If there are two things I love, it’s serendipity and clever urban interventions. As I was working on my Urban Guide for Alternate Use today the two came together when Collective CC in Lisbon sent me some images of their latest intervention, Senioritas.

As most who live in or visit Lisbon and most southern European cities will know from experience, there exists an eagle-eyed population of women who spend their days keeping watch over the street outside their window, one phone call away from reporting any wayward activity to the police – in effect, functioning as an alternate version of CCTV in these neighbourhoods. So within Collective CC’s intervention – in addition to the clever re-contextualization of the role these women serve – is another great visual joke. The signs that Collective CC has secretively placed beneath these women’s windows is a perfect copy of the omnipresent Securitas security/CCTV company visual identity.

There’s nothing about this project that isn’t superb. Well done, guys, and thanks for sharing.

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Oscar Lhermitte working rooftop on his Big Dipper Project

One of the drawbacks of living in London (and most other major metropolises) is that the ambient light from the buildings, street lamps, etc, make it impossible to see the stars in the sky at night. So when designer Oscar Lhermitte applied to the London chapter of the Awesome Foundation, of which I am a proud trustee, with the proposal “to recreate the missing stars in London”, we knew we had something Awesome to consider.

Oscar’s The Big Dipper project is an ongoing project which uses a combination of balloons, LEDs, and various control mechanisms to recreate stars and constellations in the night time sky over London.

An Early Prototype of Big Dipper over London. Photo by Cormac McGloin

He presented his project at the Awesome Foundation London award ceremony earlier this month along with four other strong contenders, and at the end of the evening, walked away with the Awesome Fellowship to advance his work. If you were unable to make it to the awards, you can see his presentation here on slideshare, and view his video overview of the project below (see it on vimeo here), which features some touching commentary from people on the street who have watched his experiments:

For those of you in the UK, Awesome Foundation London is receiving submissions for our June 2010 funding award. Submissions close on 30 June, so please go here to submit your Awesome idea for funding consideration.

Congratulations to Oscar for an inspiring and Awesome idea. He’ll be back later this year to show us how the Awesome Fellowship advanced his work, so stay tuned.

Oscar Lhermitte with his Awesome Fellowship cheque

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Just back from a few days in Berlin, where, among many other things, I had a chance to get together with Aram Bartholl to talk about his SPEED SHOW project, a beautifully simple initiative to turn your local internet cafe into a digital art show.

As Aram describes in his SPEED SHOW manifest:

“Hit an Internet-cafe, rent all computers they have and run a show on them for one night. All art works of the participating artists need to be on-line (not necessarily public) and are shown in a typical browser with standard plug-ins. Performance and life pieces may also use pre-installed communication programs (instant messaging, VOIP, video chat etc). Custom software (except browser add-ons) or off-line files are not permitted. Any creative physical modification to Internet cafe itself is not allowed. The show is public and takes place during normal opening hours of the Internet cafe/shop. All visitors are welcome to join the opening, enjoy the art (and to check their email.)”

I love the simplicity and DIY nature of SPEED SHOW, done in five easy steps:

1. Find Internet Cafe. Rent time on all the computers for the evening.

2. Select work to show on standard browsers. Create gallery plan.

3. Invite people.

4. Enjoy the show.

5. Make Internet Cafe owners incredibly proud and happy.

For a full description of the project and more video and photos, visit the project site here.

Photos by Kuc, top video grab from Aram’s video on project site.

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Mader Stublic Wiermann lighting display, Uniqa tower, Vienna. Image from cityofsound.com

On Thursday 24 June 2010 I will be giving a talk at the Interactive Architecture 2010 conference, as part of the London Festival of Architecture.

Featuring an impressive lineup of speakers ranging from Duncan Wilson of Arup Foresight to Usman Haque of Haque Design and Research, and chaired by Fiddian Warman of Soda Creative, the conference will be: “A forum for the building design community to gather and share ideas and experiences around exploiting new technologies to enable the built environment to dynamically respond to people in or around it.” Here is an overview of the conference themes and speakers:

• Sensory: Sound and light
  • Michael Spencer of Sound Strategies
  • Usman Haque of Haque Design and Research
  • UVA
• Metaphysical: Materials and structures
  • Armand Terrulli of Vector Foiltec
  • Duncan Wilson of Arup Foresight and
  • Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of TinkerLondon
• Art and Play: Community and interaction
  • Ghislaine Boddington of B>D>S
  • Matt Adams of Blast Theory
  • Eva Rucki of Troika
  • Scott Burnham of Urban Play
• Experiential architecture
  • Alex Haw of Atmos
  • Andrew Whiting of Hut

For more information and to get tickets for the event, please go here.

