Thawing out: January round up

Spared from subzero temperatures, only by Uniqlo Heat Tech (shock: it’s the magic of plain old polyester), we’re happy to be back reporting from around New York. If our workload is anything to measure anything else by, start tending your green shoots and act as if you’re done with the downturn til you really are.

This post traverses insignifica to significa in that order. So for the most part, prepare to deepen the furrow of your brow as you read on:

In spite of expanded holiday appetites, we’ve been kept us from two museum restaurant openings this month but both seem worth a mention: Wright at the Guggenheim (Frank would have been a nice name too, except Amy Winehouse/Frank Spencer both come to mind and we’re not sure which is worse) and the fancy eaterie at the recently relocated Museum of Art and Design also just opened this week, so you now have an alternative to Per Se on Columbus Circle.

Meantime, MoMA recently asked Turnstone to compile a list of the world’s best interaction design programs, and aside from kicking off a whole lot of pondering about where IxD starts and ends exactly (thank you, beard-scratchers, we love you!), we’ve collected quite the list. Over the next couple of months, we’ll share that map of pedagogy here, alongside our hit parade of girl geeks you told us you most admire. We’re working with Wired to get one or two into their UK issues regularly too, so a dazzling few will make it off screen here into print there too. The rest we expect to run into at sxsw…more on that in the coming weeks.

What else? Oh, yes. Just when we thought it was safe to hail a cab like any normal New Yorker, our enthusiasm for the Taxi of Tomorrow was reignited. NYC’s Taxi and Limo Commission just invited Detroit, and a not insignificant range of other national and international automotive designers, to respond to their recently released RFP. Yes, redesign the vehicle but please, please, please think about that an inclusively designed vehicle in a service context so that the communications don’t get left as an afterthought: It’s a missed opportunity to treat media as a nice-to-have – it’s integral to the success of the project. Basing media strategy only on models of ad revenue seems limited and out of date. New Yorkers expect location-based services, relevant to what they’re doing in the cab, from A to B. Think Foursquare for door-to-door transit. No point making a few cars wheelchair/stroller/luggage accessible if the comms network doesn’t support telling everyone what’s available and where. But that’s enough of banging our heads on the dashboard; we’re delighted that the car guys are picking up on this joined-up thinking and look forward to seeing how they incorporate media strategy as they put their vehicle designs forward to the City.

Lastly, kudos to fellow SVA faculty, Bek Hodgson, who just diverted the syllabus of the class she’s teaching this semester to focus on design for disaster relief for Haiti. The brief might as well be ‘design from scratch a new infrastructure for a ravaged country’. From the horror of that, some good must surely come. Meantime, peace to all those suffering.

Happy holidays from Turnstone!

Have a wonderful winterval and best wishes for the new year, everyone!

Thanks for reading and commenting and suggesting all your story ideas in 2009. Looking forward to sharing more urban significa here in Twenty-Ten.

Design Blogging Is Changing Everything

So says the AIGA who are hosting their 25th Fresh Dialogue this Wednesday night, December 16. And in true Escher painting style, they’re here to blog about it, and therefore so are we, and anyone else who’d like to trackback, retweet, forward, post, honk and hoot about it on t’Internet.

The skinny: Alice Twemlow, Program Director of the School of Visual Arts Design Criticism MFA, is moderating the blog-guys from Core 77, New York Times.com, Coolhunting and blog-gal, Swissmiss. The real live audience should converge on the Tishman Auditorium, at the New School – that’s 66 West 12th Street, New York at 630 for the discussion that kicks off at 7.

Decade Matter

Well, since everyone else is at it, we figured we’d boot up the Turnstone time machine to share a few cultural/inspirational highlights of the Double-Ohs. No, we never did reach consensus on what to call this decade, did we?

Ok, so this is a completely random list of excellent art, design, exhibits, movies, urban interventions that mostly took place in NY/London over the decade, our first ten in NYC. But no mention of current affairs, celeb gossip, restaurant reviews or forecasting here. Just a partial list, in all senses of the word:

2009
Presidential Inauguration Day - wherever you were
Fela! on Broadway
The Highline
Afghanistan, at the Met
The Heart of the Great Alone, Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography
The Queens International

2008
Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney
Henry Moore at Kew
Barbar The Elephant at the Morgan Library
Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself at Venice Biennale/Paula Cooper/Whitechapel
Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum
Janelle Monae, crowdsurfing at Summerstage

