cityofsound

'Bluestone Lounge Room: Designing the Streets of Melbourne' exhibition; opening speech

Last week Melbourne gave itself over to State of Design, the now annual design festival that somehow wraps up the entire city into a frenzy of all things design (I say "somehow" - it's due to the hard work of Ewan McEoin and team, as well as the receptive culture engendered in the city over the last two decades. Last year I was one of the speakers at Design Capital, and I've rarely been as well-treated at a conference.)

This year, I took part in an 'urban mobility' workshop for the 2040 City Design Laboratory (thanks to Crowd Productions for enabling that), bumped into Daniel Neville twice, which was a pleasure, and was invited to give the opening speech at a new exhibition at the Town Hall's City Gallery: "Bluestone Lounge Room: Designing the streets of Melbourne". (I've included my speech below. Unusually for me, I read it out in order to fit into the five minute time limit.)

(I should also note that the Lord Mayor of the City of Melbourne, Robert Doyle, actually gave the opening opening speech, and I followed him. I've never done the whole "Lord Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen ..." introduction before, but I don't think I broke too many official civic protocols.)

Notes on Geneva. A Walk.

As noted previously, I managed to escape for a brisk walk around Geneva during the Lift09 conference, heading from the conference venue down towards the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) and back. This was the first time I’d done such a drift aided by the iPhone’s GPS+Google-driven 'certainties', and it worked well, enabling me to embark in broadly the right direction, veering off aimlessly onto the most interesting-looking streets whilst reacquainting myself with the optimum route every now and then; a kind of waggle dance back and forth, following invisible satellites.

I was struck by how much I enjoyed Geneva. I’d never been, and despite being an ardent Helvetiaphile I had only middling expectations. One friend had described it as ‘the Canberra of Switzerland’, and so I was prepared for a peculiar, mannered version of said Australian capital, or The Hague, or Brussels, or Washington DC or one of those other cities that essentially exist purely for the sake of administrative clarity.

Yet there was immediately more to it than that. It is certainly skewed massively by the presence of the headquarters of just about every major international legislative organisation one could think of - the UN, the WTO, the Red Cross, and then a slew of organisations like ‘World x Organisation’, where ‘x’ is ‘Meteorological’ or somesuch. So while this manifests itself in an array of modernist-lite glass buildings of varying quality - as if a kind of playground for Play Time’s designers - it also lends the city with a distinctly global air and a massively diverse set of nationalities and cultures. 

Towards a new architect: an interview with Carlo Ratti

I’ve just finished working with Carlo Ratti and various cohorts on a great little project, which I hope might see the light of day here before too long. In the meantime, I thought I’d post this discussion I had with Carlo late last year, which was recently published in Architectural Review Australia. We met at the Metropolis Congress in Sydney, where Signor Ratti had just given a presentation on his work at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, an outfit whose work I admire hugely, working as they do across many of my interests: interactive architecture, urban informatics, responsive envronments, multidisciplinary design and other implications of real-time networked pervasive information systems for the city.

(Incidentally, the interview was also recently published on the new-ish Australian Design Review website - which amalgamates AR with its sister publication (Inside) - and which is rather nice and proving more than a little useful. Kudos to Andrew Mackenzie and Mat Ward for steering that through so well.)

To the discussion/article ...

Processional: Jeremy Deller/Manchester vs. Victoria Bitter/Australia

I like British artist Jeremy Deller's work a lot. I referred to his Acid Brass project years ago - in a very early entry on music metadata - as well as his moving recreation of the Battle of Orgreave (in Sheffield and The North). Recently I heard about his 'It Is What It Is' as I was ploughing through old Studio 360 shows, given the iPhone's new double-speed playback mode (which I'm loving, although I think it doubles my heart-rate too. Particularly listening to New Yorkers.)

So I watched his recent 'Procession' for the Manchester International Festival with interest. An actual procession through the centre of Manchester, it's a great big ramshackle civil serpent; sometime endearing, sometimes camp, sometimes misplaced, sometimes sad. Not everything works but it's a great idea - in a 'the city is shaped by events' sense. Here's a video on the artwork from The Guardian's report.

So imagine my surprise when someone's Twitter feed led me to the new advert for 'legendary' Australian beer VB. It's a beautifully done ad; pretty bloody funny - I can't decide between 'Cashed-Up Bogans', 'Manscapers' or 'Blokes Punching Above Their Weight'. Obviously the tone, location and purpose is quite different, but being a former resident of one city and a current resident of the other country, it's almost like I can imagine the two processions colliding, with hilarious consequences, The VB ad perhaps owes, well, a bit of a debt to Deller, no? [Higher quality here, embedded below]

Robert Miles Kemp (Postopolis! LA)

Robert Miles Kemp’s talk was always interesting and occasionally spellbinding, most of all when showing the work in responsive robotic structures. His videos of simple blocks self-assembling into what he called “nano-architecture” are quite extraordinary (sometimes eliciting a collective delight similar to that of The Living at Postopolis! NYC). Kemp situated this within a wider context of interactive and informational architecture, centred around his work at Variate Labs and renowned new media deisgn firm Schematic (and his blog, Spatial Robots) described in a consistently interesting talk, covering many of the primary themes in contemporary interface design - and indeed extending the idea of where and what interfaces are.