For an excellent overview and image resource of Interactive Architecture in general, interactivearchitecture.org is a great starting point. Another excellent angle on expressive, performative and responsive facades and architecture, this article by the prolific and inspiring Dan Hill of cityofsound.com is well worth a visit.

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When I was on the jury for the SHIFTboston design competition a few months ago, I was impressed by their desire to go after and embrace Big Ideas for the future of Boston. From contemplating transportation corridors for blimps and corresponding air ship terminals to floating extensions of the city, I came away from the experience wondering where they could possibly go from here. Well, now I know. Moon Capital is SHIFTboston’s latest competition, which humbly challenges:

“When considering the future of design let’s start looking out into space. WHAT IF we could occupy the Moon only 100 years after our first visit there in July of 1969? Might the Moon become an independent, self-sustaining, and sovereign state? If so WHY NOT start designing for that new world NOW?

SHIFTboston is calling on architects, space-architects, scientists, engineers, urban designers, landscape designers, industrial designers, fashion designers, artists and futurists to submit their most provocative ideas for the moon. Think: WHAT IF this could happen on the moon? SHIFTboston seeks to collect visions that will provoke thought on the moon as a new destination. We want radical ideas for new lunar elements such as rovers, growing pods, inflatable structures, droids and lunar habitats. How about a new moon culture? Envision: Fun on the moon – activities, moon fashion, and spacesuits! YOU TELL US. Competitors are encouraged to form teams in order to tackle multiple concepts.”

With some impressive momentum coming off of their last competition, they’ve assembled a stellar impressive cast of partners and jurors for the Moon Capital competition – visit the SHIFTboston competition website for more information.

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While I was working on the Bairro Criativo direct design project in Porto, a design competition from the other side of the pond came onto my radar that definitely deserves some attention.

As the competition website says: “The Common Boston Common Build (CBCB) is a design competition that challenges participants to design and implement a project in response to real community needs. Held over 3 days during the Common Boston Community and Architecture Festival, the CBCB is open to teams and individuals from ALL disciplines and experience levels. Common Boston and LostInBoston have partnered to host this year’s event, focused to raise awareness of the built environment, improve wayfinding and inspire connections across Boston’s urban fabric.

Competitors will be asked to work with preselected sites as well as vocal neighborhood members to develop design solutions that address the specific physical and social needs of that community. The CBCB aims to prove that even when created in less than 3 days and with a capped budget, an innovative and influential response to a real problem can alter the way we interact with and understand the built environment of a community while seeking tangible benefits for its inhabitants.”

I’m obviously a huge fan of design-build competitions, even more so when they are created as catalysts for direct design responses to community needs. Makes me miss my old home city of Boston, but not for much longer… details to come. In the meantime, visit the competition website to learn more and get involved.

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“Bairro Criativo” launched in Porto, Portugal on 24 May, the latest of my City As Platform projects which approach the urban landscape as a creative platform. I’m pleased to say that Porto has responded in style.

The agency ADDICT, lead by creative industries maestro Michael DaCosta Babb, asked me to create and direct a project exploring the question “how creative can Portugal be?”. The result is Bairro Criativo (Creative Quarter). Bairro Criativo combines the question they wanted to ask with one that I always like to ask:

We hear so much about ‘The Creative City’, but when do we get to see it?

For Porto, Bairro Criativo is that chance.

The framework for the project is quite simple. I put out the call through ADDICT’s communication channels to invite anyone in the city – designers, homemakers, business people, kids with crayons – anyone – to think of one thing they’d like to do to temporarily improve people’s daily lives in Porto. The only criteria was that the proposed ideas had to be simple, quick, and go in and come out with only a light touch on the city – nothing destroyed before they are installed, and no damage when they leave.

Of paramount importance to me was that this was an opportunity for a direct relationship between creative ideas and the physical city. No months of planning, no public workshops with post-it notes – let me know your ideas, let’s talk about how they’ll work within the framework of the project, and let’s make them happen. There are times when the long game is appropriate, and there are times when you just need to make the ideas happen.

It was interesting that a lot of people instinctively thought in what you could say were modular ideas – creating objects and opportunities to plug into the existing city to create new experiences, opportunities, and at times even temporary infrastructure. It was wonderful to see people think in modular, incremental terms – there was a pragmatic quality to the ideas at the same time as a fresh imagination which I enjoyed.

