cityofsound

London's Smoke, New York's minutes

A new issue of 'Smoke' magazine has been out a few weeks (issue 2.) It's brilliant. Available throughout London. Some excerpts: firstly from a column purporting to be by Iain Sinclair (which isn't by him at all, but is hilarious); secondly a proposal for a shipping forecast for London:

"The plan was to walk away from London. This negative goal, this quest for absence, excited me, and I wore the expression of one pulling a half-eaten bus-map from the styrofoam detritus of the motorway verge. Behind me, (Marc) Atkins and (Bill) Drummond wore the expressions of men improvising plans for reconfiguring the city's rage, hopefully into some sort of fugitive photographic exhibition. While out in front the sculptor Rachel Whiteread wore a small fur bikini and flip-flops and was singing a song about dwarves going off to work which I didn't really understand, but before I could ask her what it meant she started telling us about her next project, which was to fill the inside of a telephone box with clear plastic resin, in order to make people think twice about things. Drummond said he'd once tried to fill the inside of a telephone box with urine, but had been arrested." [Psychogeography Corner]

"But as I fall asleep each night, it's not the wild coast of Orkney, or the inky-dark Straits of Dover that I dream about. As the sound of passing taxis blends with the announcer's voice, I dream of spent clubbers marooned on the concrete reef under Centre Point, just a single spindly coconut tree for shelter. Bus conductors lash themselves to their poles as Routemasters brave high seas around the treacherous cape of Hyde Park Corner." [The London Shipping Forecast, Sebastian Brennan]

Smoke magazine

The shipping forecast idea is lovely. Reminds me of a track that's been on constant rotation on my iPod in recent weeks: Alan Licht's 'A New York Minute' (Amazon.com). It's a fifteen-minute collage of radio weather reports for New York region from January, 2001 on New York's 1010 WINS Accuweather. That's it. But it's completely beguiling. Each report last 30 seconds or so and runs straight into the next, constructing a constant stream of variations on cold, snowy weather, attempts at levity punctuating the quotidian warnings to carry umbrellas. The layered forecasts build something of the hypnotic repetitions more familiar in Licht's guitar-based minimalism. It becomes a drone - a wash - the varying speech patterns of radio presenters becoming addictive, particularly when listening walking around another city, like London. It's beautiful.

The Weather Project

So I've been to see Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project at Tate Modern twice now. It is rather beautiful. But what quickly became more interesting than 'the sun' itself - to me anyway - is the reaction of people to the project. I haven't seen many pictures of people - perhaps because the sun's so photogenic - which I find that odd, given how it's such an inclusive artwork, and people's performance in that space is so much of the piece itself, and genuinely interesting.

First of all, the light Eliasson's created is really interesting:

"Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape." [From Tate Modern: About the installation]

I soon decided to switch my flash off, preferring the slightly fuzzier, but warmer light my digital camera sought out. The faint mist pervading the space softens the edges of all but the most direct silhouettes, and the limited light means that some of the images are blurred or ghosted - but I like this effect. It looks how it felt, if you see what I mean.

First people stand and stare, wandering down the ramp of the turbine hall, barely able to believe their eyes, taking in the warm colours and misty atmosphere, drawn towards the sun (click these thumbnails for larger versions):

Slowly they look up and realise the ceiling is mirrored, increasing the 'height' of the turbine hall:

People start to point and wave, trying to spot themselves, or simply stand and stare, lost in contemplation:

They sit down, gathering in groups as if basking in front of the sun, taking photos of each other, having picnics:

Eventually, many end up lying on their backs - it's been suggested they're sunbathing ;) However, what's going on is more akin to a gentle exhibitionism, people contorting themselves into shapes discernible on the reflected ceiling, tiny children copying their waving parents without realising what a reflection is, groups forming impromptu star shapes:

