Detroit Tiny Houses

Posts Tagged ‘Design’

Detroit Tiny Houses

Thursday, September 14th, 2023

Photos by Sarah Rice for NYT

The New York Times has an interesting piece about tiny houses being used to house people in need in Detroit. The houses are all different, and rented in a rent-to-own model that eventually end up being owned entirely by the occupants:

Gladys Ferguson, who is in her 60s and has severe arthritis, rents Cass’s yellow gabled house for $350 a month. (Seven years of her accumulated rent will eventually finance her outright purchase of the property.) “It’s just a gorgeous little thing,” she said. When she first entered the house for a preview, shortly before she moved in a few years ago, she sneaked away for a nap in the tucked-away bedroom. “That was the most serene thing you’ve ever seen,” she said.

While I don’t think this is the sort of solution that would be ideal in Montréal, which needs its own housing needs addressed through denser apartments, I appreciate that it’s a good solution for a sprawl-ier city like Detroit.

Read the Full Article Here →

Jockey Cap Map

Thursday, August 24th, 2023

While on a very short hike during my vacation last week, I ran across a very simple, and very clever sculpture (for lack of a better word) at the top of a small hill. At first, I thought it was just a plaque on an elaborate stand, until I got closer…

It was a map of sorts. A 3D bronze representation, erected in 1938, of all the surrounding hills and peaks (it was just foggy enough for Mount Washington to not register on camera). A very simple idea, and a good reward for a short 20-minute hike.

Book: Mismatch, How Inclusion Shapes Design

Wednesday, August 16th, 2023

The central thesis of this book is that designers should look at disabilities not as health conditions, but instead as mismatches between the designer and those the designers are creating for. Mismatches come in a lot of forms, and can play out as physical, mental, or cultural.

A good example from early in the book deals with how men and women learn to use software in different ways. Researchers at The GenderMag identified a spectrum of ways that humans learn how to use software. One end was a guided approach, either from a human or the software itself. On the other end was to jump in and learn by trial and error. Users were interviewed and placed on this spectrum.

Writes Holmes:

The research showed that people who identified as women distributed relatively evenly across this spectrum. There was a wide range of learning styles that different women used when learning new software. People who identified as men, however, clustered heavily toward the end of the spectrum for tinkering and troubleshooting solutions.

This is an important distinction, and something that is easy to miss if there is a mismatch between software developers and the people who use our software.

One last great anecdote I wanted to share from this book that really stuck with me involves the United States Air Force research of pilot dimensions in order to better design airplane cockpits, which shows how sometimes designing for everyone can end up designing for nobody:

In the 1940s, the first fighter jets were designed to fit the average pilot. The USAF measured hundreds of bodily dimensions across thousands of pilots and used the averages of that data to design the instruments of the flight deck, or cockpit.

Every feature of that flight deck was fixed in place, without adjustability. The assumption was that any individual pilot could adjust himself to overcome the gap in reaching any element of the fight deck that wasn’t a perfect fit for him.

However, the Air Force was experiencing a high rate of crashes that couldn’t be attributed to mechanical failure or pilot error. A lieutenant and researcher, Gilbert Daniels, studied just ten of those human dimensions that were used in the design of the original fight deck. He measured four thousand pilots to confirm how many of them fit all ten dimensions.

The answer was zero.

The Problem with Plastic

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2023

Information is Beautiful highlights this informative little infographic showing just how little of humanity’s plastic waste is actually recycled. I always knew recycling rates were small, but this chart shows just how minuscule it really is.

Link →

Daring Fireball on Microsoft's New Fonts

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

John Gruber of tech/Apple blog Daring Fireball has a nice rundown of Aptos, Microsoft’s upcoming default font for its Office apps.

What I find weird about the whole thing is that Microsoft still hasn’t really shown any of these new fonts. They’ve provided glimpses of them, but mostly at large display sizes, not text sizes, which is where they really matter in the context of Office documents. I’m not the only one to find this curious.

