Starters for ten

I had to pull together a list of relevant cityofsound posts the other day, and subsequently thought it might make i) a useful introductory index for new readers, and ii) a cheap blog post. 

So below, some popular or defining posts at cityofsound. They all tend to gravitate towards recurring themes of cities,
architecture, design, media and culture – often colliding in the same
post, say on the imagined connections between travel writing and design, or football and architecture – but here’s an attempt at filing them discretely nonetheless.

Design practice

• Architecture and interaction design, via adaptation and hackability (A summary of thinking around adaptive design and hackability, and the relationship between architecture and interaction design.)   
• Adaptation, personalisation and self-centred design
  (A chapter from a report for the UK Government on the relationship between user research and prototyping cultures)
• How can the design of digital surfaces help engender trust?
  (On whether we can build trust through indicating the equivalent of physical wear and tear into interfaces)
• "How the computer can help the designer", New Scientist, 1964
  (Some scans from the mid-60s on the potential of the computer as design tool)
• The New Rationalism
  (Early post on a design approach exemplified by Naota Fukasawa)
• Design. Architecture. Football
  (Imagined overlaps in approach between Dutch Total Football, architecture and design practice)
• Starflyer (and service), Schiphol (and soccer), Stansted (and signage)
  (On service design in airlines, signage in airports, and another overlap between football systems and Schiphol airport)
• Trenitalia, travel writing and total design (Imagined overlap between observing cultures and places in travel writing and design practice)
• Insanely great, or just good enough? (A piece for Icon/Core77 on the shortcomings in the iPod design around adaptation)

Media

• Movements in Modern Media
  (Presentation on managing the contradictions in designing modern media events and programmes of activity; metaphors suggesting strategies for success in an out-of-control environment)
• Why ‘Lost’ is genuinely new media
  (On the new strategies for media suggested by the US TV programme ‘Lost’)
• Ripples, or "The Social Life of a Broadcast"
  (How to represent broadcast media in a new media environment)
• Assessing the new Guardian, with brief nod to the avant-garde [aka Grazia, Heat and The Sun]
  (Review of the Guardian redesign, compared with other contemporary newspaper and magazine design)
• Work: quick review of 2005 at the BBC
  (Round-up of a year’s work at the coal face of BBC new media and radio services)
• On podcasting itself
  (How podcasting relates to broadcasting and its qualities as media)
• The Fall and Rise of the Magazine Cover?
  (Design of magazine covers, via Esquire and The Economist and featuring scans of The Independent’s Talk of the Town supplement)
• iPods and the wireless (Re-connecting with contextual information around music, via a suggested mini-projector peripheral for the iPod)

Games

• Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality
  (Grand Theft Auto’s simulation of Los Angeles, mapped onto photographs of the real city, via Michael Mann’s Collateral, Los Angeles Plays Itself, City of Quartz and others)
• Modeling urban behaviour amidst networked ultraviolence
  (Early review of Grand Theft Auto and creating a sense of the city)
• Gangs Of New York, World-Building (Creating worlds in games and film, via Scorcese and GTA, again)

Music

• New Musical Experiences
  (Lengthy presentation on the current state of music experiences, in context of history of recorded music experience, and issues around metadata, cover art, interfaces and so on)
• Designing for shuffling
  (On interfaces optimised for shuffling as a way of listening, drawing from record decks)
• How Devices Learn (How to build products, specifically for music, which learn from user behaviour)
• Bad Metadata Is Killing Music (The importance of metadata in keeping music, specialist and otherwise, relevant)
• Music’s Rich Facets (The different angles and relationships involved in browsing around music)

Architecture

• Two possible Google Earth extensions: time and sound
  (Suggesting the ability to scroll time backwards in Google Earth, and listen in to the sound of the earth)
• The Smithsons and adaptive architecture
  (Legendary British architects and modular adaptation)
• Flora, fauna, pixels and paper
  (Paper architecture, urban:rural interplay and the virtual New York generated in ‘King Kong’)
• Tales of two cities imagined in music: Metropolis Shanghai and Chavez Ravine (On imagining cities via music and sound)

Cities, places, buildings

• The Shock of the New World, with respect to the flora and fauna of Australia
  (A somewhat epic post on my delight/shock at experiencing the physical and natural aspects of Australia, drawing from historical accounts on experiencing the New World, plus Robert Hughes)
• Punching holes in Ciutat Vella; adaptive urban form in Barcelona
  (How aspects of Barcelona adapt and develop, as flexible, responsive urban form)
• Urbis: Imagining The Modern City – And A New Kind Of Museum (My work on the ‘Imagining the modern city’ exhibit within the Urbis museum, Manchester)
• The theft of Bedford Square
  Close to the madding crowd (on St. Giles, London) (Photos of an incident outside Centre Point lead to a discussion on the history of the St. Giles district)
• Bleak House Without A Foggy Day In London Town (Discussing the TV adaptation of Dickens’ Bleak House and Victorian London)
• Savile Row and tailoring urban fabric
  (Evisu’s arrival in Savile Row and the changing nature of cultural industries in that street)
• Daily Express building, Fleet Street
  (A tour of the spectacular art deco entrance/exterior of the Daily Express, with reference to Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’)
• Swiss Cottage Library, London
  (London Open House enables a visit to the restored Basil Spence English modernist masterpiece)
• Frank Gehry’s MIT Stata Center, Cambridge Mass.
  (A ‘review’ of Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT)
• Senate House, University of London
  (Photo-tour of Charles Holden’s Senate House building, with reference to George Orwell)
• New Islington, New Hope
  (Photo-tour of the New Islington development in Manchester)
• Brunswick Centre, London
  (The redeveloped brutalist housing complex in Bloomsbury)
• Koolhaas/Balmond/Arup Serpentine Pavilion, 2006
  (Quick review of the 2006 Serpentine Pavilion)
• Boston/Cambridge Diary
  (Various articles on Boston and Cambridge, USA, with historical detail)
• Shanghai Diary (Please note: the Shanghai diaries were written for this blog by Justin O’Connor)

Policy

• Design Thinkbelt
  (Possible future of the Design Museum in London)
• Industrial Policy for Creativity (In response to George Cox’s report on creativity in British industry)

Reviews

• Jonathan Raban at London Review Bookshop (Raban gives a reading from his novel ‘Waxwings’ and discusses his writing in general)
• Stephen Gill and photographing the everyday invisible (Photography by Stephen Gill)
• Barbican: This Was Tomorrow (Exhibition about the history of the Barbican estate, London)
• New York Changing: Revisiting Berenice Abbott’s New York (A book which retraces the steps of Berenice Abbott’s legendary street photography collection, ‘Changing New York’)
• But Beautiful, by Geoff Dyer (Jazz, photography, history and fictional biography)
• Archigram, Design Museum, London (Exhibition on the influential ’60s British architects)
• The city as exhibition (The ‘Art Deco’ exhibition at the V&A, London, and how exhibitions could integrate or dissolve into the city itself)
• "China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795", Royal Academy, London (Art and craft from the Qing dynasty emperors)
• Modernism is abroad, generally
• (On the buzz around the ‘Modernism’ exhibition at the V&A)
• HyperCard RIP (Reflecting on influential, discontinued Apple software)
• ‘Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956-2006’ exhibition, The Barbican, London (Radical or utopian city and architectural visions)