active social plastic

Via the fabulous Mimi Zeiger, founder and editor of Loud Paper (and who was on the panel on architecture I moderated at 2007 SXSW): an exhibition about the more recent history on architectural zines of the 1990s and beyond. The exhibition and event pick up on little magazines of architecture past the 1960s, a period neatly chronicled and curated by the Princeton architecture students a few years ahead of me in Clip Stamp Fold. I look forward to it!

A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production
January 8-February 28, 2009
Studio-X

In the 1990s, zines such as Lackluster, Infiltration, loud paper, Dodge City Journal and Monorail subverted traditional trade and academic architecture magazine trends by crossing the built environment with art, music, politics and pop culture--and by deliberately retaining and cultivating an underground presence. Much has been made of that decade's zine phenomenon--inspiring academic studies, international conferences and DIY workshops--yet little attention has been paid to architecture zine culture specifically, or its resonance within architectural publishing today.

A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production does both. Rather than attempting to present an exhaustive retrospective of architecture zine culture, it highlights complete runs of several noted zines that began in the nineties. The exhibition also features contemporary publications that continue to draw inspiration from the self-publishing tradition, such as Pin-Up, Sumoscraper, and Thumb.
 
To launch this exhibit, curator Mimi Zeiger has published a new issue of loud paper and organized a party and panel discussion, including:

Luke Bulman, Thumb
Felix Burrichter, Pin-Up
Stephen Duncombe, NYU professor and author of Dream and Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture
Andrew Wagner, Dodge City Journal and currently, American Craft
Mimi Zeiger, loud paper

Moderated by Kazys Varnelis, AUDC

When: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 7 pm
Free and open to the public
RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu

Studio-X, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, New York, NY 10014

Exhibition hours: Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6 pm

Contact: Gavin Browning, Programming Coordinator, Studio-X, (212) 989 2398, gdb2106@columbia.edu

[Studio-X is a downtown studio for experimental research and design run by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.]

Download A Few Zines Press Release

I've joined interactions magazine, published by the ACM, as a contributing editor. It's a great crew to join, with several friends and co-conspirators on deck: Jon Kolko, Dave Cronin, Marc Rettig, Mark Vanderbeeken, Alex Wright, Hugh Dubberly, Steve Portigal and Elizabeth Churchill. The March/April issue is the first where first where I've written and edited pieces.

In the meantime, the November/December issue is outstanding, with features including "Designing Games: Why And How" by Sus Lundgren, "Design: A Better Path to Interaction," by Nathan Shedroff, "User Experience Design for Ubiquitous Computing" by my very dear friend, Mike Kuniavsky, and Rich Ling's "Taken for Granted: The Infusion of the Mobile Phone in Society."

My big project -- possibly undergirding my dissertation in a year: Postal services and pneumatic tube systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in Paris. I'm reading these services in terms of their urban interfaces, their material qualities and the interest in the 1870s-1890s of physical networks across cities. Paris is interesting because of an explosion of postal and telegraph products and services, the response to the siege of the city (Balloon Post!), and the shift from electric to material form to someone's doorstep in terms of message delivery. The Hôtel des Postes fascinates because of its ingenious interfaces within the building and its processing capability; the pneumatic tubes are fascinating because they make manifest the force of air and use it to literally propel information across a building or a city.

During the same four-year period when the word "interface" was first used, in which the notion of networks proliferated, Julien Guadet (1834-1908) designed the Hôtel des Postes (1880- 1884) in Paris, the central office for the French postal network. An enormous civic architectural undertaking, the Hôtel des Postes sorted, moved, marked, placed in sacks, audited, loaded and transported letters, periodicals and packets at high speeds, before sending them out again to their destinations. For Guadet and bureaucratic chronicler of Paris Maxime Du Camp, La Poste represented a living system that they described in anthropomorphic terms. Guadet described the postal system as epileptically fast; du Camp compared it to a heart that "draws in its correspondence and forces it back out to distribute in every direction." Beyond these biological comparisons, however, Guadet designed the Hôtel des Postes to operate as an ordinateur--a computer processor--atop the postal network. The Hôtel des Postes represents a nascent, modern approach to designing buildings, one that translated organizational, functional requirements into form.


