1934

Grungi frutti.

Near Fell's Point in Baltimore, on my way back from taking Michaela to work. She's learning to drive. I figure the East Coast is a good place to learn how to drive defensively, as long as you don't get killed in the process. East Coast drivers are insane. 

Anyway, driving around Baltimore is in stark contrast to driving around the suburbs, like I did on my way to Sally's on Saturday to run the dogs. This partially abandoned city, with smart, efficient urban design, has so much potential. 

It's hard for me to fathom living in the nasty suburbs. I told Will after returning from Target in Hunt Valley that fat, white suburbia scares me far more than the urban, minority America. Are people really that scared of a little crime? It's sad, really. When you think of urban planning through the ages, from the ancient Roman and European cities to the suburban sprawl America has authored, we've gone backwards. Regressed. It's sad. No. It's tragic.

At the same time I'm thinking these things, Will sends me this video on dissecting suburbia via TED. Entropy made visible. SO TRUE.

Cities and the quiet interface.

She walked by just as I was taking the shot. This little old lady next to the tall, glass, modern building in SOHO, filled with architects sitting down for a presentation, those builders and definers of the urban space.

While in New York last week, my senses were heightened of course, as they always are when I'm in New York City – whose aren't? I walked a lot and stopped a lot and listened a lot and observed a lot. All in the vein of what interests me most right now: the city as interface. 

We gave a presentation on Wednesday night as part of the fall lecture series for the School of Visual Art's new MFA, Interaction Design program. I spoke mostly about the visual + emotional design aspects of the new NPR.org, noting that one of our goals was to create an interface that allows the content to sing. Because our content is what makes NPR unique. To do this, the interface needed to recede. We needed a quiet interface. A crystal goblet. 

And so, having this typographic metaphor swimming around in my head, I pondered this question: what about the city as a quiet interface? Does this physical interface need to be quiet in the same way a digital one does?

The answer, of course, is no. For a city, this principle is the exact opposite. Cities need to be noisy interfaces. They need hustle and bustle and people and dogs and lights and cars and bikes and babies and colors and type and film and laughing, crying, shouting, whispering, screaming, stealing, eating, chilling, acting, dancing, mourning, celebrating, selling, buying, wheeling, and dealing. At various times of day. And sometimes in your face and all at once. The noisier the better, actually. Noisy urban interfaces make for good urban experiences, generally speaking. This is exactly what Jane Jacobs wrote about.

In an urban interface, the content is the interface. 

Which made me think of Baltimore and of the two mugging notices I received recently via MICA's campus safety. Baltimore is a city designed to hold a million people but which now holds a little over half that. It has a quiet interface. In some areas, dead quiet. And in those areas, like behind the Rite-Aid a few blocks from our house where those muggings took place, the user experience greatly suffers. 

Urban interaction.

In my ongoing thinking about the city as an interface – as an operating system, if you will, of this thing we call Earth – I picked up a book I bought while in grad school: Universal Principles of Design. It lists a multitude of various design elements and principles to consider when designing. I'm mentally listing which ones are relevant to analyze when thinking of urban interfaces. 

I also think about new nomenclature to describe this design perspective, this intersection of interaction and urban design. For example, what would the equivalent of the term GUI (Graphical User Interface) be? How about UUI™? Urban User Interface™.

The two principles that first inspired me to think about the city as an interface (i.e., UUI™) were mental models and affordances. Mental models because of my frustration with learning a new urban plan when I moved from Seattle to DC. I couldn't find anything! Just finding a Target when I first got here proved to be maddeningly frustrating. The system provided no user feedback when I made a wrong turn or took the wrong exit. This was before my iPhone, so my metadata of the UUI™ was limited to one of those folded, laminated maps. 

Mental Model – People understand and interact with systems and environments based on mental representations developed from experience. Lidwell, 130

As Seattle was the first major metropolitan area I have ever lived in, it serves as my base mental model of how the city as a product should work. Hence, my mental model for how the city was laid out upon moving to the DC was completely up-ended. Interestingly, learning Baltimore hasn't been as frustrating for me; my guess is that if you compared maps of the three cities, DC would be the outlier. Baltimore's urban layout is probably more similar to Seattle's than DC's. 