Strikes me that Eliasson's premise that people in Britain continually talk about the weather (part of the 'rationale' for this particular work) is fine, and probably true, but what the piece actually highlighted to me is people's relationship with their self-image, and perhaps even a mass(ive) desire to perform in public on several levels - both to be part of a crowd and to be individually reflexive.

iPod and adaptive design

For a while, I'd been meaning to write a piece about an aspect of the iPod design which seemed, if not adaptive, to enable iterative design strategies around the functionality i.e. the ability to significantly extend the functionality of the product via firmware upgrades. I remember battery life was increased, additional functions, feeling like I had a whole new iPod, all via one simple firmware upgrade. The physical aspects of the product (control wheel, 4 nav/select buttons, screen) are abstract enough to enable improvements by simply remapping new elements of the software.

In Stewart Brand's original layer diagram - or my clumsily reworked version (as part of this):

... this is like saying Apple are able to change the 'space plan', 'stuff', and even some of the 'services', without having to touch the 'structure', 'skin', or 'site. I liked that.

However, Adam Greenfield points to a more fundamental indication of exactly how the same company and same product breaks some fundamental adaptive design tenets. You can't replace the battery easily. In fact, you might as well buy a new iPod. This is like saying that the 'services' (the equivalent of plumbing, wiring, power etc. in a building) is tied so closely to the 'structure', 'skin' and 'site', that you have to replace the lot. It's as Brand writes about service layers in buildings such as IM Pei's MIT Media Lab: "Getting new cabling through the interior concrete walls - a necessity in such a laboratory - requires bringing in jackhammers." The service layer is fundamental in architecture, but enabling these layers to move at these different paces is what's key:

"A design imperative emerges: An adaptive building has to allow slippage between the differently-paced systems of Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space plan, and Stuff. Otherwise the slow systems block the flow of the quick ones, and the quick ones tear up the slow ones with their constant change. Embedding the systems together may look efficient at first, but over time it is the opposite, and destructive as well." Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn [UK|US]

Quite so. The 'systems' in Apple's iPod are tightly embedded, which looks and works beautifully. For 18 months. Then total system failure. So Apple need to figure out a way in which different layers of change can be enabled in their product. They've figured out a way of changing some aspects of the software layer easily; separating the service layer from its structural layers would enable users to replace the battery without being faced with the prospect of giving Apple 300 bucks to take the device apart for them. And therefore, as I did, figuring you might as well just buy a new one. Which is great if your credit can temporarily stretch that far, but how many old iPods - otherwise perfectly good devices - are now sitting around gathering dust?

This is why I keep rattling on about adaptive design - it's not only a pragmatic solution, but an elegant way of designing change into things, in this case enabling conservation and innovation to coexist. Brand can overplay things - I intrinsically struggle with a pervasive anti-modern stance - but we keep finding examples of where enabling adaptation would help.

All this is explained in a way funkier, far more concise, and much more direct sense in the iPod's Dirty Secret film [Quicktime] Adam points to.

Blood Wars

Blood Wars is an excellent PDF graffiti mag. In their own words: "The magazine for graffiti writers and street lovers ... print it out and pass it along". By www.sfaustina.com.

These cuts from Blood Wars #10:

Capsule living and everyday IA

Common Ground Community's and the Architectural League of New York's social housing design competition ended this week.

"Competitors were asked to design a prototypical individualized dwelling unit and the layout of 19 such units on a typical floor of The Andrews – Common Ground’s lodging house on the Bowery - which will shortly be renovated to house the First Step Housing Program. First Step will offer private, safe, clean and affordable short-term accommodations to individuals who are transitioning to housing, facing homelessness, or who have rejected or failed in other programs.”

