cityofsound

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.

'Soft infrastructure superpowers': Lift09 presentation

Saving me from having to transcribe my presentation, the very well-organised Lift09 conference got Swiss French Television to film all the talks. So please see the embedded video at the end of this entry, or here on Vimeo.

When I finally got to deliver this speech, I'd been travelling for some time without rest, as previously noted (and indeed, as described at the beginning of the talk). So perhaps understandably there were a few points I accidentally missed out, or stumbled over.

• Firstly, the reason I was dwelling on the airline story so much is that it's the commercial model underpinning contemporary aviation - a model I see as part of soft infrastructure - that leads to poor service, not any particular technical issue as regards hard infrastructure. Boarding the passengers whilst doing the safety checks on the aircraft is a manifestation of how close to the wire airlines have to run things. Equally, there is little or no redundancy built into the system, due to the particular financial models underpinning them, which are in turn expressions of underlying social, cultural, political fabric. When something goes wrong, therefore, it causes very large ripples through that soft infrastructure of service and system, in turn.
• The effect of bike-sharing networks such as Vélib' and Bicing, are so key to me as they indicate how soft infrastructure can utterly change the perception of the city - in this case the sense of mobility, effectively warping physical distance - without altering much in the way of hard infrastructure.
• The closing video, which people always find compelling, is lifted from a fantastic advert for the Madrid Metro, which I discovered on SuperSpatial a while ago. I re-edited, and replaced the soundrack (using a bit of Jacaszek, I seem to recall). I'm not sure who created the original advert, but it's a beautiful piece of work and I usually try to declare its provenance. Here I forgot/ran out of time. I deploy it to illustrate the promise of informatics in terms of seeing through the hard infrastructure to the activity and behaviour of the city itself, the way people actually use the city. Here's my cut of the video:

I can't show much of my work in detail due to the stage some of the projects are at - and the nature of those projects - but they'll all make it out here in time. Thanks to Keynote's effortless integration of video I now use clips heavily in presentations, but that makes it a little tricky to easily share talks afterward. The camera crew often neglected to capture the screen, so missing out on a few of the videos. So for the record, here are a few of the videos used during the talk:

"Network + network + network = network". Lift09 conference, and Geneva

It's a crisp clear Swiss winter day. Geneva looks beautiful in the pale sun. That sun, which feels like a slowly failing 20 watt bulb, is the second clearest sign I'm a long way from the New South Wales I left behind on Monday afternoon. The clearest sign is that it's -2°C here, which is essentially 32° difference to the Sydney summer day I departed from. I wear a coat for the first time in almost 2 years.

It's my first time in Geneva, surprisingly, but being amidst the effortlessly elegant Mittel-European urban form again is a delightful confirmation of certain beliefs after getting all-too accustomed to the New World sprawls of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Bikes, trams, 4-5 storey apartment blocks, pocket parks and quietly civic squares everywhere - it's all so right, even given that Geneva is far from the best example. The other, more institutional bits of Geneva feel more like one's living amidst the giant sets of Tati's Playtime, which a part of me would be entirely happy to do.

The relative proximity of Africa, rather than that of South-East Asia, is visible in the faces around me on the streets. The flat northern European colour-scheme of white, brown, grey and black across the textures of stone, brick, bare trees and filigreed overcast sky is a subtle and beautiful counterpoint to the intense light and rich colours of Australia. I'm lucky to live in both these worlds.

I also encounter 3 examples of haughty Swiss brusqueness in quick succession, from airport to taxi to hotel, which is a shock after the naturally easy-going and friendly Australian service culture. Still, I'm back in the country of my birth and I can live with this. My Swiss-ness is something I've continually over-stressed, entirely out of proportion to the <2 years I spent here after my birth in Zürich, and have spent much of my adult life adulating the likes of Josef Muller-Brockmann, Le Corbusier, Max Bill, Jan Tschichold, Herzog & De Meuron, Peter Zumthor, Claudio Sulser. The coffee's predictably poor, given its French heritage, but I can forgive almost all these foibles given the sheer delight of being in a country with the world's finest array of door handles, locks, window fittings and banknotes.

