(Blog admin: keen-eyed readers will have noted I posted the following piece as part of my post on Ravintolapäivä a few weeks ago. But I thought it is better off filed on its own, for the sake of both pieces. Occasionally, reader, you have to suffer my filing whims.)

In the midst of all our (Sitra's) field work on street food in Helsinki, and its wider context, I was asked by Artek to write a short piece for a new magazine—Manifest—that they were co-producing for Helsinki World Design Capital (also to be deployed at the Salone design show in Milan.)

I quickly wrote a kind of evolving backdrop to where our work is going which looks at Helsinki's street food "revolution" of the last year, and describes some familiar ideas of citizen participation, the everyday operating system of the city, fluid and soft cities, and so on: It doesn't quite discuss them in those terms—the free publication is distributed across the city and beyond through shops, clubs etc. You can also download the PDF from their website (English and Finnish). The rest ofManifest is certainly worth a look too.

Here's the article I wrote, or rather, the slightly longer original edit of what is a short piece. It, like the Helsinki Street Eats book, is kind of a public set-up job for what follows. Bon appetit.

An edible urbanism

Last summer, Helsinki witnessed two culinary insurgency movements in quick succession. One was fixed in space, and had the outward appearance of an old Citroén van parked outside Lasipalatsi. The other was fixed in time, manifesting itself as a distributed festival of pop-up restaurants, sudden flashes of inspiration appearing and disappearing on a single day, 21st May 2011. Each would hint at a new city emerging.

The first was the 'Camionette', and sold coffee and crepes. Odd as it may seem, this didn't fit into the City's conceptions of street food. In turn, the Camionette cast the City of Helsinki, rightly or wrongly, as a stolid, opaque institution mitigating against an entrepreneur who had a different idea about street life and urban amenities. Only through adept use of social media, side-stepping the 'dark matter' of bureaucracy, did the Camionette's owner get his permits, enabling the first food truck in Helsinki to leave the city with a new notion of what street food can be. (The City has a different view of these events, but has subsequently embarked on a procurement of more food truck opportunities post-Camionette, perhaps tacitly admitting its value.)

The second incursion was 'Ravintolapäivä' (RP). RP started with a small group who were frustrated with the bureaucracy required to start a café (see a pattern emerging here?) So RP set themselves the lowest bar possible; it simply declared that a certain day would be "Ravintolapäivä" ("Restaurant Day") and anybody could open any kind of restaurant anywhere on that day. And that's what happened.

From frog's legs to flat whites, the city's food pallette expanded radically, but more importantly, it effortlessly reimagined the use of public space, demonstrating to Helsinki citizens what their streets could do. Although the resulting 'restaurants' were right at the edge of the City's legal boundaries—most were probably well over it, though it's difficult to tell—there was little the City could do about it.

For one thing, there was barely any organisation there. Ravintolapäivä is essentially a set of instructions, and you can hardly arrest a set of instructions. Coordinated by Facebook and Twitter, and disappearing as fast as they appeared, the restaurants were also essentially untouchable. It's not as if the City could send round fleets of public works operatives playing a form of urban 'Whac-a-Mole', scooping soup kitchens, pizza ovens and cooks into the back of their vans. RP is a demonstration of the easy power of an emergent urbanism, an opportunistic urbanism, enabled through social media and mobile apps and driven by a desire for participation in the city at the hyper-local level. The sense of a somewhat conservative city opening up to possibility is palpable.

Though exemplifying pop-up tactics, both interventions also have some strategic import. In their range of experiences, offerings and characters—participation in RP is an international affair, with other food cultures strongly represented—they are sketching out a diversifying Helsinki in a broader sense, as the city's foreign-born resident population is set to double in the next decade, to around 15-20% non-Finnish. So these incursions are 'lead users', indicating what Helsinki needs to be in the near future.

Street food is interesting precisely because it has this highly visible, quotidian accessibility, and is a carrier for cultural change.

Yet if we can understand the city through street food, we might also look to carefully shape its impact to strategic ends, rather than simply enjoy its haphazard flashes of inspiration. Because the only problem with 'Restaurant Day' is 'The Day After Restaurant Day'. Where there was a gourmet coffee shop, nothing. Where a bacon and egg muffin was lowered from a first floor window, nothing. Where an Italian sausage stall stood, nothing. There we see the limits of the intervention; it is too transient and variable to change a system.

The original frustration behind Ravintolapäivä - the inabilty to easily set up a café - has not been addressed by Ravintolapäivä. Cultural change will occur as a result of Ravintolapäivä, but slowly, grudgingly, awkwardly, and without addressing the dark matter, with little opportunity to develop wider strategic or holistic value. However, it has set a brilliant example, and an experiential example is the most powerful lever one could have.

We are interested in framing the right questions, and then shaping the new set of instructions for the city, its new operating system. How can we have more things like the Camionette in more places, and how can every day be a Restaurant Day? And more strategically, how can we use such street food incursions to describe a more resilient and enjoyable Helsinki, with a more active street life, strong service culture and start-up scene, and a diverse set of cultures at play? How might we use an event or the hint of a new service, in order to reshape the "dark matter" of urban governance?

Food is a great place to start. Everybody has to come to the table, several times a day, and every single thing we eat is part of a complex, multi-layered series of systems touching most aspects of modern life. Compared to built infrastructure, it moves rapidly, is malleable and adaptable, and highly influential. It provides the setting for lively social exchange or moments of solo reflection, runs the gamut from service to logistics, from entrepeurship to social services, from pragmatic refuelling to avant-garde experience, from organic to industrial, from luxury to waste, input to output. As a platform for design strategies aimed at systemic change within the city, street food involves engaging both the hard and soft infrastructure, recognising that the city'sraison d'etre is positioned firmly in the latter, but enabled by better understanding the former.

So can we see street food as a prototyping platform for a new kind of design strategy, and a new kind of city? As unlikely as it may seem, the humble hot dog might just unlock a new kind of urban design, a replicable systemic change centred on citizens and culture rather than concrete and cars.

Find out more at low2no.org/food

Full set: Milano Centrale, May 2012 [Flickr]

Shard render by AVR Studio (via Dezeen)

Working on very different developments here in Helsinki, on one of the city's primary strategic sustainable urban development sites, we know the city's parking directives can easily lead to a situation where you have a building with seven floors (we say "storey" in English, Americans (others?) say "stories", so I'm settling on "floors") generating a requirement for 120 parking places. Here, this usually has to go in a basement, which is good in terms of hiding the problem but very expensive to build (one of the more capital-intensive aspects, actually, which means you have less capital to spend on other, potentially more innovative or productive, aspects.)

The Shard's is an amazing result, and one apparently directed by then-Mayor Ken Livingstone. This also great to see—strong public governance shaping a strong outcome. Also rare to see, particularly in this game, where public officials are often more conservative and risk averse than their constituencies—based partly on misreading their constituents, due to lack of meaningful engagement, and based partly on cautiousness driven by the need to get re-elected—and through property developers who usually (with some exceptions) are never happier than when they can do what they did previously, and never unhappier than when they are being asked to do something differently. 

Sketch of Shard, possibly illustrating no parking, by Renzo Piano (Dezeen)

As I noted in a conversation that ensued on Twitter, I recall a major "sustainable development" in Sydney where the property developer's project manager for mobility had never actually been on public transport. This gives a sense of the industry we're dealing with here.

In the light of this absurdity, a little diagram immediately came to mind, comparing the size of the buildings and the volume of parking. Here's the first scribble on the whiteboard. Simple comparison of scale versus volume. (The top of the Shard wriggles because that's about 8 feet up the whiteboard and I couldn't reach!)

It's obviously a little simplistic: the programme for the Shard is actually quite complex (offices, restaurant, spa, hotel, observatory, residential, and not that so much of the latter—only around 12 floors of residential.) But still, the average Jätkäsaari block also, ideally, has residential and commercial (office and retail) and unhabitable space too, within its seven floors.

And while the first sketch in Illustrator (below) has an accurate scaling of the two buildings, the floor area is not calculated, which is what you'd really want to do. But with a diagram like this, it has to be accurate enough to be taken seriously at first glance—here using floors as a proxy for scale—yet doesn't have to be so accurate that you actually cloud the point of the diagram, which in this case is to generate debate.

One key point is that both are extremely well-served by public transport (Helsinki's is probably better, certainly in terms of quality of service.) And as a more compact city, you can walk from Jätkäsaari to most places in the centre in 15 minutes, which is usually the threshold of how long you can expect the average punter to walk, when planning. Then, as a fairly flat city, cycling is another strong possibility.

One could draw all this, indicating transit connections, but again, that's probably better handled in a discussion. This kind of diagram is supposed to be a poke, a constructive irritant—but does not need to be a richly detailed exposition or a multi-faceted thesis. (In a culture like Finland's, where public debate is often missing in inaction, and there is still often a strong deference in the face of authority, we're trying to ramp up the levels of discussion a bit.)

The first sketch had a solid block representing the volume of parking. But it wasn't really doing it for me. After quick over the table discussion with Bryan, I realised that drawing the individual cars themselves would probably make this clearer, which it did. 

But it still wasn't really cutting it. After another rapid interchange with Marco, he pointed out that the ratio rather than the total number would be interesting. The comparison in terms of total number of cars is accurate, but the key point in these discussions is really the ratio of parking (on Australian projects, for instance, it's one car per apartment, two cars per apartment, some point in between, and so on.)

Marco pointed out it would be interesting to apply the Shard's ratio (roughly 0.5 spaces per floor) to Jätkäsaari, and vice versa; apply the Jätkäsaari ratio (roughly 17 places per floor) to the Shard. You'd end up with roughly 3.5 spaces in Jätkäsaari, and roughly 1491 spaces at the Shard (Apple-D in Illustrator to the rescue.)

So I sketched that out again, and this is when the diagram began to speak to the core problem, arguably.

Only with that vast imaginary underground cavern of cars under London we can see how ludicrous the proposed situation is in Helsinki. And only with 3.5 cars for the Jätkäsaari block could we see the possibility, and the bravery of that particular decision about The Shard. So, thanks to Marco and Bryan—when you have a lot of things, draw them all out for full effect, and focus on the ratio when you are interested in the performative relationship.

I don't mean to overplay the end result by writing about it here—it is an incredibly simple, almost dumb, diagram. But this is blog as sketchbook, to reflect on the way we do the work, rather than the end result; a learning process for me, essentially.

The point here is not necessarily accuracy—the numbers for The Shard are from one article, and not checked; those for Jätkäsaari are typical/averaged—but this is not diagram as science but conversation starter; there is just enough veracity there to make you stop and think. Don't use it to prove the point, but to start a conversation that isn't happening, to jolt a response. The allusion is more to, say, a wartime poster (hence perhaps my vaguely subconscious drift towards the Metric typeface and Gerd Arntz-style pictograms.)

