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.

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 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.

Taxis of Two Tomorrows

In October, Turnstone got a preview of Nissan’s Taxi of Tomorrow. We’re delighted a new cab has come of the strategic vision we initially set out with the Design Trust for the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

 

 

 

 

Turnstone is equally delighted the accessible, alternative fuel-ready  Karsan V1 cab, shortlisted last year to become New York’s Taxi of Tomorrow, is now a driveable prototype. The V1 went on display at the Dutch Auto Show in December, set for production in Europe.

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?

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…

Not a drop to drink, desalinate, fish…

In June, as the oil splurge seeped on, global engineering firm, Arup, began – quite coincidentally – a round of international workshops on the future of oceans, for their Drivers of Change program. Turnstone was privileged to participate in the New York session and delighted to recommend Liam Young’s architectural perspective for the London roundtable. After all, the discussion pivoted on exactly what he does everyday, pondering Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today.

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?

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.

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.