Two interesting things here, initially the idea of 'capsule living'. The idea behind The Andrews is to "combine elements of the Bowery's dying flophouse tradition — $7 a night, no lease, no questions — with smart management, on-site social services, and space-efficient modular design" (from a Metropolis article, quoted at Social Design Notes.) Echoes here of the magnificent Isokon building (home to Agatha Christie, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer et al), the recent microflat idea by Piercy Connor architects [bad Flash req. for both], or Japanese urban environments. Here of course, the idea is necessitated by the focusing on homelessness, rather than a choice of home for gilded members of the European avant-garde or key workers. However I've long been fond of this idea for more urban accommodation in general, as a far more democratic use of city space - those with a choice (myself included) tend to occupy far more space than we arguably need, which seems morally suspect in cities which are both overcrowded and rife with homelessness.

Cities need these spaces partly because 'cubicle hotels', which used to prevent much homelessness, are now a thing of the past thanks to property development and health & safety regulations. So the design challenge is beyond simply defining efficient use of space.

"You don't want it to be a doll house, but you don’t want it to be a cell either.’ A lot of these folks have been in psychiatric hospitals or in jail, and they don’t want an environment that reminds them of that. Things as subtle as being able to move the furniture around — not having it nailed down — being able to get control of a degree of privacy in the space, having a window that opens and closes onto a central corridor seemed to take something that could have been viewed as institutional and make it cozy ... Frankly, design makes a significant difference in terms of the atmosphere of calm and respect that you establish. People respond behaviorwise to being in that kind of environment. Keeping maintenance costs reduced is also a consideration. We need spaces that can be cleaned easily, panels that can be removed and replaced without having to trash the whole unit.” [Rosanne Haggerty, in Metropolis article, quoted at Social Design Notes]

Which leads neatly on to the second interesting aspect. One of the five winning entries in the competition is called "The Ordering of Things”, by Katherine Chang and Aaron Gabriel:

"The project draws from the pleasure of the everyday ritual of ordering things. Putting away your laundry, organising your books, arranging your records. These everyday activities foster pleasure by allowing the ritualistic completion of an obtainable task, and more importantly offering us the means to structure our environment. The existing first step units offer a place for the body, but no place for the objects the body needs to relate itself to the environment. These objects are often the primary possessions of the inhabitants, relating them to memories, ideas and times."

I like this personal ordering of everyday life. It resonates both with the idea of an 'everyday information architecture' and of adaptive design's notion of design living everywhere to some degree - of Rachel Strickland's work: "Everybody is a designer in everyday life. Yet we share no common vocabulary for describing everyday design practice ... design is not limited to the province of specialists who have formal training ... rather, design behaviour is a fundamental element of our species' adaption." (as quoted by Tom Moran.)

These ideas should probably be pertinent throughout most design, yet they must surely be fundamental in a project such as this, delivering a sense of self-worth and self-control back into damaged lives.
[via Social Design Notes]

Journal: Senate House, University of London

No. 2 in an irregular series of reports from London's Open House weekend: Senate House, University of London (No. 1 was the Daily Express Building, Fleet Street.) Senate House is of a similar vintage to the Express building yet feels more of a transition point; balancing classicism and modernity beautifully.

Indeed, before I continue, it's worth nothing that if any of you want real facts and academic opinion on the building, I can recommend Classicism and Modernity: The University of London's Senate House, by Richard Simpson, reprinted from the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 43 - 1999, (School of Advanced Study, University of London) the source of quotations here unless noted otherwise. My reportage will be based principally on wandering around with a camera.

Facts first: constructed throughout the mid-1930's, Senate House was designed by the brilliant Charles Holden, architect of several undoubted classics of London architecture, particularly London Transport headquarters at 55 Broadway and its satellite network of tube stations at Arnos Grove, Boston Manor, Clapham South, Morden, Southgate, amongst others. More about him later. But before Holden was on the case, the necessity for an headquarters for the University of London had long been established. A University since 1838, a major reform in 1900 indicated the need for an administrative headquarters for this, what "ought to be the chief centre of learning in the entire Empire, perhaps the chief centre of learning for the entire world" (Lord Haldane, quoted with approval by Lord Macmillan, one of the key clients and prime movers behind building Senate House.)

