1. the design observer playlist

prss release #07
,april 20 2008
the independent paper blog aggregator
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
the design observer playlist | design observer
two minutes and 42 seconds in heaven | the morning news
japan’s cyborg research enters the skull | pink tentacle
paris, invisible city | pasta&vinegar
the new oases | the economist
will your isp f you in the a? bandwidth hogs beware | gizmodo
unravelling the spaghetti | david barrie
pulp fiction, as performed by the king’s men | metaquotes
after the deluge, the farm | pruned
ikea decks out kobe train | pink tentacle
i.
illustration | annemarie
female reproductive system (series female anatomy cross section cross stitch), by Christa Rowley
http://www.craftster.org/pictures/data/500/medium/reprosystemxstitch.jpg
www.prss-release.org
1. The Design Observer Playlist
coffee machine? There is no shortage of theories about the way music
influences behaviour. It began with Pythagoras and his discovery of the
music of the spheres, and can be found today in such disparate musicological thinking as Brian Eno’s theories of ambient music, and in the
way institutions are using classical music to reduce violent behaviour
in public places. Music’s ability to act as a sedative has long been know
to medical science, as are the mesmeric effects of music as a means of
inducing heightened states of emotion.
For me, I need music pretty much constantly. Having given up studio
life in favour of working on my own, I gravitate towards introspective,
trance-like music. This can be anything from Morton Feldman to Harold
Budd. From late-period Coltrane to the latest backwoods drone rock.
From Nordic electronica to exotic soundtracks. My only stipulation is
that it has to be music without words: lyrics distract. Other than that,
anything goes.
I’ve never worked in a design studio where music wasn’t played pretty
much constantly. Nor can I recall visiting a studio where music wasn’t
being played, or where designers weren’t wired up to headphones and
bobbing rhythmically to unheard sounds. What is it with graphic designers and music? Is there a symbiotic relationship between the two? Are
there studios where music is considered a hindrance? Or does music aid
creative thinking and make us better designers?
When I launched my own studio in 1989 my first purchase was a CD
player. With five or six people all in the same room, we had music playing all the time. I’d just come from a studio where the radio was tuned
to London’s main commercial station. British commercial radio in the
1980s was dire – it hasn’t got any better, last time I checked – but somehow we learned to live with what the poet Simon Armitage has called the
“tinnitus” of pop radio. Thinking back though, I can remember hearing
Kraftwerk tracks amongst the wall-to-wall, synth-drum induced nausea
of Billy Idol and Bananarama, so perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I remember
it.
To provide a round the clock soundtrack for the new studio, we even had
a CD budget. But it was rarely used because people preferred to bring in
their own music, which resulted in a low-cholesterol diet of The Pixies
and Brit indie shoegazers like Ride, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, and
the Cocteau Twins. My own preference at the time was for David Sylvian
(a taste I still have) but I could only play his lachrymose balladry when
my business partner left the building. “Boys music,” she said, witheringly.
As the studio grew to around 10 or 12 people, it became harder to get
agreement on what should be played: arguments erupted and factions fought over control of the CD player. We had a leather-jacketed
artworker who was obsessed with guitar wizards like Yngwe Malmsteen.
It wasn’t easy to accommodate his musical tastes, but he was a good
artworker so he was given the CD remote from time to time – usually
when I needed him to work all night.
We had another growth spurt in personnel in the late-1990s (to around
20 people) and that meant the end of any sort of musical consensus. Not
that it mattered, because this was now the era of the personal CD player
and it became normal to see nearly every designer in the studio wearing
headphones.
Today, the headphone-clad designer locked into his or her own audio
bubble is a familiar sight. Graphic designers it seems like music and
abhor silence. But is it possible to claim that music contributes more to
the creative output of a studio than, say, comfortable chairs and a good
So, let’s try a bit of blog based research here. Let’s try and find out what
Design Observer readers are listening to, and build up our own blog
playlist. I’m predicting a mixed bag, with not very much Yngwe Malmsteen. But I could be wrong.
I’ll set the ball rolling. I’ve currently got Eric Dolphy’s deathless Out to
Lunch playing. What about you?
Design Observer
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/035704.html
by Adrian Shaughnessy on April 18, 2008
2. Two Minutes and 42 Seconds
in Heaven
I am a very busy and important man. I don’t need to tell you this. The
shit I have to deal with every day would make your pubes turn white.
Check it: While dictating that last sentence I did something complicated
in Excel and pleasured my ex-wife the way that makes her cry and call
her mother. OK?
Terrific. Point is, I’m all about maximum efficiency. E.g., I use “e.g.”
instead of for example. It’s just faster, and classier.
I schedule 35 minutes a day for recreation. That’s all I need to refresh
myself from the rigors of punching holes through the guts of this world.
Recreation typically consists of lifting something heavy or posting a
new sonnet to my blog. But sometimes I want to unwind with a fine
carafe of Popov and some good tunes on the hi-fi. I yearn to—in the
words of Boston—lose myself in a familiar song, close my eyes, and slip
awaaaaaaaaaaaay.