And RIP, gone too soon: Florent, Miriam Makeba and Esbjörn Svensson

2007
Lotek at Pecha Kucha Night at 3rd Ward
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love at the Walker and the Whitney
EST (see above) at the Barbican, London and at Merkin Hall, NY
Alvar Aalto: Through The Eyes of Shigeru Ban at The Barbican
Otl Aicher retrospective at Vitsoe, London
Sufjan Stevens performing The BQE at BAM
Jarvis Cocker’s The Jarvis Cocker Record
Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting, MAD
Alfred Brendel at Carnegie Hall
Postopolis NY, Storefront for Architecture
David Byrne Presents: How New Yorkers Ride Bikes at The New Yorker Festival

2006
Tropicalia, The Barbican
Ecotopia, the ICP Triennial
Janet Cardiff, Her Long Black Hair, Central Park
Yazmany Arboleda, The New Vitruvians at Issey Miyake
Droog at the old Museum of Art and Design, NY
Ashes and Snow
Jill Greenberg’s Monkey Portraits

2005
Tour of the Polich Art Works, Rock Tavern, NY, with the Creative Council
Safe at MOMA
Phyllis Galembo at Sepia
Swoon at Deitch
Spice, a post-tsunami fundraiser photography exhibit and auction for Architecture for Humanity
The Gates
Between Past and Future, New Photography and Video from China, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum

2004
OutKast’s The Love Below
Pipilotti Rist at Luhring Augustine
Critical Mass before the RNC

2003
PS1 Warm Up, Urban Beach

Pretty much everything Creative Time did that year
Luciana Souza at the Jazz Standard

2002
The Wooster Group’s To You, The Birdie, St Ann’s Warehouse
Matthew Barney, Cremaster Cycle at the Guggenheim
Shirin Neshat at the Walker, Minneapolis
Gerhard Richter at MOMA
The Whitney Biennial
Skin, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

2001
Lisette Model
The Strokes (with the original cover and track list)
The Opulent Eye of Alexander Girard, Cooper Hewitt

Oh and some movies (we even saw some that weren’t docs too, honest, so let’s throw in In the Loop, Juno, Napoleon Dynamite, Sexy Beast, Slumdog Millionaire and leave it at that)

And then (in no particular order):
The Corporation
Waltzing for Bashir
Persepolis
No End in Sight
Control Room
Spellbound
Grizzly Man
Man on Wire
The Five Obstructions
Born Into Brothels
The Two Towns of Jasper
Manufactured Landscapes
An Inconvenient Truth

We’ll likely write again before the new year but just in case, Merry New Decade.

New Tech for Participatory Planning: Grade A for a grey day

The Open Planning Project hosted New Technology for Participatory Planning – an ‘unconference’ last Friday, and what a grade A way to spend a grey day at the end of the week. The crowd was a pretty even split of techies and planners – the Regional Planning Association co-hosted. So the room was full of smarty-pants (is the plural smarties-pants?).

Lightning presentations – following the 5-minute pdf slam Pecha Kucha model – showcased All Our Ideas from Princeton University’s Sociology department; Robert Lane from the RPA reverently quoting (bow down for the second time this week) Kevin Lynch and Laura Kurgan; a data orgy of dynamic maps of possibly the most mapped city – from DoITT, including the GIS NY City Map and others, like the urban research maps, exploring open public data sets.

Then, between insights-ever-so-constrained-by-140-characters tweets, Turnstone waded into a couple of fascinating break out sessions, one on (and I paraphrase heavily from the question that the NYC Transit specialist, Sarah Kaufman posed) the input monster that civic agencies create when they invite the public’s participation, the other on what’s wrong with the Request for Proposal process. To summarize a lot of intelligent, interdisciplinary, carpe diem discussion in these groups, here are some references, questions raised and other highlights:

• Five Things We Need To Know About Technological Change by Neil Postman
• Community as functionality, a technology to understand itself (quoting from Lynch’s Image of the City)
• What’s the difference between drawing and mapping?
• What is civic engagement for? When is participation appropriate? What role, what value? To validate? Legitimate?
• What impact does the ubiquity of mobile devices have – on narrowing the digital divide? On recording public processes? On capturing site-specific participation (that is, enabling just-in-time input – comments or uploads – about something in a particular location)?
• Place still has primacy, as much as we like to run about with glee in information space
• Innovation in public policy and planning process is as crucial to the success of gov2.0/public data apps as any tech innovation
• The goals, culture, workflows and vocabulary of bureaucratic organizations is different from that of tech start ups. We need to recognize, celebrate, enhance or overcome these differences. Empathizing with the end user is a good way to unite them. Bring on the empathic user-experience design process into the mix…sure, call us the tile grout. It’s not glamorous or the thing you notice, but you sure as hell would have problems without it.
• Needs of gov agencies are not the same as wants of the public.
• Tech-mediated applications might work best (ie serve the public best) when situated in bigger experience ecologies, where other forms of media also form part of an integrated service experience. Jargon for: Beware tech-determinism and don’t separate analog from digital where both are appropriate.

