Love the part about designers shouldn’t be under the impression that anyone else cares about beautiful things.
(via Draplin)

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7577554&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1

First they smash your boat in half with an electric hockey stick; then they take to the skies, blow up Miami University, The Ohio State University and then Michigan. If that wasn’t enough, they go and get Xenu on us and blow up a volcano, creating a chain-reaction, exploding the whole damn Earth! To top it off, they fly through a space wormhole to a floating hockey arena, break in and then catch the goal on fire.
Two things I’ve learned watching these videos: first, do not mess with polar bears; second, we should show this every morning at work to start the day off right.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8718627&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1

As I wrote my last post about 41 Cooper Square I noticed that many recent Morphosis projects used supergraphics announcing the building’s name, street, or function. I don’t know if we should thanks Scott & Denise (and here), or Frank for this one, but it is interesting nonetheless.
Caltrans District 7 – see more Caltrans District 7 photos
41 Cooper Square
NOAA Satellite Operations
Sun Tower, Seoul

new cooper union building, originally uploaded by Sam 森崩

I’ve talked about Cooper Union’s Architect Trading Cards in the past, but the above timelapse of 41 Cooper Square by Morphosis in the past, so this timelapse is very revealing to me: the building is fairly standardized (repeating floor plates) but idiosyncratic base columns and what can only be described as a rain-screen skirt.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t internal gymnastics going on – there is as this flickr set illustrates.

What I find interesting is that this building shows a real design maturity from Thom Mayne which previous designs lacked. There is a real balance of form, function and economy which earlier work lacked; for example the International Elementary School has many layers of form which diagrammatically might be useful, fail to find resolution. That isn’t a critique of the previous designs, but rather my surprise regarding how rational the underlying building is and how restrained the overall composition of the building is compared to previous work.

• Cooper Union’s Architect Trading Cards
• For more about Morphosis, check out Morphopedia
• Morphopedia – 41 Cooper Square

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8468513&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1
Strange intersection of sign and signifier in this QR Code-tuned-building.

N Building is a commercial structure located near Tachikawa station amidst a shopping district. Being a commercial building signs or billboards are typically attached to its facade which we feel undermines the structures’ identity. As a solution we thought to use a QR Code as the facade itself. By reading the QR Code with your mobile device you will be taken to a site which includes up to date shop information. In this manner we envision a cityscape unhindered by ubiquitous signage and also an improvement to the quality and accuracy of the information itself.
December 15th, 2009 we held an opening which included the limited release of an iPhone application made specifically for N Building. If a QR Code is static, what could we do with a dynamic device like the iPhone? Our proposed vision of the future is one where the facade of the building disappears, showing those inside who want to be seen. As you press on the characters their comments made on online appear in speech bubbles. You can also browse shop information, make reservations and download coupons. Rather than broadly tagging, we display information specific to the building in a manner in which the virtual (iPhone) serves to enhance the physical (N Building). Our goal is to provide an incentive to visit the space and a virtual connection to space without necessarily being present.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8569187&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1
Do. Not. Want.

I know this is easy to say now: the iPad will be a revolutionary device which will change the way we interact with the city, media and each other. While some friends have said that this is only a scaled-up iPod Touch, the iPad is not merely an incremental size increase; rather the iPad will dominate, and make redundant, every low-cost, low-end, laptop in the market. And we now live in the Star Trek world.
My daily amount of reading has increased every year due to technology: the web, then blogs and newspapers online, then Google FeedReader, my iPhone, soon the iPad. We are awash in media, with the results only beginning to be seen. We are moving into an age of localized media, in a global setting. Think about this for a second: books, music and video on demand, hopefully from indies as well as the huge publishers. The New York Times writ large and glossy – I would pay a subscription for this and dump my physical delivery.

Apple created tools to harness, and profit from, distributing media from creators large and small. If you run a magazine, you can make an app and create a subscription model inside the app using already in place developer tools. The Atlantic, Time, etc would be fools if they didn’t have a large group of coders in a back room somewhere taking advantage of this. Even my favorite blogs should begin testing out this model: Gothamist should begin experimenting with products and services which exploit their hyper-local focus – this could be video interviews, audio, etc – which would augment the daily blog. Would you pay for AutoTune the News? Even 50 cents? I don’t know – but established media companies have got to experiment, or they will wither and die.
All of this is why alarmist reports about kids spending 8 hours a day using media is silly: humans are connecting with other humans on a scale never seen before, at distances never seen ever! Our primate brains developed in small social groups, with a limited roaming range; but now, our social graph is being deliberately charted (Facebook, Netflix, etc) and through social tools the number and reach of our social group is increasing dramatically. I see this all as a net positive, as humans scale up and integrate with each other.

While our media diet will surely change, our interaction with the physical environment and the polis will have the largest change. There are already applications to show you invisible artifacts of the city, such as the above New York City Subway app on your iPhone. Imagine how you would use the city (like Adam’s The City is Here for you to Use) with tools available on the iPad. I would suggest that we will become both more introverted and paradoxically more extroverted through the use of digital tools. How many people do you see walking around the city with iPods on or their face buried in an iPhone? Yet we Yelp, share video and photos, and our location data with any and all. This will be a paradox for the coming age.
My prediction: the iPad will sell like hotcakes and become the basis for any and all portable device larger than a phone and less capable than a desktop or high-end laptop.