What is Doors of Perception ?
It is an annual conference which was started in November 1993 as the first major project of the Netherlands Design Institute; (we did the first two conferences with the magazine Mediamatic) 642 people came to the first conference in response to its theme, “the design challenge of interactive multimedia”. The main idea then, as now, was to ask – in relation to the so-called ‘information superhighway’ – not so much what it can do as what it is for? At that time all the talk in America was about tele-shopping and video-on-demand, which sounded very boring. We thought: There must be more than this! – and organised the conference to consider more exciting and socially useful alternatives. The words “Doors of Perception” come from a poem by William Blake, although the words are better known to many people as the title of Aldous Huxley’s book.
