cityofsound

Essay: The Garage of Small Things; nanotechnology, biomimicry and design practice (Annex)

What follows is a slightly different edit of my article for Artek’s new magazine, 'Annex', as part of their science and technology-themed issue. It explores some of the possibilities in and around advanced material research, based on a conversation between researcher Olli Ikkala, Artek design director Ville Kokkonen, and me, at Aalto University’s “Nanotalo” (nano-house).

Along the way it explores building at the molecular scale, how cellulose might resource tomorrow’s fast fashion and slow buildings; leaps from Lilliput to Finland; links electron microscopes to Thackara’s macroscopes; remains ambivalent about whether we really are on the brink of a the new industrial revolution or about to take another unsustainable misstep: connects MIT’s Building 20 and Aalto to reinforce the value of garages; sets up a prizefight of poetic qualities between Italo Calvino, Juhani Pallasmaa and biomimicry; and sketches out how research into organic polymers might inadvertently reveal a future of creative practices …

Suffice to say, it was not easy to write this article in a way that might engage a broad audience, whilst retaining the essence of these big issues about small things. I take my hat off to writers like Steven Johnson or David Brooks who do such a thing for a living.  For some years now, I’ve tried to use this site to explore a kind of communicable, almost conversational writing about (sometimes) complex matters—it’s far too easy to hide behind obfuscation, after all—but this was a particular challenge.

As ever, I’d be interested in your thoughts: Twitter, Facebook, or even the neglected old comments box below. The 'Annex' piece is accompanied by proper photos from proper photographer Tuomas Uusheimo; the ones below are mine (full set is here.)

You should know that this is known in the trade as one of those #longreads

Essay: Foreword to Rory Hyde's "Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture"

We had the Helsinki launch of Rory Hyde's new book "Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture" today, featuring a panel discussion between Rory, Bryan Boyer, Jenna Sutela and me at the World Design Capital Paviljonki. 

Rory kindly asked me to write the foreword to the book, and as per usual, I've reproduced an edit of that below. The book features interviews with a fairly stellar cast of Bruce Mau, Indy Johar, Reinier de Graaf, Laura Baird, Mel Dodd, Wouter Vanstiphout, Camila Bustamante, Steve Ashton, Matt Webb, Bryan Boyer, Todd Reisz, Marcus Westbury, Hedwig Heinsman, Hans Vermeulen, Martine de Wit, Jeanne Gang, Conrad Hamann, Liam Young, Arjen Oosterman, Lilet Breddels and Natalie Jeremijenko. You can read more about it here, in this nice reflective post by Rory (including a note on the book designer's Robin Kinross-inspired insistence the book should lie flat, open, on a table.)

It really is a cracking book, exploring all of the most interesting practices in and around architecture today, with a suitably open and broad reading of what that word "architecture" might realistically mean. In doing so, it genuinely attempts to wrestle with the serious questions being asked of the profession's current and future status. This is one of the many places to look for clues as to the way out of the dead-end that architecture has backed itself into, but you don't often get so many strong, intelligent, interesting, and convincing voices gathered together in one place.

Rory's short introductions to each chapter are one of my favourite aspects of the book, too. Reading those pieces alone would give you a bracing primer in the challenges and opportunities within the field.

The book's genesis is also interesting, as it springs from a blog post that Rory wrote a few years ago, which exploded in the comments, almost like it was 2004 again. Internet alchemy, transforming blog post to book.

You can pick the book up at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com—please do so! Also, Rory's doing a similar event in Amsterdam this Friday, so do go along if you can.

Anyway. Here's the foreword.

(Given the book's subtitle describing the edge of architecture, I drew a bunch of quotes from the great urbanist Kevin Lynch's stone-cold classic "The Image of the City" (1960), which pepper the text. The other references are mostly well-worn favourites, I'm afraid. I really must read some new books KTHXBAI.

Essay: 21st Century Gestures Clip Art Collection

A month or so ago, Nicolas Nova asked me to write an essay for a project he was doing. He said they'd been working on a catalogue of novel "gestures, postures and digital rituals" and could I write about that, please, as a kind of foreword.

"Curious Rituals is a research project conducted at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) in July-August 2012 by Nicolas Nova (The Near Future Laboratory / HEAD-Genève), Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu from the media design program. (It) is about gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies..."

It so happens that, for some years now, I'd been collating a catalogue of novel gestures and interactions myself and had never got round to doing anything with it. So Nicolas's kind request gave me the chance to get it off my computer and onto the internet. Thanks Nicolas!

One outcome of their project is a rather nice short film; another is their book, here. My "preface" is reproduced below. Please note: as you'll see, this is not intended to be thorough, complete or even coherent—but you'll get the gist. I would guess many of us have such a list. It's probably more about noticing as a kind of practice, as a curious ritual of its own, rather than the particular gestures themselves. Even though I spent a little too much time trying to get the hands right. (Only to get the arms all wrong.)

Essay: Maginot Line, from "Dark Matter & Trojan Horses" (Strelka Press)

What follows is one of the "plays" that didn't make that recent strategic design "playbook" for Strelka Press—Dark Matter & Trojan Horses. I'm sharing here as it serves as a bit of a taster for that essay, describing what I call the "Maginot Line" play.