This reform meant the University of London had a unique federal structure compromising 19 colleges and 11 institutes (now a far more common approach.) And this posed a problem. The other key client for the eventual building, Lord Beveridge, upon becoming director of the LSE, asked a cab driver to take him to the University of London. The cabby 'looked blank. As I explained, a light broke on him. "Oh, you mean the place near the Royal School of Needlework." I discovered that this was what I did mean.'

So the new building had to be noticed. Rather more than the Royal School of Needlework with, er, all due respect. And in the manner of clients before and after, there were copious requirements before the architect was even onboard. The idea for an HQ in Bloomsbury was as old as WWI, and thoughts as to the building's form and function had been festering since that time. Beveridge's 'suggestions' indicated that the building was for:

"(A) University for the nation and the world, drawing from overseas as many students as Oxford and Cambridge and all the other English universities together. It is a civic university for the ten millions of greater London ... the central symbol of the University on the Bloomsbury site can not fittingly look like an imitation of any other University, it must not be a replica from the middle ages. It should be something that could not have been built by any earlier generation than this, and can only be at home in London ... (the building) means a chance to enrich London - to give London at its heart not just more streets and shops ... but a great architectural feature ... an academic island in swirling tides of traffic, a world of learning in a world of affairs."

Beveridge himself introduced the notion of the tower, 'suggesting' that the eventual architect "will think, I hope of at least one tower, with a great bell, a muezzin, calling the children of the University in all lands." He actually went on to light-heartedly suggest that the tower should feature "a great clock where eight mechanical deans of Faculties and five-five Senators dance each day at noon round a mechanical Chancellor." Beveridge got his wish with the tower; sadly not with the mechanical clock.

Charles Holden won the commission on the back of his London Transport HQ, over a black-tie dinner face-off versus Sir Giles Scott (of red telephone box, Battersea power station, and Bankside/Tate Modern fame) amongst others. And Holden's original plan, published in 1931, would certainly ensure that cabbies would notice it. A vast linear spine with 2 towers and 17 courtyards extending from the British Museum to Byng Place, it would have dominated Bloomsbury and much of central London, taking 20 to 30 years to complete. Of course, it never got built. Only the first part of the approved 1932 scheme, the Senate House incorporating the Library, was constructed with plans for the rest abandoned by 1937.

None the less, this was the most significant new building in the city. Holden designed the tower to taper deceptively, to "appear with quiet insistence", yet it was the tallest building in London (save the sacred St. Pauls) for years, and referred to as "London's first skyscraper". It's still a significant presence in London's skyline.

Yet perhaps thanks to Holden's ability to make a muscular, impressive building appear graceful and discrete, Senate House was largely considered a success even in a city which still struggles with landmark architecture. As Lord Macmillan quipped, in a vote of thanks to Holden at RIBA in 1938, "this is almost the only building in London which has ever been erected without an acrimonious correspondence in The Times!"

As Simpson notes, Holden was "more responsive than many to the radical developments in contemporary architecture", but he managed to balance his modernist sensibilities with a classical bent appropriate for this client. And he was ideally skilled to do this.

"Holden embodied both the architecture of the modern and that of the past. A master of the traditional classical form with a profound knowledge of construction and materials. His modernity came from his belief that architecture should, '...throw off its mantle of deceits; its cornices, pilasters, mouldings...' He was far more concerned with functional problems; how rainwater could naturally clean a wall; the flow of pedestrians through a building." [from charlesholden.com]

The magnificent tower is the main point of interest in the exterior of the building, much of the rest achieving a quietly powerful grace, devoid of ornamentation in the 'stripped-classical' aesthetic Holden had pioneered in his London Underground architecture. The underlying structure defines the form, pyramidal for stability within a traditional load-bearing masonry construction (Holden rejecting the untested steel frame form for this building 'designed to last 500 years', though across the pond architects were tossing up steel frame constructions with gay abandon in delirious New York.) The tower dominates my neighbourhood, looming over numerous approaches (click the thumbnails for larger images):

