Curbside Haiku Samples

TRAFFIC SAFETY HAIKU
With ubiquity comes invisibility. And words can be arranged with the same economy and elegance as high quality graphic design. These two precepts are the inspiration behind the DOT’s latest spate of traffic signs. By combining a little bit of poetry with well-designed visuals, the DOT hopes to call attention to hazardous intersections. According to The New York Times City Room, twelve curbside Haiku signs have been installed in over twenty locations (PDF) around Brooklyn and Manhattan with more locations slated throughout the boroughs, all of which correspond to highly trafficked intersections near major cultural institutions. Apparently, the notion of traffic sign haiku is catching on, as City Room’s readers have responded with some entertaining, seventeen-syllable poetry of their own.

DELANCEY UNDERGROUND
A couple months ago, a proposal to build an underground park at the site of the the abandoned Essex Street Trolley Terminal at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge began to circulate around the Internet. Dubbed “Delancey Underground,” the proposal excited interest, and, while its fate is still uncertain, the MTA definitely wants to open the space up to development. To that end, the MTA has released a video tour led by Peter Hine of the MTA’s real estate office (blogged earlier this week by Second Avenue Sagas). While leading the tour, Hine offers up some suggestions of what kinds of retail or commercial uses could inhabit the space, and he is particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of a nightclub: the former dispatch tower of the trolley terminal could serve as the DJ booth and revelers could enjoy views of active trains at the adjacent Delancey Street – Essex Street subway station. The video ends with an invitation to developers to get in touch with ideas about the “creative redevelopment and reuse” for this and other spaces belonging to the MTA throughout the city. For more information check out the MTA Real Estate Department’s website.

David Brooks' new installation at 46th street and 8th Avenue.

SUBURBAN DUNESCAPES IN TIMES SQUARE
A couple weeks ago, we spoke with Glen Weiss, former manager of the robust public art program at the Times Square Alliance. With the help of the Art Production Fund, Times Square has recently inaugurated a new series of installations ”that focus on raising environmental consciousness,” the first of which is a new, 5,000-square-foot sculpture by the artist David Brooks entitled Desert Rooftops. Constructed out of asphalt-shingled rooftops, the piece evokes strip malls, McMansions and other typologies we commonly associate with suburban sprawl right in the heart of New York City. Brooks’ synthetic landscape “examines issues of the natural and built landscape by comparing the monoculture that arises from unchecked suburban and urban sprawl with that of an over-cultivated landscape.” The installation is on view now through February 5, 2012 at Times Square, at The Last Lot project space on 46th Street and 8th Avenue. More information is available at the Times Square Alliance website.

DREAM CITIES
Reimagining cities has long been a favorite topic of discussion among architects and urbanists. Increasingly, the topic is capturing the attention of mainstream audiences as well. In September, The Atlantic unveiled its new online section, Atlantic Cities, which is devoted to “[exploring] the most innovative ideas and pressing issues facing today’s global cities and neighborhoods.” This week, Salon.com is widening the audience of those concerned with the future of cities even further with their new series, Dream City. The series, created to “explore the way we’re designing our cities of the future, cities in which we want to live, right now,” opened with a look at the possibilities of floating, water-borne architectures followed by a post on the removal of inner city highways. Both of these entries referenced New York City precedents: the Floating Pool and the proposed removal of the unloved Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx. We look forward to reading more.

DESIGNER SCAFFOLDING
While fun for the acrobatically-inclined child or cyclist looking for bike parking, the ubiquitous sidewalk scaffolding that protects pedestrians from falling debris at construction and demolition sites has always been an eyesore. In response to the ugliness, in 2009 the Department of Buildings invited architects and designers to submit proposals to the UrbanShed competition. The winning entry, from the team of Young-Hwan Choi, Andres Cortes and Sarrah Kahn of Agencie Group, was announced last January and their design is finally making it to the streets. For more of the coverage, check out the New York Times City Room and the Village Voice.

EVENTS and TO DOs

RAIL YARDS COMMUNITY INPUT MEETING: Now that all stakeholders have pledged to retain the final section of the High Line for recreational use, the team at Friends of the High Line are ready to move ahead with plans and designs for phase three. On December 6th, join them for a project update from representatives from the High Line design team, James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and voice your suggestions or ideas for the site. For more information about the Community Input Meeting, visit the Friends of the High Line’s website. Tuesday, December 6th, 6:30pm, at Public School 11 Auditorium, 320 West 21st Street.

Button Agreement Map, Day 5 | Stanley Greenberg

EVERY STREET IN MANHATTAN
Photographer Stanley Greenberg, who spoke with us last year about his long history of documenting infrastructural spaces and systems, has embarked on a new project, the Button Agreement. Greenberg will walk every street in Manhattan. He will go on at least one walk a week, documenting the walks with photographs and maps showing which streets he’s been on. The documentation will be made public on his blog.

A book of his previous project, Time Machines, photographs of high energy physics experiments, is now available. Join Greenberg for a discussion and book signing next week in Brooklyn. Wednesday, December 7th, 7pm at BookCourt, 163 Court Street.

AIDS MEMORIAL COMPETITION: When the AIDS epidemic hit New York City in the early 1980s, St. Vincent’s hospital was at the epicenter of the crisis. St. Vincent’s has closed and the hospital is being redeveloped as luxury condominiums, but the NYC AIDS Memorial Park Campaign has succeeded in designating the triangle adjacent to the hospital a future park and memorial space. The triangle, bounded by Greenwich Avenue, West 12th Street and 7th Avenue, which has traditionally served as the loading dock for the hospital, will now serve as a “memorial park and teaching space to honor and recognize the more than 100,000 New Yorkers who have died from AIDS.” Architizer and Architectural Record have launched a competition to design the memorial park. The competition will be juried by Michael Arad, Kurt Andersen, Barry Bergdoll, Liz Diller, Ken Smith, Robert Hammond, Bill T. Jones, Richard Meier, Dr. Marjorie Hill and Suzanne Stephens. Find more information at the competition page. Deadline: January 21, 2012.

