Earlier this year I was in San Francisco, and found myself with an hour to kill at the ferry terminal, over a cold beer and the pleasingly tall and slender format of the San Francisco Chronicle. At first glance it seemed like a decent paper - interesting stories, well-designed. But in the self-styled 'digital capital' that is the Bay Area, and with the gloomy pronouncements about American newspapers in particular, it’s hard to believe its circulation is going anywhere but south.
A month or so later, I made sure I ordered another San Francisco newspaper, the San Francisco Panorama. This isn’t a daily newspaper, and probably won’t make it beyond issue one - but that’s on purpose. It’s a prototype of a newspaper, designed to demonstrate that such things are still viable. And it’s an extraordinary piece of work.
In this core mission, it just about succeeds. It tries to demonstrate that it's possible to make a newspaper, and a local one at that, financially and creatively viable. Despite its leviathan form - which the creators are clear wouldn’t be sustainable - it easily conveys the creative possibilities in the format. Here, interestingly, it’s a hybrid, drawing much from the culture of the web as well as newspapers. And it’s beautifully designed, with a wonderful range. It feels utterly alive, and convincing, in this respect.
The paper turned out to be a prototype of the fantastic Newspaper Club, one of the more interesting ventures to have emerged from 'the papernet'. Their model rather brilliantly combines a craft-led agenda — a kind of 'slow' approach informed by bespoke design as well as template-driven production — as well as a potentially scalable infrastructure for localised printing that piggy-backs on the installed base of the newspaper industry.
Recently, the Newspaper Club team produced another entry into what may or may not be turning into the Things Our Friends ... series by creating a one-off publication for the SXSW conference, Things Our Friends Sent Us For Printing. Russell again kindly asked me to contribute something for this. So I did, choosing to write, and to write something about the physical and cultural infrastructure surrounding newspapers, as well as addressing these new physical artefacts emerging around 'the papernet' idea. It's reproduced here below.
It doesn't suggest one set of artefacts will replace the other — that so rarely happens — but there is admittedly a slightly melancholy note running through the opening series of memories, which also begins to explore the relationship between a city and its press. There's a lot more in that particular topic that I didn't get into here, but the importance of a good newspaper for a city surely cannot be underestimated (whether digital or physical or some fusion of both is another matter, and only hinted at). Hence my interest in the San Francisco Panorama, and I'll expand upon the three examples I refer to below in a subsequent post. But for now, congratulations to Newspaper Club — watch that space.
As I started writing this, it was hovering around 39˚C here in Sydney. Gusty, burning hot air. Too hot. It could not have been more different to New York, where I'd been a week or so earlier, where the temperature had been hovering around -7˚C and down to -15˚C with the windchill. I was in Manhattan for a Microsoft Research event: their annual 'social computing symposium', and this year was loosely focused on 'the city'. Many thanks to Tom Coates + Matt Jones, Liz Lawley, Clay Shirky et al for the invite.
Here are my notes on the event, with a dash of local colour thrown in for good measure.
Many, many, many people have written about last week’s announcement of Apple's iPad. I don’t actually remember a response quite like it. Far more than for the iPhone, for instance, or for any contemporary product or service I can recall. Perhaps its omnipresence in the media is due to promise it appears to hold for the media itself. But the response outside of the traditional media also feels immense.
As for me, I couldn’t help but make a few observations - I'll try to take a different angle, at least initially, approaching it from urbanism as much as product/service design, particularly not having seen the thing in the flesh yet. To get the basics out of the way right away, yes, I think it’ll be incredibly successful. And yes, the name’s a bit iffy but will not be a problem in time because it'll be incredibly successful. And yes, it’s the first iteration of something that will be rapidly refined over the coming years.
There’s been lots of talk of it being a ‘third’ product, in-between iPhone and laptop. To me, this reminds me of ‘third places’. That’s a Ray Oldenburg term, of The Great Good Place, and generally refers to cafés, bars, libraries etc. Thus the iPad to me feels more like a product for third places rather than a third product. Its form factor and service model is defined for in-between spaces. Although it will float around the home and the office perfectly well, it comes into its own in these third spaces in a way that that phone and laptop cannot, being either too small or too large respectively.