Fueling communication through pipes that ran under cities at speeds of up to 50 km per hour, the pneumatic post served as an urban subterranean communication network from the 1850s into the early 21st century, first in Europe, then the United States, and by the early 20th century, South America and Australia. Depending on the city, pneumatic tubes shuttled telegrams or letters and packages, both commercial and personal, as an antidote to increasing urban congestion and traffic on the streets above. Messages delivered by pneumatic dispatch surfaced in post offices and train stations, where messengers carried them by bicycle (or later, motorcycle or truck) from the post or telegraph branch to their final destinations.   For commercial buildings, pneumatic tubes offered ready communication systems between and within any enterprises that required the movement of receipts and paper. At once buried and tangled, emerging into the interiors of buildings and offering varied interfaces for its users, the pneumatic tube presents an enigmatic image of modernity--the merger of construction and communication.

Pneumatic networks preceded electrification, first powered by steam and only by electricity in the early 20th century. They enjoyed a long lifespan. Implemented first in London in 1853 as an information conduit between the London Stock Exchange and the Central Post Office, the technology quickly transferred to other cities. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865; Paris built its first pneumatic networks in 1866 and began public Poste Pneumatique in 1879; Philadelphia followed suit for first class post in 1893 and New York in 1897. Urban tube networks existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in operation until 1953 in New York, 1984 in Paris and 2002 in Prague (where it was only taken out of service by a flood that destroyed much of the tube infrastructure).

I must admit, I'm surprised to find myself heading toward a 19th century dissertation topic, and at that, one that deals with France. But working on tubes and postal services lets me explore the things that I love about tangible networks and interfaces. They make me realize just how much we have to learn from these old and often forgotten modes of transmission.

Reading through the August 1929 Dun's International Review ("A Journal for the Promotion of Trade" that ran until 1931), I ran into this editorial. Interesting to see US trade seeing the notion of trend and styling as something that needed to be controlled and standardized in order to help produce profits, but also in order to be profitable. It reminds me of contemporary conversations on style and trending (Zara, anyone?)

Style in Industry

Manufacturers must be on their mettle these days to meet the demands of a smart and quick-thinking public. This public knows what it wants and keeps an eye open for new trends in style and design in all kinds of articles, ranging from the daitiest of garments to kitchen stoves and industrial machinery. So important have manufacturers found these factors that some have established departments to watch movements in style and design and develop new ones themselves, when the occasion warrants.

Recognizing that many manufacturers are injecting the element of beauty into even the most common articles of daily use, a survey of this general movement has been made by the Policyholders' Service Bureau of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the results of which have been published in a brochure under the title, 'The Use of Style and Design in Industry.' In discussing the general situation surrounding the trend toward developing style and design, the booklet states that, although new styles and designs are absorbing a greater proportion of production, and despite th fact that these new styles and designs are appearing at an accelerated pace, investigation shows that apparently there has been very little developed in the way of a regular procedures to control, coordinate and direct that production of these new styles and designs so that the undertaking shall be a profitable one. The act is appreciated that the adoption of new styles and designs cannot be placed on a mathematical basis, but the risks now taken by American business are inordinately great.

American business has long been characterized by the freest exchange of information, even among competitors [...] But the literature on styling is scanty and  fragmentary. If progress is to be made in the successful utilization of style and design as factors in producing profits, the first step would seem to be the consideration of hte styling process, as it is undertaken in various types of industrial establishments. Just how is the styling developed? How are styles launched and how are they controlled once in production? It will not be long then before best practices and standards are developed in a field that is still open to guesswork and snap judgment.

A version of this piece was published last spring in Manifold, published by Rice School of Architecture. It's a review of a lecture Neil Denari gave a year ago at Princeton titled "Shrinkwrapping Vague Things."  In his studio last fall at Princeton, "Air Tight," Denari's students designed a showcase for potential buyers of the Airbus A380: a tightly controlled experience, completely interior and wrapped around the Airbus.

At the lecture and in our dinner conversation afterwards, I was struck by that Denari's approached reminded me of what interaction designers do, from research and photographic explorations, down to crafting the tiny details. It's difficult to do on all scales, the macro to the micro, but Denari manages with aplomb. "Design at All Scales" is the firm's slogan. (We also got to geek out about the line-ups for the Golden Palominos and Public Image Limited, but that's a different story.)
- - -
Immaculate Surface and Covert Construction

Neil Denari knows how to interact with his audience, how to externalize the projects, how to gauge the room, how to wield an image. He can argue about the lineup of 80s bands that you probably don't know. Above all, he is a deft architect with a broad portfolio of built projects, one who practices design at every scale. Denari's November 7, 2007 lecture at Princeton featured his scalar acrobatics and cultural ergonomics: the process of organizing into place a shrinkwrapping of vague things.

