Every so often, big brands have really good ideas; ideas that extend to capture the things that make us human. BMW Guggenheim Lab’s Public/Private online game is that good of an idea, but not without existential conflict.

The game is simple enough. Users select a common place they come in contact with (like where they work), slide it along five columns and drop it to say how often they seek privacy in that place—“Never,” “Rarely,” “No Opinion,”“Sometimes,”,“A lot”. This should be easy. But you’re left to consider the times you’re actively seeking privacy, over places you would just prefer to have privacy in. Such as, am I searching for   privacy when I go to Central Park? Or am I going there to be part of the crowd,  but also want to be alone?  In a hotel lobby, for instance, guests like the idea that they “could be alone, but not lonely.” Clearly, the idea of public/private, particularly if you live in a place like New York City, is not that simple. Read more…

Since I first began teaching the Harvard Case El Bulli: A Taste of Innovation in all my MBA New Products & Services classes, it has become my students’ favorite case because the lessons can be applied to large companies.  The case has also inspired my own new business venture, Inventours, that brings senior level execs to meet with best-in-class innovators in product design, food, technology, architecture, fashion, sustainability and hospitality, in their workplaces, to see their work, hear their philosophies, and understand how physical and mental environments can impact creativity and collaboration. Here are some key “take aways” companies like.

Leaders with a vision and working philosophy, clearly understood and shared by the entire organization, create more productive working environments. Chef Ferran Adria is a leader. He leads by making his values and working philosophy well known and embraced by his entire team. This includes never copying others; surprising and delighting customers by evoking emotions, childhood memories, irony, wonder, and analogies; engaging all the senses, if possible, with each dish; breaking the rules and not being constrained by what has been done before. Firms that work most productively and cohesively fully understand the values and mission of their companies. They know what is and isn’t consistent. They don’t waste time guessing what the objectives really are and working on products and services that don’t fit.

It’s critical to allow and allocate time to innovate and do things well. El Bulli closed for six months each year, to allow the core group of “inventors” to scan the globe for new ingredients, food combinations, cooking equipment, techniques, and presentations.  While large companies cannot shut down for months, Google has a 20% time rule and 3M has a 15% rule that allow employees to devote time to projects they’re passionate about, that may have nothing to do with their jobs. It helps to sanction employees taking a step back to view their own business and the company’s other businesses from a distance, to explore hypotheses, and new business ideas. Firms, whose employees are caught up in day-to-day firefighting, are much less likely to think into the future and be really innovative. Read more…

A mind is predisposed to organize learning and experiences into narratives, and as we search for order and patterns, our attention is captured by human stories. We can’t resist clues discovered in unfolding plotlines, beginnings and endings or conflict, climax and resolutions; the search for causes and effects is built into our “learning” brain. And we’re equally drawn to moods and settings – all experienced through real or fictional characters that grow, change, solve problems and, ultimately, win in their own way. We tend to package the results in myths, legends, literature, and entertainment that bind families and communities together and ultimately define a culture. This happens, for each of us, in the environments we build as well. The narrative representations made “in-here,” as we mirror, or imagine ourselves in the reality “out-there” become our way to impose an understandable order on fragments of experience – and realize its pleasures. Like naming, stories create their context, giving perceptions a meaning.

Encountering a new place, we enter, in effect, into stories already underway.  And as the setting and the human life that animates it engages our interest, we tend to find our own place, to belong or not, within these flows of people, spaces, and events. As the accumulating sensations trigger messages, associations, and emotions, we fill in the details and fit them into our belief systems, theories, and prejudices. We weave them into our “personal project” – our own imagined journey through life with its intentions and motivations of the moment. Then the narrative momentum, this illusion that we can control, is the way we fix a built environment into our long-term memory and, as a result, merge it into our lives – and often into our identity.

Telling a story with a built environment is integral to design and is often done with great skill by people who know their audiences. And some of the most popular, memorable public places are those conceived as theater from the start – a stage where lives play out. Dramatic narratives are laid out for us with paths, vistas, suspense-and-resolutions, and the choreography of see-and-be-seen entrances and processions.  The great English garden at Stourhead is, literally, designed to tell stories of the owner’s family, of Greek mythology and a landscape architect’s ability to express “the genius of the place.” Read more…

Micro apartments are the future, encouraging their inhabitants to buy less, use fewer resources, and live in a more streamlined, minimal way. Which is exactly why they were featured in both last and this month’s Metropolis (It’s a Small World); they presage new ways for us to live, and the concurrent design challenges inherent to them. While tiny apartments aren’t exactly news in some urban areas, the newest versions clock in at anywhere from 140 square feet (Microsoft-adjacent apodments in Redmond, Washington) to a more typical 420 square feet, (recently approved in San Francisco) to 370 square feet (largest micro apartments in NYC).