The ground floor is faced in Cornish granite and with upper floors in Portland stone. Other than that, the much of my interest is in the interior. The pedestrianised entrance is magnificent, and the Ceremonial Hall itself was too impressive to be constrained by my camera (more photos of the exterior & hall here and here.) The Hall is flanked by the William Beveridge Hall and the Macmillan Hall, titles picked out in a delicate light san serif. Above the staircase signs, Holden's clever cuts into the stone provide natural ventilation.

Inside, the quality of build is still wonderful, airy corridor upon corridor of marble, wood, and natural light streaming through thick leaded glass, lofty ceilings pitted with burnished hanging lamps. Holden's appreciation of Greek architecture, again balanced with austere modernity, is visible throughout, and the detailing on balustrades, columns, and ceilings are a joy, from the brass handles to a ceiling patterned with depictions of various forms of alphabet across ancient cultures - a 'university for the world' indeed.

The Chancellor's Hall features an astonishingly lovely and interesting map of London, painted by Macdonald Gill in 1939, showing the location of University premises. It's a map of London, organised by learning. It's huge - approximately 4m across from memory, with some sections left blank, no doubt for future expansion. For those interested in alternative mappings of the city, it's well worth a visit just for this. Here's a substantial detail (270kb):

The Senate rooms are panelled in furnished in English oak or walnut, desks set with personal microphones and lighting, ceilings disappearing into infinity.

In terms of signage, the whole place is a riot of classical thirties typography and restrained haughty authority: from appropriately austere Cashiers office signs, to the kind of notice for a First Aid room which would make you reconsider in all but the most dire of circumstances; stairways tiled in translucent white, with floor numbers inset in Bentley greens; signs for room numbers dangling from the generous ceilings.

The stained glass windows here are quite stunning, achieving a sense of modernity within this traditional format. Not quite as progressive as other early 20thC stained glass, say those by Frank Lloyd Wright or Josef Albers, but again, almost exemplifying the balancing act the building as a whole achieves: classicism and modernity. It helped that they were brightly lit by a crisp early autumn light.

The heating, gas, and water services are cleverly concealed within window recesses. Holden was keen to integrate services fully with the design - 'things commonly thought ugly, connected with the physical needs of life which the architect has to accept with gladness as by no means negligible ingredients in his masterpiece.' An intriguing and noble thought in a building of this vintage, but not being able to separate the service layer from the structural layer must cause problems in terms of an adaptive design.

The Library is a fabulously peaceful place, entirely consistent with a traditional notion of early 20thC learning. Lovely study desks with brass lamps and forbidding 'Silence' signs; serried ranks of gorgeous filing cabinets - early information architecture.

When focussing on the interior in this way (which is the point of Open House day I suppose), the building actually reveals the extent of the team effort involved: the furniture fitters, interior finishers, signage manufacturers and designers, and so on. With the Daily Express building, one senses Sir Owen Williams, the designer as polymath. Here, Holden exemplifies the true understanding of architect as team player, and of design as a collaborative process:

"Holden believed architecture should be a collaborative effort, which explains why he declined a Knighthood, twice. A highly modest man, who was yet able to exercise such an influence that he was near hero-worshipped by his colleagues." [from charlesholden.com]

Further points of interest on Holden the designer centre around his interpretation of the proto-minimalist style being hammered out by contemporaneous continental modernists, and his fascination with form being driven by function, eradicating ornamentation and in a sense the presence of the architect himself.

"A building which takes naturally and inevitably the form controlled by the plan and the purpose and the materials. A building which provides opportunities for the exercise and skill and pleasure in work not only to the designer but also for the many craftsmen employed and the occupants of the building."

