Category Archives: Patterns+systems

New Walk (and Bike) City

Image courtesy of the NYC Dept of Transportation

Image courtesy of the NYC Dept of Transportation

So Turnstone’s updates here were scare during a chunk of 2012, and here’s my excuse: I took an 8-month walk around New York, a bit like Phyllis Pearsall, tireless authoress of the London A-Z, did in the 1930s. I went analog and on secondment to join a larger design team for a really special project:

Transportation Nation and Brooklyn Spoke explain exactly what for in these previews of the NYC Department of Transportation pedestrian and bike share wayfinding systems, projects that are set to appear across the city in 2013. More about those to follow here in the coming months as the projects get off – and on – the ground.

Meantime, if you look lost at any intersection on or off the grid, the person approaching you to give you directions, whether you’d asked for them or not, is probably me.

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Oh IXD, Oh Sandy

Back in Fall 2012, I taught this class on the Design of Systems to the first year Interaction Design MFA graduate students at the School of Visual Arts.

I was channeling, but not explicit enough about, the work of Durrell Bishop, and my work about his work – unpacking his brilliantly simple and complex notion that digital products should now embody the systems of our using them, since they no longer have to take the shape of the sum of the mechanical parts they contain. Shh, and think about that for a minute.

Annnyway, we did have guest lectures from Barry Richards of Rockwell Group, the designers of the Imagination Playground, that UNICEF just launched in Haiti; Chelsea Mauldin, my erstwhile Design Trust collaborator and now Director of the Public Policy Lab; Nick Abadzis, comic book artist extraordinaire; and Noel Wilson, intrepid industrial designer with Engineers Without Borders spin-off, Catapult Design out of San Francisco. We also got ourselves properly paranoid reading Andrew Blum’s Tubes, and tiptoeing through Trevor Paglen’s incredible photography of undocumented military and industrial installations, right before Creative Time launched his Last Pictures exhibit. We even had a field trip to IKEA. It was not a boring syllabus.

Then Superstorm Sandy became not only the disruptive force that diverted us from showing up in Week 6, and from starting then completing the deep and wide class blog, but also became the focus of the final projects. Those are summarized by the students here and were critiqued by Ian Spalter of Foursquare, Scott Peterman from Parsons and Tony Moulton from Occupy Sandy.

“That was more the philosophy than the design of systems” said one student in the last class, not unhappily. Anything to make makers think and thinkers make, I say.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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