Interesting Reading: 10/9
Redefining a Profession
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/arts/28iht-design28.html?_r=3“Design thinking is an elusive concept, as Mr. Brown admits. His punchiest definition is that it is “about more than style.” In a nutshell, it involves the application of the traditional skills that designers develop, often without realizing, to identify problems and invent solutions in collaboration with experts from other disciplines, their clients and the people who will use the results.For IDEO’s designers, this has meant working in multidisciplinary teams alongside engineers, computer programmers, marketers and behavioral scientists. One design thinking project involved developing a new type of low-tech weekend bicycle — named “coasting” — for Shimano, the Japanese cycle components maker, to persuade the adult Americans who had loved riding their bikes as kids to take up cycling again, rather than developing a dazzling new bicycle as old-school designers would have done.”
--------Picture Show: Palimpsesto Urbano: Mexico City
http://www.good.is/post/picture-show-palimpsesto-urbano-mexico-city/“If Mexico City is a book, then it’s one that’s constantly being rewritten. For the photographer Brian Rosa the city is in a constant state of flux and reinvention—never completely finished; never completely reinvented. He began photographing the place while living there on a research fellowship focusing on the large scale planning that occurred in Mexico City leading up to the national Centennial Celebration of 1910. Seeing a discrepancy between “the rigid central planning of [that era] and the current chaos of informal settlements and economies,” Rosa says that he “ended up trying to reconcile these two conflicting histories, which have both manifested themselves heavily on the built environment.”
The resulting series, “Palimpsesto Urbano: Mexico City,” is not intended to be a comprehensive visual catalog of the city; rather, it calls attention to the city’s constant state of evolution—pairing the permanent with the transitory. “I can only say that Mexico City is a place of contrasts—be they aesthetic, socioeconomic, or otherwise,” says Rosa. “I expected these incongruities, but for them to be more spatially separate. To live in Mexico City is to cross countless invisible borders every day; to be constantly barraged with all things—beautiful and ugly, banal, and remarkable—that this world has to offer.”--------
The Slow Rebirth of Mexico City’s Centro Histórico
http://americancity.org/magazine/article/the-slow-rebirth-of-mexico-citys-centro-historico/
‘Established by Spain in 1521, Mexico City is now the second-largest urban agglomeration in the world, home to approximately 22 million people. Its Centro Histórico retains the original street grid of the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlán, established in 1325, and the 3.6-square-mile area has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. But despite its historic pedigree, the Centro has been in decline since the mid-20th century, when a number of public institutions, most notably the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National Polytechnic Institute, left for newly developed areas of the city. The Centro’s population has declined steadily since the 1970s, a trend exacerbated by the devastating 1985 earthquake. The result was a landscape of sagging classical architecture, crumbling infrastructure, high crime and the economic reign of tens of thousands of street vendors — without whom there would be little street life. Over the years, the city and national governments fostered prolonged neglect, even though both are headquartered within the heart of the Centro.
But in 1997 the city government changed its approach and embarked on a revitalization project, trying to reinvent the Centro as a hub for tourism and international commerce.’--------
Connect-a-Sketch Beta
http://wireframes.linowski.ca/2009/09/connect-a-sketch-beta/“This little application is still in a beta development phase, but nevertheless has some interesting potential as a means for adding interactivity to UI sketches. Simply, Connect-a-Sketch is (will be) an online tool that allows to upload a set of images or sketches, which then can be interlinked with click-able hot spots. From what I’ve noticed so far, the interactivity that can be set is limited to basic clicks, but who knows what the future may bring. Look out for an upcoming release in the near future or follow the latest and greatest on twitter.”
