Doors East 1 (2000) The purpose of our memorable week in Ahmedabad, India, at the National Institute of Design, was to accelerate the exchange of people, knowledge and experiences among Indian and European designers and internet entrepreneurs. We wanted to know: what can western interaction designers learn from Indian design and internet culture? and, what are the prospects for future joint work between the two communities? The answers were: a lot, and fantastic. We looked at the design of services enabled by the internet in a South Asia context, and discussed the relationships between information technology, development , and environmental sustainability.
Doors 7 (November 2002) DOORS 7 in Amsterdam was about the design challenge of pervasive computing. A wide variety of designers, thinkers and entrepreneurs addressed the questions: what are we to make of the trillions of smart tags, sensors, smart materials, connected appliances, wearable computing, and soon implants, that are now being unleashed upon the world? To what question are they an answer? Who is going to look after them, and how? And what social consequences will follow when every object around us becomes smart, and connected?
Doors East 2 (2003) Tomorrow's Services Designers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and grassroots innovators, shared their project experiences developing new kinds of services. They presented and discussed projects from India, South Asia, and the North, that deliver new ways to meet needs in daily life in the areas of home, work, learning, mobility, and sociability.
Doors 8 (2005) Infra On platforms for social innovation: What infrastructures are needed to enable bottom-up, edge-in social innovation? And how do we design them? Doors of Perception 8 in New Delhi continued our exploration of how to design services, some of them enabled by information technology, that meet basic needs in new ways.
Doors 9 (2007) Food Systems 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. But what to do?
For Doors of Perception 9, we went back to India in a search for inspiring new models and tools.
Dott07 (2007) Social Innovation Biennial Designs of the time (Dott 07) was a year of community design projects in North East England that explored what life in a sustainable region could be like - and how design can help us get there. It was an initiative of the UK Design Council and a regional development agency, One North East.
City Eco Lab (2008) City Eco Lab was a two-week festival of projects that took place in November in St Etienne, France. These 50-plus projects involved productive urban gardens; low energy food storage; communal composting solutions; re-discovery of hidden rivers; neighbourhood energy dashboards; de-motorised courier services; and a wide variety of software tools to help people share resources.