Here’s the problem: “More Than a Feeling” is four minutes and 47 fucking seconds long. I don’t have time for that kind of nonsense. That’s,
like, one-seventh of my recreation right there.
Don’t get me wrong, slugger. I love “More Than a Feeling.” Those who
don’t are your basic a-holes. But it’s like: We get it. The riff, the handclaps, the 10,000 multi-tracked guitars—nice. But then there’s another
verse and another chorus and infinity more solos and just a really ridiculous amount of balderdash.
My scientists told me that the perfect song length had to be closer to
three minutes than two, but definitely shorter than three minutes. Three
minutes is where bloat starts to set in. I know what you’re thinking.
You’re just that transparent. You’re thinking: “B-b-but you need time to
let the song work its magic! You gotta soak in it! You need to ride those
waves of pleasure again and again, climbing to the absolute climax at
3:39 when—just when you think the song can’t get any more intense—
the singer takes that note even higher and you are transported to blah,
blah, blah,” and I stop listening.
C’mon, cousin. Boston could’ve easily transported you to wherever you
needed to go in two and a half minutes. Your world would be rocked just
as thoroughly—but in half the time.
This epiph launched a whole in-depth study on the ideal song length.
The research was privately funded by an organization that shall remain
nameless but rhymes with Schmustin Schmimberlake, Ltd.
My starting assumption: I knew the best songs were short and to the
point. But exactly how short and how pointed?
There is such a thing as too short, of course. Songs that just take up
space there on the LP, a fragment that no one bothered to make work,
or, God forbid, a mood piece or studio experiment or some other variety
of half-assery. No, what I needed were full-fledged songs—intro, verses,
choruses, solos, maybe even a breakdown.
My scientists told me that the perfect song length had to be closer to
three minutes than two, but definitely shorter than three minutes. Three
minutes is where bloat starts to set in. Where the band thinks: Hey, let’s
do the chorus seven times. Hey, let’s give the saxophone guy a real moment to shine on this one. Hey, let’s add another bridge.
Just look at what clocks in between two and a half and three minutes:
“Mr. Tambourine Man,” “We Got the Beat,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Hot Fun
in the Summertime,” “Good Times Bad Times,” “I Would Die 4 U,” “Paranoid,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Debaser,” “God Only Knows,” and “Fall
on Me.” These are not only stone-cold classics but they also encapsulate
all that is great about the band without wasting your goddamn time.
then gets the hell out of your life.
Compare that to “With a Little Help From My Friends.” It’s a mere two
seconds longer but feels like it drags on for hours. Maybe it’s Ringo,
maybe it’s the tedious melody—or maybe it’s the two goddamn seconds.
Then over here we have “Good Morning Good Morning,” rightfully discarded by the masses as a throwaway. Why? Two minutes, 41 seconds.
Hey, Beatles, maybe next time think about tacking on an extra second to
give a song the grandeur and majesty it deserves.
OK, my point here is stop wasting your life. I know nobody lives day to
day with the ruthless intensity that I do—thank your lucky stars—but
I’m sure some of you out there do something valuable with your time.
Maybe you do the landscaping at my club’s golf course or prepare the
crab legs at my club’s restaurant. Either way, stop frittering away the
precious moments of your life on two minutes and 47 seconds of “The
Safety Dance.”
Can’t believe I blew half my recreation time telling you this. Audi 5K.
the Morning News
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/oped/two_minutes_
and_42_seconds_in_heaven.php
by Joshua Allen on April 16, 2008
3. Japan’s cyborg research
enters the skull
The scientists then dug up this song by a group that pretty much defines
one-hit wonder: the La’s. The song is “There She Goes,” and is so
flawless that it instantly made everything else the band did pointless.
This ditty is two minutes and 42 seconds, and is all about songwriting
economy.
I listened to it and said, in my rich and sonorous timbre, in my typically
concise and absolutely-nailing-it fashion: “Here is a song that has everything I need and nothing I don’t.”
The main riff acts as the intro. The verses are the chorus. The solo is 100
percent fat-free and leads right into a tidy bridge. And then we’re back
where we started. It’s like some ingenious IKEA futon or Japanese love
hotel where every component is doing double-duty. When “There She
Goes” is over, I guarantee absolutely no one in the room goes: “Jesus,
finally.”
I’d hit upon the perfect song length. I fist-bumped somebody.
What else is at 2:42? “Don’t Do Me Like That” by Tom Petty. “Divine
Hammer” by the Breeders. “Helplessly Hoping” by Crosby, Stills &
Nash. “Get Up” by R.E.M. “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the
Papas. “This Charming Man” by the Smiths.
