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.

‘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.”‘

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.

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 also 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.

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.

Tweeting more than blog posting. Follow @TurnstoneTweets.
Postcards from Penguin, 100 classic book covers
Sol Le Witt at Mass MoCA
The drawings of Kelsey Dake
Fifteen minutes listening to Nobel prize-winner, Leymah Gbowee
Symeon Brown‘s take on the riots at the London Policy Conference.
The Power of Making at the Victoria & Albert Museum
Christina Stampfli joining Turnstone
Graphic Details, female graphic novelists and cartoonists, exhibiting in NYC, touring in 2012
Steve Jobs and Jimmy Saville, and many more, RIP
Ryoji Ikeda’s The Transfinite at The Armory on the Park, NYC (above)

Angelo Kontarinis was a great friend at and after our time working together at IBM, and Sylvia Harris, among many other things, a collaborator, champion for women in business, designers of color, decent design for citizens, and personally, she was a fairy godmother to the Taxi07: Roads Forward project. Both were great designers and, above all, really good people, both missed.

The Sylvia Harris Citizen Design Award has been established to support projects that inform and inspire the public, and the dedicated designers who create them. Details about contributing funds to the Award are here.

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.

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.