As Neil Harbisson lifted a red sock up to the end of the narrow, black device extending from the back of his head, a note sounded. After a moment he set down the red sock and reached for a blue sock, this one playing a different note as he brought it to the sensor suspended over his forehead. Repeating the gesture several times, new notes sounded for each different sock - he was playing a “color concert”. Although Harbisson cannot see colors, the device attached to his head, known as an eyeborg, allows him to perceive them through the frequencies they emit, including many which are not perceptible to normal human eyes. The performance was a fitting end to the 2013 PSFK Conference, a day of talks, panels, and presentations centering on the latest in technology, design, and brand innovation.

Neil Harbisson performs a concert using his eyeborg and different colored socks.

Much of last week’s PSFK conference, which took place April 12^th at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, centered on the connections between humans and technology, and how advances in technology are changing how we relate to the world. Other major topics of the day were strategies for successful branding, and several plans to reshape New York City for the better in the coming years.

Harbisson, who in addition to his concert was also the day’s first speaker, explored the possibility of augmenting human senses with technology, similar to how he has done. He believes that, in a way, we are all handicapped in that our natural five senses do not allow us to perceive the full range of inputs from around us. Through the use of technology, our range of perception can be expanded and our awareness increased. His group, the Cyborg Foundation, works to help people augment their senses through technology, as well as advocating on behalf of cyborgs like himself.

Douglas Rushkoff discusses the phenomenon of “present shock.”

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Since 2000 when the Healthy Building Network (HBN) was founded, the advocacy group has been researching and making public their findings on environmentally friendly building materials and policies. In 2006 HBN introduced the Pharos Project, to publish information on the environmental impact of building materials commonly used by today’s architecture and construction industry sectors. In 2009, Pharos received an award from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which called the project “a revolutionary on-line tool for evaluating and comparing the health, environmental and social impacts of building materials in a comprehensive and transparent way.” In my series of Q&As about the Health Product Declaration (HPD), I asked Bill Walsh, founder of HBN and executive director, to provide the public advocate’s point of view. Here he talks about some initial victories and the dogged efforts of a small group of dedicated professionals (30 people in all) who have volunteered for the battle to clean up our environment, one building product at a time.

Susan S. Szenasy:  Recently you wrote in Healthy Building News that “March 17th marks the 10th anniversary of the EPA order that made it illegal to use the arsenic-based pesticide CCA (chromated copper arsenate) to treat wood intended for most residential uses,” and that, as a result, “the amount of arsenic used in the United States [has dropped] from over twenty metric tons annually to approximately six” since 2003. What do these hopeful numbers tell you about the inroads HPD can make on helping to eliminate toxic materials from our built environment?

Bill Walsh: The Healthy Building Network initiated the effort to create the Health Product Declaration [HPD] because informed customers are the most influential driver of healthier building products. With pressure treated wood, once consumers understood that there were two equivalent types of product on the market – that with arsenic, and that without – the writing was on the wall. Chemical manufacturers voluntarily withdraw their requests to EPA for an exemption to arsenic restrictions. That made it easy for EPA to take the action it did.

As HPDs gain currency, unnecessary, avoidable toxic hazards will be the first thing to go. For example, I expect we will see a steady transition out of chemical flame-retardants in many uses where they are unnecessary, such as below grade foam insulation, and provide no added safety benefit, such as in upholstery foams. Leading manufacturers have also said that the HPD will create an incentive for companies to make quiet transitions in order to avoid disclosing problematic chemicals.

Over the long-term, the HPD is going to create incentives for continuous improvement toward ever-healthier building products. But the first thing the HPD is going to accomplish is a rapid acceleration away from hazards that can be avoided today.

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Indulge me.

I once wrote a poem called “Profession of Mission” in which I attempted to write a personal mission statement. The poem rambled a bit, begged for clarity in my life’s purpose and ended with the word “crossroads” – no punctuation or finality – intentionally open-ended.

I wrote the poem in 2009 at age 44 – clearly the beginning of Mid-Life Crisis. Yes, young’uns, even older folks wonder what to do with the rest of their lives.

One week ago, at age 47 – no closer to an answer or closure – I took myself to Manhattan.

