This past year has been a year of change and movement. But finally, after 13 months of nomadic wandering through Europe and the States, I can finally say that I live in New York.

My visa was confirmed a couple of months ago after months of twitchy waiting; I flew into JFK for the beginning of October, and got myself a lovely apartment a couple of weeks ago. Since then, with lots of help, kind gifts, a trip to Ikea (hello, old friends EXPEDIT and FÖRNUFT and …), and several deliveries from Amazon, it’s slowly starting to feel like home. After a year spent in 15 different cities (most prominently: Copenhagen, Helsinki, London, and New York), having a single point to return to feels like rather a novelty.

For anybody else thinking of spending a year imposing on friends, sleeping on floors and couches and spare rooms, hotels and airbnb – it was fun for a couple of months, fine for perhaps 9, and increasingly stressful after that as the total lack of “home”, stability, and certainty sunk in. Also, it’s remarkable how much of the world functions on assumptions: especially that you have a permanent address; that you live in just one country, and have done so for an extended length of time. And how confused systems, interfaces, and call centres get if any of the above turn out not to be true. Systems have categories and checkboxes, and none of those are “somewhere” or “floating” or “kind of,” even thought those are, surely, commonplace. Things you don’t notice, until you’re missing them. And I’m that I’ve been navigating these things from an extreme position of privilege. Yikes.

I can can’t express my gratitude to Adam for being so understanding during these most eventful of months, and I’m really looking forward to being in a physical- and head- space where I can put all of my energies into Urbanscale, in the studio, with our wonderful colleagues, fully focused on the extremely exciting projects on the horizon.

More than anything, this last year has taught me three things:

• Friends truly are invaluable, and it has been wonderful to discover/reconfirm/be reminded of how generous so many of them are – pretty much the only constant this past year, along with change and movement.
• I’ve become ever more brutally opposed to owning physical stuff. Not only due to the constraints of baggage limits and my poor back, but the idea of wanting “stuff” totally puzzles me (and I was pretty minimalist to begin with). It’s not that I buy less than I did before (never very much), but that I’m now unusually comfortable throwing things out. The flipside of that is a reminder how much I love beautiful products, in extreme moderation. (see also)
• After a year without one, it’s wonderful to have my own home, my own space – a place to make my own, to put the few belongings I have, and to just… live in. I don’t think I could appreciate it this much without the contrast.

So. If you want to send me a postcard, I now have an address. If you want to phone me, my phone number is now prefixed with +1. And if you want to visit, the airport you’re headed to is JFK.

See you soon?

I’m still mainly in London, waiting for various bureaucrats to process/stamp various documents, but for the tail end of last week found myself in an old mill near Derby, at Laptops and Looms.

Held in the world’s first water-powered cotton mill, Arkwright’s Cromford Mill, this meeting of thirty or so people was billed as a “small get-together to talk about the world of Making, how it might intersect with the Internet of Things and what implications that might have for Futures of Manufacturing and all manner of related things”. What follow are some scattered initial thoughts: not necessarily fully processed, but squeezed out of my head while they are still fresh.

Mornings consisted of talks — from the importance of craft, materials, and using your hands (Matt Cottam) to the bigger picture of history, economics, and politics (Dan Hill), to specific examples of people trying some of these things out as a business model (Alice Taylor/Makielab) – interspersed with open discussions. These were balanced by trips and tours to reminders and remainders of the region’s rich engineering, industrial, and manufacturing heritage. There was even a game of football and a bit of cricket (to give that proper feeling of a school trip).

I found the event interesting on a couple of different levels: as a designer who makes things, and relating to Urbanscale as a company, trying to get things made. And finally, on a more abstract level, it sparked off thoughts about what making and manufacturing, and the spaces and facilities that make or made this possible, mean for cities, countries, and regions.

