Delancey Underground | image via nymag.com

LES LOW LINE
The Lower East Side might be getting a new park. The proposed project, the Delancey Underground, would repurpose the the abandoned underground Williamsburg Bridge Railway Terminal in an effort to inject some green space into one of the least green neighborhoods in the city and to join the ranks of the High Line in reimagining disused infrastructure. The subterranean wonderland lit by “remote skylights” would provide a green space “nearly the size of Gramercy Park” at the base of the bridge. The project, conceived by architect James Ramsey, PopTech executive Dan Barasch and money manager R. Boykin Curry IV, was presented to Community Board 3 on Wednesday evening. According to DNAInfo, the presentation “wowed” the packed audience. According to Curbed, skepticism abounded, despite the seductive renderings, about keeping the park safe and well lit, how it would be funded, or how the space would be programmed to best serve the community. Check out more renderings on Architizer and read more in New York Magazine.

On the Go Travel Station | image via popsci.com

TOUCHSCREEN TRAVEL
The MTA has a new magic map trip planner, the first of what they are calling their On-the-Go Travel Stations, now installed at the Bowling Green subway station in Manhattan. The Station is a 47-inch touchscreen that allows riders to access up-to-the-minute service announcements, plan trips and navigate the subway map. The upper portion of the screen is devoted to subway information, with clearly identifiable buttons for Service Status, Elevators, MTA Maps and Key Destinations. Service alerts scroll under the interactive portion, while the lower third of the screen is devoted to advertisements. For more coverage, including a video of the Bowling Green Travel Station, check out Popular Science.

TOOLS AT SCHOOLS
Engaging in a design process taps creativity, communication skills and general understanding of how things work. So why isn’t it introduced to students earlier in their education? That question is the basis for Tools at Schools, a partnership between design firm Aruliden and furniture manufacturer Bernhardt Design. The program asked 44 eighth graders from The School at Columbia University how they would redesign the basic components of classroom furniture: the chair, the desk and the locker. The students went through the entire design process: researching existing products, identifying what they saw as lacking, sketching and modeling their ideas and presenting them to representatives from Bernhardt and Aruliden. The designers took ideas from each team and turned them around into 3D models. From there, the students were invited to the furniture factory in South Carolina to see how designs become realities. The final products were presented at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair earlier this month and an exhibit of the furniture will open at the Museum of Arts and Design on October 6th. Read more of the coverage at Smart Planet.

Solar village, Solar Decathlon 2011 | Photo by Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy

SOLAR DECATHLON HITS DC
The 2011 Solar Decathlon has hit DC! After designing and building their prototypes on home turf, the nineteen teams began final construction of the houses in West Potomac Park on the 14th. Starting today, the houses are open to the public and judging has already begun. Only a few hours in, Team Maryland is in the lead, though Team New York (one of three New York/New Jersey-area teams participating in the event) has taken an early lead in the People’s Choice category. The houses will be on view through October 2nd. Keep tabs on scores and standings here and, for readers in the DC area, find more information about visiting the installation on the Solar Decathlon website.

EVENTS AND TO-DOs

PROJECT NEON: THE SHOW! In February, Kirsten Hively told us about her ongoing effort to document and celebrate the neon signage of New York City. Now, complete with a fetching new neon sign of its own, Project Neon has been turned into an exhibition, opening tonight, September 23 from 7-10pm, at Brooklyn’s City Reliquary. The show features several dozen of Hively’s photographs and marks the release of her new, free Project Neon iPhone app. For more on Project Neon, revisit our feature about the project, check out the website, or see a preview of the exhibit at the Times’ City Room.

DUMBO ARTS: The annual DUMBO Arts Festival starts tonight! Rain or shine, head towards the Brooklyn waterfront to check out three days of events with over 500 artists. Visit artists’ studios, watch performances by musicians, dancers, poets and circus artists throughout the neighborhood, commune with instrument makers in workshops, listen to tech gurus talk about the latest advances and join walking tours to hear little-known stories of the neighborhood. The festival runs from tonight, Friday, September 23, through Sunday, September 25. Check out the full schedule of events here.

LIVING AS FORM: Also opening tonight is Creative Time’s new project Living as Form, which explores the intersection of socially engaged visual art, architecture, urban design, theater and activism, just to name a few disciplines. Bringing together 25 curators, taking place both in Essex Street Market building and the surrounding neighborhood, the project will feature over 100 socially engaged projects from around the world. An exhibition and related programming will be presented through October 12, all of which will lead up to a book, scheduled for publication in January 2012. Check out the schedule of events, as well as more about Living as Form here.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

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If you’re reading this, chances are you are into cities or you are into design. Most likely, you think both are pretty interesting. But “urban” plus “design” does not necessarily equate to urban design, at least not as the term is understood in professional circles. Certainly, designers have helped to determine the physical form of cities throughout the history of human settlement, but in this country, a specific professional expertise or body of knowledge applied directly to the design of urban space has been a long time in coming.

The individuals we most commonly associate with the design of cities came from a variety of professional and educational backgrounds. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who oversaw the modernization of Paris in the 1850s and ’60s, was a lifelong civil servant, educated in law. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, responsible for the original design of Washington D.C., and Ildefons Cerdà, responsible for the 19th Century expansion of Barcelona, were civil engineers. Le Corbusier, Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the new capitals of Chandigarh, India and Brasilia, Brazil, were all trained as architects. And then, of course, are the countless designers of the streets, plazas, parks, campuses and interstitial spaces that are no less designed than the buildings of the city.

