The course I teach for the University of British Columbia is being offered again this year as an online workshop, and registration is now open. As UBC describes it… In this workshop we look at the potential of reusing, repurposing, and re-imagining a wide variety of urban assets, including existing infrastructure, […]
Can you recycle a city? In an age of limited resources, I explored the notion of recycling existing urban materials for new design use in Jesolo, Greater Venice, Italy. The language of limitation has been shaping our dialogue for several years. This is not a bad thing. While there is certain and saddening pain felt […]
Tension between the private and public realm was a recurring component of last autumn’s news, as the users of public space and the stewards of those spaces, both private and municipal, clashed during the Occupy protests. The protests themselves bore the marks of tense private vs public realities, given the immense and disproportionate stores of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]