For a preview of a couple ideas I’m particularly excited about seeing happen…

"Farmville for Real" by Rita Maia, José Ricardo Cardoso, Pedro Cruz Lopes

Farmville for Real is a collection of modular structures made of two interlocking pieces. These small strucutres can exist on their own or in a group to enable pop-up community gardens anywhere, depending on the desire of the residents. The objectives of the project, say the creators are to:

• Provide people with an inexpensive opportunity to participate collectively in a project of common good.
• Promote shared responsibility in public spaces.
• Renew the urban landscape, making it more pleasant and healthy.
• Teach children and young people to start early to enhance the environment.
• Create an alternative way of spending free time.
• Create neighborly ties among the participants of the project.

Estrutura Simbiotica by Dioga Aguiar and Teresa Otto

Another piece, Estrutura Simbiotica by Dioga Aguiar and Teresa Otto is a modular construction that, as they say, “aims not only to increase the space of existing bus stops, but also to entertain those who are still waiting for their transportation.” I like it for both the visual qualities, but also for its symbiotic relationship with the bus stop (as the name would imply), and for its role in getting us to think of other areas and objects of the cities that could host a designed structure that plugs in to existing objects to increase both functionality and enjoyment.

Bairro Criativo article, Time Out Porto (click for full image)

More information on the project can be found on ADDICT’s website (in Portuguese).

For Portuguese readers, you can find an overview of the project in the current issue of Time Out Porto – scanned above.

If you’d like to keep track of future updates to Bairro Criativo or other projects, please subscribe to this site.

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Break that phrase down more and you have a real jewel: “the authenticity of action”.

As a motivating concept for almost any pursuit, it doesn’t get much better than that. It also resonates strongly with one of my favourite quotes from my business side:

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”
- Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines

I love the simplicity of that statement, and the no-nonsense reality that the most effective strategies are in fact no more complicated than doing things. It was fitting that the invitation for the piece came on the back of a talk I gave to a conference in Italy called The Nameless City, as from both a design and urbanist point of view, the authenticity of action and the simple strategy of doing things is the most effective techniques we can employ against the sameness of our visual, narrative and physical landscapes.

The piece is a fleshed out version of one of my The City as Platform talks, as delivered in Italy. It’s a gorgeous full colour A3 production, so please search for it at your local international magazine source. For more information on the publication, you can download a PDF of their English press release here (2.8MB), which also has contact information if you want to get in touch to get a copy or help distribute them. At the moment, they don’t have a website.

They went with an Urban Play identity to illustrate my text, so until you can get a copy, here’s a couple spreads from the issue:

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Several years ago I was the victim of a fairly vicious case of identity theft. Vicious may be a strong word to use in connection with identity theft, but I feel it fits here, as the perpetrator went the extra mile: as bizarre as it sounds, he legally changed his name to Scott Burnham, and then began to absorb my personal data and identity as his own.

If you think it’s difficult when someone gets ahold of your bank statement from your trash or copies your passport information at a hotel, try having someone claim to be you, armed with legal documents showing that, actually, he is you… but he’s not. It’s not a lot of fun.

I don’t talk about that experience much, but the steadily eroding data privacy policy of Facebook and my own brushes with it have brought identity issues – specifically the relationship between trust and identity – back to mind.

As online privacy issues appear in the news daily, it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is a huge opportunity for an online service which anchors our identities securely within a trusted framework. Facebook had that chance, but its callous drive towards the commercialisation of our personal information and identities quickly kicks the supports out from beneath an allusion of trust. In other words:

When hundreds of millions of people hand you their personal data, the business opportunity is to protect it, not pimp it.

The latest episode of the podcast This Week In Google nailed it when co-host Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine identified a fundamental problem when our identity becomes more of a commercial resource for another company than our own property. In order to maintain privacy over aspects of our identity we don’t want commercialised, we have to exclude or obfuscate our personal information, which in turn erodes the larger framework of our online identity, lowering trust and truth. As Jarvis says:

“The more our identity becomes Facebook’s property, the more we feel free to lie about it. The more that the canonical ‘me’ becomes my property, the more truthful I’m going to be about it. We have to own our own identities, and when we do, that will maintain the highest value possible … [the opportunity] starts with services that help you maintain your own identity. That give you control. The reality of where we are right now is that our identities are what you find online about us. So how can I manage that?”

The seasoned netizen will respond that there are an array of services out there that allow you to manage your online identity. There are, and I use most of them daily. But they are reactive by nature, with most offering you the chance to track what is being said about you elsewhere on web. We need more services to control what is, as Jarvis says, canonical information about ourselves, and what is not, without having to worry about how our identity is being monetised.