Some date the “birth” of the urban design discipline to a 1956 conference at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design organized by Josep Lluis Sert, or to the establishment of the first graduate degree programs in the subject that emerged at places like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania a few years later, or to the raft of seminal texts on the subject published in that period, including Chermayeff and Alexander’s Community and Privacy (1960), Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), Mumford’s The City in History (1961), Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Cullen’s Townscape (1961), Spreiregen’s Urban Design (1965) and Bacon’s Design of Cities (1967).

In the five decades since, the period in which degrees in urban design have existed in American higher education, urban design qualifications have required students to have pre-existing professional degrees in architecture, landscape architecture or, to a lesser extent, urban planning. This year, Parsons The New School for Design is launching the nation’s first undergraduate degree in urban design, which prompted us to ask the program’s director, Victoria Marshall, what exactly is being taught and what exactly it means for the training of a new generation of urbanists with a different relationship to the urban realm than the designers that came before. Marshall says she is most interested in teaching “how to see the city as a designer” rather than, say, how to design the city or its spaces. And from the diverse coursework offered, the education the program provides is, indeed, much closer to an overview of urbanism — the history, the theory, the social science — mixed with fundamentals of design — section, plan, model, 2D layout — than it is to a foundation course in how to propose physical interventions to shape the constituent elements of urban space. With that in mind, there’s a chance a degree offering such as this just might respond to the tremendous civic interest in cities and how they work, especially on the part of young people less and less interested in the traditional disciplinary alignments of the 20th century.

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A CONVERSATION WITH VICTORIA MARSHALL

UO: How do you define urban design?
Victoria Marshall: I think I define it differently than how others tend to do so. I think of urban design in terms of comfort with multi-scalar thinking, the ability to link the big and the small, from large landscapes to small urban interventions.

I’ve done a lot of research with ecologists, working a lot to translate ecology theory into urban theory: how do we read cities as ecosystems? Whether I’m teaching a class on building a little garden or conducting a big studio looking at the Meadowlands as a site, these topics translate across scales.

Other definitions of urban design might link it more to urban planning – to the writing of reports or codes – or to the scenographic presentation of how an architectural project in an urban context might appear for the purposes of the real estate market, for example. For me, urban design is neither a subset nor a superset of other categories. I’m more interested to talk about what the work is than to define the discipline.

A Google image search for urban design yields a combination of architectural plans, streetscape renderings and aerial photographs.

Tell me a little bit about your educational and professional background.
I studied landscape architecture as an undergraduate in Australia, where I’m from. In graduate school, I studied landscape architecture and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. I have my own practice and have taught urban design for many years at all different institutions — Columbia, Harvard, University of Toronto, Pratt and Penn — and was exposed to many different types of graduate students. But my challenge here at Parsons is to teach urban design to undergraduates. Previous to this, urban design education at the undergraduate level hasn’t existed.

Did the desire to create an undergraduate urban design degree come from the institution or was it in response to student demand?
I’d say it’s institutional. The belief is that once we create the space, students will fill it.

Image: Elinor Mossop

What do you think someone who might want to declare urban design as her concentration is looking for?
We’re getting students who want the strong liberal arts component, but also want the design component, students who want a balance. They like the theory, they like the reading, they like the deep discussion, but they also like to make things and do things in class.

What kind of classes are offered?
On the history and theory side, we have “History of World Urbanism,” which digs into the history of cities since there was ever a city. There is another survey called “Urban Design since 1945.” And then there’s a lab sequence that students majoring in urban studies at Eugene Lang, the New School’s liberal arts college, can also access. That’s one of the reasons why the program was created. The New School is this amazing university, in New York City, with all these urban classes being taught to undergraduate and graduate students all across the university, from international affairs and urban policy at Milano, to design-specific classes at Parsons, to urban studies, environmental studies, the list goes on…

There’s also a core studio for urban design students, in which each student is given a complex problem on a complex site. Each has to do a lot of fieldwork, make a lot of drawings, talk to a lot of people. The studio teaches students how to research, how to do a pin-up, how to present and talk about their work.

Additionally, I taught a class called “Streetlife,” which was about exploring the street through drawing. Other classes are more about fieldwork: observation, taking notes, different ways of documenting a site photographically or otherwise. There’s also a class called “Sensing,” in which students build sensors, collect environmental data, do mapping and create their own aerial photography using balloons. They launch their own satellites and collect infrared data.

Is there a cohesive or canonical body of knowledge you want your students to graduate with? Do you think that exists yet in urban design? Is it emergent? Necessary?
Of course it’s necessary! “Urban Design since 1945,” as one example, looks at how all cities have changed in that period of time, which is also the period where the field of urban design emerged as a profession in this country. But we are careful not to place everything in an American context. Last year I had the opportunity to travel to China as a fellow of the India China Institute and more seriously study the way cities are being built now. If the students can have a sense of some of those dynamics in relation to all the work we’re doing in New York, then that’s a success for the program. Having a love for cities everywhere is key. Being interested in any city, anywhere a student might go, and being able to see it as a designer.

Do you see that interest and passion reflected in your students?
Absolutely!

Image: Colin McFadyen

What kind of professional opportunities do you see this program preparing students for?
I‘m not sure yet. Some of the students have said to me they’ve chosen this because it’s the kind of solid foundation they want for their university education. Others, I think they might work for a non-profit, like a neighborhood group. Any of our students would be an amazing asset for such an organization. They’ll have a strong design toolbox and an ability to participate with people and to propose collaborative ideas.

Given the extent to which ecological thinking informs your approach to urban design, where does architecture figure into this?
Part of the ecological approach for me has to do with how you understand yourself in relation to your environment. I think the way that architecture comes in has to do with measure and specificity. How do you understand what are you measuring? How do you get very specific? Architectural measures include how you work with scale, how you draw a plan, how you draw a section, how you understand the relationship between drawings and the three-dimensional space, between material qualities and material behavior.

So architecture inserts itself as visual language and as a set of methodological tools?
Yes, perhaps. But a lot of it comes from testing different things out and figuring out as we go what I think the students should know. The balloon mapping project actually ends up teaching students how to hack a camera, and then how to stitch all that data together. This serves as one example of new types of technological ‘knowledges’ in which students need fluency these days. They’re learning how to hybridize that with how to draw a plan or how to build a physical model.

Balloon Mapping Project | grassrootsmapping.org

So are the design skills students learn primarily in the service of analysis and representation? As opposed to proposing a design scheme?
No, you have to propose change. Even if I might, as a teacher, tend to move away from intervention, I will still require my students to design, say, a device that somehow transforms a condition.

What do you want your students to understand about cities and cities’ role in the world?
I’m very interested in cities as urban ecosystems. Our students start to become very sophisticated in navigating the rhetoric that gets produced around cities, but then, very strategic in ways that they can intervene or engage the city that is meaningful ecologically. For example, we had a discussion in class last week about things that are sustainable but not necessarily ecological. You can design a zero-waste shoe, or buy one, but does that kind of thinking actually change the way one acts in the world? The ecological approach is supposed to build a sustainable city, but we’re teaching them to approach it socially – and this harkens back to the social activist legacy of the New School – to approach it in terms of equality, difference, justice. If our students can perceive and communicate and strategically design how to engage and propose change, or allow the imagination of change to be engaged by others, I think that would be a success.

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Victoria Marshall is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Parsons the New School for Design and the director of the BS Urban Design Program. She is a fellow of the India China Institute practicing landscape architect and the founder of TILL, a Newark based landscape architecture and urban design office which offers design services that transform contemporary landscapes such as reclaimed river beds, brownfields, rooftops and environmental justice neighborhoods.

Carmen Dukes and Katie Koch are the co-founders of Project: Interaction, a 10-week after school program that teaches high school students to use design to change their communities. As students of the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Dukes and Koch are well versed in the ways design thinking and methods can inspire change and solve problems. Inspired by the achievements of practitioners today, they found themselves imagining the potential impact of starting design education at an earlier age. On September 29, the Project: Interaction team will teach their first class, fifteen 9th and 10th grade students at the Urban Assembly Institute for Math & Science for Young Women in Downtown Brooklyn. Their intention is to encourage skills in and engagement with creative thinking, problem solving, observation of the world around us, and the sketching, building and communication of ideas. Dukes and Koch talked with us about the motivations behind the project, and the importance of education in the still-evolving field of interaction design and how to use the city as a classroom. If you like what they have to say, check out their Kickstarter page, where they are working to raise money for classroom supplies and materials. -V.S.

What is interaction design?
Katie Koch: Interaction design is a holistic process of thinking about an unmet need. The process includes observing and defining a problem, imagining possibilities for how we might fix it, and implementing and testing our ideas in the form of prototyping. The problems we address range from the ways you use your cell phone, to how you get money out of an ATM, to how you order and receive your Netflix DVDs.

Carmen Dukes: It’s important for interaction designers to understand the people who experience the products and services we build. It’s our responsibility to evolve our ideas to accommodate the needs of the people who interact with them.

How did Project: Interaction come to be?
Katie: Carmen and I met in the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). I started my career in graphic design and have been a long-time design evangelist. My practice as a designer helped me have a greater understanding of the world around me and fueled my interest in studying the people and things in my environment. So last year I decided to return to graduate school.

Carmen: My background is in film and television and currently I work in web and mobile production. In my spare time, I’ve spent hours studying game design and how successful games create meaningful experiences. The overlap of these personal passions led me to the field of interaction design.

Katie: During the first week of classes at SVA, we both attended a lecture by accomplished interaction designer Kim Goodwin. She issued a call to action for designers to educate and train people to employ creative thinking to solve day-to-day tough problems. Carmen and I walked away with the same thought: why isn’t anyone teaching these skills to kids?

Why did you decide to work with high school students?
Katie: If you ask any designer where she first learned about design she will likely be able to recall a specific moment that opened her eyes to this world. In high school I was very much into math and science classes and engaged with art in my free time, for fun. I didn’t know about design as a way to use my logical left brain and my creative right brain together to create artifacts and experiences that make people’s lives clearer, easier, and more fulfilling. High school students are often investigating broad sets of interests, figuring out what their personal passions are while beginning to understand and establish their place in the bigger picture beyond school. They are at a crossroads in many ways and I imagine many would be delighted by the discovery of design just as I was.

Carmen: A knowledge of design methods is a transferable skill set. Giving students a toolkit that they can use to explore and solve problems that matter to them will be powerful no matter where their future careers lead them.

Before the semester begins, you are asking the students to complete a survey about their existing knowledge of design. What will you ask them and how do you hope to use their answers?
Katie: We will start by asking the students to draw a picture of their favorite place in New York City. Then, to answer questions about their favorite school subjects, what kinds of activities they like, and why they want to be in the program. We want to find out what knowledge the students already have so we can leverage and build upon their existing interests.

Carmen: This exercise is also a simple way for us to begin to get a sense of our students’ personalities. The more we can get to know our class, the better learning experience we can provide.

Tell us a little about the curriculum and planned program for your first semester of Project: Interaction.
Katie: The first few weeks will be spent covering design basics, talking about what design is, how to observe the people and places around us, and how to develop new ideas. We’ll take a field trip to a working design studio, R/GA, so students can see how designers work together in the context of a business. Then we’ll spend a couple of weeks on more intensive topics like the increased availability of mobile devices as a way to connect to other people and communities. The class will end with a three-week project that the students can share with parents, teachers and their schoolmates.