But what about REALLY micro apartments?

In Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated cities in the world (with rents some 35% higher than in New York City) about 100,000 people, including families, live 40 square-foot spaces (I don’t think most of us would qualify them as ‘apartments’), as depicted in these arresting photographs from the city’s Society for Community Organization (above and below):

Most of us, no matter where we live, will question if those spaces are big enough for one person, let alone a family. But it definitely begs the question, how small is “too small”? How do we arrive at the minimum sizes for a dwelling?  A confab among city planners, designers, potential residents and maybe even sociologists or anthropologists is needed here.

In New York City, as in most cities, the minimum apartment size was set by zoning laws. In 1987, the smallest a new apartment could be was set at 400 square feet (older, smaller places were grandfathered in). For mayor Bloomberg to introduce the small apartment plans that he did, he had to get special zoning permissions. The same is true for San Francisco, Philadelphia, Redmond, Washington and other cities with micro spaces; they have to be designed and sold as a specific type of dwelling to meet a specific need. Indeed, as the original article points out, most of them have space-saving built-in appliances and closets, and often, high ceilings, so space is utilized intelligently and encourages openness and comfort. They aren’t just small, but smartly so.

Ultimately, it’s the designers who determined these apartments’ sizes (which were then approved and vetted by public housing officials and the public, during exhibitions and competitions for the best design). They are, truly, crowd sourced apartments, both in size and layout. But why not let the market determine the apartment sizes?

This seems like it might work until you read through the comments on many of these micro apartment stories online. What one person calls a micro-apartment, another calls a tenement. But tenements were about small spaces being used to house families (closer to the Hong Kong examples, above), and a large proportion of city dwellers no longer live in a family unit; in NYC in 2009, 33% of people lived in their apartments alone, and 17% contained couples sans kids – but yet there’s a glut of 2- and 3-bedroom apartments for family units. All those singles and couples desperately need smaller (read: more affordable, and more suited to their lifestyles) places, but there are only 100,000 studios and one-bedrooms available in NYC—their scarcity then drives their prices higher than they should be.

As Jerilyn Perine, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council told channel Thirteen’s Metrofocus, “The housing market can’t possibly keep up with the population growth we’re projecting. This idea that adding to the housing supply by continually adding housing for families doesn’t address the underlying needs. This need is increasingly finding its way onto the underground housing market.”

Micro apartments offer a solution to the problem. But the majority of people will always want more space (see the upsetting New York Times article about elderly folks living in large, subsidized apartments, refusing to give them up). And for many, living in a small space is a question of prior experience. If you grew up in a suburban house, a micro apartment can seem “too small.” But for someone who has lived in a studio for years, it might seem plenty large enough (and some people, as in the Hong Kong example, are willing and able to live in too-small spaces if they aren’t regulated away from that). So maybe designers and city planners are the best final arbiters on apartment size, since it seems that other approaches, like letting developers or renters themselves decide, has so far resulted in ineffective solutions.

Starre Vartan is an author, journalist, and artist whose work concentrates on sustainability in consumer products, including a focus on vernacular, nature-based, and eco design. Recognized as a green living expert, she is the publisher of Eco-chick.com, a columnist at MNN.com, and contributes to Inhabitat and The Huffington Post. She is Metropolis’s copyeditor.

From LEED, the Cool Roof Rating Council, the ENERGY STAR program, all the way up to the U.S. Department of Energy, there is widespread belief that white reflective roofing systems, even on buildings in northern cities like New York and Chicago, are more efficient and cost-effective than dark roofing.

Based on studies done at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, for the past 15 years white roofing systems have been the system of choice because it was believed that they also reduce global warming and the “heat island effect,” in which dark-colored building materials raise the ambient temperature in urban areas by a few degrees in summer.

But architects, engineers, building owners, and roof system designers, who were not consulted on the Lawrence Berkeley studies, are finding that reflective membranes are not always a panacea for energy savings. Moreover, a study done at Stanford University, which uses the latest advances in atmospheric computer modeling, shows that white roofs may actually increase, not decrease, the Earth’s temperature. White roof membranes have high reflectivity that directs heat upward into the atmosphere and then mixes with black and brown soot particles, which are thought to contribute to global warming.

