Turnstone in transit in 2012

Beyond yellow taxi fleets to greener road transit:

The downstate New York chapter of the US Department of Energy’s Clean Cities Coalition will roll out a new identity in 2012, based on strategy completed by Turnstone in 2011. The Clean Cities program’s mission is to improve air quality in major American cities by reducing, replacing and eliminating petroleum-consuming road transit with cleaner vehicle fleets.

In September 2012, Turnstone will present a paper at TRANSED 2012, India’s national conference on Mobility and Transport for Elderly and Disabled Persons, in Delhi.

Special Brew: Summarizing the London riots

Since three days of burning shops, smashing windows, nicking trainers, drug crime, hoodies, senseless deaths, squads of indignant broom-wielding, bat-handling locals, and 24hr magistrates hearings galvanized the British public earlier this month, Turnstone has been trawling through range of (sure, left-leaning) articles about the UK riots.

One resounding concept (but ahem, not the only one) seems to be that it’s crucial to hold more than one thought in our heads about the confluence of contributing factors if any subsequent social, political, economic response is to stick. It was (get ready) multi-nuclei, local, regional, global scale, urban, heterogenic, pan-ethnic, trans-class social upset unfolding over days (breathe). To be constructive rather than draconian, any new policy must be holistic, bottom-up, top-down and must reflect only joined-up thinking to produce sustainable impact. Guess what, people, it’s not one thing and there ain’t a cure-all, quick fix. Suggesting we shhh twitter was akin to suggesting we squash ocean water, and betrayed that blokes in charge don’t recognize the nuanced segmentation and reflexivity of social networks…on as well as perhaps offline.

So our non-comprehensive coverage collected comes mostly, and with thanks, from our friend, Nick Durrant, who shared his set of sources over email in the days/weeks following. Our debate and exchange was conducted in a personal capacity. What follows is a summary of what we dug up as I asked some basic questions:

Seriously, who actually took part? The UK Guardian (a main point of reference for us) stratified the riots into its political classes to understand the wider social context of today’s British society, only to conclude that locally, the upheaval was not unexpected. A reissue of a 2007 article in Adbusters also echoed that we’re not blaming millenials, this is Generation F*cked.

And while many might retreat to an organic coffee shop in fear of them, a blog discusses today’s gangs in London and, if you dare stick your pin in the streetview, a google map of them. So while the riots reveal some unpalatable home truths about UK culture of fear and consumer greed, Suzanne Moore implored, Don’t shut these kids out now. Has anyone else written about the crisis of masculinity that the riots imply? Are girls looting the ultimate battle cry of the Ladette? Still looking for that coverage.

With that overview, it was interesting to watch various other opinions emerge by key issues-focused commentators:

Paul Gilroy, author of Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack had this to say about comparing this unrest to – and decoupling it from – the riots of the early 80s; Naomi Klein‘s “Looting with the lights off” was one of many to take a look at the consumer values/brands angle with the less likely commentators, Association of Accounting Technicians, suggest it’s too expensive to be a teenager and most pathetic of all, trainers and mobile phones, the things most shoplifted – have become objects of our disaffection.

This way, says Social Europe Journal, the riots can be seen as consumerism is coming home to roost. Echoing this, Pankaj Mishra from Bloomberg surmised that London’s rioters are Thatcher’s grandchildren and grimmer still, the UK riots were a ‘product of consumerism and will hit the economy’, according to City broker, Dr Tim Morgan of City analysts, Tullet Prebon, thinking the unthinkable. Meantime, the Mayor of London could worse than listen to the opinions and lyrics of a few more British Grime artists. About as grimy but no less perfect, is Jarvis Cocker’s Fat Children, sung from the perspective of a dead man mugged by kids for his mobile. Since Mr Cocker forbids his listeners to sing along, watch out, Prime Minister, just take heed.

Finally, onto the mapping perspective: What about seeing the inner city as a giant gaming space, part Grand Theft Auto, part Chromaroma. Why else (apart from subscribing to some scary hip hop magazines) call British riot police “FEDS”? Blackberry devices become the console for game-play in real swag and proper ‘blowing sh*t up’. Noone said anyone had to play nicely in a big urban game as they post QR codes to billboards. And for every urban antic, there must be a situationist perspective, this one from Domus magazine.

