cityofsound

"How much?" A question about imageability and seams in transport fare systems

(Something of a follow-up post to the recent transport informatics survey.) A recent conversation with Jarrett Walker, a consultant based here in Sydney, popped up the following thought. Jarrett, experienced in metropolitan transit systems, was thinking through ideas around fare pricing given the new possibilities enabled by fully automated systems.

Design of fare structures have been fundamental to transit planning for years, attempting to define charges for journeys in equitable yet efficient fashion. Balancing those last two factors mean that the basic problem is often shot through with tensions - e,g, richer suburbs paying less than poorer, due to zoning often based on radial principles emanating from a central core, and so on. Jarrett knows more about that than I. Whatever, existing systems based around zones etc. do at least usually have a stated, consistent pricing for journeys that can be easily communicated, even if not necessarily agreed with.

However, Jarrett was wondering about some emerging thinking he'd heard around the possibilities of new smart card-based, integrated ticketing systems, and the sense that varying prices could be generated in real-time, based on variables like distance, time of day, number of passengers on board, overall running costs of the system at that point, demand etc. That you wouldn't know the actual price you'd been charged for that particular journey and that actually, you needn't. You just swipe the card and conduct your journey, in the knowledge you'll have pre-paid to a certain amount, or pay a monthly bill subsequently. You'll trust the system will charge you fairly, of course, and you could see the breakdown of costs at the end of the month, or when your pre-pay card needs topping up, and so on.

(As an analogy, you'd contend that few people really know/care the exact cost of each one of their phone calls, for instance. The payment is represented by sometimes complex monthly plans, based around a number of free minutes/texts that are bundled, a certain number free within a network and so on. Obviously, some do know what they pay each time, but hasn't the general tendency has been towards bundling into monthly packages, abstracting away from pricing the actual individual calls at time of connection? With a pay-as-you-go model for those without financial security.)

So the drift towards an ongoing service model of variable pricing bundled into pre-paid or direct-debited packages seems an option. With an increasing deployment of GPS devices in all vehicles and RFID-based tracking of passenger entry/egress, it seems likely that some transit systems will try this out, in effect neatly hiding the complexity of pricing from the citizen.

This is partly also due to the sheer complexity of pricing systems e.g. Sydney's train system alone has over 120 'fare products', apparently. Multiply that by ferry, bus and light rail. This fare complexity is largely a result of attempting to be equitable, and at the moment the complexity is shared by both system operator and customers.

However, Jarrett wondered whether citizens might actually want to understand, or engage with, their public transport system a little more deeply. That pricing is one way of perceiving the structure of the transport system, and that's something that customers might innately want to do. He thought that it might be important to perceive how the system works, at least as expressed in fare structures. It's a map of the city, in a sense. In a city like London, the topography is overlaid with a mental model of the zones, which take on a kind of meaning over and above fare products (I proudly lived in zone 1, would more or less travel to zone 2, and so on.)

When he asked me the question about whether perceiving the sysetm was important, I immediately thought of the importance of seams and imageability.

Seamfulness, some long time readers will know, is a particular interest here (and of others, like Anne Galloway and Adam Greenfield.) It holds that a desire to hide complexity via an apparently perfect, hermetically-sealed product can actually mitigate against a successful informational system.

A classic example here is the iPod, which given its undoubted success also indicates how complex the argument is. That success is down to its carefully linked system architecture with iTunes as well as its rigorously reduced interface and seductive aesthetic. And yet its alleged undoing is also to do with its 'perfect' design, in that batteries are difficult to replace (meaning most people don't) and that it's a music experience that can't be tweaked or modified much. You could argue that if the iPod showed its seams a little more, it would be more malleable as a device, and even more engaging as a product experience. Doing that without damaging its seductive sheen and usability would be tricky but potentially rewarding. That old "beautiful seams" ambition.

The other reference is of Kevin Lynch's concept of imageablity, from his pivotal book The Image of the City, which I've always thought should apply to system design - the ability to perceive the system around you (visually, spatially, intellectually) and be left with a strong 'image' of its structure. Also known as legibility. A few years ago Peter Lindberg developed the idea specifically around software architecture, and I've subsequently thought it an essential feature of good system design (whether the system is a building, a music-playing device, a transport system or indeed Grand Theft Auto.)

So it seems to me that the ability to show/hide structural detail is fundamentally important element of a system. It enables the legibility of the system. And that showing a bit more detail, if carefully and sensitively articulated, can only engage the user further. Not necessarily exposing minute technical detail - though a handful will always want that - but enabling perception of the basic ambit, structure, joints, seams, influences, and so on. It certainly enables that form of engagement known as adaptation or even hacking - not in the pejorative sense of the word - but in the sense of building upon systems and extending them - as we've seen with transit systems that do begin to expose their behaviour.

And of course, as these and similar pervasive systems migrate into many spheres of life, deciding how visible to make parameters, motives and controls becomes even more important. Will hiding such intricacies reduce civic engagement in urban information systems? Or conversely, will its seamless design lead to increased take-up of services like public transport and thereby greater civic engagement?

What do you think? I'm aware that I'm posing the question to a particular audience, but do you think that, in this case, a transport system that has a choice to hide the potential complexity of a fare system should do that? Or should it reveal its complexity either through having set fares or by displaying the calculated fare on the spot? Does convenience trump legibility?

