On this page, you will find short summaries of all the workshops. A longer report is accessible on another layer. Some of the summaries here are loosely based on a conference report by Jan Wyllie from Trendmonitor.

Mapping Global Processes

Collaboration and understanding on the "econet"
An network-based collaborative environment called "econet" is proposed which enables "understanding through collaboration", connecting appropriate people (scientists, policy makers, industrialists, media, local government, and above all practitioners, such as fishermen) at all levels from all over the world to focus on local problems. Remote sensors and intelligent information agents are used to identify problem areas.

Urban Footprints

The Intelligent City and the Slow City
Successful cities -- where people have the freedom to take risks in an atmosphere of conviviality -- learn from experience. Can cities reflect on their own behaviour? Built-in intelligence in products and transport systems reduces the Cities' "eco-footprints". The slow city stands for a new kind of urbanity where IT "takes the strain".

Designing Desires

Love, Wisdom and Beauty
Our current patterns of consumption are driven by 'wants' or 'desires' rather than by 'needs'. But where is meaning? The group asks you to consider whether your last design project considered the values love, wisdom and beauty (they realised that theirs did not).

Travels to the Edge

Eco-tourism - three scenarios for the future tourist
The virtualisation of tourism was envisioned happening in three stages: 1) 1997 - preparations for trips via the Net which serves as a learning environment, tourist experiences are extended via Net discussion groups; 2) the tourist becomes a learning agent through highly versatile `Personal Digital Assistant'; access to sites is restricted via `digi-visas'; 3) Artificial life forms will beguile tourists who will be able to touch each other through "interskins".

Beyond Being There

Implicit Communication
People will lead increasing numbers of "parallel" lives in the permanent, multi-layered communications environments. The new communication models are of an implicit nature , the presences of others are `felt' rather than heard or seen.

Electronic Storylines

Ritual Enchantment
Myths can explain, justify and illuminate our life on earth. Storytelling is a ritual enchantment of an inner ecology; on the Internet, stories can be brought together to help people connect to each other and to the planet.

Eternally Yours

Learning from the African drum
This workshop developed design considerations for product eternity, using the African drum as a metaphor. Their proposal is to imbue products with the same qualities as the African drum (reparability, physicality, sensuousness, etc.).

Info-Eco Work

Optimise physical and virtual forms
The group objects strongly to intensive telework and a fusion between work and leisure scenarios. First, the physical environment needs to be optimised, then the virtual. If not, we are in danger of developing "telework prisons" and turning people into "Zombies".

Virtual communities versus Real Communities

Creating eco-presence using a karma card
The technology of virtuality is leading to a multiplicity of communities and changing patterns of reflection. Access to these communities was identified as crucial; the workshop proposed a 'karma card' for access that people can use to construct their identities in a bottom-up fashion.

Info-Eco Social Care

Through the Table Top
As the relative numbers of old people grow, more IT must be deployed to assist them. Real life transactions, supported by an electronic infrastructure, were proposed as a means for the creation of community. A new, universal `table top' interface for care and service delivery is proposed, based on free network access. This enables virtual eating together and a Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) for vegetables, stories, memories, etc.

Info-Eco Education

Reflecting on consequences leads to awareness
Two multi-user computer games are proposed (Be a Tree and EcoReality) that promote a better understanding (gained in a playful way) of the relationships between actions and consequences and that may ultimately lead to increased awareness of the players' responsibilities in the real world.

Health and Inefficiency

Extinction by `the new plague' unless humanity downsizes; Superbug solution.
The workshop warned of the "Coming Plague" in a overpopulated world as diseases mutate and evolve in their `habitat' of humanity as it takes up more and more of the biosphere; the partial answer is to fill up the new environmental space with benign, biologically evolved "Superbugs". However, this is "only a way of winning time", because humanity will hit the limits anyway and be faced with extinction or be forced to become "a smaller humanity"; best to work for a downward curve, rather than a crash to one-tenth of current size.