Zürich Eco Lab
As the guest last week of Zurich University of the Arts I set the following task to a group of sixteen masters students: “Create the plan for a social harvest festival that will reconnect Zurich with...
View ArticleThe Transition Companion
We can do this the hard way or the easy way. The easy way is that you skip this post and buy the book now. The hard way is that your reviewer attempts to describe a 320 page book whose contents have...
View ArticleTransition Dogville
In Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville (below) there is almost no set. Buildings in the town are represented by a series of white outlines on the floor. Dogville was a to-the-limit exercise in what von...
View ArticleGerman Government Think-Tank Supports Fringe Change Agents
Good news from Germany: A ‘global transformation of values has already begun’. It’s proving tough to leverage changing attitudes into sustainable behaviour – but a transition to a more sustainable...
View ArticleWhat Does This Soil Taste Like? How Does This Forest Think?
AUTUMN NEWSLETTER Xskool on Grinda UnBox in India Forthcoming events XSKOOL ON GRINDA Fifty designers, artists and architects spent a week at our Xskool on Grinda last month to explore two questions:...
View ArticleMy new book: How To Thrive In The Next Economy
Today I’m proud to announce that my new book, How To Thrive In The Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today will be published by Thames & Hudson on 7 September; (the US edition comes out in...
View ArticleAre positive stories enough?
“The world is in dire need of a narrative adjustment; that’s why we write” (Hamid Dabashi) Since How To Thrive In the Next Economy was published in the autumn, my 29 conversations about the book have...
View ArticleBack to work or college? Need an uplift? #ThackaraThrive ebook special
If you could do with an uplift on your way back to work, or college, please consider my book How To Thrive In The Next Economy; as an incentive, my publisher has just slashed the price of the ebook to...
View ArticleLean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It
Five years ago I obtained an extraordinary 736 page book called Lean Logic: A Dictionary For The Future and How To Survive It. Written over a thirty year period by the English ecologist David Fleming,...
View ArticleGerman Government Think-Tank Supports Fringe Change Agents
Good news from Germany: A ‘global transformation of values has already begun’. It’s proving tough to leverage changing attitudes into sustainable behaviour – but a transition to a more sustainable...
View ArticleBottom-Up biodiversity
Whether connecting schools to farms in France, daylighting rivers in Mexico, or rewilding grasslands in Patagonia, we’re learning how to ‘do’ biodiversity well. Fifteen minute read. This text was...
View ArticleMicrobes and Social Equity – Dr Sue Ishaq in conversation with John Thackara
The more we learn about life on earth, the clearer it becomes that the well-being of humans, and of non-humans, is inter-connected. They are a single story. Sustainable design, in this context, means...
View ArticleOpen School for Village Hosts
The Open School for Village Hosts – a pan-European Erasmus+ project – has been launched in Barcelona. Above: project partners meeting at Elisava earlier this month. (This post is a preview: the...
View ArticleFrom Control, to Kinship: Ecological Restoration in a More Than Human World
The following is a transcript of my keynote talk on 29 May at Quantum(Quantum(Quantum()))): Artificial Imagination – the 2022 aai International Conference on art(ai) hosted by Tongji University in...
View ArticleThe (Design) Journey Back To Local
I did a 30 minute talk last October for Allan Chochinov’s Products of Design class at the School of Visual Arts, in New York City. Here is the video – and below are the main points, followed by a...
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