This is the personal site of Dan Hill [fuller biography below] The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of my employer. Please ask if you need clarification.
Some relevant starting points
Below, some popular or defining posts at cityofsound. They all tend to gravitate towards recurring themes of cities, architecture, design, media and culture - often colliding in the same post, say on the imagined connections between travel writing and design, or football and architecture - but here's an attempt at filing them discretely nonetheless.
Design practice
Architecture and interaction design, via adaptation and hackability
Adaptation, personalisation and self-centred design
How can the design of digital surfaces help engender trust?
"How the computer can help the designer", New Scientist, 1964
The New Rationalism
Design. Architecture. Football
Starflyer (and service), Schiphol (and soccer), Stansted (and signage)
Trenitalia, travel writing and total design
Insanely great, or just good enough?
Abram Games, and how syndicated branding 'winds the spring'
Towards a new architect: an interview with Carlo Ratti
Soft Infrastructure Superpowers: Lift09 presentation
Wi-fi structures and people shapes
Post-occupancy evaluations of public wi-fi
The Adaptive City
The new engineering: A discussion with Arup's Tristram Carfrae
Two or three recent diagrams
Teaching and drawing urban sensing
Sensing the immaterial city
The CLOUD
Architecture
The Smithsons and adaptive architecture
Daily Express building, Fleet Street
Swiss Cottage Library, London
Frank Gehry's MIT Stata Center, Cambridge Mass.
Senate House, University of London
Two possible Google Earth extensions: time and sound
Flora, fauna, pixels and paper
Tales of two cities imagined in music: Metropolis Shanghai and Chavez Ravine
Brunswick Centre, London
La Tonnara and the Chamber of Death; Arabian floating architecture in Sicily
Postopolis!
The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown
Staircase, University of Technology Sydney
In Every Dream Home A Heartache: The Great Australian Dream and its architecture
Indiscreet music
The windy city
Façades: expressive, responsive, interactive
The Personal Well-Tempered Environment
Density, via the Weare-Phelan structure, Holbæk Kasba and the Monaco House
Joost Greenhouse, Melbourne
A collaborative map of modernism in Australia
'Placemakers', and architectural scenes
Barangaroo Tomason
m3 moire façade model
Cities, Places and buildings
New York: Seoul Survivor?
Brief Notes on Seattle
The Shock of the New World, with respect to the flora and fauna of Australia
Punching holes in Ciutat Vella; adaptive urban form in Barcelona
Urbis: Imagining The Modern City - And A New Kind Of Museum
The theft of Bedford Square
Close to the madding crowd (on St. Giles, London)
Savile Row and tailoring urban fabric
New Islington, New Hope (Manchester)
Koolhaas/Balmond/Arup Serpentine Pavilion, 2006
Boston/Cambridge Diary
Shanghai Diary (Please note: the Shanghai diaries were written for this blog by Justin O'Connor.)
Best-laid plans for Australian garden cities and reflections on the Southern Cross
Suspended at a junction in time: Australia, Silent Running, The Drowned World and the University of Queensland
The View
Apocalypse Sydney
The city as destructive system: wildfires, Dresden and the case against urban sprawl
Father of modern Brisbane
The city is conceived of radial opposites
Best Urban Spaces and Places
Lyons House, Robin Boyd, Sydney
State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Donovan Hill Peddle Thorp, and some notes on libraries in general
Sheffield and The North
Writing, about Sydney
In denial, on the beach, the drowned world
Aerial music over Beijing
Notes on Geneva. A Walk
Life on Mars; #duststorm
Emergent Urbanism, or 'bottom-up planning'
Flood
Same Old New World Cities; or, the missing vision for Australian cities; or, asking the right questions in the first place
On retail
Postopolis!
Postopolis! LA, April 2009, days one, two, three, four and five
Postopolis! NYC, June 2007, days one, two, three, four and five
Policy
Design Thinkbelt
Industrial Policy for Creativity
Hear that rain
Flat rates, Flat whites
"The Shinkansen to Melbourne is now boarding at Central Station, platform 27 ...": A new high-speed rail network for Australia
Røde, and the new manufacturing
Media
Binge Watching contemporary TV
Calling All Nations
Movements in Modern Media
Why 'Lost' is genuinely new media
Ripples, or "The Social Life of a Broadcast"
Assessing the new Guardian, with brief nod to the avant-garde [aka Grazia, Heat and The Sun]
Work: quick review of 2005 at the BBC
On podcasting itself
The Fall and Rise of the Magazine Cover?