As somebody who originally studied industrial design, and still occasionally draws on those skills, there were discussions of craft, making, and materiality that resonated deeply with me. And yet, I felt that there was an occasional confusion between “making” for its own sake (often described with a sneer as “craft”, or a hobby – itself a tangential discussion), as a prototyping process, as small-scale batch manufacturing, and mass manufacture, which are each completely different things. Different both in terms of the skills and an experience an individual should have to do them successfully, and what infrastructures and “dark matter” – politics, economics, culture – need aligning to make them possible, or easy, or more commonplace on the scale of a country or an economy. There are specific terms in there that need unpacking (as Matt Ward pointed out, in his talk on Terms and Conditions), and blending them all into one discussion practically guarantees confusion at some point.

An interesting sidenote to these discussions that I find worth mentioning was that the majority of people in the room came from “digital” backgrounds – with all the differences that implies regarding approaches, experience, and expectations. I always find the discussion of “the democratization of making” rather fascinating – what could be more democratized and accessible than wood, a hacksaw, a hammer and some nails? It would perhaps be more accurate to describe the possibilities of making to be increasingly overlapping with the digital domain – controllable from a computer (3D printing, laser cutting), linked to the open-source world (MakerBot), and increasingly programmable and scriptable. None of these things are easy or unskilled, but perhaps the skills required are closer to those individuals discussing them in this context (and often, online).

But other discussions also struck a cord, from the perspective of working for a small company interested in creating things that go out into the world, at scale – whether as part of street furniture (eg Urbanflow), or something like Project PERRY – and what it means to be a company of 4 or 5 people, versus the resources and economies of scale (but also, increased friction) of being somebody like Microsoft, Nokia, or Rolls Royce: the traditional model of “industry”. And this is where it got really interesting for me: discussions about the ability to have bits of projects 3d printed without having to own a 3d printer; of being able to develop and prototype electronics at a cost several orders of magnitude below what any of the above companies might spend on an R&D projects. We will never manufacture PERRY ourselves – for better or worse, that’s likely to happen in a factory on the other side of the world – but being able to leverage prototyping platforms (both electronic and physical) allow us to act in a way only bigger beasts would have been able to in the past. Big beasts that in terms of the economic, industrial, and organizational model they function on, at least, are descendants of the very mills we were sitting in. That said, I’m not sure we quite teased out the difference between the best model to create a product (or a good product), where we’d each like to work, vs what might be the best solution for a country’s (or a global) economy.

And finally, a visit to Derby itself, and its industrial museum, housed in what is grandly described as the world’s first factory, Derby’s Silk Mill. This was fascinating in two ways – the collection, exhibits and archive, and it’s search for a new role in the centre of the city with all the potential impact spaces such as this can play in the cultural, educational, and commercial life of a city.

Having had it’s funding recently brutally cut to an absolute bare minimum – lights and heating only, a skeleton staff – and consequently closed to the public, it is now in a desperate search for a new raison d’etre, a new use, a new business plan. The building is not just historic, but positioned right in the center of the city, and is a lovely space. The remaining staff (4, if I counted correctly), are trying to figure out a way to keep this heritage of manufacturing alive, while incorporating new models in the old space: of making, workshops, local knowledge, creative industries, small companies, balancing the public sector, the public good, the local community, and commercial interests in a single place. Potentially unfettered by the need to be a museum, but keen to keep some of the exhibits in some form, they aren’t scared to radically rethink their role within the urban context within which they exist. Good luck to them, and to Derby.

Geeking out at the collection itself, though, served it’s own purpose. Ranging from huge Rolls Royce aircraft engines to both scale and full-size models of the classic IntercityAPT (again), old railway signage, and an amazing archive of prints, it was a reminder how many of the things we’re working on in 2011 have been tacked a million times before, and a reminder of the levels of craft and attention to detail that were the norm, particularly in elements of transportation systems, the early days of the 20th century, and often lacking today. Sure, there are early experiments and missteps to learn from, too, but there are beautiful solutions that are all too often forgotten, languishing in dusty drawers of hand-drawn maps, silkscreened timetables, and cast-iron signage that we would do well to incorporate into our own work.