Carmen: The goal of our curriculum is to expose our students to design in a relatable and tangible way. It is critical that we engage them by using all the senses, so in-class activities and assignments will be hands-on — rapid sketching sessions, prototyping with Legos and letting them act out their ideas.

Katie: Our students might be surprised when they come to our first class. We want to show them that you don’t need a fancy computer to start designing; anyone can start by sketching with only a pencil and paper. We expect that the students will want to start using a computer or other device to help them solve the problems we present to them but we think it’s important to learn first how to approach issues using their brains before relying on a machine to support their thinking.

Your curriculum overview shows that you plan on staying very NYC-specific. Why did you choose such a place-based approach to the subject?
Katie: A lot of the concepts we’re presenting are fairly abstract. We wanted to ground the program in something the students are already familiar with. New York is a city made up of communities, and that’s a theme that the students will already understand.

Carmen: We want the students to rethink parts of New York City they see everyday; for example, offsetting the experience of a crowded subway commute with better bike lanes or creating green spaces for enjoyment, collaboration or recreation.

We received a lot of advice from educators about the importance of making each lesson in our program meaningful for student retention and engagement, so it was critical to us that we create connections between the city and our students. The curriculum we’ve designed will help them explore the city and the final project will give them an opportunity to apply their new-found design skills to a project that impacts their immediate community. We’re excited to be working with folks from Transportation Alternatives for the final project. They will work with the kids to observe and document city life on the street outside their school and envision ways to better utilize the space for the people who use it each day.

Katie: Ultimately, we hope our students will walk away from the class with the understanding that practically everything around them is designed, and that they, too, can participate in shaping their world.

How are you balancing the curriculum to reflect both the more consumer-driven side of design practice and the potential for design to effect social change?
Katie: Because of the way they think, designers are in a unique position to incite changes in the practice of design and in the business of the clients with whom they work. There are plenty of design studios that are focused on sustainable practices or are incorporating design for good into their services. Designers think through problems by reframing how they see them, and they often act as change makers because of their unique perspective. We’d like to reinforce that idea with our students.

Carmen: We will talk about both commercial and social design, depending on the lesson, so that students will have a comprehensive understanding of what role design has in an organization. The similarity between design firms focused on designing products for consumers and those focused on design for social change is their process for defining a problem or unmet need and arriving at the right solution. These are the methods that we are teaching.

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Carmen Dukes is a digital producer at Hit Entertainment where she is responsible for creating games and websites for global kids brands including Barney and Friends and Bob the Builder. Previously, she worked at VH1.com where she developed interactive content in support of VH1’s popular Celebreality shows. Her professional interests include video game mechanics for interaction, sustainable product design, data visualization, and educational technology.

Katie Koch is a web designer from the Midwest, by way of Brooklyn. She has designed and developed interactive projects ranging from corporate and nonprofit websites, online communities, mobile applications, and user interface designs. A typographer at heart, Katie is a details and information enthusiast whose passion for simplicity drives every aspect of her work in design and user experience.

Not too long ago we introduced you to a new project conceived by Omni-collaborator Jesse Shapins and a group of dedicated media artists – namely Kara Oehler, Ann Heppermann and James Burns – called Mapping Main Street. Well, several thousand miles later, the team has built an expansive and flexible online platform for a collaborative documentary media project that will eventually provide a vision of America unlike any we’ve seen before. Users from across the country have contributed photos via Flickr, and audio and video content via Vimeo. The only requirement is that all media “must be recorded on a street named Main.”

Over 400 hundred Main Streets have been documented so far. Which leaves about 10,000 to go. Get involved; each borough of New York has a Main Street. Brooklyn’s got a two-block long stretch in Fulton Ferry. In the Bronx, Main Street is a tiny residential lane near Locust Point and the Throg’s Neck Bridge. In Staten Island, Main Street runs across the southern tip of the island from Tottenville to Conference House Park. Roosevelt Island, weirdly, has a couple different Main Streets. There’s even one on Governors Island. And then there is the fabled subject of this week’s feature: the Main Street that’s the bustling terminus of the 7 train and the central commercial spine of Flushing, Queens.

We recently caught up with Jesse and Kara to talk about the project and where it fits into a constellation of issues including new challenges to political rhetoric, new directions in media production, and new lessons for urban planning and design.

The project was conceived last year in the context of the election. As an image of Main Street was being bandied about by politicians (often as a foil to Wall Street), the team was struck that the reductiveness of such political imagery goes unchallenged and is perpetuated by the media. Main Street is not, in Jesse’s words, “some abstract, general place; there’s a street named Main in almost every city and town across the nation!” So they went about setting up a way for citizens to complicate the presumptions that the image of Main Street, USA provides an accurate shorthand for a certain set of uniform values, economic interests and political opinions. The project’s goal is not to redefine the image of Main Street, but rather “to suggest a critical attitude toward the language and rhetoric around you.”

Mapping Main Street adds another vector to the participatory process that allows for more subjective visions from community members. It just might also suggest a critical attitude toward conventional attempts to identify community priorities around such often contentious issues as growth, change, context, preservation and development. Jesse notes that “since the 1960s, since the rise of advocacy planning and its critique of modernist planning, there has been a strong emphasis on democratic and participatory processes.” But these structures have, for the most part, “emphasized deliberative decision-making, rather than expressions of experience or identity. Mapping Main Street adds another vector to the participatory process that allows for more subjective visions from community members or stakeholders.” And indeed, some communities out there are starting to use collaborative media production to inform policy goals. Case in point: Starksboro, Vermont, where an artist-in-residence assembled a team of students (elementary through college) to use the arts to draw the community into a conversation about the town’s future and support efforts to create a masterplan.