JOIN YOUR LOCAL COMMUNITY BOARD!: Community boards serve a vital role in the life of New York City. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is hosting a series of informational meetings about the roles and responsibilities of community board members, the newly increased role the borough’s community boards play and how to become a board member. The meetings will be held Tuesday, December 6th, from 6:30 – 8:00pm in the Municipal Building, 1 Centre Street, 19th Floor; Wednesday, December 14th, from 6:30 – 8:00pm, at 163 West 125th Street, Room 8C; and Thursday, January 5th, from 6:30 – 8:00pm in the Municipal Building, 1 Centre Street, 19th Floor. RSVP to conference@manhattanbp.org.

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

On September 10th, a group of about forty-five students, design professionals and bloggers gathered at the School of Visual Arts in NYC for an “Iconathon,” a collaborative design charrette aimed at creating a set of graphic symbols that can be applied across sectors to communicate commonly recognized urban concepts. The event was organized by Code for America [for more about Code for America, revisit our feature about the program. -Ed.] in partnership with The Noun Project, a group dedicated to contributing to and disseminating the world’s collection of visual symbols. Each Iconathon event, held in cities across the country, has its own civic theme. The theme was “311″ in San Francisco, “Food and Nutrition” in Los Angeles, “Democracy” in Chicago, “Neighborhoods” in Seattle and “Education” in Boston. In New York, the event series closed out with a focus on designing icons for “Transportation.”

Taking its name from “hackathons,” collaborative computer programming sessions, the event coincided with a number of technology-based initiatives aimed at improving the way that transit riders access and interpret information. For example, just the previous week New York City’s MTA introduced its touchscreen pilot program called On the Go!, an iPad-like interface that offers applications and real-time news and weather information for subway riders. This came on the heels of Washington DC’s transit map survey, an effort by the Washington Metropolitan Transportation Authority in conjunction with Greater Greater Washington to obtain rider input on how to best convey information on the metro map during its latest redesign. As metropolitan areas and cities seek new ways to adapt to demographic shifts in language and culture, how that information is visually disseminated and the technology that facilitates this with efficiency and ease have become increasingly important.

Icon Presentations | Photo by Flickr user Josh Clark

The event began with an hour-long introduction by four speakers — Jake Barton, Founder and Principal of Local Projects; Adam Greenfield, Managing Director of Urbanscale; Frank Hebbert, Director of Civic Works at OpenPlans; and Edward Boatman, founder of The Noun Project. This was followed by an all-day, facilitated design workshop, where attendees worked in groups to design transportation-related symbols for cities.

Jake Barton discussed the work of his firm, Local Projects, to demonstrate how media can be embedded in physical spaces. He used the official NYC Information Center as an example of how tourists can create custom guides to the city using touchscreen technology and then email, print or access the information on their cell phones to use on the go. Barton showed how technology can both create localized experiences and be a revenue-generating engine for the city. Defining his work as “interaction design,” he explained how Local Projects is translating advocacy into a visual language and focusing on the everyday user experience — that is, “designing for civic action and for the public, not just for public spaces.”

Adam Greenfield also touched upon this issue of localization, but he approached it from the framework of mobility, specifically transmobility, which he defined as “personal mobility in (and for) the networked city.” Citing Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city, he spoke of the role that technology can play in creating equality of movement, where digitized interactive spaces provide people with agency in the public realm. Greenfield was the first speaker to touch upon the fact that not all symbols or civic concepts are universally translatable, but vary across cultures and demographics. He gave the example of the off-bus fare collection system on the BRT in Curitiba, Brazil, implemented to speed up boarding. A similar program is being piloted in New York City on its Select Bus Service. The system used in Brazil could not be copied in its entirety; it had to be tweaked and readapted to the behavior of New York City riders. He also discussed bike sharing, a trendy topic among urban planners in New York and elsewhere, to explain the importance of interactive technology in creating a system of “on demand, intermodal, point-to-point mobility with beautiful seams.” He argued that transitions between modes, such as from bike to rail to bus, can never be completely seamless because there are unavoidable moments of transition. But as designers we should strive for “beautiful seams,” transitions that are fluid and easy to make between modes. He articulated a larger ambition of the day’s session: to create the visual language that will enable people to get to jobs, places of work, and to explore the city.

Frank Hebbert walked us through some of the examples of crowdsourcing technology that OpenPlans has been involved with, such as the OpenTripPlanner used by the NYC Department of City Planning. Using a web platform created by OpenPlans, city residents can suggest bike share stations or determine the location of the B63 bus in Brooklyn through its real-time tracker. A question that emerged out of his examples is whether or not there is a “right” way to communicate information on a map in such a way that it can be easily interpreted by a large cross-section of people.

Icons from The Noun Project

Edward Boatman elaborated on this idea by homing in on how to most effectively communicate civic messages through symbol designs. His interactive presentation, in which he asked the audience to vote on various design options and select the ones that best conveyed a specific idea, was a particularly compelling way to illustrate some of the challenges that designers face. Setting the stage for the interactive group breakout sessions that followed, he explained that there are two ways to convey a message — through an iconic symbol, in which an object is illustrated, or a narrative symbol, in which more visually complex information is presented, such as the idea of time — and provided examples of each type. It was a successful segue into a discussion of the role that culture and demographics play in understanding civic references.

The issues raised during the workshop — the intersection of technology, connectivity, visual language and user experience — are complex and constantly evolving. Thus, understandably, the discussion raised more questions than it answered, but nonetheless provided critical fodder for discussion and debate for the design session that followed. Is there a universal global language of transport? In what ways are these technologies and visual languages scalable? How can we translate this on a broader scale to improve user experience and minimize disjointedness in transitions between systems? The Noun Project plans to release the symbols created through the Iconathons — you can browse through a series of sketches that create a graphic shorthand for everything from bridges to bus stops to bike share stations here — into the public domain later this fall.

Icons in process | Photo by Flickr user Josh Clark

Manasvi Menon lives in New York City and works in transportation. She is on the board of Young Professionals in Transportation-New York, New York chapter.

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.

NYC SOLAR MAP
A new interactive map was launched by New York City Solar America City Partnership, led by Sustainable CUNY, to show the potential NYC has for solar panel placement. Showing both existing solar photo voltaic (PV) panels and solar thermal installations in NYC, the map also gives an estimate of solar PV potential for every rooftop in the five boroughs. The map allows users to assess any building’s solar panel capacity and estimate a financial payback. Created by gathering imagery and data using LIDAR technology, Inhabitat reports that the map shows that 66.4% of all buildings in the city are suitable for panels, and could generate up to 5,847 megawatts of power. To put this in perspective, the city currently outputs 6.5 megawatts of solar energy. The map represents opportunities for building owners to assess solar capacity on their rooftop for free. See Inhabitat’s piece on the map here, and to find out your building’s solar potential, check out the new NYC Solar Map.

1,000 Nike+ runners in NYC | Image via Cooper Smith

RUNNING IN NEW YORK: MAPS
Graphic design student Cooper Smith developed a striking series to visualize the location, route popularity and time of day people run in New York City. The series was produced for an SVA course with visionary designer Nicholas Felton using the Nike+ GPS-synced mobile app. By geolocating 1,000 runners’ paths, Smith produced beautifully mapped stills and time-lapse videos showing multiple facets of New York runners’ paths. See Infosthetic’s piece on the topic and the full work here.

Underground construction on the 7 Line | Image via MTAPhotos on Flickr

7 TRAIN EXTENSION
Official MTA photographer Patrick Cashin caught some beautiful shots of subterranean work currently underway on the 7 train’s extended line. The extension is expected to be complete in three years, after which passengers will be able to reach 11th Avenue and 34th Street. See the full Patrick Cashin slideshow on Flickr.

9/11 MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM UPDATE
The Architect’s Newspaper reported on developments around the much anticipated opening of the World Trade Center 9/11 Memorial and Museum scheduled for the tenth anniversary of the tragedy this coming September. The new complex will feature a subterranean museum and memorial space, an aboveground museum pavilion and a landscaped plaza with reflecting pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers. However, due to serious security concerns, a temporary ring of chain link fences and concrete barriers will limit public access to 1500 people at a time. After September 12th, visitors will be required to buy a ticket and pass through a series of metal detectors and x-ray machines in order to enter the plaza. Eventually security measures will be moved into the museum itself, but for the time being, security features trump accessible open space.

Artist’s rendering of +Pool | Image via +Pool

SWIM IN THE EAST RIVER?
Brooklyn designers Dong-Ping Wong of Family and Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeffrey Franklin of PlayLab have launched a Kickstarter campgain around their latest project +Pool, a project to build a floating pool in the East River, similar to Berlin’s famed Badeschiff. The designers have developed a comprehensive plan with engineering/design/planning firm ARUP and other experts to help make the pool a reality. The proposed pool will filter river water through its wall to remove bacteria, contaminants and odors, making it swimmable and safe by City standards. Four pools (Children’s pool, Lap pool, Lounge Pool and Sports Pool) will join together to create a giant plus sign in the East River. Their latest round of fundraising will support the physical testing of the proposed filtration system. See the full project description here. To read up on floating pool ideas UO has covered in the past, see Jonathan Kirschenfeld and Ann Buttenweiser’s take on the topic.

NATION’S LARGEST URBAN CAMPSITE IN BROOKLYN
According to a recent press release from the National Parks Service, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has announced that the nation’s largest urban campground will be established at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, a former airport used by Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes. The park’s current five campsites will be expanded to 90 over the next two years, and may eventually reach 600. Special outreach to underserved communities around the area will introduce families to camping skills and equipment in their home neighborhoods and will facilitate participation in overnight use, complete with campfire programs, kayaking and swimming opportunities.

EVENTS + TO DOs:

New York City in 2040 Image via Interboro Partners (left) and Amsterdam in 2040, Image via Space&Matter (right)

GLIMPSES of New York and Amsterdam: 2040
The Center for Architecture has teamed up with the Amsterdam Center for Architecture (ARCAM) to present “Glimpses of New York and Amsterdam in 2040,” a new exhibit showcasing visions of the future for two cities that share an extensive waterfront and similar climate challenges. The organizations commissioned architects and landscape architects in both cities to conceptualize the “future of the future,” with five basic necessities for living: breathing, eating, making, moving and dwelling. The exhibit features five firms from each city: New York’s dlandstudio, Interboro Partners, Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL), W Architecture & Landscape Architecture, and WORKac, and Amsterdam’s Barcode Architects, DELVA Landscape Architects / Dingeman Deijs Architect, Fabrications, Space & Matter and van Bergen Kolpa. GLIMPSES will be shown through September 10th at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place. Read Inhabitat’s coverage of the exhibit or, for more information, see the official site.

COME OUT & PLAY NEW YORK
Come Out and Play, the annual festival of citywide street games, will begin on June 19th and run until July 16th. In years past, the festival has “turned New York City into a playground for a weekend,” with satellite city festivals held in San Francisco and Amsterdam. This year, Come Out and Play will begin in Lower Manhattan in partnership with the River to River Festival. Come Out and Play will run the series over the summer, culminating in a one-day field day in mid-July on Governors Island. For more information, see the official site.

GRANT OPPORTUNITIES
The Awesome Foundation is offering multiple $1,000 grants each month to “people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe.” Although no New York City projects have been funded as of yet, the NYC Chapter is now accepting applications. To apply, click here.

Sappi has announced a call for entries for grants up to $50,000 with the “Ideas that Matter Grant Program.” Ideas that Matter is open to individual designers, design firms, agencies, in-house corporate design departments, design instructors, and individual design students and design student groups. To apply for an Ideas that Matter Grant, click here. The deadline to apply is July 15th.

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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.