Thanks to Russell, Dan, and Toby for initiating and organizing the event, and everybody there for making this atypical excursion into the countryside an enjoyable and stimulating one.

Following 7 Weeks in Helsinki, I’m back in Copenhagen (last week and this), but this time, I’m here to teach at CIID – together with Adam Greenfield, and it’s a course I would have loved to have had last year. It’s lovely to be back in CPH, amongst friends – practically amongst family, it feels like.

It’s also great to be teaching. It’s my first experience of teaching in this form – I’ve previously taught very focused skill-based things: kayaking, swimming, Photoshop, Illustrator – but this is different. The students are great, teaching together with Adam is all sorts of great, and I’m enjoying being forced to express and examine my own views and opinions in a way that can only be healthy. On Tuesday evening, I’m also giving an Open Lecture at CIID, on the Craft of Invisibility: Going against designerly instincts and purposefully making things ugly. Fingers crossed it goes ok, and that I also manage to write up the thoughts in it in a form I’m happy with – if I do, I’ll post or link to it here. Perhaps I’ll see you tomorrow, at 5pm.

As part of the teaching, I put together a newspaperclub publication in lieu of an emailed reading list – I’ve written a bit more about it here, and you can grab all of the articles, and a copy of the PDF.

And while I’m here and have education on the brain, I’ve also got a couple of posts about the history of educational institutions and their pedagogical and disciplinary traditions (using Atlantic College, Brunel’s design department, and CIID as examples) half written, which will hopefully see the light of day sooner rather than later.

I’m hugely excited and honored that two of my projects have been selected for inclusion in Talk to Me, the forthcoming exhibition at MoMA, New York. That’s not a sentence I thought I’d be writing any time soon!

My visualisation of household power consumption, and a specially adapted New York version of my thesis project, City Tickets, will be on show in the Special Exhibitions Gallery at MoMA, between 24th July and November.

Concerned with the communication between people and objects, the exhibit is based on the premise that contemporary objects contain information that goes well beyond their immediate use or appearance, and explores how designers write the script on which that dialogue is built.

Although the curators originally selected my thesis project as it was completed in Copenhagen for inclusion in the catalogue and exhibition, we decided that a New York version of the project would make more sense to an audience in New York, and be a more powerful addition to the show. Just as the Copenhagen version was based on the standard pay and display ticket machines on the streets in that city, so the New York version took the existing Muni Meters as a starting point.

Showing off this new version of my project is a new set of images, high resolution versions of which can be found on flickr, and some of them are shown below. The project is fundamentally the same as the original, a description of which can be read here, although many tweaks (visual, and deeper) have been made to the project for this second run.

Thanks to Adam for giving me the time and freedom it’s taken to re-think and re-make this project over the last couple of months, and thank you to my wonderful thesis advisor at CIID, Gitte, for all her help in creating the original version on which this is based. And thank you, of course, to Paola Antonelli (senior curator), and Kate Carmody (curatorial assistant) at the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, for selecting my projects, and being so encouraging of the idea to specially adapt City Tickets to the context of New York for the exhibition.

Not new, but also selected for Talk to Me is my visualisation of power consumption in a household (with data from a smart energy meter), plotted over 24 hour periods. I took some satisfaction from opening the file to see where it could be polished, tweaked, or improved in some way, and ultimately sending it unchanged, exactly as I had left it after our computational design course at CIID, at the tail end of 2009.

Also deserving of congratulations are the lovely Jacek, Jennifer, and Martina, for having their project Sidetrack selected for the same exhibition.

Several visiting faculty and lecturers at CIID also have work in the show, including Shawn Allen/Stamen, Timo Arnall/Touch (now BERG), Durrell Bishop/Luckybite, Golan Levin, Jack Schulze/BERG, and Nicholas Zambetti/IDEO (now Apple). Their (and our!) work joins an eclectic collection of artifacts and interfaces from the late 60s to examples of contemporary design, from the functional to the fanciful.