This is the pleasurable sense of disorientation I'm feeling. The less pleasurable aspects are due to the fact it took me 4 days to get here, when it should've taken just over 24 hours. This is due partly to 3 malfunctions across 2 different planes on the runway at Bangkok airport, but mainly due to the ineptitude of British Airways and Thai Airlines, which shuttled us backwards and forwards from runway to airport hotel numerous times. It was a bravura performance of truly appalling 'customer service', a cavalcade of unthinking, desperate, flailing, inhumane incompetence, all too familiar when encountering the raw edges often left exposed by global capital.

The journey ends up being Sydney to Bangkok to Hong Kong to London to Geneva, the last 4 airports all experienced within in 1 day. Despite the intense fatigue, hassle and frustration - which eventually left me drained of anger and resolving into a zen-like state of near-calm, as if the body itself was beginning to fade - I did at least get to explore Bangkok Suvarnabhumi (pretty good; wonderful concrete alongside giant  stretched-taut silver canvas loops; not enough places to sit; over-staffed shops (not a bad thing necessarily); no wi-fi), Hong Kong (night-time descent along the lights of Macau; currently being re-modelled but still delivering a sense of massive; cavernous escalator-threaded atria; great automated transit; old people working everywhere; good shops and good food; good free wi-fi all over the airport), London Heathrow Terminal 5 (disclaimer: Arup worked on it; actually surprised by how much I liked it; also good automated transit; the finish of many details was very good; beautiful exposed structural details; the shops entirely out of kilter with the times (a glance down the departure lounge: Prada, Harrods; Dior; Mappin & Webb; Smythson; Tiffany & Co ... all predictably empty); wi-fi everywhere but not free and therefore not used) and finally Geneva (classic small European airport; functional, efficient and pleasingly so; concourse roof being remodelled presumably; no need for automated transit or shops; surrounded by Alps and so a wonderful arrival:departure experience.)

The 4-day journey is actually much longer story, which I'll spare you in detail, but it did inadvertently provide me with the opening few minutes of my speech at the Lift 09 conference. For that's why I'm here in Geneva.

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.

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.

QUT, Brisbane: 3 (or 4) people, 2 campuses

While in Brisbane last week, I took the opportunity to meet a few people at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) for a chat about their work.

Dr. Marcus Foth will be known to a few of you as the energetic organiser of the Urban Informatics group on Facebook, as well as his work at QUT. We met at the QUT Kelvin Grove campus, where their well-known Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation is based, and had a long discussion about our various ideas as to making the previously invisible effects of everyday behaviour visible, with a view towards building more sustainable modes of behaviour; a form of persuasive visualisation, after Andrew vande Moere's phrase, angled towards the personal and everyday (see Rob Annable's long-distance write-up of my recent talk on 'The Personal Well-Tempered Environment' - more to follow on that.) Foth is engaged in much the same thinking, and it was great to knock ideas about with him. He's the editor of a forthcoming book - entitled 'Urban Informatics: Community Integration and Implementation', which should be a great contribution, and I can't wait to see more emerge from his research projects "Remembering the Past, Imagining the Future: Embedding Narrative and New Media in Urban Planning" and "Swarms in Urban Villages: New Media Design to Augment Social Networks of Residents in Inner-City Developments". He's also co-organising a workshop on 'Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability' at Pervasive 2008 in Sydney, which I hope to attend. Marcus also gave me a guided tour of the Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV) and campus, which is an adventurous billion-dollar investment by QUT and the state government. (Some brief thoughts on the KGUV below.)

