Hasta La Ideas

Cabinet made of 17 old doors

pimg alt=”” src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/2010/07/endofworld-instruction.jpg” width=”468″ height=”388″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” //p

pemA still from the “Protect and Survive” animation./em/p

pAs designers of products and services, it might be argued that we tend toward a more optimistic view of the future of the world and human behaviour within it. But might we also gain valuable insight from considering how less perfect futures (or, indeed, presents) are crafted, and does this way of considering the people we design for and the world we inhabit have any practicable benefit? /p

pMy own interest in this topic comes from a panel I moderated recently at the SxSW Interactive festival. I opened this discussion with a short video of the animated film emWhen the Wind Blows/em, based on a graphic novel of the same name by Raymond Briggs. The story tells of an elderly couple living in a remote house in England who are dealing with a nuclear war and its aftermath. It’s one of many science fiction stories of near-futures that sound warnings of what might happen to humanitymdash;emBrave New World/em and em1984/em being two of the more obvious examples of this. A new adjective to describe exactly these types of narratives has come into use recently that I rather lovemdash;”ballardian,” meaning something that evokes the conditions of dystopian modernity in the work of the late J. G. Ballard. Though they may appear to have a bleak view of our future, these ballardian visions can serve as rich sources of inspiration for our work. /p

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pemA still from emWhen the Wind Blows/em./em/p

pRaymond Briggs took the inspiration for his graphic novelmdash;both in terms of the subject matter and the overall tone of futilitymdash;from a series of pamphlets and animations produced by the government of the United Kingdom to educate British citizens about what to do in the event of a nuclear conflict, entitled ememProtect and Survive/em/em. /p

div class=”article_quote”When faced with an unsolvable problem, how can we still be effective?/div

pSeen as designed artefacts, the emProtect and Survive/em publications are fascinating. Faced with the brutal reality of what would happen to a civilian population in the event of a nuclear attack, the creators of emProtect and Survive/em must have been faced with a hugely difficult set of challenges, which one can certainly see reflected in the final leaflets and films themselves (some of these films can be viewed at the a href=”http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/1964to1979/filmpage_warnings.htm”National Archive site/a (pay attention to the soothing voice of the narrator and the cartoon-like visuals in particular). The advice to citizens on how to survive a nuclear onslaught and the subsequent radioactive fall-out is presented with the paternalistic voice of a government convincing a populace that there really is nothing to worry about, while most of the instructions would in truth offer little to no protectionmdash;”keep calm and carry on,” indeed. The final frame of emWhen the Wind Blows/em, depicting the two protagonists slowly dying of radiation sickness under the lean-to they have constructed according to government directions, remains in the mind a long time, and the poignancy of Briggs’ story stems largely from the way in which he depicts the inadequacy of this government advice in the face of such destruction. /p

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pemPage from “Protect and Survive,” showing instructions for how to construct a fall-out shelter./em/p

