What is your idea about design, technology, and daily life?
JT. My work in these days is all about bringing together different groups of people and asking that question in their own community and in their own context. In general the answers are always really different, when posing the question in a particular place.
So it's moving away from the notion that there is a universal solution in sustainability, to the idea that although there are of course some general overarching concepts, the way they are applied and implemented will be different in every place.

Could you mention any examples?
JT. At the moment I’m working on a project, called Dott 07 - Design of the time 2007 which is a year of community projects, events and exhibitions based in North East England that explore what life in a sustainable region could be like – and how design can help us get there.
The project looks at design in real life situations and will leave a legacy of genuine improvements brought about by the year-long programme.
So we are working on 24 different projects located in different communities. Each project has a mixed team. They focus on health, food, energy, mobility and travel. Each issue is interpreted in the frame of a particular and local situation.

So, to give you an example, in the city of Middlesbrough, which was the headquarter of chemical industry of the UK, until 20 years ago, a classic small post-industrial town, we are doing a project which is about the question: How does the city supply itself from food grown locally rather than from food imported from around the world?
A group of designers is working with 1000 citizens in that town, on different ways of growing, preparing and distributing food.
So, it's a kinds of "can that be done?” type of experiment - people are growing food in window boxes, large containers, parks, the side of roads, in the middle of railway lines. We provide experts to help people with the growing, and we then also help set up things when the food is taken from a window box and put into a preparation space.
Then in September we'll have an event, a so-called "meal for Middlesbrough”, when some famous chef or some un-famous chef will cook all this food for the people of the town.
It’s a way to demonstrate how it is possible to feed quite well from food grown in the city.
This experiment will finally become the basis for the city, which is already keen to develop this idea for the next 3 years.

You are talking about chefs, farmers, growing food, etc…. So, what's the role of designers in this project?
JT. The people leading this project are designers, of one kind or another, but we call them producers. Their role is to produce the project, and to produce all kind of activities that are carried up from people. So, for example, for the Urban Farming project in Middlesbrough, the person leading the project is a service designer, but he's mainly occupied orchestrating the work of many other people. In that case, we consider design as orchestration rather then design as making artefacts.

A composer rather than a specialist… Is the role of the designer changing?
JT. I think both kinds of designer are needed; is not a matter of the composer replacing the scpecialist. For example, there will be artefacts in the Middlesborough project. There will be containers in which people grow food, and we required some design to make them work better. The design of the Meal Assembly Centre requires a design imput, the communications require designing, the Meal has to be designed as an event.... so there are people designing things and activities, and there are someone orchestrating the whole picture.
In Dott 07 projects, the most important question is: how can a region become sustainable? That’s the most important question, and the answer of that question is to experiment in various ways to reorganize daily life activities. That requires the participation of designers but also of the citizens, farmers, politicians and so on.

And technology, does it play any role?
JT. Not that huge amount. I mean, we are working with Ulla Maaria Mutanen, from Finland, she has a project called Social Objects, and she experiments with mobile phones and smart tags.
So, one part of Dott 07 project is how can we tell the story of food, in a more transparent way. For example, if you put a tag on a carrot and then you point your phone on the carrot you'll find out where the carrot is coming from, etc…
But that's a kind of detail.

The existent tendency of the designers is to enter different roles...
JT. Yes. But I don't think that's new. I mean, designers are always been involved in different markets, and playing different roles. Eighty percent of the environmental impact of today's products, services, and infrastructures is determined at the design stage. Design decisions shape the processes behind the products we use, the materials and energy required to make them, the ways we operate them, and what happens to them when we no longer need them. On e consequence is that designers are being blamed, for the fact that we have climate changes problems. The challenge all designer face is this: how do we justify our existence, rather than producing more products that the world does not need?

Going back to the Dott 07 project: will objects be produced during the experiment?
JT. Possibly, but this is not our central focus, there will be some products developed in the early stage, in answering to this question, but the overwhelming focus is on new services and new infrastructures in different communities. So, to give you an example, we have a project on mobility, which is questioning: how can we improve people’s accesses to places, without increasing the number of vehicles in roads? How do we use in a more efficient way the things that are already there?
This is a kind of service infrastructure, there will be things like smart cards, and web interfaces, and artefacts enable that happen, but that's just really a small part of it: our major focus is on resource utilisation, to use a technical term, and how can one design an infrastructure that enables resources to be used in a much more efficient way.
So maybe there will be an interesting smart card, I don't know, but the design objective is to reduce transport intensity while improving people access to services and quality of life.