You need more proof? Jerk. Let’s look at Sgt. Pepper. “Lovely Rita” is
two minutes, 42 seconds. It delivers that psychedelic vibe and a coda but
Researchers at Osaka University are stepping up efforts to develop
robotic body parts controlled by thought, by placing electrode sheets
directly on the surface of the brain. Led by Osaka University Medical
School neurosurgery professor Toshiki Yoshimine, the research marks
Japan’s first foray into invasive (i.e. requiring open-skull surgery)
brain-machine interface research on human test subjects. The aim of the
research is to develop real-time mind-controlled robotic limbs for the
disabled, according to an announcement made at an April 16 symposium in Aichi prefecture.
Although brain waves can be measured from outside the scalp, a stronger, more accurate signal can be obtained by placing sensors directly
on the brain — but that requires open-skull surgery, making it more
difficult to recruit volunteer test subjects.
The researchers, who have filed a license application with the Osaka
University Hospital ethics board, are working to enlist willing subjects
already scheduled to have brain electrodes implanted for the purpose of
monitoring epilepsy or other conditions. The procedure, which does not
involve puncturing the cortex, places an electrode sheet at the central
sulcus, a fold across the center of the brain near the primary motor cor-
tex (which is responsible for planning and executing movements).
To date, the researchers have worked with four test subjects to record
brain wave activity generated as they move their arms, elbows and
fingers. Working with Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), the researchers have developed a method for
analyzing the brain waves to determine the subject’s intended activity
to an accuracy of greater than 80%. The next step is to use the data to
control robot arms developed by the University of Tokyo’s Department
of Precision Engineering.
Pink Tentacle
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/04/japan-cyborg-research-entersthe-skull/
by Edo on April 17, 2008
4. Paris, invisible city
Finally managed to read the oversized Paris ville invisible book by Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998). The whole thing is an amazing
photographic essay on the “social” and technical aspects of the city of
Paris (”social” in Latour’s sense). It’s a bit like Susan Star’s article called
The Ethnography of Infrastructure but definitely in Latour’s words
(and yes it’s definitely french). There is also a web version, defined as “a
sociological web opera”.
For this post, I am mostly concerned by the notion of traces, their visibility and their implications. An important part of the book is about
various “channels of signifiers”: from collected data like temperature or
time to their computation by intermediaries (sensors, computers) and
the map and model outputs employed by institutions such as telecom
operators or police departments
“Megalomaniacs confuse the map and the territory and think they
can dominate all of Paris just because they do, indeed, have all of Paris
before their eyes. Paranoiacs confuse the territory and the map and
think they are dominated, observed, watched, just because a blind
person absent-mindedly looks at some obscure signs in a four-by-eight
metre room in a secret place. Both take the cascade of transformations for information, and twice they miss that which is gained and
that which is lost in the jump from trace to trace – the former on the
way down, the latter on the way up. Rather imagine two triangles, one
fitted into the other: the base of the first, very large, gets smaller as one
moves up to the acute angle at the top: that’s the loss; the second one,
upside down in the first, gets progressively bigger from the point to the
base: that’s the gain. If we want to represent the social, we have to get
used to replacing all the double-click information transfers by cascades
of transformations. To be sure, we’ll lose the perverted thrill of the
megalomaniacs and the paranoiacs, but the gain will be worth the loss.
(…)
The more information spreads and the more we can track our
attachments to others, since everywhere cables, forms, plugs, sensors, exchangers, translators, bridges, packets, modems, platforms
and compilers become visible and expensive – with the price tag still
attached to them. the reader will perhaps forgive us for our myopic
obsession with the trails of traces“
About how to reveal the invisible and the role of this book:
“the visible is never in an isolated image or in something outside of
images, but in the montage of images, a transformation of images, a
cross-cutting view, a progression, a formatting, a networking.
(…)
In photos and text we’ve attempted to highlight the role of the countless intermediaries who participate in the coexistence of millions of Parisians. In the series of transformations that we followed with myopic
obsession, we would have liked to have kept each step, each notch, each
stage, so that the final result could never abolish, absorb or replace the
series of humble mediators that alone give it its meaning and scope. “
Why do I blog this? The book is a very intriguing read for anyone interested in contemporary cities and their underlying activities/infrastructures. If you liked Italo Calvino’s “invisible cities”, that book written by
Latour (with pictures from Emilie Hermant) is a must read. The notion
of traces described here is very Latour-ian to some extent and it’s interesting how he uses it to describe what happens in a contemporary city
such as Paris. What I find relevant here is this idea of “intermediaries”
and the observation of the transformation he discusses.
Some excerpts from an english translation by Liz Carey-Libbrecht:
If you’ve read Dan Hill’s post “The Street as a Platform”, that book is a
theoretical exploration of the issue of technologies in city space. There
is of course much more to draw from this book, which I will explore in
following blogposts.
Pasta&Vinegar
http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2008/04/14/paris-invisible-city/
by Nicolas Nova at April 14, 2008
5. The new oases
Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic
FRANK GEHRY, a celebrity architect, likes to cause aesthetic controversy, and his Stata Centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) did the trick. Opened in 2004 and housing MIT’s computerscience and philosophy departments behind its façade of bizarre angles
and windows, it has become a new Cambridge landmark. But the building’s most radical innovation is on the inside. The entire structure was
conceived with the nomadic lifestyles of modern students and faculty in
mind. Stata, says William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT who worked with Mr Gehry on the centre’s design,
was conceived as a new kind of “hybrid space”.
