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.

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.

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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Enjoy.

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]

Here’s the 8.5mb pdf of Turnstone’s live drawings from the conference. Wherever you reference these, thanks for crediting/linking to them.

 
It’s typical, when live scribing, to draw for an audience that’s less familiar with thinking in pictures, so it was an honor, albeit a slightly daunting one, to record the conference in drawings for delegates with both published comics and medical degrees. They couldn’t be a nicer, more talented, more empathic and funnier bunch. Though the conference schedule ran the gamut of contagious diseases, grief, chronic pain, mental ill health and all manner of blood and guts, the tone was light, educated, entertaining, erudite and on to something: Experiences of illness and healing, of physical well-being and its opposite, are by definition corporeal, and encountered, and retold over time in 3-d technicolor. So it is fitting that sequential storytelling belongs in the medical humanities, and it turns out that band aids and comic strips adhere nicely. Highlights included:

• Joyce Brabner’s perspective on revealing (almost) all in Our Cancer Year, the autobiographical work she made with her now late husband, graphic novelist, Harvey Pekar.
• Dr Alan Blum’s hunch that satire could be as powerful a weapon against obesity as it was against smoking
• The Mayo Clinic’s efforts to turn incomprehensible HIPAA forms into clear-as-day cartoon narratives
• Pediatrician Alex Thomas’ Booster Shot comics, teaching kids to use inhalers.

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.