CIID projects at MoMA, and in truly amazing company – happy days. Simona and all the faculty in Copenhagen and beyond deserve a huge amount of credit for that.

I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibition in July, and hope to see you there.

So following an extremely enjoyable time in New York, my next couple of months are a bit messier. This week I’m in London, and then on Sunday I fly to Helsinki, where I will be based until the end of June.

That will be followed by two weeks in Copenhagen (teaching at CIID!), three weeks in New York (Talk to Me opens at MoMA, featuring City Tickets and Visualising Power), and then I’ll be back in Europe for another little while. (it gets fuzzy from August – I’m not quite sure *where* in Europe)

First of all, if you find yourself in any of those cities at the same time as me, I’d love to meet up, whether or not we’ve met before. I’m open to coffees and beers, tips about places or introductions to interesting people.

Helsinki, specifically: I don’t actually have somewhere to live lined up. So if you or somebody you know in Helsinki has a spare room, or is going on holiday and is willing to let me apartment-sit, and would like some extra money for not doing very much, please get in touch! (Even just somewhere for the first week or two would be great, to give me time to find my feet. Vague and uncertain leads and tips much appreciated.)

I also don’t really know many people in Finland, and although I’ve been very kindly introduced to a couple of friends-of-friends in Helsinki and I’m sure I’ll get to know the people I’ll be working with, I’m on the look-out for friends. So, please, do say hello.

Hopefully I’ll see you or meet you somewhere, sometime soon, on my nomadic meanderings…

On the move again. Hugely excited that I’m about to head off to LHR to get on a flight to New York, which I guess I might have to get used to calling home for a little while. A new adventure.

If you happen to be in New York, do let me know – I’ll be lost and confused in a new city for next couple of months!

Talking of which, I should get myself to the Airport.

Next stop: JFK

Walking down an unassuming side street in Madrid earlier this month, I encountered this slightly threatening yet rather wonderful futuristic medallion on the side of a grand but unmarked building. Diving down the rabbit hole of the internet, this is what I later found out about it.

The medallions (a word that itself required a fair amount of searching/asking to remember!) are on the outside of one corner of the Banco de España (National Bank of Spain) headquarters, while the rest of the building is covered in more conventional architectural ornaments. It turns out that that corner (the one on the right of the photo below – the bank covers the entire block) is an extension (the third of three: 1927, 1969, and 1978-2006) to the original building, which was inaugurated in 1891. The third extension has a slightly more convoluted history, with the idea to take over the entire block originating in the 50s, the original architectural plan being stillborn in the late 70s, with construction finally starting in 2003 and finished in 2006.

[above: image from the Bank of Spain, bde.com.es]

The history of the extension, from the official site of the Bank of Spain:

In the 1970s the Bank decided to extend its headquarters yet again to include the corner of Calle de Alcalá and Calle Marqués de Cubas, closing the whole block and thereby guaranteeing the security of the Bank. With this in mind, the Bank had already acquired the adjacent building on 2 February 1950. On 25 September 1978, a design competition was held to undertake what would be the last extension of the Bank to date. [...] chose the proposal presented by Rafael Moneo and commissioned him to design the final project. However, work was unable to begin at that time because the building was listed.

The Madrid Municipal General Ordinance Plan, which lifted the protected status of the existing building, was approved in 1997. In 2003, by virtue of an agreement signed between the Madrid City Council and the Banco de España, work began on the last stage to close the block as defined in the project revised by Moneo himself in 2002. In 2006, coinciding with the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the name Banco de España , the extension was inaugurated.

[flickr]

So it’s an extension to the Bank of Spain, built in 2003-2006 but initially designed in 1978-9 by architect Rafael Moneo (Pritzker Prize bio, Harvard GSD bio), to a building from 1891, designed by Eduardo Adaro Magro. The ornaments themselves are by sculptor Francisco Lopes Quintanilla.