This is best seen in the building’s “student street”, an interior passage
that twists and meanders through the complex and is open to the public
24 hours a day. It is dotted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and lounges
are interspersed with work desks and whiteboards, and there is free
Wi-Fi everywhere. Students, teachers and visitors are cramming for
exams, flirting, napping, instant-messaging, researching, reading and
discussing. No part of the student street is physically specialised for any
of these activities. Instead, every bit of it can instantaneously become
the venue for a seminar, a snack or romance.
The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions
such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a
huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such
as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand
for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc
workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in
architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about
specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so
forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such
as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the
economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles.
The new architecture, says Mr Mitchell, will “make spaces intentionally
multifunctional”. This means that 21st-century aesthetics will probably
be the exact opposite of the sci-fi chic that 20th-century futurists once
imagined. Architects are instead thinking about light, air, trees and
gardens, all in the service of human connections. Buildings will have
much more varied shapes than before. For instance, people working
on laptops find it comforting to have their backs to a wall, so hybrid
spaces may become curvier, with more nooks, in order to maximise the
surface area of their inner walls, rather as intestines do. This is becoming affordable because computer-aided design and new materials make
non-repetitive forms cheaper to build.
Who needs a desk?
The effect already reaches far beyond university campuses and is causing upheaval in the commercial-property industry. Debra Moritz, a
director at Jones Lang LaSalle, a firm that helps companies to manage
their office buildings and consults on property investments, says that
the total area devoted to traditional office space has begun to decline,
although slowly. This is because “inefficiency is more obvious as workers
become mobile,” she says. According to Jones Lang LaSalle’s research,
workers are at their desks, on average, less than 40% of their time (Ms
Moritz ditched her own desk long ago). This does not mean that office
space will drop by 60%. But it does mean that office designers are thinking about using space better.
There will be more “on-demand spaces” and “drop-in centres”, says
Ms Moritz, with flexible layouts that facilitate collaboration. Within a
typical office building, the area devoted to solitary work, such as the
cubicles immortalised in Dilbert cartoons, will shrink. Internal walls
and furniture are becoming movable. More space is given to communal
areas, some of which are distinguished not by their function but by their
etiquette—loud or quiet, say—as in libraries.
A particularly striking example, bordering on caricature, is the so-called
Googleplex, the headquarters of Google in Mountain View, California.
Naturally it has Wi-Fi coverage. But the Googleplex is famous for its
good and free victuals, doled out at food courts throughout the sprawling campus, and for the casual mixture of play and work. Over here
a software engineer is writing some code on his laptop, sweaty in his
workout clothes from the volleyball game in progress on the lawn. Over
there another one is zipping along on a scooter, heading for a massage
or going to pick up his laundry from the onsite service. Google even extends this workspace, virtually, throughout the entire San Francisco Bay
Area by running a fleet of commuter shuttles, all of which have Wi-Fi on
board to allow uninterrupted coding.
Some traditional property developers are drawing inspiration from
this sort of thing. Nomadism is “not good for the office industry” as
such, concedes Robert Dykstra, who has been developing commercial
property for 27 years. He, however, has spotted an opportunity. His new
office park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a dilapidated city that hopes to
take some service-sector jobs from nearby Chicago and Detroit, is unlike
any traditional office and “more like a community centre”. Instead of
renting to corporate tenants, says Mr Dykstra, he plans to sell memberships as a club does—by the hour, week or month—to nomads dropping
by. Mobile workers come in, find all the services they might need—from
tech support to copying—and satisfy their needs for “work, love and
play” as well, with the aid of fitness studios, restaurants, cooking classes
and music rooms.
This “flexibility is what separates successful spaces and cities from
unsuccessful ones,” says Anthony Townsend, an urban planner at the
Institute for the Future, a think-tank. Almost any public space can
assume some of the features of a Googleplex or a Stata Centre. For
example, a not-for-profit organisation in New York has turned Bryant
Park, a once-derelict but charming garden in front of the city’s public
library, into a hybrid space popular with office workers. The park’s managers noticed that a lot of visitors were using mobile phones and laptops
in the park, so they installed Wi-Fi and added some chairs with foldable
lecture desks. The idea was not to distract people from the flowers but to
let them customise their little bit of the park.
Third places
The academic name for such spaces is “third places”, a term originally
coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book, “The Great,
Good Place”. At the time, long before mobile technologies became
widespread, Mr Oldenburg wanted to distinguish between the sociological functions of people’s first places (their homes), their second places
(offices) and the public spaces that serve as safe, neutral and informal
meeting points. As Mr Oldenburg saw it, a good third place makes admission free or cheap—the price of a cup of coffee, say—offers creature
comforts, is within walking distance for a particular neighbourhood and
draws a group of regulars. The eponymous bar in the television series
“Cheers”, “where everybody knows your name”, is an example.
Mr Oldenburg’s thesis was that third places were in general decline.
More and more people, especially in suburban societies such as
America’s, were moving only between their first and second places,
making extra stops only at alienating and anonymous locations such as
malls, which in Mr Oldenburg’s opinion fail as third places. Society, Mr
Oldenburg feared, was at risk of coming unstuck without these venues
for spreading ideas and forming bonds.
No sooner was the term coined than big business queued up to claim
that it was building new third places. The most prominent was Starbucks, a chain of coffee houses that started in Seattle and is now hard
to avoid anywhere. Starbucks admits that as it went global it lost its
ambiance of a “home away from home”. However, it has also spotted a
new opportunity in catering to nomads. Its branches offer not only sofas
but also desks with convenient electricity sockets. These days Starbucks makes bigger news when it switches Wi-Fi providers—it dropped
T-Mobile for AT&T in February—than when it sells a new type of coffee
bean. Bookshops such as Barnes & Noble are also offering “more coffee
and crumbs”, as Mr Oldenburg puts it, as are churches, YMCAs and
public libraries.
But do these oases for nomads actually play the social role of third
places? James Katz at Rutgers fears that cyber-nomads are “hollowing
them out”. It is becoming commonplace for a café to be full of people
with headphones on, speaking on their mobile phones or laptops and
hacking away at their keyboards, more engaged with their e-mail inbox
than with the people touching their elbows. These places are “physically
inhabited but psychologically evacuated”, says Mr Katz, which leaves
people feeling “more isolated than they would be if the café were merely
empty”. That is because the “physical presence of other human beings
is psychologically and neurologically arousing” but now produces no
reward. Quite simply, he says, we have not evolved biologically to be
happy in these situations.
Many café-owners are trying to deal with this problem. Christopher
Waters, the owner of the Nomad Café in Oakland, regularly hosts live
jazz and poetry readings, and actually turns off the Wi-Fi router at those
times so that people mingle more. He is also planning to turn his café
into an online social network so that patrons opening their browsers
to connect encounter a welcome page that asks them to fill out a short
profile—as they would on Facebook, say—and then see information
about the people at the other tables.
Most nomads are very open to this sort of thing. Technology aside, there
is not such a big difference between a geek with earphones and a laptop
today and a Paris existentialist watching the world go by at the café Les
Deux Magots in the 1950s. The first might be simultaneously instantmessaging, listening to music and e-mailing, the other puffing a Gitane
and jotting down notes about being and nothingness. But as soon as an
attractive new customer breezes in, both will instantaneously realign
their focus of interest.
As more third places pop up and spread, they also change entire cities.
Just as buildings during the 20th century were specialised by function,
towns were as well, says Mr Mitchell. Suburbs were for living, downtowns for working and other areas for playing. But urban nomadism
makes districts, like buildings, multifunctional. Parts of town that were
monocultures, he says, gradually become “fine-grained mixed-use
neighbourhoods” more akin in human terms to pre-industrial villages
than to modern suburbs.
Ms Moritz at Jones Lang LaSalle is already counting more offices leav-
ing suburbs entirely and moving back into downtowns, which tend to be
younger and hipper. This helps to revitalise city centres. Paul Saffo, the
forecaster, sees a simultaneous movement to “charismatic exurbs”, such
as Mendocino on the Californian coast or Cape Cod in Massachusetts,
where incoming nomads are building “consensual communities” with
lifestyles reminiscent of the Utopia movements of earlier times. The big
losers, Mr Saffo thinks, are the suburbs that were built for specific functions in a previous era but are now blighted.
The same trend is also changing traffic patterns. Alan Pisarski has been
researching urban movement for three decades and has written a series
of three books called “Commuting in America”—the first in 1986, the
others one and two decades later. He is now working on the fourth.
Thanks to the ten-year intervals, Mr Pisarski claims he has been able
to capture the biggest trends. In 1986, before the era of mobility and at
the dawn of the PC era, he still observed “the classic diurnal flow” of the
post-war commuting pattern, which had baby-boomers sitting in traffic
jams at 8am and 5pm between the suburbs and the downtowns. In 1996
he saw a new “circumferential pattern” as jobs shifted to the suburbs,
so the baby-boomers were now sitting in jams “on the beltways”. At
the same time he already noticed that the fastest-growing group was
telecommuters.
Things started looking very different in his 2006 book. Younger workers were now joining the baby-boomers in the workforce. Car trips had
stopped increasing and were even declining in cities such as Seattle, Atlanta and Portland. Traffic was still heavy but now spread out over much
longer periods, starting at 5am and lasting till noon, say. Bizarre new
patterns were cropping up, such as a “reverse commute” in Seattle as
lots of male computer scientists at Microsoft in the suburb of Redmond
raced downtown to find females—a weekday ritual called “the running of
the programmers”.
The current data, for use in the next book, are telling Mr Pisarski
something else again. The baby-boomers are starting to retire, forcing
employers to compete for new talent by letting younger employees work
wherever they please. Even the older workers are becoming nomadic
(Mr Pisarski himself is 70 and works from his BlackBerry and laptop).
Traffic congestion, though still bad, is for the first time not getting
worse. Car-pooling, which “green” city governments are still encouraging, is declining sharply as commuting times and directions are becoming more diverse and more complex.
Indeed, even though there are as many cars on the roads as ever, they
are now making very different journeys. In the previous decade trips
followed a “radial pattern”, says Mr Pisarski, as both office workers and
telecommuters ran errands away from their workplace and back again in
order to check their voice messages and faxes. Now people are making
trips in a “daisy-chain” pattern, he says. Nomads set off in the morning
to drop off the kids at school and then spend all day hopping from one
third place to another, with stops at the gym, the post office and so on.
Throughout the day they remain connected to colleagues and family
members who are elsewhere, and increasingly their movements form no
discernible collective pattern at all.
The Economist
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_
id=10950463
by the Economist, April 10, 2008
6. Will Your ISP F You In the A?
Bandwidth Hogs Beware
Comcast:
Here’s the statement we got pre-BT chumminess, though we now know
that Comcast is moving to a more management style that’ll temporarly
slow all traffic, whether it’s cracked copies of Final Cut Pro from your
favorite P2P or YouTube, to a drip during congestion:
We have a responsibility to provide all of our customers with a good
Internet experience and we use the latest technologies to manage our
network so that they can continue to enjoy these applications. During periods of heavy peer-to-peer congestion, which can degrade the
experience for all customers, we use several network management
technologies that, when necessary, enable us to delay—not block—some
peer-to-peer traffic.
When we pressed about filtering, we got:
As the amount of bandwidth we devour has skyrocketed, so has ISPs’
need to police our appetites, even as they offer more bandwidth to whet
it. We talked to the biggest ISPs around to get their official positions on
traffic management and content filtering to see what’s in store for your
pipes. Here’s where you find out which ISPs may screw you, and which
ones swear to Giz they won’t. Update: We’ve got new responses from
AT&T and Speakeasy.
The scariest scenario is invasive “packet filtering,” where companies
look at what you’re downloading and punish you for perceived misconduct. Comcast was the poster child for BitTorrent throttling before
getting cozy with it to avoid an FCC smackdown, and AT&T infamously
broached the idea of filtering its entire network for copyrighted content.
Beyond packet filtering, there are two potentially more widespread ways
big ISPs can try to bring down the Torrent mad: “Caps,” already used
by local ISPs such as BendBroadband and Sunflower, are set amounts
you can download each month. Anything over that, like cellphone plans,
means overage penalties. “Throttling” is the ability of the ISP to, any
given moment, put the brakes on your connection when you’re being
too much of a resource hog. Here’s where the ISPs stand on the tactics
above and your pipes.
AT&T
We have said consistently that AT&T will not allow itself to become
a policeman or enforcement agent on the Internet. We have also made
clear that there is nothing inherently wrong with P2P applications
like BitTorrent, which are advanced, and legal, technologies that are
used and welcomed on our network... We do not block or degrade any
P2P application to manage network congestion. At the same time, we
feel that any company involved with the Internet should be concerned about illegal activity, whether it is identity theft or intellectual
property theft, and should be prepared to cooperate in legal means
of addressing such problems while protecting fully the privacy of our
customers.
Content filtering somewhat touchy, but there are indications they’re
backing off the idea after the huge outcry. When we pressed AT&T
on the issue of throttling down overzealous pipe users, the company
declined to comment. Hopefully that just means it is still deliberating
the issue.
Update: AT&T wrote in with an additional statement: “We can’t give
you details on our specific network management techniques to handle
times of high-volume” citing similar reasons as Time Warner, “but those
techniques don’t include degrading or blocking traffic.”
Comcast is not currently using or testing any filtering technologies.
We agree that copyright owners have a right to protect their content.
We work well with them under existing law and will continue to work
with content owners to find solutions to help support their efforts
around piracy. We cannot speculate on what AT&T is doing or how its
technology works.
Time Warner
We talked to Alex Dudley, Time Warner’s PR VP. In addition to referring
to us to TWC’s acceptable use policy, he told us that “we both reserve
the right to manage our network and try and explain to our customers
and others that it’s important that we manage the network.” As to how
the system works, he says, “We haven’t been pro-active in talking about
what we may or may not be doing because it’s proprietary” and to stave
off “another ISP go[ing] in and market[ing] against that.” Content filtering “is not something we’ve discussed in detail here” but Time Warner
“supports AT&T’s right ot manage their network anyway they see fit.”
