a different market space [...]
Two manufacturers have caught the eye at the current round of car shows - and they’re not from Europe or the United States. At the Delhi Auto Expo, Tata has been been breaking visitor records with its Nano car - at 100,000 rupees (less than £1,500) a time. In Detroit, meanwhile, Toyota is talking the [...]
There’s been a flurry of interest on the design blogs on the ‘FE-Mittelschrift’ typeface adopted for German number plates. It breaks pretty much all of the rules for typographic design, perhaps because it is designed to prevent manipulation of number plates. The most important ‘readers’ may be machines, not humans.
The recent DARPA ‘urban challenge’ car competition has directed attention towards the futures of the the car - especially the urban vehcile - as a transport mode. It’s a reminder of how much our social assumptions about technology shape the way we imagine their futures.
The American designer Mark Dziersk has a short piece in the US business magazine Fast Company in which he looks at how sustainability is used as a source of competitive advantage. He argues that we’re past the point where people can continue to claim that customers won’t pay more for sustainability - but that sustainability [...]
I spent some of the weekend in Newcastle (or more precisely Gateshead) at the DOTT ‘07 exhibition which marked the close of this ambitious two year project. Three essential lessons for me, which won’t be surprising to those who know the work of John Thackara, who directed the project:
Sustainability is about flows, not stuff
Those flows [...]
The north-east’s DOTT ‘07 project is probably the most innovative thing happening in the UK at the moment in terms of thinking about how design for sustainability works at a regional and local level. It culminates in a festival in Gateshead which opens in about ten days. Ahead of time, they’ve produced a booklist [...]
One of the building blocks of futures work is the task of making the present seem strange so that one can see ways in which assumptions about the everyday might change in future. There’s a good example of this process in a short photo-essay courtesy of International Herald Tribune which illustrates the work of the [...]
Something is going on when, as happened last on my work last week, I was given leaflets in separate places by people promoting the new “pay as you go” car services, Streetcar and Zipcar.
