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.

Austin Kelly/XTEN Architecture (Postopolis! LA)

Next up, Austin Kelly, one of the principals of the firm XTEN Architecture, as interviewed by David A and David B of ArchDaily/Plataforma Arquitectura. Intriguingly, the two principal architects at XTEN are Kelly and Monika Häfelfinger, who come from very different backgrounds: Los Angeles and Switzerland respectively.

In responding to the Davids’ question as to their profile, Kelly starts with this fact. He notes that Monika coming from Switzerland lends a very different sensibility to the office - her education and experience combining with his in interesting ways (elsewhere it's been described as "minimal vs. expressionist") - particularly as they strive for an open office environment, characterised by frequent “debates and arguments in the office”. Kelly says they have a “very horizontal office” in this respect. (Having been a manager of teams large and small myself, I recognise that this is the kind of thing we managers often say, frequently with little justification. Kelly sounds like he means it though, and his thoughtful, considered answers lend credence to his claim.)

In response to the question “what is architecture?”, Kelly replies that it’s “a process of questions, a method of inquiry. From the questions we develop 3D models, diagrams, drawings etc. Then we debate, and then we start synthesizing these ideas into material dimension - physical, connected, spatial ideas …”. It’s a literal answer to a question that is often interpreted in more abstract fashion, but in almost instinctively focusing on their work, their practice, Kelly says a lot about their firm with this answer. 

When asked about the role of architects in current society, Kelly tentatively suggests that “we do have wider role.” By way of an example, he suggests that the school system in particular “has not been addressed in Southern California”, and that if “architects can get a seat at the table” they would have a lot to offer to that thought process, amongst others.

A question on the role of innovation in their practice. He answers that they do base some of their built form on the possibilities afforded by technology - such as their laser-cut Diamondhouse - but they think innovation manifests itself more in collaboration. They use competitions to derive ideas, as many practices do, but innovation seems to emerge more through working together on mock-ups, and in particular work with fabricators, and so on. He notes that “lots of fabricators are coming out of automobile design industry, developing composites and glues …”

 

(This is fascinating, and as I noted in my PostOpsLA summing up, a real theme in Los Angeles architecture, perhaps emerging originally in boat building and the aeroplane industry, and then in automobiles - and still prevalent. A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be part of a UK Government-funded research tour, around the theme of user-centred design, along the entire West Coast of the USA. The stop-offs at BMW and Volvo design labs rarely revealed much in the way of user-centred, or people-centred, design practice, but they were still fascinating. To see how car designers work is always interesting to me - there are good things and bad things about it - but it would be particularly interesting to explore this elision between LA-basedarchitecture and the history of design as pursued by the fabricators of the local car/plane/boat building sector.)

Kelly then talks about how they split work over their offices in Switzerland and USA. He clearly finds it amazing and inspiring (as do I) how the Swiss manage to attain such high standards in design (albeit generalising somewhat). He asks “why the post office is a brilliant architectural building, or grocery stores …” He mentions a particular grocery store in Lucerne as “a brilliant piece of work” (tried to find a reference and couldn't; anyone?). He puts this down to the competition system in Switzerland, in that they have ”competitions for almost everything.” He outlines briefly how the Swiss equivalent of the AIA administers competitions, governs rules, and ensures towns get incentives if they do a competition. As he notes, this is very different to the USA (and indeed Australia), where they “don’t do competitions much.” (I think this is profoundly important cf. recent UTS competition here in Sydney, in terms of creating an open and discursive culture around design in concert with raising awareness of, and therefore quality of, design.)

Kelly’s answer to a question about how the office does ”social networking” is a nice one, I think. He says they “don’t really go to cocktail parties … We tend to focus on the work and let the work go out and network for us …”

I asked a question about this overlap with industrial design, and the use of contemporary fabrication techniques (laser-cut, pre-fab etc. etc.) As well as a technical overlap between industrial design and architecture, I’m interested in these two ideas of the building as one-off, due to particular constraints of site, client etc. - ‘every building is a prototype’ - versus the ideas at play in industrial design, where you might think of a building as a series of designs which iterate over time. In short, that if you draw from the tools of car design, can you - and should you - also draw from the processes and systems of car design? (I should note that one of the foremost thinkers on these issues is the Australian architect Michael Trudgeon of Melbourne firm Crowd Productions, who currently has an exhibition in Melbourne - I haven’t been yet, but I know it will be worth checking out. I was lucky enough to read Trudgeon's fantasitc Phd thesis around these ideas.) Kelly thought this was interesting theme, and said that they do have a prototyping culture and are very much oriented towards fabricating off-site and then assembling on-site. He suggests he hadn’t thought through whether that could in turn enable a kind of iterative, “series approach” to architecture, as with cars and other industrial design, and seemed intrigued by that idea.