Monocle: design notes

It’s a year or so after launch of Monocle and things are going very well, both in print and online, so it's time for me to move on. Having worked with Tyler Brûlé and the rest of the Monocle team to breathe life into the project, creating the first volume of the magazine and iterations of the website and steering it through its first successful year of operation, I decided to leave, and departed at the end of March 2008. The project is up and running, with good solid foundations. Thus, others can run the daily business from here on in.

With that, I thought I’d pause to reflect on some of the design and strategy choices I made with Monocle.com and share them here. I’ve often tried to be ‘transparent’ about the work done on projects here, in the hope that it stimulates useful thought or conversation in other projects elsewhere, and partly to facilitate my own reflections on work. None of what follows is rocket science, and it’s not the place to look for thoughts on 2.0/3.0, social software, or urban informatics. That would be in the accounts of different projects. But if you’re interested in the honest craft of website work, almost deliberately old-fashioned ‘classical’ web design - and how to ally this with innovation in magazine publishing - the following should provide a decent account of several of the key decisions in this particular project.

During the course of an insanely busy year there are many other key decisions that just occurred and aren't noted here - most of them, in fact. And of course some that are confidential. Nor is this particularly structured. Nonetheless, it contains early sketches, outlines of strategic thinking and some insights into decision-making, tool choices and design practice. I hope you find what follows to be useful or interesting.

Context
As someone put it, Monocle was probably the most blogged about magazine last year. It was written about offline a lot too, but I won’t dwell on the magazine specifically here, except where it relates to the design and production of the digital services. (For a bookended account, Monocle's editor Andrew Tuck wrote about the launch and Tyler and Andrew were both recently interviewed a year on.)

Many were too quick to judge perhaps,  but others were less so and considered responses emerged throughout the year. Reception varied wildly, as one expects, but leaving aside the reception for the magazine and brand overall, the website itself often received much critical acclaim, for which many thanks. The likes of Eye, Print, BusinessWeek, MagCulture and Design Week all suggested we were onto something with our integration of print and web specifically. I’ve mentioned the Eye article before, but the Print piece by Andrew Blum was particularly sharp in identifying the Monocle.com difference. While the new media commentators often mistakenly looked for a 2.0 platform play, Blum noted our attempt to bring quality back to the table, trying to use a new platform to reinvigorate broadcast journalism itself. Similarly BusinessWeek spotted that the “web component (is) more like TV than print”. It actually feels somewhere between the two, but that was the intention.

Perhaps more importantly, the user figures have grown healthily throughout the year. Unique users and time spent on the site are all doing fine, but I knew from the BBC that getting the broadcasts into iTunes would be the thing that really extended the viewership of the programmes, our primary purpose. When we added BBC radio podcasts to iTunes they really thrived, and sure enough, since November 2007, viewing figures have been doubling month on month for Monocle’s movies, driven by iTunes’ ease-of-use. We’re now shifting terabytes of editorial each week. If you have audio or video material, the value of iTunes at this point cannot be stressed enough. It’ll be interesting to see how that platform develops.

Best of all, we hit number 1 in the iTunes News & Politics chart just before Christmas 2007. It’s hardly the most rigorously calculated chart in existence, but still an achievement, I think, to have the likes of the rather more well-funded and well-established Economist, Guardian, BBC, Reuters and Sky trailing in your wake through December, even temporarily (with the first four there having an average age of over 100 years or so, and our brand barely 10 months old at that point.)

So for an entirely new non-mainstream brand, with a no-celebrity policy allied to serious global coverage of subjects that are often little known before we cover them, I’m very happy with the favourable response from readers and viewers. We’ve covered e-Sports in South Korea, the animated title sequences of Kuntzel+Deygas, Narcotecture in Afghanistan, Tezuka architects’ Fuji kindergarten, Lexus’ brand issues, Paula Scher on Brand America, the train from Istanbul to Van, the CEO of Lego, the Tällberg Forum, the 2007 Salone industrial design fair and Frankfurt Motor Show, slow food in Turin, our top urban design solutions, mayoral summits in New York, photojournalism from Murmansk, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe and Abkhazia, and much more besides, Plus, we got name-checked by Lupe Fiasco.

Materials Monthly (Princeton Architectural Press)

After a hiatus, Princeton Architectural Press have re-started Materials Monthly, in their words the “popular, build-your-own materials library subscription service that delivers the latest in materials research, from our desks to yours.” And that it does.

I’ve had a chance to look over, and pore over, issue #11, based around the theme of ‘Modern Adaptations’, and cannot fail but to be very impressed with this unique publication. Arriving in a pleasingly chunky cardboard box, the package contains actual examples of the materials discussed, alongside some well-produced loose-leaf editorial discussing them and their use, in this case historical. The ability to pick up, touch, rub and generally explore the tactility of materials is surprisingly affecting. I’ve long been espousing the virtues of senses other than sight in terms of assessing the impact of the built environment, drawing heavily from the likes of Juhani Pallasmaa, Stephen Holl, Paul Schütze, Mirko Zardini etc., but here’s a publication that actually takes that idea and delivers a sensory experience.

