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The Safety Net: A NYT article echoes Nobu+Karla’s “investigative reporting” May 11, 2009

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Jason DeParle’s article, The Safety Net, in this weekend’s New York Times, on scattershot access to services during this downtown is highly relevant to the class assignment. It is, if you like, equivalent to Nobu and Karla’s ‘investigative reporter’ presentation – stage 1 of the design process: Stating the problem/framing the opportunity.

Week 13-14: Ben’s Worklessness case study April 28, 2009

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The Live | Work case study that Ben Fullerton showed at the end of week 13 is neatly summarized here. Download the pdf at the end of that article to see how the customer journey becomes the organizing framework for the whole presentation: It recurs not only to set the context of the audience experience, but also as a place to situate all the existing organizations, and map one person’s experience through phases of progress.

Week 13: The Assignment – A Go Bag for NYC’s Recently LaidOff April 23, 2009

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In weeks 12-13, you were assigned the task of conceiving and designing a Go Bag for the Recently Laid-Off. Instead of a bag full of products for surviving a physically situated emergency, you were asked to consider the suite of services this user group in NYC might want to access as the economic crisis affects them personally – to weather the experience of a different kind of disaster from immediate shock, through response, recovery and stability. In pairs, you each had a role and related task - investigative reporter, client issuing an RFI from the City agency, creative strategists specifying a brief, designers detailing aspects of the system, Area Man users giving feedback about your experiences, an economic historian of the future interpreting artifacts of this service retrospectively. You presented in a sequence that matched the design process lifecycle: Discovery, Definition, Design, Detailing, Documenting.  

In week 13, we were delighted to welcome Ben Fullerton, erstwhile employee of Live | Work and now at IDEO in San Francisco. Together, Ben and I played good cop and good cop. We were seriously impressed with your presentations, and ideas. You all rose to the five day challenge, raising a white board’s worth of questions about public space and design methods. It was an excellent way to try out some rapid conceptual prototyping and draw on the secondary resources and the methodological frameworks we’ve encountered this semester. In the final week, we’ll find a way to gather everyone’s material to tell a coherent summary of the project to the readers of Urban Omnibus, taking SDPS to new audiences.

SDPS food for thought April 14, 2009

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This semester I have been meditating upon themes of urban mentality, emotional life in the city; the shaping of cities and probably most importantly the idea of designer as agency.  Because of this, I chose the latest reading Natural Capitalism, and the 5D’s of design methodology based on our discussion of IDEO’s design approach, as the two things that have had the most influence on me personally.  The idea that as designers we can become instruments of creative change, is one that is empowering and forward thinking at the same time; and that in order to embody a more efficient, successful and evolving framework, we can offer more than just products is simply smart.  This idea in relationship to the urban environment can be translated in a myriad of ways.  Eliminating muda, or waste, from our workflow is definitive in the shaping of cities that will in turn shape the way that we look at our own work on a smaller scale.  Why should we not work towards creating “Smart Cities” that are efficient in its production and customizable in their services?  IDEO has it right with a design methodology that is looking at the situation from all perspectives and experiences as a means to subvert traditional modes of practice.  I believe this is especially relevant in today’s economic times, in which the need for developing products and services that address the inherent needs of our society on a deeper level rather than beyond the superficial is especially important.

In my own work, this need has influenced the way I am thinking about people’s emotional attachments to objects in my Computational Cameras class and the Dérive time clock that I developed for my Flash of Flash class which tells time according to changes in the urban environment.

Week 12: Gems about public space all over the blogspace April 13, 2009

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Thanks to Nobu and Ari for some great resources this week:Ideo’s Urban Pre-Planning methodology, featured in a Fall 2007 issue of Metropolis, here.The Geography of Buzz. Our friends at the Spatial Information Design Lab looking at LA/NY glamor – from Million Dollar Blocks to…million dollar frocks…wahhh.My review of Postopolis LA, in conversation with Alissa WalkerAnd, as promised, City of Sound has transcribed the excellent talk by Ben Bratton, from Postopolis LA. 

service design for public space April 10, 2009

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I chose the Georg Simmel chapter from the Metropolis and Mental Life as my most influential piece of reading from this semester.  Simmel helped me articulate my interest in observing people as a way of understanding the way technology works with people and vice versa, without focusing on or fetishizing the technology itself.

The most useful diagram/ tool for thinking for me has been the 13 points  for urban strategies as outlined in Iain Borden’s article “The Good Life”.  I think Borden has selected very integral and core positive qualities of the urban life that we as urban dwellers can use as tactics to be used on a daily basis  or even integrate into  long term strategies  to ameliorate our environment. His point taken on integrating play into our daily environment has been a critical aspect of a project for my Design Expo class.

SDPS Synthesis April 7, 2009

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Reading – Galison, War Against the Center
Tool For Thought – The IDEO Way

I chose Galison and IDEO because they embody both ends of a spectrum upon which I situate my past work and what I hope to accomplish in the future.  The relationship between information and the physical planning and layout of space – the intersection of the built and mediated environments – is one I find endlessly fascinating, and the Galison reading captures how a statistical reality could overly-determine the layout and design of a physical reality, and it illuminates precisely why my interests as a designer have focused upon information ecologies.  The IDEO way inspires my thinking and process in considering how to design around information while keeping its impact on the built environment in mind.  It not only builds a structure around the design process that allows for an inductive approach to solving design problems, but emphasizes the need for building in addition to thinking, or more importantly as a tool for thinking. 

These two areas inspire me to look for meaningful pieces of information that dramatically impact one’s experience of and relation to physical space – an issue that takes central focus in two projects I’m working on this semester for Design for Unicef and Networked Objects respectively.

Free Fresh Kills Site Tours March 20, 2009

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I found out from someone who works for the landscape architecture office Field Operations  that  that NYC Parks Department  gives free tours of the Fresh Kills site in Staten Island. I found this exciting because I have an odd fascination with Staten Island (and its free ferry).

Free Tours of Fresh Kills!

You just sign up ahead of time. They pick you up from the station the day of the tour. I’m going on Saturday, April 4 in the afternoon if anyone wants to join me!

Timothy “Speed” Levitch on the NYC Grid March 3, 2009

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Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s beautiful, poetic, incoherent and often quite insane rhapsodies are works of art in and of themselves. He has a way of describing the most indescribable aspects of living in this city, with a sense of timelessness that seems impossible to replicate. Somehow he is able to identify persistent truths about New York, even as the ground shifts under him (and the enormous double-decker tour bus underscores this as a metaphor). A documentary on his tour-giving days, “The Cruise” shows him in his absolute best element: out on the streets and left unbridled. In this video, he discusses the grid system in a way that is just incredibly compelling in its peculiarity. I can honestly say that growing up in this city, I had never once thought of abandoning the grid system in favor of something else. (Sorry for the lack of embedded video… blocked by YouTube) 

Open Source and Public Space February 3, 2009

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Building on the Low and Smith reading from this week, Wired has an interesting article on Mark Gorton‘s idea to bring the open source movement to urban planning (and thus public space). Gorton is one of the founders of Limewire, the unstable and ever-annoying P2P network, but he is also the single largest supporter of Transportation Alternatives, the New York-based transit advocacy organization. TA is a great organization, largely responsible for the increased presence of protected and/or highly visible bike lanes in the city, among other initiatives.

Gorton started The Open Planning Project (TOPP) in 1999 as an exploratory project to see how open source tools could improve public services, especially in the area of transportation. They have some interesting projects worth checking out, including Grand Army Plaza.

This is an interview with Gorton from Streetfilms.org, a great site dedicated to chronicling novel planning solutions.