Another question from the audience concerns whether and how they swap architects between the Swiss and US offices. Kelly replies that they do work across both offices, and notes that “it’s difficult in terms of timezone and things” but otherwise straightforward and often beneficial. All their team know metric, but getting their head around the codes in Switzerland is more difficult, as they are “intense”. He says the “energy requirements in particular are probably 20 years ahead of US in terms of everything - in terms of the performative aspects of a building”. (Which is interesting.)

I enjoyed Kelly’s approach to these questions, and the thoughtful considered responses, particularly those highlighting issues around the design process and fabrication, as well as insights into the cross-cultural Swiss-US practice straddling such different working environments.

XTEN Architecture

Oyler Wu Collaborative (Postopolis! LA)

Another question and answer session with The Two Davids of ArchDaily/Plataforma Arquitectura. If you want to start a smart, funny, Chilean architecture-based talk show, you know where to go.

Oyler Wu Collaborative are an LA-based but they started in NYC in 2001. (I’m interested in these practices that move across the country, given the different cultural backdrops. It was a perhaps inadvertent theme in the ArchDaily guys’ choices - note wHY architecture’s combination of Japan and American and see also Austin Kelly straddling LA and Switzerland.)

Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu provided a set of smart, thoughtful answers. I’ll do my best to recall them here.

To the difficult question of ‘what Is architecture for you?’, Oyler replied, as many did, that “architecture is inherently a synthesis of so many different things” - not evading the question so much as suggesting it’s too complex and variable to answer. Though he did then attempt to nail it with “architecuture is specifically the exploitation of material and tectonic ireas for the creation of spatial experience” (which I note is perhaps closer to a more traditional answer to this question, more akin to Corb's “masterful, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light”...)

Wu suggests they’re “more interested in the process itself”, in “experimenting with new ideas,” and constantly exploring detail in the work, throughout construction. Here she specifically mentions fabrication (a theme that would emerge numerous times over the week, perhaps partly due to the looming presence of SCI-Arc in the architectural community here and partly due to the long LA tradition of working with industrial design (boat builders, car designers etc?)

They’re also involved with academia (as many architects tend to be - it’s a way of making a living) and so constantly questioning their work is part of the deal.

Question: "What should be role of architects in current society?"
As opposed to some of the ‘strategic thinking / design thinking’ answers this question sometimes elicited, Oyler suggests that “architecture tends to work on an individual basis” I.e. it affects one person at a time. It concerns “how one person engages the work from a tactile and experiential standpoint”. Wu adds that the “architects’ role is the making of space, of human interactive space”. Oyler adds this is about an “obligation to build … and to build well.”

In terms of innovation, Oyler suggests that there’s an “incredible over-emphasis on the role of innovation - we never set out to design projects that are ‘innovative’. Yes, technology can enable some new possibilities but you can also create incredibly innovative architecture without technology - so if ‘innovation’ is driving the thing you’re making, it’s misguided.”

In terms of this ‘innovative’ technology, Wu describes how, yes, their work is “all CATIA, Rhino, Maya. You have to know it, as a tool, but it’s not the end point in itself. Don’t let the tool become the end product.”

The ‘social networking’ question draws a blank look. They ultimately respond that it’s “important, but not our favourite thing to do.” They’d also suggested that their schools are the source of networks to some degree, and to the Davids’ question about education for young architects, they respond that its fundamentally important to “go to the schools, talk to the people there, see which school has the right spirit for you …”. They say this as, at the end of the day, “architecture is real hard. It’s hard work, long hours, the pay’s not great. You have to love what you do - have to really love it.” They give the sense that it’s important to flush this out early on.

As to what skills they look for, Wu responds, with a smile, “You have to be able to do it all! That sounds like a joke, but when the 2 of us are teaching 3 days a week it has to be someone who does it all. We had someone in the office in front of a computer doing Maya in the morning and he was pounding nails in the afternoon. We’d like to be an office that gets big enough so that that’s not the case, but right now you have to do it all.” She adds that they “work in iterations”, and they don’t employ ‘grunts’. “We don’t have grunts in our office.”

(That’s an interesting sentiment in terms of ‘liking to be an office that’s big enough not to have people doing it all’. Another approach is to stay small in order to retain the ‘do it all’ holistic nature of the work - that the architecture might be better informed by someone comfortable and proficient with both Maya and nails. But the drive towards scaling up is seen as a natural - if incredibly difficult - progression in architecture for sure.)