In The Eyes of the Skin, Pallasmaa discusses the relationship between touch, objects, memory, history and process - "The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsmen and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand … The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition … it is time turned into shape." He notes that "the skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter."

Indeed, despite only being fragments and samples, it is a revelation to feel the cool weight of the small block of pigmented structural glass, or the delight on peeling back the protective wrapper to stroke the small square of sharp, highly-polished prismatic stainless steel. This simple yet rewarding experience actually suggests that the series serves not only as a regular prompt for designers and builders, but almost as an oblique critique of the ocularcentric architectural press elsewhere.

Of course its target audience is really designers, builders and engineers, and the publication is tuned to that crowd accordingly, but you half-wonder what if other, more general magazines like Dwell, Monument, A+U, Architectural Review, Frame and Mark took this approach, perhaps as a multi-sensory special-edition every quarter.

But for now, you have to subscribe to Materials Monthly for that kind of experience. They say:

“Each issue now includes at least five material samples and spec sheets with mechanical and physical properties, life cycle analysis data, sourcing and manufacturing details, digital and prefab options, installation, maintenance, and preservation advice, and other important technical information.”

It’s well-designed for use, with pages in loose form to be bound later, and a coding system linking object to text and beyond that makes the information architect within twitch with glee (he doesn’t get out much these days, so you’ll forgive me.) Subscribing, you'd quickly build a fantastic collection of materials, and copious notes on their historial, and potential, use. With so much attention being paid to new materials - e.g. the Transmaterial series amongst others - but so little opportunity to genuinely sense them, Materials Monthly, and Princeton Architectural Press, deserve a lot of credit for this smartly realised service.

Materials Monthly (more images below)

The street as platform

[Image courtesy of Timo Arnall]

I was recently asked to comment on ‘the street of the future’; a response for a quango responsible for the built environment and a government department responsible for transport, roads and so forth. Which means it's really the street of the near-future. I didn’t have enough time to write something short, so I dashed off the following, and I’m really posting here as a note to self, rather than an attempt to deeply discuss the everyday informational street circa 2008. Still, I hope you find it useful or engaging. The photos don't relate directly but create a kind of composite illustrative city nonetheless.

It’s deliberately grounded in the here-and-now, more or less, so it will seem rather old hat to some of you. Which in a sense it is. And in another sense, it isn't. But either way, this was a better strategy for the task-in-hand, and in imagining the scene below, via a kind of narrative, it's still remarkable to even sketchily consider how much data is already around us, and is near-invisible to traditional urban planning perspectives. And I'd suggest that this data beginning to profoundly affect the way the street feels. Some quick analysis follows the narrative, raising a series of questions for governance, legislation and the public-private partnerships that also constitute the contemporary street.

"The Shinkansen to Melbourne is now boarding at Central Station, platform 27 ...": A new high-speed rail network for Australia

There's a lot of interest in high-speed rail networks at the moment, with good reason. European networks are beginning to form a continental grid of high-speed trains, and Japan's supreme bullet trains of the Shinkansen are being exported. Interest in reinvigorating the USA's Amtrak is being discussed seriously for the first time in decades. London's St. Pancras finally delivers. (And what is the design of new Macbook Air, if it's not a Shinkansen 500 nose welded to the backside of Porsche 928S, as if Luigi Colani was grinning away in some dodgy East End garage, glowing oxyacetylene torch in hand ...)

Monocle's latest issue covers many of the developments. Also, Treehugger just posted an interview with Andy Kunz, of newtrains.org, which covers the situation in the US in some detail and worth a read (if you skip past the New Urbanist bit at the start, which is woefully short of the kind of ambition and imagination that created high-speed trains in the first place.)

Meanwhile, Monocle also has a new film up - one of my favourites thus far, I must say - covering the train journey from Istanbul to Van, on the way to Tehran. Our correspondent Saul Taylor produced a wonderfully atmospheric little mini-doc, capturing exactly the dislocating sensation of those long train rides across Eastern Europe.

My own Eastern European train journey from Sheffield, via the Netherlands, to Budapest in 1991 is still a vivid memory. I've been lucky enough to experience many great rail networks. Doing a lot of business with the IHT last year meant many meetings in Paris, a very swift and easy ride away from London (it's even faster now). I recall the magnifique TGV from the north, down to Marseille; extremely fast, through beautiful terrain, and smooth as silk. Getting the train down the north-west coast of the US, from Seattle to Portland, was a not terribly comfortable ride but through the most sublime landscape imaginable. A hot dusty train from Milan to Pistoia gave me a clear sense of Italy's country and city, before I really set foot in it. The Shinkansen in the (entirely affordable) first class Green Car from Osaka to Tokyo was perhaps the pinnacle, sitting back in an armchair and watching Mount Fuji slide by, reaching phenomenal speeds yet gliding gracefully, attendants bowing to passengers upon entering and leaving the carriage. Yet Swiss railways, on simple trips along the edge of Lake Zürich, are the best examples of service design I've ever seen.

As a non-driver and only occasional flyer, the train is by far my preferred mode of transit. It's easier to work on a train, to relax and read, to stroll to the restaurant car (again, watch the Monocle film on the journey to Tehran for a particularly fine, if old-fashioned, example of the restaurant car in action.) Sleeper trains, if operated by Deutsche Bahn and not the generally woeful British rail companies, can be a wonderful way to travel longer distances in real comfort. They're safer too, if run well (the Shinkansen hasn't had a single passenger fatality in shifting 6 billion passengers over its 40-year history, including through earthquakes and typhoons).