One could go on to draw the implications of dropping that traffic-generating mass into downtown Helsinki—150 cars x no. of blocks (20?) in Jätkäsaari. As the city is essentially an archipelago, with sea on three sides, and with Jätkäsaari near the tip, there aren't so many places for all that traffic to go. (I'll post another time about the interesting planning history regarding Helsinki and cars.) Jan Gehl has made a career of helping cities understand that building any car-based infrastructure simply generates more cars; it never, ever alleviates the problem (if you've ever heard his story of the squirrel, the basement, and the trail of nuts, you'll never forget it.)

You won't see that impact in the official Jätkäsaari flythrough (below)—we need a new way of drawing these performative relationships. My diagram ain't it, but it at least exposes the underside of these design choices—actually cultural choices—in a way that the flythrough doesn't.

Of course, having started the debate around ratio, one can come back and say, well, what should the ratio be, then? If we're in a sustainable development conversation, the discussion might at least start at Vauban, Freiburg, which is a guaranteed stop on most study tours by those conducting sustainable developments (incl. from Australian projects, actually, but certainly Europe.) This is essentially car-free, or at least has a very low car-ownership, and dropping, as people can take effective, enjoyable public transit, or cycle or walk—just as they might in this bit of Helsinki (with all the numerous benefits, including financial, that flow from that.)

Or indeed study the conditions of any oldish European city, which Helsinki almost is. In doing that, it doesn't mean we are being retrograde any more than plonking a monorail or a flyover in a city is by definition progressive or "futuristic"—we should be beyond that debate by now, a half--century on.

Ultimately, we might nudge up the number of spaces from Vauban, but the core idea that a compact city, very well-served by public transit, should start with zero and then be argued up is far more interesting. You might end up with 20 spaces, say, rather than 120. I hope that's the conversation that diagrams like this might trigger.

This screen grab of an iPhone app is interesting for a number of reasons. One reason is seemingly mundane, and concerns the procurement of such things, yet could unlock possibilities nonetheless.

The other reason is genuinely inspirational, potentially transformational even, and this post describes why, through both journal entry and essay.

The screen grab is from the Ravintolapäivä iPhone app. Ravintolapäivä is "Restaurant Day": each of the map's little green or black shields represents a pop-up restaurant of sorts. After starting in Helsinki a year ago, Ravintolapäivä's role is to suggest "a food carnival when anyone can open a restaurant for a day". 

Which it is, although this doesn't quite describe the genesis of the event, which came out of frustration with the effort required to set up a restaurant in Helsinki, of the kind that is open for more than a single day. (More on that below.)

Today, though, the sun was shining, the streets were full, and that frustration was long forgotten, given the explosion of invention on offer. While each of the little black shapes on the map above purported to represent a "restaurant", imagine "restaurant" in the widest sense of the word.

For instance, our first stop this morning was for breakfast served from a little wicker basket lowered from a first floor window into the group of waiting customers below. Euros are stuffed in the basket, and up it goes. You shout up your order. Breakfast comes back.

The string had a menu attached, featuring egg and bacon, or eggs benedict, in home-baked English muffins (both hot bacon sandwiches and English muffins are extremely difficult to come by in Helsinki.) This is, again, not exactly within the law, but if this is considered a problem, then I believe the saying is the law is an ass.

(Me, C and the kids shared our walk with Marcus Westbury, of Renew Newcastle fame, who we (Sitra) had flown over to Helsinki from London the day before. He was here to give a talk on his own opportunistic urbanism experiments in Australia, at the excellent World Design Capital pavilion down the road. A day later he was, I think, slightly bewildered and slightly delighted to see the sights of Ravintolapäivä. We agreed that any civil insurrection starting with egg and bacon muffins was probably a good thing.)

The following description of "BLTs & Beer" on Laivurinkatu is also worth noting. This is Finland.

Other highlights of a wander around the city on Ravintolapäivä:

Fat Tony's BBQ was doing a fine line in pork ribs and Kobe beef at Koffinpuisto:

Next to this, some very fine carrot cake and quiche, from women who had clearly thought about the entire experience (the radio was playing music that matched their garb):

Further on, our intern at Sitra's Strategic Design Unit was running a coffee shop out of the ground floor window of a co-working space (expertly-made flat whites and rosemary meadowsweet truffles):

(Incidentally, we were 'parasitically' using the coffee stall as a kind of "design research honey-pot". Kalle had come up with the idea of getting people to scribble down what they'd like to see more of on Helsinki's streets, and I quickly made a poster featuring a 'blank' kiosk, as seen all over Helsinki and largely under-used, for people to sketch on. It seemed to be working, and more on this later.)

We also sampled a crêperie run by a French fashion student, sampling blueberry crêpes before walking past some kind of Cuban scenario:

Ice cream for the kids from the (finally open) lippakioski ("baseball cap kiosk") at Johanneksen kirkon puisto:

And finally, gourmet Italian sausages, spaghetti and tiramisu served outside a cooking equipment shop on Korkeavuorenkatu, and cooked inside:

All were fantastic. The quality was excellent—especially the Italian and Kalle's coffee—and how delightful to compose a brunch by walking around the city, folloiwng your nose (or rather, the app), as if the streets themselves were one giant smörgåsbord.

But the street experience itself was a joy to behold. It truly felt like a new kind of Helsinki. International, cosmopolitan, diverse yet uniquely Finnish. A mix of punters, experiences, spaces. Hipsters and grannies, and hipster grannies. The previously grey, buttoned-up, sparse and often deserted central streets—an atmosphere carefully cultivated by the City's anachronistic approach to urban planning—were suddenly flowering in the warm spring sunshine. The smiles on everyone's faces utterly belied the stereotypical taciturn character of the locals. That characterisation is of course a generalisation, but as Monique Truong wrote in The Atlantic this week, on Helsinki's food markets, there is "a Finnish matter-of-factness that can register as dolefulness or resignation to a newcomer’s ears." But increasingly less so, and certainly not today.

It's the essence of urbanism, this coming together of diverse elements on the streets, to exchange, to generate culture.

It might sound patronising—I don't mean it to be—but it felt like a city discovering they could use their own streets as they liked; that the streets might be their responsibility (compare with my recent notes from Berlin.) 

While it might seem trivial to those who have seen cities with a looser approach to the streets, it's somewhat extraordinary in this context. At some point, this happens to a city. In Brisbane, it took until Expo 88 for the city to discover eating and drinking on the street, despite the climate. In Manchester, maybe the mid-'90s. In Helsinki, perhaps given the far less favourable weather for half the year multiplied by the stentorian governance regime of the recent past, food in the street has only flared at points in the pre-modern city, at the '52 Olympics, and perhaps only again now (read our history of Helsinki street food here.) Whatever the contested history, I was proud to be a citizen of Helsinki today.

Again, the kind of restaurants you see above are, in essence, illegal within the City of Helsinki's jurisdiction. The only establishments licensed to prepare and sell food in the street context are the tightly regulated 'grilli', generally selling variations on hot dogs, and at a handful of places designated by the city.

Or at least, if it is not illegal, it is in a very grey area indeed. Deeply grey. And this city has plenty of grey area. Helsinki is an extremely opaque city, in which governance is often exercised through interpretation and tacit understandings which—traditionally—has been enabled by having been relatively homogenous and relatively small. All of this is now changing, with the diversity described by events like Ravintolapäivä, which is, in a sense, a positive reaction to that opacity. It has created a giant floating question mark over the city: who decides what the streets are for? And so, who they are for?

I'd suggest that, in this, it also describes an broader ill-fit between contemporary institutions and contemporary conditions or problems, with the former still in a 19th century organisational model, largely, and the latter very much not in that mode. Ravintolapäivä is exploiting the gaps between the City of Helsinki's 34 different departments, few of whom talk to each other coherently. To be clear, this is not an issue unique to Helsinki—almost all city governments are in this ill-fitting mode—and there are some smart people at the City of Helsinki (officers and councillors) trying to do something about it.

But elsewhere, this wider institutional ill-fit—essentially, inappropriate cultures of decision-making—is probably responsible for the people on the streets of Athens, Moscow and Madrid this year, Occupy Everywhere and the UK riots last year, the Eurozone debt crisis and the Arab Spring, the tetchy political deadlock in Washington. That last year of peak news was down to this.

In Helsinki, with its robust economy, firm social contract, and, now it's late May, a summery disposition, the people on the streets are chasing after first world problems—how to get a good falafal on Iso Roobertinkatu.

Yet somehow this is all connected, and the form of activity, as well as the chosen mode of operation, between Ravintolapäivä and Occupy, Arab Spring, UK riots and Athens protests, is strikingly similar, even if the outcomes and intentions are, at this point, radically different. All are engaged in "maginot-lining" institutions, using networked organisational models and social media communications infrastructure, to sidestep bureacracy rather than engage with it. All are emerge from some tension with the way authority has been exercised. Here, with a blithe blindsiding of some of the real issues in town, it is only expressed through pork ribs and carrot cakes. It won't always be so benign, however.

As we know, while these are supremely powerful organisational tactics, these approaches tend not—so far—to provide a decision-making culture that can provide solutions, never mind frame better questions.

We think it's necessary to bring institutions with us, not least given our investment in them, but importantly, because the institutions enables a strategic, holistic and considered response that the emergent does not. This is not to overplay their importance—they are not everything, for every situation. Clearly they can be structurally flawed, poorly run, even dangerous. Yet no more so than the alternative, and as designers, it would be a gross dereliction of duty to ignore the opportunity of reshaping institutions to work within these contemporary conditions. This slow unravelling at both ends of our societal fabric is not good enough. We need to figure out the systemic conditions required to enable, say, 10% of Ravintolapäivä to thrive the day after. In doing such a strategic piece of work, our institutions get to practice working with diversity, quality, experience, service, identity, and other productive intangibles. That will be valuable later, in other arena. And more on this later, perhaps

(Briefly back to that iPhone app. It is excellent, and was designed and developed, along with all other mobile versions, via a 40-hour hackathon by a small team of volunteer designer/developers. It knocks spots off any comparable publicly-procured app in terms of performance (incl. stability, resilience, user-centred design, accessibility, you name it) and was developed in a fraction of the time and cost. We know it is possible to work in this way, yet why can't public procurement do this? One couldn't even get through legal discussions about the tender process that quickly, never mind tender, develop and deliver the app that quickly. Why this might be, and how we might redesign that knot of dark matter, is another strategic question for another day.)

All of this is fascinating for us, from a strategic design viewpoint, and we've been somewhat obsessed with documenting and understanding the emergent networked activity of Ravintolapäivä, as well as engaging in positive discussions with the City of Helsinki around this area. We have a series of projects emerging here, which I'll talk about soon enough.