A good conversation, although you feel Oyler Wu have a little more to give, perhaps, particularly as they’ve been featured on one of the handful of truly essential architecture blogs: that of Lebbeus Woods. I was particularly taken with their write-up of their Density Fields project there, not least the final passage, which further reinforces many of the primary interests we heard about at Postopolis! LA, from OW and others:

“The lack of conventional separation between design and fabrication has allowed us to use the construction phase as an extension to the design process. It has been especially helpful with our aspiration to create a level of engagement that is equally as powerful at the scale of an individual as it is as a site strategy. Overall, this process has led to a period of material discovery, invention, and experimentation that comes only through the difficult, but profoundly rewarding task of realizing the work on a given site.” [From 'Density Fields', by Oyler Wu Collaborative, at Lebbeus Woods]

Oyler Wu Collaborative

Røde, and the new manufacturing

Over a year ago now, before the real emergence of the current economic ‘global financial crisis’, I wrote a piece for Monocle on Røde, the Australian microphone manufacturer. I’d used their microphones at Monocle, and had been intrigued by this Scandi-sounding brand producing beautifully crafted mics that could only be German or Japanese … until I saw ‘Made in Australia’ on the box. The story appeared a couple of issues back in truncated form but I thought I’d post a longer cut here for a number of reasons.

I find Røde interesting as they exemplify the possibilities of manufacturing in the contemporary city, using advanced but increasingly affordable techniques like rapid prototyping via laser cutting, and so integrating design processes with manufacturing. As a result, they have many of the benefits of a pre-industrial craft economy (design and manufacturing aligned; mass customisation possibilities; stock levels managed flexibly, almost on-demand; reduced environmental externalities through aggregating all activities under one roof and with increasingly light industrial processes), with the potential global scalability of the industrial model.

They suggest that a modern diversified economy could - should - still have manufacturing at its core, alongside service industries. And that so-called knowledge-based work is present in both. They employ local people, and have global presence. Sure, it won't employ the thousands that, say, the Colonial Sugar Refinery in Pyrmont once did but they employ people nonetheless. It’s a design-led business, with the aspirations of a premium brand, but sells in high volume at affordable prices.

So in the context of previous writing about Sheffield and other cities largely (though not totally) stripped bare of their manufacturing heritage, this little story from the baking hot streets of Sydney’s western suburbs may have resonance elsewhere.

Although the proportion of manufacturing industry in Australia (10-12% of GDP) is even lower than the UK’s (13-16% of GDP), oddly it feels higher here. Despite Australia being a laissez-faire economist’s dream, there’s somehow still a strong debate about the importance of, say, the car industry to Victoria. There may be some deeper understanding that actually making things is important. As I noted earlier, I wrote this piece before the GFC - as you can tell from only the early portents of a “US-driven recession” - which continues to hammer economies structured as Australia’s is. While I personally won’t shed a tear for the devaluation of mining and shopping malls the speculation that, for instance, Melbourne is to be hit harder than Sydney due to its larger manufacturing base sends out the wrong message. The recession originates in the service sector (financial services, to be precise) and manufacturing need not be dragged down with it (though they are of course linked). Now is the time to innovate our way out of this with new models, and these examples of new, smart hybridised businesses that are both manufacturing- and knowledge-based may be all the more important right now.

"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.

Joost Greenhouse, Melbourne

The Greenhouse, by Joost and others, is an opportunistic temporary insertion into a gap in Federation Square, Melbourne.

It’s built entirely from recycled and recyclable materials. The exterior is dis-assembled shipping containers and packing crates, filled with straw bale and covered with plants. When I was there, the walls were embedded with strawberry plants and potatoes were planted on top (and used in the potato salad served below), amongst other things.

"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?

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.

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]

The windy city

Reading a recent Building Design article on the introduction of wind turbines on Elephant & Castle in London, I sense a tenuous link between that and last month's note on modeling the behaviour of sound in urban spaces, not just within buildings.

Repeating my hasty sketch, intended to indicate sounds bouncing through a space ('wavetracing') after Arup's SoundLab, it's easy to mentally reconfigure that to indicate wind - although of course the engineering actually being carried out here is far more precise, and wind has quite different characteristics to sound.

The engineering on the Southwark project is by Brian Dunlop Associates and Gas Dynamics. Dunlop says:

"There’s plenty of data for photovoltaic performance in urban locations but very little regarding urban wind power. From a planning point of view, we want to put to bed fears over noise and vibration, and so far the results have proved positive." Dunlop does add, though, that there is an enormous amount of data to be analysed. “The equipment used collects information every second using sophisticated software created by Gas Dynamics,” he says. "At the moment South Bank University is analysing data gathered from the first three months."

Arup's engineers are also modelling the way wind moves through open urban spaces, which sounds impossibly complex. Arup's Rupert Blackstone:

"Modelling urban wind movement is a real challenge. It’s almost impossible to be predictive because every environment has local characteristics that affect air flow. The surface roughness — meaning the variation in height of a neighbourhood’s buildings — has a huge influence on the wind resource available. There’s really no point in extrapolating from meteorological data — you have to be location-specific in your analysis.”

