cityofsound

Biology and building

Just wondering. Can anyone tell us about biologists interested in, or working within, architecture or engineering, or conversely architects, designers or engineers much influenced by biological process ... Janine Benyus springs to mind, and a few architects do too (e.g. Ken Yeung is close; thanks to Rob Annable for the tip. And there are many architects with work inspired by natural forms, but I'm looking for a deeper level of integration/realisation, ideally.). But not many. Following Pruned and BLDGBLOG will help, but any other ideas? Comments below much appreciated.

Frank Gehry exhibition, Art Gallery of Ontario

Good to see the Art Gallery of Ontario involving quite a few bloggers in the 'press' coverage of their new Frank Gehry show. As a result, there's good stuff at Singer.to, David Crow, Torontoist, Spacing Wire amidst other round-ups as reported on the AGO blog

Incidentally, I'm really pleased that the exhibition itself features a few of my photos, from this earlier collection, for this post on the MIT Stata centre. (Again, the curators found those here and got in touch accordingly, so further sign of AGO using the net to their advantage, arguably.)

The show looks very interesting so do check it out if you can get to Toronto:

"This exhibition places Transformation AGO within the past ten years of the architect’s career, featuring drawings, models and site photographs of recently completed projects, along with working models generated through the design of the transformed Gallery."

AGO: Frank Gehry - art and architecture
[NB: Don't know if this is just me but beware hitting the main AGO site with Mac/Safari - it seems a little crashy-browsery. Above link should be safe.]

Punching holes in Ciutat Vella; adaptive urban form in Barcelona

Wandering around Barcelona over Christmas, I was much taken with La Ribera and El Born districts, which comprise a major part of the Old Town, or Ciutat Vella. With a history extending over a millennium, this is essentially the heart of the city. Or the stomach perhaps. Either way, there can be few examples of the medieval European city in such fully working order, still brimming with people, noise, smells, trade of all kinds. In fact, it makes no sense to describe it as 'medieval' at all, given the ease with which it also sits within the 21st century. It's capable of flexing form and fabric to accept change apparently effortlessly, providing a showcase for contemporary architecture dated 1328, 1500, 1870, 1908 or 2005.

The density in Ciutat Vella is such that you almost feel contained within some kind of stone organism. You emerge into the neighbouring Eixample almost gasping for air, blinking in the light, breathing in the wide open 19th century boulevards. And yet, back towards the Mediterranean, we'll see that history suggests this tightly wound, virtually solid city space is almost as effective and adaptable as Cerdá's Eixample plan. The form of El Born is such that modular design solutions can be enabled by simply punching holes in blocks to enable sudden impromptu squares. One can almost imagine the skin healing over again given time, slowly filling these gaps with people and concrete ... until it's time to punch another hole somewhere else. As if each block truly is part of some greater, living whole. The built fabric in this part of the city is more like a membraneous, textured skin rather than streets, blocks or roads.

In fact, the form of some contemporary Spanish architecture, especially Miralles' Mercat Santa Caterina in between La Ribera and El Born, appears to (unconsciously?) echo these earlier constructions. Mercat Santa Caterina has a colourful skin stretched over tightly-packed individual plots within, almost as if it were a fractal suggestion of Ciutat Vella itself. The density of El Born behind the market is such that it's not hard to imagine Miralles' reptilian roof continuing to stretch and sweep overhead, occasionally punctured to let light and space in but ultimately re-forming to ensure this part of the city is preserved into the future. Not untouched by change, but adapting organically to it.

Audio signatures for BBC radio networks

Interesting stuff from our R&D team - aka Tristan Ferne - automatically produced radio signatures for BBC radio networks, using the iTunes signature maker.

"I have a directory for each radio station on a particular day with an MP3 file for each programme and I run the application over this. Each random chunk is then cross-faded into the next one in the same order as the programmes were broadcast. This gives a 1-minute signature file per day per radio station, hopefully representing what went on that day..."

Laden with issues, editorial and technical, which Tristan explores further in his blog post. We're not quite sure how, or indeed if, to deploy them yet - though we do have a set of potential locations and functions in mind. Interesting either way.

Cookin/Relaxin: Radio signatures

Crimewatch 1674-1834

This has been around a while, but I've only just started exploring it. An excellent site for the proceedings of the Old Bailey central criminal court in London:

"The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1834. It allows access to 100,000 trials, free of charge for non-commercial use. In addition to the text, accessible through both keyword and structured searching, this website provides digital images of the 60,000 original pages of the Proceedings ..."