Google Profiles has a foot in the door there, but they’re not leveraging it actively, at least not yet. And while many give Google a higher trust index than other online services (due largely to their embrace of The Data Liberation Front and open standards), the recent uproar over Google Buzz privacy holes show just how fragile trust can be when dealing with our online identities.

Regardless of the media or the medium, one thing never changes: the killer app is always trust. It is only recently that we have had to debate the exchange of our trust and identity for the sake of connecting with other people, which is a perverse exchange. Identity should never be treated as a monetised platform, and trust is a commodity that holds limitless value. And there’s the window of opportunity.

For those who want to dig further into the issue, Jeff Jarvis goes deeper into some of these ideas on his blog here.

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RI >>>CHPOOR by Above

I think we’re missing the boat on street-level design R&D.

That’s pretty much the summary of my latest essay and photo gallery exploring the visual and physical interplay which is taking place between urban intervention, street art and the urban landscape which was just published in the journal CITY: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. When they asked me to do a piece for them on a trend in urban aesthetics that I felt needed more attention, I gave them the above sentence, but they said that they usually like pieces longer than 11 word statements. Fine, I thought. I’ll flesh it out some more. So here’s some more of what I’ve been thinking.

As many people know, I’ve long been fascinated by the resonance between objects in the city and its inhabitants. My Urban Play project looked into this in great deal in both the exhibition and the city-wide design intervention project I did with Droog Design in Amsterdam in 2008. What continues to inspire me is the ongoing relational design that is taking place at the margins of urban culture – the interventions which form intrinsic relationships between individual creativity and the physical city.

Most dismiss these non-sanctioned urban interventions as playful tokens of creativity at best, and vandalism at worst. But there is a lot more going on beneath the surface of this activity. As I say in the essay:

If we were to consider the dialogue of design in the same way we do the linguistic development of a culture’s language, then just as informal street-level vernacular has innovated and filled in the gaps of a culture’s formal language, the street has as well developed its own vernacular to fill the gaps in the city’s formal design. This new street-level language of design – non-commissioned, non-invited interventions in the urban landscape – transforms the fixed landscape of the city into a platform for a design dialogue.

Take, for example, the work of Gualicho:

San Jose bridge support by Gualicho (click image for full size)

Interventions such as these, at their core, are more than simply creative play in the streets – they signal a new aesthetic correspondence between the individual and the physical city; a step-change in not only the street art scene but in the relationship between the power of the individual and the aesthetics of the city.

Of note are those works which not only reflect a specific relationship with space, but also with time. For example, the shadow skaters by Singapore’s TR853-1, which only have a terrain to skate on at night:

TR853-1

TR853-1

And of course, Montreal’s Roadsworth:

Bible Bench by Roadsworth

Some of the great victories in this genre are those works inspired by the cast-off, degraded objects and areas of the city. The objects kicked to the side of daily life in the city. It is from these areas of urban compost that new crops of work grow. DIY up-cycling? Creative urban re-use? For people like Jim Darling, the cast-offs you might find in an alley – old mattresses, discarded tires – become source material, returned to the alley in a new form:

Trash Dude Beacon by Jim Darling

Artist Mark Jenkins is in a category of his own in this field. For Jenkins, there is a dramatic tension in the objects and detritus of the city waiting to be revealed.

“Sometimes I’ll come across something in the city that will give me the idea to do something site specific. But other pieces aren’t so much about a particular site but more about affecting city objects and structures [and] exposing the vulnerabilities of these structures to be extended into the surreal.” - Mark Jenkins

At times, all that is needed is a discarded bed frame and an exposed lamp box for his characters to get up to mischief in the city:

Storkers at Play by Mark Jenkins

Or an overlooked trash can in Moscow to add a twist to people’s daily experience:

Trash Sperm by Mark Jenkins

Echoing Guy Debord’s belief that “what changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than what changes our way of seeing painting”, there is an opportunity for contemporary urbanism itself to pay attention to the energy and innovation that can be found in the streets today and learn from the relationships it creates between people and their physical city. Just as online and digital media has been transformed by remix culture and open source methodologies, the same metamorphosis is occurring in the creative relationship of the individual and the physical city. We should be paying attention to this as an equally transformative movement.

The full text is published in the current issue of CITY, featuring Above’s signature work from Lisbon on the cover.

If you would like to read the essay in full, you can find it online here.

A PDF is also available on the site featuring an extended image gallery of some of the artists and works shown here.

If you’d like to keep in touch with my upcoming projects or publications, please subscribe or get in touch directly via the email address in the header.

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