Gavin Sade is also based at QUT's Kelvin Grove campus, within the Creative Industries faculty too, but working more in the area of teaching multimedia design. We talked of pedagogical issues in the contemporary classroom, and new classroom design - in other words, turn off the wifi if you want attention - and a bit on shaping education at this level. He also showed me some of his artwork/research, produced with the artist Priscilla Bracks (of whom you may have heard) and others as part of a collective, Kuuki. 'Charmed', exhibited at Experimenta in Melbourne earlier this year, is quite a beguiling little piece. It's constructed from three small white blobs, whose appealing tactility almost begs you to pick them up. Upon handling, sensors track movement and location over a table, and an embedded screen reveals an internal world which can be prodded and poked, and reacts accordingly. Here's Gavin's statement:

"The touch sensitive screens of Charmed offer intimate views into a virtual world accessed via three glowing resin pods. Each pod provides an entry point to inhabitants of suburban neighborhoods, apartment buildings and city spaces. Within these highly evolved snow domes, a black and white linear aesthetic depicts a world populated by mesmerized figures carrying out the routine tasks required of their environments. Haptic gestures, like touching or tapping, provide a pathway into the spaces and a connection with the cultures, uncovering the diminutive details of the lives of these animated figures. Touching the screen can break the spell and provoke change. Repeated tapping can cause chaos, disrupting lives, forcing computers to malfunction and causing traffic accidents. Tapping can impact inhabitants, even causing a man to drink so much that the inevitable happens and he wets his pants. In Charmed each portal offers an impression of omnipotence as private lives and public spaces are exposed and controlled by our touch."

Several thousand pairs of hands later, the blobs are a little grubbier and a lot less Kubrick accordingly, but that grimy patina reflects a lot of happy investigation. Gavin also gave the KGUV tour, so I got two angles in quick succession there. You can follow Gavin's blog here.

A day later I met up with Ben Kraal, at another QUT campus - the beautiful Gardens Point, just outside the CBD. Kraal is a research fellow in the School of Design, in the faculty of Built Environment and Engineering (the interweaving of disciplines across schools is healthily jumbled at QUT) broadly in the area of researching how people use things. I leave it that broad as his work could fit into the mainstream currents of HCI - indeed he just presented a paper at OZCHI in Adelaide - but also fits into general observational research into product design, practice, expertise, technique etc. And his current research drops the C in HCI altogether, focusing instead on nurses' application of compression bandages, seeing them as 'complex physical interfaces' and detailing how expertise might be systematically engendered in training and transfer of experience - and possibly leading that learning back into the product design itself. I found it fascinating to see the well-equipped labs, and particularly the software used to log videos of observations and then extrapolate themes in practice. In his words:

"We’ve shown that existing theories of expertise (continue to) scale across tasks, activities and disciplines. Also, we think we’re able to scale our approach to other physical interfaces. And that means that we’ll be better able to understand the actual use of physical interfaces, or indeed interfaces that are a mix of physical and digital, in the real world not just in a lab. And if we can get closer to understanding what people think and do, we can design better artefacts."

We also had a hugely enjoyable, incredibly detailed yet free-wheeling (no pun intended) conversation on car design, with particular reference to rotary engines and how different design and construction methodologies in the Japanese car industry impact on their possible adaptation and re-use of components (cf. Toyota). I hasten to add that all the detail was coming from Ben. You can follow Ben's blog here.

Many thanks to Marcus Foth, Gavin Sade and Ben Kraal. The fourth person I wanted to see, obliquely referred to above, was on holiday in the UK for Christmas. That's John Frazer (see also), who Arup's Tristram Carfrae had recommended and is Head of the School of Design. His research in informational models of cities is fairly unbeatable, ditto the use of generative systems in architecture. We hope to catch up another time. I'd also like to catch up with the Centre for Sub-Tropical Design at QUT, next time I'm up. I've been fascinated in their work for years, and I'm a bit gutted I missed their recent 'Hearing the city' event (nice PDF on that here) and related 'Brisbane River Audio Stream', co-produced with Lawrence English, supremo of the internationally-renowned local label, Room 40.