Many of the rest of the big ideas are captured on here.

Loose lips launch library lion logo

Last week, the New York Public Library launched its new logo, and Turnstone went along to take a look. The logo is a rather fetching lion (Patience? or Fortitude? That’s what the two on the steps at 42nd Street are called) and its launch prompted a rather lovely New York moment:

Later on the night of the launch, we pulled the obligatory logotastic schwag bag out to show a friend on the subway, and a man opposite us starts beaming and waving at us. It was Marc Blaustein, the art director of the Library, pleased as punch that we were waving his work about on the F train. So be careful what you pull out of your bag on the subway: Loose lips launch library logos. Talking of which, here are Turnstone’s, on (and on about) the logo on You Tube:

 

Oops, your Ten Days for Oppositional Architecture are almost up

Er, we’re back. Getting a new computer is not unlike moving house. The boxes are all organized but in the wrong rooms, some crockery gets broken, any kind of normal day-to-day admin – including the odd blog post – seems like a luxury. But we’re here, surrounded by the online equivalent of popped bubble wrap, to report in:

This week we’ll give a full run down on the Open Planning Project’s most excellent Tech For Participatory Planning Unconference last Friday, which you can follow on Twitter if you look for  #planningtech.

Meantime, if you don’t mind Turnstone returning to our geographer roots: Get to the last day of the Ten Days for Oppositional Architecture this Saturday – David Harvey (bow down, po-mo geographers) is giving the keynote lecture at noon, at the Gair Building, No 6, 81 Front St in Dumbo (Brooklyn NY 11201 for those who are info-spatially-sensitive). If you want to blog about this here, let’s hear from you.

“Best Square Wins” Goes Public

Turnstone is delighted to report that one of our favorite grad school exercises is busting out of the classroom next week: “Best Square Wins”, an educational ‘graphics exercise crossed with Survivor’, will be played out to the general public on Tuesday next week, as part of “The Public School for Architecture”, a project for public architectural education that Common Room are putting forward in conjunction with the Van Alen Institute. 

The exercise is the brainchild of architect, and absurdly original thinker, Don Schillingburg, a guest in the Service Design class at ITP this Spring. There, he gave our students a headspin with a round of BSW. As Schillingburg explains,
“Although the subject matter may appear to be quite boring (after all, aren’t all squares the same?), the exercise itself confronts the participants with the ambiguities of making and perceiving, where geometry hits performance (actually, no two squares are the same; the wheel meets the road when we have to decide why).

The debate draws out a wide variety of issues as the participants jostle each other to determine the “Best Square.” I have to admit that, comparatively, winning is a dubious distinction at best, but perhaps as architects know better than anyone else – the smaller the prize, the more furious the competition.

The experience is a mix between platonic disputation and a football scrum – in general, the outcome is quite unexpected and remains unresolved until the last vote is cast. You’ll never look at a square the same again.”

If your interest is piqued, head to the Van Alen Institute at 6:30-8pm on Tuesday, November 10 to see who will claim the title “Best Square”. No supplies, preparation or stretching is required, but signing up ahead of the event here is.

Turnstone does Taxis (again!)

The team at Urban Omnibus shines The Architectural League limelight on Turnstone today: Rachel’s in-cab interview with Cassim Shepard, the blog’s editor, from back in the summer, is now available to read and hear, here. It’s one of many discussions about tech in taxis that we’ve engaged in over recent years, and our broadcast debut. Oh my, the London accent appears to be going off duty…

NYPL Live: Capitalism and the Future

From grass-roots to ski-slopes, we’re shifting seamlessly from posts about London’s Bigger Picture to skip off to the New York Public Library Live event this evening (Tuesday 7pm): The Aspen Institute presents Capitalism and the Future, a light pre-dinner aperitif from the Institute’s President, Walter Isaacson, Black Swan author, Nassim Taleb, Harvard economist, Niall Ferguson, Google’s Eric Schmidt and Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo.