Bobulate

Work, interrupted

Joseph Holmes on the Workspace project, an attempt to capture the private spaces people carve out in public:

Such spaces represent a tug of war between personal expression and comfort on the one hand and the unyielding demands of work on the other. …. Lately I’ve been finding workspaces by walking in off the street with camera and tripod and simply asking (though “simply asking” doesn’t quite convey the complex dance of explanation, skepticism, persuasion, and fascination that goes back and forth). What I end up capturing, then, turns out to be the work that was interrupted to answer the door.

I’ve been a long-time admirer of his ability to capture the public/private dichotomy, particularly his work at the AMNH in New York. (More here.)

Look no farther than the front yard

The Front Yard Company designs and manufactures products to make front yards useful places to store things that take up space indoors, meanwhile, invigorating the street and sidewalk:

Front yards are important in three ways: 1) Their contribution to the street, as a part of our built and designed environment; 2) Their contribution to the natural environment; 3) Their contribution to the street socially, e.g., a good place to sit on the step and meet your neighbors.

As October forces New Yorkers inside for months on end, I’m hopeful but curious about how a prospect like this could work. Small spaces and social constructs demand it.

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When the only possible achievement is negative

Regarding supermarkets, all the anthropology, all the focus, all the Underhill, is always on the customer or the seller. No story has been written on the checkout operator. Until now:

[T]he checkout might look like the last survival of the old scene in the shop: there is a counter and on the other side of it a human being. But this formal resemblance conceals the great difference. The cashier, unlike the shop assistant, has no role to play in the customer’s choice of what to buy, no words to say beyond formulaic instructions and questions; the job is just to get the given things scanned and paid for. Apart from speed, the only possible achievement is negative, not to have made a mistake.

Success defined in the negative.

Curated inspiration

The Architects’ Journal blog network introduced a selectively curated architecture and design inspiration, the Architects’ Notebook. Collecting both editors’ picks and others, it presents the Heffer Pitcher (admittedly, a favorite gift of mine) and the recent crowd-favorite the hand from above.

Clearly, even without explanation, crowd curation is valuable. Yet sometimes, I wish there were a bit more pause for individual contemplation. The burden is on us to consider implications of the visual inspiration, or contemplation may be in danger of going extinct.

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People in order

Short films that arrange 471 people according to four scales: age, birth, love, and home.

471 strangers plucked from the streets of Britain and arranged in order. Everyday life made simple!

The first two (New Age, Old Age and New Love Order) are available, and bear a charming resemblance to Michael Apted’s Up Series.

Escalante, and small teams with world-size effects

Matt Webb’s keynote from from Web Directions South on design, hiking, science fiction, and invention:

Hiking is a journey of discovery of internal and external terrains. And you find out who you are behind the chatter and the blisters and the every day. Exploring a landscape takes time, and good pens, and good shoes. This is one thing designers do really well. They’re able to define a space without defining it. To explore it, leaving open the possibility that the exploration will open unknown unknowns.

Later:

The 21st Century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web — breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero — for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design — playful and rational all at once — to help us figure out what to do when we get there.

Brilliant.

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When a place is better than a plan

On why revitalizing urban areas is better done through small improvements, not grand schemes:

Small changes are appealing for many reasons. They’re cheap, for one thing. Also, what works can be easily expanded, and what doesn’t work can be as easily terminated or altered. One successful food concession can become two; an unsuccessful stall selling local crafts can be replaced; a planter made from a material that discolors or chips can be replaced with a better one. Contrast that with grand schemes, which can attract broad opposition and be subject to complex political, logistical, and financial obstacles. Once an elaborate design has been committed to, backing away from it — or even altering it — becomes both politically and mechanically complicated. Further, planners have a limited capacity to predict how people will respond to their designs. The larger the project, the more likely unintended consequences become, and the more difficult it is to change course.

Manshel mentions urbanist William H. Whyte’s suggestion that in public spaces, people prefer movable chairs to fixed seating. “Movable chairs let people face one another and interact in different ways, not just the ones that landscape designers have in mind when they arrange fixed furniture.” Michael Bierut recently posed similar urban intervention questions in the shape of a piece on the rubber folding chairs as part of the pedestrian malls at Times Square in New York. He raises the question: “when it comes to fulfilling simple human desires, can design get in the way?”

Places and people beget unintended consequences, and responsive places can, well, respond to these changes, not get in the way. People in public spaces are responding to the place itself, not its plan.