Growth by Design | Center for an Urban Future

First off, what is the mission of the Center for an Urban Future?
CUF is a public policy think tank specializing in economic development and workforce development issues. We focus primarily on the five boroughs of New York but have done comparison studies of other big US cities. One thing we’ve been studying for years is the need for New York to diversify its economy. The city has traditionally been so focused on financial services and real estate and, to a lesser extent, media and advertising that it has failed to notice its other economic assets. So every year we try to profile a sector in New York that shows potential for growth with the hope that city economic development officials will take note and develop supportive policies. We’ve done studies on biotech (before that was big), food manufacturing, video game development and health information technology. Our report on design is in the same vein, though going into it we already knew the sector was strong. In our 2006 Creative New York report, which was an attempt to define and quantify core creative sectors in New York, we saw that the applied design fields had more firms than advertising, performing arts and publishing combined.

For those who haven’t read the report in full, please summarize your key findings.
We established beyond all doubt that New York City’s design industries, including architecture, are not only an important part of the city’s economy but one that has been growing rapidly over the last decade and will likely continue to grow. Despite the 2008 crash and the depressed economy that followed, the number of design firms in the city rose 15 percent since 2001, which is a much faster rate of growth than most other industries. New York has 3,969 firms in architecture, landscape architecture, fashion, graphic design, industrial design and interior design. That’s 33 percent more design firms than Los Angeles, the next largest city. The New York metro area has 40,470 designers, a majority of whom don’t work at design firms, and that’s 75 percent more than the next largest city which, again, is Los Angeles (with 23,160 designers).

When you look at the proportion of employed people in New York who work as designers, you’ll see the city has a much higher concentration of designers than any other major US city with the exception of San Francisco, which has an equivalent concentration but a smaller number. Economists measure an industry’s geographic concentration in order to get a sense of how much it is exporting to other places; if the concentration is much above the national average, then it is likely serving more than just local needs. New York’s design cluster is well above the national average. That’s a good sign.

US Metro Areas With the Highest Concentration of Designers | US Bureau of Labor Statistics

Did you (personally) have any assumptions about the design industry going into this project?
It’s hard to live in New York City and not have a few preconceived notions about design. Design is everywhere here, fashion is everywhere — it’s all over the people on the street, in most stores in Manhattan, and on subway advertisements.  But recently, I think, the whole city has become much more conscious of design, with Brooklyn Bridge Park and the East River Waterfront esplanade going up at the same time this last year, and the World Trade Center memorial slowly being realized and Governors Island opening up to the public. A lot of smart design and quality architecture has happened in the city over the last five years, and I think it has raised awareness of design’s importance and value.

Landscape Architects Designing | via Green Mission

How did you come to define “design” in your study? Does your definition differ from a standard used by the government in labor research?
One thing we uncovered was the difference in the design field between industry employment and what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls occupational employment. Typically, economic development analysts and economists will use industry employment (categorizing companies by sector) as their basic metric for judging the size and growth of a particular field. This doesn’t work very well with designers. For example, in New York, there are about 1,100 graphic design firms and something like 4,500 people who work at those firms, but that represents a small fraction of the graphic design industry, since, it turns out, most graphic designers work for companies in other industry categories like finance, media and publishing. According to another survey that asks employers to categorize their employees by field, there are 16,000 graphic designers in the New York metro area, and, since the Occupational Employment Survey won’t capture freelancers if they’re not counted as employees, there are likely many more.

Our on-the-ground reporting does much to explain this gap. From talking to designers and people from other sectors, we know that more and more companies, whether they’re banks, museums, universities or retail businesses, are deepening their internet presence. Banks are offering online banking, museums are developing online catalogs, universities are offering online courses and so on. And their design departments are expanding as a result. In 2000, the Occupational Employment Survey found just 6,700 graphic designers in the New York metro area. Nine years later, it turned up 16,000. That growth would have been completely invisible to someone looking at industry employment data. If anything they would have found a slight drop in employment and wondered to themselves why graphic design was doing so poorly.

Growth of Design Firms in Brooklyn: 2001-2009 | US Bureau of Labor Statistics

What were the biggest surprises that emerged from your research?
I’m not sure surprise is the right word, but the field I knew least about was industrial design. New York has a larger industrial design sector than I expected. It has more firms and people than any other US city. But in terms of influence, it trails the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston, where the tech boom has led to a lot of work designing consumer electronics and software interfaces. A lot of cutting-edge industrial design work in New York revolves around consumer experience research and consulting on innovation strategies for large manufacturers. One designer told me that if industrial designers would get more involved in New York’s tech scene it could lead to a lot of growth. Designers are more willing now to forgo upfront consulting costs and instead take investment positions or royalty positions in these young start-ups, and since they’re really good at developing and sharpening prototypes they could bring a lot to the table. That’s actually an area city officials could focus on.

What have you identified as some of the key drivers of growth for
 the design industry, both globally and for NYC?
Design will continue to grow in large part because it is so exportable. Fashion designers, industrial designers and architects, in particular, are offering a service that, first of all, is difficult: it requires skill and research and practice, and all of those things benefit from proximity. Second, it’s a service that is experiencing a rapid rise in demand in other parts of the world. The fastest growing consumer markets in the world right now are China, India, Singapore and Brazil. Those countries are investing heavily in their cities and their middle classes are growing faster than we’ve ever seen. What they don’t have is a lot of home grown design talent. Chinese developers are tapping American and European architects for their biggest developments and in a lot of cases giving them carte blanch to do whatever they want. Asian manufacturers are similarly looking to American and European fashion designers and industrial designers for consumer products. One major Korean textile company recently opened up a big design studio in Chelsea in order to develop fashion brands for Chinese consumers. They didn’t go to Chinese designers for that. This is a built-in advantage for New York as well as for the country, but the city, state and federal governments need to do more to facilitate our dealings with these countries.

