Services are Everywhere: Turnstone at AIGA National Design Conference

Turnstone joined Zipcar and Facebook to introduce “Services Are Everywhere” to the annual AIGA National Design Conference in Phoenix, AZ this Fall: The all-women panel kicked off four sessions on service design, moderated by innovation consultancy, Continuum. Click the clip here to watch this recently released, short’n'sweet film of the presenters’ perspectives, from Disney, Facebook, the Mayo Clinic, My Police, Sony, Turnstone, Zipcar and others.

Turnstone in collaboration

In 2011, Turnstone participated in Amplify Brooklyn, run in November by the DESIS Lab at Parsons, the New School for Design, as part of their Open Design for Organizational Innovation initiative, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The one-day workshop brought together designers, social scientists and practitioners to use fieldwork and other design methods to address the organizational challenges of a non-profit organization in North Brooklyn. Here’s a short film about the workshop, Open Design for Organizational Innovation from Parsons Desis Lab on Vimeo:

In the spring, Turnstone also joined a team of architects and designers from Italy, Portugal and Hungary to submit a proposal to EUROPAN 11, a competition for regenerating a section of the town of Szeged, Hungary. Of 70 entrants, ours was a finalist, commended for its strategy, though none of the projects, not even the winner, will be realized. The EU has more pressing matters to attend to…?

Turnstone’s sideproject, dilys+asante, created more hit party props for the award-winning I Love Vinyl party’s second anniversary in May, as featured in Time Out in June. Even us strategists need to get hands on. And our dance on.

dilys+asante at Lincoln Center’s LCDJ tomorrow!

As a sidebar to all things Turnstone:

Scratching an itch to craft something, stretching beyond strategic design briefing documents right through build to installation, Rachel is launching a co-created personal project with fellow Royal College of Art graduate, Kofi Aidoo. Tomorrow we debut as dilys+asante and present Project Auricle at Lincoln Center’s LCDJ, a party hosted on 10/29 by I Love Vinyl. To toot our own horn and spout our own blurb:

“Mixing familiar funfair delight with social media, textiles and twinkling electronics, Auricle draws in party guests to express just how much they love the tunes each DJ digs up. Throughout the night, participants can email photos of their interactions with Auricle to view and share on flickr here, on facebook and on the I Love Vinyl online family albumduring and after the show.”

More about us, I Love Vinyl and LCDJ on Lincoln Center’s web site. Thanks to Glen of Core77 and Ben of I Love Vinyl for the inspiration.

Next, we sing at Carnegie Hall…

The power of pictures

This week, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have the cover story for Newsweek magazine, a suite of articles on the science of fostering creativity in children, while the RSA have recently put their animated creativity to good use, inviting one of Turnstone’s favorite geographers, David Harvey, to explain the crisis of capitalism.

And if that doesn’t burst a cloud, the World Press Photo show returns for 2010 to the United Nations on its annual world tour this August. If you only look at world news coverage on your iphone, it’s time you stared at some big colorful prints of what’s going on beyond your tweeting, browsing, outstretched arm in the hallowed halls of the place that’s supposed to make it all better.

Yerba Buena Arts Center SF

Last but not least, Turnstone can’t rave enough about the Yves Béhar-curated TechnoCraft show at Yerba Buena Arts Center, just opened in San Francisco. Divided into Crowdsourcing, Platforms, Blueprints, Hacks, Incompletes, and Modules, it includes work from Marti Guixé, Max Lamb, the Bouroullec brothers, the prisoners of St Quentin jail, and…you.

Refreshing to see an industrial design show that doesn’t just show off the usual suspects, but shows off the unusual suspects, and then makes you think about our old friend creative agency: how you can do, undo and make do with clever stuff with what’s in the world around you. Fast Company has a nice review here. Our only gripe is that there’s no exhibit catalog. Not even an a propos coloring-in book.

Out of office, and back to work

A four-day week (for both UK and US readers this week) seems like a good one in which to publish Is This Working?. It’s a review of a conference about the peculiar future of the office. It’s our latest article at Urban Omnibus. Thoughts provoked during the day: While we save energy switching off lights in our buildings and cutting down on business travel, how much power does working over the Internet actually consume instead? Is the most sustainable office in fact no office at all? For whom does a city become an office, and how does an office become its own city?

Off to WorkTech10 we go

Worktech10, ostensibly a conference of real estate developers, office architects and workplace programmers, is turning out to be quite the gathering of heavyweights today.

Bill Moggridge (ex of IDEO, now Director, Cooper Hewitt), David Owen (of the New Yorker, author of Green Metropolis), the Smarter Cities team from IBM presented this morning. We’re tweeting now and again @TurnstoneTweets, so head here for #worktech10ny tweets.

Much talk of connected, collaborative working, but not enough on silent, solitary working, or home offices (fair enough, given the audience), but attention needed: What about disconnecting from IT? What about tasks that require focused concentration not teamwork? What about individuals’ desire to separate vs. blur work from not-work? What about incentivizing staff to care about cost savings to companies when they move whole facilities to places they don’t want to go?

Also odd theme emerging that Gen Y/Millenials need romper room offices. They too will grow up, surely? Each generation is surely influenced by what their parents’ workplaces meant to them, just as today’s city planners are influenced by growing up in the 1970s.

An interesting split in US/Euro sensibilities. The Americans tending to talk of fun/clocked-off time as yet another realm of productivity (sports! destination weekends! vacation plans!). Do the Brits just go to the pub? It’s been a while…

Anyway, we’ll be writing up the whole thing for Urban Omnibus, in a feature out next week. But you heard it here first.

After this (off-duty, ha), we’re off to What Our Cities Are Telling Us – a panel at the Open Planning Project, feat. John Tolva of IBM Smart Cities and Carole Post from NYC Department of Information Tech and Telecomms (DoITT). Stay tuned for Personal Democracy Forum’s Conference and Unconference in early June too.

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.

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.

October Roundup: Measuring progress by foot

Over the last week, Turnstone tiptoed to the green roof above the Open Planning Project‘s new office, just up Lafayette St, reminiscent of the lovely SCI-Arc-designed one in Downtown LA on top of the ex-Holiday Inn (now called ‘The Flats’); on the latest carless trip to LA this month, walked to the Petersen Automobile Museum in LA because it was the closest significant landmark (LACMA across the street, yes) within walking distance from our HQ. A perverse, pedestrian triumph.

Talking of walking vs driving round cities, we expect our summer ride through NYC to be featured on Urban Omnibus any week now…and as she preps the SVAIXD class for next month, Rachel introduced the basics of service design to the undergraduate class in Innovation at the Parsons New School of Design last week. Giving class in that auditorium felt like doing the washing up in an Olympic swimming pool. Thanks to Elliot Felix of DEGW and Laura Forlano for the invitation. After all that sojourning, it’s nose back to the monitor for this week. Til next time, we’ll leave you women designers with this preview of a forthcoming post about What Women Make. Sisterhood for the sketchbook. More where that came from.