News: researchers from IBM have redesigned the bus routes across Ivory Coast’s largest city using data from mobile phones.
The project, by a team from IBM’s research lab in Dublin, Ireland, is an example of how so-called “big data” can be mined for information that leads to improved policies and services.
The researchers looked at 2.5 billion call records from mobile phone users to work out commuters’ movements.
The anonymous data came from phones in the city of Abidjan, where a deteriorating public transport system has prompted a huge and unregulated fleet of private minibuses and taxis to spring up.
Outgoing flows from a mobile phone antenna
Commuters’ journeys in these private vehicles can’t be easily monitored by the city’s authorities, so the IBM team used time and location data from call records and text messages to work out frequent routes.
They then looked at how well commuters were served by the city’s buses and came up with 65 possible improvements to existing routes, concluding that they could reduce average travel times by 10 per cent.
“If transit agencies could have an effective tool to quantify the travel demand, as well as recommendations on how to best design the transit network, cities would be able to better support travellers’ mobility demand through a regulated and efficient public transport system,” the researchers explained in their report.
Routes on Abidjan’s public transit network
The AllAboard project, which is currently only a research exercise, was entered into the Data for Development competition run by mobile phone operator Orange, an open data challenge inviting researchers to find uses for its huge datasets of call activity.
Olivier Verscheure, a senior scientist at IBM’s research laboratory in Dublin, told the BBC that the project only hinted at what could be gleaned from such huge datasets.
“If we could have merged the telco data with city data, such as the bus timetables we could have the potential to completely change the existing network,” he said.
“Analysis of public transport and telco data would show how people move in a city and allow planners to create a bike sharing infrastructure from scratch, for example.”
Opinion: as the Bank of England unveils the design of its new £5 note, Sam Jacob ponders the historic and cultural symbolism of money in this week’s opinion column.
Last week the Bank of England announced its new £5 note. In 2016 Elizabeth Fry (don’t worry, I had to look her up too) will be replaced by a new design with Winston Churchill’s jowly boat race plastered all over the great British Pam Shriver.
Of course, we need new notes. Money gets worn out. It gets handled, dragged out of pockets, shoved in purses, rolled up, folded, scrawled on and so on. And as forgery gets smarter, the anti-forgery devices incorporated into currency need to evolve. But the changing cast of characters that play across our national currency also provide a portrait of the nation at any given moment.
Visualisation of the new five pound note
The design of currency is then a technical, cultural and conceptual project. Money first is a representation of value, a kind of floating signifier of the value it represents. It’s both the value and the representation of that value simultaneously and locks value into its representation through the steps it takes to be unforgeable.
While performing these complex sleights of hand and technical feats, money also acts as a piece of national pageantry. It sits amongst the accoutrements of state that include the symbols and bureaucratic paraphernalia of a state, somewhere between a flag and a driving licence.
We know that money – as in coins and notes – isn’t really real. It’s just a physical manifestation of an abstract value. It is, in the great phrasing of a US customs form, a ‘monetary instrument’. Monetary value itself is an invisible entity that can leap from one state to another with ease. It slips in and out of substances as though it were a restless supernatural spirit.
We know the story of how money developed this supernatural power: how coins began as the thing of value itself, as lumps of value, actual pieces of gold for example, unitised. We know that this equivalence of substance to value shifted so that the coin referred to a value that was now held elsewhere. We know too how notes became a way of referring to value by acting as a promise that the actual material would one day change hands. And we know that this act of referred value came to mean something so significant that it gained a life of its own – the sign became a thing in itself. Money flipped. It changed from being the substance that contained the value to a symbol of that value, from the thing to a sign.
As objects, coins and notes are pitted by the residues of this history and scored by the presence of value. Their design is a record of the ways in which value is manufactured and protected.
Its surfaces construct the idea of value. They are embellished with symbols of nationhood, state, monarchy and culture that derive from the arcania of heraldic design, a language that links it to the sovereignty and government, symbolically tied to economic mechanisms that underpin the idea of money. Equally they protect value through the intricate lacings of so many security systems: inks and colours, holograms and watermarks, foil strips and paper, the fritted edges that once foiled those who would have shaved off slivers of gold.
Filigree lines loop back on themselves with almost psychotic intensity, so fine that you can zoom in and in. Images break down into patterns like fingerprints as though money wasn’t something you could actually draw with a line, only suggestively sketch. Its tentative quality is a matter of anti-counterfeiting but also perhaps an expression of the immateriality of value, graphically on the verge of immateriality, a point cloud that can only approximate the thing it is trying to represent.