(A fuller story behind Restaurant Day can be found in the short book "Helsinki Street Eats", that Bryan and I wrote a few months ago (with contributions from Ville Tikka, Nupu Gaivert, Kalle Hurtig and others.) There, we place Ravintolapäivä in the context of the story of food in this city, and hint at where the city might go next—I'll return to this in a later post too.)

Find out more at low2no.org/food
All my pictures of Ravintolapäivä at Flickr

I didn't think that a humble flower bed could have quite this effect. The verges - for they numerous, every few metres - turned out to be the key feature of the streets of Shöneberg, Berlin, where I was walking with my colleagues on Friday morning.

We were being given a tour by Dr Dieter Genske (Fachhochschule Nordhausen, Universität Liechtenstein, ETH Zürich etc), one of Europe's leading experts on the relationship between cities, communities and renewable energy, particularly in Germany. And, it turns out, an excellent tour guide. Schöneburg was the subject of our tour as it is in the midst of an increasingly fierce gentrification battle, and so providing a concentrated demonstration site for examining civic action, urban regeneration and urban development.

And Germany was the subject of our visit as — perhaps with Denmark — it has the most interesting (and arguably most successful) energy policy in Europe and beyond. Germany has created an energy infrastructure which is, amongst other things:

• highly distributed and localised (minimising transmission loss),
• increasingly based on a diverse set of renewables (doubling its share of overall energy production from 10% to 20% in only six years), 
• generates hundreds of thousands of new high-value jobs in R&D, services and manufacturing, 
• and most interestingly of all, the infrastructure is majority-owned by communities themselves (individuals, small towns, villages, community associations.) 

This is part of a historic turn away from nuclear power and towards renewables for the country; importantly, described as part of an "energiewende" (energy revolution, or turnaround, roughly), a phrase that has echoes of German unification; and so the implicit idea that this is a national mission shared by all Germans.

We were there, as part of Sitra's Brickstarter project, to explore these relationships between systemic change, governance and citizen participation (we also saw Design Research Lab at Universität der Kunst, Renewables Grid Initiative, and Eclareon (more on all this on our Brickstarter project blog soon, as well as a quick post here explaining what Brickstarter is all about.)

Back to those verges. Schöneberg has as rich a history as any neighbourhood in a city that's seen more history than most, but the verges were the first thing Dieter pointed out. Almost every verge we saw was maintained by citizens — usually those in the adjacent block, or business — and this is agreed either formally, through asking the municipality, or informally i.e. just doing it without asking; "the Berlin Way", as Dieter had it.

Most of these flower beds are around the base of mature street trees (something else this neighbourhood benefits from.) Each is different, due to each block having different people in them. Simple.

Here a kind of meadow has formed in the middle of the road. What cities would allow this?

Some are beginning to grow herbs and other edibles (of course, community gardens are rampant in Berlin at the moment. For example.)

Sometimes a cafe has built a wooden bench around the base of a tree (strong enough to resist late-night clumsiness) to act as a 'bar' for waiting customers on summer nights. Here we see the name of the adjacent cafe — 'Soleil' — spelt out in flowers. (Should be on page one of any branding textbook, this one.)

It's an entirely small thing, and yet thoroughly inspirational. Of course, Berlin's governement is notorioulsy cash-strapped, and has been for years. Intriguingly, this does not seem to affect the city itself too much, which is as appealing as ever (a thought worth reflecting on, in terms of the hand-wringing over debt and austerity both here and abroad.) But it means the city has probably never turned down a request from citizens to look after their street.

For all the emphasis on major urban projects - on buildings, infrastructure and branding - it is through such entirely small acts that the healthy, resilient and enjoyable city is daily constructed.

How does a city engender this positive form of civic pride and activity? Can it work in London, say, with its fraught social contract, individualist culture and preference for a moan over action? Could it work in Helsinki, say, with its rock solid social contract meaning a instinctive outsourcing from citizen to state of such activities? How to balance this civic activity and individual responsibility alongside that of a community - an extremely diverse community at that — and a strong sense of governance, an effective state, a "big picture"? (For what is key here is that Germany is doing the large-scale policy work too.)

Given that Germany's communities (and small governments) across the nation have actively started build their own energy infrastrutures — and we spent much of the 36 hours in the city unpicking exactly how — is this model capable of translating from country to city, and of scaling up from a block's "shared ownership" of a verge to a block's shared ownership of a heat pump to provide the block's hot water from its waste water and of electricity from photovoltaics on the block's abundant free roof space? Could this enable a similar patterning of resilience here too?

These small patterns of plants, woodwork, mulch and ornamentation ask some serious questions.

Schöneberg itself was a genuine delight. Dieter noted how the area was, to some extent, demarcated by "male prostitutes in that direction, female prostitutes in that direction, and transvestites over there", a form of municipal boundary that is exactly how citizens think of cities and exactly not how administrators and politicans do.

We walked from U-Bahn Nolldendorfplatz around the corner to one of the most perfect streets I've ever seen. This is how much of Berlin was before the war's bombs, and indicates the elegant Paris-inspired plans laid by James Hobrecht, the city's urban planner in the mid-nineteenth century (Dieter points out that Hobrecht was Prussian, but in a region that is now Lithuania, and whose mother was called "Johnson", and so a foreigner one way or another - as is the current head of urban design (a Swiss?); this is something other cities, particularly Helsinki, might benefit from.)

Ernst Kirchner, "Nollenddorfplatz" (1912)

This street, with avenue of trees perfectly situated within the 22-metre high line of buildings, has a quiet grace that is near impossible to beat. We wander into a few of the open courtyards, which are also perfect little oases of sandpits, greenery and recycling bins.

It's here, also, we see a small office of a community group organising a very local resistance against the increases in rent in the area. It's "very local" as the badges on the window indicate a couple of cafes across the road have chipped in, as has the City of Berlin and the European Union. (You don't often see a set of sponsor's logos that scale from a cafe over the road via city hall to Brussels and the continent. Quite good.) The protest against the rents rising in this 'kiez' - an old slavic word for neighbourhood, apparently - seems active and well-organised.

Dieter, Karoliina and Bryan

Elsewhere in Scöneberg, the patterning of architecture is more varied, with streets often displaying most if not all eras of Berlin's rich history simultaneously, World War II's bombing punching holes in older blocks, sometimes rebuilt as part of the post-war effect (and marked with a plaque accordingly), sometimes left as pocket parks, playgrounds, and all covered with trees already flush in the full green of summer foliage. The only happy outcome of that bombing is that Berlin is now an intensely green city.

Although Berlin's form partly resisted the truly devastating effects of the incendiary attacks then in vogue in the Allied bomber command, the hammering the city took left Churchill to describe the city as being "nothing but a chaos of ruins". British Air Marshall Arther Tedder, who accepted the Germans' surrender, thought that Berlin would never be rebuilt. In fact, most of the rubble in what would shortly become West Berlin was driven to the edge of the city to create the vast man-made hill of Teufelsberg ("The Devil's Mountain"), carrying the western powers' surveillance equipment throughout the Cold War; 75,000,000 m3 of rubble, some of which would have been from these streets, was driven west and dumped on top of Albert Speer's incomplete Nazi technical college, which had resisted Allied explosives. Every brick round here has a story to tell, but perhaps only Berlin can pull off this kind of story.

And like any good city, the stories are still being written. We are led to what looks like a large vacant pseduo-modernist housing block, on a roundabout with a fine fountain, the local high school and some other more elegant blocks. This is effectively gentrificationcentralen, as it turns it out is not unoccupied, but has two residents left in it (one of whom is a lawyer, and holding out.)

The building is owned by a large construction company, and due for destruction, but many residents fear that the inevitable replacement will lead to rent rises throughout the area. The first sign is a curiously smashed phone box outside the building, incongruous compared to the generally immaculate streets elsewhere. A low metal fence outside the building is covered with fluttering tell-tale sellotape fragments.

A few days earlier these were holding up posters from the local community protesting against the block's imminent demise. The other obvious feature here are the freshly cut tree stumps, indicating the removal of the mature trees that surrounded the block.

The vast blank facade now looks like a rotten tooth, and you expect it's about to be extracted either way (but then I'm used to the way that British and Australian developers are allowed to throw their weight around; perhaps this is a more even battle. I know one thing: a British property owner would've had the roof off by now, to rapidly rot the structure from the inside.)

It looks this partcular battle is already lost, to be honest, but talking around, it's clear that Berliners will simply move onto the next one. So battles are won and some are lost, but the importance of standing up in the first place — of a community defining itself through impassioned discussion and civic action — is a more important form of soft city than this particular block.

A hand-made 'School - Go slow' sign. Many cities would have removed this.

Wandering around, we see many plaques to famous residents like writer Christopher Isherwood, the legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, and several others I know nothing of (but we often see the exquisite sans serifs of Berlin typefaces that inspired a current favourite, Metric, by New Zealander Kris Sowersby.)

As my once-Mancunian-now-Frankfurter friend Taz later pointed out on Facebook, this was also where David Bowie holed up to create his hugely influential 'Berlin trilogy' in the mid-'70s (with housemate Iggy Pop looking after the domestic arrangements. Sending Eno out to pick up some falafels, that kind of thing.)

(Bowie lived here "because of the friction", apparently. Other famous Schöneberg residents include Marlene Dietrich, Blixa Bargeld, Albert Einstein, Helmut Newton, Klaus Kinski, Billy Wilder, Ralph Steiner etc. etc. and so on. This gives a sense of the kind of area we're dealing with.)

It's also completely clear the place is regenerating itself, to some degree. Building sites are visible every few hundred metres, alongside smaller renovation work, builders and carpenters piling old wood in the streets.

It's rather different to the Schöneberg of Isherwood's day:

"From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class. I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."  ['A Berlin Diary 1930', in "Goodbye to Berlin", Christopher Isherwood, 1939]

It isn't just that the urban fabric has transformed since Isherwood wrote that famous "I am a camera" line. His Berlin novels initially describe the fervent chaotic transgressions of the interwar years, but increasingly reveal that "the whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear", and that Berlin was "in a state of civil war."

"Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair-legs, or leaded clubs; bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster-columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines ... 

Our street looked quite gay when you turned into it and saw the black-white-red flags hanging motionless from windows against the blue spring sky. On the Nollendorfplatz people were sitting out of doors before the café in their overcoats, reading about the coup d’état in Bavaria. Göring spoke from the radio horn at the corner. Germany is awake, he said. An ice-cream shop was open. Uniformed Nazis strode hither and thither, with serious set faces, as though on weighty errands. The newspaper readers by the café turned their heads to watch them pass and smiled and seemed pleased." ["Mr Norris Changes Trains", Christopher Isherwood, 1935]

OK, we're just wandering through - simply skimming the surface - on a particularly sunny spring day, with the economy doing fine, but these same streets could not feel more different. It's a tribute to the city's ability to transform itself, and a defiantly optimistic signal about the possibility of recovery, of progressive change, and, well, of the arc of history tending towards justice.

