As the “sub-prime” mortgage crisis winds its way across the United States (and impacts the lives of everyone else) we are left wondering how this real estate tsunami will affect the future of home-buying, suburbia, and urbanism. The Atlantic.com suggests that the shuttering of the suburban dream is being fiscally hastened by financial crises, and […]
Mobile tech researcher Younghee Jung describes the extraordinary interaction design of Japanese love hotels:
The entrances of love hotels are characteristically discreet. It is impossible to see the inside of the lobby from outside. There are many entrances to the building. Once in the lobby, you see the big board with pictures of all rooms. The […]
My dissertation looks at how pervasive computing and locative media practitioners treat cities as interaction design spaces and publics as co-creators, so I’m always interested in how people are envisioning future cities. Dan Hill recently pointed to the Living City project, in which three alternative and parallel futures are explored:
Living City is an ecology of […]
Meatropolis by Nicholas de Monchaux
[B]oth images represent a system of commonly understood distinctions, rendered in order to negotiate the body of a complex system: the city, the (bovine) body. Just as we need arbitrary designations to govern the path of a knife, or palate, around and through the body of the cow, so we need […]
Kingwell’s recent article in Walrus Magazine describes some of the ironies of the creative (i.e. bourgeois bohemian or “bobo”) class in cities like Toronto. He suggests that the political dimension of cities is lacking in our Richard Florida-informed “creative economy,” and that justice must be rethought and reconsidered. An excerpt:
The hucksters and tourism shills […]