Infrastructure


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 | June 15

Everything you ever wanted to know about, well, everything (design-related, that is). Or so they claim! [JH]


Observed | June 09

Is protest more potent when you adopt the typeface of your subject? Don’t miss these photos. [JH]


Observed | June 08

Artist Corita Kent’s famed Hollywood studio is saved in a landmark historical preservation victory. [JH]


Observed | June 01

A fascinating look back at the internet’s major milestones. [JH]


Observed | May 27

Next week marks the 100 year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the focus of a new historic center, Greenwood Rising, opening next week. “Greenwood Rising honors the icons of Black Wall Street, memorializes the victims of the massacre, and examines the lessons of the past to inspire meaningful, sustainable action in the present.” [BV]


Observed | May 26

How Colonial Pipeline’s archaic branding told us all we needed to know about the company. (via James I. Bowie) [BV]

President Biden revokes Trump‘s controversial classical architecture order. [JH]


Observed | May 25

Design Twitter goes wild over David Hockney’s typographic reworking of the Picadilly Circus logo. [JH]


Observed | May 19

Join the Society of Design Arts (SoDA) and AIGA Baltimore for an online talk by Rafael Cardoso, part of a virtual series created to promote the rich and plural histories of Latin American production in design. Free registration here. [JH]


Observed | May 18

After a decade of design and planning, +Pool has been approved by the city of New York. Listen to Michael Bierut’s conversation with founder and designer, Archie Lee Coates IV, on Season 6 of DBBD. [JH]


Observed | May 12

Kerby Jean-Raymond will be the first Black designer to show at Couture Week in Paris. Listen to Michael Bierut’s interview with him on Season 6 of The Design of Business | The Business of Design here. [JH]

The kind of speculative mashup you need right now. [JH]


Observed | May 10

“Nothing is unaffordable in a C.G.I. dreamscape, and rent is never due.” Anna Weiner on the speculative design world of “renderporn”. [JH]


Observed | May 09

Ellen Degeneres launches a new reality show to find the next great furniture designer. [JH]


Observed | May 07

Infusing design with equity: one designer’s perspective. [JH]


Observed | May 06

Last week Microsoft announced that they wanted the Twitterverse‘s help picking a new default font. This seemingly trivial choice by Microsoft will determine what works looks like for hundreds of millions of people. (via Blake Eskin) [BV]


Observed | May 05

In conjunction with the Walker Art Center, BluDot announces OpenStudio: a free design program for kids aged 9 to 14. [JH]


Observed | May 04

Titus Kaphar signs with UTA where he’ll start developing film projects based on his paintings. [JH]


Observed | May 03

A new site celebrating the Uruguayan publication La Semana highlights the personal and public triumphs of this memorable newsweekly. (In English and Spanish.) [JH]

Rhode Island’s license plate—known affectionately as the wave, and designed by Rhode Island native and RISD graduate Tyler Smith—will be redesigned by the, um, public. Holding an open design contest is bold and exciting;, writes architecture critic Will Morgan. It is also a recipe for disaster. [JH]

Wallpaper offers a superb roundup of advocacy and support groups working for equity, inclusion, and change in deisgn and related industries. [JH]


Observed | April 28

Lehrer Architects LA‘s second Tiny Home Village project has opened this week to residents in North Hollywood. Yet tiny houses aren’t always loved. Discuss! [BV]

How to really look at art: an eight-step guide by Antwaun Sargent. [JH]


Observed | April 27

Dwight Garner reviews the new novel by Rachel Cusk and notes its unusual (and seemingly deliberate) type choice: Optima! “Optima is unusual to see in a novel,” Garner observes. “I tried using it to type this piece. It made me feel I was working on Laurie Anderson’s laptop.” [JH]

At the nation’s newspaper of record, the term “Op-Ed”—a relic of an older age and nod to an older print newspaper design—is being retired from duty. [JH]

How mathematicians use their chalkboards to reveal the conceptual and visual beauty of their discipline: a new book by photographer Jessica Wynne. [JH]


Observed | April 21

Astrid Cooper is a curator in Bath, England. Also, she is five years old. [JH]

A new illustrated children’s book—featuring a flying gherkin—from Foster + Partners. [JH]


Observed | April 20

Introducing the whitest paint ever invented. [JH]

Just in time for Earth Day: Belgian artist Alain Verschueren’s Portable Oasis lets you spend quality time in the garden while social distancing at the same time. [JH]



Jobs | June 22