More easily asked than definitively answered Some design questions are more easily asked than definitively answered. Inventors are seldom at a loss for problems, and so they must choose which ones they will work on. Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things inventionquestionschoice
When Movable Type ate the blogosphere Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it. When you produce your whole site by hand, from HEAD to /BODY, you begin in a world of infinite possibility. You can tailor your content exactly how you like it, and organize it in any way you please. Every design decision you make represents roughly equal work because, heck, you’ve gotta do it by hand either way. Whether it’s reverse chronological entries or a tidy table of contents. You might as well do what you want. But once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost. Movable Type didn’t just kill off blog customization. It (and its competitors) actively killed other forms of web production. Amy Hoy, How the Blog Broke the Web constraintschoicetools
Junctions The junction, or place of a break in transportation, has compelling importance for the city observer. Because decisions must be made at junctions, people heighten their attention at such place and perceive elements with more than normal clarity. This tendency was confirmed so repeatedly that elements located at junctions may automatically be assumed to derive special prominence from their location. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City citieswayfindingchoice
What kind of world it's going to be The wonderful thing about living in a world of our own creation is that we get to choose what kind of world it's going to be—at least in principle. But the promise is meaningful only if a broad enough "we" can be engaged in the process. At present, mechanisms and democratic institutions for making collective decisions about the deployment of technology are hopelessly cumbersome. How can anyone make a sensible choice without being able to weigh one alternative against another? Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape democracypoliticsclimatechoice
Art and science "What the artist does is essentially the same as the scientist. In other words, what you do when you start to do a painting is that you begin with a basic idea, a hypothesis of what you're setting out to do. Then it's just a million yes-no decisions. You try something in the painting, you look at it, and you say, 'N-n-no.' You sort of erase it out, and you move it around a little bit, put in a new line; you go through a million weighings. It's the same thing in science, the only difference in the character of the product." Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees sciencedecisionschoice
What Le Corbusier got right about office space An Article by Tim Harford timharford.com In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished. Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives. ...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not. workpersonalityownershipmodularitychoice
In Praise of Small Menus An Article by Rachel Sugar www.grubstreet.com The best way to experience a restaurant, I have always felt, is by eating exactly what it wants to feed you. I do not want choices. I want the best thing. A restaurant might have five or ten best things, but it cannot have 45. There are many infuriating things about the world, but one of the more fixable is the sensation of acute regret from having ordered wrong. Why are there possibly wrong orders? Recently, I was at a fancy restaurant with great pastas and bad pizzas. So cut the pizzas! A kitchen that focuses on its strengths turns out consistently excellent things, even if that results in fewer total things. fooduxchoicesimplicity
Become a person who actually does things An Article by Neel Nanda www.lesswrong.com If there’s one thing you take from this post, let it be this: notice the next time you agonize over a choice, or pass up an opportunity. And ask yourself not “what is the right decision” but rather “which decision will get me closer to the kind of person I want to be”. wisdomchoiceprogress
A Burglar's Guide to the City A Book by Geoff Manaugh burglarsguide.com To commune with the spaceEvery building is infinitePutting the streets to useTopology by other meansBurglary's White Whale+13 More Picking locks with audio technologyThe axis of movementLearning to walk through walls architecturecitiesurbanismcrimetheft
To commune with the space ...having realized long ago that the best way to commune with an architectural space was by breaking into it. crime
Every building is infinite For the burglar, every building is infinite. House of Leaves architecture
Putting the streets to use Tad Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form. Burglary's White Whale transportationurbanismcrime
Topology by other means The burglar is a three-dimensional actor amid the two-dimensional surfaces and objects of the city. This means operating with a fundamentally different spatial sense of how architecture should work, and how one room could be connected to another. It means seeing how a building can be stented: engineering short-circuits where mere civilians, altogether less aggressive users of the city, would never expect to find them. Burglary is topology pursued by other means: a new science of the city, proceeding by way of shortcuts, splices, and wormholes. spacetopology
Burglary's White Whale If all cities already contain the crimes that will occur there, then, taken to its logical conclusion, this suggests there might be a kind of Moby-Dick of crime, a White Whale of urban burglary: a town or city so badly designed that the entire place can be robbed in one go. Putting the streets to useInvisible Cities
Tarzan of the concrete jungle Weissmuller was most famous for playing Tarzan, and swinging into his apartment from a ledge outside had a wild irony, like some new Tarzan of the concrete jungle updating the character for an urban age.
