Posts filed under 'design'
Just the ticket
Andrew Curry writes:
It’s always a pleasure to see good design, especially in unexpected places. This was the ticket I got when I played a round of crazy golf at Puckpool Park on the Isle of Wight last weekend. Less paper, less hassle, less waste. And quite a good size for a bookmark afterwards.
Add comment 29 May 2009
How liveable are your streets?
Anouk van den Eijnde writes:
The majority of the world’s 6.5 billion residents now live in cities – cities that are often overpopulated, congested and hostile to pedestrians and cyclists. Take Mexico City, for example, with a population of more than 20 million people: it suffers from pollution, traffic, water shortage and a high crime rate. The once attractive public spaces are now deemed by local residents to be too dangerous to spend time in. The mayor is slowly tackling these issues by revitalizing its historic centre, improving public transport and dealing with its acute water shortage. But what do residents really want from their cities?
Caracas-based architects Brillembourg and Klumpner, founders of the Urban Think Tank, are consulting local residents and community groups in an attempt to find sustainable solutions to the city’s ever-exploding population. Their focus is on the growing ‘informal cities’ where four out of its six million inhabitants are squatting the hillsides in self-built constructions. One of their initiatives is a cable car system connecting the valley to Caracas’ public transport system. Their site has an engaging video about their work.
Taking a leaf out of the ‘livable streets’ initiative - which encourages people to re-imagine how their cities would be if they were healthier and more sustainable – the American magazine GOOD asked people to do just that, and redesign their streets to make them more ‘livable’. The task was to take a photo of a street or intersection you know and hate, then use Photoshop or other image software to make the changes you wanted to see. Green spaces, bike lanes, street art, playgrounds, exercise machines – it could be anything. The winners, though mostly North American, demonstrate the value of visions in making change, and there’s also a whole gallery of entries.
Another example of involving people in urban design is Fix My Street, a UK website from the team at mySociety that allows people to report local problems like vandalism, broken lights and litter. You can simply type in the postcode online (or on your i-phone), find the location on the map and type in the problem. Comments are then sent directly to the local council on the users’ behalf. Who better to influence the design and maintenance of neighbourhoods than its local residents?
Add comment 27 May 2009
Constructivist advertising
Andrew Curry writes:
I knew about the Russian Constructivist artist Rodchenko’s work as a photographer and a designer, but until I visited the Tate Modern’s current exhibition (in London until 17 May) I hadn’t realised that he’d also run an advertising agency. His partner was the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who wrote the copy, and the company was called ‘Advertising-Constructors-Mayakovsky-Rodchenko‘.
They designed adverts for the Moscow department store GUM, for the state airline, and also some posters which would these days fall under the heading of ’social marketing’, for trade unions (“The Trade Union is a Defender of Female Labour”).
The two men were able to set up the business after Lenin encouraged some small-scale private enterprise in the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. Mayakovsky dismissed criticism of those who thought that this wasn’t revolutionary work by saying ‘it is necessary to employ all the weapons used by our enemies’. He clearly learnt the lesson well – one of their posters was for a union opposing the NEP. Rodchenko later did the famous posters for Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. Their advertising and design work was revolutionary, in both senses (British and American ads from the same period look fussy and cluttered in comparison), and decades ahead of its time.
The poster at the top of this post, for the state airline, is courtesy of the Tate Modern.
2 comments 22 April 2009
Some good things we’ve seen # 1
Compiled by Tom Ding
The first of an occasional column: Passed around the office lately were:
- A brilliant presentation on the “past and future” of city magic by Matt Jones of Doppir
- A map of the internet (or at least the 333 most important bits) modelled on the map of the Tokyo metro – not the first time, by the way, that we’ve blogged about maps based on tube networks.
- Another less subterranean map of parliamentary expenses (thanks, Digital Urban) – MapTube, the mapping mash-up site which published this also has a map showing all of the London tube stations in their geographically correct positions.
- A complete visual history of Lego’s ‘mini-figures’ from which the picture at the top of the post is taken. And news of a rather larger Lego figure, a sculpture of Jesus made from 30,000 bricks, unveiled at a church in Sweden just in time for Easter.
Enjoy!
Add comment 16 April 2009
Sounds like the future
Andrew Curry writes:
Anyone with a passing interest in modern jazz knows the ECM label, now 40 years old, with its distinctive roster and innovative design. To mark the anniversary it has released 40 of the best from its back catalogue as ‘Touchstones’ – with performers ranging from Pat Metheny and Keith Jarrett to John Surman, Anouhar Brahem and Jan Garbarek. The price is low (”at download prices”) and the packaging reduced.
It’s a move which pushes some obvious buttons. The €9.90 price is a response both to the digital download market and also to the recession, the card covers more environmentally friendly than the typical jewel case. But it also touches on some less obvious trends. The packaging design reduces the amount of space the CDs take up, in an age of decluttering, while also evoking the glossy look and feel, if smaller, of the original LP sleeves, creating a kind of nostalgia for the future. It can only be a matter of time before ECM’s new releases follow suit.
The picture is of pianist Chick Corea and vibes player Gary Burton, both on the Touchstones series.
Add comment 20 January 2009
Designing for austerity
Andrew Curry writes:
Alice Rawsthorne has an interesting article on the impact of recession on design in the International Herald Tribune. It seems it’s all good news. This shouldn’t be a surprise; innovation thrives on scarcity and constraint, and design is no different. And certainly the historical evidence bears this out. The Bauhaus and the Modernist movements emerged in the 1920s and ’30s, and the Italian post-war design boom from the depths of its post-war austerity.