In the spring of 2010, President Obama outlined a National Export Initiative that hopes to create jobs by doubling US exports over the next five years. But at the state and local level, very little is being done to achieve that goal. New York State has repeatedly cut its export budget, and the State now spends $1.5 million per year on export assistance. $1.5 million doesn’t go very far, as I’m sure you can imagine. Other places spend many times that. I’ve been told that Ontario spends $70 million per year on export assistance. Meanwhile, most federal and state programs focus overwhelmingly on manufactured goods and agricultural products rather than services, and they look primarily to Canada, the UK and Israel — those are our biggest trading partners, but their consumer markets are also not growing anywhere near the rate of China or Brazil. I think this would be a great opportunity for New York City to step in and begin an export strategy of its own. Right now, as far as I know, the City doesn’t have an export strategy at all. Design would be a good place to start. Designers are already dealing with clients in China and other fast growing markets, and there’s good reason to believe that will increase over the next decade. According to the financial services firm Credit Suisse, China is poised to become the world’s largest consumer market by the year 2020.

Top US Metro Areas by Number of Practicing Designers: 2009 | US Bureau of Labor Statistics

How do design clusterings and productive adjacencies influence the
 design industry?
Designers depend on communication and visual information sharing, which, despite technological advances, still happens most efficiently in person. In his book Triumph of the City, the economist Edward Glaeser cites studies that show steep rises in long distance air travel as advances in telecommunications increase, and telephone calls appear to take place most often between people who are geographically close. A little contact, a little information sharing, apparently begets the need for even more. Many of the designers I interviewed said, even between competing firms, there was a lot of idea sharing, enabling a person or firm that did not originate an idea to carry it to the next level. In New York, designers have definitely carved out geographic communities. There’s the Garment District of course, but also DUMBO, Bushwick, the Starrett-Lehigh building in Chelsea, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Old American Can Factory. In those places you have designers working with other designers but also a panoply of service providers like iPhone application people, product photographers or pattern makers. Those kinds of adjacencies lead to all kinds of productive exchanges that, collectively, push ideas and new methods forward.

Graphic Design Office | via The Office Stylist

What challenges are emerging to the future viability of New York’s design sector and its prominence on the global stage? The report makes clear that economic development agencies haven’t
historically paid attention to the design industry. What kinds of
 economic development strategies do you think would benefit this
sector?
I think the biggest challenge in maintaining New York’s prominence in design will be making sure that the venues and organizations that make information exchange possible are allowed to continue and grow. Unlike most other industries, even knowledge industries like software development, designers depend heavily on cultural non-profits, industry groups, publications and galleries. These organizations provide context and space for the meaningful exchange of information, they get people excited and inspired, but they rarely capture that value monetarily. A vast majority of designers don’t make a lot of money either, and they have to spend years apprenticing at firms for next to nothing, so making sure that New York is a place where both underpaid organizations and underpaid individuals can physically survive is incredibly important. It’s definitely a hard thing for the city to address. It encompasses so many different things including land-use policy, transportation, student visa and H1-B visa processes, and on and on, but its importance can’t be stressed enough.

There are a lot of other, more targeted things the city could do to support growth in the design industries. In the report, for example, we recommend that the city look to London’s Design Festival as a model for capitalizing on and connecting the city’s various design-oriented trade shows in the spring and fall. London’s festival is really neighborhood-centric in that local groups are encouraged to create hubs with their own idiosyncratic styles. Some neighborhoods put on street events and parties, and others build site-specific installations like toothpick cathedrals. That could galvanize other institutions like the big design schools and museums to collaborate more, but it probably needs a big initiative from the city to get it going, and perhaps some continued coordination and marketing later on.

Etsy offices in DUMBO | via mashable.com

David Giles is the Center for an Urban Future’s Research Associate. In his two years at the Center, he has written about the need for New York to diversify its economy by looking to sectors like health information technology and the problems many of the city’s small businesses have had in accessing energy efficiency incentives.

There’s a large section on public input gathered from various ‘digital environments’ via Quora.com, Meetups, By the City, online surveys at nyc.gov and more. The top identified needs gathered from such surveys are public wi-fi, internet access in more locations (even in the subway) and real-time public information.

Much of the report talks about all the great stuff the city is already doing — but here’s some of what we can expect from the city’s growing digital infrastructure in the years to come:

• Better Access to the Internet: public computer centers with senior learning, underground subway wi-fi and cell service in six stations, improve computer access with hardware and internet to 72 of the highest-need middle schools in the city
• Open Government: API-enabled Public Data and NYC Platform, an open government framework featuring Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for City data, a hub for feedback from the developer community and an NYC App store
• Engagement: Partnerships with social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr) to engage residents, digital 311, and a better nyc.gov

Read the full Roadmap for yourself here.
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HOUSING TRENDS
With New York City’s housing climate hitting new lows — last week’s tragic fire in Bushwick resulted in the deaths of two men living in an illegally-converted boarding house — the need to reevaluate legislation and enforcement around illegal subdivisions was made clear. Bolstered by surprising 2010 Census numbers which discounted predictions on Queens’ new residents (reporting that only 1,343 new people moved to Queens in a decade), illegal conversions housing new immigrants are being taken seriously by housing advocates and even City Hall. A recent analysis by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) found that “illegal housing types, subdivisions and sharing are so extensive in the city that it has become impossible to truly understand the population living behind our closed doors.” The Architectural League is working with CHPC on a multi-phase design study that will provoke innovative design thinking to promote a greater diversity of housing typologies in the city, given the mismatch between contemporary demographic reality and the kinds of dwellings that conform to New York’s complex housing code. Stay tuned for more on this collaboration in the weeks to come.