This, from the European Tribune theorizes about the police’s multi-layered, can’t win/can’t win role, speculating why enforcement can’t just be airdropped straight from Bratton’s LAPD ‘copter from Watts to the West Midlands. A perfect example of the constraints of models, as described in  “The Fruitful Flaws of Strategy Metaphors” we’ve referred to here before, from the Harvard Business Review.

We’ll conclude with the incredible interview with globalization guru, Zygmunt Bauman, who makes me feel dumb just looking at him. Two quotes stand out:

“The thus far reaction of the British government to the mutiny of the humiliated is bound to deepen the self-same humiliation that caused their rebellion…”

“Their mutiny was an un-planned, un-integrated, spontaneous explosion of accumulated frustration that can be only explained in terms of ‘because of’, not in terms of ‘in order to’; I doubt whether the question of ‘what for’ played any role in that orgy of destruction.”

His conclusion is not for the faint of heart. While there is not enough work to do, there is work to do.

Spring fever

Turnstone has spent the spring surveying other designers’ work for spring inspiration.

We’re just back from Budapest, where we climbed down a 200ft hole by the Danube to inspect how the Metro 4 line is coming along under the river, connecting Buda and Pest. Good to compare public transit projects between NYC and Central Europe, and meet the students at MOME, the Moholy-Nagy University of Design.

In June, we’re co-judging Open Plans’ “Beyond the Countdown Clock” competition, which invites interdisciplinary geeks from all over to design the future of transit. They’re still inviting entrants to participate, so get on it!

In London, there is a glut of shows that are fit for our design inspiration purposes. What one thing we can take from each?

Thomas Heatherwick’s reflections at the Then|Now show at the Aram Gallery resonated. He decries that design school didn’t teach him enough about the transition from “I” to “Us”, how to shift practice from solo to studio.

The Wim Crouwel exhibit at the Design Museum is predictably delectable and rectilinear, and proves that pink and red do work together, if you also happen to be a master of Dutch mid-century typography. More when we’ve shuffled around the Dirt, Yohji Yamamoto and Susan Hiller shows this week. Under our own personal Shengen agreement, we’re crossing from one design discipline to another without a passport.

Turnstone has also visited The Hunterian, a museum of medical specimens at the Royal College of Surgeons, at last. Noone usually asks ‘what did you do that for?’ about going to see a museum collection, but posed that question several times over, there is now an answer. It definitely was more ghoulish than the London Dungeon or Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. I went on an empty stomach, and still lost my appetite. It’s beautifully displayed but you do have to overcome the waft of formaldehyde. But I went to look at the structures of things; to step out of my field of usual inquiry, and to conclude that disease looks disruptive. When that kind of ooh, that looks weird is scaled up, it might be a way to assess sprawl or other systems that mimic nature, or flatly deny it.

Back in New York, Turnstone just published a maiden wikipedia article for clients, Peter Gluck and Partners, on architect-led design-build. We also proudly handed over a copy of the essay on interaction designer, Durrell Bishop, to the curators of “Talk To Me“, a show about interfaces, which is due to open at the Museum of Modern Art in July. Bishop’s work does speak for itself – that’s mostly the point of it – but the 1999 written interpretation still holds up and predicts such crazy far-out futures as iphone apps and digital displays in shop windows. A true time capsule, that.

Reflecting on the contemporary context of learning and advancing interaction design, it was interesting to compare this year’s graduate candidates’ portfolios with last year’s, as admissions reviewers for SVA recently: Of a consistently high standard, applicants’ work seems to be a weathervane for the zeitgeist. In 2010, anxiety and efforts towards system-change stood out in the work, in a climate of deep economic uncertainty. This year, there are still a contingent of do-design-for-good-ers, but the applicants’ preoccupations seem to have turned back to enterprise and storytelling again. Happier times? And how will the bumps of the last few years impress on the next generation of creators and inventors?

Turnstone will be back soon to update our 2009 50 women we admire in tech story, and 20 years of architectural restoration we thought we’d left alone, report back on our talks to Harvard and Carnegie Mellon grads and Harlem 5th-8th graders, and dig up some press coverage curiosities we’ve come across during this season of Taxi of Tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Tonight: What’s Mine is Yours, What’s Future is Present

As is so often the case on any given weeknight in NYC, a clash of yoga-for-the-brain gatherings:

First, we’ll celebrate with Nick Bilton, NY Times writer, ITP adjunct, erstwhile Turnstone client, to mark the publication of his much anticipated book, I Live In the Future and Here’s How It Works.

