Elsewhat

Yesterday I attended a talk at The Canadian Centre for Architecture given by members of HouseEurope!, an organization of architects pushing for laws which will encourage the renovation/restoration/adaptation of buildings using pre-used materials where possible as opposed to demolition and rebuilding from scratch.

They make some bold claims about the benefits of renovation:

↗︎ Renovation saves homes by keeping prices stable.
↗︎ Renovation saves jobs by boosting local markets.
↗︎ Renovation saves energy by preserving what is there.
↗︎ Renovation saves history by valuing the existing.

The organization pushes for tax and zoning reform to encourage renovation over demolition. Something we could use over here as well.

The New Yorker writes up one of my favourite iPhone apps, Halide, and goes into depth about the aesthetics of phone photographs. Cue the Brian Eno quote:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit—all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

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Via Rafa

This book follows the history of what is commonly referred to as user experience (or UX) design. The book both chronicles the history of UX, and describes how we arrived at the current state of the design industry (warts and all).

I particularly liked this passage discussing how accessibility in design has lead directly to innovation:

You sit at the end of a long line of inventions that might never have existed but for people with disabilities: the keyboard on your phone, the telecommunications lines it connects with, the inner workings of email. In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter so that his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters more legibly. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf. And in 1972, Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent internet. He believed fervently in the power of electronic letters, because electronic messaging was the best way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work.

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When I saw the title of this book, written by fellow Montréaler Kevin Yuen Kit Lo of LOKI, I know I had to go to the book launch and read it. The description says it well: “Design Against Design argues for the urgent necessity of critical engagement and political resistance through graphic practice.”

The book is a clear reflection of its author—socially conscious, antiestablishment, anticapitalist, and with a punk aesthetic in its visuals and politics. It’s also deeply personal, and begins with a vivid account of childhood abuse, which may turn some people off. You know from the first chapter that it’s not a beach read.

Design Against Design was great, evoking some other great socially-conscious design writers like Victor Papanek and Mike Monteiro. It’s not meant to go down easy.

Order the Book Here →

The above is a photo I took of a formerly empty lot in Montréal, upon which has been built a thriving temporary space. It has the above gazebo, benches galore, picnic tables, and a free mini gold course. It isn’t built to last—instead it’s built to test out having a park in that spot. It’s taking unused space and giving it a use, commonly known as ‘tactical urbanism’.

Montréal, more than any other North American city I’ve seen, really uses its public space. Kids play. Old people walk and sit on the benches or play pétanque. Young people go at night to drink beer, hang out, and flirt. Our parks are full from morning to late at night. More and more streets are being closed temporarily to cars, and replaced with benches, terraces, games, and art installations. Lots or formerly empty spaces are being filled with spaces for all ages to gather. It’s a wonderful way to try things out, see what people use, and adapt for longer use later.

As this article in Arch Daily puts it:

The intent behind meanwhile spaces is to grow innovative ideas and empower the local community. Through interventions such as meeting areas, learning and training spaces, pop-up shops, eateries and exhibitions, urban areas and their communities witness positive transformation. The lease may last anywhere between a few days to a few years. The impact on localities may last up to a lifetime.

I love this tiny house designed by Japanese artist Zajirogh and his wife. The house is centred around a courtyard which can open to the sky. Extra points for showing the house without being staged like in an architecture magazine.

A cute little piece of design. This is a self-propelled phonograph, which runs on tracks embedded with music, by Japanese artist Yuri Suzuki. Taken at the SF Moma Art of Noise exhibit.

Built in the 1950s to test a rather ambitious plan to build a series of dams across large parts of San Francisco Bay, the Bay Model is an impressive, multi-acre scale model of most of the lower part of watershed. The model found that the plan was extremely flawed, and would likely cause extensive flash floods, but it lived on as laboratory to study the movement of water in the region until the early 2000s, when computer modelling became feasible.

The model was built with three different scales, with the vertical depth being exaggerated in order to improve the accuracy of depth measurements, and the scale of time on the model condensing the tide cycle down to under 15 minutes.

We unfortunately visited it when the water was not flowing, but there is a great little summary by Tom Scott:

This is an old oil tank converted into a great looking public space.

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Years and years ago I designer a weather app called Skyline. Little of it exists on the internet anymore, but the core idea of the app was to present an hourly forecast as a series of icons which would rise and fall with the temperature, giving you an easy-to-read graph of the day ahead. I don’t believe we were the first to ever present a daily forecast this way, we were the first I know of to package a whole app around it.

App developer Carrot recently launched a new version of their Carrot Weather app, which has what I consider the best version of this concept yet, and the best overall weather app I know of for iPhone or iPad (it also runs on newer Macs, though it’s a bit less good there). It’s got good data, presented well, and it looks pretty.

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