With this in mind, it also reminds me of Jan Gehl’s book, Life Between Buildings, in that the iPad is a device for the life between buildings.
If we approach it spatially - in terms of context of use I mean, rather than the device itself - it becomes clear why I think it’ll be a success.
It’s a device for airplanes, taxis, public transport, park benches, coffeeshops, pubs, bars, bistros, co-working spaces, breakouts, studios, receptions, meeting rooms, plaza and piazza, public libraries, beaches and all manner of transient spaces, civic spaces.
I've been meaning to post more on this theme for a while - it's partly one of those entries that is really a 'note to self'. But when Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze posted their fascinating research into visualising the (otherwise invisible) characteristics of RFID last night, it prompted me to hit 'publish'.
Their research piece Immaterials is quite lovely, exploring the spatial qualities of RFID in terms of its readable volume, captured with a simple LED/sensor and camera. Here's their video, in which they explain more:
(As well as the conceptual backdrop, outlined in more detail by both Timo and Jack, I particularly like the care and attention they've given to the visualisation, and the presentation of the research. This is quality design.)
In their work I even see something of the early experiments of, say, Benjamin Franklin and Nikola Tesla in terms of understanding the behaviour of electricity, such that it can then be tamed, conducted, and put to work. It's perhaps drawing a long bow to make that comparison, but it feels like a similar sentiment. Whilst electricity is hardly invisible, there is a sense of trying to understand such immaterial phenomena through prototyping and experimentation. (And again, while some would see that as the province of science, it's also the contemporary purpose of design.)
(In this particularly fine image, we see Tesla's friend Mark Twain conducting high-frequency high voltage current, bringing a lamp to incandesce. Tesla is lurking in the background.)
Part of the purpose behind Immaterials is to understand more about RFID in terms of an emerging 'material knowledge', as Timo put it, from the designer's perspective. But perhaps also in order to raise awareness of a technology which is essentially invisible - and often feared - such that we can better understand it, and so make informed choices. It's similar to my own far sketchier work exploring the shape of the wi-fi at the State Library of Queensland (written up here) - if you could perceive the phenomenon of wireless internet as a physical space, what might it look like? (It'd be more interesting to ask what it feels like, actually.)
Despite the fact that it suggests the already massively overused term "making the invisible visible", I'm particularly interested in tapping into the content in such transactions, as well as their materiality/immateriality, as a way of understanding patterns of behaviour in what I'm calling the new soft city.
Closing the loop then means finding a way of exhibiting these invisible phenomena back in physical space. In an email exchange with Jack last night, I suggested that we might see such blooms or halos sparking as transit card-carrying passengers walk through ticket barriers in subway stations (I'm currently working on informatics for a subway project; it was front-of-mind). Jack had already put it thus:
"Having produced these visualisations, I now find myself mapping imaginary shapes to the radio enabled objects around me. I see the yellow Oyster readers with plumes of LED fluoro-green fungal blossoms hanging over them – and my Oyster card jumping between them, like a digital bee cross-pollinating with data as I travel the city."
As well as the wi-fi research, I've also been fascinated by capturing existing everyday examples of how the city assesses invisible or hidden characteristics of its infrastructure.
I've been taking photos of people who appear to be sensing the city - in the broadest, er, sense of the phrase. The following shots are from Sydney and Los Angeles, and indicate the more quotidian, prosaic activities involved in instrumenting and monitoring the city - from surveyors to telecoms operators, from vans counting passing traffic to guys probing underground pipes, from markings on streets indicating what's underneath to this peculiar footage of what looks like someone using a sonovac but is probably just a device checking for cables.
I've created a public group at Flickr called Sensing the City, so if you have similar photos, do add them there. I'd be interested to see what turns up.
While it's a very different sensibility and approach to the aforementioned explorations of radio frequencies - it's often a very material city, rather than immaterial; just hidden - in the context of discussions around instrumenting the fabric of our cities via urban informatics it's interesting to consider how much of this already occurs on our streets. And despite being marked by traffic cones and fluorescent work jackets it's become an invisible activity, somewhat ironically, for passers-by. These people are sensors.