"I discovered the significance of form as distinct from the tricks of architectural ornament. The building would take on its character of its own often requiring little in the way of embellishment and finally confirmed my slogan 'when in doubt leave it out' ... "I don't seek for a style, either ancient or modern. I want an architecture which is through and through a good building. A building planned for a specific purpose, constructed in the method and use of materials, old or new, most appropriate to the purpose the building has to serve." The Kind of Architecture we want in Britain, Charles Holden, 1957

To me, echoes here of Naoto Fukasawa's quotes: "Good design means not leaving traces of the designer and not overworking the design" or 'new rationalism' & "design dissolving in behaviour", or Tom Moran's aside on "design being a humble trade."

Since construction and initial occupation, the building has achieved an unforeseen notoriety, analogous to that of Broadcasting House's room 101, as almost certain inspiration for Orwell's fictional 'Ministry of Truth':

"The Ministry of Truth - Minitrue, in Newspeak - was startingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace three hundred metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below."
[George Orwell, 1984]

It's worth noting that Senate House was indeed the Ministry of Information headquarters during WWII, telegraph codename "MINIFORM". Orwell's wife Eileen worked there, and the building was visible from their St. John's Wood flat, itself the model for Winston Smith's Victory Mansions. Wasn't much of a leap for Orwell to devise MINITRUE.

Given this, the deeper psychogeographical connections to Bloomsbury's rich heritage as a place for political agitation (albeit of a distinctly dusty literary nature) are somewhat ironic. Each year, various Marxist conferences are held at Senate House, bearded gentlemen of a certain age wandering around the surrounding streets. And as I type today, the start of the anti-Bush protest set off from Malet Street, directly in front of Senate House.

Pevsner wasn't sure, calling it "undecided modernism" and "strangely semi-traditional" - basically saying not as good as his earlier stuff. So, undecided or balanced? Either way, Holden's classical allusions were surely part of the brief for a building so redolent of traditional learning and Empire. A difficult compromise, but as I sit gazing out at the impassive alabaster monolith proudly standing guard over Bloomsbury's intellectual heritage, it feels like a successful one.

Sonata for the Unaware

Sonata for the Unaware is an absolutely stunning piece by carbonatedjazz, who I now realise has been involved with a few sites I've coveted over the years, including the Classic Motown extravaganza a while back.

"The mundane routine of Philadelphia commuters is transformed into a living piece of music. Human bodies become musical markings on the pages of a cranking machine. Bodies were not tracked by hand. Video effects and body tracking were done completely through Director scripting."

Sonata for the Unaware [Flash]

Made me think of several presentations at last year's Doors Of Perceptions conference - and that someone should add this musical dimension to David Rokeby's beautiful work done on tracking people, objects, pigeons across Piazza San Marco in Venice.

Also made me think that if we reverse this process - a musical score derived from visual events, into visual events derived from musical ones - could we not make an alternative to the visualisation software built into iTunes or Windows Media Player? i.e. rather than variations on faux-psychedelia, what if the visual patterns were fragments of cityscapes & street scenes, visual triggers we recognise and love (patterns of buses arriving/departing, timelapse of people/cars queuing, rain in puddles in the gutter, neon lights reflected across same, park life, skyscraper lights fading up at night etc.) Closer to elements of Koyaanisqatsi I guess, though without the environmental agenda and with the random element. But the same notion of city rhythms at work. The visual counterpoint to Steve Reich's City Life, Walter Ruttman's Weekend etc. They'd be heavily compressed natch, but personally that's a visual style I enjoy anyway, whether vectored or pixellated. One could achieve further variation via a series of randomised real-time filters on these images/loops. I guess the library of clips and effects would have to be huge (as we're talking a finite series here, rather than the infinite generative series - though even with several thousand short clips (updated live via http - ha!), the random element in music would surely enabled huge number of combinations?) Anyone know of such a thing? Would it ever be at all practical? Maybe it already exists?!

