cityofsound: About City of Sound

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'

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

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

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

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

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)

Fuller biography for Dan Hill
British. Born Zürich, 1970. Based in Sydney.

Work

2008-: Arup, Senior Consultant, Sydney. [related post]
2007-2008: Monocle, Director of Web and Broadcast, London/Sydney. [related post | related post]
2001-2006: BBC Radio & Music/Future Media & Technology, 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/Builder
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

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

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 City journal [full text], BBC Music, 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], and my graphic design has featured across numerous websites, most recently in Artkrush magazine's 'Design and Architecture' edition, March 2006 [info]