My European roots might be showing here, but the New Rail Revolution isn't limited to that continent. Juergen Kornmann of Bombardier - one of the world's biggest train manufacturers - told Monocle about the investment in rail elsewhere.

"It's those emerging markets - India, China and Russia especially. They're making huge investments in infrastructure. They have a big need for new material, and this means very good business. Russia has an urgent need for freight rail infrastructure because they have such huge distances within the country, from the mines in the east to the population centres, and Europe, in the west. In India, passenger traffic has increased as more people move to big cities. In China, it's both."

The options for trains are increasing too. Over and above the Shinkansen, Deutsche Bahn has a fleet of ICE trains, which can reach speeds of 300km/h. Generally, an all-electric line would be the way to go.

So high-speed rail cuts across countries with vast open spaces as well as densely-packed Europe. And now we are either just post-peak oil, or thereabouts depending on who you read, the other benefits of trains over cars and 'planes barely need stating. (Again, read the Treehugger interview with Andy Kunz if you do want the stats on how much more energy efficient trains are.)

But it's not just about efficiency. There's a romance to the train journey that has never been fully captured by the aeroplane, save those early heady days of flight, and the initial commercialisation of airways (see Evelyn Waugh's Labels for an example). The road movie has a certain panache, admittedly, but is usually defined by an existential solitude. Flying is usually defined by anxiety and fear, whereas the train by intrigue, chance, possibility, cameraderie, romance, and travelling rather than arriving. Examples abound, from Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train to Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched The Trains Go By to Greene's Travels With My Aunt, and many others. See also the films, such as Strangers ..., The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes from Hitchcock alone. You will have your own favourites.

The posters of Tom Purvis, those GPO films of the London to Brighton route, numerous great pieces of music. A nostalgic point admittedly, but what a different class of cultural production, as if the imagination is stoked by the train more than any other mode of transport.

Moreover, trains can be amongst the most thrilling examples of industrial design, train stations our sublime secular cathedrals, rail bridges our finest creations in civil engineering, and so on. So this isn't at the 'knit your own scented mung bean' end of sustainability; rather, gleaming future cities ascribed with high-quality, high-tech mass transit.

Except here in Australia.

Many think the Australian economy will be shielded from recession by China, and it's currently running at a fairly hefty budget surplus. Either way, spending on infrastructure works is one way of dealing with productivity during global economic slowdowns. So there's money. And sure enough, the Australian government is looking at infrastructure.

"Cabinet also decided yesterday to go ahead with plans to establish Infrastructure Australia, a body to co-ordinate public and private investment in areas such as ports, roads and railways."

Yet the train network has long since departed from the popular imagination, and that's the major issue (economic capacity to invest in infrastructure is really a question of will, which is in turn a question of culture). In fact, Australia might just have been a little too new for it to really have ever landed, as a concept. Even though my initial observations suggest that large areas of Australia's cities are given over to rail and related infrastructure, many will see this as ripe for redevelopment (e.g. the certainly very good CarriageWorks development of the Eveleigh Rail Yards.)

Certainly, this is a car-based culture, just as with the US. Yet it's significantly without that cultural memory of the long arms of iron railroad, hardwiring America out of its mid-western plains (described most wonderfully in Jonathan Raban's Badland.) The interior of Australia is still largely untouched by industrial development, and will always remain so. Politically, the governance model has been left in an unhelpful position, indicating the careless negligence with which rail has been treated. Rail networks were created and run by the states, rather than the federal government, even leading to different gauges of track being laid down from state to state, apparently. They're still run by state-based companies, which means you sometimes still have to change trains to get from Sydney to Melbourne, an incredible state of affairs in 2008.

Of course Sydney to Melbourne is no small journey. Australia is such a vast country, based around effective city state economies, that a constant series of flights shuttle back and forth between cities almost every half-hour, providing hour-long journeys between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. The iconic drives take a day or so, if done by car, which people seem happy to do.

But neither of those modes of transport are tenable going forward, for mass transit, from almost any perspective you'd care to mention. To be clear, cars and planes will still be valid options, just not for the vast proportion of the travel required. The road journeys - the Great Ocean Road, the Grand Pacific Drive, the Pacific Highway - will still be tourist experiences, quite rightly. Infrastructure like the Sea Cliff Bridge in New South Wales will always provide visceral experiences of Australia's beautiful terrain, almost second to none.

But the roads need to be replaced as as the platform, no pun intended, for mass transit. They're barely suitable for freight, and certainly not suitable for business travel. A AUS$3.6 billion upgrade to the Pacific Highway alone is a lot of money to spend on a short-term solution.

In comparison, the train wins out in almost every possible future scenario. Leaving aside that small matter of peak oil, trains are far more comfortable to work in, as long as the space plan is generously laid out (again, don't look to British trains here). Wireless and mobile networks are far easier to implement on trains than in the air. And they deliver you from city centre direct to city centre, as opposed to depositing you well outside the outer suburbs with another journey ahead of you (never fun rushing from the airport to a meeting in near-tropical conditions.) Moreover, as Kunz points out, it's easy to integrate interstate trains with an urban light-rail/tram network, in a three-tier system of national, regional, local.

I see the opportunity for a primary southern- and eastern-coastline based network, connecting Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, with a tangent shooting off to Canberra, and a possible stop at Newcastle. These are all classic 'city pairs', in the language of high-speed rail network planning. (Perth and Darwin are just too far to connect on this line directly, but should be served by long-distance high-speed sleepers, with the level of comfort and service achieved by the Deutsche Bahn City Night Line. Lines exist on these axes already, run by Rail Australia essentially for tourists - the Ghan (bottom to top, Adelaide to Darwin, 3000km) and the Indian-Pacifc (the 4300km from Sydney to Perth via Adelaide)).

Let's call this new network the Southern Cross Line, as Melbourne's excellent re-worked Spencer Street station could be its centre-piece (it's a fine station by Grimshaw, and winner of the Walter Burley Griffin award for Urban Design in this year's RAIA awards. It indicates the fine opportunity for quality in civic architecture the railway station presents).

Just as that station attempts to suture Melbourne's CBD together with its Docklands, the high-speed rail network would genuinely connect most of Australia's major cities. Roma Street in Brisbane and Central Station in Sydney would both need a re-vamp (yet Elizabeth Farrelly in the Herald suggests a way forward for the latter in Yuval Fogelson's plan to sink Central underneath Sydney's inner-west.)

(For fun, I've dashed off a simple identity, drawing on the best elements of the Australian flag set on the turquoise of the accompanying ocean, then indicating how an animation could warp the constellation slightly to indicate the major destinations (below), a sequence of pearls along Australia's coastline. The Commonwealth Star remains on the logo, alongside the Southern Cross, indicating this wider national sensibility connecting the city states. This bending of the Southern Cross stars towards the cities relates to the maps of Europe warped by high-speed rail I posted about before. I've half a mind to re-draw Australia on that basis, indicating a pinning of the fabric pulling towards this densely-packed south-east corner. And of course a train with a hooter like the Shinkansen (top) surely deserves a pimple.)

It barely needs pointing out that this 'Southern Cross Line' would also instantly be amongst the most beautiful rail journeys in the world, particularly given a few show-stopping bridges and viaducts hugging the coast as much as possible, yet also easing through lush pasture and rocky outcrop, tinder dry plain and damp rainforest.

The trains should quite simply be imported Shinkansen bullet trains. Taiwan have bought the first exports (700 series) from Hitachi (video of Taiwanese tests below). Russia are interested, for their Trans-Siberian Railway. China has taken a joint-venture approach, modifying bullet trains built by Kawasaki. Even the UK has ordered 29 aluminium Javelin trains, from London to Ashford for the 2012 Olympics (possibly overkill given the UK's small footprint. Unless they give it a bit more of a journey, it'll be like tethering a greyhound on a very short leash.) So the Shinkansen import model is alive and well, and if elements of Japan's service culture and attention to detail in branding and service design (certainly a little more thought than my five-minute sketch above) can be imported too, all the better.

Australia has imported wisely from its Asian neighbour in the past - its peerless architecture is heavily influenced by Japanese tradition through the work of Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds et al, and its cuisine likewise. There's no harm in doing a bit more importing here.

From Tokyo to Fukuoka is 1,174km, and the N700 bullet trains do that in five hours. Melbourne to Sydney is roughly 900km and currently takes around 10 hours. Sydney to Brisbane is 1000km and currently takes around 13 hours. Both services run essentially 1 train per day. With Shinkansen, and newly built track optimised for high-speed, you might guess that Melbourne to Sydney would take around three and a half hours, and Sydney to Brisbane around four hours, and you could run them on the hour. That's getting comparable to flying time, as trains have far quicker check-in and can deliver you from city centre to city centre.

This 'Southern Cross Line' can run alongside the Gahn and the Indian-Pacific, which remain great tourist services. And of course, cars and planes are still part of the mix. It's just that, given the circumstances, the balance now has to shift heavily, back towards the train.

So I call on Mr. Rudd's administration to spend some of that budget surplus - which could be around AUS$18billion - and build a national high-speed rail network. Reorganise the governance to be a federal network, as rail is inevitably an interstate issue. Buy the trains from Japan and lay down the track. Create a network that people would be thrilled to use; would be proud of, as the Germans, French and Japanese are proud of theirs; that would ultimately make them leave the car at home and the plane on the runway. Rudd is right to have made broadband networks one of his administration's priorities, but this is a different network, a different level of investment - and return on investment - altogether. It's a new network for Australia.

Façades: expressive, responsive, interactive

A series of notes on the contemporary façade, from expressive and performative to responsive and interactive.

(This is by no means an attempt at an exhaustive survey; there are many more advanced façades out there - do feel free to note your favourites below. And for further examples, see the excellent Interactive Architecture dot org. Nor is this about contemporary façades in general (currently foremost for me, the glowing "lenses" of Steven Holl Architects' extraordinarily beautiful, quietly bravura Block Building for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (amateur video here and here) and the soap-bubble structure meets ETFE skin of Arup/PTW's National Aquatic Centre in Beijing).

