read more: the better-writen bio that could be mine

"I struggle often to justify my love of aesthetics. I love to rearrange furniture and choose lipstick shades and curate art collections and have amassed more than enough statement jewelry over the years, and I sometimes treat these gifts as if they’re burdens. I sometimes wish I could trade these passions for something more “worthwhile” – whatever that means – and then I realize how ridiculous that sounds. Gifts are gifts. Passions are passions. We don’t choose them; they arrive, packaged in cardboard. They’re often bubble-wrapped, I think, and sometimes I use that same bubble wrap to suffocate them. Lately I’ve been working really hard not to do that, and instead, to pop the wrap a bit at a time with a new challenge (pop) or project (pop) or pursuit (pop pop pop)."
- Erin Loechner, Design for Mankind on writing her 'real bio' 

read more: sustainable web design

"How can the web have a sustainability problem when 'paperless' and 'eco-friendly' frequently share the same sentence? After all, designers in many disciplines are trying to fix their own sustainability problems by moving them online – in other words, things are made 'green' when they go on the web...While some products become more sustainable by converting them to a swarm of bits, we must remember that those bits require something very physical to exist – a big, high-tech network, using lots of electricity and always-on computers to operate."

- Pete Markiewicz, Save the Planet Through Sustainable Web Design

read more: the duty of design

"It is enough for good design to be things we cherish because they are beautiful, well made, or a pleasure to use, but it seems to me that our daily lives are dominated by barely competent and sometimes downright sinister works of industrial design, and I do not understand why designers don’t spend more time chasing down these opportunities.

The whole infrastructure of security and surveillance that dominates our experience of the city today (to take just one example) has gone untouched by the field of product design in any meaningful way. These are works of design that take justice and trust as their topic, and they make it pretty clear how those in power think of us as citizens."
- Kieran Long, On the Civic Duty of Product Design for Dezeen 

read more: richard rogers on an architect's duty

"In my generation the idea was you'd build for the future... The idea is that we have a responsibility to society. That gives us a role as architects not just to the client but also to the passer-by and society as a whole."
- From Denzeen

read more: africa's new cities

"Africa is bracing itself for the arrival of the New Cities. That’s the term being used by urban scholars to describe the continent’s next urban phenomenon: Comprehensively planned, independent, relatively self-contained communities, usually built from scratch, and large enough to provide within their borders housing, public facilities, socio-cultural opportunities and employment for their residents...

Based on the assumption of a shared longing for new urban spaces, these cities come with promises of impressive amenities and functioning systems that will enable the urban lifestyle most Western cities provide. And they’re branding themselves accordingly – they’re sometimes called Eco-Cities or Smart Cities — and boast that they will be more connected, global and sustainable than traditional cities.

What is worrying is that there is little recognition of place, economy, context and even poverty in these cities. This begs several questions. To whom do these cities belong? Who is planning them? Are they inclusive cities, or simply profit-driven businesses?"
- Jane Lumumba, Why Africa Should Be Wary of It's 'New Cities' 

read more: re-regulation and government adaptation

"New businesses and the entrepreneurs that create them are intrinsically adaptive, responsive to change and driven by market realities. If they don’t possess these traits they fail." 
- Charles Luzar, What The Government Can Learn from Crowdfunders

read more: resilient architecture

"To build resilient communities and avoid the devastation of the next Hurricane Sandy, designers should look southward. If architects valued prevention instead of permanence, buildings could guide cities and reduce vulnerability rather than increasing risks. Such a values reorientation could radically improve our cities and our lives. The fundamental thing the global south teaches us is that a revaluation of architecture is not only imperative but also already happening far away from the epicenter of wealth."
- Michael Murphy, GOOD

read more: design ethics

"Design should have an opinion about service to humans. Design should have an opinion about it’s ethic. If you buy the premise that there is no “not design”, but just poor design and good design as I do, then I suggest that design cannot be totally benign either. It has an ethic and that ethic is either toward good or toward harm."
- Matthew Smith, Medium

read more: why our own neighborhoods needs us as much

"Recognize that you are an expert in your own community. Think about the research and ramp-up time and cultural assimilation needed to understand a community outside of your own. Whether elsewhere in the United States or halfway across the world. 

A lot of this ramp-up isn't necessary when you stay local. Working locally offers a way out of a vicious cycle of guilt, feeling hindered, and inaction. It offers escape hatches leading to a more sustainable situation for yourself, meaning you can get out of the mentality of thinking you need to quit your job and move to Africa to do something good."

- Julie Kim, GOOD

read more: form follows... distribution method

"You can buy a Coke pretty much anywhere on Earth. Thanks to a vast network of local suppliers, Coca-Cola has almost completely solved distribution, getting its product into every nook and cranny where commerce reaches. There are places in the world where it’s easier to get a Coke than clean water. In the 1980s, Berry was an aid worker in Zambia, and when he looked at Coke’s success, he saw an opportunity."
- Tim Maly, Wired 

read more: design 'what we do'

The answer is to design ‘what we do’ rather than to simply design ‘things’. We must design the everyday items of our lives, landscapes, our streets, our buildings, our services and institutions in a way that will foster behaviours that will continue to sustain us.
- Liam Hinshelwood in GOOD.is

read more: design literally change the world

"Design can help by making it easier to live up to our aspirations: by making stairs a more accessible and enticing option than escalators, for example, or creating open spaces where people want to gather instead of being trapped in their cubicles. By shaping the objects, interactions, and environments we live around and within, design literally changes the world."
- Ingrid Fetell, quoted in an wonderful, longer piece by Erin Loechner , Design for Mankind

read more: placemaking

"Involving the intended users of a public space in that process helps the resulting design to be responsive to the community’s needs—including the inherent need of all communities for people to connect with each other. Any organization can pave a plaza, but it’s not a place until people are using it."
- Brendan Crain for Project for Public Spaces, in response to Jim Russell's blog post

read more: building a space for calm

Currently, questions about design at psychiatric care facilities are viewed through the prism of security. How many guard and isolation rooms are needed? Where should we put locked doors and alarms? But architecture can — and should — play a much larger role in patient safety and care.