These two campus sites, Gardens Point and Kelvin Grove, are both good and interesting. The former, Gardens Point, is perhaps the more appealing currently, though it's hardly a fair comparison given that Kelvin Grove is still in the very early stages of a 'tabula rasa'-style development, whereas Gardens Point has borne an educational establishment for almost a century. Gardens Point has much of the same 'sub-tropical foliage reclaims sci-fi-brutalist space station' feel that the University of Queensland campus has, further up the river. It's a quite wonderful sensation and the campus cleverly snakes a few elevated walkways through the wide variety of buildings, '70s hulks next to late colonial architecture.

How great to walk over the Brisbane River, via the Goodwill Bridge, above the tangles of black, silty mangroves, and into the campus. The other side of the campus backs onto the city's Botanical Gardens, bursting with overgrown fig trees and blooming tropical plants, and on the other sides by the CBD and the river. A pretty good spot to think. [photos of Gardens Point here]

Kelvin Grove Urban Village is, as mentioned, at a far earlier stage of development. It's just post-construction and pre-character. However, the facilities are excellent, it's 3km from the city centre, and the complex has a variety of building types spread across the now-ubiquitous mixed-use development. Things are falling into place. Its architecture isn't particularly distinguished, though perfectly functional and with a good quality build. There are solar-powered bus stops a-plenty, decent cafés and other services. There is affordable housing as well as other (unaffordable?) housing, cheek by jowl. Although, somewhat oddly, the affordable is all in one block, which is apparently causing some issues. But essentially, the only thing the whole place needs is to be lived-in a bit. That, and the mass-transit connection to the centre, promised in the form of light rail. It just smacks of a new town development - a rare sensation for someone from the UK to feel - where only half the residents and services are in. Which is essentially what it is. While I don't like the phrase 'urban village' - it's an oxymoron; is it 'urban' or 'village'? - it seems to have been well-planned. Possibly over-planned, but on a decent scale.

Inside the buildings, the facilities are generally excellent. And outside, there's a giant billboard (the now familiar 'largest in the southern hemisphere' phrase is applicable here, apparently) and some nifty projectors in the 'square', trained on a large blank wall. Not used so much yet, these have potential. It's also rather charming how the former inhabitants, the 100-year-old Gona Army Barracks, are still visible in the form of old wooden huts and a long straight line of palm trees denoting the parade grounds. Ditto the naming and landscaping drawn from the relationship between the Indigenous Turrbal people and the land. While Gardens Point bears witness to a fully-formed campus, as evidenced in the height of the foliage, it'll be fascinating to see how the Kelvin Grove develops - it deserves to do well. [photos of Kelvin Grove here]

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:

New Monocle; one Eye satisfied

Surfacing briefly to note a couple of things. Monocle issue 05 is out now; a double-issue for summer, focusing on improving the quality of life in cities.

I'm personally pleased as it's the first issue of the magazine that I've helped shape a bit, albeit no more than subtle nudges and suggestions here and there. I'm particularly proud that there's a fine article on security in cities by Jonathan Raban; we've been in touch since I reviewed a talk he gave at the LRB Bookshop a few years ago, and I'm a huge fan, as regular readers will know. I also suggested Charles Landry to write about the practical side of shaping cities, and contributed a few items for our 'top 25' urban design ideas. It's a cracking issue, I reckon, so get thee to a newsstand, or subscribe online. Well done to Andrew Tuck and the team.

Speaking of which, we produced a few related broadcasts at Monocle.com around this issue. First up, a short news report on the recent C40 convention in New York. The C40 is a kind of 'G8 for cities' and features most of the world's city bosses in one place. That in itself is an interesting thing - and lends credence to the 'global federalism/city states' ideas discussed here and elsewhere. Indeed, my future mayor, Sydney's Clover Moore, even mentions the city states thing in our film. This year, of course, the subject of the convention was climate change, and it's interesting to observe mayors articulate the role they see for their cities in affecting change globally.

Our other two videos are more illustration-led, featuring some of the gorgeous illustration you see in the magazine (some of which is actually drawn by a Japanese monk, but that's another story). We've a rendering of Monocle's 'Perfect High Street', which is a retail-led exploration of the urban precinct idea, and a great collection of urban design solutions, from the scale of park bench up to entire precincts, via wi-fi and trams.