And the production of the media itself has broader applications. Schools, youth programs and local radio stations across the country have been getting in on the action, encouraging participation in the Mapping Main Street project both as a way to build storytelling skills and also to get youth to engage more deeply with place. The four portraits of Flushing’s Main Street below were produced by high school students from the East-West School of International Studies and the Frank Sinatra High School for the Performing Arts as part of WNYC’s Radio Rookies program. Over the next three years, the Mapping Main Street Project will roll out a distributed production model, partnering with a wide variety of NPR affiliates and educational institutions to document every single Main Street in the country. But while infrastructure to support that effort begins to develop, the first phase – producing the participatory platform, setting the tone and getting the word out – will conclude with an exhibition created with Red Antenna (which just happens to be the creative agency that designed and developed urbanomnibus.net) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago early next year as a part of the Third Coast Filmless Festival. Just as the website enables thematic relationships between Main Streets to emerge – in addition to the geographic relationships – the exhibit is certain to make manifest the elegance of the Mapping Main Street project: to infuse a cliché with all the contradictions and diversity of America itself.

And that diversity, of course, isn’t just apparent among small towns in different parts of the country. Big cities, like ours, have them too. And sometimes, as in the case of Flushing, Queens, street names harken back to a time when outer borough villages were independent of the growing metropolis that would eventually subsume them. Flushing, in fact, was one of the first Dutch settlements on Long Island way back in 1645. It was the site, according to New York City historian Kenneth Jackson, of the birthplace of religious tolerance by decree in America. These days, the neighborhood is more commonly associated with Queens’ incredible ethnic diversity and large foreign-born population. Flushing’s Chinatown “now rivals [Manhattan's] Chinatown as a center of Chinese-American business and political might, as well as culture and cuisine” according to the Times’ Kirk Semple. It’s a place of steam buns, old movie theaters, ethnic perceptions and interactions, and some particularly intriguing (and dapper) characters. -C.S.

Steam Buns ‘R’ Us from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Main Street Cinemas from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Culture Talk from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Searching For Main Street’s Flushing Pimp from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Mapping Main Street is created by James Burns, Ann Heppermann, Kara Oehler, and Jesse Shapins. Production help from Ian Gray, Josie Holtzman, Sara Pellegrini and Baughman Reinhardt. The project features new original songs by High Places, Chain and the Gang, Jason Cady and The Hive Dwellers. Radio Rookie Short Wave stories in Flushing, Queens are reported by Tracy Leon, Edwin Llanos, Rachel Temkin, Helen Peng, Andrea Torres, Rayon Wright, Alexis Gordon, Hawa Lee and Melissa Best and produced by the Mapping Main Street team with Sanda Htyte and Veralyn Williams. The website was designed by the Mapping Main Street team and Local Projects.

The first phase of the project is produced through the generous funding of Maker’s Quest 2.0, an initiative between the Association of Independents in Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project is also supported with funds from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and KUOW’s Program Venture Fund. All broadcast radio stories aired on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

“Design has become too important to be left to designers,” Tim Brown told a packed auditorium at Parsons last Wednesday. Brown, the president and CEO of IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy based in Palo Alto, advocates applying a problem-solving methodology founded on observation, storytelling, visual thinking, iterative prototyping, and experimentation – what he calls design thinking – to problems, such as voter turnout or educational reform for instance, that might not normally have you raising a finger and exclaiming, “Aha, what we need here is a designer!”

The reason, according to Brown, is that traditionally, large organizations and institutions have prized analytical thinking. Analytical thinking is great for narrowing down options but it’s not so great for coming up with those options, which is probably why you don’t see a lot of innovation coming out of accounting departments. Where analysis narrows and reduces ideas, design thinking broadens and multiplies them. Designers give ideas form.

Brown envisions a future in which a kind of perpetual design that springs from the end-user replaces the one-off project. Services in particular tend to innovate incrementally, so design needs to be constant and led by design thinkers embedded within organizations. The Mayo Clinic established its Center for Innovation for that very purpose. And the key to the success of such initiatives, according to Brown, is participation.

“I’ve struggled my whole career with the notion that Modernism got it wrong,” said Brown. Most designers learn to design from first principles rather than to connect their ideas to existing systems of use. Business writers and innovation thinkers have been harping on participatory design for the last decade. Involve the people affected by the changes you’re trying to promote in the design of those changes, and they’ll be much likelier to succeed. Not rocket science, but also not necessarily part of every design curriculum. Imagine if all architects invited students and teachers to participate in the design of their school.

It’s relatively easy to envision the perpetual and participatory design of intangibles, but is such an idea really applicable to the physical worlds of industrial design, architecture, or urban planning?

At least in principle, why not? Obviously there are certain material constraints – you can’t start moving around roads or expect a plastic cup to become a metal bottle overnight, but why not build in affordances that allow users to shape products, buildings, and cities through their use after they are “finished?” It’s not too hard to imagine an intelligent city grid that reroutes traffic, flexible and reconfigurable interiors and even exteriors, or modular hospital machinery.

Even as Brown encourages the widespread adoption of design thinking, he stresses the need to educate designers to think “upstream.” Every object is part of a larger system and it is up to designers to understand how that object will influence that system and vice versa. But he’s optimistic, recognizing – in the burgeoning DIY movement and a return to tinkering – a much larger shift away from industry and towards ideas, one he likens in importance to the Industrial Revolution.

In Brown’s view, if this new revolution succeeds, society will need to update its measure of value. Economists will tally the value of networks and knowledge created in the exchange of ideas rather the money generated in the exchange of goods.

In the meantime, Brown’s ideas in book form will set you back $27.99.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Alex Kauffmann is a former innovation consultant and a current tinkerer. He makes art that beeps.

