I Am Still Alive

Why would a company want employees diving into its trash bins? Because at Sasaki Associates, one of the country’s hottest landscape and urban-design firms that’s shaping the Olympic village in Beijing, life is all about salvaging good from bad.

When we examine the physical environment, we find a set of patterns emerge of what works and what does not. Architect Christopher Alexander codified many of these patterns into a book in 1977 A Pattern Language so we can use it as a quick reference to anchor any attempt to design a physical environment.

In order to secure a relatively high-density environment where everything is within a ten-minute walk, housing needs to be close with shared walls between buildings. Yet people who grew up in detached housing (the quarter acre section) express concern. “Kiwi’s won’t like that” said a New Zealand developer. Why not? It turns out the problem is not proximity but an aversion to neighbour conflict. The closer two neighbours are, the more they get on each other’s nerves. It turns out that it has to do with the physics of noise through air. The quarter acre section gives enough distance that the decibels of the noisy neighbour drop enough to be comfortable. The alternative is to use design so neighbours do not make irritating noise that travels. For a start, place the outdoor activities somewhere else: on the plaza or in the greenbelt rather than next to the house. Do not have a back lawn that needs mowing with an 85 dBa mower. Do not have a back yard where people curse each other. Build the row houses wide rather than deep and make the common wall soundproof. The developer listened, considered and replied “Yup, that should do it… you’re right. I had never considered why.”

Function truly is also to elicit emotions.

Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design is a manual aimed at helping NGOs and advocates strengthen their campaigns and projects through communicating vital information with greater impact.

The manual was designed and produced as a collaboration between Tactical Tech and John Emerson of Backspace – a design consultancy dedicated to research, development and promotion of design in the public interest.

A moment ago I used the word culture, a notoriously awkward concept. According to the critic Raymond Williams writing in Keywords, his classic lexicon, culture is used in two crucial senses. In cultural anthropology—now there’s a word the innovators love to bat around—it refers primarily to material production, while in history and cultural studies it refers primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. Combining these usages, we might conclude that culture is about things (which have a look) and meanings (conveyed by how they look). Whichever way you look at them—so long as you do actually look—these products of our culture tell us who we are. There is bound to be a relationship between impoverished ways of (design) thinking and impoverished visual form.

Some Bold Steps to Make Your Carbon Footprint Smaller

“A former city employee in the Fukushima prefecture town of Koriyama has built a 4-meter (13-ft) long canoe from thousands of used disposable chopsticks recovered from the city hall cafeteria. Bothered that perfectly good wood was going to waste after a single use, Shuhei Ogawara — whose job at city hall involved working with the local forestry industry — spent the last two years of his career collecting used chopsticks from the cafeteria.”
- via SVN

Since 1980, the Walker Art Center Design department has maintained a graphic design fellowship program that provides recent graduates (both undergrad and grad) the opportunity to work in a professional design studio environment.

Fellows are employed full-time for one year and are assigned a wide range of graphic design projects from developing graphic identities for specific programs and exhibitions, including the design of all related collateral materials, to assisting the design director and other designers with long-term projects such as exhibition catalogues and promotional campaigns. Fellows are involved in all aspects of the design process, including client meetings and presentations through production and supervision of printing.

Architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account “All children, all species, for all time.” A tireless proponent of absolute sustainability (with a deadpan sense of humor), he explains his philosophy of “cradle to cradle” design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics.