I rode the Toronto tram system on a recent trip to Toronto. I had to go from the subway to my hotel, and so thought the tram would be the best way. Unfamiliar with the city, or the tram system, I stood next to the driver to get directions of where to go.

“If you want to go there, you should get off at the next stop” he told me.

“Ok, great. That sounds good. Thank you.” I replied, as I walked to the door to get off.

The tram proceeded to blow straight through my stop.

“I thought you said that was my stop.” I said, a little miffed.

“Yeah, but you didn’t ring the bell” he replied, matter-of-factly.

I have the feeling that just about everyone has experienced going into a chain restaurant and asked them to make an exception on something, only to have it rejected.

“could I get an ice cream cone instead of onion rings? They’re the exact same price”.

“I’m not allowed to do that, sorry”.

Can’t open the cash for change. Can’t even be trusted to put the right amount of ketchup on a hamburger, so they had to engineer a caulking gun-like device to do it exactly the same every time. Want a large glass of water? Too bad, because the management counts the number of cups. This is a serious deficit in trust, and it’s a problem.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the lowly endangered shopkeeper, and her family-owned business. They can’t always compete with the big chains on price, but in many cases the service more than makes up for it.

We might have to pay a little more, but once you find a good shop, you’ll be more likely to get what you want. Getting what you want means more intelligent and effective consumption, which I believe is better for us, and the environment, in the long run.

Jane Jacobs, famous urban planning critic, was also quick to point out that the shopkeeper plays an important role in the neighborhood—watching the street, creating a hub for communication, and keeping money and business local.

Of course, we shouldn’t deify the shopkeeper too much. There are plenty of family-owned stores and restaurants with terrible products and services. The chain business does have consistency going for it. If you go to McDonald’s, you’re virtually guaranteed to get the same meal each time. It will never be completely terrible, but it will never be good either. Locally-owned restaurants might be terrible, but they might also be fantastic.

Part of me thinks we’re simply a society that doesn’t care anymore. We drive through ugly suburbs to mediocre restaurants, and buy cheap crap from the biggest, simplest, most obvious stores, run by people who don’t care, and aren’t given any real responsibilities or incentive to do the sort of real work they could be doing. We have little to no quality public space, and we’re too busy watching television to talk to our neighbors to find out what the good local restaurants are.

So, in concluding this long rant, I’d like to urge you to support locally-owned business. Eat their food, buy their stuff, and enjoy their services.

When summer comes around, I bike everywhere I can. It’s almost always the healthiest, fastest, and cheapest way to get around. The biggest deterrent for me personally are cars. Every spring I usually have a few close calls because drivers have not yet readjusted to having to look out for bikes. As my city develops a more bike-friendly culture, I have seen this decline, but it’s still there.

Bike lanes can help by creating a clear space for bikes, letting drivers know where to avoid, but they don’t often go where you need them to go.

Enter the Light Lane. It’s just a concept, but it seems like something that could feasibly be built.

“Our system projects a crisply defined virtual bike lane onto pavement, using a laser, providing the driver with a familiar boundary to avoid. With a wider margin of safety, bikers will regain their confidence to ride at night, making the bike a more viable commuting alternative.”

Via Spacing Montréal.

I’ve kept my eyes on Dubai’s development ever since hearing stories about $300 slices of cake served in the restaurant atop the Burj Al Arab (the world’s fanciest hotel, apparently, and certainly not the most reasonably priced). Just the lobby of the building is large enough that clouds formed in it when first built. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, as Dubai has embarked on mega-project after mega-project, including a whole series of islands, a downtown core, the world’s largest amusement park, and much more. Before they had even completed work on a record-breaking 800m high Burj Dubai, they began drawing plans for the 1200m high Al Burj.

On a certain level I have to respect their vision. Financial-crisis aside, oil is most-likely running out, and they seem to have embraced tourism and trade as replacements. They’re trying to build a world-class metropolis from the ground-up.

Aside from many glaring questions about whether this is sustainable financially and environmentally, my main concern is the sheer speed of expansion. A city is an incredibly complex web of various factors, and I personally believe that it is well beyond the capabilities of any designer or design team to draft up a fully functioning city in the middle of a desert in one fell swoop.

They may well get lucky and come up with the right mix of ingredients, but in my eyes a city is something that builds itself over the course of decades. Only time will tell, but the speed here certainly is alarming.

For a summary of recent Dubai building projects, I suggest the aptly, if not overly-simplisticly named Dubai is Nuts.

THE INTRODUCTION

I think I need to come out and say that first of all, I don’t own a car. I use them from time to time, but I find something slightly off-putting about automotive culture in general, and something fundamentally wrong with the fabric of cities that come out of our exaggerated car-centric society. Still, I need to interact with cars every day, and couldn’t avoid them if I tried.

This concept was inspired by a situation I’m sure many of you have been in. I was in a rental car, stopped at a light on a dark night. I saw a friend on foot crossing the street right a little ways in front of me. I tried gently tapping the horn, in hopes of making a friendly little beep. Instead, the car spewed out an angry-sounding honk, and the friend of mine, not knowing who I was, promptly gave me the finger.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

Drivers, for the most part, are largely anonymous to the other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists they interact with. On foot, if you cut someone off or act rudely, you risk being in a direct confrontation. In a car, you’re not only usually shrouded from view, your only methods of communication are essentially your horn, flashing your lights, or revving your engine. All are ambiguous at best, aggressive at worst. I’m sure I’m not alone in asserting that driving does not bring out the best in people.