Three Yellow Arrows. Courtesy of Yellow Arrow.

“Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

- Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917)

Jesse Shapins: The internet has opened up some tremendous opportunities for new methods of representing cities. With the rise of platforms such as Google Maps, in particular, a whole subfield of urban media arts has evolved, driven by the ability to attach photographs, videos, sounds or text to specific places on a map. Projects within this subfield – whether produced by an individual artist or consistently evolving through new user contributions – work with the assumption that the traditional map or aerial photograph, now open for re-interpretation and annotation via the internet, must be the basis for a new cartography. What do you see as some insights these projects offer and some of the problems associated with these works?

Brian House: Well, mapping platforms such as Google’s typically begin with the traditional, Cartesian representation inherent to geo-data. That’s problematic because it’s so reductive. These reductions may be subconscious, so all the more reason to address them artistically and pedagogically. A map begins with a view of the streets in a very car-centric navigational mode; at first, Google Maps didn’t even include subway stops for New York City, so we are clearly not starting from a point of concern for how different environments operate on the street level, especially not from a pedestrian’s perspective. Now, of course, Google has “Street View”, which is a pretty awesome database of panoramic images for streets in major cities. But its frozen perspective and positioning as an objective representation of the street further highlight the challenge at getting from a mapping platform to more complex urban dynamics.

Google Street View

However, when you can take the set of expectations that come along with this kind of traditional map and add an unexpected dimension that reveals something orthogonal to that vision of space, then you really have something. For example, I think that Million Dollar Blocks, by Laura Kurgan and the Columbia Spatial Information Design Lab, is a great example of this. You still have streets delineating blocks in the city, but you have changed the value of those blocks to represent something more socially potent: the dollar amount spent by the government to incarcerate the people who lived there. Online projects often miss this kind of transformation; plotting ephemera on a Google map might be momentarily interesting, but I think it’s far more satisfying to try and change the meaning of the map substrate to some creative end.

Prisoner Migration Patterns. Brooklyn, NY. 2003. Courtesy of the Spatial Information Design Lab.

JS: Can we bring that transformed idea of space into the experience of place? How do we evaluate the relationship between the experience of place through a conventional computer screen and the experience of a subject actively engaged on a city’s streets? I’d say that the classic geocaching is a great example of a project that plays with the tension between the representation online and experience in the real world. Geocaching.com publishes the latitude/longitude of the caches, which can be easily shown on a Google map. So where’s the fun in that? Well, the fun is actually getting there and navigating the physical and social obstacles the real world presents; climbing a tree in Inwood can’t be described by a Google plot, but seeing the map can motivate you to attempt it.

BH: Yes, that’s exactly it; designing for the street is the inverse of the computer screen. Instead of adding dimensions, you need to reduce them. This is what we do everyday: the pedestrian is trained to block out what is habitual and focus on the task at hand, such as getting to the office. But if artists can provide an alternative reduction of what the city has offer, we can mine a lot of depth from what would typically be ignored.

Yellow Arrow¹ was a project that specifically worked along these lines. People received stickers in the shape of yellow arrows; printed on each one was a unique alphanumeric code and telephone number. Participants were invited to place the sticker anywhere they chose. Then, by sending a text-message with the sticker’s code to the telephone number and including an original statement about the location, the person was able to attach a message to that actual place. When someone else saw the sticker and sent a text with the code to the phone number, he or she received the person’s original message. Additionally, the two individuals could then communicate directly (but anonymously) by sending texts back and forth through the Yellow Arrow phone number. The screen-based dimension comes in later, as users are able to upload photographs of their arrows and plot their exact locations on an online map.

By jshapes | Location: 4514 Davis Street, Queens, NY (US)| TXT: Queens and Manhattan melt into one range of mountains to be scaled. There is a Yellow Arrow atop the Chrysler building. Squint and you can see it.
Courtesy of Yellow Arrow.

Although it may seem obvious, I think it’s important to keep in mind that sending a Yellow Arrow text-message on the street is always going to feel very different than seeing a top-down representation of arrows plotted on a city map. But it’s a complementary experience, and one motivates and brings insight to the other. With the inexorable technological advances of mobile devices, there is some danger in collapsing these two modes into a single means of experience. If I am walking around Manhattan and following my progress on an iPhone screen, I haven’t reframed my perception of the environment so much as inhibited it. This amounts to a commodification of my experience by the provider of that particular service, who is then free to exploit my attention.

If artists can provide an alternative reduction of what the city has offer, we can mine a lot of depth from what would typically be ignored.

JS: I think our proposition is critical in that it insists upon an urban media arts practice that explicitly challenges this kind of commodification of everyday life. In general, one of the products of the explosion of the internet and the widespread adoption of mobile phones has been an ever-increasing commercialization of all hours and dimensions of human experience. While I feel that we must embrace the technology, it does not mean we have to embrace the use-assumptions of the technology’s producers or to refrain from developing our own tools.

BH: I think that’s really the underlying motivation for developing our own pedagogical platform with Periplurban. When we began formulating our workshop on issues of urban research, representation and mapping, we wanted to build upon the experiences of experimenting at the interface of the physical and virtual city from Yellow Arrow to loosely formulate a media-based practice of street-level, critical investigation in the city. At a party, I was introduced by a mutual friend to a fan of Yellow Arrow. When he learned that I was a co-creator, he exclaimed ‘The Periplum!’

I had only a passing familiarity with Ezra Pound, but when he explained the metaphor, I thought it captured the poetic aspect of that project quite well: in his Cantos, Pound uses “periplum” to describe both mapmaking and history as seen from the point-of-view of a poet. Rather than taking the conventional bird’s-eye view of the cartographer or historian, the poet is a voyager personally navigating space and time. When we needed a name for the platform we developed for the course, the neologism Periplurban suggested itself.