What I find so wonderful is that the extension might have gone completely unnoticed, had it not been for the subtle, modern/futuristic flourishes. The bulk of the exterior is a perfect match of the existing building, using the same materials, continuing the same lines, and in most cases, continuing the same architectural style and details. A few of the ornaments, notably the medallions and other heads/crowns, are in a wonderful geometric, pre-cubist style.

In line with the approach of mimicking the existing buildings, even these surprisingly radical decorations actually match the originals in size, shape, frame, material, and even content – compare an example of an original medallion with one on the extension, below.

[above: original medallion]

[above: medallion on the modern extension. flickr]

A feature/article from On Diseno 291, specifically about the extension, is available online in a flash-wrapped pdf, in both Spanish and slightly awkwardly translated English (starting on page 139), with many more details and text, diagrams, and models from the original proposal and renewed report from 2003, and interior and exterior photographs of the final building.

A couple of excerpts:

What we sought with the project was to complete the block of the Bank of Spain in its most literal sense. It is therefore understood that the materials are the same as those used on the facades of Adaor’s building. […] insofar as possible, to approach the construction systems used when the bank was erected. This means that stone was used with powerful sections and not as cladding, and that the ironwork sought to maintain the forging that we see today in the crowning and railings of the bank.

A caption in the original proposal also reveals that the “ornamental details of the building are sculpted from carrara marble by Francisco Lopes Quintanilla in a pre-cubist and geometric aesthetic.”

The impact of the extension and the (newly) whole building on the wider “urban backdrop” was also a major consideration in accepting this proposal:

The Bank believes that this proposal will considerably improve the Bank of Spain as a monumental building characteristic in the image of the city, given that in occupying the whole block it becomes free standing, integrated, and complete, and results in a better urban backdrop. The result of the intervention would make itself felt on a wide radius and the effect of the corner build according to the proposal can be completed from many points of view, calle Alcala, Gran Via, and Marques de Cubas.

[above: architectural details, new and old. From On Diseno/Moneo Architects]

I find it amazing how little there is on either the building, the extension, or even just the ornaments, online. I would have expected at least a reasonable collection of photos on flickr of these strange, mysterious faces that look like a better fit for a science fiction film than a national bank. The fact that there’s no plaque, no signs, mean that maybe they are out there, just not tagged or described in any way that google’s or yahoo’s search can find them (it wasn’t even immediately clear that the building was the bank of spain). The confused history of the extension mean that many of the articles I found are confused and contradict themselves: is the extension from 1978 (the competition call), 1979 (the acceptance of the proposal), 2003 (start of building) or 2006 (opening of the extension), or even one of the other, earlier, extensions? It doesn’t help that Moneo also designed a branch of the Bank of Spain in Jaen, Andalusia (Spain) in the 80s, as well as a different bank (Bankinter) in Madrid, which adds noise to any  searches.

[above: ornament on the modern extension;  from Carlos Viñas, on flickr]

Finally, my sleuthing led me to this article, in Spanish, from the newspaper El Pais, titled “La maestría inadvertida” (~“Inadvertent Mastery”)

The section that I enjoyed the most (via my very basic Spanish), was the final conclusion:
En la ciudad y en la vida nos cruzamos de continuo con obras y personas que pasan inadvertidas, no tanto por su bajo perfil como por su prudente subordinación a un contexto urbano o institucional. Es una actitud que demanda elegancia vital y maestría profesional: nadie ha dicho nunca que fuese fácil volar bajo el radar.

My translation:

In the city and in life we by chance cross with works and people not only because of their low profiles, but because of their deliberate integration into an urban or institutional context. It is an attitude that demands vibrant elegance and professional mastery: nobody has ever said it was easy to fly under the radar.

Amen.

.