But posting this also gives me a chance to write about some work done at Arup Sydney a few years ago. With my excellent colleagues Emma Synnott, Georgia Vitale and Safiah Moore, and Sydney- and Melbourne-based comms and branding agency Naked, I worked on a project for the Australian government, outlining a strategy that would enable a meaningful shift in the housing market towards sustainable choices. Unusually, we chose to do this by addressing citizens' perceptions and behaviour directly, rather than simply focusing on the supply-side of the built environment business.

There's a lot in it, I think—it's well beyond half-hearted "nudges"—and I'd be interested in any responses to that project in particular. Naked's expertise in behavioural psychology, as well as mainstream marketing techniques, was crucial, and provided our team with new angles to explore. It also implicitly describes how you often have to re-write the brief in areas with little or no precedent (let's be clear; I doubt this was what the government though it would be getting when it wrote the tender.) And also kudos to senior leaders at Arup, who approved our bid/approach even though it was almost entirely uncharted water for the firm.

You can download the PDF report describing the strategy here (was linked to from this page.)

Read on, and you'll see how, in retrospect, I began to think of this as a kind of "Maginot Line" strategy.

Essay: Helsinki Street Eats (Sitra)

A while ago, we (Sitra’s Strategic Design Unit) released a book on Helsinki’s street food culture, which, taken with a liberal pinch of salt, covers the last 150 years or so of food in the city. It ends with the currently burgeoning food scene in the city, as exemplified by the culinary insurgency movements of Ravintolapäivä—covered here—and the temporary incursion of the "Camionette" crêpes van at Kamppi last summer—mentioned here. 

Our short book goes into more detail on the emergence and significance of those very recent events, but also puts them in a context of Finnish history and culture, and particularly Helsinki’s history. As Helsinki is a youngish city, we took its relevant food history to  date back to a first “golden age” of food culture as a trading post and military base under Swedish and Russian rule, and then fast forward through the straitjacket constraints of the freshly-minted Finnish national identity after independence in 1917, via the constriction of prohibition in the ’20s, pausing briefly on the severe war years before basking in the temporary liberalisation of the 1952 Olympics.

We then pick our way through the complex social mores of the 50s and 60s—which started with women not being allowed into restaurants on their own; nor barstools for that matter—before the emergence of fast food and cheap air travel leads to another expansion and contraction, through the late twentieth century, into the "New Nordic Cuisine" of recent years.

In some ways, the history of food holds up a mirror to the history of the country, which indicates what fundamental cultural patterns and industrial and political systems we’re dealing with when we look at food. Which is exactly why we’re interested in it, of course.

Essay: Dark Matter & Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary (Strelka Press)

Please note: this piece has moved over here, as part of a publication Dark Matter & Trojan Horses at Medium. Please read, and link to, that version instead.

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Q. What connects Bryan Ferry and Cedric Price, dark matter and Hitchcock’s “Macguffin”, Trojan Horses and iPhones,  21st century social contracts and street food, the Brisbane floods and the UK riots, Occupy Everywhere and institutional redesign, bold claims about a relevant future for design with a pop at “design thinking” and the consultancy model?

A. My newish essay for Strelka Press about strategic design, available for not much money at all as an e-book! (Note: now also available in a print-on-demand version)

An explanation… 

A couple of weeks ago Russell Davies sent me a review of a talk by writer Neal Stephenson. Russell was aware of my interest in appropriating the concept of “dark matter” (see previous post) after I floated the idea at Arkwright’s Mill last summer, for our “Laptops and Looms” event.

“In fact, said Stephenson, we already have much of the fundamental technology we need to fulfil such science fiction ambitions as large scale solar power production, or routine space flight. Instead, he said, we need to start looking at the non-technological obstacles to these advances, citing insurance as a key example. The development of alternative space launch systems has been curtailed by the unwillingness of the insurance industry to underwrite satellite launches on systems for which there is no good model of the risk involved. Turning to the audience of mostly MIT students, Stephenson said "maybe some of you people need to go into the insurance industry instead of writing code." 
The response was nervous laughter.”

I like that “nervous laughter”. It’s usually a sign that an edge has been detected, that we’re in uncharted waters, that we’re beyond precedent or habit, outside their comfort zone. 

Funnily enough, that kind of response is partly why we pursue strategic design at Sitra, as Stephenson is describing a kind of practice with includes redesigning contexts—in this case, organisations, insurance and legislation—rather than solely addressing “technology”. And few people are genuinely trying to connect these things together; to understand, clarify and address complex opportunities holistically. Stephenson understands that the problem is never technology—or “the idea”—but it is the context around it that makes it happen. Or not. And we need to design that context if we want, say, large scale solar production to happen.

So I’ve written an essay, distributed as a short e-book, called Dark Matter & Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary, to begin to sketch this emerging area for design. It would be lovely if you found the time to read and assess, critique or discuss, and ideally, appropriate.

Here’s the synopsis of the essay from the Strelka Press website:

“We live in an age of wicked problems, whether it’s climate change or the decline of the welfare state. With conventional solutions failing, a new culture of decision-making is called for.

Strategic design is about applying the principles of traditional design to "big picture" systemic challenges such as healthcare, education and climate change. It redefines how problems are approached and aims to deliver more resilient solutions.