The “Modern Times” exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum - part of Sydney Design 08 - is something of a curate’s egg. Containing some wonderful artefacts, the show is worth seeing for a few items alone. However, the unimaginative presentation is fairly disappointing and you walk away sensing an opportunity lost, as much as you are enlightened and enlivened by the possibilities inherent in the material.
The “untold story of modernism in Australia” is a tagline open to misinterpretation. It’s not that modernism in Australia is an “untold story” - as Australian modernism, through the likes of Boyd, Grounds, Seidler, Nolan, Preston, Dupain, the Featherstons et al, has a well-documented history here, and the architectural scene in Sydney in particular has an ongoing relationship with modernism. It’s more that the curators intended to tell a different story of modernism, one that focused perhaps a little less on architecture and built environment, and more on the social and cultural patterns emerging throughout the modern period. (This insight gleaned in an interview with curator Ann Stephen on ABC Radio National’s By Design show.)
While this is laudable, it should not negate engaging with architecture and urban planning - as this is the built expression of those social and cultural patterns. And it’s the buildings that we’re left with, marking modernism in the streets around us every day, long after the fashions, posters and poems have faded. Sure enough, many of the artefacts directly relate to architecture and urbanism nonetheless. In fact, although the exhibition opens on the body, health and the emerging fashion, it tends to become more centred around architecture, cities, and other fragments of built fabric as it continues.
Been working on a new wave of material for Monocle.com. Over the last week, we published a few features which relate to stories in issue 02. For each issue, we try to take a some stories online, twisting in a new direction, or providing further context. For instance, issue 02's Andrea Lenardin Madden profile expands into a little feature about her collaboration with the Sprinkles cupcake empire.
So, related to our lead story on Norway, we were extremely privileged to be granted an interview with HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. He doesn't often do them, and proved to be an extremely engaging interviewee. Progressive, intelligent, diplomatic yet involved - everything a modern monarch should be.
Additionally, we'll cover material which isn't mentioned in the magazine. Regular readers here might enjoy the brief documentary on Swiss robot bricklayers - yes, really - in which we discuss mass customisation, digital fabrication and architecture, talking to the profs at DFAB, ETH Zürich.
Back to issue 02, where we created our ideal broadcaster (other than Monocle of course): the 'Nordic News Network'. So, we got architect and designer Anders Nord to render a quick fly-through of the imaginary studio set, and we also quickly worked up an identity and soundtrack. Behold NNN.
Oh, and I hope you saw the lovely Kuntzel+Deygas work we posted up previously, such as these title sequences, music videos, character animations etc. There's more there, and much more to come of course. We're simultaneously working on reworking the site - and a million other things - particularly for subscriber-only material.
In other news, I managed to slip a QR code into our manga for issue 03 - fun! Sneak preview:
Hopefully a lot more of that kind of action to follow. Next week, off to Osaka and Tokyo with Tyler to explore this and more.
Please excuse the work-related post, but we're hiring. Do pass this on to anyone/anywhere you think might be interested.
Production Assistant, Monocle Web & Broadcast
Monocle.com is the broadcast arm of Monocle, producing high-quality audio and video related to subjects covered in the magazine. The website, and corresponding mobile channels, aim to 'raise the bar' for internet-based video, both in terms of editorial and production values.
Monocle is looking for a highly motivated, skilled all-rounder to join our core team in London, helping with the creation of both the website and the new broadcast-led formats it carries.
Main responsibilities:
Planning and executing the logistics of broadcasts, and broadcast acquisitions.
Creation of audio/video material for Monocle.com and its related interactive channels.
Editing and encoding of Monocle broadcast content.
Required experience:
Experience of creating and producing high quality audio-video material.
Experience with Final Cut Pro, within a Mac-based digital video environment.
Basic video production skills (handling cameras, mics etc.).
Basic skills in Photoshop, Illustrator etc.
An in-depth understanding of contemporary web content and internet-based and mobile platforms.
Good understanding of international current affairs, business, culture, design, as covered in Monocle.