We also have the sound of the Tokyo Airport Limousine Lady, having acquired the audio from the Airport Limousine bus service. I like this item, small as it is, as it complements our earlier Afghan radio piece - both are the sound of other places, presented without fanfare or unnecessary levels of context. They speak for themselves. Check our 'Premiere' programme brand for more. On that front, watch out for some amazing ident sequences from South Korean TV soon.

Thanks to our team of Gillian Dobias and Aleksander Solum in producing these pieces.

Back to the magazine, where Monocle drew up a list of the 20 most liveable cities in the world. London's not in, of course, but many of my favourite places are. The 'winning city' is Munich, followed by Copenhagen, Zürich, Tokyo, Vienna, Helsinki, Sydney, Stockholm, Honolulu, Madrid, Melbourne, Montreal, Barcelona, Kyoto, Vancouver, Auckland, Singapore, Hamburg, Paris and Geneva.

You may have seen some press about it. We tied up with the International Herald Tribune over this, with both print and online version of the IHT carrying Monocle articles and videos respectively (e.g.). I think that's quite a neat way of spreading the message, and it's worked well for both titles. It was the fruit of several day trips to their Paris offices in the last couple of months. Thanks to Nick Stout and the team there.

Finally, it was good to see Monocle in the latest Eye magazine, one of my favourite publications. In one article, Rick Poynor lays into the magazine (somewhat unfairly I think, but hey). Whereas Monocle.com gets a more positive write-up in a good article summarising a state of play in contemporary website design, with the majority of comments tending towards the positive. I'm pleased that Erik Spiekermann finds it "a clever Web equivalent of a magazine I haven't quite made up my mind about", and John O'Reilly enjoys the "genial content spread" (!) though finds "the design more forbidding in its horizontal logic" (?). Brendan Dawes doesn't appreciate it much though, saying "it looks like a straight export from Quark or InDesign files slapped on the Web." In response to that, I can only say that I wish it were that easy.

Most of all, though, I'm delighted with the comments from Anne Burdick and particularly Adrian Shaughnessy, a man whose opinion I trust. Burdick writes

"At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I find it immensely satisfying and refreshing to encounter a clear and intelligent editorial point of view online. Monocle's consistent quality runs throughout the design, the reporting, and the use of media. Whether or not the "international jet set" mentality suits your tastes, it is a well thought-out experiment in the relationship between print and Web, a kind of TV-print hybrid with text and videos perfectly suited in size and substance to Web viewing and reading."

Adrian Shaughnessy writes:

"If the aim of 21st-century publishing is summed up in the dreary phrase 'cross platform', then Monocle hits the target. But the magazine is eclipsed by the website, which is a triumph of confident and unclichéd design. It boasts broadcast quality video and audio, and functions as a genuine expansion of the magazine and not the usual online dumping ground."

While the idea isn't to "eclipse" anything as such - except lazy thinking elsewhere - many thanks to both for those comments in the Eye article. Shared kudos to the team of Richard Spencer Powell, Ken Leung, Maurus Fraser and Paul Finn working with me on that interface between magazine, web and broadcast. Ditto Rufus Leonard, our excellent developers.

It's funny for me, as I've been focused on the editorial side - commissioning and producing those pieces mentioned above - and simultaneously on the design and build of Monocle.com v2, which has just emerged, rather than the v1 they're referring to. (Hence my ability to deep-link to magazine articles above.) Either way, Shaughnessy and Burdick managed to nail exactly what we're trying to do with Monocle.com. What the next release tries to do is keep the best elements of the hastily-built v1 whilst extending it significantly, giving it a bespoke yet scalable architecture yet retaining its clarity. Stay tuned for more on this, and check out the new site in the meantime. Then it's straight into v2.5, which ties up some loose ends and extends the navigation with a few key aggregation points around place and keyword - and then v3, more programmes etc. But all via a few big life-changes first ...