Instead, this is simply a curated set of façades, juxtaposing a few different approaches to expression or interaction.

The Personal Well-Tempered Environment

SUMMARY

• A real-time dashboard for buildings, neighbourhoods, and the city, focused on conveying the energy flow in and out of spaces, centred around the behaviour of individuals and groups within buildings.
• A form of 'BIM 2.0' that gives users of buildings both the real-time and longitudinal information they need to change their behaviour and thus use buildings, and energy, more effectively. An ongoing post-occupancy evaluation for the building, the neighbourhood and the city.
• A software service layer for connecting things together within and across buildings.
• As information increasingly becomes thought of a material within building, it makes sense to consider it holistically as part of the built fabric, as glass, steel, ETFE etc.

INTRODUCTION

This is a somewhat overdue write-up of my talk at Interesting South, November 2007. For expediency, you could watch the video of the presentation. (It's 10 minutes long and punctuated at the end by the intro to 'These boots are made for walkin''). This is the extended write-up with notes, references and slides.

Caveat: I've often seen this site as essentially sharing my sketchbook, so please bear in mind that what follows is no more than a sketch, and series of notes, rather than any attempt to envision a fully-formed product. Any attempt at the latter would entail these sketches being tested by a more coherent design and research process. For now, this is simply a sketch, a kind of un-built architecture (for it is architecture, of a sort), and a simple, not necessarily innovative, idea drawn up for a swift 10-minute presentation at a highly multi-disciplinary event. Please take it in that spirit. I'd like to see something like this realised as a product on the market, which is part of my rationale for publishing here. In other words, feel free to make this - or some version of this - a reality yourself. If you find that the central idea doesn't ring true, I've written in such a way that you may still find some of the references or thoughts useful.

Essentially, the idea is for a system that makes previously invisible aspects of people's behaviour visible, in order to help change individual and collective behaviour. In this case, the primary drive is towards leading a more sustainable personal life, encouraging less consumption and more contribution, also taking into account the context of your behaviour in wider neighbourhood and city. By tracking your energy and resource usage, and playing this off against possible contributions made through generating energy or resource, systems are able to build simple aggregated profiles for these aspects of a person's or household's behaviour. Using popular techniques drawn from social software, these profiles provide users with historical trends for their behaviour, and allow the profiles to be compared, contrasted and recombined with those of others. By opening up these data feeds through APIs, within appropriate ethical and privacy frameworks, unforeseen applications of this information can emerge, even enabling the 'gaming' of consumption and contribution profiles, encouraging civic and sustainable behaviour through competition. By conveying this information through multi-sensory feedback and persuasive visualisation distributed across discreet domestic interfaces, the effects of a person's behaviour can thus be discerned in the everyday.

It's a kind of real-time, responsive, itemised bill for all the different kinds of primary resource usage (electricity, gas, water, transport etc.) in your life, which also takes into account the contributions you make. A sustainable lifestyle, leaving aside the thorny definition of such a thing, could at least become a little bit more tangible.

As it concerns this somewhat over-used word 'sustainability', I wanted to start the talk with the following image of the Sydney Morning Herald to indicate that I was less interested in apocalyptic headlines or hectoring people into submission, and more interested in giving people tools and information to encourage positive behaviour, and to explore ways of taking personal control of a more sustainable way of living (More on 'Apocalypse Sydney' here).

John Thackara has also noted this problem with the sustainability message:

"The house is cold, someone keeps turning the lights off, and the greywater toilet is blocked again. As a way of life, sustainabilty often sounds grim. The media don't help: they tell us we have to consume our way to redemption. The shopping pages are filled with hideous hessian bags; and ads that used to be placed by double-glazing cowboys now feature wind turbines, and solar roofs. Adding mental discomfort to the mix, politicians scold our bad behaviour as if we were children dropping litter. And preachy environmentalists expect us to feel guilty when we fail to embrace their hair-shirted future with joy."

So this is an idea to make sustainability something personal, intimate, meaningful and orientated towards positive contributions, as well as connecting the individual's actions to the wider urban context.

Honda Puyo

I love this Honda Puyo concept car, just exhibited at the Tokyo Motor Show. Not least for its looks, its clear orientation towards high-density urban living - it can spin 360 degrees to park - plus the now obligatory 'green' credentials of electric motors and hydrogen fuel cell, but mainly because of two ongoing obsessions: sensory and behavioural aspects of the design.

Firstly, the car's roof explores tactility (as well as safety). According to Honda, "PUYO is a Japanese onomatopoeia that expresses the sensation of touching the vehicle's soft body.":

"The body of the Puyo is not traditional metal but a soft gel designed to look and feel like human or animal skin. As well as the marketing appeal of a such a radical finish, the soft exterior delivers improved safety performance, especially when it comes to pedestrian protection, something Honda leads the world on."

And secondly, the car's exterior has behaviour, in line with its conditions:

"The Puyo’s body can also glow various colours to change its look and – depending on how you view it – its personality. Honda says the changing colours alert owners to the condition of the vehicle, “facilitating a more intimate relationship between people and their cars”."

