Topic

cities

A collection of 50 issues

A Second Sunday. A first month.

I didn’t know of Jim Haynes until I read about him this week in Leo Hollis’s Cities Are Good For You: The Genius of the Metropolis. He’s an American in Paris who, for almost 40 years, has held an “endless dinner party” in his apartment at 38

Vive la France! Or why I fly the French flag.

Why would I go to the funeral of a friend or relative but not all of the funerals happening in my city that day? Why would I visit my own sick child in the hospital but not the hundreds of other sick ones, too? Why do I, an American, fly

On Microsoft Excel, Big Software, and Brazilian Favelas.

I often telling people designing for Excel is more like urban design than anything else. Because like a city, big software is a messy, chaotic system that is constantly evolving with millions of opinionated inputs by passionate, feeling, needy inhabitants and feisty, exuberant, competent and just as often, incompetent (but

On how good design makes food taste better.

I never knew I was a foodie gourmande until I didn’t have access to good food. Misery loves company, and some of my first conversations with my friend Paolo, who moved to D.C. from the West Coast about a year or so after I did, were about how

On the yonic and the phallic.

I have never had any desire to go to Dubai. But that changed this week when I listened to this BBC podcast on why we build skyscrapers, and learned about the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. I want to see it. “Yonic – yo• nic, adj. – a stylized

The sound of a city.

Watching House of Cards makes me miss D.C. If ever there was an audio portrait of a city, this theme song is one. Mood and musical palette of a city. Gravitas. Gritty. Scintillating. Titillating. Dark and foreboding. What you don’t see. The underbelly. The riptide. Puppet master riff.

Interaction design + urban planning.

The semester is humming nicely along. I have an incredible group of about nine grad students in my Visualizing Information design class at MICA. In my research for the class, I came across Trulia Hindsight. It couldn't be more timely given my current bedside reading, Jane Jacobs'

On urban semiotics and self image.

In This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide To Semiotics, author Sean Hall outlines key semiotic concepts (in which are cloaked Peirce’s sign, object, and interpretant): Sender (who) Intention (with what aim) Message (says what) Transmission (by which means) Noise (with what interference) Receiver (to whom)

On cities and multiple mental models.

Looking down Dame Street toward Trinity College. Dublin, Ireland. Photo by Callie Neylan, February 2012. What I love about cities is everything. What I love about traveling to other cities is how it expands and challenges ones mental models. As Charlie Munger expounds, having multiple mental models is a necessity