The source code for SimCity Local Code was Sorkin’s attempt to design a whole city from scratch—with one big twist. The whole thing had been written as if it were the byzantine, nearly impossible to follow codes and regulations for an entire, hypothetical metropolis. The effect is like stumbling upon the source code for SimCity. Sorkin’s exhaustively made point was that, if you know everything about a given metropolis, from its plumbing standards to its parking requirements, its sewer capacity to the borders of its school districts, then you could more or less accurately imagine the future form of that city from the ground up. Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42º N Latitude rulesregulations
Architectural dark matter Every building had its rhythms. These service corridors were the internal hinterlands—the architectural dark matter—so beloved by Bill Mason. Sonorisms I euphonyinfrastructure
Vamburglars Burglary was originally only possible in a household or dwelling; the very word contains an etymological variant on the Latin burgus, for “castle” or “fortified home” (from which other words, such as burgher and even borough, also derive). Common law definitions of burglary also originally required the person to break into a house or dwelling at night. Giving historical burglary an oddly vampiric dimension, you could not, legally speaking, be a burglar while the sun was still out. darkness
The close Think of it as an invisible geometric shape perceptible only to lawyers—a conceptual pane of glass that might not have kept the rain out but could, for legal purposes, be used to define the original limits of the car’s interior. This is the close, and defining it is ultimately just a form of connecting the dots: drawing an imaginary line from the corner of an open window to the edge of a nearby wall to the front gate of a home garden, and so on. Breaking the close thus constitutes entry into a “protected interior” or “specified enclosure". law
To deter crime “To deter crime,” Cisneros explains, “spaces should convey to would-be intruders a strong sense that if they enter they are very likely to be observed, to be identified as intruders, and to have difficulty escaping.” Eyes on the street
Architectural sequences Noted designer and architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi would call the predictable repetition of events inside an architectural space a sequence: a linear series of actions and behaviors that are at least partially determined by the design of the space itself. Architectural screenplays architecturebehaviorux
Architectural screenplays Tschumi began to explore this notion through what he called screenplays: each “screenplay” was a black-and-white diagram breaking down a range of events that might occur inside an architectural space. Tschumi drew them in a way that resembled dance notation or the spatial analysis of a film scene. Architectural sequences
The City of Light Streetlights were one of many new patrol tools implemented by Louis XIV’s lieutenant general of police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. De la Reynie’s plan ordered that lanterns be hung over the streets every sixty feet—with the unintended side effect that Paris soon gained its popular moniker, the City of Light. The world’s most romantic city takes its nickname from a police operation. urbanism
Spatial expectations Loya, who served seven years in prison for multiple bank heists before becoming a writer, explained to me that it was during the getaway that he often had the best chance of thwarting people’s spatial expectations. In his case, this meant that what he did immediately after leaving the bank was often the most important decision of all. Bandits
The getaway to end all getaways Any attempt to track down the perfect getaway is made all the more complex because almost everything we know about burglary—including how they did (or did not) get away—comes from the burglars we’ve caught. As sociologist R. I. Mawby pithily phrases this dilemma, “Known burglars are unrepresentative of burglars in general.” Great methodological despair is hidden in such a comment. Studying burglary is thus a strangely Heisenbergian undertaking, riddled with uncertainty and distorted by moving data points. The getaway to end all getaways—the one that leaves us all scratching our heads—to no small extent remains impossible to study. failure
Every heist is a counterdesign Heists obsess people because of what they reveal about architecture’s peculiar power: the design of new ways of moving through the world. Every heist is thus just a counterdesign—a response to the original architect. crimearchitecture
All the things we want to do This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives. Rage rooms urbanismlife