Verizon
This was most the straight up: “We don’t manage our network by throttling, slowing or curbing service, either on DSL or FiOS.” In reference to
content filtering, we weren’t given a new statement, but referred to earlier remarks by public affairs VP Tom Tauke that it is “reluctant to get
into the business of examining content that flows across our networks,”
the most pro-active stance against content filtering. However, it’s still
no fan of the government stepping in: “These are decisions best made by
network engineers and operators—not policymakers.”
Speakeasy
They got back to us after we went to press, but here’s what they had to
say on network management: “Our position on this is that [we] attempt
to manage our network to account for peak usage so that we do not need
to throttle bandwidth of customers pending applications in order to
keep our pipes unclogged.” And on content filtering: “Speakeasy does
not currently do any content filtering, and at this time we have no plans
to filter content.”
The Takeaway
Since BitTorrent became a rallying point for net neutrality advocates
(and caught the attention of the FCC) ISPs have made a show of stepping back from P2P hampering to shield themselves from both nerd
backlash and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s steely gaze. Verizon and
AT&T, for instance, both pointed me toward their corporation-friendly
“P4P” file-sharing development initiatives for more effective downloading (at an unknown cost), and Comcast has touted its R&D with BitTorrent.
All of that’s a pretty effective smokescreen for moving to more hardcore
capping and throttling, allowing them to cry “We treat all traffic equally,
neutrally even!” while nuking all of your traffic without prejudice. Most
people downloading the hugest amounts are probably not paying for
all that content. And note that everyone except Verizon left themselves
plenty of hedge space on the issue. Time Warner says it doesn’t talk
about it because it’s afraid others will use it in marketing; well, Verizon
is kinda sorta using their total lack of filtering as an underground
marketing thing already, which is especially effective when coupled with
FiOS’s insane speeds.
In 1990, several architectural designers came up with some alternative
design ideas for the area over and under the Junction: an infrastructural
megastructure that’s magnificent to see from above and travel through
but that cuts up communities living either side.
Robert Adam, the classicist English architect, decided to accentuate the
interchange as a gateway to the city:
Even with ever-higher speeds, bandwidth will remain an issue for ISPs
as they try to cram more and more HD content down pipes you’re using
to download movies, swap music and other increasingly bandwidth-intensive applications. So more management is going to go hand and hand
with more bandwidth, make no mistake.
But it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, if they’re smart about it. They make
a genuine movement to smarter protocols and management techniques
that don’t hose anyone’s broadband (like that P4P stuff, if it’s really
open), but instead help everyone squeeze every last bit out of it as efficiently as possible. We can only hope.
Gizmodo
http://gizmodo.com/378760/will-your-isp-f-you-in-the-a-bandwidthhogs-beware
by Matt Buchanan on April 14, 2008
American internationalists Swanke Hayden Connell decided to condense the structure by building on top and around it with offices and
housing:
7. Unravelling the spaghetti
Annoyingly I don’t have an image of the scheme by Melanie Sainsbury, a
former partner in crime of Nigel Coates and the Narrative Architecture
Today group.
But Melanie imagined a fabulous, Hamburg-style nightclub beneath the
interchange piers:
This is an image of the Spaghetti Junction interchange in the West
Midlands, England.
And alongside recent RIBA Gold Medal winner Edward Cullinan, Finnish landscape architects Pirkko Higson chose to use the scale of spaces
beneath the interchange
But one principal stands tall.
Architecture need not be communicated by the media simply through
reportage.
It can be communicated by the media acknowledging that it has a role
as a protagonist in the public realm and that it can make its presence
known as commissioner and cultural speculator.
In some places or situations, civic organization is dead and buried.
In others, it is fractured in to bowling associations, amenity groups and
people obsessed with the world on their doorstep.
In others still, local government has given up the job of curating the
physical quality of public life.
and imagine a jungle:
The question is whether the media can and is willing to fill the void and
become an activist promoter of civic value and support the common
sense prescription of architect Denise Scott-Brown when she wrote:
Where civic design succeeds, it is usually because it is sponsored by a
civic organisation that operates as watch-dog, implementer, funder,
maintainer, and supporter of the project because this group has convinced the city that its project is in the interest of the whole community.
Yes, the media is entertainment. And yes, it’s devoted to making money.
It would be deadly if it were otherwise.
But if architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as the
enclosure of its walls, ditto the media.
Somewhere between the two there is common purpose.
Five architects, five revisions of a public space: oh God! another architectural ideas initiative!
Yes. But there’s a small but important dimension to this project.
Over at BLDGBLOG, there’s speculation on the relationship between
architecture and the media.
How are architectural ideas communicating through...various media?
Does the medium itself inform the message, as it were – and in what
specific way? How are architecture and architectural ideas repackaged
for discussion in these various forms?
The project on Spaghetti Junction contributes to the discussion because
it was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation and was
broadcast as a special edition of an innovative arts TV series called The
Late Show.
The person who came up with the project idea - er, me! - wanted to
speculate upon the different pictures of the world in architectural designers’ heads, suppressed by tight top-buttons done up and the virulent
anti-architectural spirit of the times, triggered by Prince Charles’ outburst against the National Gallery extension by Venturi Scott-Brown.