Affordance – A property in which the physical characteristics of an object or environment influence its function. Lidwell, 20

Affordances in the context of the UUI™ are very interesting, I think. There are physical affordances, such as sidewalks, freeway exits, alleys, streets, parks and buildings. But there are also perceived affordances, those imposed by social implications and realities. These are the affordances that might prevent or discourage you from going into high-crime neighborhoods. For example, blue security cameras abound throughout many Baltimore neighborhoods, indicating that crime is such a problem there that 24-hour video surveillance is necessary. 

There are many more, for sure, but this is the beginning of my categorical thinking. I'm also developing an NPR patterns library at work, which will further fuel my thoughts on this topic; what is the pattern language of urban design?

Lidwell, William, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler. Universal Principles of Design. Gloucester, MA:Rockport 2003.

I want new letters.

The fact that graduate design programs bestow upon their students the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree is antiquated and irrelevant. Instead, the design discipline should have its own standardized classification of academic distinction, as programs at IIT, Cincinnati, and Carnegie Mellon do: a Master's of Design. And as architectural programs do. When have you ever heard of someone with an MFA in architecture? Never. Because nobody has one. Because architecture, while encompassing elements of art, is not art. It's Architecture. Design is not art, either. It's Design. Here's an example description of such a program: 

The Master of Design (MDes) program is a two-year, 54-credit-hour degree program intended for those seeking professional mastery at the highest level in the planning and design of new communications, products, services, environments and systems. The degree terminates with a project demonstrating the application of new theories and processes to contemporary and developing design problems in a variety of areas.

I'm writing this because I'm really, really tired of people not understanding what I do. Of people equating design with art (IT'S NOT THE SAME), and of people assuming that I draw pictures and make web banners for a living. This is not what I do. But part of the reason people think it is, I'm theorizing, is because my alma mater, the University of Washington, mislabeled me. I have a Master of Fine Arts in design, which in itself is a paradox because design does not equal fine art:

fine art

1 a: art (as painting, sculpture, or music) concerned primarily with the creation of beautiful objects —usually used in plural b: objects of fine art

vs.

design

transitive verb

1: to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan : devise, contrive

2 a: to conceive and plan out in the mind b: to have as a purpose : intend  c: to devise for a specific function or end 

The primary difference is that art is about making beautiful things. Design is concerned with beauty, too, but not as much as it is about function. Therein lies the difference. The act of designing involves greater dimensionality than does art. A designer has many more externalities to consider when creating an object, which requires more sacrifice and compromise toward the end product. It's difficult to make beautiful things, lest you think that I'm dissing fine art. It takes talent and hard work. It's also difficult to make functional things; ask any engineer or computer programmer. Enter design, which is concerned with both. Creating something that is both functional and beautiful requires a broader skill set and the ability to collaborate with others and work within a narrow set of parameters. Dare I say that design is twice as hard?

Perhaps at the advent of design programs in the early 20th century, the MFA made more sense. In terms of two-dimensional design – posters, album covers, etc. – a designer often did create art as part of the overall design. Graphic designers worked with illustrators, painters, and photographers as a general rule. 

Today, however, with so many more disciplines of design in practice, this automatic association of design and the fine arts displays ignorance about the multi-facets of contemporary design.  At least in terms of newer fields of practice, such as interface and interaction design. It fails to take into account the other fields one must be well-versed in to succeed in designing interfaces.

As an interface and interaction designer, I am far more likely to interact with business analysts, system admins, computer programmers, library scientists, and cognitive psychologists than I am to work with painters, illustrators, or sculptures. 

So, please don't insult me by calling me a "web designer" or a "graphic designer". While graphic design falls under the umbrella of what I do, it's simply a tool in my interface design set. Neither of these terms aptly describe what I do for a living. And god forbid you should ever call me an "artist". 

In the glow of the launch of the new NPR.org – a yearlong endeavor involving an incredibly detailed overhaul of a very complex content management and publishing system – I've decided that I want new letters. I'm definitely a master of something, just not the fine arts.