If I can “figure it out here, I can figure it out anywhere,” right?

I’m pleased to report that I found clarity in Chelsea … without a stitch of help from any of Woody Allen’s analysts.

But I did have help.

I attended a daylong workshop called “Design the Life You Love” created by New York-based product designer Ayse Birsel.

Ayse became a friend after I heard her speak at a user conference put on by a client of mine, Swedish design-software company Configura. Born in Turkey, Ayse is Pratt Institute-educated, a Fulbright Fellow whose work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, both in New York City.

She is perhaps best known for designing Herman Miller’s Resolve office system and Moroso’s M’Afrique collection. She and partner Bibi Seck own Birsel+Seck, a design studio that also works with Johnson & Johnson, Hasbro, Hewlett Packard, OfficeMax, Renault, and Target. Ayse designed a potato peeler for Target that’s just $7.99, she says. So, even if you never make it to MoMA or Cooper-Hewitt, you can see (and buy) her products at a Target near you.

Ayse has taken her product design methods – which she calls Deconstruction:Reconstruction™ – and developed the “Design the Life You Love” workshop with concepts and exercises that even non-designers can easily grasp.

The workshop has become a mission for Ayse: “Our lives are our most important project,” she says.

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Photo by Lindsay Roffe at Ink Factory

What is Research? In our age of information overload, does anyone have the time to do research? Does research lead to innovation, especially in the architecture practice? What is the future of research? How can the American Institute of Architects help? To find these answers and many more, the AIA Research Summit met this past summer in St. Louis. The delegation of 24 was split almost halfway between academicians and practitioners, with some AIA staff. It was a unique experience for me because research is not spoken in the same vocabulary or at the same level in my practice as was done at the summit. It is evident that academicians and practitioners see research with very different perspectives. Hence, the summit’s two distinct tracks of academic and applied research. The goal was to understand the similarities and dissimilarities among the two, form a connection between them, and make it easier for researchers to exchange information and learn from each other.

Image by Lindsay Roffe at Ink Factory

Academic research focuses on gathering information and deducing specific conclusions. It generally tends to be lengthy as it includes background information such as method, experiments, data, and details in addition to the conclusions. Academics are striving to find new information and the results are rigorous.

Applied research may be understood as simply doing a Google search, although it would not be considered serious “research” in academic terms. Applied research involves finding information, aggregating the facts, and applying them to practice. Practitioners look for concise abstracts and many are driven towards visual forms of information. Small firms have multi-skilled professionals who do research as part of their other activities. Most of the large firms today have dedicated researchers on staff, creating specialized deductions to be used in the design practice.  Although small firms spend limited amount of time in research, their projects don’t seem to require the level of research a large firm might need. Apart from all this, Terrence E. O’Neal, AIA holds that there is tacit knowledge held in the minds of researchers, which needs to be extracted before the baby boomers retire.

Image by Lindsay Roffe at Ink Factory

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The “classic” Silicon Valley stretches from Palo Alto to south of San Jose, CA,
about 20 miles south of San Francisco.

Bay Area locals are mighty excited about Greenbuild coming to San Francisco in November.  The conference theme, “@ Greenbuild,” references the mindboggling array of Internet and technology companies headquartered in our backyards. You know Google, Yahoo, Twitter (co-founder, Biz Stone, will join us at the Greenbuild opening plenary), LinkedIn, Yelp, and YouTube.  Smaller social media outlets are also ubiquitous, including StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, Yammer, Pinterest, and many more.  Of the 17 companies mentioned in a recent survey on social media for designers, all but one are headquartered here. (Tumblr hails from New York.  Rebels!)  We also have our host of gaming companies, many of whom tap into social networks; gamejobhunter lists over 120 companies nearby, from tiny start-ups to titans like EA and Zynga.