Then, if gathering gadgets from the future isn’t as compelling as sharing services in the here and now, you should brave the filthy fall weather for The Rise of Collaborative consumption, a presentation and panel at Parsons/The New School Tishman Environment and Design Center tonight (9/16), led by Rachel Botsman with

- Co-author of What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, Roo Rogers;

- Christopher Lukezic of space rentals site, Airbnb

- Carolyn Woodward, co-founder of Trade School and OurGoods.org, a peer-to-peer online network that facilitates the barter of goods and services between creative people, and

- Ryan Rzepecki, who’s sketched out a not-yet-on-the-streets bike-sharing scheme for NYC called SocialBicycles.

The blurb at Eventbrite says:

Rachel will share stories and research from all around the world, to explain how  from social lending (Zopa) to car sharing (Zipcar) and co-working (The Hub), from peer-to-peer rental (Zilok) to collaborative travel (AirBnB) and neighbourhood sharing schemes (NeighborGoods), millions of people from all around the world are already using Collaborative Consumption to reinvent not just what we consume but how we consume.

The panel will be highly interactive exploring opportunities and themes related to Collaborative Consumption including: the role of design thinking; how technology creates trust between strangers;  and the new culture and economy around sharing.

Can we borrow an umbrella?

Thank you petrolheads+systems thinkers: Envisioning the taxi of tomorrow

Turnstone is proud to have completed its pre-bid phase of work with Karsan, one of the auto manufacturers bidding to win the New York City Taxi of Tomorrow contract.

Due to hit the streets in 2014, the winning cab must remain a New York icon, but be much more fuel efficient (that is, a greener yellow), with a smaller footprint (no more 18foot Crown Vic canoes) and roomier on the inside (not just for wheelchair but stroller and suitcase access). A bit like Dr Who‘s Tardis, only for hire.

Karsan is paying close attention to all these requirements, and has put forward a built-to-suit solution, rather than modifying an existing model.

Turnstone joined the European consortium to specify how tomorrow’s cab communications might work. As we’ve discussed, tomorrow’s taxi will be more than just a car. It’ll be a personal wireless device on wheels, a way to access services on the go, on the way from A to B.

The project was an amazing opportunity to apply thinking from earlier discovery and definition phases of work to articulate an initial design proposal – drawing from research from the Taxi07 report, and months of independent lectures, Turnstone has reconceived, visualized and put forward what goes on those credit card payment screens, what public service announcements, maps and roof top ads look like inside and out, in a integrated package of passenger- and driver-friendly graphic signage and digital services.

The City is due to choose a winning design by the end of 2010. Meantime, Turnstone would like to thank the Karsan team and all those who shared enthusiasm, insights and recommendations (in an informal capacity) at our winter roundtable, at Google, Teague and Virgin America, social gamers Mudlark, screen technologists, Lumio, Transport Research Institute at Edinburgh Napier and elsewhere. Yes, we talked to in-flight entertainment aviation people. Because taxicab or plane cabin, city maps or in-flight snacks, it’s clear that user-centered designers in both fields have a critical brokering role, influencing the right kind of collaboration between the technologists and engineers to make the whole experience work, planes, trains and for-hire automobiles…

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?

Shave your head to save the Gulf from the oil spew?

An incredible chapter in Lovins’/Hawken’s “Natural Capitalism“, much mentioned on these pages, describes how human hair, yes, that swept off barbershop floors, effectively absorbs crude oil from water. Is it time the nation shave our heads and drop the clippings into the Gulf of Mexico? Like everyone else, Turnstone fears it may now be too late, even for this zany Plan B. Still, a provocative question of when waste becomes an asset in a crisis.

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.

ET, Phone the White House

Famous for explaining plagues and exploding spaceships in pictures, and railing against the ills of Powerpoint, Yale statistician and info design evangelist, Edward Tufte, has been appointed by Obama to the Independent Recovery Advisory Panel. To misquote Tufte himself, this may represent an exercise in making (un)clear, as well as clear, thinking visible, no snark intended. It’s awesome, as one friend suggested, that the White House gets it. And as Ben Fry said at Columbia the other week, “We’ll never have less data. [We'll just need] better ways of hiding it and learn how to ignore the right things”. Power to the picture.