Postopolis!: Jake Barton, Local Projects

Note: This is a summary of a talk given at Postopolis!, taken in real-time, with minimal editing. Reader beware! Postopolis! was organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and ran from May 29th-June 2nd 2007. Flickr group for photos here. YouTube videos uploaded here. All Postopolis! posts here

Jake Barton runs a design firm in New York called Local Projects. He says they call themselves 'media designers', as they work at the intersections between broadcast media, interactive media, architecture and physical space. It's as good a term as any for a field still emerging. Barton's background is in interior architecture, and the firm is fairly multidisciplinary. The firm's name comes from their belief that, just as Tip O'Neill used to say "all politics are local", they believe all design is local. That is, local to the specific project; there is no predetermined house style or methodology, they're platform agnostic, solution agnostic. (This is an interesting, valuable approach.)

Barton lists a few of their recent projects, such as for the Museum of Chinese and the Americas, a cellphone tour for the Statue of Liberty, and their recent hefty commission for the World Trade Center memorial museum in partnership with Thinc Design. He then goes on to outline their approach and interests – they explore innovative interfaces in physical space, hybridising between physical interfaces and online interfaces, and have been particularly engaged in collaborative storytelling projects.

He shows the Miners Story Project, which is based around a caravan in which a recording booth resides. The exterior looks like a dot matrix image of a copper miner, but as you get closer you realises each of the 'dots' is also a speaker. Thus the caravan itself is a giant speaker which plays oral histories captured within. Barton says that Making Museums Matter by Stephen Weil has been a particular influence, in terms providing inspiration for museums turning themselves inside out; or providing ways of ensuring that musuems are spaces for knowledge production, rather than just repositories preserved in aspic.

Of course, with internet-based media, this notion has been hoovered up into the term 'user-generated content', providing both a contemporary goldrush and much hand-wringing. Thanks to an earlier project, the now well-known StoryCorps, Local Projects is in the position of having helped create an almost iconic example of how to obtain user-generated content in physical space. StoryCorps was directly inspired by the influential Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects of the early 20th century. (Which is about as good a reference point as you can get.) It links with a weekly NPR show to capture oral histories. As interaction designers for the project, Local Projects worked with architects to design the listening stations that sit outside of booths, and dynamic signage. Based in Grand Central Station, the WTC and elsewhere throughout the US, they've been hugely successful, garnering over 10,000 stories. Barton plays us a few selections. (I'd actually heard these before, having spoken with Jake at IDEA 2006, but they're still hugely affecting everyday stories.)

This was an early example of user-generated content, from pretty much before the term existed within the museum/exhibit context. Additionally, the booth at the WTC is the only physical architecture on the site itself which interprets 9/11. Nobody had the green light to do an interpretative project before, but there's something about the shape of these projects, Barton suggests, that allows for a broadcasting of a message like this; to be capable of talking about 9/11 on the site.

Moving on, Barton takes us through his firm's collaboration with author James Sanders (who would talk at Postopolis! a day later): Timescapes, at Museum of the City of New York. This is a giant 3-screen projection that enables people to approach the city itself from different angles simultaneously. It's an ambitious attempt to create something which engages the numerous New York City buffs, and therefore has the granular detail that cartography really affords, as well as being approachable to the newcomer. Barton says they tried to reverse the typical paradigm in which history is communicated i.e. a neatly ordered sequence great people and great events. In Timescapes only 3 people are mentioned directly. Rather, the point of view is rendered in the map - attempting to convey the city as a series of systems, a group or cloud of actions, each affecting the next. For instance, the creation of subway lines visibly affects the subsequent creation of apartments and communities built along those lines, enabling the creation of the Bronx and Queens. This is a fascinating take on the evolution of the city, and deserved more exploration than we were able to give it, sadly.

Their new project is on the building of the city itself - and how the city is evolving in contemporary life. It's in relation to Bloomberg's 'Plan NYC 2030', and the idea that 1 million new people will move into NYC by 2030. (Barton pauses to reflect that the last talk on Lagos, where they're growing by a million a year, is "very humbling" in this context.) Working with the AIA's Center for Architecture in New York, it's called the Public Information Exchange, or PIE AIA. (Barton says they pronounce pieaia.org as 'paella'. Oh ho.)

