To explore these questions in context, John Thackara organises collaborative innovation projects in which designers, together with grassroots innovators and citizens, develop new service concepts and prototypes in real locations. The results are published on an award-winning website, and discussed at the celebrated Doors of Perception conference. Current clients include Schiphol Airport, Europe’s High Speed Train Network, the administration of Hong Kong, the University of Amsterdam, a regional development agency in the UK, and a national childrens hospital.
Doors also helps cities and regions build new institutions that enable designers, other specialists, and citizens, to learn and work together in new ways. These design institutions focus not on discrete products, or buildings, but on next-generation services that improve the ways we live in daily life. John Thackara was on the the team that set up Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, in Italy - a research centre described in Panorama as “one of the few schools in Italy that produces intelligence and innovation”.
A former journalist and publisher, John was the first Director (1993-1999) of the Netherlands Design Institute. He is a member of the Virtual Platform, a club of research institutes which advises the Dutch government; he also sits on expert groups advising the European Commission on its innovation policy, and was on the coordinating group, responsible for vision building, of Convivio - the EU network for social computing.
John Thackara studied philosophy and journalism in England before working in book publishing in New York. He edited Design magazine for five years, was later Modern Culture Editor of Harpers & Queen, and was design correspondent of The Guardian. In 1987 he set up Design Analysis International (DAI), a conference and exhibition company with offices in London and Tokyo. DAI organised events at the Pompidou Centre, Victoria & Albert Museum, Axis Gallery in Tokyo, and other venues. From 1989-1992 John was Director of Research at the Royal College of Art, and was twice chairman of the European Design Summit.
Among John's 12 books are Design After Modernism: Beyond the Object (1987), and Lost in Space: A Traveller’s tale (1995). His next book, In the Bubble: Designing In A Complex World, will be published by MIT Press (as its lead title) in Spring 2005. He has lectured in more than forty countries.
Fast Company described John Thackara as "a design guru, critic and business provocateur…". For the Wall Street Journal, he "has established a global reputation as a cutting edge design expert". Wired called him a “a design luminary”, and the Economic Times of India noted his "brilliant insights into the internet and sustainability"