In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the messy politics – the “dark matter” – taking place above the designer’s head. And that may mean redesigning the organisation that hires you.”

Those are not my words, but in my essay I’d argue this is a good place for design to be. In fact, it might be the best place for design, if not the only place that design can genuinely make a difference.

I also argue that we desperately need to make a difference, given last year’s "Peak News" events, from the focused and organised incursions of Occupy Everywhere to the unprecedented, emergent and chaotic UK riots, from the rapid sweeps of the Arab Spring to the numbing stasis of the Eurozone Crisis, from the party-political-posturing stand-off over budget ceilings in Washington DC to the very real stand-offs in the streets of Moscow. When I wrote the essay (November-December 2011) Italy and Greece, both cornerstones of European civilisation, where being run by unelected technocrats, an implicit challenge to the very idea of democracy itself.

What on earth does design have to do with all this? Well, read the essay … but given that we are approaching these new kinds of issues—these deep stress fractures in our established cultures of decision-making—in exactly the same way we approached older, simpler problems, we should not be surprised that they are no longer working. Should we not be exploring different responses, developing frameworks more attuned to thinking holistically, to collaboration, deploying synthesis rather than simple analysis, to prototyping? What approaches might be productive when there are no precedents?

Equally, the essay suggests we have to make a more meaningful case for design—without which we are largely left “sticking lipstick on the pig”, as we charmingly say in Britain. Architecture, for example, is utterly buggered in its current position. Its inability to reinvent its context, its industry, its practice and its point meaning it falls far, far short of the claims it makes for itself. With some very honorable exceptions. And much the same can be said for much of the rest of design. So design has problems of its own to solve too.

Lest this all sound a little turgid, note that all of the characters mentioned in the introduction are in there, along with others. And yes, it makes the time for a little critique of the "design thinking" movement, and to some extent questions the efficacy of the design consultancy model.

Where the first book from SDU concentrated on the idea of using the studio concept to open up the right questions, this essay is a bridge, concentrating more on “what next?” How do you get things done, in this kind of different context for design? 

We call this facet of design “stewardship” in the team, and the essay is framed as a sort of tentative “play book” of tactics, strategies and other approaches that might trigger useful thoughts, adaptations or discussions (Note it is not the kind of playbook that is to be simply enacted, but one to be interpreted.)

So, for instance, such plays include basic tactics for addressing “dark matter”, such as appropriating the ideas of the Trojan Horse or Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin for the Low2No sustainable development competition. And yes, there’s an anecdote in there about how Bryan Ferry gave me some of the best—well, most succinct anyway—design advice I ever received.

For more of a flavour, I’ll shortly post a couple of off-cuts which didn’t make the final e-book.

The essay is published as part of the splendid new e-books series on Strelka Press. Strelka is one of the sharpest new(ish) design schools in Europe, and the series is edited by the excellent Justin McGuirk. I was happy to be in good company, with other texts by some of my favourite writers, including Keller Easterling, Owen Hatherley, Sam Jacob, Alexandra Lange, Julia Lovell, and Justin himself.

As with much of Strelka’s activities, the format of the series is also an experiment. I haven’t had much to do with the model, but it’s pitched at a price-point accessible to students whilst, through Amazon, making the discourse widely available outside of the school, which opens up the possibility of further readers for the Bryan Ferry anecdote I’ve shoehorned in there.

The series also looks great on the Kindle app, by the way; it hints at what we might be able to do with cover design in this format:

Thanks to Strelka Press for publishing the series. And many, many thanks to Justin for asking me to write it in the first place, and to both him and Chris Hall for their patient, careful and insightful editing. And thanks to Sitra, and particularly my colleagues Bryan Boyer, Justin Cook and Marco Steinberg.

And finally, thanks also to Bryan Ferry of course. Now for the product placement: you can buy the book in numerous formats, from Kindle, iBook and Bookmate for e-book readers, or print-on-demand, via Strelka Press.

Essays: An edible urbanism

Video of egg & bacon muffins via first floor apartment window / Ravintolapäivä

(Blog admin: keen-eyed readers will have noted I posted the following piece as part of my post on Ravintolapäivä a few weeks ago. But I thought it is better off filed on its own, for the sake of both pieces. Occasionally, reader, you have to suffer my filing whims.)

In the midst of all our (Sitra's) field work on street food in Helsinki, and its wider context, I was asked by Artek to write a short piece for a new magazine—Manifest—that they were co-producing for Helsinki World Design Capital (also to be deployed at the Salone design show in Milan.)

I quickly wrote a kind of evolving backdrop to where our work is going which looks at Helsinki's street food "revolution" of the last year, and describes some familiar ideas of citizen participation, the everyday operating system of the city, fluid and soft cities, and so on: It doesn't quite discuss them in those terms—the free publication is distributed across the city and beyond through shops, clubs etc. You can also download the PDF from their website (English and Finnish). The rest ofManifest is certainly worth a look too.

Here's the article I wrote, or rather, the slightly longer original edit of what is a short piece. It, like the Helsinki Street Eats book, is kind of a public set-up job for what follows. Bon appetit.

