We’ve been doing a lot of reading and some furious scribbling here at HDL HQ.
Fellow Helsinkian Adam Greenfield has been musing about the contemporary city and the sorts of designers needed to make the most of it. The comments are particularly interesting.
GOOD Magazine is slowly revealing their list of 100 “exciting, interesting” people and projects. Favorites there include Project M and Data.gov.
It’s a bit old news now, but Business Week has published their annual list of the “Best Design Programs in the World,” a term I put in quotations because they’ve certainly stretched the definition of design for their own purposes. Bruce Nussbaum’s introductory post titles it “World’s Best Design Thinking Programs” and that seems a far more appropriate title.
Our friends at BERG London together with Timo Arnall have released Immaterials: the ghost in the field, a second video exploring the realm of RFID and nearfield communications. Rarely does one have the opportunity to watch a discourse take large strides, but I get the feeling that’s exactly what we’re witnessing as Touch/BERG elaborate nearfield communications as something with nuance – in other words, as a material.
Elsewhere, Matt Haughey points us to some tips on building community websites which is a nice compliment to his own on-the-ground post from 2007. These issues are on our minds as we begin to work on the new HDL site.
Adriel, Ezra, and Justin have been making headway on the studio briefs.
I Finally had a chance to talk to colleagues at 2nd Road in Sydney. Despite the bounty of ways to communicate, it never fails that the hardest thing of all is to find an overlap in two busy calendars (let alone 4). Justin and I will be visiting them in November to collect information for a case study we are writing about one of their projects. That’s part of a longer trip that I’ll share more about next week.
[...] And the Helsinki Design Lab 2010: [...]
Hi Bryan!
Thank you (and the rest of the team) for this blog: you have here loads of interesting ideas and links.
Concerning Adam Greenfield’s post… In my opinion he couldn’t say it more clearly… (but if there are people like him living in Helsinki, why don’t we have more of this kind of debate at the architecture department in TKK?). I quote Adam:
“Where a need for it is seen to arise, the responsibility to think holistically about the urban milieu is generally located within architecture, never least by architects themselves. But where Holmes argues that architecture has ceded the “big picture” to the contingent whims of other disciplines, I’d submit that this is because the field is in genuine risk of missing the picture entirely. I like to think that I’m reasonably familiar with what’s going on in the domain, as an enthusiast amateur, and if I can judge by what gets published, even the more advanced practices of the current architectural generation seemingly remain smitten by scale-free, procedural strategies for the generation of form. (…) So I don’t think architecture is at present organized or oriented in such a way as to provide the necessary insights, nor are individual architects much motivated to do so (with the usual and much-admired exceptions).”
It´s just ironic that after living two years in Otaniemi (and passing many times in fron of the SITRA building in Leppäväärä) I have come across Helsinki Design Lab only now, when I am living in Nairobi… But I am coming back!
Carlos-
Thanks for the kind words. We’re very curious if you know any projects going on in Nairobi or elsewhere in Africa that are along this line of thinking. Please send some suggestions if you have any!
[...] the Helsinki Design Lab 2010: “Rarely does one have the opportunity to watch a discourse take large strides, but I get the [...]