The point is that global food systems are becoming unsustainable in terms of environmental impact, health, and social quality. Up to 25 percent of the ecological impact of an 'advanced' city can be attributed to its food systems.
Now a big part of the food in India is grown and eaten very locally, but they are just beginning an enormous program of development of supermarkets, package food industries, and all this stuff, which for us is a problem.
We were in India at the same time as the publication of the new master plan for Delhi, which includes the abolition of street food, the stalls inside which people can eat, that kind of stuff, which for us foreigners is part of the quality of the city, and the reason we go there.
More press coverage was: foreigners want the street food and Indians want to get rid of it.
But it was also in the context of the enormous investments that is starting right now, in whole markets, relays industries and so on. At the moment, one supermarket open every day in India, a big giant one: every day.
In Doors 9, we had 60 foreigner specialists in food system projects, meeting with the same number of Indian project leaders.
We will organize the part two of that discussion in October as part of the Dott 07 festival.



What key differences did you notice between the Indian and the Duch editions of Doors of Perception?
JT. I would say Doors has become non-national. As an organization, Doors is now a completely mobile. Last year we closed our office in Amsterdam, now we have a partner in Bangalore, and my house in France, but we don't have anymore a physical headquarter.

What is your impression on how India is developing, in parallel to China?
JT. They are completely different from each other. And they are both much more complicated; they are not really one place: India has three thousand languages. In fact you cannot say what really “India” is and what “China” is.
A difference I do perceive is that China is much more aware of the sustainability and climate change challenge. We were part of a conference in Beijing, last year, where Chinese politics and design leaders, all said that climate changes are their number one preoccupation. That just is not true in India, unfortunately.
On the other hand, lots of people in India are beginning to think about it.

Any new future project emerging?
JT.I no longer make long-term plans. We operate according to certain principles and react to opportunities as they arise.
With Doors we decide at the beginning of the year, and not before, what will be do that year, in terms of location and subject. This method for the last 3 years it has worked well. So, I have no idea on what happens on 2008, I mean I have one or two ideas, but...

What is your opinion about global tendencies like Second life that is becoming more and more popular over the past 5 years?
JT. I have no special insight into the meaning of Second life, except to observe that every technological innovations have unexpected consequences.
So I expect the evolution of mobile communications and commerce in developing countries will be a thousand time more dramatic than that you see in the west with this social web site. Nobody has a clear idea on what kind of consequences there will be, except, that they will be very big, and one of the reasons I’m optimistic, is I don't know what's going to happen: definitely it will be something that we don't know, which is good.

Link:
http://www.thackara.com/
http://www.doorsofperception.com/
http://www.dott07.com/
http://ullamaaria.typepad.com/hobbyprincess/
http://secondlife.com/

Bibliography:
John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press April 2005

John Thackara, New British Design.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1987

John Thackara, Leading Edge
(ed) Tokyo: Axis 1990

John Thackara, Design After Modernism: Beyond the Object,
London: Thames and Hudson, 1988

John Thackara with Riiche Miyake, T-Zone
Brussels: Europalia (in association with Architectural Association) 1991

DoPRom (Doors of Perception CDRom)
Amsterdam: Mediamatic, 1994

John Thackara, Lost In Space: A Traveler's Tale
Haarlem: De Grafische Haarlem, 1994

John Thackara, Winners! How Europe's Most Successful Companies Use Design To Innovate
London: Ashgate, 1999

John Thackara, The New Geographies of Learning
Amsterdam: University of Professional Education, 2003

John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press April 2005

John Thackara, New British Design.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1987

John Thackara, Leading Edge
(ed) Tokyo: Axis 1990

John Thackara, Design After Modernism: Beyond the Object,
London: Thames and Hudson, 1988

John Thackara with Riiche Miyake, T-Zone
Brussels: Europalia (in association with Architectural Association) 1991

DoPRom (Doors of Perception CDRom)
Amsterdam: Mediamatic, 1994

John Thackara, Lost In Space: A Traveler's Tale
Haarlem: De Grafische Haarlem, 1994

John Thackara, Winners! How Europe's Most Successful Companies Use Design To Innovate
London: Ashgate, 1999

John Thackara, The New Geographies of Learning
Amsterdam: University of Professional Education, 2003