Sea the Forest for its trees

 

The Umi-no-Mori ("Sea Forest") project is an initiative of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. The project involves the conversion of a 30-meter high, 217-acre wide landfill on Tokyo Bay into a forest, including the planting of over 70,000 trees over the next three years. Grade-school children will be actively involved in planting these trees, which according to project chair Tadao Ando, will help them "understand that the environment is closely tied with human activity" (via Bloomberg).

Umi-no-Mori was initiated in part to support the city's 2016 Olympic bid. Not only will the forest serve to remind its visitors of Tokyo's commitment to "greening" the city, it will serve as the equestrian field in Tokyo's Olympic Park. The project chair (and very active board member of the Tokyo 2016 Olympic committee) is architect Tadao Ando, who is known for projects that emphasize a harmony between the built and landscaped world. As a Chicagoan I suppose he's currently my rival, but I think Tokyo's "carbon minus" approach to the bid would be so interesting to see in implementation. Will also be interesting to see if the Umi-no-Mori project still goes forward if the city doesn't win the bid...

heidelberg project

via Rosh Sillas Metro Detroit Photographer

This past week I had two students from Germany staying with me, Chrissi and Nadine, who study urban planning and geography respectively. As part of a university trip they were doing, they visited cities on the "Rust Belt," which are very interesting in terms of urban planning (or lack there of). Among them - Detroit. They showed me some photos of this art project/community that they had stumbled upon in the city - Heidelberg Project - and I was immediately fascinated.

The Heidelberg Project was initiated in 1986 by artist Tyree Guyton, his grandfather Sam Mackey and former wife, Karen Guton. Inspired by the tragic effects of the Detroit riots, which have made of Detroit a highly-segretated, poor, and altogether abandoned city, Tyree thought to reinvent vacant houses and lots on his street (Heidelberg) into an outdoor community-focused "art environment." Involving local kids and families from the community in a variety of art projects, the Heidelberg Project has become a model for community revival and using art to keep kids busy, off the streets and stimulated.

Check out the Heidelberg Project site for more photos, info on their 20+ years and some of their current initiatives and accomplishments.

Bit more on Detroit:
Cover story in this week's TIME, "Detroit: The Death - and Possible Life - of a Great City"

Eminem's new video for "Beautiful" has a lot of scenes of vacant/abandoned spaces in Detroit:

peepoo bag

The PeePoo bag is a biodegradable, self-sanitizing, single-use bag to be used as a receptacle for - you guessed it - pee & poo - for the 2.6 billion people living in the world who don't have access to proper toilet and sanitation facilities, and as a result are at high risk of becoming infected with life-threatening diseases.

When my roommate forwarded me a link from Design Observer on the PeePoo bag, I had 2 immediate, but conflicting thoughts:

1. This is a great temporary solution
2. The title and the concept seem a bit degrading

After reading a lot of the very heated commentary from readers of the blog, I am still conflicted about the overall approach and have some unanswered questions/thoughts that are really ever-present when I look at product design of this nature.

Function. The peepoo bag is a great temporary solution. It sounds potentially degrading, but if it's complemented with real strategies to improve sanitation and water access problems in the long-run, then the product isn't just a product - it's a symbol of a greater campaign, and a temporary fix that if implemented properly will save lives.

Timeframe. How long should "temporary" be? Can "temporary" products become a crutch that impedes progress towards finding more sustainable solutions?

Branding. I thought about branding in product design recently at a lecture on Project H Design given by founder Emily Pilloton at Columbia College. Project H worked on the redesign of the hippo roller, a water carrier concept originally developed by engineers Pettie Petzer and Johan Jonker that aims to increase water access for populations in rural South Africa by allowing them to carry significantly larger loads of water than did their previous method of carrying filled buckets on their heads.

When Project H did the redesign of the hippo roller (including a few functional improvements), they didn't want to fundamentally alter the actual look of the product, because it had become recognizable in the community and having one had become a source of pride. So, is this a culturally-, and community-sensitive approach, or does it feed into a certain sense of possession and accumulation that seems to be inseparable from product design...or both? Can branding be a positive way to proliferate ideas, concepts and innovative products, or does it always take advantage of our desire to accumulate?

park(ing) day chicago!

Friday was Park(ing) Day! Park(ing) Day began in 2005 with an installation by architecture & design firm Rebar ("interdisciplinary studio operating at the intersection of art, design and activism") based in San Francisco.  It has since grow to worldwide movement that encourages civic participation in reimagining our urban  infrastructure to include greater focus on open, green public spaces, versus our current car-centric urban landscapes.

In Chicago, architecture firm Moss Design, along with industrial design firm Strand Design, conceived of "urban park" in two parking spots outside Southport Grocery.

Video interview from WBEZ blog with Matt Nardella of Moss Design, the sustainable design studio in Lakeview on the making of and concept behind their parking spot design.

PARKing Day from WBEZ on Vimeo.

There doesn't seem to be as much critical mass behind the movement in Chicago as in other cities - haven't heard much about other groups/individuals participating in Chicago. I did get a note through my UIC listserv that the Urban Planning department there was leading an initiative on campus.

Park(ing) Day is particularly pertinent to Chicago with the recent heavily contested deal to privatize metered parking throughout the city.

Some shots from other cities, various years:

Original Park(ing) Day in San Francisco, 2005

Chicago, 2007

Honolulu, 2008

New York, 2008

Portland, 2009

UPDATE: Just received images of UIC's parking day this year. Wish I'd made it!

More here.

rethinking value

Related to the previous post on Kawano Takeshi's work:

Fabrica, Benetton's communications research center that commissioned Takeshi for the global warming awareness project, has done a lot of other interesting, innovative work. The group, based in Treviso, Italy describes themselves as an "applied creativity laboratory, a talent incubator" where young, modern, international artists develop innovative projects that have a communications focus.

One project that grabbed my attention is titled, "Colors of Money" which, in the wake of the financial crisis, examines the root causes of the economic meltdown - "the desires, the fantasy and the hubris which fuelled the financial abuses and brought about disastrous economic consequences".

The installation, exhibiting in Luxembourg through November 2009, includes a variety of media - photography, creative writing and art. It questions the "cultural dominance of finance" and explores the ways in which artists and designers are attempting to counteract this force that has so influenced the formation of our global, contemporary culture.

The exhibition corresponds with the 73rd issue of of Fabrica's Colors Magazine ("a magazine about the rest of the world" - that examines global trends & themes from innovative perspectives) - which has a feature that focuses on 15 different substances found through lab analysis of currency that had passed through hundreds, thousands, millions of exchanges...They then explore each substance found (ex: oil, microbes, metal, soil) and critically analyze its value and use in a variety of national and international contexts. For example - on the island of Yap, Micronesia, soil is a measure of wealth much like currency. This approach exemplifies the ways in which Fabrica breaks information and concepts down into pieces, parts. This approach allows the viewer/reader to critically analyze how "money" is a just false construct with no real or concrete value or utility.

Some examples of installations in the exhibit:

The Podium by  Erik Ravelo (Cuba, 2008)
"An interactive installation built with thousands copies of COLORS 73, this podium speaks to symbols of opulence in a society which encourages us to accumulate more and more to supposedly reach the top of the world. The podium invites visitors to go backwards: take some money, leave the rest, and watch the hierarchy slowly collapse as each of us do the same."

Piggy Bank by Sam Baron (France, 2009)

"Save money, spend money. Save money, spend money. Start over. An innovative design object, Sam Baron’s Piggy Bank questions the endless process of accumulation and expense that rules our daily lives by showing the futility of this social game we always lose."

More here.

melting zoo

Artist Kawano Takeshi was commissioned by the Italy-based communications research center, Fabrica, to raise awareness about the effects of climate change.

 

 

I haven't been able to find much else out about Kawano Takeshi's work, but these works have gotten a lot of attention. They have a lot of impact as graphics, but I imagine if the sculptures are life-like they'd have much more effect in person. Like going to a melting zoo...

dirty water for $1

Read about this UNICEF campaign over at Artsy Time.

For the dirty water campaign, UNICEF placed a "dirty water" vending machine in Union Square in New York. The vending machine provided consumers with 8 options, themed around diseases contracted from drinking contaminated water.

The campaign was created by communications firm Casanova Pendrill as an initiative of UNICEF's Tap Project, founded in 2007 to raise awareness about (and funds to combat) the poor quality of water in developing countries.

Operating on budget of $0, all materials and services were provided pro bono.

Video for the campaign

The end of this video is really disturbing: two idiotic girls making jokes about diseases that "make you skinny" because they involve throwing up and diarrhea... "yea, i mean if it doesn't kill you, it'll just make you skinnier." Tap Project responds with the message "There's still a long way to go." Good for them for keeping this in there - it's a reality check that these issues are not present enough in the public dialogue. You would never see people publicly making a joke like that about a disease like cancer.

It's unfortunate that people like this exist, and a mass-impact campaign will most likely never change their perceptions. What it does do though is:

1) raises funds using a combination of the brilliant vending machine concept (forgo the pack of m&m's to provide a child with 40 days of drinking water? i think so), text messaging and a probably less immediately successful, but still very accessible online donation option
2) provides people with something physical and visual to make sense of the pressing issue - rather than mere statistics, it uses a bright vending machine in the middle of one of the busiest areas in Manhattan and then, the bottle of dirty, brown contaminated water
3) makes the very critical connection between the 8 life-threatening (but PREVENTABLE) diseases and water sanitation & access. This provides a reminder, and in some cases newly informs people that these diseases are directly related to the dismal state of water quality in developing regions like Africa and India.

According to UNICEF, for every dollar raised, a child will have enough water to drink for 40 days. Donations raised by the Tap Project fund targeted projects that increase access and improve sanitation of water in a few countries within Africa, South America and in Iraq.

NEW BLOG, ACTUAL THEME.

Which is, roughly: the intersection of design/visualization and social change.

This blog is dedicated to appreciating and spreading awareness of the innovative products, works of architecture, urban plans, graphics, maps, graphs etc that serve to reinterpret, reconceptualize, and often recreate the world around us.

Inherent in the word "design" is a sense of functionality - design, versus art, has a function. Whether it be an innovation like the advent of the lightbulb or the redrawing of world maps popularized by Western cultures to expose their colonial misinterpretations - progressive design and visualization should be predicated on the idea that change is achieved by rethinking the very systems upon which we operate and the norms which we accept.

Instead of designing products, advertisements or buildings that serve the misguided wants of a mass consumer, temporary culture - designers should use their creative energy to create products, designs, or ways of visualizing the world/concepts/themes that seek to reinterpret the world around us, and that change our perceptions of what solutions are possible for the world's political, social, cultural, environmental problems.