An edible urbanism

Last summer, Helsinki witnessed two culinary insurgency movements in quick succession. One was fixed in space, and had the outward appearance of an old Citroén van parked outside Lasipalatsi. The other was fixed in time, manifesting itself as a distributed festival of pop-up restaurants, sudden flashes of inspiration appearing and disappearing on a single day, 21st May 2011. Each would hint at a new city emerging.

The first was the 'Camionette', and sold coffee and crepes. Odd as it may seem, this didn't fit into the City's conceptions of street food. In turn, the Camionette cast the City of Helsinki, rightly or wrongly, as a stolid, opaque institution mitigating against an entrepreneur who had a different idea about street life and urban amenities. Only through adept use of social media, side-stepping the 'dark matter' of bureaucracy, did the Camionette's owner get his permits, enabling the first food truck in Helsinki to leave the city with a new notion of what street food can be. (The City has a different view of these events, but has subsequently embarked on a procurement of more food truck opportunities post-Camionette, perhaps tacitly admitting its value.)

The second incursion was 'Ravintolapäivä' (RP). RP started with a small group who were frustrated with the bureaucracy required to start a café (see a pattern emerging here?) So RP set themselves the lowest bar possible; it simply declared that a certain day would be "Ravintolapäivä" ("Restaurant Day") and anybody could open any kind of restaurant anywhere on that day. And that's what happened.

From frog's legs to flat whites, the city's food pallette expanded radically, but more importantly, it effortlessly reimagined the use of public space, demonstrating to Helsinki citizens what their streets could do. Although the resulting 'restaurants' were right at the edge of the City's legal boundaries—most were probably well over it, though it's difficult to tell—there was little the City could do about it.

For one thing, there was barely any organisation there. Ravintolapäivä is essentially a set of instructions, and you can hardly arrest a set of instructions. Coordinated by Facebook and Twitter, and disappearing as fast as they appeared, the restaurants were also essentially untouchable. It's not as if the City could send round fleets of public works operatives playing a form of urban 'Whac-a-Mole', scooping soup kitchens, pizza ovens and cooks into the back of their vans. RP is a demonstration of the easy power of an emergent urbanism, an opportunistic urbanism, enabled through social media and mobile apps and driven by a desire for participation in the city at the hyper-local level. The sense of a somewhat conservative city opening up to possibility is palpable.

Though exemplifying pop-up tactics, both interventions also have some strategic import. In their range of experiences, offerings and characters—participation in RP is an international affair, with other food cultures strongly represented—they are sketching out a diversifying Helsinki in a broader sense, as the city's foreign-born resident population is set to double in the next decade, to around 15-20% non-Finnish. So these incursions are 'lead users', indicating what Helsinki needs to be in the near future.

Street food is interesting precisely because it has this highly visible, quotidian accessibility, and is a carrier for cultural change.

Yet if we can understand the city through street food, we might also look to carefully shape its impact to strategic ends, rather than simply enjoy its haphazard flashes of inspiration. Because the only problem with 'Restaurant Day' is 'The Day After Restaurant Day'. Where there was a gourmet coffee shop, nothing. Where a bacon and egg muffin was lowered from a first floor window, nothing. Where an Italian sausage stall stood, nothing. There we see the limits of the intervention; it is too transient and variable to change a system.

The original frustration behind Ravintolapäivä - the inabilty to easily set up a café - has not been addressed by Ravintolapäivä. Cultural change will occur as a result of Ravintolapäivä, but slowly, grudgingly, awkwardly, and without addressing the dark matter, with little opportunity to develop wider strategic or holistic value. However, it has set a brilliant example, and an experiential example is the most powerful lever one could have.

We are interested in framing the right questions, and then shaping the new set of instructions for the city, its new operating system. How can we have more things like the Camionette in more places, and how can every day be a Restaurant Day? And more strategically, how can we use such street food incursions to describe a more resilient and enjoyable Helsinki, with a more active street life, strong service culture and start-up scene, and a diverse set of cultures at play? How might we use an event or the hint of a new service, in order to reshape the "dark matter" of urban governance?

Food is a great place to start. Everybody has to come to the table, several times a day, and every single thing we eat is part of a complex, multi-layered series of systems touching most aspects of modern life. Compared to built infrastructure, it moves rapidly, is malleable and adaptable, and highly influential. It provides the setting for lively social exchange or moments of solo reflection, runs the gamut from service to logistics, from entrepeurship to social services, from pragmatic refuelling to avant-garde experience, from organic to industrial, from luxury to waste, input to output. As a platform for design strategies aimed at systemic change within the city, street food involves engaging both the hard and soft infrastructure, recognising that the city'sraison d'etre is positioned firmly in the latter, but enabled by better understanding the former.

So can we see street food as a prototyping platform for a new kind of design strategy, and a new kind of city? As unlikely as it may seem, the humble hot dog might just unlock a new kind of urban design, a replicable systemic change centred on citizens and culture rather than concrete and cars.

Find out more at low2no.org/food

Essays: Interfaces for the unlimited dream of flying

Flying from Singapore to Helsinki. We’re flying over an apparently endless landscape of dark forests and snow-covered hills, presumably Russia, rendered indigo in the velvety pre-dawn light. Settlements are picked out by clusters of yellowy-orange lights, connected by a vast web of white lines, roads and rail cutting through the trees and rock.