Euro note designs
Money is covered with historical reference. Maybe it’s the same kind of validation that banks once used when they were built in the form of Classical temples: historical reference somehow conferring significance. Churchill’s image on a bank note then transfers his significance, his personality and historical narrative not only onto money, but into it too. It works as a form of cultural guarantee. Euro notes too seem to have the whole history of Europe backing them. They have images of bridges, arches and gateways that look quintessentially European. Except, look closer: that’s not actually a Rialto or Pont de Neuilly! The landmarks depicted are not real things or places, they are things designed to evoke the sensation of European history and culture. They are imaginary renditions of Classical, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Art Nouveau and Modern. It’s the story of Europe told through an imaginary architecture.
One can imagine the extreme lengths designers and their Eurocrat clients went to avoid national favouritism, to tell an inclusive story that all of the EU could feel part of. But one wonders if they also considered the narrative they were writing through this imaginary, non-existent Europa-heritage. For example, did they think of the implications of using essentially faked-up historical images as the face of money? As a thing that spends so much of its effort – so much of its surface and material quality – being authentic and non-fake?
As an aside: oh how I’d love to build full-size replicas of these imaginary historical sites – a version of fake Europe so real that it would be indistinguishable from actual Europe as precipitated by, y’know, real events and people (aka, history).
The aesthetic of money remains distinct even as it intersects with more contemporary design sensibilities like the recent British coins that fragmented the Royal Shield head over varied denomination coins if you arranged them in the right way, or Hong Kong dollars with their see-through plastic.
Maybe the future of money is Bitcoin, the digital currency based on open source cryptographic protocols that has recently been in the headlines for the volatile fluctuations in its value. Bitcoin has internalised the visual and material security systems of physical currency into the complexity of its algorithmic generation – the so called ‘mining’ of Bitcoins. Its value is (if I understand it correctly) related to the computational labour of manufacturing it. Which seems far more appropriate, far more accurate a description of what contemporary money actually is than being linked to gold reserves.
Right now Bitcoin is really only useful for buying sandwiches in Kreuzberg or illegal substances online. But perhaps it provides a far better, far more realistic depiction of value than those anachronistic notes and coins.
News: New York studio SO-IL has won a competition to design an art museum at the University of California’s Davis campus with plans that will unite indoor and outdoor spaces beneath a large steel roof.
Designed in collaboration with architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art is conceived by SO-IL as a landscape of galleries and workshops that reference the flat plains of of California’s Central Valley.
The 4000-square-metre canopy will stretch out across the entire site, creating varying degrees of shelter in different sections. “Its form and its shape are an abstract patchwork of geometric forms that in a way refers to the agricultural landscape and the vast horizon,” says SO-IL’s Florian Idenburg.
Beneath the roof, the building will contain galleries for the University of California‘s collection of artworks, as well as temporary exhibition spaces, lectures rooms, studios and artists’ residences.
“I think the museum of the future will be one that needs to be able to accommodate a lot of change,” says Idenburg. “A museum on campus, like here, should be a testing ground for new ideas. We see the building itself offering a stage on which all these different things can happen.”
Construction of the museum is set to begin next year.
Here’s a project description from the design team:
Grand Canopy
Davis is an ideal setting for a museum that will sow new ways of thinking about the experience of art. The Central Valley breathes a spirit of optimism. Whether one is influenced by the sweeping views over the flat plains beyond to the horizon, or the sense of empowerment one feels when being able to cultivate and grow freely – the spirit of this place is of invention and imagination. It is precisely this spirit we capture in our architectural proposal for the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
As an overarching move, the design proposes a 50,000 square-foot permeable cover – a “Grand Canopy” – over both site and building. The distinct shape of this open roof presents a new symbol for the campus. The Canopy extends over the site, blurring its edges, and creating a sensory landscape of activities and scales. The Canopy works in two important ways: first, to generate a field of experimentation, an infrastructure, and stage for events; and second, as an urban device that creates a new locus of activity and center of gravity on campus. The Canopy transforms the site into a field of diverse spaces. At night, the illuminated canopy becomes a beacon within the campus and to the city beyond.
Inspired by the quilted agrarian landscape that stretches beyond the site, the design inherits the idea of diverse landscapes, textures and colors stitched together. Like the Central Valley, the landscape under the Canopy becomes shaped and activated by changing light and seasons. Its unique form engenders curiosity from a distance, like a lone hill on a skyline. Catalyzing exploration and curiosity, the Canopy produces constantly changing silhouettes and profiles as visitors move through the site.
