Infrastructure
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 | October 01

Adnan Lotia recreates iconic album covers with ... Lego. [JH]

Designers Verònica Fuerte and Sebastián Londoño turn circles into an international design language. [JH]

Jim Jarmusch, collage artist. [JH]

Posted without comment. [JH]


Observed | September 24

For the ABC Science series Phenomena, the Australian artist and filmmaker Josef Gatti collaborated with the Australian composer Kim Moyes for an amalgamation of art and science exploring ‘naturally occurring patterns, and the fundamental forces of nature that create them’. [BV]

Jack Kerouac, book designer. [JH]

An exquisite memorial by the American artist Suzanne Firstenberg. [JH]




Observed | September 17

From Aunt Jemima to AI, How Racism Creeps Into Design: an insightful video from Bloomberg Equality. [JH]

The 40 winners of this year’s Posterheroes Becoming e-Quals competition have been announced. Congrats to all! [BV]

German artist Max Hattler finds inspiration in the immense size, muted colors, and relentless repetition of the facades of Hong Kong’s apartment high-rises. [BV]

Swatch Bharat—online collections of Indian native aesthetics, created to preserve artifacts disappearing due to globalization—has completed their eighth collection. Get inspired![BV]


Observed | September 10

Rachel Berger’s Shooter Box—an exhibition protesting the United States military’s use of Microsoft Xbox controllers as battle equipment—now on view at California College of the Arts. [JH]

Pantone No. 1837, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a conspiracy theory about art and commerce. [JH]

Designing a better airport. [JH]

Revisiting a seminal guerilla signage project, twenty years later. [JH]


Observed | September 03

Everyone’s a (design) critic! The internet goes wild—not in a good way—for the cover art “design” for Drake’s new album. [JH]

A new graphic novel on censorship—from MITPress—gathers insights and highlights from a profession under attack. [JH]

Rebranding Chernobyl with a logo that decays over time. (Via Michael Bierut.) [JH]

Today we chase after information, without gaining knowledge. We take note of everything, without gaining insight. We communicate constantly, without participating in a community... This is how information develops a lifeform: inexistent and impermanent. [JH]



Jobs | October 19