Most landscapes are transcendental from an airliner; Australia’s are particularly transcendental, if that makes any kind of sense. Flying up from Adelaide, towards Singapore, we pass over what I think is Lake Eyre, a body of water that is only sometimes water, a 10000 square kilometre salt pan.

It’s as if Australia’s terrain is designed to be seen from the air. From the ground, as Robert Hughes and others have pointed out, Australia’s landscape has a beauty of its own, but it is not one that can be easily drawn from the lens of western aesthetics. From the air, however, the vastness of its systems can be quickly appreciated. It’s beyond Burtynsky.

Similarly, flying into Singapore, we can sense the scale of the world’s economic systems, as with most of the eastern cities at this point. The water is full of tankers, container ships and smaller freighters, queuing to get into the port, patterns stretching towards the horizon. As the dark waters give way to land, suddenly everything is the pristine green of manicured golf courses, peppered with clubhouses.

As I said at the time:

Flying into Singapore under steely skies; sea full of container ships, land full of golf courses. Entire history of modernity right there.

— Dan Hill (@cityofsound) March 25, 2012

Of course this transcendental, strategic scale hits the all-too-down-to-earth reality of airports at some point; well, at numerous points. I started writing this in the altered realities of Singapore Changi airport, but when I got to Adelaide, on Integrated Design Commission business, I saw an artwork by the Russian collective AES+F which further “unpacked” the experience of airport—as purgatory—in "Allegoria Sacra" (2010-11)

At the Art Gallery of South Australia, in a wonderfully-curated 'International Art Series' show alongside pieces by the Chapman Brothers, Goya and a 16th century Japanese screen depicting a civil war, "Allegoria Sacra"is difficult to describe in terms of content—we were fortunate enough to be given a superb, florid and articulate introduction to the piece by gallery director, Nick Mitzevich, which took around ten minutes—but technically it consists of a 39-minute three-channel projection, composed essentially of animated digital stills at the scale of a gigantic tableau (this was apparently projected from the street, onto the gallery itself, for the opening; a smart attempt to turn this archetypal Victorian interiorised ‘house of art’ inside out.) Everything is in this piece; do take the chance to see it, if you can, in Adelaide or anywhere else. This video gives a hint of it, but no more, obviously. You have to sit down in front of this thing and soak it in:

I’ve written about airports many times before, finding them endlessly fascinating, but a year or so ago, I wrote a piece for Domus that focused more on the experience of flying an aircraft—which I’ve never done, I should hasten to add (not that this stopped me from writing it). But the editor (Joseph Grima) asked me to write something about the developments in interfaces for flying, aka avionics. It sat alongside an article by an aviation expert which focused more on the developments in aircraft design, but I was to take an interaction designer’s point-of-view on the design of the avionics systems interfaces.

Here I also wanted to capture the sense of an interface’s possibilities: not merely in the functional, but also in conveying the sensation of flying — which is present as a passenger, never mind a pilot. This, despite the relatively mundane outcomes of avionics design, which are quite rightly risk-managed to the hilt. Hence the allusion to Ballard’s extraordinary book, "The Unlimited Dream Company", amongst other things. That particular allusion should also suggest that this is a fairly exploratory, speculative piece.

There are a lot of question marks in this piece, perhaps tellingly, and as ever, this is the longer original edit, not seen in the magazine version—the ’30 Rock auto-pilot' edit.

Essays: Introducing SuperNormal

A quick word about a new series I’m curating for Domus, the Italian art, architecture and design magazine. Called SuperNormal, it’s an attempt to ‘sketch’ a different kind of technology journalism, recognised how cultural it is. 

A few years ago, in response to the usual diminished depiction of contemporary technology as simply “IT”, someone—I forget who—said something like “Is a 14 year-old girl updating her Facebook status from her mobile phone as she walks down the street ‘IT’?” Of course it is, but more importantly, it isn’t. It is more than that; contemporary technology is deeply cultural. We might argue that all technology always has been “deeply cultural”, from the Stone Age axe onwards, but given that symbolic consumption and production—one definition of culture—is now actively and deliberately embedded in objects we design and build, and that these objects are embedded in the patterns, habits and rituals of everyday life—another definition of culture—we must now see technology for what it is.

So with Domus, Joseph Grima and I saw an opportunity to write in a different way about everyday technology. Domus has a long tradition of writing about such things, driven by the strong Italian heritage of post-war industrial design, covering Brionvega radios, Elica hoods, Vespa scooters, or Olivetti typewriters, for instance. 

But as I suggest in my series opener (below), perhaps a culturally powerful contemporary equivalent of these things now exists in the form of social media, mobile phones, web services, information graphics, smart cards, personal informatics, robots, and so on.

It might be a stretch to suggest that these things are the equivalent of an Olivetti Valentine in a number of ways, but not in terms of the way such things now shape our lives. Yet the vast bulk of journalism concerning this everyday technology is dominated by the technology press, which is rarely critical in the sense that Domus is, rarely covers design aspects with any depth, and rarely attempts to place developments in a wider cultural context. While I have no problem with the likes of Engadget, Techcrunch, Wired and the rest—not that they’d notice either way if I did!—there did seem a gap in the market here.