Nothing much has happened to the space since this outburst of creative visioning, perhaps confirming in the abstract architect Bernard
Tschumi’s thought that
No spatial organization ever changes the socio-economic structure of a
reactionary society.
So the job has got to be to get media corporations to not just commission superstarchitect head offices but become activists and sponsors of
design and social innovation.
And for architects to not take such a snobbish, PR-orientated attitude
towards the media, acknowledge a mutual role as shapers of the public
realm, not hide in the basements of their buildings...and PLAY!
Pictures of Spaghetti Junction courtesy of Tim Ellis.
David Barrie
http://davidbarrie.typepad.com/david_barrie/2008/04/unravellingthe.html
by David Barrie on April 17, 2008
8. Pulp Fiction, as performed by
the King’s Men
ceruleanst gives us two passages of William Shakespeare’s Pulp Fiction:
ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter a carriage, with JULES and
VINCENT, murderers.
J: And know’st thou what the French name cottage pie?
V: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
J: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
V: What say they then, pray?
J: Hachis Parmentier.
V: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
J: Cream is but cream, only they say le crème.
V: What do they name black pudding?
J: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.
9. After the Deluge, The Farm
...
J: My pardon; did I break thy concentration?
Continue! Ah, but now thy tongue is still.
Allow me then to offer a response.
Describe Marsellus Wallace to me, pray.
B: What?
J: What country dost thou hail from?
B: What?
J: How passing strange, for I have traveled far,
And never have I heard tell of this What.
What language speak they in the land of What?
B: What?
J: The Queen’s own English, base knave, dost thou speak it?
B: Aye!
J: Then hearken to my words and answer them!
Describe to me Marsellus Wallace!
B: What?
JULES presses his knife to BRETT’s throat
J: Speak ‘What’ again! Thou cur, cry ‘What’ again!
I dare thee utter ‘What’ again but once!
I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!
Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,
If thou hast any in thy head but ‘What’,
Of Marsellus Wallace!
B: He is dark.
J: Aye, and what more?
B: His head is shaven bald.
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: What?
JULES strikes and BRETT cries out
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: Nay!
J: Then why didst thou attempt to bed him thus?
B: I did not!
J: Aye, thou didst! O, aye, thou didst!
Thou hoped to rape him like a chattel whore,
And sooth, Lord Wallace is displeased to bed
With anyone but she to whom he wed.
Context will know my name is the LORD.
Metaquotes
http://community.livejournal.com/metaquotes/6644038.html
by Ceruleanst on April 14, 2008
For a more sober take on urban farming than Work AC’s agro-fantasia,
check out this project by Mossop+Michaels for a Vietnamese-American
community in New Orleans. Today, it garnered a 2008 ASLA Professional Award.
Quoting the brief in part:
The Viet Village Urban Farm project represents an effort to reestablish the tradition of local farming in this community after Katrina.
New Orleans East was one of the most damaged areas of the city during the storms of 2005. In response to the devastation, the community
has organized around the idea of creating an urban farm and market
as the center of the community. The farm, located on 28-acres in the
heart of the community, will be a combination of small-plot gardening
for family consumption, larger commercial plots focused on providing food for local restaurants and grocery stores in New Orleans,
and a livestock area for raising chickens and goats in the traditional
Vietnamese way. The proposed market on the site will provide a location for the individual farmers to supplement their income as well as
serve as a central meeting space for the larger Vietnamese community
along the Gulf Coast. Based on the history of the markets in the area
before Katrina, as many as 3,000 people are expected to come to the
site for a Saturday market, perhaps more on traditional festival days.
Specialty vegetables and foods used in Vietnamese cuisine will be sold
at the market. Local Vietnamese restaurants will have a space to sell
prepared food during market days as well.
Another goal of the project is to bring together the different generations with the local community through the shared endeavor of the
farm and that the traditional skills and practices of the culture brought
from Vietnam to America are passed down by the generation of elders.
Thus it is also important that the farm also acts as a community center
and areas for sports and playgrounds are proposed for the site. The
community sees this project as the centerpiece for the rebuilding efforts
in the New Orleans East.
If you’re at all interested in urban agriculture, this is a good case study
to review.
(Strange that no one is seen tilling the fields.)
Image courtesy of Mossop+Michaels.
Pruned
http://pruned.blogspot.com/2008/04/after-deluge-farm.html
by Alexander Trevi on April 15, 2008
10. IKEA decks out Kobe train
Swedish furniture giant IKEA has converted the Kobe Portliner Monorail into a moving showroom before the April 14 opening of a new retail
outlet at Port Island. The redecorated train, which features a colorful
exterior, bright upholstery and fancy curtains, will carry passengers in
style until May 6.
Pink Tentacle
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/04/ikea-decks-out-kobe-train/
by Edo on April 9, 2008
www.v-annemarie.nl