Main References:

Bank of Spain official history of it’s building: Link

On Diseno, 291 (04/2008) (English and Spanish), including text from the architect’s/bank’s 2003 proposal/report: Link

El Pais, (04/2006): La maestría inadvertida: Link

.

… and on an only slightly related note, my photos from my trip, on flickr.

I’ve used delicious since January 2006, and in the nearly 5 years since then, I saved over 2700 bookmarks on the service. Last week, it came to light that Yahoo had ominously placed it in a “sunset” category, and like many people, I quickly jumped ship to Pinboard.in.

The leaked slide was initially unconfirmed, but I had switched before the news had even really graduated from rumour to news. A post a couple of days later on the delicous blog confirmed that the rumors were kind-of true, but that Yahoo would not, in fact, be shutting down the service, merely “moving it on”. Nonetheless, #deliciousexodus happened at such a pace, that most of my existing delicious network is already up and running on pinboard, which dealt with the sudden influx of users remarkably well, and once the shift had happened, it was done. There was something impressive about the sudden, unplanned movement, en-mass, from one service to another.

A couple of things.

Quite a few people have spoken about how the demise of delicious sounds the death knell for trusting the cloud, for trusting your data to somebody else’s servers, somebody else’s business plan. But to me, at least, it doesn’t really change anything. Just as before, your data (bookmarks, photos, documents…) on the internet (“in the cloud”) can never be trusted to always be around, but equally, can never be assumed fully erased if you try to get rid of them. Never to be trusted, and never to be wiped away completely.

I really like pinboard, so far. Yes, there are a couple of features from delicious I miss (particularly a slightly more evolved social side, although I know it’s a conscious choice), but in stark contrast to delicious, you really get the feeling that it’s in active development – the founders are there, involved, responsive (an email to them was dealt with within a couple of hours), and that it will evolve over time. It’s fast, it works smoothly, and every feature is considered and carefully implemented. So far, so good.

Something that pinboard seems to take perhaps even further than delicious, is what I like to think of as being a humble and quiet service. It doesn’t really do anything, it mostly sits there, quietly waiting. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t get jealous, it doesn’t try to interfere with anything else you want to do. And when called upon, it’s hugely, amazingly useful. It does something simple, and it does it well, and without fuss, with features when you need them, and not very much else. That’s something more services (online and otherwise) could learn from. It’s also something I’d like to explore more from the perspective of a designer and especially through the lens of service design, and maybe design education. Another post, another day.

My only gripes so far with pinboard is the undeveloped nature of the social side of the service, although, to be fair, it is quite explicitly described as an introverted service. Still, the lack of a for: tag or equivalent – no way to send members of your network a link – or a simple way to find people to add to your network feels unnecessarily overly introverted to me. And on a related note, it’s frustrating to see how many people have added you to their network (in other words, follow what you bookmark), but have no way of knowing who. I’d rather not know how many at all, or I want to know who.

I used delicious, and now pinboard, initially for purely selfish reasons. It’s an extremely efficient way of letting me outsource my memory; it’s a place I can put stuff I’ve read, and know I can find and get it back out again when I remember it, need it, want to reference it, or want to send it to somebody. But beyond that – and this went more for delicious than for pinboard – I also used the social side. I like being able to send somebody a link, without any extra effort, but also in the knowledge that it was arriving at the other end unassumingly. Unlike an email or an IM message, that demanded to be read (and now), a link tagged for: never interrupted anybody, could always be ignored, and somehow hit just the right note of “saw this, thought of you; your call if you want to look or not”. Over the last year or so, I’ve also found that simply keeping track of what my network had recently bookmarked worked almost like a lower-volume, higher signal-to-noise-ratio version of my RSS reader (and, interestingly, tended to cover slightly different topics, too). There’s something interesting, from a service design perspective, to building something that works perfectly well on a purely individual level, but grows in value as you start exploring the social sides of the service (both actively and passively social). Something that is both a standalone product, and a (networked) service.