The issue was also addressed in the most recent version of PlaNYC, and re-evaluation of the topic is at the forefront of political conversation. NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy released its quarterly report on the city’s state of housing — and trends look dreary for foreclosure and sales. Housing prices have dipped in all boroughs except Queens, and 40% of the city’s foreclosure notices are in Brooklyn, but have declined in every borough since 2010. See the full Furman Report and more on housing reform here.
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New and Old Parks Department Logo | Images courtesy Pentagram

PENTAGRAM AND PARKS DEPARTMENT TEAM UP
Paula Scher, of the design firm Pentagram, has teamed up with the NYC Parks Department to retool their iconic logo and identity, first introduced in 1934. The redesign will touch signage, wayfinding and environmental graphics for 1,700+ parks, playgrounds and other facilities. The design effort, spearheaded by Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, seeks to coordinate the visual identity of the Department of Parks and Recreation with high-profile projects like the High Line and Madison Square Park and to increase consistency across agency materials.

Although consistent with the original design of a leaf in a circle, the new logo has a modernized leaf, a thinner circle line, a brighter, lighter green and is set in the typeface Akkurat. Park signage has the most radical revamp, with modular pieces for future expansion and double sided signs. To read the full story, see Pentagram’s coverage.

New Parks Signage | Images courtesy Pentagram
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END OF SUBWAY CAR REEFS
If you caught last week’s UO feature on Stephen Mallon’s photography, including his series capturing the process of using retired New York City subway cars as man-made reefs, check out this New York Times slideshow from last week announcing the end of the decade-long program. Over 2,500 retired subway cars (toxic and valuable material removed) had met their fate in the Atlantic, off the coasts of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, as permanent underwater homes for sea creatures. The program was discontinued this year, when the introduction of newer subway cars with more plastic parts and more complex stripping methods, rendered them unsuitable for oceanic disposal.
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EVENTS & TO-DOs…

NYPL ALL LIT UP
Paul LeClerc, the president of New York Public Library sought Parisian inspiration to light the renovated Fifth Avenue landmark library. François Jousse, Paris’ civic expert on building lighting and engineering, impressed the library with his practice of putting lights atop streetlights surrounding Paris’ most beautiful buildings, casting a magnificent glow onto the most ornate of facades. The library chose Claude R. Engle, a lighting consultant who has illuminated the World Trade Center, the Louvre and the Pompidou, to redo lighting on the beloved library. Marking its 100th birthday on May 23rd, the building will be drenched in glowing, white light to highlight the massive three-year restoration project.

WILLIAMSBURG SMÖRGÅSBORD
Starting this weekend, there’s a new addition to the growingly popular flea market culture with foodies in mind. Smorgasburg, the new Brooklyn Flea Food Market, is a popular add-on to Williamsburg’s waterfront with 100+ food vendors, food organizations (SlowFood, Just Food, NYC Food Coalition) and NYS Greenmarket farmers to offer a retail market with fresh and prepared food, kitchenware and al fresco dining. Yum! Every Saturday. See the official site here.

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On November 26, 1967 the opening of the Chrystie Street Connection — the first true integration of the IND and BMT systems since they were merged with the IRT to create the unified subway system in 1940 — offered subway riders traveling on lines through the Lower East Side and Brooklyn the first opportunity to access to the three systems with a single ticket. Called “the big switch,” one might assume this event would be relished by subway-goers. In reality, it was somewhat of a disaster. As described in an article in the next day’s New York Post entitled “Riders Burn as TA [Transit Agency] Pulls the Switch,” passengers at affected stations were largely confounded by the new system’s hard-to-grasp routes.

The main culprit was the confusing signage that greeted subway customers and transit officials alike. From the Post: “A mild panic set in at the Atlantic Ave. station when TA officials arrived early to find old signs still hanging. They quickly ordered the old signs and maps covered with newspapers before the rush set in.” At the affected stations, new signs integrating the lines — the first in the system designed by Massimo Vignelli’s design firm Unimark International in a spare, modern sans-serif — had been hung. But they stood in the same space as decades-old signs originally erected by the defunct transit companies.

Furthering the confusion, officials at individual stations erected hand-drawn signs on pieces of cardboard, in an attempt to clarify the changes for customers not familiar with the new transfer system. It quickly became obvious that the New York City Transit Authority had a major communication problem on its hands.

Installing a decal on a Unimark-style sign at an unidentified BMT Broadway line station, c. 1979 | Courtesy of MIT Press

This mishap is just one of many that fill the pages of Paul Shaw’s excellent new book, Helvetica and the New York Subway System (MIT Press, 2011). Expanded from an earlier piece published online under the title “The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway,” the illustrated essay is both a history of the signage of the New York Subway system as well as an attempt to complicate, in Shaw’s words, “the commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system,” (a myth notably perpetuated in Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary Helvetica).

As noted, the Vignelli-designed signage was not rendered in the typeface Helvetica (as the famed type designer and recipient of this year’s Architectural League President’s Medal would have you believe) but rather in Standard (also known as Akzidenz Grotesk), the subway’s predominant typeface throughout the 1960-80s. In the course of showing how the Helvetica myth “is not true — or rather, it is only somewhat true,” Shaw’s story is compelling by showing just how complicated a thing as conspicuous as a subway sign can be. And how the examination of this complicated thing can reveal much about the history and workings of the subway system, and of the city itself.

Shaw weaves together the histories of subway signage in New York, the development of international transportation systems in the 1960s, the involvement of Vignelli’s firm and the history of the typeface Helvetica. He surveys an impressive collection of photographs of tile mosaics and screenprinted tiles that were used by the three different subway companies. He illustrates the point that these signs varied not only by company but also by line and station, establishing a precedent through which the system’s hodgepodge quality endured.

Platform signs at Forest Hill-71st Ave. Left sign is set in Standard; right sign in Helvetica | Courtesy of MIT Press

While systems in Europe and the MBTA in Boston created coordinated signage systems (many adopted Helvetica and like variations, specifically) in the early- and mid-1960s, the New York Subway had yet to heed any of the calls to get its act together. It was not until 1966 that the NYCTA hired Unimark International to undertake plans for such an effort. When Unimark made their proposal to the TA in 1967, they were told that the agency lacked the funding to commission a design manual, let alone implement any of the ideas. And when the TA’s in-house sign shop attempted to implement some of the signs at various stations, Vignelli called the result “the biggest mess in the world.” By 1970, Unimark put out the first official design manual for the New York system, but it specified Standard Medium as the font to be used. Despite Vignelli’s expressed desire to use Helvetica, Shaw postulates that it would have cost too much effort and money to the in-house sign shop at the time, and therefore Standard was selected.