Conversely, this was also a way to introduce discussion of the recent design disciplines of interaction design, experience design, service design and information design, to this more established strata of design media. For what it’s worth, my motive for doing this—discussing the technology in terms of culture, and discussing its design in the context of other design practices—is in order to try to understand it better; which is in turn in order to design it better, to realise it better, to procure it better, and so on.

(By the way, it’s a huge honour to work for Domus. There can have been few more influential titles in design history since its inception in 1928 and Joseph Grima, who I first worked with on Postopolis, has repositioned the magazine at the forefront of media once again, for me alongside Eye and Idea as the best design magazines out there. It’s also been a pleasure to work increasingly closely with the designers, Salottobuono, and particularly Marco Ferrari.)

The series will run in the magazine and online. We’re using the website to carry more in-depth versions of the print articles, and including video and other contextual information such as interviews where relevant.
I’ve written the first two articles to frame the series.

The first covered the Nokia N9 (and to some extent its successor, the Lumia running Windows Phone) but pitches that in the context of the wider skirmishes in the mobile phone market, tactility, sounds and ocularcentrism in cellphone design, the hegemonic power of Apple, the importance of materials and the “dark matter” of licensing and logistics, European design history and entrepreneurship, via Roland Barthes and the Citröen DS19.

The second piece concerns Facebook Timeline, and so timelines, information design, social graphs, identity and representation, and so on —but also the broader context of a shared social memory, and how that might affect the way we forget and function. (Additionally, Facebook were good enough to get us an interview with Timeline’s lead designer, Nicholas Felton—he of Feltron Annual Reports fame)—and his early mockups of Timeline, to accompany this article. Thanks to both Nicholas and Meredith Chin for that.)

These initial articles are markers, sketching out the trajectory and territory of the series to some extent. But as the series opener suggests below, the terrain should get increasingly rich, diverse and fertile and I’m lining up a set of great writers ready to explore it and map it. More on that to follow. I’ll pitch in from time to time too.

Have a read of the first two—‘Portable Cathedrals’ on the Nokia N9 and ‘In Praise of Lost Time’ on Facebook Timeline—and let me know what you think: here; at Domus; or elsewhere.

And here, below, is the original text for the series—which I’ve dubbed SuperNormal, in respectful homage to Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa’s great book and exhibition, noting its title Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary. This text introduces and frames the venture, and is a slightly different version to that which appears on the Domus website and in the magazine.

Essay: Happy Feelings at the Awakening of Finnish Spring*, Summer, Autumn / Helsinki, Spirit Level Cities, Scarry Cities and Opaque Cities

("Happy feelings at the awakening of Finnish Spring" being one of the alternative titles cheekily used by performers of Sibelius' Finlandia in its early performances, in order to escape Russian censorship.)

We arrived in Helsinki in the Finnish Spring, fresh from the Australian Late-Summer. Before long, the Finnish Summer announced itself with glorious sunshine and warmth creeping across southern Finland. Helsinki in summer could be surprisingly warm, touching the mid-thirties on the streets around our apartment. On holiday in the UK in July, I found myself saying something I thought I never would: I miss the heat of the Helsinki sun.

By September it was deeply Autumnal, though. Up in Lahti a month ago, the gutters were already lined with soggy piles of decomposing leaves. To the south, here in Helsinki, we're in a schizophrenic state in which summer and autumn co-exists from one hour to the next.

The next punctuation mark in the seasonal calendar here is ruska, a word which has no particular counterpart in English as far as I can see. Perhaps the diametric opposite of the week of cherry blossom in Japan. Ruska is the one week in which birch, larch, rowan et al really explode into russet tones, turning to richly saturated peaks of purples, reds, yellows and oranges, before rapidly shivering off their leaves for winter. This phenomenon is connected to the level of sugar in the leaves, apparently, which is in turn to do with particular temperature ranges. Some years are more ruska than others. (This may happen in similar climates elsewhere, like Maine perhaps, though I don't know if it has an apogee of one week in this way.) Ruska will already have occurred in Lapland and is making its way south, arriving here in Helsinki around mid-October.

Seasonality is far more pronounced here than in the UK or Australia. Various popular rituals still dot the calendar, particularly in summer, which is a real pleasure. Juhannus (midsummer) was spent on a small island in the Tammisaari peninsular with around thirty Swedish-speaking Finns. The landscape and seascape was as simply beautiful as anywhere I've ever seen. Another presumably pagan ritual marks the end of the season: a crayfish party in the shared garden of a couple of adjacent blocks in downtown Helsinki. Also magical (if fuelled somewhat by schnapps and unintelligible drinking songs poking fun at the Swedes, the Russians, and—Finns being Finns—the Finns.)

The seaons are more pronounced in the food, too. The good stuff anyway. At a dinner at Muru in early September, the dishes were emblazoned with a particular kind of local redcurrant, in season for two weeks only. The berries sequence themselves for our pleasure: strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, whitecurrent, redcurrant, gooesberry, seabuckthorn berry, cloudberry, and many more I've never heard of.

Restaurants like Noma in Copenhagen—the best in the world—have utterly transformed the idea of Nordic cuisine, in doing so emphasising local, seasonal produce like no other equivalent operation. Indeed, the staff spend the morning foraging for ingredients to be used in the evening. While this is an excellent and welcome game-changer in the region, it's hardly replicable at scale. Yet seasonality is more evident in even near-mainstream food culture here than in the UK and Australia. It's a foundation to build upon.