The work of A. Aubrey Bodine.

 

Will and I went to breakfast a couple of weekends ago at our favorite restaurant in Baltimore so far, Golden West. It's in Hampden, a really cool Baltimore neighborhood about four miles from our house. Kind of like a mix between Seattle's Fremont and Ballard neighborhoods, with a little U-District thrown in. Anyway, we were in this quirky gift shop (if there's one word I would use to describe Baltimore, "quirky" would be it) when I happened upon a row of greeting cards. 

I was instantly captivated by the photographic images of A. Aubrey Bodine. A photojournalist for the Baltimore Sun during the mid-20th century, he gained renown via his portraiture of Baltimore and to a lesser extent, the state of Maryland. He is also a MICA alum. 

Needless to say, I am very inspired. I'm planning on doing a joint photo shoot with Kevin Wong, a former colleague in Seattle and will be thinking about Bodine as I shoot. We're both going to shoot on the waterfront at the golden hour, he in Seattle, me here in Baltimore, and then display our best shots together. I find that although Seattle is a more polished city than Baltimore, as urban personalities, they have a lot in common. I'm really looking forward to this!

There's a part of me that really likes Baltimore. But I'll tell you one thing: if you ever hear me speaking with a Baltimore accent, POINT ME TO A GOOD SPEECH THERAPIST. I prefer my west coast linguistic neutrality, thanks.

Worthy architecture.

originally uploaded by Neylano.

"A development which spoils ten square miles of countryside will be the work of a few people neither particularly sinful nor malevolent. They may be called Derek or Malcolm, Hubert or Shigeru, they may love golf and animals, and yet, in a few weeks, they can put in motion plans which will substantially ruin a landscape for 300 years or more.

The same kind of banal thinking which in literature produces nothing worse than incoherent books and tedious plays can, when applied to architecture, leave wounds which will be visible from outerspace. Bad architecture is writ large.

We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness." by Alain de Botton in The Architecture of Happiness

I just finished this book on the train this morning and found these two passages especially noteworthy. They bring to mind Will's and my decision to buy another house here in the walkable, sustainable city rather than building something on his mother's property which would force us to drive a lot more than we want to, not to mention the cost of hiring a really good architect to help us honor the land. 

The second quote also makes me think about the differences between my old neighborhood in Seattle (Queen Anne) and my new one here (Bolton Hill). The architecture immediately surrounding our house here is much more honorable of the land it's replaced, I think. For while the initial settlers of Queen Anne did produce some beautiful buildings there, I'm reminded mostly of all the butchered bungalows on Queen Anne, with additions sprouting like malignant tumors out of the roofs and back porches. There is a lot less of that here in Bolton Hill. I really like this neighborhood. 

Falling Water.

Fallingwater from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

As Will and I ponder whether to buy or build, I came across this computer-generated film on Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece. Simply amazing.

The lovely Cathedral.

originally uploaded by Neylano.

It snowed in DC yesterday. I love the snow. Taken from my open living room window.

La Maison de Verre.

I must go see this house next time I'm in Paris....

The Best House in Paris

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: August 26, 2007 in the New York Times
PARIS

NO house in France better reflects the magical promise of 20th-century architecture than the Maison de Verre. Tucked behind the solemn porte-cochere of a traditional French residence on Rue Saint-Guillaume, a quiet street in a wealthy Left Bank neighborhood, the 1932 house designed by Pierre Chareau challenges our assumptions about the nature of Modernism. For architects it represents the road not taken: a lyrical machine whose theatricality is the antithesis of the dry functionalist aesthetic that reigned through much of the 20th century.

The O'Shea Building.

I went on an architecture tour of downtown Seattle a few weeks ago. In an effort to learn more about my city's history, I'm trying to pay attention to the names and stories of buildings downtown that I really like. Take the O'Shea Building, for example. Built in 1914, it's located in the heart of Seattle at Fifth and Pine. Seattle's Gensler office is on the third floor. I really like working there; it's a great space. Beautiful light from the tall windows. It's dangerous, though. The Gap is just downstairs and it takes me less than five minutes to walk to the Nordstrom women's shoe section. Trouble.