Other studies show that white roofs increase average space heating use more than they decrease average air conditioning use in northern climates. Since owners have to spend more money heating their buildings with a white roof, they must consume more natural resources, thus increasing global warming. Read more…

Having followed Robin Guenther’s work for some time, when Fast Company named this FAIA and LEED AP one of “The World’s 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012,” I was delighted, but not surprised. The sustainable healthcare design leader at Perkins + Will is known as a strong and persistent advocate for human- and planetary health. Her crusade to increase her own knowledge about our material world gives her the authority of someone with genuine concern for her fellow creatures and long-term experience in the complex filed of health care design. Her advice to the magazine’s readers about the materials we live with every day, is dramatic in its simplicity:

“If they don’t tell you what’s in it, you probably don’t want what’s in it.”

“Consult your nose—if it stinks, don’t use it.”

“Use carbohydrate-based materials when you can.”

With this in mind, I asked Robin to talk about the Health Products Disclosure (HPD) initiative, and how it may change our material world for the better. Read her realistic, but optimistic observations on everything from HPD’s short and long term influence on the built environment, to the power of the design community in creating positive change in the marketplace, and more.

Susan S. Szenasy:  You have been an eloquent advocate for patients (in fact anyone who works or visits) in the healthcare segment for as long as I can remember. Your ammo has been finding the least toxic, most healthy products available for the interiors you design. In view of your long and inspiring campaign for healthy interiors, what does the formation of HPD signal to you?

Robin Guenther: The HPD represents a major milestone in the advocacy for safer and healthier building materials.  For the first time, we will have access to important, accurate information on the contents of building materials – “a nutrition label,” so to speak, that we can use to inform our specifications. As the HPD information is used to build Pharos, the Healthy Building Network comparative tool, it will accelerate the possibility of independent comparisons of products, another important aspect of this quest. Read more…

In her new book, The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science, Akiko Busch discusses how a thoughtful citizenry can learn, understand, and act upon their findings as they observe, closely, the rapidly changing natural world around them.  In reading her introductory remarks, in which she gives the pride of place to a quote from Edward O. Wilson—“We do not understand ourselves yet and descend further from heaven’s air if we forget how much the natural world means to us”— an overwhelming truth hit me square in the eye. As a long-time resident of the big city, I have forgotten my innate connections with the natural world. As I went deeper into Busch’s text, I came to a painful realization of what this careless disconnection has done to me. I now know that the further I have turned away from that natural world, the more impoverished I became, both intellectually and emotionally.

Busch’s examples of citizen scientists, those who regularly observe, record, and act upon the wrongs visited on the natural world in their own back yards, seem to have a deeper sense of place than those of us who stopped paying attention. In addition to using their keen powers of observation, these alert citizens take it upon themselves to share their findings with others through all kinds of social networking, thus adding to the sum total of human knowledge of our world.  They also get their hands dirty, like Busch and her cohorts have done in the Hudson Valley, where she made these observations about nature, human nature, and the nature of deep connections to place. Here, as she talks about her encounter with water chestnuts, she got me intrigued about Bats in the Locust Tree, Coyotes Across the Clear-Cut, Eels in the Stream, just a few of her evocative chapter headings I’ll be getting involved with next.—-SSS

Weeding water chestnuts (trapa natans) from the river is an exercise in which leisure and industry easily coincide; it’s a brand of gardening in which a sense of purpose can intersect with being languid. From time to time, I saw an elver, a juvenile American eel, winding around a stem or root like some weird extra plant appendage. Although the fish diversity is lower here than elsewhere on the river, eels can withstand the low oxygen levels of the water chestnut bed, all the while snacking on its assorted invertebrates. Yet if the eels swim off quickly, everything else seems to take its own time. Like anything else that is done in water, weeding is done slowly, as though it is possible to take on the liquid motion of what is around you. The stems can be pulled out with the gentlest tug; their attachment to the riverbed seems slight, their resistance imperceptible. Yet there is the smallest bit of spring to them, as though some bit of elastic thread has woven its way through the watery pink tendrils, and they have that sense of give that the most tenacious opponents sometimes seem to have. With a bit of stretch, these interlopers seem to be hanging on, though without much faith. And the mud on the bed of the river has a give, too; at each step, we sink in a bit. Perhaps this is why I am so drawn to the waterworld of rivers: nothing here stays the same for too long; things are always shifting, drifting, gently giving way. Read more…

As much as the boundaries between design and art fade away (at DesignMiami galleries sell design through an art market structure, such as a $50,000 limited edition of 3 “designer” chairs), yet we continue to need to categorize and make distinctions between the two. And when we can’t see the distinction, bewildered, we cry for an explanation.