One prominent goal of facility design, for example, should be to reduce stress, which often leads to aggression. 

For patients, the stress of mental illness itself can be intensified by the trauma of being confined for weeks in a locked ward. A care facility that’s also noisy, lacks privacy and hinders communication between staff and patients is sure to increase that trauma. Likewise, architectural designs that minimize noise and crowding, enhance patients’ coping and sense of control, and offer calming distractions can reduce trauma. 

Thanks to decades of study on the design of apartments, prisons, cardiac intensive care units and offices, environmental psychologists now have a clear understanding of the architectural features that can achieve the latter — and few of these elements, if incorporated into a hospital design from the outset, significantly raise the cost of construction. 

- Roger S. Ulrick, The New York Times

read more: 10 reasons millennials might abandon big cities

The growing urban constituency of hipster parents is not timid about making itself heard. Educated and in professional jobs, they are equipped to organize and galvanize. "They make clear the kinds of things they want to see," says Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory, who created a Young Professionals Kitchen Cabinet when he took office in 2006. "We've got to work fast. Think how accustomed they are to speed. ... They expect it. They also expect things within their community to transform at a much faster rate."

- 10 Reasons Millennials Might Abandon Big Cities, Business Insider

read more: crowdsourcing local development

"The history of modern financial investment has been the story of people and their money moving farther apart into abstraction, to the point where most of us don't know where our investments (if we have any) have gone. But shorten the distance between those two points, and things start to change. Put your money into a building you can see in your neighborhood, and suddenly you might care more about the quality of the tenant, or the energy efficiency of the design, or the aesthetics of the architecture."
- The Real Estate Deal that Could Change the Future of Everything, Atlantic Cities

read more: making public transit safer

"An unwelcoming physical environment and unpredictable schedules are the greatest fears for female transit riders. While budgetary shortfalls might be to blame for the lack of safety innovations, Loukaitou-Sideris says there are low-cost solutions. Sometimes it's as simple as relocating the bus stop. "You can put the stop half a block away, but by a business that's open late and that has pedestrian traffic," Loukaitou-Sideris, she suggests, adding that many women reported walking farther to a different stop that was better lit or had more people around."

- How to Make Public Transportation Safer on a Shoestring Budget, GOOD

read more: election day special

While nervously awaiting the results of this year's Presidential election, various Senate and House races plus the 15+ propositions I got the opportunity to vote for here in California, I'm exploring the New York Times election coverage. They consulted designer Todd Oldham to talk ballot design. There's a great video, too. 

"Most of us don’t think about ballot design until we’re in the voting booth and asking ourselves which oval to fill in or which box to check so that our candidates actually get our support....The confusion is understandable. In American elections, ballots are rarely designed by professional designers. And not surprisingly, form follows dysfunction."
- Ballot Design with Todd Oldham, The New York Times

read more: after sandy

Much has already been written about Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy. Here are a few pieces covering design, community building, and adapting to a changing world.

Airbnb may not have read my reflections but they, along with several other companies, have been responsive according to Fast Company. Citizens are banding together to assist the overwelmed disaster relief teams in FastCo Exist. My former boss wrote about preparing for climate change in The Nation and Next American City covered what this means for designers.

"Airbnb is to waive its fees on all properties in the areas devastated by Sandy, after one of its homeowners offered up her rooms for free to victims of the disaster. The offer stands until November 7 and covers New York, the Hamptons, Providence, New Haven, and Atlantic City. It also urged its hosts to lower prices."
- Andy Dugdale for Fast Company

"We’re not from the Red Cross, FEMA, New York Cares, the public housing police or any other city agency. We’ve never met before and we aren’t affiliated with any one organization, school, or group. We come from all corners of the city: Elmhurst, Crown Heights, Cobble Hill, and even downtown neighborhoods like Chelsea and the West Village, where the power’s still out. Each of us showed up this morning for the first time, after we saw a notice on a website, got an email, or saw a Tweet that volunteers were needed at 46 Hester Street on the Lower East Side, where a local Asian community organization called CAAAV has become the hub for an almost completely self-organized aid effort."

- Anya Kamenetz, FastCo Exist

"What can we do? Three major options: (1) abandon our coastal cities and retreat inland, (2) stay put and try to adapt to the menacing new conditions or (3) stop burning planet-warming fossil fuels as fast as possible."
- Mike Tidwell, The Nation

"For architects, designers and planners, this means stepping up. We need to redesign and rebuild our infrastructure, and we need to do it sooner rather than later. Sandy gave many of us a few days out of the office. Now it’s time to get back to work for a shared future." 
- Eric Corey Freed, Next American City

read more: technological momentum

"According to Hughes’s theory, the technologies we end up using aren’t determined by any objective measure of quality. In fact, the tools we choose are often deeply flawed. They just happened to meet our particular social needs at a particular time and then became embedded in our culture." 

- "Why Your Car Isn't Electric," New York Times.