So long Delicious. It’s been a real pleasure, and I’m sorry for how it ended.

Hello Pinboard – I look forward to good times ahead.

From now on, my bookmarks live here: http://pinboard.in/u:mayonissen.  See you there.

A couple of things caught my eye during my all-too-short trip from CPH to Munich – a city I haven’t been to since I was a little kid. Both barcode related, one at a train station, the other at the aiport.

At Marienplatz, one of the city’s main stations (and I’m guessing, other stations, too), the standard ticket machine had an unexplained “barcode scanner”, placed and marked prominently in the center of the (typically messy) interface. There was no explanation of what might be expected to be scanned, but the ticket I had just purchased had a 2d barcode on the back, so I tried that, got a satisfied beep – and was told on the main touchscreen the same information that was printed on the ticket. (purchase location, zones covered, price, validity). I couldn’t quite figure out why it was there, what it was useful for. Maybe it also scans other things? Season tickets, maybe? Perhaps it’s not specifically meant for passengers? Why was it marked with an extra sticker taht felt out of place, even though it looked pretty built in? Answer on a postcard, please.

On my way back via Munich Airport, I came across something else I hadn’t seen before. The concept of passengers checking in online and printing their own boarding passes is now commonplace; using a mobile device with the boarding pass (and more importantly, the barcode) on it is increasingly normal, too, even if it still occasionally draws a scowl from security. But generally, you have to hand your barcode (whichever medium it happens to be in) to a person, who scans it, double checks you are who you’re supposed to be, and then waves you onwards.

[für Gäste mit Barcode-Bordkarte / for passengers with barcode-boarding pass]

But in Munich, boarding my Lufthansa flight back to Copenhagen, I encountered something new: there was a queue in which I could hand my barcode to a stewardess, as normal, but there was also a (shorter, faster moving) line marked Quick Boarding. I hung back and watched a bit, carefully inspecting the screen above the line and the various instructions. It turns out that it was a line where each passenger could scan their own boarding pass, the barrier would open, and you could board the flight, without any human interaction. It wasn’t clear if this would only work with printed passes or also with an iphone (it worked fine), nor if this was something only for special passengers (whatever that might mean – but no, it worked fine for me, too).

Having brought up the barcode on my iphone, i turned it upside down and placed it on the indicated scanning pad (whereupon the iphone probably got confused and rotated things several times), and after a short pause, the LCD screen (“please watch display”, see above) flashed up my name, and the barrier opened. There was an awkward pause between scanning, the screen changing, and then the barrier opening – it wasn’t clear whether it had scanned properly or not – but it all worked more-or-less smoothly.

There’s something odd about getting on a plane without having to talk with (or at least nod at) a person, or have your ID checked at the gate. Strangely 21st century. Not sure why, but there is. But just like online check in, I’m sure we’ll get used to it soon enough.

City Tickets would most likely exist as part of a wider ecosystem, being only one element among several touchpoints of a service. I thought it might be interesting to sketch out some of those, and explore how they might work together.

When I was working on my thesis project at CIID, I focused both my thinking and the tangible design work on the specific service of city tickets, printed receipts available from parking ticket machines. Focusing so tightly on the single aspect of receipts from ticket machines was a strategic decision for the project, to make sure it was clean enough an idea to be communicated clearly, and to focus both efforts and attention on the parts that were new and interesting, and I’m very (!) glad that I did that. But it’s also fun to let my mind off the leash a bit, and see how that single element might fit into a bigger (and more complex, messier) ecosystem. The short version:

• City tickets from parking ticket machines, as I’ve proposed them in my project.
• City tickets from other sources that already give receipts: stores, supermarkets.
• Mobile applications (plural, varied)
• Phone (voice; human operated)
• SMS and MMS
• a website

Each of those has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they don’t all have the same capabilities or features. But working together, they fill in the gaps (of geography, demographics, technological opportunity) left by the others, and thus make a much tighter and more powerful system.

