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…

New Tech for Participatory Planning: Grade A for a grey day

The Open Planning Project hosted New Technology for Participatory Planning – an ‘unconference’ last Friday, and what a grade A way to spend a grey day at the end of the week. The crowd was a pretty even split of techies and planners – the Regional Planning Association co-hosted. So the room was full of smarty-pants (is the plural smarties-pants?).

Lightning presentations – following the 5-minute pdf slam Pecha Kucha model – showcased All Our Ideas from Princeton University’s Sociology department; Robert Lane from the RPA reverently quoting (bow down for the second time this week) Kevin Lynch and Laura Kurgan; a data orgy of dynamic maps of possibly the most mapped city – from DoITT, including the GIS NY City Map and others, like the urban research maps, exploring open public data sets.

Then, between insights-ever-so-constrained-by-140-characters tweets, Turnstone waded into a couple of fascinating break out sessions, one on (and I paraphrase heavily from the question that the NYC Transit specialist, Sarah Kaufman posed) the input monster that civic agencies create when they invite the public’s participation, the other on what’s wrong with the Request for Proposal process. To summarize a lot of intelligent, interdisciplinary, carpe diem discussion in these groups, here are some references, questions raised and other highlights:

• Five Things We Need To Know About Technological Change by Neil Postman
• Community as functionality, a technology to understand itself (quoting from Lynch’s Image of the City)
• What’s the difference between drawing and mapping?
• What is civic engagement for? When is participation appropriate? What role, what value? To validate? Legitimate?
• What impact does the ubiquity of mobile devices have – on narrowing the digital divide? On recording public processes? On capturing site-specific participation (that is, enabling just-in-time input – comments or uploads – about something in a particular location)?
• Place still has primacy, as much as we like to run about with glee in information space
• Innovation in public policy and planning process is as crucial to the success of gov2.0/public data apps as any tech innovation
• The goals, culture, workflows and vocabulary of bureaucratic organizations is different from that of tech start ups. We need to recognize, celebrate, enhance or overcome these differences. Empathizing with the end user is a good way to unite them. Bring on the empathic user-experience design process into the mix…sure, call us the tile grout. It’s not glamorous or the thing you notice, but you sure as hell would have problems without it.
• Needs of gov agencies are not the same as wants of the public.
• Tech-mediated applications might work best (ie serve the public best) when situated in bigger experience ecologies, where other forms of media also form part of an integrated service experience. Jargon for: Beware tech-determinism and don’t separate analog from digital where both are appropriate.

Many of the rest of the big ideas are captured on here.

Turnstone does Taxis (again!)

The team at Urban Omnibus shines The Architectural League limelight on Turnstone today: Rachel’s in-cab interview with Cassim Shepard, the blog’s editor, from back in the summer, is now available to read and hear, here. It’s one of many discussions about tech in taxis that we’ve engaged in over recent years, and our broadcast debut. Oh my, the London accent appears to be going off duty…

The real architects of New York City: Rivers and tides

Bachman's fish-eye map of New York and Environs (1857)

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 main library on Fifth/42nd St, is full of cartographic treasures. They document the changing topography, political landscape and progressive urbanization of the city of New York, from Dutch to British to American rule; from the glacial morphology, creeks, swamp- and farmland that shape the city, to shipping lanes, local industry and littoral leisure into the twenty-first century.

Depicting all boroughs, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, highlights include a 1598 map recording Verrazano’s visit on his way to Asia (though he never made it); John Bachman’s 1859 fish-eye lens view of the city,  a circular map annotated with familiar neighborhoods around its circumference (see left); four of nine volumes of a richly inked Dutch seventeenth century Atlas, featuring Asia, Europe, the Netherlands and (of all places) Essex, England; a dynamic fly-through rendering of 1687 maps superimposed over contemporary Google Earth images of the Hudson Valley; long thin maps tracing the trickle of the Hudson at its source near Troy to the New York Harbor where it washes out past the Statue of Liberty into the Atlantic; a 1947 ‘cartographic interpretative’ of the Hamptons , by children’s book illustrator, Richard Scarry, for New York Holiday magazine, and David Cain’s 2008 Partnership for Parks map of the Astoria/LIC waterfront parks. Plenty of maritime significa for the land-locked here. Fellow New York nerds will gorge themselves on rarely seen views of their favorite town – a city defined by, amongst other things, its edges.

The show runs til June 26, 2010, with tours twice daily.