pBut consider what the discussions behind the creation of emProtect and Survive/em must have been like. Knowing that it was impossible to create something that would truly help a population in the event of nuclear attack (because, really, nothing could). What might the next best outcome be? Perhaps an attempt to alleviate mass panic and civil disorder by providing people with simple but time-consuming tasks to concentrate on, keeping them occupied, proactive, and hopeful. emProtect and Survive/em succeeds in this, even if that hope is untenable. Faced with a potentially inevitable catastrophic set of circumstances, the designers embodied principles of pragmatism over idealism in the artefacts they created, all the while working within a realization that some problems cannot be solved. This might be hard for us to come to terms with as designers, but emProtect and Survive/em demonstrates that it’s certainly a useful space for us to explore. When faced with an unsolvable problem, how can we still be effective?br /
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div.a href=”http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/centrallondonmap.jpg”img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-1909″ title=”centrallondonmap” src=”http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/centrallondonmap.jpg” alt=”” width=”700″ height=”429″ //a/div
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div id=”_mcePaste”The exemplary specimen of what were labelled, in the early 1980s, the #8216;chattering classes#8217;, was emIslington Man/em (*). Both terms described a certain type of city-dwelling British liberal, self-assuredly spouting enlightened opinions on how to improve society at large, and indeed the world in general. One of the early highlights in Islington Man#8217;s existence was the release in 1984 of the Band Aid charity single emDo They Know It#8217;s Christmas/em? After that, not much more was heard of him. Indeed he may have become extinct. Maybe for lack of an Islington Woman./div
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divIn this new century, opinions #8211; high-minded, interesting, or otherwise #8211; are exchanged online rather than at the dinner table. Chatter has a new gold standard: Twitter. The microblogging site, best resumed as #8220;the web#8217;s text message service#8221; (at max. 140 characters per emtweet/em), is only four years old, but already counts over 100 million subscribers. These generate 750 tweets per second, or 65 million per day, or 4 billion in this year#8217;s first quarter alone./div
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divIt#8217;s not yet clear if the twittering classes of today are direct descendants or rather more distant relatives of their chattering antecedents. But this map does show that the HQ of blah has moved: Islington Man has yielded to the Soho Twit./div
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div id=”_mcePaste”This emtweetograph/em translates location and amplitude of twitter traffic in London (**) to a format we instinctively understand: a contoured map. It borrows from your basic standard relief map the isolines (each connecting locations with the same altitude) and the range of colours (bluish green, brown, beige through white for ascending altitude), in the understanding that higher altitudes chime with peaks in Twitter traffic. London#8217;s localities are renamed to reflect the highs and lows of this nifty, post-orographic representation./div
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div id=”_mcePaste”The centre of the map, and of London#8217;s tweeting community, is the area of Central London comprising Soho Mountain and Picadilly Rock. Traffic (or altitude) radiates out from that summit fairly evenly through Westminster Rock, Waterloo Hang, Hydepark Steep, Victoria Point and Smithfield Moor. The even pattern is interrupted by a small elevation labelled Liverpool Street Hill to the east, Hackney Downs Hill further north-east, Peckham Crag to the south-east and a freestanding hill complex to the west (Holland Park Hill, White City Peak and Earls Court Hill). A smaller, single elevation to the south is called Battersea Hill./div
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pa href=”http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/londonoverview.jpg”img class=”alignright size-medium wp-image-1910″ style=”float:right;border:0 initial initial;” title=”londonoverview” src=”http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/londonoverview.jpg?w=300″ alt=”” width=”300″ height=”280″ //a/p
div id=”_mcePaste”The overall appearance of London on this map with a radius of 30 km is of an island set in an encircling #8211; and indeed circular #8211; sea. This is reminiscent of the ancient Greek world view (discussed in a href=”http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/288-okeanos-and-oikoumene-homer%E2%80%99s-snowdome/”#288/a)./div
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divThe fantastic London tweetograph and similar ones detailing the local Twittersphere in New York, Paris and Munich were produced by Fabian Neuhaus of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (a href=”http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/”CASA/a) at University College London (a href=”http://www.ucl.ac.uk/”UCL/a). Called emNew City Landscape Maps/em, they can be seen in greater detail a href=”http://urbantick.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-city-landscapes-interactive.html”here/a on Mr Neuhaus#8217; a href=”http://urbantick.blogspot.com/”Urban Tick/a blog and on the a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/40984848@N04/”tweetography subset/a of his a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/40984848@N04/”Flickr pages/a./div
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divemMany thanks to Tom Anderson,  Alex den Haan, Jedidjah de Vries, Jon Morris, Matt Schneider and Joel Winten for sending in this map, which was also discussed /ema href=”http://londonist.com/2010/06/londons_twitter_traffic_mapped_as_c.php”emhere/em/aem on /ema href=”http://londonist.com/”emLondonist/em/aem and /ema href=”http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1290777/The-London-Twitter-o-Meter-Boffins-map-city-tweet-tweet.html”emhere/em/aem at the /ema href=”http://www.dailymail.co.uk/”emDaily Mail/em/aem./em/div
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div id=”_mcePaste”#8212;#8212;#8212;#8212;#8212;#8212;#8211;/div
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div id=”_mcePaste”(*) Note the slightly derogatory tone in both labels, the former referring to the inane nature of the communication thus described, the latter a pastiche of Piltdown Man, Java Man and other eagerly studied species of early humans (some of which turned out to be fakes)./div
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div id=”_mcePaste”(**) Based on data for May 2010, taking into account tweets sent from mobile devices that include geospatial information at time of message./divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/bigthink/blogs/strange-maps/~4/4BwIhh7yGkw” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Architect Philippe Schmit has completed an extension to a Luxembourg art gallery, clad in perforated brass panels. (more…)

A paper bracelet that anyone can download and build, like a children’s game, using glue and scissors. It’s a really special and distinct accessory, to..