Category: Strategic design
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Essay: ‘A sketchbook for the city to come: the popup as R&D’, for AD ‘Popups and Parasols’
Please note: this essay has now moved over to Medium. This follows the earlier post on this set of essays, which also features 'The Commodification of Everything' for 'SQM' and 'Urban Parasites, Data-Driven Urbanism, and the Case for Architecture' for A+U. This one was first published as: 'A Sketchbook for the City to Come:…
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Journal: Three essays from last summer; networked urbanism
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“The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much”—Frei Otto Around this time last year, at the family home in Brisbane, in the jetlagged early hours of what was ostensibly a holiday, I wrote a set of articles for three architecture-oriented publications—a magazine, a journal and a book—all concerning the dynamics of…
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Essay: Clockwork City, Responsive City, Predictive City and Adjacent Incumbents
This is the in-depth version of my column posted in Dezeen this week, around the impact of predictive analytics on cities. This version particularly uses public transport services and new transport startups as the pivot for its arguments, as transport (or transit, or mobility) is a fundamental aspect of city services currently being transformed, disrupted and…
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Essay: ‘Dark Matter and Trojan Horses’ e-book now on-paper, on-demand
Print-on-demand version of 'Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary'' A consistent request over the last couple of years has been for a physical version of my e-book for Strelka Press, 'Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary' (Read the background to that book here.) Potential readers either wanted a physical version…
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Journal: Fabrica
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I’m writing this flying over the Alps, on BA579 from Venice to London. It’s a big blue sky lit by hazy sunshine, and the Alps look unreal. We just flew a few metres over a contrail, a perpendicular arc into the sunlight, hundreds of kilometres long, a surprisingly distinct temporary structure of curly vapour. Best…
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Journal: Open Kitchen is open for business
A picture is worth 1000 words. Which I think means I now have to write 1000 words, right? This is my favourite picture from the last Ravintolapäivä pop-up restaurant day (I've written about Ravintolapäivä before) As someone commented on Instagram, "I wish I could open 10000 Instagram accounts so I could like this photo that…
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Essay: Foreword to Rory Hyde’s “Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture”
We had the Helsinki launch of Rory Hyde's new book "Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture" today, featuring a panel discussion between Rory, Bryan Boyer, Jenna Sutela and me at the World Design Capital Paviljonki. Rory kindly asked me to write the foreword to the book, and as per usual, I've reproduced an…
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Essay: Maginot Line, from “Dark Matter & Trojan Horses” (Strelka Press)
What follows is one of the "plays" that didn't make that recent strategic design "playbook" for Strelka Press—Dark Matter & Trojan Horses. I'm sharing here as it serves as a bit of a taster for that essay, describing what I call the "Maginot Line" play. But posting this also gives me a chance to write about…
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Essay: Helsinki Street Eats (Sitra)
A while ago, we (Sitra’s Strategic Design Unit) released a book on Helsinki’s street food culture, which, taken with a liberal pinch of salt, covers the last 150 years or so of food in the city. It ends with the currently burgeoning food scene in the city, as exemplified by the culinary insurgency movements of…
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Essay: Dark Matter & Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary (Strelka Press)
Please note: this piece has moved over here, as part of a publication Dark Matter & Trojan Horses at Medium. Please read, and link to, that version instead. —- Q. What connects Bryan Ferry and Cedric Price, dark matter and Hitchcock’s “Macguffin”, Trojan Horses and iPhones, 21st century social contracts and street food, the Brisbane floods…