(It might enable the car to daub its own 'CLEAN ME' graffiti, perhaps.) This capability reminds me of Herzog & De Meuron's Allianz Arena, of course, but also Brian Eno's idea for re-equipping cars horns with a suite of aural motifs designed to communicate various messages - or provide a greater range of expression - to other drivers and pedestrians. The Puyo's visual approach may be quieter if no more discreet, but I do like the idea of the car communicating its state and behaviour with subtlety. It might have been more interesting to connect these two approaches and communicate state through tactility as well as visual feedback. I'd love to hear more detail of the various parameters involved, and associated interfaces (given that changing the exterior colour of the car will be of negligible use to the driver inside, leading to possible later confusion.)

Toyota also had a concept car - the RiN - on show, which approached mood and behaviour, though with rather less insight:

"The RiN uses sensors to monitor the driver’s mental state. The futuristic concept can determine if the driver is flustered or calm and display the results on its modern dashboard."

Though if you need a car to tell you how you feel, I suspect you're beyond help.

Honda Puyo wants to be loved [Drive.com.au]
Honda Puyo concept [Autoblog]
Early look: Honda's Puyo concept [Leftlanenews]
See also: Frankfurt Motor Show [Monocle]

A few more images of the Puyo below:

Flat rates, Flat whites

Before moving to Sydney, I'd promised myself that this site wouldn't become completely overwhelmed with notes on Australia. Yet these are precious moments, when my wide eyes are eating everything up, even more than usual. This is a rare time, first impressions hitting hard - as Dyer said of Lawrence, he would start writing about a place from the train on the way there. The active naïvety of the outsider -  familiar in some of my favourite writing by Raban, Robb, Carey, Dyer - is a powerful force when well trammelled. Mark Twain said something similar. Though you never know with Mark Twain.

Every day provides a cavalcade of differences, a sensation will be familiar to anyone who has lived in another country. From yoghurt pots to the layout of bus timetables to bar protocol to forms of government, and all points in-between. Even the certainties of death and taxation will be handled differently. Australia, which shares the same language as my native Britain - to some extent - and with it a strong residual cultural influence, is still utterly different. Perhaps it's more surprising as at the meniscus, the culture seems familiar, but the differences are actually fathoms deep. If you're on top of things, this is a wonderful feeling, a gently bewildering, continual mild surprise.

The basic setup of life in a new country immediately brings many of these differences rushing to the foreground, in a way that holidays never do. I won't bore you with my thoughts on what the differing designs of electrical plugs can tell us about national characteristics (OK, then: the overly safe, sturdy British plug, as if made of brick; the insouciant apparent lack of a pin for earth on the Continental European; the Australian discreetly positioned half-way between European and American styles, doing its own thing etc.) nor the other quotidian surprises: Weetabix being called Weetbix, the shape of coins, randomly different pronunciations, the curious affection for lawn bowling, the abundant size and flavour of local produce, with exotic fruits no longer exotic, the prevalence of school uniforms, the trajectories of news coverage. More immediate again: the more expansive, more experimental architecture; the obviously different climate and beautiful flora; the genuine political issues; the enlivening sense of limitless space, of earth and sky, that you just breathe in 'till your chest swells and your head is filled with possibilities ...

All these subtly different experiences will ultimately tell me a lot about this place, as the dust settles. In all this, I discover a bit about local approaches to technology adoption, regulation, geography, urbanisation - and some global patterns too. As with most western economies, they're all caught on the apparent dilemma of providing both individual choice and effective public service, bobbing up and down in the often turbulent wake of Milton Friedman's work, particular interpretations of the call-and-response between government regulation and market forces. Australia has of course developed numerous iterations of its own political and economic strategies, filtered through a complex historical prism and multiplied by geography and regional aspect - it's far too detailed and subtle for me to appreciate yet. But if the reasons for things feel obscured, blurred, opaque, the differences are felt sharply nonetheless.

In setting up a business, I encounter more contrasting systems - here, the importance of state-level business administration versus national taxation systems. Equally, registering for health care, opening a bank account, moving about. In terms of public transport, one has the feeling that Sydney is sort of trying them all out at once without really getting behind any of them with any vigour: bus, tram/light-rail system, an urban rail network that briefly dips underground downtown, as if trying out being a subway then quickly thinking better of it, ferries, taxis, water-taxis, even a monorail for goodness' sake. With banking, we find internet-based e-banking and contemporary financial services, but also charges on ATM transactions and in-person appointments with an actual human representative to open an account. (This latter turns out to be a more improved service, actually.) Health services are far more responsive, less under the cosh than in London. Getting a mobile, I find a far more confident, competitive and coherent 3G market than in the UK. Bolder, sharper.

Alongside all the myriad benefits and improvements I see - albeit through the rose-tinted view of the newcomer - one negative difference that hits home quickly is relatively woeful broadband environment. It's a shock to feel it, coming from the UK, where the rabid competition in telecommunications has hammered everything in favour of the consumer, leading to low, low prices and relatively fast speeds. And this is something you feel; it's like suddenly carrying a lead weight. In Australia, the available speeds are much slower on average, products can be non-standard, service can be poor (connections drop without warning), the former state telco Telstra still dominates, and the deals are structured around limited data usage and bandwidth per month, rather than the flat rate 'as-much-as-you-can-eat' packages you get in the UK and elsewhere. It's only with flat rate packages i.e. consistent pricing irrespective of usage, that this technology is really freed up.