iPods and the wireless
Cables
Games
Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality
Modeling urban behaviour amidst networked ultraviolence
Gangs Of New York, World-Building
Music
Music for Films: Top 12 Appearances by Bands in Films
New Musical Experiences
Designing for shuffling
How Devices Learn
Music's Rich Facets
Reviews
Alan Fletcher, Design Museum
Defab
Stephen Gill and photographing the everyday invisible
New York Changing: Revisiting Berenice Abbott's New York
But Beautiful, by Geoff Dyer
Jonathan Raban at London Review Bookshop
Archigram, Design Museum, London
"China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795", Royal Academy, London
Modernism is abroad, generally
The city as exhibition
HyperCard RIP
'Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956-2006' exhibition
Barbican: This Was Tomorrow
'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait', by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno
Luigi Colani exhibition, Design Museum, London
+&-=X 20 years of typo-graphics from the Tokyo Type Directors Club. UTS Gallery, Sydney
Houses. Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa. SANAA (Actar 2007)
Habitus magazine
The Black Swan, Nicholas Nassim Taleb
"Modern Times: The untold story of modernism in Australia", Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; plus some notes on architectural exhibitions
'Network + network + network = network'. Lift09 conference, and Geneva
Work and the City, Frank Duffy (2008)
The Murder of Crows, Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, Biennale of Sydney 2008
'Towards the Sentient City' exhibition, New York
A machine for the life between buildings: some notes on the iPad
Notes on the 'next generation check-in experience' from Qantas
Linked Hybrid by Steven Holl Architects, and designing for the occupation of space in contemporary Beijing
Fuller biography for Dan Hill
British. Born Zürich, 1970. Based in Helsinki.
Dan Hill is a designer and urbanist. He is perhaps uniquely positioned at the intersection of strategic design and urban policy, urban design and urbanism, contemporary culture and sociology, interaction and experience design, advanced technologies, design research and practice, media and social media.
He has worked in leadership/practitioner positions across several industries and continents, for organisations large and small, and within both public and private sectors. He’s been working at the forefront of interaction design and innovative information and communication technologies (ICT) since the early ‘90s and is responsible for shaping many innovative, popular and critically acclaimed products and services.
Dan is a Strategic Design Lead at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund (see related post), working as part of the Strategic Design Unit. He and his colleagues are exploring the use and practice of design in enabling systemic change. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Architecture department at University Technology, Sydney (UTS) and a member of the Integrated Design Commission Advisory Board in South Australia.
Previously, Dan was Urban Informatics leader for Arup, assessing how real-time information changes the urban experience from a design-led perspective. He was also the leader for Arup’s global Foresight + Innovation team for the Australasia region, responsible for long-term scenario planning and strategy. He developed the Strategic Design business at Arup, using design practice to help clients in government and business address complex interdependent issues, helping frame the right questions. Based in Sydney, Dan worked on major urban projects worldwide.
Previously to that, Dan was Head of Interactive Technology & Design at the BBC in London, where he helped lead design across their award-winning websites as well as conducting significant strategic work, re-thinking the organisation for the on-demand age. He was design lead for iPlayer, and his team introduced podcasting to the BBC, amongst numerous other innovative services. In between the BBC and Arup, Dan worked for Monocle where as Director of Web and Broadcast he was a core part of the startup team. Dan is one of the organisers of the acclaimed architecture and urbanism event Postopolis!, running in New York and Los Angeles so far. He also writes City of Sound, generally thought of as one of the leading architecture and urbanism websites, as well as regularly writing for architecture and design press worldwide.
Dan has experience of product development and management in design, software and innovation, applied to sectors ranging from media and music to city government and academia. This is combined with a background of research and practice in urban regeneration through cultural industries and urban informatics. Dan is a regular speaker at conferences and events, and has strong links with academic research units around the world.
Dan is also a member of the invitation-only International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which selects nominees and winners for the Webby Awards, the leading honour for websites, and was included in the inaugural list of Sydney’s ‘Creative Catalysts’ for the Vivid Sydney arts festival 2009. His design work has featured in the AAA exhibition, 'Remodelling Architecture: Architectural Places - Digital Spaces', running at Customs House, Sydney, Sep-Nov 2009 and 'Habitar: Bending the urban frame', at Laboral in Gijon, May-Nov 2010.
