We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but we've lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World.These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if "tech" ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives.Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we're unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how?In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now -- not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, "the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology -- ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles -- above all, lightness -- inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.
John Thackara is a writer, speaker, and event producer. He is English, but lives in France with his wife Kristi van Riet. His daughter Kate is an art student in England.
John is the author of In the bubble: designing in a complex world (MIT Press) among thirteen books, and of a widely-read blog at Design Observer. As founder and director of Doors of Perception (Doors), John organises festivals around the world, at a city-region scale, in which communities imagine sustainable futures - and take practical steps to realise them.
John studied philosophy, trained as a journalist, worked as London bus driver, and later was a book publisher and magazine editor in London and Sydney. He was director of research at the Royal College of Art in London, and then from 1993-2000 was Director of the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam.
John produced seven Doors conferences in Amsterdam, and then three (so far) in India. In 2007, he was programme director of Designs of the time (Dott), the social innovation biennial in England. In 2008 he was Commissioner at Cité du Design, the main French design biennial.
He is a fellow of The Young Foundation in London; sits on the advisory boards of the Pixelache Festival in Helsinki and the Pecha Kucha Foundation in Tokyo; and is a member of the UK Parliament's Standing Commission on Design. John Thackara lives in France.
