Urban hackers and DIY urban designers gather round: The Urban Guide for Alternate Use is hosting an urban design hacks competition to find the best examples of urban re-use and re-purposed urban design.

To encourage and celebrate resourcefulness in the city, EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! Live Art Festival is awarding a prize for the most innovative re-use of an urban object or area for a new purpose. The GO11 Award is a €500 prize for the best examples of design hacks and re-use in the city – the winner will receive €500, and their work will be presented in the festival magazine, published October 2011. Winning and shortlisted entries will also be presented as part of the Exchange Radical Moments festival in Berlin on 11/11/11.

I created The Urban Guide for Alternate Use as an online guide to urban design hacks and examples of individual design resourcefulness in the city. The response has been tremendous in the short time since it has launched, and I’m looking forward to discovering all sorts of new urban design hacks and re-purposed objects courtesy of the GO11 Award.

Please contribute your urban hacks and re-purposed design ideas or discoveries on the GO11 Award submission page here.

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The classic newspaper vending boxes have always played role in the city larger than their designated one. At their peak, when each box was filled with that day’s issue, even the most hurried urban citizen running for the bus could get an analogue news feed of current events by scanning the headlines as they ran past. They were infomatic barometers of an area – you could tell a lot about the average population of an area by the number of financial newspaper boxes vs. daily tabloid boxes on a given street corner. For the enterprising street merchant, they were a quick entrepreneurial resource – for the investment of a few quarters, you could grab that day’s entire stack of papers and go around the corner to increase your investment ten-fold. Even before Craigslist the business model of the daily newspaper had its weaknesses.

When I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago to speak at the Future of the City Conference, I was waiting to cross the street when I found myself next to one of the last innovations these form of vending will see – the unified newspaper box. Saddened by the lack of papers still populating these boxes, I stole a quick glance of the headline of that day’s FT to get a bite of the news. “Bush seeks remaining $350bn of rescue fund” the headline told me, and I crossed the street. I chewed over the headline for a while – “Bush? In the news today?” I thought to myself. Then, thinking about the $350bn referenced, the only thought I had was maybe that was how he was funding his retirement. Nothing about this made sense, so I doubled back across the street, and looked again – the issue of the FT I was referencing was dated January 13, 2009. My instinctive bite of the daily headlines was drawing information from 2 and a half years earlier.

While it was unfortunate that another newspaper box had been abandoned, the interesting thing for me was that my perception of the information delivery vehicle, the newspaper box, was still wired to an outdated model. Now, I’m about as much of a RSS feed addict as it is possible to be, and no luddite by any definition, but in my rushed moment of stealing a glance of the news in the hustle of crossing a busy street, I was drawing on an almost subconscious wiring formed during my student days in Boston when this would be my quick news feed on my way to class. My relationship with the newspaper box had already been formed, but instead of having to re-learn a relationship with this object, the responsibility now seemed to “un-learn”, essentially to have no relationship with this function-less object. That’s a tough thing to do – to change an existing relationship with an element of the urban landscape not into a new one, but into a non relationship.

Back home in London, I was sitting outside at a cafe thinking about this when a uniquely London game of cat and mouse was unfolding in front of me that linked with my thoughts. A public maintenance worker had just finished cleaning out one of London’s iconic red phone booths, with a pile of garish escort cards being swept up into his cart before he walked around the corner to tackle the next booth. As the sounds of his wheels faded into the next street, a man stepped into the clean phone booth, took a stack of cards from his pocket and began pasting a new batch of escort cards throughout the booth.

With the near universal adoption of mobile phones and almost total abandonment of using public phones, particularly in London, this has become something of the default function of these public booths – a street-level adult services directory. There is a slight sophistication to this use of the dormant phone booths, as each booth displays cards from locally based escorts; in this way, each booth becomes something of a local directory of services, and provides a private booth from which to make a call on your mobile phone. While it is easy to dismiss or discard this notion of use of these phone booths, the booths retain an informational function within the urban landscape by hosting these cards. The cleaners, while respectfully doing their job and removing the cards, also remove the booths of their new function. Yet within minutes, the cards come back and the modified function returns.

We are at a fascinating moment in our physical relationship with the city. As our relationship to information, news and communication channels have become deeply individual in both use and access, the public icons and objects anchored to our streets and shared spaces remain as memorials to when these services were points in the urban landscape. At times, we are left with no choice but to try and train ourselves to un-learn our existing relationships with these objects, such as with the American newspaper boxes, or to accept the informal re-purposing of these objects in the case of the London phone booths.

The instinct of most cities is simply to remove these physical embodiments of past behaviors. I’d like to think in a different manner – to think of re-programming these analogue structures into serving new functions in the city. A re-programmed, re-purposed object still retains its link with its original use, and there is value in that. There is a balance between sentimentality and breaking the commonality of relationship that we had with our physical urban icons. When we remove these tributes to objects of common use, our notion of common relationships with our physical surroundings is removed slightly as well.

For some examples of re-use and re-purposing of newspaper boxes, phone booths and more, see The Urban Guide for Alternate Use. You can also keep up with updates to The Guide and this site by following @scottburnham on Twitter.

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Moon Capital Winner: "LPS: 2069" by Bryna Andersen

SHIFTboston has run some fantastic design competitions lately (discloser – I have been on the jury for one of them). Their Moon Capital competition is their latest offering of “What If…” competitions, asking designers and architects to think outside the box planet to imagine future opportunities. As they summarise the competition:

When considering the future of design let’s start looking out into space. WHAT IF we could occupy the Moon only 100 years after our first visit there in July of 1969? Might the Moon become an independent, self-sustaining, and sovereign state? If so WHY NOT start designing for that new world NOW?

They have just announced the winners on their blog here. Some excellent imaginative ideas worth checking out. I particularly liked the tag line for their first call for ideas for creating future cities on the moon “let’s not screw it up this time”.

Finalist: "Lunar-Base" by G. Leech

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Being a huge advocate of the value of DIY design interventions, I also find equal, and at times greater, merits in design projects that harness the ethos of design interventions to offer precise and quick solutions to the needs of people and communities.

Nothing Design Group‘s recent installation of a series of superbly designed solar powered street lights in the World Cultural Heritage site of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, is a model project along these lines. The area had no problem attracting tourists, but it lacked one vital ingredient to encourage them to venture out at night to integrate more with the local population and its income generating markets: public lighting.

Designed in their trademark nature-inspired style, the “light trees” created by the Korean practice were strongly embraced (at times, literally), by the local community, who gathered together to help install them alongside the designers.

As soon as the lights were installed, tourists began exploring the surrounding areas more, and makeshift markets began forming beneath the lamps in the evening, providing a secondary income source to many local people and increasing the nightlife of the area for local residents.

DIY Night Markets Assembling Beneath the Lights

I had the pleasure of working with Nothing Design on the Fishes in the Sky part of Urban Play in Amsterdam, and was immediately impressed with their direct, simple approach to problem solving and improving people’s experiences through their work. Nice to see them reach another level with this one

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When I was on the jury for the SHIFTboston design competition a few months ago, I was impressed by their desire to go after and embrace Big Ideas for the future of Boston. From contemplating transportation corridors for blimps and corresponding air ship terminals to floating extensions of the city, I came away from the experience wondering where they could possibly go from here. Well, now I know. Moon Capital is SHIFTboston’s latest competition, which humbly challenges:

“When considering the future of design let’s start looking out into space. WHAT IF we could occupy the Moon only 100 years after our first visit there in July of 1969? Might the Moon become an independent, self-sustaining, and sovereign state? If so WHY NOT start designing for that new world NOW?

SHIFTboston is calling on architects, space-architects, scientists, engineers, urban designers, landscape designers, industrial designers, fashion designers, artists and futurists to submit their most provocative ideas for the moon. Think: WHAT IF this could happen on the moon? SHIFTboston seeks to collect visions that will provoke thought on the moon as a new destination. We want radical ideas for new lunar elements such as rovers, growing pods, inflatable structures, droids and lunar habitats. How about a new moon culture? Envision: Fun on the moon – activities, moon fashion, and spacesuits! YOU TELL US. Competitors are encouraged to form teams in order to tackle multiple concepts.”

With some impressive momentum coming off of their last competition, they’ve assembled a stellar impressive cast of partners and jurors for the Moon Capital competition – visit the SHIFTboston competition website for more information.

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While I was working on the Bairro Criativo direct design project in Porto, a design competition from the other side of the pond came onto my radar that definitely deserves some attention.

As the competition website says: “The Common Boston Common Build (CBCB) is a design competition that challenges participants to design and implement a project in response to real community needs. Held over 3 days during the Common Boston Community and Architecture Festival, the CBCB is open to teams and individuals from ALL disciplines and experience levels. Common Boston and LostInBoston have partnered to host this year’s event, focused to raise awareness of the built environment, improve wayfinding and inspire connections across Boston’s urban fabric.

Competitors will be asked to work with preselected sites as well as vocal neighborhood members to develop design solutions that address the specific physical and social needs of that community. The CBCB aims to prove that even when created in less than 3 days and with a capped budget, an innovative and influential response to a real problem can alter the way we interact with and understand the built environment of a community while seeking tangible benefits for its inhabitants.”

I’m obviously a huge fan of design-build competitions, even more so when they are created as catalysts for direct design responses to community needs. Makes me miss my old home city of Boston, but not for much longer… details to come. In the meantime, visit the competition website to learn more and get involved.

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RI >>>CHPOOR by Above

I think we’re missing the boat on street-level design R&D.

That’s pretty much the summary of my latest essay and photo gallery exploring the visual and physical interplay which is taking place between urban intervention, street art and the urban landscape which was just published in the journal CITY: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. When they asked me to do a piece for them on a trend in urban aesthetics that I felt needed more attention, I gave them the above sentence, but they said that they usually like pieces longer than 11 word statements. Fine, I thought. I’ll flesh it out some more. So here’s some more of what I’ve been thinking.

As many people know, I’ve long been fascinated by the resonance between objects in the city and its inhabitants. My Urban Play project looked into this in great deal in both the exhibition and the city-wide design intervention project I did with Droog Design in Amsterdam in 2008. What continues to inspire me is the ongoing relational design that is taking place at the margins of urban culture – the interventions which form intrinsic relationships between individual creativity and the physical city.

Most dismiss these non-sanctioned urban interventions as playful tokens of creativity at best, and vandalism at worst. But there is a lot more going on beneath the surface of this activity. As I say in the essay:

If we were to consider the dialogue of design in the same way we do the linguistic development of a culture’s language, then just as informal street-level vernacular has innovated and filled in the gaps of a culture’s formal language, the street has as well developed its own vernacular to fill the gaps in the city’s formal design. This new street-level language of design – non-commissioned, non-invited interventions in the urban landscape – transforms the fixed landscape of the city into a platform for a design dialogue.

Take, for example, the work of Gualicho:

San Jose bridge support by Gualicho (click image for full size)

Interventions such as these, at their core, are more than simply creative play in the streets – they signal a new aesthetic correspondence between the individual and the physical city; a step-change in not only the street art scene but in the relationship between the power of the individual and the aesthetics of the city.

Of note are those works which not only reflect a specific relationship with space, but also with time. For example, the shadow skaters by Singapore’s TR853-1, which only have a terrain to skate on at night:

TR853-1

TR853-1

And of course, Montreal’s Roadsworth:

Bible Bench by Roadsworth

Some of the great victories in this genre are those works inspired by the cast-off, degraded objects and areas of the city. The objects kicked to the side of daily life in the city. It is from these areas of urban compost that new crops of work grow. DIY up-cycling? Creative urban re-use? For people like Jim Darling, the cast-offs you might find in an alley – old mattresses, discarded tires – become source material, returned to the alley in a new form:

Trash Dude Beacon by Jim Darling

Artist Mark Jenkins is in a category of his own in this field. For Jenkins, there is a dramatic tension in the objects and detritus of the city waiting to be revealed.

“Sometimes I’ll come across something in the city that will give me the idea to do something site specific. But other pieces aren’t so much about a particular site but more about affecting city objects and structures [and] exposing the vulnerabilities of these structures to be extended into the surreal.” - Mark Jenkins

At times, all that is needed is a discarded bed frame and an exposed lamp box for his characters to get up to mischief in the city:

Storkers at Play by Mark Jenkins

Or an overlooked trash can in Moscow to add a twist to people’s daily experience:

Trash Sperm by Mark Jenkins

Echoing Guy Debord’s belief that “what changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than what changes our way of seeing painting”, there is an opportunity for contemporary urbanism itself to pay attention to the energy and innovation that can be found in the streets today and learn from the relationships it creates between people and their physical city. Just as online and digital media has been transformed by remix culture and open source methodologies, the same metamorphosis is occurring in the creative relationship of the individual and the physical city. We should be paying attention to this as an equally transformative movement.

The full text is published in the current issue of CITY, featuring Above’s signature work from Lisbon on the cover.

If you would like to read the essay in full, you can find it online here.

A PDF is also available on the site featuring an extended image gallery of some of the artists and works shown here.

If you’d like to keep in touch with my upcoming projects or publications, please subscribe or get in touch directly via the email address in the header.

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I was in Paris the other day and came across the latest campaign from French online clothing retailer La Redoute. The first thing that caught my eye was of course the pixelated trails that were coming off of the images of the models. At first, I thought I had stumbled across an always pleasing moment of unintentional design, the billboard print escaping some quality control, as celebrated perfectly in the book Glitch: Designing Imperfection. But then I realised it the pixel motif was intentional, and it then became even more interesting to me.

Though it is most likely an abstract of the intention of the design, the pixels provide a rare moment of authenticity in the design itself; transparency in a sense – admitting that for all the beauty and style being communicated, the poster is indeed a digital creation. There is an honesty in the pixelated traces coming from the models – the painter’s brushstrokes still evident in the final work. (OK, more like the Photoshop Jockey’s mouse strokes… but ‘painter’s brushstrokes’ sounds better.)

Of course, the actual intention is most likely less poetic and far more pragmatic in communicating the digital origin in the campaign. And that is obviously connecting the imagery directly to the store’s website. It is impossible to look at the adverts and not think one thing: digital. You see the clothes, and understand that the digital experience is directly tied to them. That the fashion and the lifestyle is accessible, but there is something in the way of it becoming real, and that thing is the digital world. So just visit the website, and you can remove this barrier.

Notably, when you do visit the La Redoute website, the pixelated motif doesn’t follow through online. It has already done its job, intrinsically linking the advertised imagery to its digital origins. And now you’re at the website, so the once digital images begin to become real. A great campaign that reaches a bit deeper than I suspect the agency realised. Analogue delivery of digital realities, which are all available…

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