On a particularly elegant street, with a rich diversity of housing types, Dieter points out a 'refuge' for young gay men who are often trafficked here from Eastern Europe. It's run (funded) by the community itself. As our colleague Karoliina points out, in many cities there would be a NIMBY response to such amenities; here, in this case, a YIMBY response (this "YIMBY over NIMBY" theme is the core of Brickstarter.) There is a temptation to suggest that an openness to difference(s) is simply a function of a big city, as opposed to a medium-sized city - that it is almost a question of statistics, of volume - but there's more to it than that.

The site of a previous protest, but now this new building is apparently accepted

For instance, will this well-meaning togetherness continue as the neighbourhood changes? Signs of active discussion — some coordinated by the the city; some entirely emergent — are all around us, and it is this gives real hope that the area might maintain its diversity whilst changing. Apparently local politicians are at least aware of the role they might play in enabling this delicate balancing act, which is also heartening to hear. One is stating the absolute necessity to enable low-income families to afford the rent in this area, according to Dieter. Too often western politicians have abdicated sole responsibility for their city's mix to the market, with damaging gentrfication the inevitable result (the untrammelled market only ever tends to inequality, after all). Whilst the morality of this city's architecture is often the focus, given its history and the obvious target of dumb stone, it is in fact the flow of capital, that driver of architecture, that should be constantly in question.

Here, with Berlin's identity always in flux, these questions are scribbled on the streets themselves, in the actions of its citizens. On this unseasonably warm sunny spring day, it's good to witness the traces of such activity, from the fluttering tape surrounding the near-vacant tooth of a block to those well-kept flower beds.

Whilst all large cities are necessarily diverse, some actually implicitly celebrate it (again, culture over statistics). Berlin feels like one of those. Indeed, James Hobrecht talked of the diversity of the 'mietskaserne' (tenements) in response to criticism of his plan in the late nineteenth century.

"In the Mietskaserne housing estates they are next-door neighbours - the children from the basement flat goes along the same hallways to the free school just as the those children from the upper class go to the grammar school. Shoemaker Wilhelm in the attic and the bedridden old Mistress Schulz in the backyard tenement with her daughter running a meager seamstress business they will be the best-known persons on the first floor. It allows to pass on a dish of the day, to help in times of sickness, to give away a warm jacket, and bring in incentives for additional schooling. From all that which will come out as comfortable relations between so differently socialized people it allows the giver to ennoble himself on the situation. In between the extremes of the social classes the poor from the second to fourth story will be nurtured by the cultural life of the civil cervants, artists, professors and teachers. This will come out as beneficial to the society even when it would only be that the latter would have a daily silent example in their sight of those which were mixed among them." [Hobrecht, quoted here]

Beautifully put. The idea of "ennobling" oneself through daily contact with difference is a sentiment that was not so widely promoted at that point, or indeed since.

I'm reading Richard Sennett's latest, "Together", on cooperation. It's his second in his "homo faber" trilogy, following the excellent "The Craftsman" and preceding the final, on making cities, which will be a kind of culmination of these and other threads. The new book starts with a mention of Robert ("Bowling Alone") Putnam's research on how people react to living with diversity. Based on a giant study, the findings remain brow-furrowing, to say the least. They appear to indicate that "first-hand experience of diversity in fact leads people to withdraw from these neighbours; conversely, people who live in homogenous local communities appear more sociably inclined towards and curoius about others in the larger world" (Sennett 2012, writing about Putnam 2007). 

A while ago, from a London birthing ward, I wrote of "The condition that makes the city the greatest of all human inventions: ensuring people encounter diversity and difference in the space that they inhabit." That sentiment was me drawing directly from Sennett.

"Cities are places where learning to live with strangers can happen directly, bodily, physically, on the ground. The size, density, and diversity of urban populations makes this sensate contact possible - but not inevitable. One of the key issues in urban life, and in urban studies, is how to make the complexities a city contains actually interact."

This detail of "actually interact" is perhaps key. Sennett says that Putnam's study is based on attitudes rather than actual behaviour. Their behaviour appears to indicate that people are "obliged to deal with people we fear, dislike or simply don't understand." We might live and let live, but our attitudes harden with diversity. According to Putnam.

I'm intrigued to see where Sennett takes us. (Watch this video of him speaking — carefully, slowly, brilliantly — at Harvard GSD earlier this year.) From a European perspective, it's tempting to write this off as merely relating to American data and so drawn from a country which is increasingly unravelling, belying its rampant and worsening inequality and inexcusable social immobility. Or that the obvious inferences are just too obvious, and we're missing some complexity in the data. But we know that the European context is quite capable of unravelling too, and this finding of Putnam's is entirely counter the orthodoxy of the "civilising function" of cities. I'm looking forward to seeing where Sennett goes with "Together", in terms of making a case for cooperation enabling the "ennobling" described by Hobrecht.

Walking through Schönberg's elegant avenues, as the slow Friday lunches begin to gently occupy the leafy street corners, it's hard to see Putnam, and rather easier to believe in Sennett and Hobrecht. Long may that continue, as this particular neighbourhood, in a city of very particular neighbourhoods is caught in the throes of gentrification, and let's hope beyond hope that this is not simply wishful thinking. Getting a glimpse of the social fabric overlaid onto these streets, and as an inveterate optimist, I don't believe it is.

We sit down for lunch at a café, looking out onto its carefully maintained flower bed on the pavement.

[Many thanks to Dieter Genske for the excellent walking tour, and his insights in general. It's possible to believe that most problems might be cured by taking the protagonists on a good walk around a good city, followed by a good lunch. More detailed reflections on the possibilities of community-led energy infrastructure, in the context of German energy policy and culture, will be later noted on the Brickstarter project blog.]

See also
All photos from Schöneberg walk [Flickr]
Berlin: City of Stones, by Jason Lutes
"Berlin, because of the friction"

Most landscapes are transcendental from an airliner; Australia’s are particularly transcendental, if that makes any kind of sense. Flying up from Adelaide, towards Singapore, we pass over what I think is Lake Eyre, a body of water that is only sometimes water, a 10000 square kilometre salt pan.

It’s as if Australia’s terrain is designed to be seen from the air. From the ground, as Robert Hughes and others have pointed out, Australia’s landscape has a beauty of its own, but it is not one that can be easily drawn from the lens of western aesthetics. From the air, however, the vastness of its systems can be quickly appreciated. It’s beyond Burtynsky.

Similarly, flying into Singapore, we can sense the scale of the world’s economic systems, as with most of the eastern cities at this point. The water is full of tankers, container ships and smaller freighters, queuing to get into the port, patterns stretching towards the horizon. As the dark waters give way to land, suddenly everything is the pristine green of manicured golf courses, peppered with clubhouses.

As I said at the time:

Flying into Singapore under steely skies; sea full of container ships, land full of golf courses. Entire history of modernity right there.

— Dan Hill (@cityofsound) March 25, 2012

Of course this transcendental, strategic scale hits the all-too-down-to-earth reality of airports at some point; well, at numerous points. I started writing this in the altered realities of Singapore Changi airport, but when I got to Adelaide, on Integrated Design Commission business, I saw an artwork by the Russian collective AES+F which further “unpacked” the experience of airport—as purgatory—in "Allegoria Sacra" (2010-11)

At the Art Gallery of South Australia, in a wonderfully-curated 'International Art Series' show alongside pieces by the Chapman Brothers, Goya and a 16th century Japanese screen depicting a civil war, "Allegoria Sacra"is difficult to describe in terms of content—we were fortunate enough to be given a superb, florid and articulate introduction to the piece by gallery director, Nick Mitzevich, which took around ten minutes—but technically it consists of a 39-minute three-channel projection, composed essentially of animated digital stills at the scale of a gigantic tableau (this was apparently projected from the street, onto the gallery itself, for the opening; a smart attempt to turn this archetypal Victorian interiorised ‘house of art’ inside out.) Everything is in this piece; do take the chance to see it, if you can, in Adelaide or anywhere else. This video gives a hint of it, but no more, obviously. You have to sit down in front of this thing and soak it in:

I’ve written about airports many times before, finding them endlessly fascinating, but a year or so ago, I wrote a piece for Domus that focused more on the experience of flying an aircraft—which I’ve never done, I should hasten to add (not that this stopped me from writing it). But the editor (Joseph Grima) asked me to write something about the developments in interfaces for flying, aka avionics. It sat alongside an article by an aviation expert which focused more on the developments in aircraft design, but I was to take an interaction designer’s point-of-view on the design of the avionics systems interfaces.

Here I also wanted to capture the sense of an interface’s possibilities: not merely in the functional, but also in conveying the sensation of flying — which is present as a passenger, never mind a pilot. This, despite the relatively mundane outcomes of avionics design, which are quite rightly risk-managed to the hilt. Hence the allusion to Ballard’s extraordinary book, "The Unlimited Dream Company", amongst other things. That particular allusion should also suggest that this is a fairly exploratory, speculative piece.

There are a lot of question marks in this piece, perhaps tellingly, and as ever, this is the longer original edit, not seen in the magazine version—the ’30 Rock auto-pilot' edit.

Interfaces for the unlimited dream of flying

“Fly with the confidence of knowing where the sky always begins.”

So says the marketing material for Garmin Cirrus Perspective multi-function display. It’s a rather poetic turn of phrase for what are essentially a couple of displays mounted in a cockpit. But this is the paradox of interfaces for flying, or ‘avionics’—what happens when something as ethereal and other-worldly as the act of flying becomes experienced through hardware and software environments more commonly found in the grey cubicles of a Cisco branch office?

In fact, whilst they are rarely multi-touch interfaces (yet), contemporary avionics systems, such as L-3’s SmartDeck or the Cirrus Perspective (below) suggest a convergence not simply with personal computers, but with the latest multi-touch devices such as the iPad, iPhone, Android and so on.

This is in stark contrast to the impossibly complex array of controls and indicators that used to stud the cockpit of aircraft. To sit in a Dassault Falcon 10, a popular corporate jet throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, is to sit amidst an orchestra of dials, switches, knobs, levers, sliders, joysticks, warning lights (below). The pilot is
conductor, carefully and constantly calibrating the ‘plane’s performance.

Dassault Falcon 10 interface

Without data processing to generate abstract models of performance—”Is the engine working correctly or isn’t it?”—aircraft could only report on the state of each individual component, and the pilot had to build the abstract model themselves (”This is the reading from the fuel pump, this is from the aileron, this is the air speed, this is the altitude and attitude—this, overall, means that everything is probably OK.”) The cognitive load on the pilot was considerable, given the number of components, and their relatively complex interactions. It’s also a physically demanding environment—a glance at the primary engine controls reveals a thicket of levers to be manipulated and coaxed into position.