I’ve often been asked why I hadn’t simply designed an iphone app instead of using parking meters. In some ways, it’s a reasonable question, and an iphone app could functionally do almost all – and more – than can be achieved using printed receipts from parking machines. But I think there is great value in designing a service that is for all – not just those who have iphones or smartphones – and embedded in the physical urban fabric – here and now, where and when it’s needed.

Services like 311 already exist (notably in NY and SF), and initiatives such as Open311 take a great stab at proposing and creating an open and extensible backend, which has already spawned a bunch of exciting services and applications that, in essence, already do what people are asking for when they ask why I didn’t design a mobile application instead.

City tickets from parking meters can come pre-printed with hyperlocal maps, and don’t require any additional hardware (ie, you don’t have to own an expensive phone), and can be filled in using that great technology, a pen – with all the freedom to scribble diagrams or annotate maps that come with it.

But an iphone or other smartphone app can work where parking meters are less common, and can more accurately pinpoint your current location; although it puts the burden on the user (citizen), the fact that any text is typed removes the hurdle of messy handwriting. Photos of the location or issue can be included in the report, perhaps removing the need for a scouting trip by the local authority to determine what resources are required.

Existing 311 systems let you phone in and talk to a real person, which lets issues be immediately be routed to the right place, and you get immediate feedback that it’s being in some way dealt with. Other options are SMS (short, text only – send in your location and basic information on the issue), and maybe MMS (short text, and also including a photo of… something relevant), which open many possibilities to many people (who, again, may not have expensive smartphones), as well as very immediate feedback.

Receipt printers in every shop and store in every city are another example of a potentially magnificent infrastructure, basically just sitting around. City Tickets very similar to the ones I proposed from existing parking ticket machines could also be available from kiosks, corner shops, post offices, and supermarkets. In Copenhagen, each of these already has a custom-ish receipt printer that lets them sell mobile phone credit – the receipt you get also has instructions, and a code to put the credit on your phone, etc, in addition to being a receipt and telling you how much it cost. The same thing goes for the National Lottery receipts you get in the UK, which tell you which lucky numbers you selected. There’s no reason these can’t also print other things, if you ask for it; or maybe every receipt has a city ticket bit attached or on the back. It would be interesting to think about how they might be different to the ones I designed for the parking ticket machines – would the map be the same scale? Would there be different fields to fill in, depending which type of store you got it from? Would it be co-branded with the store? Would the same store also work as an additional ‘input’ location, which I’ve currently defined as post boxes. See also BERG’s lovely exploration of the possibilities of microprinting in their recent videos.

An obvious element (that I didn’t even talk about as part of my project, but in my mind was always kind of implied) that is also worth highlighting is some sort of web-based access to all of the data in the system – a way of marking a spot on a map and reporting issues, a way of looking up a specific issue (“what’s the status of problem #6912?”), and a way of looking up what’s known for a specific location (the equivialent of a city ticket todo list, ie “what’s known near machine location #3129?”) or, more human-friendly, what’s known near an arbitrary street address or postcode?

But the key point, I think, is that these approaches are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, I think city tickets as I’ve proposed them could (and should) happily co-exist with an iphone app, and a phone service, and a website, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and each catering to different needs, times, and people. If the backend system – database, API, data formats – are designed to be sufficiently open, then practically infinite ways of accessing, contributing to, and building on the municipal information could emerge, though many different media/channels, including ticket machines, iphones, and more. (As an aside, I love Kevin Slavin’s description of the incompatible 311 systems in different American cities as having evolved ‘data dialects’ in his talk in Barcelona earlier this year.)

Some or all of this exists in various forms, but it becomes a different beast when all the different parts are interconnected: submit something from a ticket machine on the way home from work; check the status online a week later during an idle moment; maybe follow up with a phone call to complain at the slow response. But as with many things, an ecology of different channels, media, touchpoints, flows and connections can be much more powerful than any single one in isolation.