In this respect, Australia suffers from a particularly unfortunate comparison with its South East Asian near-neighbours. Urbanisation is often mentioned as the key to South Korea's reputation as high-speed haven, as it's only really Seoul that benefits from ubiquitous high-speed connectivity but that's the majority of the population. Seoul's infrastructure was built through a combination of government drive and corporate muscle, but neither driver appears to have really kicked in yet in Australia, leaving the environment caught between regulation and competition with neither apparently able to move quickly. It needs to invest, sharpish. The government should make it a priority, at national, state and city levels, and provide whatever catalysts are needed for infrastructure provision and then let intense private competition do the rest. I'm too new to the market and culture here to take the detail of this argument much further, so listen to Leith Campbell:

"If the race has started to develop really fast broadband in the Asia-Pacific area, Australia has already all but lost, a leading telecommunications analyst says. And if that situation is to change, the Government has to encourage investment in taking optical fibre cables not just to street corner nodes, but all the way to homes." ['The connection's just not there', Sydney Morning Herald]

Australia has one of the most urbanised population in the world, so it should be able to share some of the natural benefits South Korea had. Given that, there's no need to worry too much about far-flung communities. (They can almost be picked off as special cases, and will not get in the way of commercial roll-out to the majority. Again this is different to dispersed European populations, where there's a complex variegated spread of population in a relatively smaller space.) So despite its massive scale, Australia benefits from a very usefully focused dispersal of its population. Yet some think this is not the case:

"The comparisons are somewhat unfair, of course. In Asia, with high population density, a fibre-optic cable connected to the base of a large apartment block instantly connects hundreds of people to very fast broadband." ['Wide hopes on broadband', The Age]

Indeed, Australian housing patterns are lower density than in Seoul, but they're still highly concentrated, when viewed at a macro-level of broadband rollout and compared to the European situation. By far the majority of the population lives in the well-organised 7 coastal cities - opinion varies as to the actual proportion, from 75% to 95% of the population - and these cities are relatively contained spatially, despite Australia's effectively unlimited space. Any resistance to the idea that Australia should have extremely fast broadband, competitive with its Asian neighbours, smacks of defeatism, myopia and lack of ambition.

The best story I heard recently for a successful technology- and culture-inspired rollout that takes advantage of urbanisation is perhaps somewhat oblique. But it's also an Australian story; that of how it ended up with the best coffee culture in the world. (Yes, New Zealand, you may quibble now.)

Coffeegeek.com has a great article explaining how this happened, written by coffee entrepreneur George Sabados. Before 1948, and the invention of the mass produced electric pump-driven espresso machine, most Italian emigration was to the United States, taking with it the old-fashioned approaches to making coffee, and little knowledge of the espresso as we know it. The invention of this new espresso machine coincided with the Australian government attracting vast numbers of new immigrants, via its '£2 ticket' scheme, whereupon most Italian emigrants then switched course and headed South. (For the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, a third of the city's population were Italian, or Italian-Australian. And Peter Robb, in his majestic 'Midnight in Sicily', writes briefly of this Italian emigration to Australia, particularly from the mezzogiorno, and the taste for coffee that went with it.)

The way Sabados tells it, the acceleration of coffee culture in Australia was enabled by its urbanisation - "The concentration of the population bases in these cities (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane) set the framework for the rapid spread of espresso" - and then through competition, during the eighties and nineties, competing in terms of quality of experience as well as quality of coffee. This leads happily to a vibrant, distinctive small entrepreneur-led market, as well as some national franchises. (Interestingly, Sabados tells of how Australian coffee developed the integration of milk with espresso too, leading to more variety than the Italian market and the fabulous Flat White.)

The result is an extraordinarily rich coffee culture, arguably the best in the world, with numerous fantastic cafés throughout its cities and a highly knowledgeable populace brewing at home too.

It's perhaps frivolous to suggest telcos and government could look at this and learn from it, but essentially this too is a story of regulatory catalyst, technology adoption and new cultural influence through immigration to an urbanised population, wherein competition can improve quality. The ingredients may be electricity and water supply, trade routes and knowledge, and the context quite different historically and culturally, but all these facets are also the results of that 'call-and-response between government regulation and market forces' I mentioned earlier, and take strategic advantage of Australia's urban culture. Seeing broadband as a feature of a culture akin to coffee shops, rather than technical problem, may help too. Coffee shops often get used as metaphorical placeholders for the information age - not least here - but here's something that describes their genuine culture- and technology-driven evolution, through urbanisation. Equally, in terms of immigration-driven change, standing in a long, busy line at the Department for Immigration and Citizenship the other day, I was only one of a handful of immigrants who didn't appear to be South East Asian. Perhaps they will bring the broadband, as Italians brought the coffee.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge

"On the occasion of the 112th birthday of one of the 20th century’s most prescient futurists and global thinkers, The Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) announces the launch of the first annual BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE."

"Each year a distinguished jury will award a single $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity."

"The Buckminster Fuller Challenge seeks submissions of design science solutions within a broad range of human endeavor that exemplify the trimtab principle. Trimtabs demonstrate how small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change."

Entries accepted September 4th - October 30th, 2007

Buckminster Fuller Challenge