Beirut continues to pulse with creative and entrepreneurial energy, its citizens designing their own small versions of the nation they want to live in.
It was agreed that to achieve this there needed to be a "revolution" in thinking: a "journey to modernisation" that would see customers as citizens designing their future experience.
The combination of citizen-design ideas and immense computational power available anywhere -- just like having water from the tap or electricity from the plug -- will lead to a cognitive design-computing environment, in which citizens are much more active and proactive in designing and improving their cities.
And at "Model Citizens," a design show at the Chelsea Art Museum, the Dutch designer Juliette Warmenhoven's Potato Music Box, part of her Everyday Growing collection, turned a sprouting potato into a centerpiece.
A dose reconstruction study for the Rocky Flats facilities, begun in 1990, provided a unique opportunity for concerned citizens to design and implement field studies without participation of the DOE, its contractors, or other government agencies.
Sixty-two pieces have been sponsored by local businesses and citizens, and design of the horses was conceived and painted by local artists.
Citizen product design is still unsung, but it has already become a force in software, especially gaming software.
"Most of the opportunities available to senior citizens were designed for a former generation of older adults, to get them out of the rocking chair.
It was patterned after the Swiss practice of having public juries of experts and citizens evaluate designs, and the result was an efficient and elegant bridge for essentially the same amount of money that a standard design would have cost.
Denmark may be the perfect testing ground for citizen product design, says Christopher Lettl, who six months ago left his native Germany to become professor of user-driven innovation at the University of Aarhus School of Business in Denmark.