Languages an advantage.
Reporting to Director of Web & Broadcast (that's me), and working as part of Monocle's core team at our London HQ in Marylebone.
All applications and enquiries to dh [at] monocle [dot] com. Thanks.
Having previously argued that convergence is something tech companies seem to show huge appetite for yet consumers seem to show little appetite for, I'll now happily admit I may be wrong. I finally see a convergent device that makes sense, that would appear to appeal to me almost completely. It just seemed that Apple had to make it, that's all. If they can actually launch the thing - on time, in sufficient numbers, globally - and it lives up to even half the promise of their near-perfect presentation, then convergence becomes a pragmatic, useful, beautiful reality.
Jan Chipchase has posted a fantastic summary of what he calls local
repair cultures, as seen on his research travels across Chengdu, Delhi,
Ulan Bataar, Ho Chi Minh, Lhasa, Kampala and Soweto. Jan describes the
highly innovative practices involved in acquiring, modifying and
repairing mobile phones in the bustling street markets of these cities.
The activities can be simple to complex, ranging from "swapping out
components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a
language of your choice." The techniques are sometimes documented in
reverse-engineered manuals, but generally move more rapidly through
physical, social networks: "It's often easier to peer over the shoulder
of a neighbour than open the manual itself"
These repair cultures appear intensify in pace and scale even more than
traditional consumer electronics repair cultures around TVs, DVDs etc.,
largely due to the number of mobile components available and the
importance of the device itself in contemporary life.
There's an entire ecosystem - from training to wholesalers -
articulated in Jan's post, accompanied by his wonderful pictures (for example, those above). What
immediately springs to mind is a question that jumped out at Jan too:
"Why do these informal repair cultures exist at all? What is so different between London and Lhasa or Helsinki and Ho Chi Minh?"
Jan's self-answer is clearly part way there at least:
"The informal repair services that are offered are quite
simply driven by necessity - highly price sensitive customers cannot
afford to go through more expensive official customer care centers and
even if they could their phones are unlikely to be covered by warrantee
- having been bought through grey market channels, been sent as gifts
from friends and relatives abroad, or were locally bought used, second
or third+ ownership. In many cases these users cannot afford to be
without their mobile phone, not in the social sense of being out of
touch (which is valid enough), but in many instances because their
livelihoods depend on it. On the supply side there is a ready pool of
sufficiently skilled labour, ready access to tools, components and
above all knowledge."
And yet I wonder whether there is more to it still, which veers closer to culture and history rather than simply economics.
Mary Myers: Andrea Cochran: Landscapes A glorious book, about glorious work. Cochran's landscapes are pitched perfectly, balancing formal order with controlled explosions of planting, light and colour. It's quite beautiful work, stretching mainly down the west coast of the USA, and so with beautiful landscape to borrow. And the book presents and dissects the work, and the thinking behind it, with equal precision. Wonderful. (*****)
John Birmingham: Leviathan: The unauthorised biography of Sydney A fantastic read. Thoroughly subjective, impassioned, personal and slanderous. Well researched and hefty, but written with a light touch, it takes apart the Emerald City, revealing it to be both impossibly dark and essentially conservative. Along with The Fatal Shore and a few others, essential reading in terms of understanding the city. (*****)
Gary Hume: Toyo Ito: Sendai Mediatheque As with the Seattle Public Library book in this series from Actar, I've been poring over this over the last year, pulling details and insight into recent work. A good resource, well-produced. (*****)
Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap Clever yet eminently readable novel of modern Melbourne manners. Written with the devilishly compelling page-turnability of a good grown-up soap opera, it's also a smartly structured and beautifully nuanced depiction of contemporary Australian urban:suburban society, warts and all. (*****)
Steven Carroll: The Art of the Engine Driver Lovely evocation of late-'50s Melbourne suburb, and of the railways just before the heart was ripped out of them. Not just a warm nostalgic costume drama, but with rich atmosphere and complex themes rippling beneath the surface. (****)