Work
- 2011—: Sitra, Strategic Design Lead, Helsinki. [related post]
- 2008—2011: Arup, Associate, Sydney. [related post]
- 2008: Consultant (clients included Channel 4, Lonely Planet, BBC)
- 2007-2008: Monocle, Director of Web and Broadcast, London/Sydney. [related post | related post]
- 2001-2006: BBC, Head of Interactive Technology & Design, London. [related post]
- 2001: Urbis Museum, Manchester. Curator/Producer (freelance) [related post]
- 2001: Playlouder.com, London. Design Director (freelance)
- 1997-2001: state51, London. Designer
- 1994-1997: Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester. Researcher/Designer
- 1992-1994: Manchester City Council, Manchester. Senior Officer (IT), Chief Executive's Department
Education
- MA by research: 'Cultural Industries in the digital city', Manchester Metropolitan University (1995-1997)
The research provided a snapshot of contemporary cultural change in Manchester's Northern Quarter, addressing the nascent new media design industry and other design-oriented cultural industries, urban cultures, urban regeneration models, and theoretical writing on the city. It provided practical recommendations for regeneration and intervention in this area, tied to active engagement and support for cultural businesses in the Northern Quarter. [published article | related post] - BSc: Computer Science (2:1), University of Hertfordshire, (1988-1992)
[related post]
Presentations and events
- Cisco Public Services Summit, Oslo, running a workshop, December 2011
- Integrated Design Commission/TACSI public lecture, Adelaide, November 2011
- Creative Entrepreneurship for a Competitive Economy, Tallinn, speech, October 2011
- Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design Open Lecture, Copenhagen, September 2011
- Laptops and Looms, Derbyshire, August 2011
- Keynote speech, National Digital Forum, Wellington, October 2010
- Helsinki Design Lab Global, moderator of sustainability sessions, September 2010
- Partnership for Urban Innovation, Shanghai, June 2010
- Creative Clusters symposium, Hong Kong, June 2010
- Microsoft Social Computing Symposium on cities, January 2010 [related post]
- Closing keynote, Web Directions South, Sydney, October 2009
- 'New Soft City', World Design Congress, Beijing, October 2009
- Opening speech, 'Bluestone Lounge Room: Designing the streets of Melbourne' exhibition, Melbourne, July 2009 [related post]
- 'Urbanism about information', Australian Institute of Architects, Sydney, July 2009
- RE:HAB Student Architecture Congress, Canberra, July 2009
- Brisbane Ideas Festival, Brisbane, March 2009
- Postopolis! LA, Los Angeles, April 2009 [related posts]
- 'Soft Infrastructure Superpowers', LIFT09, Geneva, March 2009 [related post | presentation]
- State of Design, Melbourne, July 2008
- Pervasive 2008, Sydney, May 2008
- Postopolis!, New York, June 2007 [related posts]
- 'New Movements in Media', Aula: Movement conference, Helsinki, June 2006. Speaking as part of a panel with Tyler Brulé, Abbas Raza, Jim Griffin and Dan Gillmor among others. [info | related post | presentation]
- IDEA 2006 conference, Seattle, October 2006. Speaker on 'The New Media': how the architecture of information around media/art shapes our experience and interaction. [info]
- 'New Musical Experiences', Sibelius Academy/British Council, Helsinki, keynote speaker at 'Future of Music' seminar, September 2005. Also given at Manchester Metropolitan University 'Local Cultures in Global Space' lecture series, February 2006. [presentation]
- 'Radio in 2010', Nokia symposium, Helsinki, February 2005
- 'The Future of User-Centred Technology Design', AIGA Experience Design, Design Council, London, January 2005 'Self-Centred Design', Design Engaged conference, Amsterdam: November 2004 [info]
- 'Future of Design' seminar, UK Government-sponsored (DTI) mission, British Consul, San Francisco, October 2004 [info | report]
- 'Designing for Hackability', SIGCHI Designing Interactive Systems conference (DIS2004), Cambridge, Mass.:, August 2004 [info | presentation]
- 'Towards Designing for Adaptation', AIGA Experience Design, Design Council, London, December 2002 [info |
Recent Published Work
- 'Towards a new architect: an interview with Carlo Ratti', in Architectural Review Australia (2009) [full text]
- 'Røde, and the new manufacturing', a version of which appeared in Monocle (2009) [full text]
- 'The Adaptive City', chapter in the accompanying publication to 'Urban Play' project/exhibition, curated by Droog Design and Scott Burnham, part of ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam (2008) [full text]
- 'Loam for civic creativity', chapter in the accompanying publication to 'Actions: playing, gardening, recycling and walking', exhibition, curated by Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi for the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal (2008)
- Review of Jan Gehl Architects' plans for Sydney in Architectural Review Australia (2008) [full text]
- Contributed a section of Dan Saffer's book 'Designing for Interaction' (New Riders, 2006) on the subject of adaptive design, interaction design and architecture, alongside 10 other 'interviewees' such as Marc Rettig, Larry Tesler, Hugh Dubberley, Brenda Laurel etc. [full text]
- Report for UK Government: 'Adaptation, Personalisation and Self-centred design', in the Department of Trade & Industry Global Watch Report: 'Innovation through People-Centred Design' (2004) [full text]
- Icon magazine: 'When Perfect Isn't Good Enough', on the iPod and adaptive design (2004) [article]
- Core77: 'Insanely great, or just good enough?' (2004) [full text]
- Other writing and journalism for Monocle, City journal [full text], BBC Music, Icon, Cre@te magazine and various online music magazines.
- My architectural photography appeared as part of the Art Gallery of Ontario's major Frank Gehry exhibition throughout early 2006 [info]
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