Hasta La Ideas

Hambourg est une de ces villes qu’il fait bon d’explorer la nuit aux heures où elle change de visage. Les bars éclairés, les rues où les stigmates des nombreuses heures de fête subsistent dans le quartier de Reeperbhan, ou encore les hôtels et les vitrines de magasins, le photographe Mark Broyer a saisi toutes ces petites curiosités nocturnes sublimées par la lumière des néons.

Here’s a great example of an architect becoming enamored of a new, flashy concept while failing to consider real-world behaviors. In 1881, architect William H. Brown patented the following design:

That’s the plan and elevation views of a rotating jail. The circle contains eight pie-shaped jail cells and there’s only one door. The cell rotunda rests on ball bearings, and a guard rotates a manual hand crank to spin the entire structure.

The supposed benefit of this design was that only one guard would need to be hired to watch the single door. But the downsides are manifold. Never mind the increased construction costs; in an emergency, say a fire or a flood, the one guard must stand there and painstakingly rotate each prisoner out. The larger, more gruesome problem is that the lone guard has no way to see what’s going on in the cells on the other side of the circle. If, say, a drunk arrestee has passed out with his arms sticking out of the bars, well, guess who loses those arms when his cell rotates and lines up with an immovable wall.

Amazingly, a dozen or so versions of Brown’s design were actually constructed, and though all were decommissioned as the design’s demerits came to light, some are even still standing. YouTuber Tom Scott visited the Rotary Jail Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and got a demonstration of how it worked:

The simplest design items can lead to organizational clarity at home or in the office. That’s exactly what Jan Van Look, founder of Antwerp-based design studio Kabinet Van Look, is offering with his TRAKTOR magnetized wood cubes, funding on Kickstarter……

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Ten teams of architects and engineers have been chosen to design solutions that will help San Francisco and the surrounding region combat the effects of climate change.

Resilient by Design’s Bay Area Challenge asked entrants to come up with ideas to protect coastal areas from rising sea levels, flooding and earthquakes.

As the global climate warms and these kinds of events appear to be getting more frequent, the region doesn’t want to take any chances.

“Rather than wait for a natural disaster, the San Francisco Bay Area is proactively reimagining a better future by creating a blueprint for resilience that harnesses Bay Area innovation and serves as a model for communities around the world,” said the challenge’s website.

After issuing a design brief at the end of May 2017, the jury announced 10 teams that will embark on a year-long research project earlier this month.

These comprise combinations of architecture, landscape architecture and engineering firms. The 10 are led by Aecom, BIG, Bionic, TLS, James Corner Field Operations, Hassell, Mithun, Base Landscape, Scape and Gensler.

Over the course of the next few months, the design teams will tour areas around the Bay, including the city of San Francisco, to learn about the specific needs of communities and ecosystems.

The teams will present three to five “design opportunities”, giving the public the chance to input, before a Research Advisory Committee matches one Design Opportunity to each team.

Site-specific conceptual solutions will then be developed in collaboration with Bay Area experts and community members, with opportunities for public consultations along the way.

Many firms in the chosen teams have experience with designing for climate change and protection against natural disasters. For example, BIG was awarded $335 million to improve Lower Manhattan’s storm defences following Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

A similar initiative to Resilient by Design’s competition was recently launched by What Design Can Do, Autodesk Foundation and IKEA Foundation, which are asking designers to come up with general proposals in response to the changing climate.

The post BIG, MVRDV, James Corner and more to tackle Bay Area climate change appeared first on Dezeen.

The next time you see a squirrel running around, give it an appreciative smile. That’s your fellow organizer right there.

As summer yields to autumn, these little fuzzballs are busy gathering nuts that will sustain them during the winter. Scientists from University of California Berkeley recently wondered exactly how they accomplish the life-sustaining feat, including the improbable act of finding each tiny hoard weeks after it’s created.

What they discovered was pretty impressive. Squirrels use chunking. Chunking refers to the practice of sorting information into similar, easily remembered groupings. For example, when learning a new phone number, we don’t memorize an interrupted series of 10 numbers, we (at least here in North America) learn the three-digit area code, the three-digit exchange and then the last four digits.

Likewise, a bookshelf stuffed with no semblance of order would make it very hard to find a certain title. So, we group books into fiction, non-fiction, biographies, etc. It’s much easier to recall where a specific piece of information is when it’s in a chunk of similar items.

Squirrels understand this.

Researchers discovered that squirrels are “scatter hoarders.” That is, they create several caches of nuts, each grouped in the same way. In the study, 45 squirrels were offered a series of nuts from several locations. Upon receiving nuts from a central location, the cute little rodents put the goodies into species-specific groupings: almonds, hazelnuts, pecans, and walnuts. This suggests, scientists concluded, that finding the nuts weeks or months later in snow-covered forests, that the squirrels rely on a technique like chunking to recall where each pile (or species) of nut is hidden.

What does that have to do with you and me?

Aside from the obvious “we’re all nuts” joke, chunking is truly an effective strategy. Like the squirrels, it will help you recall where that seldom-used item is stored. For example, if you’re looking for Christmas tree ornaments, they would be “chunked” with the other holiday decorations.

Aside from storage, chunking can apply to productivity, as Mike Vardy explains on Productivityist:

Time chunking – and fine tuning the practice – allows me to work with optimum productivity. It’s worth trying in some form or another because it removes a decision from the process of doing: what to do and when to do it.

Take a lesson from our furry friends. Sort time, items, and effort into definable groups for better recall later. Whether you’re a human or not.

Post written by David Caolo