Mayor Bloomberg at the NYC Big Apps 2.0 awards ceremony, photo: Kristin Artz/Office of the Mayor, via the New York Times.

How do you take the enormous amount of critical information gathered every day by city agencies and make it actually useful to citizens? On the City of New York’s DataMine web site, just looking through the list of datasets generated by the Department of Transportation alone is enough to give you a headache. Enter the annual NYC Big Apps competition – a call to software developers who can mine this data and find ingenious ways to put it at the fingertips, or keyboard clicks, of the average New Yorker. This April, winners received a total of $20,000 in cash, the wide exposure their work deserves, investment meetings with BMW, and a chance to talk to Mayor Bloomberg about their ideas.

Here’s a round-up of this year’s Big Apps:

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Le Nichoir: Matali Crasset’s first feral house in France, photo: Lucas Fréchin

The last time we checked in with Matali Crasset, she was coming up with names like The Troglodyte for the ecolodge she had designed in the Tunisian desert. Now we find her deep in the forests of France, building little camper’s retreats. Six villages in the region of Meuse, Lorraine, which collectively call themselves by the rather lyrical name Le Vent des Forêts (The Forest Winds) have been inviting artists to their neck of the woods since 2008. Crasset is the only designer among this year’s invitees.

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It turns out that the 1939 World’s Fair in New York was only the culmination of what seems to have been a veritable craze for International Expositions in the United States. Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, on view at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., until September 5, presents astounding evidence of America’s world-fair-mania: posters, architectural models, films, furniture, and even Elektro the Moto-Man robot.  Throughout that glorious decade companies like GM and Stran-Steel gave designers free reign to speculate and dream. And the American public lapped it all up. The contrast with the US pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo, or even recent American design shows, is almost too stark to bear. Read more…

As we discovered at the Architecture and Design Film Festival in New York last year, good films about design are few and far between. Even among these, it is easier to find films about designers, design disciplines, or objects. But a film about design theory? Now that’s a truly ambitious project.

In March this year, Yuhsiu Yang and Melissa Huang of the Taipei Design Center U.S. teamed up with film makers Mu-Ming Tsai and Iris Lai of Muris Media to make a film about one of the most elusive concepts designers have come up with in the last couple of decades – Design Thinking. Even though the term has been bandied about since the 1970’s, and used as a mantra by some of the biggest creative consultancies,  we’re still debating if it is relevant, indeed if it means anything at all.

This week, the four film makers, who are calling themselves One Time Studio, have officially released the trailer for their film, and it looks impressive enough. They’ve got a lot of big guys—like Smart Design’s Dan Formosa, and AIGA CEO Richard Grefé—to talk about why designers felt the need to qualify what they do with the word “thinking.” (Watch closely for a sneak peek at Metropolis’s offices, and a quick comment by editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy.)

But are they being critical enough? Read more…

The Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust Company building at 510 Fifth Avenue, New York. The lower levels are being renovated.

The ancient Egyptians were the ur-preservationists, but I have always thought that there was something perverse about their method of immortalizing dead kings. The first part of the process, carried out by skilled professionals, was to extract all the internal organs of the Pharoah’s body—all the parts that we call “vital” for good reason, that enabled the man to walk, talk, eat, and think. These the embalmers put away in sealed jars. They then went to great lengths to swathe the hollow shell of a body so we can go stare at it in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Much like the Egyptian mummifiers, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) of New York gave the Manufaturer’s Hanover Trust Company building landmark status in 1997, but protected only its exterior. Read more…

Photo: Matthew Hinton/The Times-Picayune.

Not even a month after we wrote about the impending demolition of the Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School, the battle over one of New Orleans’s last standing mid-century modernist schools has come to an abrupt but decisive conclusion. On Friday, bulldozers began their work on the dilapidated structure, two months before anyone had any reason to expect them. Read more…

In our June 2011 issue, Peter Hall writes about the fascinating relationship that the giant design consultancy, IDEO, has with a very particular type of client – governmental agencies. The firm’s trademark design thinking method is showing mammoth bureaucratic juggernauts like the Social Security Administration a deep insight into who uses their services, and how they can help streamline even the most convoluted process, allowing government officials to effectively reach out to the citizens who need them (while saving costs). In the process, IDEO also had its own significant learning curve on how to use design to fix problems in governance.

There are some interesting parts to that journey that we couldn’t share with you in the magazine, like the videos produced by the firm as part of two projects: monitoring energy use in buildings operated by the General Services Administration (GSA), and helping Clark Realty understand what kind of housing wounded veterans really need.

The GSA came to IDEO to understand how they might meet President Obama’s directive that all government buildings are to reduce energy consumption by 30% below 2003 levels by 2015. So in a sense, the client was already converted. But the administrators weren’t the only stakeholders in the project. Read more…

The work of Sheila Hicks is a feast for more than the eyes. As writer Véronique Vienne found out in writing a feature article on the artist for Metropolis, Hicks’s brilliantly colored loops, tangles, weaves, and tassels produce an instantaneous, visceral reaction. You can sample the splendour of the textile installations on pages 78-85 of our June 2011 issue, or here. But we couldn’t resist offering up some more images of Hicks’s art, and a video of her speaking in her characteristically intuitive way at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum last month:

(click on images to enlarge)

Trapeze de Cristobal (1971) (detail)
Wool, linen, cotton; 129 15/16 X 783/4 inches
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Read more…

Image courtesy World Monuments Fund.

The Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School in New Orleans looks like no other school anywhere else. Designed and built in 1955 by the architect Charles Colbert specifically for the historic African-American neighborhood of Tremé/Lafitte, the now-decrepit modernist glass box appears to float above the ground. Colbert managed to set back the columns needed to hold the building above flooding levels, creating dramatically cantilevered class rooms and an empty common area for the kids underneath. Huge windows let in plenty of sunlight, and kept the building surprisingly cool in hot and humid New Orleans. The building was celebrated for these features at the time, but fifty years of neglect and a hurricane have taken their toll. In July last year, the Recovery School District (RSD)—which works to rehabilitate underperforming schools in Louisiana—finally decided to tear the dysfunctional building down, and build a new school in its place by 2013. Read more…

The 100 Mile Challenge, by students from the Maryland Institute College of Art and the University of Washington.

The student exhibits at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair stand out by default. On a floor filled with big-name businesses, emerging designers, and suppliers, you can tell the school teams not by the signage, but by the extremely enthusiastic young talent waiting to tell you exactly how this idea came about, or how they built that. Eight Schools exhibits were selected to be part of ICFF 2011: Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)/ University of Washington, Rhode Island School of Design, Pratt, Philadelphia University/Sane Jose State University/University of Lincoln, University of Oregon, and The University of Tokyo. In addition, Metropolis’s booth this year was designed by students from Parsons The New School for Design.

The most idealistic exhibit, certainly, was the 100 Mile Challenge, a joint effort by students from Baltimore’s MICA Environmental Design department and students from the industrial design program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Read more…