Final Debate
Contributions by: Wim Crouwel, Susan George, Derrick de Kerckhove, Oliver Morton, Sam Pitroda and Andrew Ross/B>

The Doors Panel Sessions are often the high point of the conference; with all speakers up on stage, and the audience given a its main chance to voice its opinions.

Oliver Morton set the ball rolling, saying how surprised he was by degree of negativity at the conference. 'Many of us value speed, for example, the car. I wonder how speed is distributed in society? Like income?' (a long slope up to a sharp peak of super rich). 'We here are high speed by choice -- and have the choice to downshift,' he said. 'But we can't say everyone should downshift (and leave us with our relative advantage).' Like fashion, he said, maybe we should just say if it becomes a blur, change the signifier.

Andrew Ross bemoaned the triumph of the free market and loss of alternatives. 'My plea to designers is: think about designing jobs, not saving labour.' Sam Pitroda clarified his personal position on speed: 'I can live more lives in one lifetime with more speed. I like speed, but want simplicity.' Susan George disagreed: 'We're too kind to speed. What is the correlation between speed and profit? More like a pyramid, with 85% of wealth owned by the top 10%'. She added that Rem Koolhaas' idea of a European enclave 'living well and making beautiful things terrifies me'. As did Adriaan Geuze -- 'what future for democracy with no public space?' Ravi Sundaram's parting shot was that 'Speed is a categorical imperative which must be negotiated with'. And Europeans -- 'be self-critical, reflect more on the past. There is a declining attention to the South.'

Which prompted someone to ask that old chestnut, 'Can the South leapfrog industrialisation?' Sam Pitroda says in India, 50 phones in a village of 5,000 can produce 85% more revenue. 'The farmer can check his markets before selling, lorry drivers can make appointments, even vaccination is helped.' Many linkages between telecoms and life have been forgotten by the West, he believes, such as the connection between phones and drinking water, phones and education -- connections which are still appreciated in India. IT may destroy jobs, but they shift elsewhere into more worthwhile things, he believes. 'Many jobs are not real anyway -- like filling in forms all day.'

Wim Crouwel was impressed with the high intellectual content at Doors 4. 'I conclude I am not scared by speed. There was much longing for the past and fear of speed here,' he said, defending Adriaan Geuze. 'Inspired -- I loved the vision.' Old aesthetic ideas are changing for new interesting times, and design is changing from specialisation (such as graphic or industrial) to the borders -- 'which is where it will happen, and why the Netherlands Design Institute was created.' Design is not affected by speed, he ended, as it's in the head.

Morton's fellow Wiredling Jim Flint took rather detailed exception to Susan George's theories before coming to the point: don't worry about the speed; 1 million Ecstasy-users in the UK love speed, actively seek it out. 'Worry about the new agglomerations of power that are aiming to control the new social groupings created by speed culture.'

In the last of his dramatic outbursts at the conference, Claude Gaignebet suddenly lept to his feet raving that 'in 1968 we did not slow down -- we stopped . If you want to change anything, you must stop, and decide you are free! (Much cheering, from the over-40s at least).

Which just left the irrepressible Derrick de Kerckhove -- a Doors veteran himself, this time in the audience: 'Speed is not the cause but the symptom of a transition stage from one technology to another,' he declared. 'We've seen this before, in the switch to literacy (which led to 200 years of war in Europe), and to radio (which led to the First and Second World Wars). Linear speed is explosive, producing religious wars.' Now we have radial acceleration, he said: a connecting of intelligences. 'We feel this as speed. All we can hope for is that it turns out to be calming, not explosive.'