Under the Canopy, the site forms a continuous landscape, tying it in with its context. Lines from the site and its surroundings trace through to shape the design. Interwoven curved and straight sections seamlessly define inside and outside. The result is a portfolio of interconnected interior and exterior spaces, all with distinct spatial qualities and characteristics that trigger diverse activities and create informal opportunities for learning and interaction. Textures and landscape break the program down into smaller volumes to achieve a human, approachable scale. The future art museum is neither isolated nor exclusive, but open and permeable; not a static shrine, but a constantly evolving public event.
“My clothes have always got a very strong dynamic rapport with the body – they are very body conscious, they help you to look glamorous, more hourglass, more woman,” said the designer.
For the men, Westwood has come up with a tailored three-piece suit in burgundy wool.
The outfits make use of recycled materials including canvas, leather off-cuts and polyester yarn produced from plastic bottles.
The uniforms will debut in July before their official launch next year, when they will be worn by over 7500 members of staff, including cabin crew and pilots.
This isn’t the first time Westwood and Branson have crossed paths – the punk designer was onboard a boat trip organised by Branson in 1977 for the Sex Pistols, the latest signings to his Virgin record label.
The birds inside this cuckoo clock by London design studio BERG are programmed to poke their heads out to announce Twitter messages, retweets and new followers (+ movie).
#Flock, which was commissioned from BERG by social networking service Twitter, was built using BERG Cloud, the design studio’s operating system for network-connected products.
Using a wirelessly controlled Arduino microcontroller, the three birds inside the clock are choreographed to respond immediately to activity on Twitter.
Retweets, direct messages and new followers each trigger one of the three birds to pop out of the clock, accompanied by a snippet of birdsong.
Like the studio’s Little Printer, the tiny thermal printer that led to the development of BERG Cloud, #Flock is a web-connected device designed to give digital data a physical expression.
News: the deliberate copying of a design is set to become a criminal offence in the UK, in line with the law on breaching copyright and trademarks.
The change, announced this week by the Intellectual Property Office, is intended to simplify and shorten the legal process surrounding design right disputes by moving them from the UK’s civil courts to its criminal courts.
Design right provides automatic protection for the three-dimensional shape of an unregistered design – although not its two-dimensional aspects, such as surface patterns – and lasts a maximum of 15 years.
The trade organisation Anti-Copying in Design (ACID) welcomed the government’s decision, but said there was still “a long way to go”.
“It’s great that the government has taken a first step to protect designers from those who copy their designs, but there is still a long way to go to ensure we receive the same protection as musicians or filmmakers,” said ACID chief executive Dids Macdonald.
“[D]esign right itself is a seemingly marginal protection. Yes, it covers unregistered designs, but only 3D designs (products and furniture but not graphics or illustrations) and is only effective in the UK,” he said.
“So while creating a new crime doubtless sends out the right message – and hopefully makes serial copiers less likely to offend in future – the practical effect would seem to be minimal.”
The government is also introducing changes to ownership so that a commissioned design is now owned by the designer, not the commissioner, as it had previously. The proposed changes can be read in full here.
In Milan last month, designers including Marcel Wanders and Tom Dixon told Dezeen in a movie (below) how they are responding to the phenomenon of copying. “It’s become an increasingly big problem for us,” said Dixon. “People can steal ideas and produce them almost faster than we can now.”
Australian office Kennedy Nolan Architects used recycled bricks, concrete and rough-sawn timber to construct this courtyard house near the beach in Melbourne.
Merricks Beach House functions as a holiday home and is available to rent on a short-term basis, so Kennedy Nolan Architects was asked to create a flexible building with a structure durable enough to accommodate regularly changing occupants.
The single-storey house is arranged over three staggered levels that respond to the natural slope of the site. Rooms are laid out on a U-shaped plan, creating a large courtyard on the western side of the building.
Half of the house is given over to social spaces, on the assumption that temporary residents spend more time entertaining and are likely to have children around. To the south, a kitchen leads out to a dedicated barbecue deck, while a sunken living room opens out to the courtyard and a “bunk room” can be used as a second lounge.
Two bedrooms are lined up along the eastern side of the building and sit beside a single bathroom. There’s no need for much storage, so each room contains just the basic furnishings.
The recycled clay bricks were used to construct the lowest sections of the house’s walls and are visible both inside and outside the building. In most places they are painted white, but the architects left two unfinished circles to reveal the original colour.
Timber wraps over the tops and corners of the walls, while windows are slotted into gaps between the two different materials.
Read on for more information from Kennedy Nolan Architects:
Merricks Beach House
This small house at Merricks Beach has been designed as a weekender that is available for short term rental. It needed to be an economical build and tough enough for the knocks of a rental market. It is two blocks from the beach. It has no views and had no existing trees on the site.