Despite this failure, Vignelli held out hope that his manual for the system would nonetheless bring the system’s signage into a more rational state. This, too, proved impractical. The 1970s brought the near-bankruptcy of the city and the transit system. Writing in the New York Times in 1979, Paul Goldberger declared that the state of the signage of the system was such that “the signs are so confusing that one is tempted to wish they were not there at all — a wish that is, in fact, granted in numerous other stations and on all too many of the subway cars themselves. And the system is so complex that one might feel signs make very little difference — a rider may as easily find his destination by taking a chance as by any sort of careful planning.” In addition to such failures of clarity, these years were marked by graffiti-laden cars and walls. In criticizing the hypocrisy of the city’s spending millions on anti-graffiti programs when many cars and stations lacked any official signage at all, Patricia Conway wrote in Print, “If nothing else, the subway graffiti are a testimony to the monumental failure of TA officials and their design consultants to make the system legible.”

L: Allerton Avenue, 1973. R: Subway car, 1971. Photos by Jack Stewart, from Graffiti Kings: New York City Mass Transit Art of the 1970s. | Courtesy of MIT Press

Although Shaw traces the myth that Helvetica was the official typeface of the Subway back to the 1970s, it was not widely implemented until 1989 and into the following decade, when capital improvement campaigns allowed a coordinated signage system to be undertaken for the first time.

While Helvetica and the New York Subway System is ostensibly about undoing the Helvetica myth, it is more of an exploration into the mutable and untamed history of the New York Subway System. Shaw demonstrates that much of the look and feel of today’s official signage is, in fact, the result of misinterpretation, obfuscation and politics, both personal and structural. In both its scope and explication, Shaw’s book has something to teach the practicing typographer and the historian alike.

There’s a scene in Hustwit’s Helvetica where the Swiss designer Lars Müller implies Helvetica is “the typeface of the city,” and viewers are subsequently treated to a montage of him pointing to a series of encounters with the typeface in the urban landscape. Müller here reifies the modernist ethos of a perfectly communicating typeface that is easy to apply universally. Shaw’s book provides a poignant counterpoint to this notion on his journey through the subway, documenting (though endless footnotes and photographic juxtapositions) a deluge of irregularities contained within the transit system.

MTA poster heralding route designation changes, 1979 | Illustration by Nancy Stahl | Courtesy of MIT Press

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Eric Peterson sometimes writes things and sometimes designs things. He is a former project associate of Urban Omnibus and lives in Brooklyn.

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.

From left to right: Steven Miller, Massimo Vignelli, Paul Shaw, John Tauranac, and Eddie Jabbour

Last night, the Museum of the City of New York brought together a panel of New York City subway map dignitaries for “The New York City Subway Map – Form v. Function in the Public Realm:” designer Massimo Vignelli, designer John Tauranac, author and typographer Paul Shaw, and KickMap creator Eddie Jabbour, in a discussion moderated by Steven Miller. A packed room listened to a dialogue about the designers’ efforts to help riders understand and navigate the New York City subway system and the unfortunate (d)evolution of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s official map in recent decades into increasingly complicated, intermodal and difficult to read versions of itself — the latest of which was released earlier this year.

1972 Subway Map designed by Massimo Vignelli | via nycsubway.org

Massimo Vignelli started off the conversation with an introduction to transit diagrams around the world. Massimo noted the differences between a diagram and a map, but stressed the importance of both form and function in both. A map is geographic, with streets and topography. It can locate you on a wide variety of scales, but it typically needs to be very detailed. A diagram depicts the structure of a system. Diagrams are commonly used to illustrate transportation systems all over the world. The 1972 Vignelli NYC subway map was an attempt at a diagrammatic display for the subway system, consisting of 45 and 90 degree angles, many colors, and extreme legibility. However, the map was criticized by the public, who found the lack of above-ground geographic and navigational details confusing. In 1979 the MTA ousted Vignelli’s diagram for a “more legible” version — legibility defined, not as visual and textual clarity, but as geographical clarity.

Detail of the 1979 Subway Map | via gothamist.com

Thus brings John Tauranac into the picture. Tauranac is a New York City native who has been making maps of the city for almost 40 years and sat as the chair of the committee to redesign the MTA subway map in 1979. The redesign intended to retain certain elements of a diagrammatic map, but based on geography, with a new color coding system for grouped trunk lines (prior to this, there was a different color for each line). Tauranac showed the progression of “quasi-geographic” maps since the 1979 version (designed by Tauranac and Michael Hertz), which he described as becoming “more quasi and less geo, with a loss of legibility.” As he zoomed in on Manhattan’s Financial District, it was easy to see how the maps have gotten more muddy, with type running over the lines and no designation of service changes (i.e. weekday versus weekend versus nighttime). The theme of the night should have been, Tauranac declared, “Basta!”

Paul Shaw discussing the problems of perception in the design of a subway map.

Paul Shaw, author and typographer, then introduced some common problems to consider when making a subway map. He explores the subway system, looking at signage and stations, and has come to understand the complexities that are inherent in a large transit system such as that of the MTA. One archival image he presented showed a woman in a station, standing at a large call board. If you just pushed a button representing your final destination, the board would tell you how to get there from your current station. This behemoth was the predecessor to smart phones and Google maps, but why did such a useful concept disappear from the subway system? Now, for unfamiliar travelers, it is hard enough even to know where to get on the subway, let alone travel from one destination to another and transfer trains. The current map is not for travelers who need expedited information, but for the person who has time to scan tiny type to decipher whether or not the N train stops at 28th Street.

