| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Short History of Doors of Perception |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | John Thackara |
In a funny way the history of Doors of Perception is a history of our recent relationship with information technology and design. In 1993 when we had the first conference of Doors the theme was: "wow this stuff is amazing, but what is it for?" We stared wide-eyed at the presentations from the experts and the pioneers and said: "Okay, we are impressed, but let us see what the real applications will be". Strangely we got no answer from industry, from the telecommunications companies and the computer companies. They were tool-providers, but could not tell us what to do with them. So in Doors 2 in 1994 we decided to take the initiative a bit, and look pro-actively at one subject-area: "Home" and ask ourselves: "What happens to 'home' when it gets connected?" And we had a very interesting three days but no particularly clear conclusions came out except that it was indeed an interesting question. In Doors 3 in 1995, we became even more pro-active. We decided that if industry was not going to make an agenda maybe we should explore agenda's for ourselves. And the theme of Doors 3 was info-eco : what should be the connection between information-technology and environmental sustainability? That strange and chaotic but also tremendous week has resonated to this day. Just two weeks ago there was a rather spectacular workshop in Holland, organised by the "O2" network called sustainable business concepts, which marked another step forward in the evolution of thatDoors3 agenda. 200 people from around the world took it completely for granted that there should be a connection between information-technology and environmental sustainability. Very busily and in a matter of fact way, they made scenarios, doing projects, talking to companies, talking to government-people as if this was normal. But only two years earlier it would have been a very weird and rather controversial combination of subjects. Two years ago we started to be more critical of technology determinism and said. We said: let us take the theme of speed – but critically. This technology is fast, life is fast, the trains are fast, but do we, as designers of cities and transport systems and communications, behave uncritically towards speed? Is speed an end in itself? Or is it possible to imagine differential speeds? Probably information should get faster, but maybe we should move around less. It was again a very emotionally charged discussion. Quite a large number of people in the Doors community were angry that we should even question speed. They say: We like speed more or less uncritically. But once again the resonance of that discussion has been incredible. It's not that we caused it, but the subject is everywhere now in business magazines, in design conferences, in transport conferences and everything else. Speaking personally I think a lot to this day about Ivan Illich and his two young colleagues, who spoke about the difference between fast and quick, about birds flying around, hawks that go fast and quick to catch their prey. Those magical insights that resonate for ages–for me they are what Doors is about. Speed now seems a natural thing to think about So this is the journey we've gone through. One of the consequences of the Speed conference is that we've decided to just ease up a bit in throwing big issues into the pond. Even if you didn't need a break, we needed time for this stuff to sink in, and we decided to make Doors every two years, rather than every year. Very much in a conscious attempt to give the Doors community time to think things through, and come with a relatively not overfilled mind to the next meeting. When we came to think of a theme for this year's conference we were stimulated in the first place by all this publicity and government action in the subject of wiring up classrooms. I went on a terrible journey to Japan where a mis-named 'expert delegation' boasted about who would have the most classrooms wired up, the most quickly. Whether it was US, Europe, Japan or some other country. You could see this wall of technology and money bearing down on the schools of the world with no thought about the purpose of it, the content, the relationship of the teachers and the children and the parents to this stuff. the overwhelming feeling was: Just wire them up and everything will be sorted out. So in contemplating the theme of Learning for the conference we said : "there must be more to it than this", and spent quite a lot of time looking around the world for examples of internet, school connections being used in a creative and enlightening an delightful way. Frankly we found not so much. Policy-circles in the school systems of the world misunderstand totally the internet or they misunderstand learning. They see the internet basically as a one-way pipe to deliver content into schools. And if that removes the cost of teachers then so much the better, in extreme cases. They see learning as an industrial age process – a bit like a convey belt in which knowledge is taken from people who know things (teachers) and poured into the heads of people who don't know things, children. It was a pretty depressing research period. So we said, okay : where is something more interesting happening? And we looked at games. There is this unbelievable boom in games, video games, computer games and all the things around the technologies; just in Japan, eight billion dollar spend on the stuff. Tens of billions spend around the world. It's a booming industry but almost completely unknown outside the people who are in it. So why is there is so much drama and excitement and enthusiasm in this sector– and so much heaviness and conservatism on the internet and schools? Could we learn by connecting the two together? What happens when people play games? Are they learning or are they just kind of emoting? Are they just reacting? Of course we began to discover that these things are complicated, and looked at the different directions in which a study of games, play and learning can interact. Our speakers over the next three days will take you up different roads on subjects of play and lots of different aspects. You've read the program, you've seen the website I hope; it's obvious we will venture in a lot of different directions. We do not see it as our job to connect and make sense of it; that's your job. And so in a funny way we play the trick on you: you thought you came to play, but you came to work. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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