So I took matters into my own hands, and created rudimentary specimens for each of Microsoft’s five new typefaces

All are better than Arial. I don’t use office, but as Gruber says:

it’s impossible not to encounter documents created with Office, whether you personally use it or not. Thus, Microsoft’s typographic choices affect us all.

The Impossible Map by Evelyn Lambart

Wednesday, July 5th, 2023

For the second day in a row I’m posting an old favourite by NFB legend Evelyn Lambart. This time it’s The Impossible Map, one of my favourite explanations of how map projections work using fruit and vegetables. Simple but effective.

The Sublime Title Screens of Evelyn Lambart

Tuesday, July 4th, 2023

Canada’s National Film Board has helped create many wonderful films over its long history. In 2020 I hosted an event in collaboration with the NFB to show films and host a discussion about legendary animator Norman McLaren. I want to talk about one of his frequent collaborators, Evelyn Lambart. Specifically, I want to highlight her tremendous title cards and wonderful lettering.

The bulk of her films were created using stop motion of paper cut outs, laid out on a black table and filmed from the top. Her title cards were absolutely gorgeous—colourful, playful. Each title links to the films, which are mostly beautifully rendered versions of simple folk songs or fairy tales.

Lambart was born in Ottawa in 1914, and was active making films with the NFB from 1943 until 1977. Each of these title cards links to versions of the films you can watch for free.

Book: Symbol Sourcebook

Wednesday, June 28th, 2023

This book, assembled by Henry Dreyfuss and team for original publishing in 1972, is a really great design resource. It’s a fairly exhaustive collection of different visual symbols used in all sorts of industries. Think of it as a sort of Noun Project but in book form.

As well as being a reference for everything from nautical flags to hobo symbols, it also recounts how some symbols have changed over the years, such as this excellent grid of evolving Olympic symbols:

The back of the book contains a wonderful index of symbols from all sources organized by rough shape:

But perhaps my favourite part of the edition I bought is the exuberant introduction by one Buckminster Fuller, which he concludes with:

Henry Dreyfuss’ contribution to a new world technique of communication will catalyze a world preoccupation with its progressive evolution into a worldian language so powerfully generalizes as to swiftly throw into obsolescence the almost fatally lethal trends of humanity’s age-long entrapment in specializations and the limitations that specialization imposes upon human thinking. Thus humans can be liberated to use their own cosmically powerful faculties to communicate what needs to be done in local Universe, as humans are uniquely capable of doing – and uniquely advantaged to do – by the phenomenon love and the truthfully thinking mind.

Purchase Here →

On Buckminster Fuller's Exuberance

Monday, June 26th, 2023

As I touched on in my post about Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook, Buckminster Fuller, the designer of the above-pictured Expo 67 American Pavilion here in Montréal, was a big character. I recently ran into the following passages about him in a thrifted book This Was Expo, about Montréal’s Expo 67:

He once had an idea for an apartment building that would be put in its place by a dirigible. The building would be made of lightweight alloys and the floors of it would be hung from a great mast. A dirigible would pick up the whole building and take it to where it was needed. First the dirigible would drop a bomb – that’s right, a bomb – which would create a hole in the ground for the mast. Then the dirigible would put the building in place and fly away. A ground crew would pour concrete around the mast to secure it. And everybody’s housing problem would be solved.

This is someone who does not shy away from big ideas. It continues later:

On this day he was talking, as usual, about his ideas and about the future of mankind. “Because I’m in research,” he was saying, “I’m on the frontiers of man.” He looked around at the fair outside, through the transparent walls of the dome. “We are all going into world man,” he said. And for a moment, under the spell of his genial intensity, Expo seemed an important moment in world history and “world man” indeed a possibility. But then perhaps all moments seem important to those in Bucky Fuller’s company.

In a 1972 interview, Bucky allegedly said:

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth again: The whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. It takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole ship of state is going to turn around. So I said, ‘Call me Trim Tab.’

And he believed in this small idea of leverage enough that he put it on his tombstone.