Ankles, eyes, hands, codes, software

Denari frames arguments with photographs. The images operate on a Lilliputian level, his lens catching young adults in Shibuya on a sultry August night. From the street-grade vantage, he catches the ankles of his subjects as the camera looks up at them against a black night sky. They are illuminated by small signs and doorways on a side street, and by Shibuya's grandest interface: the Qfront with its famous living billboard (the one you remember from Lost in Translation, with the walking elephant). The photographs capture moments at different scales. These instances shift from the body, to the door, to the sign, to the street, to the billboard. They catch people's interactions with devices, and yet the devices stand in juxtaposition with the spaces they inhabit: a boy holds a game controller in a crowded arcade; a photocopier backs against a sea of blue cubicles opposite a religious shrine. It is the relationship of the hand, the eye, and the billboard, a triangular interaction, micro-to-mini-to-macro, that Denari brilliantly catches.

Denari's moves reflect the approach of interaction design. This discipline is the creation of the products, systems and interfaces (usually electronic) with which people engage. It developed in the early 1980s out of the desire for the interior behavior of a computer to meet the molded exterior of its hardware. Doing this effectively requires an understanding of several levels of interiority: human behavior, system function, and site limitation, to name a few. Could we see his projects, especially his interior renovations, as a new type of software that brings many interactions into focus?

Pristine, in effect

Denari twice mentions Antonioni's Blow-Up during his lecture. This isn't a surprise, given the ways his zooming in and zooming out reveals what is not available upon first glance. MUFG Nagoya (a private client center for one of the world's largest banks)uses separations of scant millimeters on panels and joints on its 28-meter black stainless steel façade; zygotic shapes forming into circles and then lighting for the entrance; tangerine custom furniture for the lobby.

But zooming out to the High Line 23, a residential building on New York's High Line, Denari occupies a different dimension altogether. Here, it is a matter of hacking building code. Each facet of the "leftover" site the 13-story residential tower will occupy is won through negotiation. "Zoning x Desire = What it takes to build in Manhattan," quips the DMNA website. The building is the manifestation of these interstices. For the projects he showed, the typical plan and program are straightforward, nearly boring. It is always section that shows the potential and kinetic energy; it is the ceiling plan that shows the ulterior motive for circulation of the body and the eye. In construction, the elements meld together smoothly, vacuum-formed and glossy.

Or do they? With the 1956 House of the Future, Peter and Alison Smithson created a plastic house with undulating, white, pristine surfaces--at least, in effect. In reality, the Smithsons achieved the surface effect through layers of plaster on plywood: the result of detailed crafting and not of space-age manufacture.  As Denari zeroes in on the ceiling detail of the MUFG Ginza banking branch, he first shows the underlying metal framing. He then notes the moment where the wooden surface bends to meet the white, planar pathways of the ceiling.

But here, appearance and construction differ. Handworked stucco achieves the effect, not technology. It is similar to the prototyping tools industrial and automotive designers use as they model the form factor: they sculpt it from clay. Denari wins with cleverness, for knowing the right design tool for the job. When technology can't offer pristine effects, it doesn't matter whether the year is 1956 or 2007. The hand completes the curve and the eye is none the wiser.
 
Shrinkwrapping vague things, then, commands an understanding of motion beneath the surface, bringing things into alignment, the structures the film clings to. Denari plies these things on all levels in his conversations as well as his buildings. It is eye, hand and billboard, the laws and politics governing the site as much as it is 80s avant-garde rock and a contrail connecting LA to Tokyo. Through all its scales of operation, it is the dance of interaction that sculpts his immaculate surfaces of covert construction.

(Thanks to Shawn Protz and Enrique Ramirez for their insights and to the editors and staff at Manifold.)

One of my long-standing projects is understanding the social use of communication technology and how space is changed and structured by these interactions. One of these projects in particular examined how people share mobile phones in urban India, shaped by constraints and contexts, born out of a study I did at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore in 2006. Two articles resulted from the work, one about to be published, the other published in spring 2008.

I wrote "Beyond the Personal and Private: Modes of Mobile Phone Sharing in Urban India" with Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India. It will be published later this month in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices (edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell). Here, I looked at sharing in a number of contexts and discovered that across class, caste and gender, mobile phone sharing is pervasive, but constraints (money, family mores, gender, literacy, adjacency) determine how the phone will be shared in different spatial contexts (we looked at domestic, out and about, the marketplace and village-to-urban social ecologies).

With Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Carolyn Wei, we wrote "'Express Yourself' and 'Stay Together: The Indian Middle Class Family" in the Handbook on Mobile Communication Studies, edited by James Katz. It discusses of the effect of the mobile phone on several domestic situations: home finances, romance and the domestic boundary. 

Researching this project opened me up to new ways of understanding how mobile technology can fix spaces that seem transitory -- like a marketplace --  or how it calls attention to the porous nature of other spaces -- like the domestic boundary. It leaves open areas I'd very much like to research: issues of trust, of porosity, of connection across broad social networks in the traditional sense, a reconsideration of the fixed and mobile in a marketplace.

From our design session Sunday morning at Design Engaged: the network of bacon.

"There is almost nothing to build, and if we can really build somewhere, we do it to live. Or maybe you're lucky enough to be carrying out a good contract? I'm finding the practice to be cloying, and in principle, you all seem to be feeling the same way. Honestly: it is completely good that today nothing's being 'built.' Things can thus mature, we can collect our strength, and when it begins again, then we'll know our goals and be strong enough to protect our residents from dangerous adhesion or degeneracy. Let us consciously be imaginary architects."
--Bruno Taut

November 1919 and the post-World War I situation in Germany was dire. It would only get worse as hyperinflation skyrocketed for the next four years. While architects wanted to build, they found they could only educate and design. It was when the Bauhaus began and it was the site of a visionary exchange about the promise of architecture -- not as it was built but how it would be imagined. The group of 13 included Walter Gropius, Bruno and Max Taut, Hans Scharoun; they imagined the possibility of using film to express their ideas; they exchanged images and poetry and words.

(It also, amusingly, has a Myspace page.)

I'm a few days out from the fabulous third Design Engaged, so well-organized by Andrew Otwell, Jenn Bove, Boris Anthony and Mouna Andraos. I've talked to so many people at the event about things grand and banal, and now, I've reimmersed in school's more theoretical issues of critique, history and theory.

All of these things leave me thinking about the nature of design as it seemed to be defined by the community surrounding Design Engaged.

There is a real privileging of Making, to the extent that I feel I should capitalize the word. Making includes building something, prototyping, manufacturing a product. Making seems to be particularly valued when it results in something being not only prototyped but manufactured. It relies on tools and materials. Other things go into Making, like sketching, molding, and wiring. But Making does not seem to include writing, researching, or interpreting.

Design is the endeavor of form and forming. What to design and how to do it is the primary, vital question of the designer. Form takes place not only by work in three dimensions and by machines, but through conversation, interpretations and argument, by pencils and words and feedback. Since cybernetics, design has taken on networks and feedback, as a correcting mechanism, to define design problems, to introduce possibilities of the agency of objects.

Design can encompass the forming of things that never get built. This is the realm of sketch, drawing, rendering, model, maquette. All of these involve some manner of imagination, conception, figuration. Their formation may may be pinned up on a wall to be critiqued, may see their way into stacks of construction drawings or business plans. It may also stop at any moment: left in a sketchbook or hard drive, balled up after being spit from a plotter, left in a pile of old models, rejected in a competition, turned down by a client. If the instances of design only matter in their manufacture or construction, much -- or even most -- of design and architectural history must be written off.

The history of design since the founding of the Bauhaus (1918-1933) tackles the questions of building and making within a theoretical and built context. In the education and work of designer, there are many stops on the way: learnings of color and form, practice in a specific field, discovery of how all the fields converge to make the work of art. But also, this same trajectory tries to make sense of itself -- to perform, to write, to photograph, to document, to share.

Does Making leave out interpretation or sensemaking? If it excludes these activities, what does that say in turn for the nature of design? And where does it leave those of us for whom design involves these other activities?

I'm reminded of an e.e. cummings poem:

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                          A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

I am in Montreal for Design Engaged 3, my third of three.

Four years ago, I was applying to graduate school, teaching again at Ivrea, and beginning to make a major life change into what I'm doing now. Three years ago, I had just begun my master's degree and was spun up about the possibilities of history and theory, of being a student, of wanting to share it. Today, I'm in my fourth year of it and am learning how to meld the world(s) I came from and the one(s) I'm in now.

These gatherings with this expanding and contracting group of people, first in Amsterdam, then in Berlin, now in Montreal, have been a vital community for me. It's wonderful to come back to this group, bounce the unfinished, meet the new, embrace the old, eat, drink, talk, listen. I'm delighted to be here again.