JS: The term Periplum also suggests a mutually transformative relationship between language and the city. One of the projects I’ve always found fascinating is ABCDF: A Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City. The general principal of this book is to re-define the city through a new form of dictionary. Thousands of words are defined by images from a wide variety of sources, ranging from the home photographs of ordinary citizens, to historical newsprints, to the work of famous contemporary artists. These images are complimented by short texts in a glossary at the back. What emerges is a highly detailed mosaic of the city that brings to life the everyday life of the metropolis. With this background in mind, we designed Periplurban to function as an ever-expandable “dictionary.” The standard dictionary definition is an authoritative declaration of a word’s meaning. In this dictionary, the process of definition is made subjective and intermedia. Each participant is able to contribute words to the larger dictionary and define words through text, photography, video and maps. From a pedagogical perspective, what is attractive about this model of a media-based dictionary is the ability to bring together multiple perspectives into a cohesive project, without losing the specificity of individual work. It can also function cumulatively, so that each week students can complete small assignments that build up over time, and new students can pick up where previous groups have left off and continue to develop the project.

One of the challenges with the standard design studio is that it often starts from scratch and knowledge does not often transfer from one body of students to another. With Periplurban, we’re aiming to develop a system where different groups of students, sometimes at the same institution, sometimes at different institutions, can in effect collaborate together over many years by all contributing to the same constantly-evolving dictionary.

Some entries in the urban experiential dictionary. Courtesy of Periplurban.

BH: So much of architecture and urban planning today is developed while looking at a computer, whether through scripting and 3D modeling or researching sites through Google. We wanted to stimulate another mode of urban practice that was based fundamentally in the physical, social spaces of the city. In other words, we wanted to get students out of the classroom and onto the streets. We were inspired by Shklosvky’s concepts of estrangement and “Art as Technique”, we then aimed to use media arts critically as a mode of research to gain new perspectives. To begin, each student chose a specific site within New York City to declare as his or her territory for work over the whole course of the summer. The only constraint was that the space had to be traversable in 10 minutes by foot. As an initial act of linguistic reinterpretation, the students had to also name their territory. A student working in a section of Central Park named it “The Green Void.” Another student focusing upon the Columbus Circle area re-defined it as “The Microcosmic Hub.”

Green Void’s territory. Courtesy of Periplurban.

JS: Students were assigned seven exercises ranging from ethnographic interviews to Fluxus-inspired non-theatrical performances to short city-symphony films. Some were representational, others were designed so that students had to create experiences for other people in their territory. The larger goal of these collective investigations was to begin re-defining what is a city, and in this process, to begin creating a new urban language. To complete the assignments, students had to define a minimum of five terms each week that resulted from their particular responses to the exercises. For example, after reading some excerpts from Kaprow’s Blurring of Art & Life, students were asked to write a series of instructions for people to perform while walking in the city. The student whose territory was “The Microcosmic Hub” invented the term “people-watch the people-watchers.” His definition was:

“completely reversing the system, locate people in the territory who are observing others. Then, find a spot to sit and stare back at them. Continue to do this until they leave; if they realize they are being watched, watch and observe their actions.”

“People watch the people-watchers.” Courtesy of Periplurban.

BH: Though Periplurban accepts multiple media formats, we chose to make language the primary navigational interface. This shifts the focus to issues of subjective meaning, and produces tension and synergy on a linguistic level as the content grows, rather than the geospatial or media-type groupings that one might typically find with new media mapping projects. To foreground this dimension, we built in structures to cross-reference the definitions of each word. Basically, a student can create a link between any two definitions, producing paths through the work that might highlight surprising juxtapositions or suggest micro-narratives within the larger dictionary. For example, you can move from “acronym,” a verb directing people to write acronyms from their names using words found on Canal St, to “mosaic,” a verb directing people to look closely at a mosaic on Broadway near Columbia.

JS: Furthering the language theme, we built on De Certeau’s understanding of walking through the city as an act of reading and writing. After each student defined around 35 words for their territory, the final assignment aimed to synthesize this material and create a series of design interventions in physical and virtual space. Writing in this new language, the core component of the students’ final project was to write a “poem” that linked together multiple words they had defined in their territory. In addition to the longer and visual media, students had to also now define their words in 140 characters as text messages. The poem would be read, then, as an SMS-based walking tour of their territory that poetically connects the words in physical space using the new vocabulary they have defined. We created the interface and the messaging infrastructure, which they could then script for their particular walks. The walks provided an experiential tour of the multiple layers of physical, social, historical and fictional qualities that students identified through their research throughout the summer.

BH: One of the most interesting walks was developed through “The Canal,” along Canal Street between Broadway and 6th Avenue. The student gave directions in terms of upstream and downstream according to the long-gone waterway, and folded the dictionary back into the street using her definitions such as “To Acronym (v.): To spell out one’s name using words that contain a letter in your name, found on Canal St. All words must be documented photographically.”

After a series of exercises (like bursting a bubble-blowers bubbles and feeling counterfeit bags), the walk leads into Pearl Paint to purchase drawing supplies. The participant is then asked to sit on a stoop and draw an impression of Canal Street and mail it to a friend at the historic post office building. What we really liked about this walk was the full engagement with the senses in such a personal way. It would have been impossible to convey the experience through documentation; the student’s script very effectively drew us into the space in a way that is now a persisting part of our perception of that space.

“Welcome of your tour of Canal Street.” Courtesy of Periplurban.

I think that maps are particularly problematic when they are viewed as closed works or interpreted as frozen representations. If we perceive them to be frameworks begging for subjective, human intervention, then maps suddenly become systems in need of constant individual and collective revision to give them meaning.