Anyway, that wishful thinking aside, go check Sonata for the Unaware.
[via Diary of a Superfluous Man]

A New York sound

Charmingly exotic on this cold London day, sky heavy and white, streets moistened with overnight rain, squat buildings in drab browns and grey. Ok, I've got flu ... Anyway, how nice to browse across this:

"Times Square.  Crossroads of the world!  Transfer here for everything!" bellowed by the 1 Train subway conductor.

[Found on the excellent gothamist]

Coffee as lubricant of the enlightenment

M'learned colleague Simon Hopkins related an anecdote from Neal Stephenson's historical novel Quicksilver, about how coffee's introduction to Britain was doubted as being a highly exotic acquired taste, if not a mindbending intoxicant due to the average constitution's lack of familiarity with caffeine.

With delightful serendipity, a recent Pepys' diary entry, for Saturday 10 November, saw our hero stopping off at a coffee-house. The excellent annotations lead to various further notes on coffee, and this fascinating aside from T.B. Macaulay's History of England:

“The coffee house must not be dismissed with a cursory mention. It might indeed at that time have been not improperly called a most important political institution. No Parliament had sat for years. The municipal council of the City had ceased to speak the sense of the citizens. Public meetings, harangues, resolutions, and the rest of the modern machinery of agitation had not yet come into fashion. Nothing resembling the modern newspaper existed. In such circumstances the coffee houses were the chief organs through which the public opinion of the metropolis vented itself."

Further, this excellent article on the history of coffee-houses in general, including which coffee-houses were associated with which nascent political parties, and their importance as nodes in London's information networks:

The London coffee-houses provided a gathering place where, for a penny admission charge, any man who was reasonably dressed could smoke his long, clay pipe, sip a dish of coffee, read the newsletters of the day, or enter into conversation with other patrons. At the period when journalism was in its infancy and the postal system was unorganised and irregular, the coffee-house provided a centre of communication for news  and information.  Runners were sent round to the coffee-house to report major events of the day, such as victory in battle or political upheaval, and the newsletters and gazettes of the day were distributed chiefly in the coffee-house.  Most of the establishments functioned as reading rooms, for the cost of newspapers and pamphlets was included in the admission charge. In addition, bulletins announcing sales, sailings, and auctions covered the walls of the establishments, providing valuable information to the businessman who conducted much of his business from a table at his favourite coffee-house. Naturally, this dissemination of news led to the dissemination of ideas, and the coffee-house served as a forum for their discussion. As the eminent social historian G. M. Trevelyan observed: "The 'Universal liberty of speech of the English nation'...was the quintessence of Coffee House life."

I guess wifi changes things somewhat, but this still sounds like an advance on Starbucks. The fact that their information flows (newspapers, pamphlets, conversation) were covered by the 1p admission is better for a start, never mind the imperative to create a 'universal liberty of speech'.

Mobile phone design

Fabulously informative post over at Chris Heathcote's anti-mega on the latest in mobile phone design in Japan:

"The biggest difference in ergonomics is flip phones compared to our candybars - there are candybar phones in Japan, but they are big and ugly compared to the flips. The flip format allows some nifty features, such as a second screen. These are now as colourful and good quality as the main screen, are on all the time (unlike the idle screens on UK colour phones), and you can download programs to run on the outside screen. These displays show everything from the time, to your last mail, to information downloaded from the net. The main displays are high quality, getting bigger with better resolution. The latest craze are 3d display."

And it's not just displays either, but new models of interaction beyond the Sony jogdial, including the mysterious-sounding Neuropointer and Roll Navi trackball. Fingerprint readers, location-based services, and pet-based mail delivery systems abound! The EZ Navi walk service sounds particularly interesting, providing a point-to-point navigation service designed for a country without street names - more details here. (apropos of that: Chris was also right to pick me up on recently simplifying the situation over street signs.)

Anti-mega: Keitai