It's an utterly compelling rendering of London, organised by crime. Desperately bleak, all of human vice is here. A random, er, cutting from 1677:

"Here was expectation of the Tryal of a Midwife for taking up a Childe out of its Grave, &c. but for some reasons it was put off. Also a horrid murder was in Easter week committed in the Hay-market by Charing-cross, where a Hackney-Coachman falling out with his Wife about their Horses going to work, in his devilish fury got up a Fire fork, and therewith stabb'd her into the head and several parts of the body, of which wounds, after neer a weeks languishing, she died, and by the Coroners Inquest on the 26th instant it was found wilful Murther; but the Husband immediately after the blows given, made his escape, and is not since heard of. There were in all Nine persons, Six men and Three women, Condemn'd; Nine Burn'd in the Hand; and Six, for petty Larceny, to be Whip'd at the Carts Tayl."

How can the design of digital surfaces help engender trust?

Fascinating day yesterday at an internal BBC event for the new media community (called 'Digital Futures', following a similar event last year), in which we pulled in a few external speakers to provoke discussion around user experience design. I'm afraid I missed Ron Pompei's presentation, which I'm very sorry about (phone call from the boss to handle). Apparently it was good though. Matt Webb hacked his Mind Hacks into new shapes. Dan and Adrian Hon gave a fascinating talk around their Perplex City alternate reality game, of which I am in awe at the sheer scale of the operation. Natalie Jeremijenko foregrounded the ethical aspects of interaction design, drawing on feral robot geese accordingly, and Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path picked over Web 2.0, of which more below.

But well done to the fabulous Max Gadney and his colleagues on NM Design Forum for sorting it - a really useful day, which provided a cogent summary of current issues, somehow wide-ranging and related at one and the same time. It will have inspired many in the team to produce higher quality interactive experiences for public service. Which is A Good Thing. The question left buzzing around my head at the end of the day was the following one, which I asked to Jeff Veen.

"How the computer can help the designer", New Scientist, 1964

Like most designers, I have bundles of old magazines littering the place up - '50s 'Life'; '60s 'Punch'; copies of the 'The Face', 'The Wire' and 'iD' from the early '80s, some early 'Neo2s' from the '90s, etc and so on. Leafing through a copy of 'New Scientist' from 1964, so old that the staples had corroded and vanished leaving only ferrous brown smears, I chanced upon the following article.

Written by D. F. Walker of Ferranti Limited, "How the computer can help the designer" was surrounded by other pieces asking "What price cosmic conversation?" or taking us through "The cephalosporin story", and further surrounded by the glorious period context of the adverts. These give a sense of a British manufacturing industry still in full bloom, the sheer technical power of an empire still present at background trace levels, such as in the central London addresses for companies now long gone. But between the lines, or rather between the classifieds, it's also possible to detect change afoot e.g. several adverts indicating increased scientific emigration to Australia (perhaps Britain's human supply chain there describes a vanishing point of  empire - from transportation society to information society in 100 years).

Other adverts can now be re-contextualised as inadvertent pop-poetry: "People who shape society ready New Society" or "At Halewood, building 2 Corsairs every minute ... FORD KEEP ON SCHEDULE WITH COVENTRY CLIMAX FORK LIFT TRUCKS. Telephone Coventry 28481".

However, nostalgia ain't what it used to be. Of genuine interest 40 years later remains Walker's article. I've scanned the whole thing in for you to read below.

Jobs at BBC Radio and Music Interactive

Several new jobs in our team available now! Closing date soon! We're looking for Technical Project Managers, Software Engineers, Information Architects, R&D types, a Senior Software Engineer and a User Experience Manager. Here's some of what we did last year. For more on the jobs and all information on how to apply, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/jobs/rminteractive/.

Closing date now past. Thanks for your attention.

Work: quick review of 2005

Please excuse a lengthy, self-indulgent post (unusual, huh) in which I take stock of the last year at work. Partly this is public thank you to the teams I work with at BBC Radio & Music Interactive; our own excellent Technology & Design team in particular (take a bow!), and the many teams around the organisation who support and enable our work. But this is also me using the blog as the proverbial 'outboard brain', the notebook-cum-scrapbook-cum-sketchpad with the web attached. So excuse the inward focus and switch channel if you like, but I figure some people might find the dispatches from the front line of the BBC interesting, given how little info actually makes it out of large organisations. So here's a (currently flu-ridden) design manager's view, as I see it from our third floor haven at Broadcasting House, overlooking the new building rising from the ground. The Technology & Design team I run is responsible for designing and building the BBC's interactive services around radio and music ...