MTA map (left) compared to KickMap (right) | via kickmap.com

With the onset of new technologies, more and more people are taking it upon themselves to alleviate some of these issues. Eddie Jabbour designed the KickMap as a geographical and graphically legible alternative to the MTA map, and even offered it to them to use. They declined. So Jabbour and his son created an iPhone app, which notes day and nighttime service changes, options to receive notifications of unexpected delays, GPS technology to help locate nearby stations and a compass to help orient yourself after exiting to the street. The app has been downloaded by over 350,000 people — a sign, Jabbour pointed out, that people are calling for a less confusing option. But, he added, we can’t rest on smartphone tools, which are only used by a fraction of subway riders. There is still a dire need for easily-accessible print media, or other innovations that can benefit everyone.

Despite the obvious frustrations with and criticisms of the MTA’s design choices (and perhaps because no MTA representative sat on the panel), it was a jovial evening overall. Serious discussions were balanced by more lighthearted conversations, such as favorite subway stations (which ranged from the abandoned City Hall station to the grand space of the 181st Street station in Washington Heights). Ultimately, the evening reminded us that the struggle between complexity and simplicity, comprehensive information provision and distilled clarity, that is inherent to an infrastructural system the size and breadth of the NYC subway is one that can be aided — or sometimes hindered — by design choices.

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Meredith Baber is a Project Associate at Urban Omnibus and a Masters candidate in the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture Program at Columbia University’s GSAPP.

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.

Images from left to right: Hudson River Park, image courtesy of Mathews Nielsen; West Harlem Piers Park, image courtesy of Alison Cartwright | via archleague.org

PARK TOUR AND BIKE RIDE
This Saturday, Architectural League group Design in 5 is hosting a park tour and bike ride of Hudson River Park and the West Harlem Piers, two of the many waterfront revitalization efforts springing up all over New York City. Design in 5 events are typically open to designers roughly five years or fewer out of school, but the group invites all young Omnibus readers as well. Participants will travel by bike to two different Hudson River parks and meet Len Greco from the New York City Economic Development Corporation and designers Barbara Wilks, of W Architecture, and Signe Nielsen, of Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. Join them to talk about waterfront development, design processes, and coordination efforts involved in projects of this scale, all while enjoying a beautiful day out in the sun. Email designin5@archleague.org to sign up.
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A HUNDRED MILLION CALLS TO 311

311 Calls for New York | Pitch Interactive via wired.com

WIRED reports on What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York, including how 311 calls “represent a huge pool of data to be collected, parsed, and transformed into usable intelligence,” evident in crowdsourced detective work like the Maple Syrup Mystery. Eye-grabbing infographics provide a quick glance at New York’s most vocal zip codes and common gripes, but also reveal more nuanced geographic and temporal complaint patterns. The article points to various efforts, by the City and private companies, to improve the efficiency of problem solving, but suggests that these programs can only go so far in improving the urban fabric. As a resource though, the uses of 311 call data continue to unfold. The call center is a voice of accountability that may encourage more New Yorkers to speak up, and 311 data is a tool to analyze the City’s problems, spurring timely and targeted response.
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DESIGN MATTERS
A recent survey following Election Day, which tested polling issues ranging from voter privacy to equipment functionality, found that over a third of the survey participants thought that the newly-designed ballot was difficult to read and used font that is too small. Design matters! Maybe its time for New York’s Board of Elections to go back to the drawing board with AIGA’s Design for Democracy, which “applies design tools and thinking to increase civic participation by making interactions between the US government and its citizens more understandable, efficient and trustworthy.”
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TRACING TRASH
Trash can over flowing? Not to worry, take your waste to Union Square tomorrow from 11am- 1pm for Culture Push’s Tracing Trash symposium. The “curated trash experiment” gathers information about waste disposal practices in the city. Orange-jumpsuited liaisons will answer questions about where garbage comes from and where it goes, and offer ideas for alternative disposal. Just remember to RSVP, to cp@culturepush.org, for your date with the dumpster.
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SWIMMING CITIES
Last weekend, the newest addition to Swimming Cities, which we discussed with artist Swoon earlier this fall, was launched in the Gowanus — or at least the radial foundation for it was. The Ocean of Blood, as the fleet of small boats is called, and its crew of artists will begin a journey up the Ganges River in India in March. The small rivercrafts can be connected for common space or separated in order to navigate narrow waterways. On-board motorcycles serve dual purposes, as propellers for the individual boats and vehicles for the crew when they need to get supplies on land. The final destination for The Ocean of Blood is Varanasi, the oldest living city in the world, where the crew will collaborate with local artists to create visual and musical performances using their journey as inspiration.
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KRANTHOUT

KrantHout | via worldchanging.com

File this under new materials wrought from extreme recycling: Worldchanging tells us about newspaper wood, aka KrantHout, designed by Mieke Meijer and available through the Dutch design firm, Vij5. The product is made from layers of recycled newspapers, which can be milled and sanded like any other type of wood. Meijer says KrantHout is “a reversing of a traditional production process; not from wood to paper, but the other way around.” The material has been in development since 2003 and Vij5 is working on a line of products to be added to their collection.
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EYEBALLING BRIDGES AND TUNNELS
Last week’s interview with photographer Stanley Greenberg reminded BLDGBLOG of this 2004 “carto-photographic look” at New York’s bridges and tunnels, an impressive gallery of images from the Library of Congress, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and Historic American Engingeering Record (HAER). “Eyeballing New York City’s Bridges and Tunnels” spotlights the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck, George Washington, Queensboro, Verrazano-Narrows, Triborough and Hells Gate Bridges along with the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, in all their infrastructural beauty.
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TEDxBROOKLYN

This Saturday, TEDxBrooklyn — one of many local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a “TED-like experience” — is hosting a stage event at Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn Campus. The one day program will focus on “the making of a movement,” bringing together local artists, entrepreneurs, activists, innovators and other Brooklynites to talk about and demonstrate their work and ideas. Meanwhile, you can nominate a “transformational individual” you know to be considered for TEDxBrooklyn’s “ONE Brooklynite,” to be featured on the program website.
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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.