The cockpit for Concorde (below)—though now we're really comparing apples with oranges—is more complex again, with virtually every centimetre of every surface an interface, as compared to the clean surfaces of the Cirrus Perspective's automobile-like shell.

Concorde interface

A contemporary commercial aircraft, such as Falcon 2000DX EaSy, still looks extremely complex to the untrained eye, although clearly simplified (below). But as an interaction designer used to working with purely digital experiences, it’s a particular joy to see the sheer physicality—the full body experience—still evident in the ‘interface for flying’ that is the cockpit of a commercial aircraft.

Falcon 2000DX EaSy interface

Yet there has clearly been a significant shift in that interface. Looking at the L3 SmartDeck system (below), the cockpit, increasingly moulded and oriented around the pilot’s body, is dominated by tablet-like displays arranged in a something of a cross, as if an altar of information.

L3 SmartDeck

The aesthetics of the interface, of the space, are increasingly refined; again in comparison to the Falcon 10, which was almost the plane’s raw engineering on display.

However, it’s still a highly functional environment, and still actually quite different to the dashboard of that of, say, a BMW 7 Series or the home screen of an iPad. There are two distinct schools of interface design at work here. We have the human-computer interaction (HCI) camp, which essentially predates the internet and forms part of the first wave of computer science as a discipline and practice. This was primarily an engineering-led discipline, injected with a strong dose of cognitive psychology, and can be seen at work in these older Falcons. And then we have the interaction designers, comprising those who matured as designers in line with the development of the web and other internet technologies, and whose closest understanding of that other world is perhaps through rudimentary flight simulators on the Spectrums, Commodores and Ataris of the mid-1980s. This later school does not seem to figure much in the world of avionics, yet. Note the launch video for the SmartDeck, which talks of engineers, pilots and human-factors, but not 'design' as such:

But looking at these new avionics systems, we recognise them. In a continuum between aircraft cockpit of 1950 and an iMac, they are of course only moving in one direction. The screens are full of data, but capable of switching mode or focus almost effortlessly. And screens increasingly control everything. There are on-screen ‘buttons’ with faux-bevels, GPS-driven maps provide navigation, and the systems themselves are essentially platforms, installed across multiple ranges of aircraft. The avionics systems—hence the suffix EaSy in the Falcon 2000—do the processing for you, and flying can essentially become a question of lining up a series of indicators on-screen.

The benefit of all this abstraction is safety and precision. In theory, it enables the flying experience to be safer than ever, enabling the pilot to concentrate on other things. Yet is this the step forward claimed?

Decision-making on auto-pilot

There is a chance that the screens become so effective—they become by far the best way to perceive the location of a runway on a foggy night—that they override the complexity, the reality, through the cabin windows. And if commercial aircraft are increasingly flown automatically, perhaps much of this interface could fade away altogether. The residual interface seems there to cajole, to reassure, almost as a form of in-flight therapist rather than a controller that requires manhandling to generate necessary the shifts in air pressure.

(In US comedy ’30 Rock’, Matt Damon’s airline pilot character, in an argument with troublesome passenger (and troublesome girlfriend) Tiny Fey, angrily shouts at her: “Maybe you just wanna fly the plane yourself. Well good luck. You trying pressing (counts on fingers) take off, then auto-pilot, then land!”)

As avionics interfaces approach the condition of consumer electronics interfaces, they become less physical. The levers, buttons and switches evaporate into LCD or LED displays. These technologies are perhaps designed to enable you to enjoy the experience of flying, yet the dislocation from the physicality of flying means a disassociation with the reality of flying. As with soldiers operating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in battlezones thousands of kilometres away, could this lead to a form of desensitisation? It might at least lead to a form of disengagement from flying itself; just as some motorists argue that cars with automatic transmission are not worth driving. “It’s steering, not driving”, they say dismissively.

While augmenting or extending human capacity in this way seems the right thing to do, at what point do these systems actually inhibit agency, learning and engagement? Perhaps they actually reduce the experience of flying, in attempting to make it easier, safer.

Do such interfaces even need to be there at all? Indeed, as Matt Damon’s exasperated outburst implicitly suggests, given auto-pilots do pilots even need to be there? Are we reducing the need for both pilots and interfaces in unison? The latter is only requred for the former.

Given that the passengers never really see them flying, it’s almost as if pilots could be played by actors most of the time. Ironically, Qantas’s in pre-flight safety announcements were delivered by “Qantas ambassador” John Travolta for the last few years, dressed in full captain’s regalia (admittedly, leaving aside the Aussie soft power own-goal, Travolta is an experienced pilot.) . As with doctors, might passengers one day hear the message “If there’s a pilot on-board, could you make yourself known to one of the flight attendants?”…

With commercial airliners, perhaps safety would be increased without humans — to a point just this side of HAL, that is. Given that the repetitive nature of airliner flying is such that no amount of engaging experience would make it appealing, it might as well be automated. If so, are we in effect making interfaces for things which don’t need to be interfaces?

There are parallels further back in the cabin of airliners. Here, the in-seat entertainment system now also controls much of the passenger’s immediate environment. You can end up navigating to a menu on a screen 100cm in front of you in order to switch on a light 20cm behind you. This is reminiscent of the control systems installed in hotel rooms around the world, which virtually involve “user training” before you can turn on the TV or dim a light. There is no need to reinvent the light switch, and airlines deploying in-seat lights with more usable and tactile physical switches will become valued for only making digital what ought to be digital. Designers are designing on auto-pilot, funnily enough, making interfaces because they can.

(The in-seat system on Finnair flights displays aircraft performance data during take-off, but via an interface which conjures the 1950s, all analogue dials set in chrome bevels and rivets. What is going on here?)

In-seat display during take-off, Finnair

While simplification in avionics is there in order to reduce information to the absolutely necessary input, to reduce stress, and to enable better decision making, it could be that the first two aspects are done so well that the last, decision making, is actually obviated. This is not necessarily a good thing.

As a result of contemporary building control and informatics systems that automate seemingly mundane processes — automatically closing windows, turning off task lights, shutting down sleeping PCs — I would argue that people become passive rather than active “citizens”. It reinforces their lack of engagement in systems and spaces. In reducing allegedly unnecessary tasks, it inadvertently reduces active decision-making, The “smarter” alternative in buildings may be systems that require more active intervention from people, which —depending on the climate and context— may require less automation rather than more: as Glenn Murcutt once said, “If you’re cold, put on a jumper. If you’re hot, open a window.*

Might there be a parallel in avionics which reduces engagement, and decision-making, from pilots to the point where it is dangerous? Does it speak to a wider problem about a society on auto´pilot?

Rapid iteration at 30,000 feet

Innovation in interface design for commercial aircraft is a complex proposition. On one hand, the level of risk involved in flying necessitates a steady hand on the tiller, minimising risk through standardisation and gradual incremental improvement. Although these software-based cockpits could update their firmware as regularly as an iPhone can, in theory, the need for rock-solid system behaviour mitigates against this happening. If the Blackberry Playbook has low latency, it won't sell; if a plane’s new interface has low latency, you might die.

Compared to the proliferation of interface innovation in the last 20 years, post-web, post-apps, the cockpit of the aircraft has moved at glacial pace. And yet given that aircraft are not really a mainstream consumer proposition, their interface idioms could develop more quickly than, say, that of the automobile. There, the basic interface for driving—steering wheel, pedals, gearshift, indicator stalks—has remained essentially unchanged for a century or so (as the MIT CityCar project showed most clearly when it attempted to reinvent that interface from the ground up.)

So in comparison to most cars, aircraft interfaces do seem to moving more rapidly towards device-land. It’s not as if you expect to see trending topics, Words with Friends, and Facebook feeds to be appearing on the L-3 SmartDeck, 30,000 feet over the Pacific—but it could.

Their magnificent flying machines

While that might be a recipe for disaster, how should avionics interfaces take advantage of contemporary interaction design thinking?

One of the perennial debates in interface design is around so-called “natural user interfaces”, in which the interface layer itself effectively disappears altogether. For instance, using physical gestures and multi-touch, a user might select, stretch, pinch, or rotate ‘objects’ directly, rather than via a separate, almost prosthetic device like a mouse. Those who use multi-touch devices are aware of the liberating feeling of touching the content directly, rather than through a proxy.

Yet older aircraft - with all that ‘engineering on display’ - were also a kind of natural interface, with switches connected directly to actuators, as if the pilots were thrusting their hands into the body of the machine itself. Physically, their limbs became extensions of the levers, cables, struts and pistons of the aircraft’s mechanics, pilot and plane almost conjoined as one entity, rather than dislocated via avionics.

Would it be possible to retain the physicality and engagement of flying whilst benefiting from the increased levels of safety and precision that contemporary avionics introduces?

Apologies for bringing it up, but arguably the most influential interface in recent years is not necessarily that of Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, but an interface that is not even real, in almost any sense. The science-fiction movie ‘Minority Report’ featured a large-scale multi-touch environment designed by John Underkoffler, where the physicality of movement and gesture involved almost put one in mind of a new Olympic sport.

A few years hence, the firm Underkoffler works for, Oblong Industries, have developed the g-speak platform:

Here, the interaction is physical, embodied, multi-sensory; again, manipulating information and action as if conducting an orchestra. In that, there are echoes of how pilots describe the act of flying in the old ‘stick and rudder’ days.

Instead of continuing on its trajectory towards the PC, perhaps avionics could leapfrog the disengaged device model to this richer form of interaction, and in so doing, re-capture some of the physical, embodied aspect of flying, in effect enabling a richer communion between “man” and magnificent flying machine? Recall the unwieldy early prototypes of aircraft, in which pilots were sometimes ‘standing’ upright, harnessed in a deeply mechanical contraption; ludicrous, yes, but somehow wonderful too.

Rather than the slightly denuded interaction seen in contemporary avionics, this might be a full-body experience; relying on the subtle interactions of physical gesture, or multi-sensory feedback—across touch, hearing, proprioception as well as sight.

Here, the plane itself becomes an interface again, as a genuinely embodied interaction (after Paul Dourish’s phrase). No more prodding of on-screen buttons—buttons that are not even buttons. Instead, the pilot is immersed and integrated with the aeroplane itself, freed from the fear of flying through avionics, yet free to experience the physicality of flying through a more embodied form of interface.

Thus, the act of flying might become closer to the elegiac state described in JG Ballard’s "The Unlimited Dream Company", closer to the eternal dream of flying itself:

”I saw us rising into the air … benign tornadoes hanging from the canopy of the universe.”

What kind of interface might enable that feeling?