So really, there is nothing passive about applying one’s full creative capacity to the perception of the city. This isn’t a new ideal; the Situationist International suggested that the intersubjective reality of urban life might be transformed through a universal adoption of this kind of awareness. In 1967, Raoul Vaneigem wrote that “the concepts and abstractions which rule us have to be returned to their source, to lived experience… The sole authority is one’s own lived experience: and this everyone must prove to everyone else.”

Applied to urbanism, this becomes an imaginative practice, one that requires each of us to contribute to the re-creation of the city with every step.

JS: Critical media arts must intervene in the sphere of the urban imaginary, “the cognitive and somatic image which we carry within us of the places where we live, work and play.” As Andreas Huyssen writes, the urban imaginary “is an embodied material fact. Urban imaginaries are thus part of any city’s reality rather than only figments of the imagination. What we think about a city and how we perceive it informs the ways we act in it.”

Technology is integral to this practice, but not as an end it itself. We should avoid making technology into a fetish. Instead, we might remember that the ways in which avant-garde artists first experimented with the new media of modernity, recognizing that each medium is a product, a construct, and a perception of its time.

Within the context of design education, Periplurban hopes to ignite a more serious conversation about the use of media in design practice. On one hand, we believe the project can evolve to become a more robust system for urban research and analysis. Design decisions are always influenced by the information that designers have at hand, and if a framework like Periplurban was deployed in a real design scenario, it would hopefully introduce a lot of surprising ideas and perspectives into the design process.

But possibly more importantly, we hope that it helps students to question the assumptions behind different media technologies and feel liberated to challenge these assumptions. As media become ever more integral to design and the urban experience, it becomes increasingly important to demystify media and empower designers and everyday citizens as critical media artists.

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1. Yellow Arrow was created by Brian House, Jesse Shapins, Christopher Allen and Michael Counts in 2004 with the support of Counts Media Inc., a start-up entertainment company. The project culminated in 2006 and was archived in the public domain.

Some other urban locative media projects worth checking out include the following:
(list adapted from “Placelogging: mobile spatial annotation and its uses for urban planners and designers” by Raj Kottamasu)

Blockies (blockies.com)
Take pictures and place a special, printable sticker with a unique code at or near the site where the photo was taken. Send photos via MMS to the Blockies server with the unique code. Text messaging the server with the code returns the uploaded photo. Other participants can also upload more photos to the same unique code.

E-lens (mobile.mit.edu/elens)
Place and photograph stickers with unique mosaic visual codes to deliver and access place-based news, sports, weather and entertainment, to make reports or give input to civil authorities, to connect to social networks, or to engage in placelogging, collaborative art-making or gaming.

Geostickies (andrew.cmu.edu/user/noriyuki/artworks/geostickies/index.html)
Leave and read geo-located text messages about places using cell phones with installed location-based software. Receive alerts via phone when near posted messages.

Grafedia (grafedia.net)
Make real-world hyperlinks by uploading photos to keyword@grafedia.net via Media Message Service (MMS) and scrawling the underlined keyword in blue marker on any surface. Sending a text message or e-mail to that address returns the image.

[murmur] (murmurtoronto.ca)
Staff records stories about places from people who contact them or from people they find through community networks, makes them accessible via phone numbers and unique codes printed on green metal signs posted on telephone poles near sites.

Open City (terirueb.net/open)
Record messages, ambient sounds, conversations, stories or opinions about the present state of downtown Washington, D.C. via cell phone or public pay phone. Listen and contribute to recordings on the subjects of technology, public space and civic identity, also archived on project website.

Plazes (plazes.com)
Add Flickr photos, comments and reviews to profiles of mapped locations; share personal real-time location and notes about those locations via Plazer application for PC or cell phone.

Semapedia (semapedia.org)
Create printable tags linked to Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) content with unique mosaic codes on them. Taking a picture of the barcode using cameraphones with 2D Barcode Reader applications installed calls up the Wikipedia page via mobile web.

SMS Guerrilla Projector (troika.uk.com/smsguerrillaprojector)
Project text based SMS messages onto public spaces, in streets, onto people, inside cinemas, shops, houses. A home made, fully operational device.

Socialight (socialight.com)
Map and share geo-tagged digital photoand text-based Sticky Notes via web or mobile. When mobile, get automatic alerts when near Sticky Notes from affiliated social networks and subscribed channels of content. Includes professionally authored content (reviews, attractions).

Tactical Sound Garden (tacticalsoundgarden.net)
Plant or remove sound files at specific locations using a WiFi enabled mobile device (PDA, laptop, cell phone). Drift through wireless “hot zones” listening to located recordings and songs with headphones and a WiFi enabled device.

TXTual Healing (txtualhealing.com)
Builds community through public story telling. TXTual Healing is an ongoing series of interactive performances that harnesses the SMS capabilities of the cell phone as a medium to interact with and explore our shared public and physical space.

Urban Markup (urbanmarkup.com)
Collect photographs and observations of urban markup language [i.e. - stickers, grafitti, maintenance and construction crew markings, etc.] found in New York City.

Urban Tapestries (urbantapestries.net)
Uses PDAs and cell phones to map and share ‘threads’ connecting sites of text, audio, video and photo annotations. Research project to explore social and cultural uses of the convergence of place and mobile technologies.

Jesse Shapins is an urban researcher, media artist, curator, and design educator. He lives in Cambridge, MA where he is a PhD candidate in the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, pursuing a joint degree in History and Theory of Urbanism and Film and Visual Studies.

Brian House is a bricoleur interested in art, code, and cognition. Currently, he is Creative Technologist at Local Projects, a design studio in New York working primarily with museums and public spaces.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.