Learning from St Louis

Image courtesy of CityRiverArch.org

Turnstone has recently been interviewed about the role of storytelling in placemaking, for PBS’s current affairs show, Stay Tuned, on KETC, Channel 9, out of St Louis, Missouri.

This week’s episode, broadcast on 4/4/2013, was about the St Louis Gateway Arch Grounds 2015 renovation project, specifically the vote that narrowly passed to support a controversial earmarked “Arch tax” increase, to be levied locally to support the renovation of the famous St Louis monument and its surrounding grounds (technically a National Park).

Stay Tuned presenter, Casey Nolan, asked me about what it takes to get a city behind a redesign of public space, what other international precedents there are that St Louis could follow and what steps it takes to win public hearts and minds around big ideas for shared spaces. There’s a good background panel discussion at the top of the show, then Turnstone talks sense from around minute 16. Click the clip above to watch the full show.

New Walk (and Bike) City

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.

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.

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:

.

Graphic Novelists/Novel Graphics

Images for AIGA NY courtesy of (top) Nick Abadzis and (below) G.B.Tran

Get your Hallowe’en costume sorted early and get excited for this:
Super-honored to announce that on Tuesday Oct 30, Turnstone will be moderating a very special conversation between two titans of graphical storytelling: Eisner Award-winning Nick Abadzis (Hugo Tate, Laika) and G.B.Tran (author of Vietnamerica, one of Time Magazine’s all-time Top 10 Graphic Memoirs).

The event is organized by AIGA New York and co-hosted by MoCA, the Museum of Chinese in America, to tie in with their current exhibits, Alt.Comics/Marvels and Monsters. Alt.comics showcases an incredible, poignant, funny, beautiful array of comics by Asian American comic book artists and graphic novelists. Marvels and Monsters looks at depictions of Asians in (ahem, stereotypes perpetuated by) American comics since the 1940s.

Abadzis and Tran come together to share with a wide audience of MoCA members, comic book fans, and AIGA members their inspiration, approaches to historical and personal research and pen-to-pixel working methods. It’s my privilege to introduce them. It should be a special night.

MoCA is at 215 Centre Street, New York, NY 10013 – between Howard and Grand Streets, a block north of Canal St. The event runs 630-830pm and tickets are available here. Come thru!

[Postscript: This event was cancelled due to the inauspicious arrival of Superstorm Sandy on October 29, and due to scheduling conflicts, it was not possible to reschedule later in the year, while the exhibit was still up]

When Telly Savalas comes to town

Turnstone’s back to its blog after months of roaming in what we now affectionately call ‘meatspace’. We’ve been on the road, doing fieldwork, and away from the screen a while. In our sojournings, some nuggests to share:

Turns out life after Kojak turned Telly Savalas into a voiceover for Britain’s finest cities: In several movies by Harold Baim, he was the poster child for post-war, post-industrial 1970s Birmingham (that’s UK, not Alabama), Portsmouth, Aberdeen and elsewhere. Watch this clip as he waxes lyrical about West Midlands gun and cake shops then stay tuned for a seamless segue to the over-40s disco-dancing competition. Oh dear. If this was Kojak’s ‘kind of town’, he’ll really should have tried harder with the accent. A lurid, slightly desperate celebration of urban regeneration. Thankfully Brum has a lot more to show for it these days, smooth TV stars not included.

Then, to cleanse your palette, soothe your eyes and without straining your necks, here’s a rather lovely resource of the world’s skyscrapers, in elevation. For starters, here’s New York. Oh, and Birmingham.

Birds of a feather: Crain’s talks taxi tech to Turnstone

A bigger off button doth not a better content strategy make: Crain’s New York Business has been talking to Turnstone about media in yellow cabs:

‘Some urban-design experts are critical of New York’s taxi screen setup, saying that television programming should be only one element in the mix, writes Matt Flamm.

‘They’d like the screens to be open to a range of content providers and digital applications, and used to create an iconic New York experience rather than as the out-of-home extensions of two broadcasters.

“The screens could be telling me I should look out the window because right now that’s what’s exciting,” said Rachel Abrams, founder of Turnstone Consulting, who was co-editor of Taxi07, a report about the future of New York’s yellow cabs. “The city lost an opportunity.”‘

Read the full article here.

Turnstone in schools

Turnstone’s most inspiring audience of 2011: In March, we addressed 150 5th-8th grade students at the East Harlem School. Here are EHS’s star performers at BB King’s, at the school’s annual Poetry Slam. The School invites volunteer tutors to join their Saturday School program during the academic year. Interested? Email here and Turnstone will introduce you.

This Fall, Rachel returned to the School of Visual Arts Interaction Design MFA Program, to supervise five graduate thesis projects. The second years will, come hell or high water, present a range of fantastic concepts, ideas realized, at their Graduate Symposium in May. Looking forward to it already. It’s a strong year.

In 2011, Turnstone also presented to the Harvard Graduate School of Design Urban Planning Organization and Carnegie Mellon University, as a guest of the Nierenberg Chairs of Design, and to Moholy Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, Hungary.

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.

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.