The Design Observer Twenty




Infrastructure
Laetitia Wolff
Practical Utopias: Luca Ballarini, Turin’s Designer-Caretaker
 Utopia + care-taking of our cities sound like opposites, in fact they’re complementary to creating vibrant, greener, more inclusive communities.
Victoria Sloan
Meet Me Under the Bents
 There are now more than 25 so-called “infrastructure parks” in North America, including Canada’s Bentway.
Lee Moreau + Devorah Klein
The Futures Archive S1E6: The Toilet
 On this episode of The Futures Archive, host Lee Moreau and this episode’s guest host, Devorah Klein, discuss the toilet, privacy, and connections.
Jessica Helfand + Ellen McGirt
S9E10: Quemuel Arroyo
 Quemuel Arroyo is the first ever chief accessibility officer at the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority.
Laetitia Wolff
Design is Capital: Five Lessons I Learned from Lille
 Useful ingredients to bring design to cities.
Laura Scherling
How Micromobility Vehicles are Redesigning Global Transportation Systems
 As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to disrupt business-as-usual, a micromobility revolution is quietly moving forward.
Laura Scherling
A Tale of Long Island City: Between Industrialization, Innovation, and Gentrification
 The multi-faceted aspects of development in Long Island City, with creative and technological development deeply ingrained in it’s rich urban identity and history.
Rob Walker
Infrastructure Field Trips
 The Macro City conference in the Bay Area includes "field trips" to examine "overlooked networks of infrastructure that surrounds us," firsthand.
John Thackara
Ecuador, Open Knowledge, and ‘Buen Vivir’: Interview With Michel Bauwens
 John Thackara interviews Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, is to lead a strategic policy project for Ecuador’s government called Free/Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK), also known as the social knowledge economy project.
Alexandra Lange, and Mark Lamster
Lunch with the Critics: Fourth-Annual Year-End Awards
 Our intrepid critics, Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster, celebrate (and castigate) the best and worst architecture and design of 2013.



Rick Poynor
Belgian Solutions: The True State of Things?
 The foul-ups or “Belgian solutions” in a new book of street photographs are simply the way things are.
John Thackara
Trust Is Not An Algorithm
 By some accounts the world’s information is doubling every two years. This impressive if unprovable fact has got many people wondering: what to do with it?



Observed
Parking Meter History
 The history of the parking meter — originally designed to have a positive affect on traffic flow and shopping.



Philip Nobel
Oops: Understanding Failure
 A review of To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure, by Henry Petroski.



Observed
A Campaign to Save The Post Office
 Tucker Nichols is campaigning to save the Post Office.



Observed
Forgotten Tube Stations
 A graphic tribute to the forgotten stations of the London Underground.



Observed
Celebrate World Toilet Day
 2.6 billion people don't have access to a toilet. For them poop can be poison.
Alexandra Lange
Knolling Your Polling Place
 Knolling your polling place: for the next election, a little spatial organization would go a long way.
Rob Walker
The Infrastructure of the Cloud
 On the material structures we depend on to deliver us the immaterial digital world.
John Thackara
Design In The Light of Dark Energy
 A shortened version of a talk on why the world has to reduce energy consumption, the five per cent energy solution and some of the people around the world who are leading the way.
Alexandra Lange
Lessons from the High Line
 How can the High Line become a new paradigm, and not a dead end?
Alexandra Lange
What Makes Architecture Useful?
 At Experimenta Design 2011, the buildings of Lisbon make the best argument for the ongoing usefulness of good design.
Alexandra Lange
An Atlas of Possibility
 The Institute for Urban Design's By the City/For the City project provokes crowd-sourced possibilities for New York's future.



Alexandra Lange
Jane Jacobs Is Still Watching
 Despite my dislike of Jane Jacobs's beef with architects and planners, so many points seem strangely prescient.



Roger Martin
Design Thinking Comes to the U.S. Army
 Design is almost overnight the centerpiece of military doctrine and the U.S. Army has gotten design thinking quite right. The struggle to get design thinking ensconced in Army doctrine, though, is no easy feat.



Alexandra Lange
Welcome to Fort Brooklyn
 Let us sincerely hope that the Atlantic Terminal Entrance in Brooklyn, a gateway to the LIRR and the hub’s many subways, marks the end of empty transport monumentality.



Ernest Beck
GlobalTap
 Report on prototype for GlobalTap water refilling stations.



Rachel Berger
A Makeover for the BART Map
 Unlike the notorious 1972 Massimo Vignelli redesign of the New York City subway map, the new BART map didn't make much of a splash in graphic design circles.



Aspen Editors
Aspen Design Summit Report: Sustainable Food and Childhood Obesity
 At the Aspen Design Summit November 11–14, 2009, sponsored by AIGA and Winterhouse Institute, the Sustainable Food Project focused on accelerating the shift from a global, abstract food system to a regional, real food system via a robust portfolio of activities — including a grand challenge and a series of youth-engagement programs.



Jonathan Schultz
Better Place
 Report on Better Place, winner of the 2009 INDEX Award in the Community category.



Observed


Is the future of refugee housing permanence?

“It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” explores Picasso‘s legacy through a feminist lens, asking if, when, and how modern audiences can separate the artist’s work from his infamously misogynistic behavior.

Quite possibly the most fascinating job opportunity in design right now.

Jessica Helfand on using AI as a tool to reverse-engineer a historical narrative.

Rethinking the city.

Rethinking the planet.

The problems of the user interface, one streaming service at a time. More here.

Urban design, with safety in mind. And that includes parks.

Think design thinking is over? Think again.

A museum renames a vegetable still life by Van Gogh that identified the wrong kind of allium.

Graphic design and typography obsessives—look no further!

“The challenge isn’t just that our systems default to keeping the “unlike” out,” notes Jens Martin Skibsted, “but we are, rather, in need of an interconnected worldview that appreciates the existence of other realities and contexts.”

Neville Brody’s new monograph (his THIRD)—covering his work for Nike, Coca-Cola, Tate Modern and Channel 4, as well as various informational graphics and magazine editorials—will be published next month by Thames&Hudson.

Milan Design Week wants to know your most memorable experience. Ours is easily Shaped by Water, an immersive experience exploring water as a source of inspiration for design. Co-created by Ivy Ross and her design team in collaboration with the water, light, and sound artist, Lachlan Turczan. Vote for your favorite here.

Non-profit design advocacy agency Where are the Black Designers? (WATBD?) has announced a year-long partnership with digital product studio Ustwo.

“He was mulling a career in graphic design when, at 17, he saw a searing image that would change the course of his life.” The American photographer Kwame Brathwaite has died. Considered the catalyst fo the “black is beautiful” movement in the 1960s, Braithwaite’s career spanned art, music, and more. He was 85.

The subtley, simplicity, and curious symbolism of the humble serif.

After a career of looking at pictures, she is now making them. George Gendron talks to Kathy Ryan, longtime director of photography at The New York Times Magazine.

COLLINS co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Brian Collins and co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Leland Maschmeyer will speak on branding and creativity at OFFF Barcelona this weekend.

“I can’t imagine any person with a background in graphic design made that thing without a committee of bland politicians sanding away its edges until they felt safe enough to unveil that to the public.” Behold: Logogate!

Black designers, curators, and more.

How do you stop deep-sea trawlers from harming ecosystems? Commission 10-ton marble sculptures and place them on the ocean floor, of course.

For ten years, Matt Needle has reimagined every best picture award nominee by redesigning their posters.

Coca-Cola...and art?



Jobs | June 10