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 Basing media strategy only on models of ad revenue seems limited and out of date.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.