[A version of this article first appeared in Domus magazine, issue 946, April 2011]

For what is not a great movie, by most measures, Bullitt is an influential film. What it gave us is more textural than textual. It has its moments—the car chase most obviously—but delivers moods and stylings rather than narrative or structural innovation: the blankness of McQueen; his look, and that of Jacqueline Bisset’s; Lalo Schifrin’s score; the pace of the cop movies of the following decade, involving laborious observation of detectives at work; the way that San Francisco is shot, including some handheld but also carefully sanitised of any of the social ferment present in the city in 1968.

The chase scene has three lead characters, none of which are human: McQueen’s Ford Mustang Fastback; the bad guys’ Dodge Charger; and the city itself. The actors are, in the words of Alfred Hitchcock, treated like cattle, mere action figures swapping places with the scenery, the latter foregrounded over the former. The scene won an Academy Award for best editing, but the sound design is also strong, with the explosive roar of the engines still quite shocking. They’re like external combustion engines.

Not the full chase, but close. There are hundreds of tributes and reedits on YouTube, including dull attempts at recreation, recreated in Lego, in Hot Wheels, or in Matchbox, and the ultimate accolade, a reference in The Simpsons. See also this obsessive comparison of then and now.

On the flight on the way to Adelaide, I watched Drive, at Boyer’s recommendation. This, in some ways, features contemporary Los Angeles as a character, much as Michael Mann’s Collateral did. As Mann noted, digital HD camera technology enables Los Angeles, that city of electric lights, to be ‘properly’ shot at night, and both Drive’s and Collateral’s best driving scenes are at night (whereas Bullitt’s San Francisco has rarely looked so sunny.)

Drive’s Ryan Gosling has the same studied impassive voidery of McQueen, actually ramping up the mute to new levels somehow. The driving is just as good as Bullitt, or indeed Collateral, which is at least one large part of what these movies are about. The city is the other part. Drive is a portrait of LA, just as Collateral was (and many more before it, as discussed in that old Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality post.) 

I enjoyed it hugely, as I tend to when movies are portraits of cities, rendered through mood and texture, actors as cattle.

One scene—in that hazy golden LA sunlight, actually—features the Los Angeles River as the backdrop for some mild Gosling-on-Carey Mulligan flirtation. They get out of the car, and throw stones in one of those pools of water significant enough to throw stones into, amidst the wild scrubby foliage that grows through cracks in the giant concrete culvert that forms the body of the modern river.

“Nic wanted something different and romantic for [Driver and Irene] to do. I’d heard that you can actually drive up the L.A. River,” Gosling recalled. “So we tried it, and it worked—until we got to this one spot where out of nowhere there was this patch of shrubs and trees and you couldn’t go any further. There was no reason for it to be there. It was kind of magical.” (LA Times)

Here’s the scene, 1’25” in. Again, there are lots of videos of people driving the LA River at YouTube, for example these kids, but also some kid doing commentary on driving it the river in the video game LA Noire.)

It’s a similar setting to that the impromptu "happening" I wrote about a few years ago, when I first figured out there was such a thing as the LA River. And of course the river has been the setting for numerous other movies.

Seeing this unique infrastructure again in Drive inspired me to dig out my notes on the LA River, half-written a couple of years ago. Here they are:

Walking (a bit of) the LA River

After Postopolis LA, I had a day or so in the city, and generally had a ball, walking around, taking buses, reading, writing, photographing. Having learnt a bit about the river, after that first naive post on the happening, I asked one of the local participants at Postopolis LA where I could go to see it, maybe even get into it. What I knew of LA's interwar and post-war history was filtered obliquely through Chandler, Ellroy, Polanski, Mike Davis; and the city's troubled relationship with water was as much a key character as any of Chandler's blondes or Davis's Latinos. The least I could do was go to see the river.

The next day I walked through downtown, towards Sci-ARC and the rail tracks that mark the eastern edge of what passes for the centre of LA. Sci-ARC is in a long low building that mirrors the railyards it sits in front of, and indeed the LA River, which the rail runs alongside. The size of the river’s concrete bowl indicates the flood potential of the river, even if flooding seems a little impossible given the comparative trickle of water at this point, more like an elongated puddle. Still, this part of the river has more water in it than most, and a few miles downstream the water grows in volume before becoming a vast estuary heading out to sea.

(For more on the river itself, I can highly recommend two essays in “The Infrastructural City”, 2009, Varnelis (ed.) by David Fletcher and Lane Barden. The river's story is utterly fascinating, of a natural habitat being shaped on an almost tectonic scale. There have been numerous proposals for the river, most recent schemes pivoting around the idea of returning the river to its “natural state” or “revitalising it” Leaving aside the issue that its natural state is a highly variable flood plain, hardly conducive to hosting modern American settlement patterns, the idea of returning such radically re-shaped environments to a natural state is almost always flawed (see also former Australian PM Paul Keating's harebrained ideas for Barangaroo, Sydney, a project I worked on for a while.) These environments have been altered so much that they have undergone a form of irreversible state transition. Fletcher's piece in particular makes clear the "freakology rather than bucology" of the river, pointing out that it is really a "fully engineered flood-control system" rather than a naturally-occurring system. It is also a twisted mess of legislation and governance, with no single entity controlling the river.

Given this, the focus ought probably to be on a post-natural hybridised environment, working with the river both as it is now and in the drier Southern Californian future. Fletcher's and Barden’s essays, the latter accompanied by a compelling photo-essay that tracks the river from valley to sea, from trickle to port, make this case clearly, based on a deep understanding of the river’s history and geography.)

The sun is hot and bright, and the water is cobalt blue against the bleached white of the old concrete. It’s the colour of Chinatown streets in a James Ellroy novel, or so I imagine. The structure is just giant slabs, slammed together, the most basic form of engineering.

Standing on a bridge looking downriver, it’s quiet. (East 1st St Bridge?). As is often the case when I’m walking in cities not made for walking, there is virtually no-one around. Very few cars, even. I can hear east LA from here, which I’ve only really experienced through movies, novels and hip-hop, so I’m not sure if I can hear the squeal of tyres and wail of sirens or whether I’m making it up.

The warm wind whips through the struts supporting the bridge, the cables singing softly in the heat. The bridge has charming little extrusions every 10 metres or so, civic cut-outs from the concrete balustrades, big enough for people to stand in, to pass the time. They’re currently filled with rubbish, however. One has the remains of a filthy sleeping bag, another a dead bird.

I keep walking and head over to Union Station. I have to navigate a knot of freeways that is around 15 lanes deep in order to get from the clutches of low industrial buildings and garages on this side, over to the station on the other. It’s more difficult to ford this thing on foot than it would be to wade through the river.

Somehow on the other side, I approach Union Station, which is just spectacularly beautiful of course. Where the river’s structure, and the bridge, had been cracked and blanched, the parched white of a skeleton in a desert, Union Station’s white is creamy, pristine against the deep blue sky, offset by rich terracotta roofs. The architecture is something of a melange of the Americas, and delicately done, with perhaps the most spectacular structure on show the monumental wooden chairs in the waiting area.

I’m here for the relatively new light rail line, recently established out the back of the station, which is smooth and efficient. It feels odd in this context, this high quality, contemporary public transport. Locals look slightly incongruous on something so, well, “European”. Like seeing Ice Cube cooped up in a Fiat 500, Paris Hilton on the number 73 bus, Liberace on the tube.

The station discreetly suggests the outlines of some long lost halcyon age of American rail travel, and although this light rail seems almost Jetsons-esque, sliding into the sidings, the hefty, awkward Amtrak trains remind us of the reality of most transit on rails in the US. (As noted in Tony Judt’s memoirs, it’s as if Amtrak is kept alive on a paltry life-support machine of just-enough funding only to continually demonstrate the folly of not privatising public goods. It’s transport as political tool, run into the ground to illustrate that public transport cannot work, a hegemonic journey as much as a physical one.)

(Interestingly, the LA Metro is slowly, very slowly, re-building the network of streetcars and rail lines that once served the city, known as the Yellow Car lines around these parts, which were systematically removed in the General Motors streetcar conspiracy, a scandal which happens to form a sub-plot in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Everything is a movie round here.)

I believe I hopped off the train at Lincoln/Cypress station. As the Metro Gold line is in part elevated, I’d been able to loosely follow the river on the journey from Union Central, and so walked from the station down to a road of industrial units alongside the trees lining the man-made riverbank.

Some of the old industrial buildings looked disused, though one had some sort of managed studio space in it. The newer industrial units were all set back to make way for large parking lots. I think I’m around movie business infrastructure. Some of these newer units had the distinct air of illicit, or at least immoral, behaviour about them. A sleek car with mirrored windows slides inside an automated gate, as two girls in not so many clothes lounge outside what may be a studio door, all legs and heels (I think I’m around here somewhere.)

I turn a bend and find a railway crossing, with a fine view of the hills behind, but realise—somehow—that I’m moving away from the river. I double-back. Even though the buildings are low around here, and spottily placed, it’s hard to spot a river when it’s been so thoroughly tucked out of sight. I can really only head for what looks like a line of trees and hope for the best.

I find a road running over a bridge perpendicular to the river, itself under another freeway snaking overhead, and head over to the fence leading into undergrowth.

I look in vain for gaps in the fence. At the end of the units, I walk over a road leading to a bridge over the river, thinking I can at least get a look at it from there. Yet here I see a gap in the fence.

I climb through, push past some bushes, and find myself walking at the top of the concrete culvert. There’s a clearly defined path up here, with bushes, trees and fence to my right and culvert dropping down to the left. The road bridges cut across at a daigonal.

The river is nothing more than a stream here, snaking down the middle of its concrete setting. I contemplate scrambling down the side of the culvert to get to the water, but it’s actually quite an incline, and I worry I won’t get back up. I’m wearing the wrong shoes for this, and I remember my family back home. I'm now a father. It's not worth it.

It’s here that I look back to the bridge, and notice a figure in the crisp shadow underneath it. It’s standing there, down by the water’s edge at the base of the culvert. It moves forward and bends down, and starts washing some clothes in the water. I turn and look up to the next bridge, and see two figures under that one too. I’d read that people live down in the river, and here they are.

I keep walking along the top of the culvert. It’s quiet up here, though I can see across to the other side, over thickets of trees, perhaps eucalypts, to a busy highway. Here, though, it’s a peculiar environment and actually appealing. Although I must admit to being slightly tense, having seen the people under the bridges. (Though, of course, I am probaly safer here than walking alongside the freeways.)

The foliage is thick, and vibrant. I’m sometimes walking along a well-trodden path through long grasses. Other times through gobbets of gnarled trees and bushes. There is rubbish strewn around, particularly collected around the base of the fence. These elements are twisted around each other, with vines growing over, through and around shopping trolleys, milk crates and plastic bags. The plastic bags, which after a storm adorn the higher reaches of foliage in their thousands, are known as "Los Angeles moss". (I saw the same "moss" in Melbourne on the Maribyrnong river, after a good storm there.)