A recent post here by Starre Vartan elaborated on one of the defining factors of that distinction: the relationship between the creative and the commercial and what it means to both. This was a great insight. Then my visit to Indianapolis and the new art hotel brought even more clarity to the topic, a case study for discussion.

The Alexander Hotel (a 209 room property, part of the CityWay redevelopment complex in downtown Indianapolis) is the result of an initiative by Indiana developer Brad Chambers, a long-time art philanthropist and collector. With the assistance of the curatorial team, lead by chief curator Dr. Lisa Freiman of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Chambers wanted to bring to the project the inspiration that art, his passion, gives him and, in the process, bring to Indianapolis something new and unique.

Beyond a comprehensive and thoughtful art collection put together exclusively for the hotel, 14 artists were commissioned to create site-specific pieces for the property. All pieces make relevant statements and combine successfully to bring the trendy art hotel category to America’s Midwest. Undeniably, the piece de resistance is Jorge Pardo’s “design” for the bar and lounge, Plat99.

Pardo was given one of the most prominent parts of the project to design. The bar and lounge area is a glass box slightly pulled off the main volume of the Gensler designed building, hovering on the second floor at the corner of the busy intersection where the hotel is located, its curtain walls serving as a teaser, inviting passersby for a closer look at what’s inside.

Read more…

In his introduction to Design Education for a Sustainable Future, published recently by Routledge/earthscan, Rob Fleming says his premise “is remarkably simple. It is based on a series of straightforward questions that seek to uncover the context, values, and behaviors necessary for effective twenty-first century design education. Is society moving towards a new sustainable or integral worldview, a new set of cultural values that are reshaping the very fabric of human existence? If so, how are such profound shifts in consciousness impacting the design and construction industries? And how can design educators better reflect the zeitgeist of the new century by moving from well-intentioned but lightweight ‘greening’ to the deeper and more impactful ideals of sustainability and resilience?

“The process of answering these questions begins with the requisite historical narrative which explores cultural evolution not as a slow and gradual rise to new levels of complexity but rather through a series of hyper-accelerated jumps in human consciousness. The jump from dispersed Hunter Gatherer cultures to centralized agrarian societies and then to industrialized nations correlates well to the convergence of new energy sources and the invention of new communication technologies.” What follows is Fleming’s opening salvo to a much talked about, much-overdue shift that needs to take place in design education:

Jeremy Rifkin argues in his book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis that “The convergence of energy and communications revolutions not only reconfigures society and social roles and relationships but also human consciousness itself.”¹ The early twenty-first century, as characterized by unprecedented sharing of information via wireless networks and by the emergence of renewable energy technologies, demarcates a threshold from one world view to another, a jump from an industrialized conception of nature as immutable and infinite to a Gaia inspired view of nature as alive, intelligent and, most of all, fragile in the hands of man.

The principles of sustainability, which emphasize ecological regeneration and co-creative processes, comprise a new and powerful ideal that is reshaping technologically driven initiatives, especially those associated with the design and construction of the built environment. Societal conceptions of money and profit, consumerism, design and technology are radically shifting to address the superficial but useful demands of “greening,” and are leading to finding deeper and more impactful processes to meet the much higher bar of sustainability. Read more…

In our last post, we addressed the challenges of designing around underground utilities. Another challenge faced by property owners and designers is the post-design waiting period—in response to the phasing of projects or due to the unpredictable nature of the construction process.

The typical scene of cranes, fencing, building debris, etc. that is associated with a construction site.  Photo: Liz Ernst

Design. Wait. Bid. Wait. Build. Wait. It’s no secret that getting a project built is a process. Once a site is in construction, the finished product could take months—even years—to be completed, and the landscape component of a project often occurs near the end of a site’s construction cycle.

These “waiting periods” are part and parcel of the construction world. So, what if the design process took this waiting period into consideration? What if temporary or short-term strategies could be incorporated into a designer’s plans from the outset?

Rendering from Hudson Square Streetscapes Improvement Plan showing multiple landscape strategies, all of which help form and shape the framework of the final streetscape vision. Courtesy: Mathews Nielsen

Read more…