Geoff Dyer: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel Hugely enjoyable, as ever. One of the finest British writers around. Not autobiography, but autobiography. Fiction, and non-fiction. Travel writing, and not travel writing. Hilarious and occasionally moving, learned and light, warm and bad-tempered, revelling in facile reactions and almost immeasurably deep. A mess of contradictions that establishes a coherent world-view. Which is a contradiction in itself, of course. Beautifully turned prose too, apparently effortless but almost certainly not. (*****)
William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces Amazingly, I'd never read this in linear fashion, from cover to cover, until recently. Quite brilliant, clearly, and written so well. With humility and grace, wit and candour, insight and experience. Although focused primarily on New York of the '70s, it's still essential. (*****)
David Peace: GB84 Not sure why it's taken me so long to read this, as I'm a big fan of David Peace's writing and this book is set in and around the early-80s Sheffield of my youth. But it was well worth the wait. Peace fictionalises the miners' strike, and the extraordinary events of 1983-85 as Britain teetered on the edge of large scale civil unrest. But it's only just fiction, no matter how brutal it seems. A brilliant evocation of the time, and a social fabric stretched taut to breaking point. (*****)
Cormac Mccarthy: The Road I don't recall being quite so affected by a book before. Absolutely extraordinary, particularly if you read within one day. It left me speechless, shattered and reflective. (*****)
Julianne Schultz (Editor): Griffith REVIEW 21: Hidden Queensland (Griffith Review) Very good issue. Although it pores over the same old ground again and again from numerous angles, it ultimately reveals a fascinating, multiperspectival portrait of a place. Beneath its becalmed, languid easy-going surface, QLD has the scars of an extraordinarily rich half-century of history; a set of stories and characters well drawn out here. (****)
Frank Duffy: Work and the City (Edge Futures Ser.) Excellent summary of issues around working environments by DEGW's Duffy - from numerous angles, taking in history and future. Very useful read, even if you sense there's much more to come here. (*****)
Movies Is Magic Klimek: Movies Is Magic Dedications was one of the albums of the last decade, and this is a supreme follow-up. Breathtakingly gorgeous music. (*****)
Contra Vampire Weekend: Contra A vaguely more ethical version of Graceland, this is perfectly pleasant pop with little glamour or edge, but is just arch enough to tweak the synapses. (****)
History, Mystery Bill Frisell: History, Mystery Gentle, supremely tasteful, and beautifully arranged - and therefore without the edge of Frisell at his best. Those days may be gone forever (although the Gerhard Richter album gives us some hope) but this is 21stC easy-listening at its best. (****)
The BQE Sufjan Stevens: The BQE Come on Sufjan, could do better. And this doesn't qualify as New York State. (Though even coasting, he's still good.) (****)
Gutter Tactics Dälek: Gutter Tactics Crunching relentless paranoid dark-hop. Form an orderly line, 'The Wire'-fans, your soundtrack is in. (*****)
Monoliths and Dimensions Sunn 0))): Monoliths and Dimensions Ye Gods, the most startlingly beautiful thing I've heard for a long time. Absolutely stunning. They say: "the most musical piece we’ve done, and also the heaviest, powerful and most abstract set of chords we’ve laid to tape"." Features Eyvind Kang, Julian Priester (!), frequent collaborator Oren Ambarchi and a Viennese choir. (*****)
SND: Atavism Brutal in its starkness, these ultra-precise, ultra-sparse clipped rhythms are the polar opposite of Sunn O))). (*****)
Filastine: Dirty Bomb Not every track works here but those that do are fantastic. A rich stew of jump-cut rhythms and Hispanic samples, framed by an architecture of R&B. (****)
Various Artists: Pop Ambient 2009 A few quite lovely tracks on here, generally those featuring the brilliant Klimek. Others are pretty enough but a little insubstantial. (****)
Flying Lotus: Los Angeles Beautiful fractured rhythms and smeared fizzing neon samples. Wondrous piece of work. LA, indeed. (*****)
Antony and the Johnsons: The Crying Light Luminous, shimmering, iridescent. Seriously, quite lovely. Only a couple of off-notes; otherwise, a major progression. (*****)
Production Assistant, Monocle Web & Broadcast
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