It actually feels relatively harmonious, as if the fence, crates, vines, grasses and bushes have merged into one hybrid ecosystem. They're certainly better integrated here than on the (in theory) more inhabited bridge by SCI-Arc. There are wild flowers in the grasses, and no doubt animal wildlife all around. As ever with SoCal, the foliage reminds me of that found in and around New South Wales. Fletcher's essay makes clear what a gloriously productive and fertile "artifical ecology" the river now supports, or is.

Given the proximity to the freeways, the rail, the enormous concrete channel for the black squiggle of water, this feels surprisingly close to “nature”, whatever that means. If you look down and straight ahead, it’s like a wilderness trail; look up and left or right, and you’re in low-rise light-industrial LA suburb, threaded together by 1950s infrastructure.

Again, it's quiet, despite the adjacent freeways.

I carry on walking. The river is still a trickle, a little shameful really. It’s hard to believe that this stream can turn into raging flood, but it can. Naturally, it’s a wide-ranging, diffuse body of water; the brute force infrastructure of Los Angeles forced it into these tight channels, having tapped it at numerous points up stream. The river has been knocked around so much that it couldn’t actually flow at all without human intervention in the form of sewage and run-off from streets and industry. You half-wonder whether the artificially-enriched water is responsible for the abundant flora. The water in the river is greener here than at SCI-Arc.

I walk through a couple of punctured fences and under a couple of bridges, elegant examples of civil engineering from an age where engineering could be somewhat civil. They're also training grounds, so-called "graffiti universities". The language suggests the patterns of Latino-led magical urbanism increasingly shaping Southern California.

I’m keeping my eyes down to check for syringes in the dry grass and sand, but I don’t see any. I look up to see a couple walking towards me.

The man has dark glasses, straggly hair and a canvas fedora. The girl is dressed in not so many clothes, though is decent enough. I decide to look “natural” (there’s that word again.)

“Hey,” man says, with a smile.
“Hey,” I say, with a smile.

We pass by each other. I carry on walking. No idea.

The foliage is opening up a little, which means I’m more visible. The freeway is running right alongside the river, on the other side. It’s a good feeling finding this haphazard home-spun walking trail running through these long arteries of concrete. The bank to my right sometimes drops down, such that the fence running along the path has flowers either side.

Parts of the trail really are rather lovely. sheltered by the odd bridge, trees and bushes. For some of the way there's a fence on the left too, securing the concrete 'riverbed'; at other points, it would be possible to scramble down. Again, I don't fancy it.

It's a shame that the this unique, highly pleasurable experience is so difficult to access. As I noted before, walking in Los Angeles—specifically, where you are not really supposed to walk—is one of the most appealing urban encounters I've had (and yes, I'm aware that it may be appealing to walk here because it is difficult to walk here.) Although Reyner Banham famously said he learnt to drive in Los Angeles so he could "read it in the original", and while I too have learnt much from being driven around LA, there are other ways to read this place, equally "original", if you like. This is sublime.

There have only been a few gaps in the fence along the route, so I decide to walk back. In that peculiar way of things, it seems like no time to get back simply because I know where I’m going this time.

Again, I see dark silhouettes in the deep shadows under the bridges. I cannot imagine what that life must be like.

As I approach the road, I have a quick look through the fence, so as not to startle anyone. I slip through the gap and step out onto what passes for a pavement around here, as cars zip by. I turn my back on the river and walk away.

The river quickly slips out of sight again. I walk back towards Lincoln/Cypress station. I had walked a very small section of the river, but it was one of the more memorable urban walks of my life.

It’s possible to see the river as a sorry state of affairs; the waterway that made the city, to some extent, and whose water was the subject of so much controversy, corruption and capital, has been effectively neutered. You might see that it has been brutally manhandled such that a mighty regional-scale ecosystem has dwindled to a concrete-encased dribble.

Yet this is a romantic view. The river is still a mighty regional-scale ecosystem; but it is now a hybrid system, reinforcing itself with human inputs and outputs. It has become something else. The question of whether it is “sustainable” is moot; it just is, and so it is sustainable. The river is no longer a “natural” system in a pre-human sense (by which we at least 8000 years ago) but it will always be there. It now has different performance, and our perceptions of what “natural” is need to be radically recalibrated.

Los Angeles was enabled by the river, at least in part, and now Los Angeles in turn enables the river. The idea that the way forward for this environment is to somehow attempt to recapture some kind of natural, pre-human state should recognise that the river is comprised of effluence and affluence as much as anything else.

In fact, the river exists as a constant flow only because of these human interventions. Fletcher's essay states that the river was actually dry in summer, and then flooding in winter; only in forcing the river down the channel, and enhancing it with run-off and sewage, does it achieve this "steady state". Fletcher says, "In the sense that the river has more continually running water than it has had in its post-colonial history, it is by many definitions more a *river* today than it ever was."

Equally, contemporary thinking about ecosystems—such as the second part of Adam Curtis's "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace"—suggests that nature is not some harmonious, steady-state system, with zero waste and maximum design efficiency. Fletcher also describes this updated thinking:

"Stability in nature is an illusion; moreover, non-natural factors such as urbanization, global warming, and the heat-island effect all have to be included in the ecological equation. Thus the native versus exotic debate is oversimplified; the landscape assemblages should not be mistaken as the cause of environmental degradation, when they are actually an ecologically appropriate result." (Fletcher, in The Infrastructural City, Varnelis (ed.), 2008)

The river has cultural value as much as environmental, as indicated by the numerous movies and other artefacts that have used it as scenery. At this present time, it is in an in-between state, a form of linear liminal zone. It is both accessible and inaccessible; movies like Drive suggest that it is some kind of gilt-edged urban park, the ideal place for a young family to play on a Saturday afternoon, albeit a getaway driver’s young family.

The movies indicate that it is one of the most spectacular settings in a city made from celluloid, and yet it is also sometimes mundane, banal, largely forgotten. At its clearest, I will never forget watching the paradox of people cleaning their clothes in sewage. It is hybrid. It is not something we can clean up. In an interesting adjacency, it occurs to me that “revitalising” or “recovering” the river might be as flawed as the idea of “the recovery” that Benjamin Bratton had taken down at Postopolis LA a few days earlier.

Walking the river as it is now is essential to understanding these kind of urban systems, essential to thinking about how to take hybrid environments forward, rather than work against the grain of history by looking backwards.

Rivers tend not to go backwards, after all. And resilient cities also adapt, finding new ways to flow, just as rivers do.

All photos of LA River [Flickr]
The Infrastructural City [Amazon]

A quick word about a new series I’m curating for Domus, the Italian art, architecture and design magazine. Called SuperNormal, it’s an attempt to ‘sketch’ a different kind of technology journalism, recognised how cultural it is. 

A few years ago, in response to the usual diminished depiction of contemporary technology as simply “IT”, someone—I forget who—said something like “Is a 14 year-old girl updating her Facebook status from her mobile phone as she walks down the street ‘IT’?” Of course it is, but more importantly, it isn’t. It is more than that; contemporary technology is deeply cultural. We might argue that all technology always has been “deeply cultural”, from the Stone Age axe onwards, but given that symbolic consumption and production—one definition of culture—is now actively and deliberately embedded in objects we design and build, and that these objects are embedded in the patterns, habits and rituals of everyday life—another definition of culture—we must now see technology for what it is.

So with Domus, Joseph Grima and I saw an opportunity to write in a different way about everyday technology. Domus has a long tradition of writing about such things, driven by the strong Italian heritage of post-war industrial design, covering Brionvega radios, Elica hoods, Vespa scooters, or Olivetti typewriters, for instance. 

But as I suggest in my series opener (below), perhaps a culturally powerful contemporary equivalent of these things now exists in the form of social media, mobile phones, web services, information graphics, smart cards, personal informatics, robots, and so on.

It might be a stretch to suggest that these things are the equivalent of an Olivetti Valentine in a number of ways, but not in terms of the way such things now shape our lives. Yet the vast bulk of journalism concerning this everyday technology is dominated by the technology press, which is rarely critical in the sense that Domus is, rarely covers design aspects with any depth, and rarely attempts to place developments in a wider cultural context. While I have no problem with the likes of Engadget, Techcrunch, Wired and the rest—not that they’d notice either way if I did!—there did seem a gap in the market here.

Conversely, this was also a way to introduce discussion of the recent design disciplines of interaction design, experience design, service design and information design, to this more established strata of design media. For what it’s worth, my motive for doing this—discussing the technology in terms of culture, and discussing its design in the context of other design practices—is in order to try to understand it better; which is in turn in order to design it better, to realise it better, to procure it better, and so on.

(By the way, it’s a huge honour to work for Domus. There can have been few more influential titles in design history since its inception in 1928 and Joseph Grima, who I first worked with on Postopolis, has repositioned the magazine at the forefront of media once again, for me alongside Eye and Idea as the best design magazines out there. It’s also been a pleasure to work increasingly closely with the designers, Salottobuono, and particularly Marco Ferrari.)

The series will run in the magazine and online. We’re using the website to carry more in-depth versions of the print articles, and including video and other contextual information such as interviews where relevant.
I’ve written the first two articles to frame the series.

The first covered the Nokia N9 (and to some extent its successor, the Lumia running Windows Phone) but pitches that in the context of the wider skirmishes in the mobile phone market, tactility, sounds and ocularcentrism in cellphone design, the hegemonic power of Apple, the importance of materials and the “dark matter” of licensing and logistics, European design history and entrepreneurship, via Roland Barthes and the Citröen DS19.

The second piece concerns Facebook Timeline, and so timelines, information design, social graphs, identity and representation, and so on —but also the broader context of a shared social memory, and how that might affect the way we forget and function. (Additionally, Facebook were good enough to get us an interview with Timeline’s lead designer, Nicholas Felton—he of Feltron Annual Reports fame)—and his early mockups of Timeline, to accompany this article. Thanks to both Nicholas and Meredith Chin for that.)

These initial articles are markers, sketching out the trajectory and territory of the series to some extent. But as the series opener suggests below, the terrain should get increasingly rich, diverse and fertile and I’m lining up a set of great writers ready to explore it and map it. More on that to follow. I’ll pitch in from time to time too.

Have a read of the first two—‘Portable Cathedrals’ on the Nokia N9 and ‘In Praise of Lost Time’ on Facebook Timeline—and let me know what you think: here; at Domus; or elsewhere.

And here, below, is the original text for the series—which I’ve dubbed SuperNormal, in respectful homage to Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa’s great book and exhibition, noting its title Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary. This text introduces and frames the venture, and is a slightly different version to that which appears on the Domus website and in the magazine.

SuperNormal

The humble form of the mobile phone galvanises culture and design like few other products ever have. 

