Adam Green field posted this at Speedbird:
Marc EnglishThe Architectural League of New York invites architects, artists, designers, technologists, engineers, urbanists, or teams thereof, to submit qualifications for an exhibition that will critically explore the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture. The League will commission five to seven teams to develop urban interventions–to be installed in and around New York City in spring 2009–that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Commissioned projects will receive support ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.
The exhibition continues the League’s commitment to supporting original research into the implications of ubiquitous/pervasive computing for architecture and urbanism. In fall 2006, the League, along with the Center for Virtual Architecture and the Institute for Distributed Creativity, presented “Architecture and Situated Technologies,” a 3-day symposium organized by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, that brought together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of Situated Technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary city. The project continued in winter 2007 with the publication “Urban Computing and Its Discontents,” the first of nine pamphlets to be published over the next three years that explores how our experience of the city and the choices we make in it are affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other Situated Technologies.
The latest issue of the Austin Chronicle has a great Marc Savlov profile of my friend Marc English, designer extraordinaire. The quote below has one thought, though I just messaged Marc I think he's really the Joe Strummer of design. (I'm not sure what that means, but I don't know what "Stanley Kubrick of design" means, either. Maybe he's the Marc English of design?) Whatever the case, every time I visit Marc's studio, I feel very down the rabbit hole.
His identity both as a human being and an artist is XXL life. AustinDesign Democracy
filmmaker/writer Cary Roberts has rightly called him "the Stanley
Kubrick of design." He fairly burns with passion for his life and work,
and he wants you to burn, too. No sparks or embers here. English is a
conflagration of design theory, overwhelming talent, and
experimentalism, and his work with Criterion meets at the dirty
crossroads of the artistic truth of what has been entrusted to him and
the bottom line, the movement of "product," the allure of the dream
made cardboard, laser-encoded plastic discs, at midnight, beneath a
full moon, with pistols and blood well spent. His aim is truest.
Via Bruce Sterling: Design Democracy is a site and online event all about mass customization, which (according to the Wikipedia entry) is "the use of flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output." It's kind of a contest, where anyone can vote "early and often" on designs posted to the site. I love the logo.
A couple of older notes about emergent information architecture, the first by Peter Merholz, who talks about the range of architectures from those explicitly created by the user to those implicitly derived from user behavior – with tags a hybrid: "They’re explicit in that people have to engage in some explicit act of applying the tag. They’re implicit because the aggregate of that tagging leads to folksonomies and other social metadata that starts making connections between information that was not there before." The other post, by Gene Smith, is about how people co-create information environments, looking not only at the x-axis from implicit to explicit, but also factoring in a y-axis of personal to participatory. These are from back in July, so not new; I ran across them via a post by Adrian Chong at the now-defunct iaslash. (Archives still available to dig through... still yielding goodies.)
Simplicity is complicated. And, as Bryan Trogdon posts in comments, quoting Leonardo, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." [Link]
While we may set out to design a “simple” system, it is shortsighted to force it when it may not be appropriate for the end-users or the tasks. Applying user research methods to guide design decisions will assist in the appropriate balance and placement of simplicity in the product, and the exposure of complexity to the end user. Tackling these issues during the design process is the best approach to displace complexity from where it would otherwise end up: the users’ experience.Portions
"Architectures of Control" ponders our tendency to eat all of a portion we're fed, so that if we get "supersized" portions, we eat more. My wife and I have noticed, with our kids out of the house, that we eat all or most of a dish that used to serve the whole fmaily with leftovers for another meal.
One question which does arise from thinking about packaging and portion sizes is to what extent established sizes (weights, volumes) have affected consumers’ habits. Is it coincidence that, say, a typical bag of crisps (potato chips) in the UK used to be 1 oz (around 28g), and that that’s about the portion that most people ate in one go? In the last ten years though, cheaper brands have reduced to 25g or less, and premium brands escalated up to 38g or 45g - and yet still people eat one packet at a time, even when it may be almost double the weight of another. When the default size of spirit measures in pubs has gradually risen from 25 ml (down from 1 fl oz previously?) up to 35 ml or even doubles (50 ml) unless the customer specifies otherwise, this must have an effect on consumers’ behaviour. Most people do not spend double the time drinking a 50 ml measure that they do a 25 ml measure. They drink it in perhaps a few seconds longer, yet have imbibed double the amount of alcohol. (Equally, the shape of glasses affects perceptions of liquid quantity - more of Prof Wansink’s research.)digitalurban: "Frank Lloyd Wright Architectual Visualisation in Half Life"
Hence, this choice of default can have a major effect on behaviour, and is surely a powerful control technique in itself...
digitalurban posts a rendering of Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann House using game engine – specifically the Half Life Source Engine – for the visualization. [Link] Digital Urban is doing a whole series on Cities in Games.
ScraperCoulda used one of these th is week... the Rosendahl Ice Scraper by Erik Bagger, via Core77 Design Blog.
Worldchanging book designInteresting discussion with Stefan Sagmeister, designer of Worldchanging: A Guide to the 21st Century.[Link]
I think the form that we suggested to the publisher was one of a compendium. The one that would allow you to read it at various levels, that you could sneak in here or there or read it in one go if you so desire. The book from the very beginning that was always conceived on uncoated paper. It would have the weight of a novel, so that you can still actually read it in bed.
Also, from the very beginning what was important to me was that it was cheap enough to print that it would be possible for a mass book. It wouldn't be much more expensive than a novel would be. By its design conceit it would actually be able to talk to the masses. That's what I was utterly interested in. We will see a year from now if this will all work out or not, if we can do another book that preaches to the converted. You know, that talks to Ralph Nader voters. I had no interest in that whatsoever. I think these people have enough information out there. The challenge is really to get this information to a lot of people.
White Space
I actually think a lot about white space. I spent several years working for a typographer, and I took that gig in order to learn more about publishing, especially design of the printed page, but I've never done a direct study of visual design... so I had a passing understanding of the value and use of white space, but until now I'd never seen a good article explaining how it works. A List Apart has just such an article, written by Mark Boulton, who notes that whitespace is subjective, its use a matter of practice. He points to a good reference, Typography: A Manual of Design