There are a lot of things you often can’t express while driving. You can’t say sorry for a mistake, you can’t say hello, and yes, sometimes you can’t express the anger you wish you could.

MY DESIGN

This concept takes the idea of the horn but multiplies it. In this case there are three horns which each make a different sound. The goal being to provide the driver with multiple ways of expressing themselves through series of short, musical tones.

Happy: Plays happy notes, useful for saying hello or “after you”.

Sad: Apologetic notes, useful for saying sorry.

Angry: Says what sometimes needs to be said.

As an alternate idea, I would try making the angry button much smaller than the other two, in hopes that people would only use it when they really had to.

The driver will likely never be able to express themselves as clearly as they would while walking or biking, but the goal is to provide them with better communication tools than they have.

CONCLUSION

In the end, this is more of an art piece than a true design concept. I have not looked into the legal or technical limitations, nor do I know if it would have any real impact if put in the real world.

Driving has come to be an awkward hybrid of a public and a private space. In many ways, it borrows some of the worst qualities from each one – you interact with many people, but in a way that’s anonymous and unpleasant. This is no magic bullet, but hopefully gets people thinking about the way that drivers interact with the world around them.

Chicago used to use an extensive series of small underground trains for transport between large downtown buildings.

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Here’s a road which had been cut with grooves in order to create musical notes. It’s reminiscent of a very late-night (possibly slightly drunken) conversation I had several years ago with a musician friend about outlandish possible ways of distributing his music. They’ve actually done it.

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Paradoxes of Creative People

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Flow fame writes a piece on creative types and their many paradoxes.

Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements

Guilloches

An article about making those beautiful geometric patterns often used on banknotes and certificates. They were formerly used mainly for security, but have become more of an aesthetic thing now.

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Parking Day

An event which aims to reclaim parking spots by creating small parks or social spaces in them for a single day.

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Ta-Ka-Ta-Ka-Boom

For those of you who don’t live here, or who aren’t aware, Canada’s nationalized broadcaster, the CBC, is holding a contest to find new theme music for our major hockey broadcast, Hockey Night in Canada. The entries are all online for people to listen to, comment, and rate them.

This is an entry to the contest. Listen to the pre-amble for a bit (it’s important for comedic effect) and then jump to 2:20 for the actual song. I couldn’t stop laughing.

Looks like it was submitted after the August 31st deadline though, so HNIC may not be able to use it.

Athens Olympic Venues Unused

Living in a former Olympic City with an unused main stadium we only managed to pay off two years ago (the Montreal Olympics were in ‘76) I’m not at all surprised to see this video showing the unused state of the venues from the Athens Olympics. There’s something about the Olympics that seems to make architects think they can just drop their stadiums and athletic facilities in the middle of a field of concrete with no regard for how they’ll be used for the decades after the games. There’s little wonder that they’re often abandoned and somewhat depressing as soon as all the crowds leave.

The planning committees should have retrofits in mind when they build the facilities to keep them functional when they’re done with – including covering up some of that ugly and barren concrete with something practical.

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Elevator Group Behavior

A classic clip from Candid Camera which shows just how easy it is to get people to bend to group behavior.

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HP Packages New Laptops in Messenger Bags

A simple solution to reducing packaging, so long as those messenger bags are at least somewhat decent in quality.

My Photos of Port in the City

Yesterday, Montreal’s port had an open house. There were tours by train, bus and boat which carried visitors into the heart of the city’s port operations. It was great to see the inner workings of a system which is easy to take for granted. We saw ocean-going freighters being unloaded, and the much smaller lake-going ships readying themselves to take cargo to the great-lake cities of Toronto, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Thunder Bay.

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Time Fountain

A relatively simple little fountain that ingeniously seems to bend time.

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Zoom into Concrete

A powers of 10 style video that shows the structures of concrete in great detail, down to a molecular level. Like the original poster, I would love to see this done for other materials.

Yesterday I went into my local, family-owned, print shop to buy some office supplies. I didn’t have any cash on me, and I paid by debit card. As I was walking out of the store I saw something else I wanted which sold for $2. I turned around and went back to the cashier, but was told there was a $5 minimum on debit purchases. I turned around to look for something else I might need, so I could pad out my bill, but he stopped me and just said “it’s ok, pay next time”.

I was floored. It’s a small thing, yes, but it was the sort of human gesture which made all the difference and made me all the more loyal to their store. It cost them nothing in the end, since I went back the next day to pay them back (and do some printing I needed to do anyhow).

I contrast that with experiences I’ve had at national chains, where the clerk has zero autonomy and can’t make any decisions. It can range anywhere from “I can’t make change for you unless you make a purchase” to the blatant apathy shown by too many retail clerks these days.

I don’t mean to pick on large chains – some of them have good service. Conversely, many family-owned businesses have awful service. If you take the time to find the good ones though, it really pays off.

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On the theme of being nice – I was downtown this morning, and happened to be looking at some ugly cigarette butts someone had thrown on the sidewalk. Just then a city maintenance worker just happened to come by to sweep them up. I know this sounds cheesy, but I said “thank you.”

His smile made me realize it’s probably not the sort of thing he hears often enough, even though it is important work.