Temporary sculpture (Bronx, NY)
Sculpture is still graffiti-free in Bronx neighborhood where tagging is common
I noticed the print ads for in amNewYork yesterday for The Pump, a new healthy NYC mini-chain restaurant. Here they’ve stretched their advertising dollars by creating what amounts to ad, but releasing it as a YouTube video. Smart.
Design solutions for the MTA
Students in SVA’s Interaction Design MFA program took a stab at design challenges within the system. Several of the projects I felt created problems where there weren’t any in order to come up with something clever.
However the ReDirect project by student Russ Maschmeyer found an obviously problematic information design question and created a very elegant solution.
Of his project he comments:
“Service changes are bad. Very, very bad. They often involve doubling, sometimes tripling the time it takes you to get where you’re going. To add insult to injury, the accompanying service change signage is such a riddle of dates, times, and re-directions that it often requires multiple readings to glean even a basic understanding of the change. For any transit system experiencing redirects, there are four key messages that need to be conveyed: alert the riders to a change, provide a quick overview of that change, course correct any wayward travelers, and finally, guide riders through the hallways to the proper platforms. If done right, no one should have to stop to study a sign, but study them we do. Currently, the MTA employs a single, densely packed sheet of 8.5x11” paper to convey an entire set of messaging. This is a problem worth solving.
Amen to all that. Simple, clear, and fixed something badly in need of fixing.
A bad color corrected scan of a beautiful post for a day of celebration for then new Dept of Transportation.
Horror and beauty on an urban expressway
But he doesn’t romanticize the roadway; in the notes, he calls it “a dark, spotty, viral, cancerous, bronchial, pneumatic, and convoluted mass of gray matter, at best.” What fired his imagination was not love, but horror. To him, the highway represents the nadir of American transportation culture and the melancholy triumph of the dark lord Robert Moses.
The BQE as muse.
Image and quote via New York Magazine
"An organization that wins through dirty tricks starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work."
At Newly Nerfed, my write-up on National Disability Mentoring Day experience
The post looks great, and Joey added sweet pics of the interior of Bloomberg LP. (My DMD location.) Many, many thanks to Joey and her blog for posting my review.
Is there any place that’s doing better interactive data visualization? Another fantastic piece from the New York Times: The Jobless Rate for People Like You
via FlowingData