Well beyond its original brief of connecting voices in real-time, and now dissolved in social media substrate, the mobile phone is essentially a tool for cultural production and consumption, for the everyday projection, dissembling or articulation of identity itself. As such, the cellphone represents an entirely new form of industrial design; it is intimate physically, psychologically and culturally, as well as framing the city and its activities. It can only be understood in the context of the few genuinely new design disciplines of the last two decades: the overlapping circles of interaction design, experience design, service design. 

And for mobile phones, read Facebook Timeline’s interface design, the organising principles underpinning operating systems like OSX and Google Chrome OS, the platform service ecosystem of iTunes+iPhone, an RFID-based airport check-in system, the architecture of Angry Birds, what XBox Live says about community; what transport data apps say about contemporary urbanism; what the Microsoft Word interface says about our approach to tools; how the design strategy of the New York Times sketches the future of journalism, how Spotify follows in a lineage of music experiences from Brionvega to Technics …

When Domus started, there was no equivalent of these kind of devices, these kind of platforms, these kind of issues, although Domus has a long history of reviewing the products of everyday life, particularly through its coverage of industrial design. The publication absorbed these daily objects from its earliest days, particularly placing domestic products, furniture and office equipment on its pages. These are technology too of course. But now we must see beyond furniture to the glowing devices lying upon them. The iPhone, Facebook and Chrome are the descendants of Sottsass’s Olivetti Lettera, in a way. Perhaps Sottsass sensed this:

“My furniture is a trivial thing and doesn't matter at all. But the idea would be to invent new total possibilities, new forms, new symbols …” (Ettore Sottsass, Domus, 1965)

It turns out that these are the new objects, products and services of everyday life, the “new total possibilities”. They are ‘Super Normal’, though perhaps not in the sense that Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa intended in their exhibitions of 2006-2007. Our reading of the situation attempts to move beyond the traditional frames for assessing industrial design, and assesses designs that are intended to be usable, functional, meaningful, personal, productive, strategic, participative. 

In the introduction to the accompanying Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary book, Gerrit Terstiege mentioned the 1976 Darmstadt exhibition ‘Das gewöhnliche Design’, and in particular the opening talk by Bazon Brock, professor of Aesthetics in Wuppertal:

“We must analyze and understand our contemporary world as if it were the everyday world of a historical society”. (Bazon Brock, 1976)

This would entail critically unpicking the social and cultural meaning of everyday products, not simply assessing their form, material or technical characteristics, but getting to their point; what each product says about our time and place.

So the cultural potency—the sheer relevance—of products like mobile phones, social media, and operating systems, has prompted Domus to start a new form of technology criticism, in a series that politely and respectfully hacks the name ‘Super Normal’.

Our idea is to offer an alternative to a discourse dominated by the likes of Engadget, Techcrunch, DPReview, Gizmodo et al. Sites like these cover products and services in unparalleled levels of technical detail and with respected in-depth knowledge. Yet they rarely discuss design in any meaningful way or the wider cultural impact of such things. 

Domus won’t cover technical details, as they are ably covered by those sites, but it will assess what these products say about contemporary design. It won’t pore over unboxing videos, but it will try to unpack the wider issues that these products imply for contemporary culture. It won’t attempt to second-guess business strategy, but will describe how products and services are now linked as never before to the spheres of economics, logistics, environment and community.

So this is no buyer’s guide, but it may be a user guide of sorts, to the key products and services of the 21st century; the things that surround us, yet are currently not on the radar of design criticism. Stay tuned.

“Super Normal is already out there, out in the open; it exists in the here and now; it is real and available. We have only to open our eyes.” (Gerrit Terstiege, 2007)

SuperNormal: series opener [Domus]
Nokia N9: Portable Cathedrals [Domus]
Facebook Timeline: In Praise of Lost Time [Domus]
Interview with Facebook's Nicholas Felton [Domus]

I swear I can still taste the coal dust in my mouth, nine hours later. Marco had noticed the soot in the snow first. Looking down from our vantage point on the 14th floor of our tower in Ruoholahti, we get a good view of the Finnish-registered coail carrier, the Alppila, unloading its cargo into the hoppers on the dockside of Kellosaari.

The hoppers direct the coal down to a tunnel, which then stretches some 700m to the west of Ruoholahti. The coal is then subsumed into the Salmisaari power station, a 1953 job owned by Helsinki Energia. Even though the distributed system of energy generation and district heating is profoundly smart for any modern city, and particularly a city with the heating/cooling loads and geography of Helsinki (see this earlier descent into the depths), I hope I don't need to point out the (now inexcusable) problems with coal-powered generation.

Despite growing up in the north of England, it's a strange feeling to see a large chimney billowing smoke above a neighbourhood. You just don't see that in those post-industrial cities anymore, and haven't done for decades. The air from Ruoholahti chimney may not be as dirty as it once was, although you'd hardly want a toke on it, but the days of recent persistent snow suddenly made legible this form of energy. (You may know this chimney from the Nuage Vert installation.)

Leaving aside the carbon footprint of these old stations, what struck Marco and I was its more immediately apparent footprint, suddenly highlighted by the combination of snow-covered land and frozen sea with bright sun, even from a kilometre away. The Alppila was clearly sitting in a large and growing halo of black coal dust, a smudge on the pristine white seascape. 

I went for a walk with my camera. Approaching from the north, and still several hundred metres away from the dock, I could immediately see that the snow downwind of the Alppila was covered with a thin film of coal dust. This is an entirely unnatural landscape at the best of times — Ruoholahti is essentially 1910 landfill joining three or four islands — and people need energy, but still.

Along the banks of the canal to my left, I see miniature landscapes of snowy striations drawn by the wind whipping up from the bay.

There's something awful and beautiful about these patterns, and particularly the grainy grey sweeps of soot falling across the sea frozen solid around the ship.

The white of the newer snow on the Ruoholahti canal easily offsets the black ridges on its banks. Still well downwind of the ship, the air suddenly starts tasting of coal.

I plunge my hand into the deep snow to describe the difference. There's a crust of black particulate covering everything. Closer, on the now-filthy bridge adjacent to the Alppila, I step in up to my knees to take a photo of the sea - each footstep plunges deep into pure white, clearly marking how dirty the bridge is afterwards.

The ice around the ship is bright white on one side and deep grey on the other, the wind curling the black dust around the lee side of the ship, a cruel sketch of what at first looks like a shadow, but is simply a thick coat of coal dust on snow and ice.

Tracking the Alppila on marinetraffic.com, it looks like it's come in from Vyotsk, Russia. Vyotsk was a minor strategic node in the brutal battles between Finland and Russia during World War II, but is now a small town with a major strategic port shifting oil and coal to the west, with over 2 billion tonnes of the latter exported last year. But the coal carrier is not going to see Russia anytime today, sitting gripped by thick ice generated by the last few days of -20C temperatures. It's a brutish looking thing, described in the evocative language of shipping as "Lloyd’s Register +100 A1 Bulk Carrier, Ice Class 1 A Super", but the entire Baltic is sold as far as the eye can see.

There's no-one visible on-board the ship. I stand on the tram bridge perpendicular to the ship, along with a few others 20 metres away towards the boldly cantilevered F-Secure building, watching what looks like an automated operation, ship as robot. Smoke billows from the ship announcing another dumper of coal swinging gracefully through the cold air.

The Alppila's black cranes continue to empty coal into the hoppers and down into the ground, soft clouds of soot drifting over the residential neighbourhood downwind.

Coal landing at Salmisaari [Flickr]

In Tallinn recently for a conference, I took a chance to go for a long walk from the old medieval city centre to an ancient forest to the east. I took a meandering route to Kadriorg Forest, along the oversized roads and undistinguished housing blocks that are the typical stains left by Soviet-era planning guidelines; wide enough for tanks, and possibly aircraft, and little use to the contemporary city.

While there are several distinguishing features along the route—the appealing wall-bound statues that fuse bust and typography, a vaguely Metabolist housing block opposite a thrusting modernist chapel, a great deli and coffee shop, and some lovely old wooden houses and masonry blocks, half of which are disintegrating, half are being renovated or rebuilt, near the stadium as you approach the park—I was heading for the KUMU art gallery and an installation in the trees.

Heading beyond the ponds, playgrounds and formal landscaping around the palace at the edge of Kadriorg park, the forest itself is immediately quietly extraordinary. It’s been there for centuries, and there’s something graceful and majestic about the scale of the trees, particularly with autumn ablaze in the leaves, viewed from the long avenues cut through the woods.

KUMU, designed by Finnish architect Pekka Vapaavuori, was excellent, but the installation was magical. Designed by Tetsuo Kondo Architects, it was a floating ramp hoisted up into the forest, a 95 metre long white steel walkway suspended from the trees themselves. Rather than sitting on columns, it was simply supported by brackets attached to tree trunks.

(In this, it reminded me a little of Australian architect Andrew Maynard’s proposal for treehouses I wrote about five years ago, co-opting his protest structures for Battersea Power Station.)

Given its slender profile and lack of columns, the ramp was barely visible until close up. There were only a few signs, with a smart silhouette identity, to announce its presence. I was lucky to catch it in autumn—I'm not sure how long it's around for.

I’d heard about it via a Domus article, where Tetsuo Kondo writes:

“In the elegant woods of Kadriorg, we added a path. The path is supported by the trees as it floats through a forest that is over 300 years old. I feel that the appearance of the woods changes slightly when you walk along this path. We are no longer looking up at the trees from the ground but we come closer to the leaves and glide through the branches.”

Of course, the batteries on the Olympus ran out just as I approached, so all these shots, and the video, are from an old iPhone. Apologies.

You do glide through the branches, as the designer suggests, and the structure is surprisingly firm, given that it's slender and light. The white steel had become a little muddy, as you'd expect, but not a problem—a half-decent shower would fix that. The ramp twists its way through the trees, and bends round on itself several times, as this lovely diagram from the Kondo website indicates.

It ascends high enough above the ground to feel like you're part of the forest's canopy, rather than simply walking through it. Memories of climbing trees as a kid come flooding back, of the sudden shift in perspective afforded by sitting on a gnarly branch, high off the ground. The video above closes with a walk along the entire structure.

I’ve been a little mean about installations and one-offs recently, seeing as they generally do little to change the city in meaningful terms. But it was a pleasure to be reminded of the joy in the temporary and the transient, of the frivolous idea of a path to nowhere that almost wafts you up into the trees, of a playful intervention that opens up a new aspect on a familiar experience, at least for a moment, of climbing trees like a kid.

And it’s such as simple design that it could be replicated in any reasonably sized copse of trees elsewhere, lending a replicable aspect that extends the idea a little beyond the ‘mere installation’.

The forest itself remains the most extraordinary thing around here, and always will, but Kondo’s suspended ramp actually helped underline that fact, by lifting me further into the trees.

All photos of Tetsuo Kondo's Suspended Ramp [Flickr]
Tetsuo Kondo's Suspended Ramp [Domus]
A Path In The Forest [Tetsuo Kondo Architects]