Wind turbines, as with other renewable energy sources, are only likely to increase in number throughout urban space, and personally I'm all for them. I've never quite understood arguments against their introduction - a few messy bird-kills here and there aside - and have personally almost always found them aesthetically appealing. I recall Justin Good's piece for Design Observer, when he almost systematically 'proved', in that way philosophy doctorates do, that "wind farms are objectively beautiful."

However, the article was predicated on the most likely current siting for wind farms - rural environments - and so hinged on the suggestion that people found wind farms unappealing as they resembled modernist sculptures, and so "don’t want the ideology of high modernism disrupting the very different order of the natural world."

In urban environments, smaller vertical axis wind turbines can look like modernist sculptures and all the better for it, perhaps more universally at ease in this setting. With some of the newer wind turbines on the market, they're not a million miles away from the Alexander Calder or Barbara Hepworth sculptures that we see at the Fundaçion Joan Miro or pinned to the side of John Lewis in Oxford Street.

Still, the portrayed settings for these turbines are often the ex-urban 'object in the landscape'-style houses familiar to photogenic regions of Australia, California, Scandinavia etc.

This is perhaps due to their unwieldy size thus far but also, I think, a cultural association between renewable energy and 'the great outdoors', which is entirely false and actually problematic. As with water tanks there's an irony that most renewable energy products appear to be designed for properties in rural settings or at best on the fringes of urban sprawl. Whereas, of course, most people live in cities, in areas that are the highest contributors to greenhouse pollution. I'd like to see small elegant turbines intended for domestic use in tighter urban context.

That's why it's so interesting to see the experiments at Elephant & Castle. As Monocle reported last month, on some days Denmark achieves all its electricity demands via wind power - with an average of 20 percent. The blades developed by leading Danish company LM Glasfiber are 61.5m long, travel at around 300km/h and pull 9Gs. Not exactly what you want atop your house. But the Windspire, Helix, and particularly the Quiet Revolution, designed for small scale wind generation in cities, are developments that just might. Indeed, Quiet Revolution is almost designed to take advantage of the turbulence found in urban settings - or at least not be impaired by it.

Their current QR5 is 5-metres tall, but appears to need a 9-metre base - again, outside of what most urban residents have space for. But just as water tanks are now being designed with apartment dwellers and renters in mind, we'll surely see smaller-scale generators extrapolated from the QR5 - such as their 'in development' QR2.5 for instance.

Their projects include a QR5 to be mounted on top of a listed building on Southwark Bridge Road; planning permission granted, installation in "late 2007".

See also these seven turbines planned for the top of a development in Croydon. (Has all of south London been turned over to a giant test-bed for wind power or what? Wouldn't be a bad thing.)

Quiet Revolution's display turbines are also interesting, comprising LEDs embedded in the blades, combining renewable energy with informational possibilities - hopefully carried a little further than simple branding (an obvious display would be amount of energy contributed, in the spirit of the presentation I gave last week at Interesting South). I'd also love to know what they sound like. I suspect, in the spirit of positive soundscapes, that they would sound fantastic, actually. Should it necessarily be a quiet revolution?

We look forward to hearing more about these projects, and their impact on surrounding neighbourhoods, and also to a further refinement of their design, derived both from the sculptural lineage noted above and the huge variety in urban conditions found worldwide (wind may be the same force everywhere, but the spatial characteristics, cultural capital and related environmental conditions certainly aren't. Will we see cities such as Chicago and Wellington increasingly talking up their windiness?)

Do add a comment if you know of similar projects (perhaps even, dare I suggest it, outside of south London).

Finally, returning to the first point, modelling wind through these spaces is just one of the numerous fascinating developments around urban modelling - extending increasingly sensor-based models of buildings, generated and maintained throughout the lifecycle of a building and known in the trade as building information modelling (BIM), up to the scale of cities, aka city information modelling (CIM). So as well as developmental tools, speculating as to potential environmental behaviour of buildings and spaces, some of these systems could be built as real-time feedback loops, indicating the behaviour of urban spaces in real-time. It's a burgeoning loosely-defined field at the moment, running from indices of air pollution, water pollution or informational behaviour through to these live 'field recordings' of wind or sound. As the Building Design article suggests, "an enormous amount of data" can emerge from recording the dynamics of urban wind power, but our ability to now process this data - and then make sense of it through information design - has given us new possibilities for assessing the behaviour of urban environments.

It's also not without problems, as models are just models and not reality, and as such are limited in their expression of territory and have various patterns of power or ideology coded within them  - a great editorial by Flavio Albanese in Domus #908 made a similar point about maps, recently - but when used imaginatively and with well-informed civic value in mind, we begin to have ever-more useful tools that may enable us to sculpt wind, sound and other elemental forces for the benefit of cities and citizens.