The current financial and economic crisis requires that we think again about how our systems work, and – as she writes – designers excel at simplifying complex issues and collaborating with other disciplines. Rawsthorne anticipates that designers will help companies to cut costs by thinking about new ways to use materials and by imagining new service models (for example part-ownership or ‘renalism’ rather than outright purchase, as is happening with the Parisian Velib bicycle initiative – or Streetcar and Zipcar, come to that).
Beyond this, there are whole new approaches to service and system design, and she commends the work of Live|Work, which has redesigned support services, for example in its work in Sunderland, to put the user at the centre and access resources from multiple agencies rather than being caught between them.(It also works in the private sector).
The final bit of good news? The market for expensively designed objects has tanked. Half of the lots at Sotheby’s design auction last month went unsold.
Thanks to core 77 for the tip. The picture of a Velib station at the top of this post is from an article about the Velib scheme in Post-Carbon Cities.
Add comment 1 December 2008
Flying the flag (post 2 of 2)
Jake Goretzki writes:
In the first half of this post, I wrote about flags as brands with an army and navy – but still in need of relaunching or repositioning from time to time. When they do work, relaunches are marvellously transformatory. Imagine Canada with this blazer badge of a flag (below) – unbelievably, this survived until 1965. It seems to convey the notion of Canada as some kind of British backwater. How could it ever have stood out? The Maple leaf on the other hand is ownable, differentiated and unifying. That said, of course, Quebec might beg to differ – anyone for a rebrand?
Canada Pre-1965
Canada Post-1965
Add comment 22 April 2008
Usability and simplicity
Andrew Curry writes:
Our former colleague Chad Wollen, who has spent the last few years working for digital media companies, sent me a cartoon by Eric Burke that’s being going the rounds in the digital community:
Judging by the response to the original post, it’s clearly struck a nerve among designers and programmers, even provoking some discussion about the purpose of jokes.
What’s interesting, reading the comments, is that people are taking a somewhat ‘binary’ view of simplicity (it’s either ‘good’ or ‘bad’). As John Maeda reminds us in his Laws of Simplicity, it’s a bit more complicated than that. One of the ‘laws’ of simplicity, he suggests, is to ‘reduce’, for example by removing functionality – the Apple and Google trick. But he also reminds us that simplicity often requires knowledge on the part of the user, that “simplicity and complexity need each other” – and that “some things can never be made simple”. The design skill is knowing what can be, and why.
Add comment 17 March 2008
Unravelling the cassette
Stacey Yates writes:
The audio cassette is 45 years old this year, and is reaching the end of its life, at least in Europe and the US. It peaked in the 1980s, but started to decline after the CD was rolled out in 1993. As our music consumption becomes increasingly intangible, people are pointing to some of the pleasures of more tangible forms – as a amusing post at the design blog Core 77 recently reminded me: the cassette as a design convention.
In contrast to the age of digital, the cassette was a lo-fi, low tech object and it was the first hard format to emerge in response to a more mobile society – the age of the Walkman preceded the iPod generation by 25 years. It could get stuck down the back of your sofa or crammed into your banger’s glove compartment for months, and you knew you could still rely on it to work when you found it again. Unlike the CD, it was near unbreakable and was always ready to play just where you left off. If it did get a bit chewed up, all you needed was a pencil or a biro to sort it.
The one time you might have been precious about a cassette was when you made a mix tape. In the 1980s creating a mix tape for someone was an act of dedication. Sitting through selected tapes with your finger hovering above the pause button took time and choosing the right mix of songs took creativity. The mix tape could also be a personal selection, creating a whole new way to mix and match music that has been reinforced by the rise of the celebrity DJ and by digital music. But let’s face it, there’s no romance in a USB stick. So perhaps it’s not surprising to find a site which, perhaps cunningly, is selling the ease of the digital ‘mix-stick’ - but in a package which offers all the personalisation that you used to get from the cassette.
Image © Stacey Yates
[Correction: A typo above has the CD launched, incorrectly, in 1993. In fact, it was launched commercially in Europe and the USA in 1983 (late 1982 in Japan). Thanks to Harry, in Comments, below, for pointing this out.]
6 comments 5 March 2008
Collectibles of the future
Trevor Harvey writes:
Which collectibles will be worth something in 2030? The Times this week asked some experts what they’d spend £100 (or less) on in 2008 in the hope of a return in 20 years time. The answers varied from an Anya Hindmarch ‘not a plastic bag‘ to celebrity autographs to David Linley pencils to mousemats (on the assumption that they’ll be as old-fashioned as antimacassars by 2030, so will be a social history of our times), to advice to hunt out a craft objet. Of course, such exercises say as much about the present as they do about the future. What I learned from this was that the experts think that celebrity culture will still be alive, and booming, in 2030, and we’ll still be chasing after ’stuff’. It’s possible that this won’t be the case. What if evidence of ideas are more valuable instead – notes or drawings or sketches? Or if our interest in fame has moved beyond the circle of royalty, entertainment and sport?
And since collectors like their collectibles as mint-condition as possible, better not use any of this stuff. The advice on the Anya Hindmarch bag is to wrap it carefully and put it away somewhere safe. And keep on using the plastic bags, no doubt.
Image source: www.davidlinley.com
Add comment 8 February 2008
