The real architects of New York City: Rivers and tides

This week’s opening of a new exhibit at the New York Public Library, “Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009″ coincides not only with the Hudson 400 anniversary, but also with the online launch of the Library’s map division (up from tomorrow, Friday).
Tracing four hundred years around the edge of Manhattan and upstream, the show, at the [...]

Start Mapping Sense in the City

A LOT going on this week. The Conflux festival is in full swing and the Sentient Cities exhibit has just opened at the Architectural League. With info space meets physical place in mind, we’re excited that there are efforts underway to persuade the powers that be to open up NYC Transit data, along the lines [...]

Art? Museums would rather stick a fork in it

If you liked the train ride to the US Open, have a hundred bucks and an adventurous appetite, head back to Flushing Meadows on September 26 to sample the fayre of the food trucks competing in the Vendy Awards. It’s outdoors, near the Unisphere, and hosted by our friends and client, The Queens Museum of [...]

Highlights of upcoming SVA IxD public lecture series

This week, the inaugural class of the School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design (IxD) met for their first day of orientation. Congratulations to the program Chair, Liz Danzico, on making it to Day 1. The IxD space looks fantastic, reminiscent of the CRD/Design Interactions studio at the Royal College of Art from our [...]

Stuffed

Friday: An appropriate interlude for Turnstone’s homage to material culture, collecting things and all manner of stuff: Stoop sales vs flea markets, bling from six 1st century tombs, including shoe soles made of gold and (see left) a folding crown (everyone needs a folding crown).
Next on our list of alternative ways to gaze on gross quantities of things [...]

How a service designer reads books

What do publishers do, and what should they do next? These two questions have been the focus of Turnstone’s attention again lately. Preparing for our talk for Random House last week, about what publishers can learn from service design, Turnstone was reminded of Publishing in Exile, a show at the Leo Baeck Institute in NYC. [...]

An afterword: Defining design from A to…B

Lists a) and b) in the Afterword of the Royal College of Art Design Interactions Degree Show catalogue make good brainfeed. We’ve kept the order and the gist as listed, but editorialized for sense, so apologies to the DI team if anything’s re-interpreted beyond what they had in mind. File this under Makes Us Think.
After [...]

“How To Stay Free” at the University of Trash

Of all the flyers we receive, the ones with headshots of grinning neo-conservatives don’t usually grab our attention first.
But sure enough, our artist friends, Daniel Lichtman and David Baumflek sent out an invitation to attend the first of their three discussions, “How to Stay Free”, about art practice in an age of neo-liberalism. Part [...]

The cheapest NY real estate ever

Gothamist has recently spotted what we NYC mappers already knew: Visitors and fans of The Queens Museum of Art can now snap up prime Manhattan real estate for the price of a small donation. They’re putting up the Panorama up for grabs, as a way to raise money for its upkeep, property by property. A [...]

That Friday feeling: Genius+Creativity+Happiness

Fieldtrip: To the Gagosian to absorb some late Picasso genius while listening to a TED lecture about creativity : A source of happiness. That’s all for this week.