Our social media bonanza has roots in the original tech boom in Silicon Valley – named after silicon chip innovators – back in the 1970s.  What is Silicon Valley exactly?  Although the name originally referred to a specific region around Stanford University and San Jose, its tech prowess has spread throughout the region; the San Jose Mercury News recently argued that “Silicon Valley” now includes five Bay Area counties.  For many of us, though, Silicon Valley is more about a mindset and an approach to business that’s become synonymous with high tech innovation.  It has remained in this area because, as I once learned in a city planning class, companies that demand a stream of employees with the tech sector’s specialized mindset and skillset tend to thrive when they flock together.  (San Francisco’s tax break for tech companies probably doesn’t hurt either.)

Autodesk, another Bay Area tech giant,
enjoys a LEED CI Platinum certification for its One Market St. office space.
Photo by David Wakely, courtesy of HOK.

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Image courtesy Storefront for Art and Architecture

Storefront for Art and Architecture’s current exhibition Aesthetics / Anesthetics, a challenge to the conventions of architectural representation, is the sort of idiosyncractic show the organization has become known for, gleefully picking apart architecture’s accepted canons and unwritten rules. This time, the targets are “certain representational devices that have become architectural clichés operating almost as placeholders or decorative elements of an architecture unable to draw itself … birds on beautiful skies, happy children with balloons, those axonometries” (from the show’s description). The core of the exhibition is a group of 30 drawings—including some that stretch the term “drawing” pretty far—commissioned from an international group of emerging and established architects.

Michael Young [Young & Ayata]
Condenser, 2012
Metallic C-print mounted to dibond, 18 x 24 in.

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Image courtesy of Chambers Design

It’s no secret that our energy infrastructure has problems - from fossil fuels and pollution from power plants, to the age and condition of the system that delivers energy to homes and buildings.  But rarely do we hear about the dilemma we face. The modernization of energy distribution in the United States has brought power to everyone everywhere while, at the same time, that access has driven us to be the single largest users of energy, per capita, in the world. The grid is the reason for both our current lifestyle and technological advancement, and our oversized impact on the environment.

Little over a hundred years ago, the energy grid didn’t exist and most people didn’t have access to electricity. Today we overlook the revolutionary condition of ample output that powers our lives, day and night, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Image from the Library of Congress

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I admit it. I tend to overuse the phrase, “Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.” So here I go again. I’d like to point out that we need to bring two issues together when it comes to getting things done:  We need to temper our ability to do our work digitally and in places that aren’t offices and at the same time appreciate the role played by shared physical places in enabling performance.

In the first few pages of our Network paper, the authors emphasize the value of face-to-face interactions: They note that “the more we live in a digital world, the more important it becomes to reconnect with the physical environment. We’re spending more and more time working, socializing and playing in virtual settings. Communities of practice are expanding, effectively combining social and information networks. Games are becoming incredibly realistic – some in terms of sight and sound, while others replicate real life with virtual pets, babies, families, gardens. However… there are certain skills that are critical to successful face‐to-face social interaction, and we only master those skills by using them. So the physical environment remains vital to communication, interaction and developing skills”.

Google is known for thoughtfully provisioning workers: Visitors to any office can expect to find Googlers sharing cubes, yurts and “huddles”; video games, pool tables and pianos; cafes and “microkitchens”; and good old fashioned whiteboards for spur-of-the-moment brainstorming.

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Google’s Project Glass caught my eye while reading the New York Times. These augmented reality glasses that promise to display maps, charts, and other visuals right in front of our eyes, are one more piece of seductive technology. Before we buy in, we need to consider the social and design issues raised by such terrifically exciting innovations.

When we ran out and bought iPod Touches for our kids, we didn’t consider the difficulties these devices would create in carrying on focused conversations. Neither did we think of how these highly appealing objects would act on the long-term unintended impacts on the kids’ emotional and physical development.  Similarly, I’m seeing a lessening in quality of conversation in day to day interactions in business and out in public with so many of us multi-tasking on some device or another.  So given these recent experiences what are my larger concerns with Project Glass?

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After mounting a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper at Rockefeller Center in 2008, and then placing a diverse collection of vintage streetlights like lit columns at a main entry to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), artist Chris Burden astounds us again. LACMA presents Chris Burden’s Metropolis II.

1100 miniature cars race along 18 lanes of traffic around 25 buildings. Given the miniature scale, they speed the equivalent of about 230 miles per hour. 13 trains mosey along through this mini-city as well.

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