There are the usual line-up of rooms required, and in this instance it is a modest list; but what becomes a more interesting conversation is how you live differently in the weekender.
» No one needs to ‘own’ a bedroom » No one needs to shower and leave quickly in the morning » What you need to store is completely different » You arrive and unpack; you leave & pack » You spend more time with others; having guests stay over is common » There always seems to be more children than adults! » It is a place to enjoy each other
A courtyard typology ensures maximum privacy and access to northern winter sun, yet in this straightforward floor plan a number of ‘in-between’ spaces have been considered.
The bunk room which is located on the north edge of the internal courtyard has no doors and the king single bunks sit within their own alcove. This spacefeels dark and private and becomes a second living room when the house swells with people. Within this space thereare different places to be. There is no need for walls or doors. Light forms the threshold.
The coastal weekender is not just a summer dream. In winter the hearth is central to this house. Located between the kitchen and living room, a slow combustion fireplace defines another ‘in-between’ space. There is time here in the colder months to pull up a chair, chat or read. In summer this space dissolves into the open corner of the central deck.
A slight fall across the site allows for the house to have 3 levels. The living pit sits below the central timber deck. It is a soft floor that allows you to be low and look out over the skillion roof to the trees in the surrounding area. The pit edge becomes another of these in-between places. It is a place to sit and wide enough for a futon for an afternoon nap in the winter sun. The edge curves to become the hearth for the fire, finishing in a ledge for the television.
The materials of the build are a big part of what this house is about. It is not a precise build. It feels raw and tough. A language of masonry, concrete and timber was developed. The white painted brickwork to both interior and exterior walls is never punctured by windows. They are always walls, solid and straightforward. There are two moments where a circle has been left, telling the story of the recycled red bricks that the house is made from. The structural concrete slab, rough-sawn timber cladding and concrete block screen wall have been expressed with similar simplicity.
Floor plan
Location: Merricks Beach, Melbourne, Australia Architects: Kennedy Nolan Architects Project type: New house Completion Date: May 2012 Site area: 850sqm Floor area: 155sqm Project Team: Rachel Nolan, Patrick Kennedy, Michael Macleod
Milan 2013: Dutch designer Bertjan Pot has created lightweight chairs for furniture brand Arco that have wooden seats with edges curved tightly over the aluminium frames.
Designed for Dutch furniture brand Arco, Buzz by Bertjan Pot combines 3D-formed, wafer-thin veneers with tubular aluminium frames in order to make the chairs as lightweight as possible.
The ultra-thin veneers allow the seat to fold closely around the frame in all directions.
Available in beech or oak, the chairs come with legs in a variety of colours.
Buzz forms part of a range called Table Manners that features tables, chairs, cabinets and other small pieces of furniture, all of which were presented at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan last month.
Dutch studio Barcode Architects has renovated a house in Belgium to make room to display a collection of hunting trophies.
Named Markthuis, the two-storey residence has been reconfigured to create a central atrium, helping to bring more daylight onto a double-height “exhibition wall” of paintings and antlers.
Barcode Architects replaced the original staircase with a freestanding wooden structure that folds back and forth through the atrium between clear-glass balustrades.
A frosted glass wall separates the staircase from the entrance lobby just in front, where a bearskin rug is spread across the floor.
Beyond the atrium, most of the original partitions have been removed to create a large open-plan space on both storeys. At ground-floor level, this room functions as reception room for entertaining guests, while the floor above is used as a general living and dining room.
“From any point in the villa there is a clear view out, to the sky and the green,” says Barcode Architects. “Combined with the ‘lofty’ floor plan, it delivers the house with a unique transparency and quality.”
Here’s some more information from Barcode Architects:
Barcode Architects ‘Markthuis’ is completed
Barcode Architects design for the extension and renovation of ‘Markthuis’ is completed. The design is driven by the desire to optimise the daylighting in the house and the wish of the client to reserve a prominent place for his large collection of art and hunting trophies.
In order to maximize the spatial experience most of the interior walls are removed to remain with one open living space extending over the first two floors of the villa. Downstairs are comfortable spaces for receiving guests while on the upper first floor more intimate and private areas with an open plan kitchen, study, and lounge area are situated.
A large atrium connects the two layers and provides space for an exclusive, double high exhibition wall with an impressive amount of artefacts. The wooden staircase is placed as a freestanding piece of furniture within the vide, on one side guided by a 6 meter tall piece of glass. The glazed element separates the kitchen and the entrance lobby from the rest of the house and offers exciting plays of light and shadow.
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