All the time, we’re aware of WINTER looming in the background. 

If I had a Euro for every time someone had asked, with a malicious twinkle in the eye, “And will it be your first Finnish winter?”, I’d have around 28 Euros. The sheer duration, depth and weight of the WINTER projects itself deep into August, no matter what the weather outside is. We all know it’s coming.

"The sky was almost black, but the snow shone a bright blue in the moonlight. 
The sea lay asleep under the ice, and deep down among the roots of the earth, all small beasts were sleeping and dreaming of spring. But spring was quite a bit away because the year had only just got a little past New Year's.
At the point where the valley began its soft slope toward the mountains stood a snowed-in house. It looked very lonely and rather like a crazy drift of snow. Quite near it ran a bend of the river, coal-black between ice edges. The current kept the stream open all winter. But there were no tracks leading over the bridge, and no one had touched the snow drifts around the house.
[..]
But he could no longer forget the one terrible thing—that the sun didn't rise any longer. Yes, it's true; morning after morning broke in a kind of grey twilight and melted back again into the long, winter night—but the sun never showed himself. He was lost, simply lost; perhaps he had rolled out into space. At frist Moomintroll refused to believe it. He waited a long time."
—Moominland Midwinter, Tove Jansson (1957)

Can't wait.

That is so different to the months we've just had, which were characterised by hot sun and rich blue endless skies and seas, dusty city streets and islands covered with lush birch, larch, pine, soft green moss and great sun-warmed, mineral-streaked hunks of granite and gneiss. Still, it's good to be in a place with such sharp contrast between seasons, described not least by a 50ºC temperature swing.

We are beginning to enquire after boots of a sturdiness never previously thought of, after coats of such firmness and commodity that they are virtually architecture. As the other mammals around us begin preparing for winter—and by other mammals, I principally mean the local red squirrels with the long ears, scurrying around collecting nuts in-between posing for photographs, as John Updike memorably described their stop-start motion—we don’t so much gather foliage as idly browse Tretorn and Woolrich websites, or wonder about the efficacy of Artek's new SAD-countering white lights.

Back in May, however, it was that splendid Finnish summer that was rearing its pretty little head. A couple of weeks after arriving in Helsinki I was asked by one of my old employers, Monocle, to write the piece accompanying their selection of the city as their no.1 in 2011's urban quality of life survey.

It felt somewhat odd to write about the city having just arrived. Yet I had visited many times, with several deep engagements in the last year. Plus, I still maintain it's possible to capture the essence of a city from fleeting impressions, even if true depth of understanding takes years.

Since writing the piece—and I'm posting the original, longer edit below—my experiences have served to back up most of what I wrote, at least to my mind. Our apartment in Ullanlinna sits at the epicentre of an entirely walkable, entirely liveable existance, exhibiting exactly the kind of naturally high yet everyday and affordable quality in services, amenities and infrastructure that the Monocle index is interested in. More importantly, this sits within a society with modernity and equality at its core.

Yet perhaps paradoxically this even provision of quality is also the root cause of Helsinki's occasional shortcomings. (This also applies by extention to Finland, to some extent.) The outcome of 'spirit level' economy and society is complex. It's essentially A Good Thing: ethically sound; no-one left behind; a comparatively sustainable economy predicated on equality; high-performing across numerous indices. You wouldn't want it any other way, almost.

There are few things more quietly appealing than walking your kids to the local päivakoti (daycare) 10 minutes away down by the sea, bumping into friends in the street on the way and taking a couple of minutes to chat about what's just opened in the neighbourhood as people scurry past on their way to the tram, just before you pass a playground full of kids clambering over climbing frames, wearing fluorescent tops emblazoned with the name of their päivakoti, past miniaturised bits of municipal cleaning equipment buzzing around a square surrounded by well-made 8-storey blocks of stone painted pink, yellow, blue, grey, with shops and cafés at their ground level beginning to glow a warm orange as their day starts ...

It's like a bloody RIchard Scarry book come to life, sometimes, it really is. (And not Cars and Trucks and Things That Go either.)

Yet the same spirit level that produces the evenly distributed daycare, the clean streets and occupied shops, the dads sharing childcare and the mums in work, the pervasive public transport, the squares, the parks, the playgrounds is also a complex, slightly impenetrable system in terms of stimulating 'spikes' of innovation or difference.

It's a system that, as compared to much of the deregulated West, still has effective policy levers to pull, and effective services on the end of them. Thus it's possible to engender positive systemic change rapidly, at least in theory. And yet the same system can also, often inadvertently, resist diversity, difference, external influence, and experimental pockets of change or exceptional quality. And an ecosystem that resists diversity and change is arguably lacking essential resilence. Understanding how to access sweet spots in the middle of the spirit level will be the key to unlocking this place.

This is really something for another day, but you can sense elements of this in my writing below. Critique is not what this piece was about, and so it's difficult to subtly elide notes of caution, hesitancy or equivocation into what had to become <1000 words on Why Helsinki Is So Good. But there are some notes in the mix nonetheless. These are really a concern of the day job, in the first instance, although I know Monocle would be happy to hear more about how the city could incrementally improve.