It's a project to foster some kind of "proactive dialogue between all those involved in public architecture", as Barton puts it. There are a few sides to this. He says "when I talk to museum people, I usually talk about broadening the space for dialogue. When I talk to architects, I say this wants to be the MySpace for architects." Essentially, the site enables architects and planners to upload photographs, images of models, plans, schemes for new buildings in New York, and then draw commentary from all involved, including the public. Every image has comments, prompted by questions which can be set by the architects, and thus encourages a deeper level of engagement than merely 'thumbs up or thumbs down'. When I asked Barton about the quality of comments, he replied that so far things have gone well. That is perhaps in part to the excellent design of the interactive space.

(Personally, I believe that quality design encourages quality responses from users, just as design for public space or public housing encourages civic behaviour. I made this tenuous analogy between British post-war public housing and user-generated content a few years ago.)

Barton states that it's not designed to be a wiki-style system for co-creation. He doesn't believe in the "collaborative creation of architecture ... I think that's a fallacy", he says. But architects can use it as a tool to get research, to ask the questions that you want to know of the public, or other stakeholders. It enables architects and builders to promote aspects of the project like LEED certification, or go beyond that. It's designed for both the small playground just built in your neighbourhood, to public street furniture, to major private projects.

A huge yellow stripe gives emphasis to public commentary on the page, making clear a balance between the projects and their stakeholders. For Barton, this project should form a widely distributed, "open memory" around architecture.

(In my professional opinion, it's beautifully done. Each building has Google maps integration, further links, space for a variety of renderings, and at this early stage anyway, excellent engaged comments from users. It's contemporary without being clichéd. There are only a handful of projects uploaded at the moment, but it looks to be an excellent, scalable example of integrating architecture with the web. There are some nips and tucks required but nothing major. All it needs now is far more use than the project currently has; go to it NYC-based architects and planners.)

In a nice touch, the yellow stripe is also clear in the physical manifestation of PIE, at the Center for Architecture's Public Resource Center, located at 536 LaGuardia Place, between West 3rd Street and Bleecker Street. There are public access workstations, designed by Grimshaw who recently did street furniture for the city.

Barton asked the Postopolis! crowd whether people would use it. A few of the architects in the crowd put their hand up. Others would use it stakeholders or users, and it's clear that that's where the value is. Barton notes that collaborative projects like Architecture for Humanity are really architect-to-architect, as good as they are, whereas this is for users of architecture too. Architects may need some convincing, despite the 'Myspace for architecture' tag, as these issues of consultation, and a form of ongoing post-occupancy evaluation are deeper than the lack of a platform. But at least it now has a platform, in New York at least.

This project seems emblematic of Local Projects' approach – rooted, considered, elegantly open, and specific to the problem at hand – and Barton's talk gave us an imaginative yet pragmatic illustration of the potential in the overlap between physical and digital spaces.

Here's a video excerpt of Barton's presentation:

Wanted: Internship for CSM Narrative Environments students

Update: Jeff and friends got in at OMA/AMO, so I think we're done here. Thanks very much for the interest.

In my spare time, I mentor a student on MA Narrative Environments at London's Central Saint Martins, name of Jeffrey Koh. (Actually, he's so smart I often find I have to remind myself who's mentoring who, but that's another story.) Jeff, along with two equally smart and capable colleagues, is looking for an internship over the summer, so one small way I can help out is to post their details here. The three come as a set, covering multiple disciplines but would be particularly useful in the crossovers between architecture, urban planning, graphic design and related. I can highly recommend them, so if you're looking for interns in the next couple of months, please do get in touch with Jeff on smallcaps at gmail.com. It doesn't have to be London or UK-based company, necessarily.

The basic requirements of the course's placement program is that they work a minimum of 50 hours for a company using whatever skills are required, after which they produce an experience report and company audit that is made available to the company and course director.

After the jump, more details on the students: