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Ettore Sottsass — one of the post-war architects who literally invented the idea of Italian Design — is today eighty-seven years old: a true éminence gris. Recently, I talked to the designer/writer and cultural provocateur at the Barry Friedman Gallery, which was staging his first furniture show in New York since 1987. |
| January 2005 |
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28 January 2005
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24 January 2005
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“Davos diary: This is not about money” by Jim Fruchterman, President, The Benetech Initiative. |
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24 January 2005
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Architect William McDonough has witnessed China’s rapid modernisation and sees hope for sustainable development. He is working to bring his cradle-to-cradle protocol to China, where old buildings are being demolished as quickly as new ones are constructed. |
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20 January 2005
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| Sporting Puma sneakers and a downtown hipster haircut or two, a team from the design firm Imagination USA shuffles into a fourth-floor loft in New York’s SoHo district. They’re met by David Polinchock, who offers Blow Pops and ushers them into a big space punctuated with inspirational quotes on the walls. (”Nothing is real until it is experienced — John Keats.”) |
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20 January 2005
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Corporate social responsibility as the tribute that capitalism pays to virtue. |
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12 January 2005
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Microsoft Corp.’s research unit is turning to social scientists in a new effort to understand the long-term possibilities for computer technology in developing countries.
A Microsoft Research lab, to be inaugurated tomorrow in Bangalore, India, plans to employ anthropologists, ethnographers and others to observe and document the lives of people in India’s rural villages. |
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8 January 2005
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| “Digital media have not only made in-roads in the way visual artists, musicians, designers, film makers and other cultural practitioners work – they have created a new context”.
Michiel Schwarz’s insightful Dutch policy paper on “e-culture”, that has just been published in English, says stirringly that “the key here is not doing the old things with different tools, but rather ‘to do other things’. Digital technologies and the Internet are opening the door to new forms of expression, changing the roles played by cultural institutions, and placing the audience and user increasingly centre stage”. Download PDF (372 kb) |
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8 January 2005
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Culture and creativity are the latest “buzzwords” in the debate on innovation strategies for the knowledge economy. But what is the cultural dimension of the knowledge economy? And what does this imply for the public domain? These were the central questions of the Amsterdam Creative Capital conference on March 17 and 18 2005 in Amsterdam.
The conference brought together innovation experts, economists, urbanists, social innovators, cultural entrepreneurs, policy makers and politicians. During the conference, they charted the state of the innovation debate and re-drew the public agenda for a creative public domain that supports a strong knowledge economy. |