Monocle's Tom Morris did a brilliant bit of editing to take the following piece and carve it to the required word limit, whilst also Monocle-ising it somewhat. I'm not sure how editors do that.

Evidently.

But what I try to get at in this longer version is the idea of the tacit city, or opaque city. There is a strong element of this to Helsinki. It's possible to visit, and miss the point entirely. It doesn't offer itself up easily at all. The peculiarly distinct language exacerbates this, of course, but there are other ways in which the city remains opaque—cultural, social, environmental. But I argue that that makes the city more interesting as a result, just as it is at a different scale with London. You have to work harder at it, but it's more rewarding.

Although Helsinki has been a constant delight in our few months here, it's not immediately obvious to the visitor with preconceptions about what a city is, or some other prejudice to resolve.

"The officer shifted his gaze towards the city, turned his back on me and replied.
'This isn't just any city. It is an encampment of Mongols who surfaced at the other end fo the continent by mistake; savages whose only thought is to get drunk, even on ethyl alcohol if they can't find anything else!' Pleased with his words, he turned around and drew heavily on his cigarette.
'Welcome to Helsinki!' he added sardonically, then walked away, tossing his butt end into the sea. Perhaps he had had those words stored away for me right from the beginning of the voyage."
—New Finnish Grammar, Diego Marani (2000; English translation 2011)

This, from Marani's majestic little book, of which more later, is of course chosen here as the most ludicrously oppositional counterpoint to my ode below. But some really don't see why Helsinki was chosen as Monocle's #1. To those proffering indices and rankings I'd say there is no objective city (hence, partly, the deliberately subjective criteria behind the Monocle ranking.) Cities are, after Raban, soft, in that they reveal as much about the observer as anything. You get out what you put in, and perhaps Helsinki exemplfies this more than most.

"“For better or worse, (the city) invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a map fixed by triangulation. Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them."
—Soft City, Jonathan Raban (1974) 

When the tacit knowledge prevents urban processes functioning, as can be the case, there's a problem to be resolved, but often you're only a couple of clicks away from unlocking something rare, something so uniquely Helsinki that it's a pleasure to discover in an increasingly homogenous world.

This opacity is also balanced by a form of gentle civic urbanism, humble almost. One of my favourite quotes about the Finnish character is about the peerless footballer Jari Litmanan (of Ajax, Barcelona, Liverpool and Finland fame), drawn from the recollections of Ajax team manager David Endt: 

"The press conference is over, and in comes Jari Litmanen, from behind the door. And I looked at his face and I looked at his eyes, and I recognised something in those eyes. And I thought, this is a man with a great willpower. Because he was not shy, not timid, but he was modest. He is not a man who will raise his voice, or bang with his fist on the table and say, ‘We do it this way.’ No, he was more of a diplomat, not wanting to be a leader, but being a leader."

This feels entirely familiar: a leader, but not appearing like one. Again, all the issues pivot around this slightly mysterious, enigmatic character, as well as the assets.

At the level of built fabric, this means that the city's architecture is really all about details and interiors. If I were to start wrting about the componentry—the doors and door handles, window frames, typography, house names and numbers, signage, particularly skyline silhouette, brickwork, ornamentation, lighting, emblems and so on—neither of us would be out of here any time soon. So I've sublimated that desire into a Flickr set about it instead, much of which draws from the 'peculiar ugly-beautiful Jugendstil thru' functional modernism' of our immediate neighbourhood. Enjoy.

There is no particular signature architecture—save several Aalto gems—but this is the corrollary of everything else achieving that spirit level mean. On the whole, I'd rather have this than sprawling mediocrity punctuated by jewels. (And on the whole, I'd rather have a high-functioning spirit level society than exemplary architecture anyway, even allowing for a symbiotic relationship between the two.)

But again it means the genuinely fine craft is only visible at the second glance, or even the touch, and hidden in courtyards, tucked under oxidised copper awnings or inside a gloomy threshold, decorating the roofline well above your head. This is most evident in the Richard Scarry City of downtown Helsinki, replete with pre-modern romantic megastructures that are almost aircraft carriers of such componentry, but that craft is also a relatively straight line drawn clean through modernism and beyond.

As Juhani Pallasmaa pointed out, the door handle is the handshake of the building. I've enjoyed countless such introductions with buildings since moving here. It's an everyday experience of quality in building which is absent in those cities studded with more precious jewels. It may be drawn from the pragmatic need for shelter in a city whose winter can touch -25ºC, but the spirit level means everyone, virtually, has an entirely everyday, taken-for-granted, often subconscious pleasure in building craft. This care for detail doesn't extend in all directions though, and again, sometimes struggles with the new, different or foreign, but if I were to build a city, I'd start with the door handles of Helsinki and work my way up from there. (After the jobs of Shanghai of course.)

Enough context, on with the ode. Here's the full, original version of my essay on Helsinki for Monocle, issue 45, July/August 2011. It should go without saying that this is me writing in Monocle mode. Many thanks to interviewees Martti Kalliala, Mayor Jussi Pajunen, and Ville Relander, whose quotes have a little more space here. (No photos for this piece as, really, where would I start?)