Sketchbook: London Squared map, with After the Flood
One of the early collaborative projects at Future Cities Catapult—actually roughly the same time as Pixel Track with BERG—was a very small, very quick, but very useful, insightful and powerful bit of information design with After the Flood. I asked them to work with us on a visualisation 'device' for data about London, principally the […]
Sketchbook: Connected Streets
Much of the work at the Catapult is about making more holistic, integrated urban projects happen. While this can include governance and investment pieces, we’ve also been exploring technology at the street level. For example our Sensing Cities project, which is deploying air quality sensors across Enfield, Brixton, Elephant & Castle and Hyde Park, and […]
Journal: Back “Hyper-Reality: A New Vision of the Future” by Keiichi Matsuda
Production drawings by Keiichi Matsuda An uncharacteristically brief post just to point you at Keiichi Matsuda's Kickstarter campaign, launched today, for his ambitious new films about the modern city, set in Medellin, Colombia. Matsuda's previous work is quite brilliant—I've mentioned it before—and the premise of this new series is even more promising: "It will be […]
Sketchbook: Fabrica 2013 Informal Annual Review: Fabricanti Handbook
On my second or third day here, I showed the peerless Tom Sachs Studio “Ten Bullets” movie. Enjoy: “Ten Bullets”, tongue in cheek and deadly serious at the same time, captures the spirit of a studio, of its people and of the work they do there (without showing the work, really.) I knew right away that […]
Sketchbook: Domus magazine on iPad
(This is a slightly unusual entry in the Sketchbook series, as the end products are largely all the hard work of others, as noted below. Still.) For the last couple of years, I’ve been a strategic advisor to Domus magazine in Milan, principally on their digital aspects, where I’ve also led much of the design […]
Sketchbook: New SuperNormal column by Max Gadney, on real-time data visualisation and football + “Football” by Danny Blanchflower
I'm watching Germany vs. Italy at Euro 2012. It's currently exhibiting most of the characteristics that Max Gadney wrote about in the latest issue of Domus: quixotic improvisation and extreme technical skill, cohesive teamwork and the individual brilliance of Balotelli, fluidity and structure, deep history and contemporary culture, data driven insight and unpredictable chance … […]
Sketchbook: New SuperNormal column by James Bridle, on Amazon, Kindle and reading
Just a quick note to say that James Bridle's article for the SuperNormal series I curate for Domus is out now in the magazine (#958), and on the Domus website. I asked James to write something about reading, and how the Kindle might be changing our experience of reading—and he went way beyond that limited […]
Sketchbook: drawing The Shard’s parking
A very short little note about a diagram we made yesterday. The fuller story is over at Helsinki Design Lab, which notes how my interest in The Shard tower in London was piqued by Bryan tweeting about the incredibly low parking rates they've achieved on that project. There are 87 floors, 72 of which are […]
Essays: Introducing SuperNormal
A quick word about a new series I’m curating for Domus, the Italian art, architecture and design magazine. Called SuperNormal, it’s an attempt to ‘sketch’ a different kind of technology journalism, recognised how cultural it is. A few years ago, in response to the usual diminished depiction of contemporary technology as simply “IT”, someone—I forget […]
Sketchbook: Melbourne Smart City, for City of Melbourne/C40 Cities (incl. a note on why it’s easier to crowdsource a revolution than a light-rail system)
About a year ago, I helped design and run a workshop for the City of Melbourne, as part of Arup’s agreement to run a series of workshops for the C40 ‘climate leadership group’ of cities (the C40 is in partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative, and is a consortium of what could be described as the […]