On air, up in the AA air

American Airlines’ inflight business show, Talk Business 360, interviews Turnstone Consulting in its latest episode, talking about visual scribing. If you travel on an AA or US Airways flight anywhere in the world during April and May, business or coach class, you’ll be able to listen to the whole program from your seat, on Channel 9. That’s on air to five million passengers up in the air. And, for terrestrial listeners, Turnstone’s 3-minute segment is available here:

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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 words and pictures

Turnstone has returned to its drawing roots this year, inspired by collaborations with Ludic Group, the international innovation consultancy. By invitation, Rachel takes visual notes for corporate-level strategy meetings. Sample concept drawings and diagrams from closed client sessions can’t be shared, but more illustrative images are here on the Turnstone web site. Rachel also presented at  LaydeezDoComics in London in December 2011.

In September, QR This, Turnstone’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s interactive media exhibit, Talk to Me, appeared in the Architect’s Newspaper.

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?

After the break: Ten quick posts

OK, we’re back. Two million things to write up since March…starting with:

Our SxSW Design for the Dark Side panel is now available as podcast (alas no graphics, you kinda had to be there). But do click the link on the right hand side of the page here and give it a listen.

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:

 

Women’s work: HBR’s mean girls, the cats’ meow

Before the third and last segment of Ben’s review of the Bigger Picture, a pre-Hallowe’en interlude… A few months ago we wrote Hey Ladies, about women’s experience of work, queen bees and wannabees with a paycheck. This, on a related topic from Harvard Business Review blog, caught Turnstone’s eye. It’s about working with colleagues who, short of stealing your lunch money, are still flexing their inner Lindsay Lohans at their desks, and how to deal with it.

Intent on preserving our sense of humor about such things, we suggest our own antidote for anyone livid in lipstick: Make Il Duetto Buffo di Due Gatti your company song (apologies to Rossini). Happy Friday. The good stuff begins at 1’19″:

Fast forward, Pause, Rewind, Eject

Turnstone loves to celebrate old as well as new media on these pages. We can start with the new – the incredibly beautiful visualizations that BERG London have made (our friends at Schulze and Webb and now Jones, and while we’re at it, sometimes Arnall – who’ve renamed themselves). By methods best left to their own explanation, they’ve captured images of what the fields around an RFID sensor look like. My response to Jack’s preview of this wonderful video?
“It’s your Oystercard on drugs”. Sort of. Those kids seriously know what it means to discover by doing. There’ll soon be a Nobel Prize for Tinkering at this rate. 

Then, before we get carried away with the shock of the new, a moment to rewind. Next Weds, Oct 28th at 7pm at Housing Works, there’s a book release for the rather charmingly titled, ‘Cassette From My Ex‘. In the tradition of Found Magazine and Smith’s Six Word Memoirs, here’s a celebration of ‘stories and soundtracks of lost loves’ aka a wonderful archive of social anachronism, filling up the basements and storage lockers of Generation Xers everywhere. Maybe that sounded like an autobiographical admission, but we’ll have you know we chucked ours a while ago (sniff). Except for that one from…oh never mind…

Work, not rain, stops play

Strange of us to pick a cricketing phrase for this week’s headline. Occasionally these vestigial Brit phrases burp up from nowhere. Anyway, we’re back. Excuse the silence, we had a spiffy interaction design project to work on at all hours, in collaboration with our London friends at Maoworks, and now we’re back.

Hiding from the rain, but with a few excuses to bust early onset cabin fever and leave the desk, for example:

A week of walks began in the drizzle in our fave part of Queens (around the Museum) today, promoting the lovely Ms. Alissa Walker’s book, City Walks Architecture: New York, 25 architectural walking tours of NYC. Funny, never thought twice about her last name til I typed it here. Wonder if she did as she put one foot in front of the other a couple of summers ago to trace her steps for research? Anyway, the tours include Midtown Modernism, Sustainable Skyscrapers and a roam round the Lower East Side before Tuesday’s release party at the Jen Bekmann gallery. Full details on Gelatobaby.