A few weeks ago I attended a conference on retail-led regeneration run by Future for London. I must admit my expectations for hearing much innovation were low considering it was being held at GVA’s offices. However, I was pleasantly surprised when Richard Coppell from Lend Lease started talking about the importance of quality of place for successful retail areas. Richard even used the example of the Howard de Walden estates management of Marylebone High Street to create the right overall balance of shops by cross-subsidising different occupiers.

The idea behind the management of Marylebone High Street that Richard alluded to is that if you leave the make-up of a high street to market forces, you’ll eventually get a homogenous spread of national multiples who can afford higher rents serving the population with the highest disposable income and displacing some of the places main attractions. Instead, if you take a view on the value individual shops have on the overall image and feel of the street, the unquantifiable value of their presence might be more than the difference in rent they can pay.

It’s good to know that large landowners like Lend Lease are becoming aware of the need to manage the overall experience of a place. However, Coppell’s use of Westfield and One New Change as other examples of this suggested to me that although they are moving in the right direction, they still lack a fundamental understanding of what makes a place that people like using.

Recently I asked people on twitter what shops they would have on their ‘perfect high street’ and the suggestions were, as expected, a range of different small scale, local independent retailers. But the reason for this wasn’t necessarily because local shops are better for the local economy, or because they contribute to increasing social capital in a neighbourhood, but because of the type of place that they create.

We don’t want to spend time in places that have been minutely designed to ensure that we are always safe and comfortable, inhabited only with people like us, buying the things that we buy.

We want places that will stimulate us and keep us interested. Places that take us outside our comfort zones and show us things we wouldn’t see otherwise. Places that haven’t been specifically designed for us, but emerged over time. Places that are authentic and whose character isn’t artificially preserved. With shops that have been there for years, with the same staff. With restaurants that have secret menus that only the locals know. With dark bars in basements that you only notice after multiple visits visit. Places that can’t be consumed in a single serving, where the more you go the more you find out.

I’m sure ‘retail experts’ will be quick off the mark to tell us that we can’t create places like these. They will tell you that small local independent retailers can’t pay as high rents as national multiples, so they can’t be accommodated in new retail areas, or expected to survive as rents increase in existing areas.

But this is what Simon Baynham, from the Howard de Walden Estate, realised back in 90’s. There is an unquantifiable value of having some types of shops on a street because of their impact on peoples experience of the street as a whole, and this is worth more in the long term than the difference in rent they can pay.

These principles can also be applied to new areas. Granted they will never have the historical continuity of victorian high streets, but there is still a lot we can do to ensure they are places we want to go to.

Unfortunately I’m not getting paid to advise Lend Lease on how to put together a great retail area, but if I were I would suggest four things:

1: Dedicate a number of shops to local business that have been in the area for a long time and pepper pot them throughout the new development. A local corner shop, a hardware store, a fishmonger.

2: Invite some occupiers that focus on other activities, not retail. Maybe some artists studios, or an exhibition space, even a place of worship or a small cinema.

3. Invite some culturally relevant occupiers. Emerging designers and start-ups, that need small units to try out their new business ideas.

4: Don’t be too precious about the look of the area. Let it evolve over time. The character of the area will emerge from the people and activities that use the place.

The bigger challenge however will be to apply these principles to areas where there are multiple land owners. Who will be the landlord that will accommodate the occupier that pays lower rent, and would other landlords contribute to the difference if they were convinced of the wider impact a particular shop could have? This is the challenge for most high streets.

Chatsworth Road Neighbourhood Plan from Peter Dickinson on Vimeo.

Whilst doing my work at Chatsworth Road there’s been constant references to the gentrification of Broadway Market, the displacement of local assets and the alienated local community. On the one hand this is exactly the type of change the neighbourhood plan at Chatsworth Road is looking to manage, but on the other, although these urban processes seem to be very similar, the DNA of each place has a huge impact on how the process unfolds.

I’ve been working with the Chatsworth Road Traders and Residents Association to create a Neighbourhood Plan for Chatsworth Road and its surrounding area.  The focus of this plan is on the neighbourhood centre and how well it serves its surrounding residential and business community.

I’m hoping to establish a method for creating neighbourhood plans that can be replicated in other neighbourhoods at low cost, while establishing a clear vision of how the community envisage their area to change in the future.  These plans will allow communities to take a proactive role in the shaping of their neighbourhoods rather than simply reacting to unwanted development.

We will be launching the Chatsworth Road Neighbourhood plan this coming Wednesday (19 Jan). In advance of this we have created a discussion thread on yeahhackney.com to get people involved.

As you can probably tell, i’m doing a lot of research on social networks, to understand how best to make these so that they work on a local, place specific scale. Here is a nice video about the story of Metafilter:

Matt Haughey (Metafilter founder) at Gel 2010 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

An old Clay Shirky talk at Google, eloquently explaining the fundamental changes that are making collective action more and more common.

The city of Ordos – built for 1 million people but no one has moved in!!

Despite the two tiered system of british governemt and the increasing power of local authorites, local newspapers are rearley seen as a primary source of information. This results in people being disconnected to what is happening immedeately around them, usually the issues that they would have the most say over.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/oct/12/guardian-local-news-bloggers-emily-bell

Here is a collection of logos and marketing videos for the next Olympic applicant cities.  It’s quite interesting to use these to study how these cities  communicate their sense of place and identity.

Our vending machine explores social responsibility by changing the quantity of sweets you get in response to the amount of money previous people have paid. This shop in japan takes this concept to an extreme by giving you what the person before you ordered and passing your order to the next customer.  Amazing!

I’ve been thinking about design codes a lot recently. I’ve been working on some for a 3500 homes development. It’s a bit like writing a design brief and making sure the designers will cover the essentials of the scheme – to what extent are design codes used at all in other areas of design? I can imagine them being used when designing a branding strategy for example, but can’t see how they could be used in product design. On the other hand Apple could have codes that ensure all products have similar styles. Maybe you only need them when you can’t rely on the quality of the designers – that’s the case in architecture!

So, that’s £1.9 per litre. Over the last 10 years petrol has increased about £0.4/L. Today petrol is about £1.10/L. If the rate of increase doesn’t change, by 2030, petrol will cost £1.9/L – the tipping point from where the private car will loose it’s appeal as a means of transport.

Christopher Steiner predicts that in 20 years time petrol prices will reach a tipping point of $12/gallon where it becomes too expensive to drive for convenience like we do now. He talks about the impacts this will have on cities. The reduction of private vehicles on the street; the dereliction of suburbs; and the growth of local manufacturing. He is interviewed on Smart City Radio and his book is called “$20/gallon”.

Would oil prices rise this much in 20 years?

Boundaries, built by Tom Taylor is the most successful method i’ve seen of mapping out perceived  identity of places.  Using geo-tagged information overlapped with  place names, it illustrates the perceived boundaries of a place.

Another day, another place.

Today i came across this story about car parks in London that are going to start charging a variable price according to demand and supply. Depending how the system is designed it has the potential to be quite and interesting little experiment in free market capitalism.  It would be interesting to see how much the last space in the car park would go for.

We’ve been  considering developing a Mark II of our sweets vending machine.  The idea being that we can create the same situation but with something that people feel more strongly about than sweets.  In London, something that people always want more off is car parking opportunities.

Maybe we can make a parking meter where the cost of parking reduces according to peoples levels of altruism.

I’ve been meaning to record some thoughts  about the “perfect high street” since I came across what i found to be quite a provocative video on the Monocle website where Monocle outline what they see to be their ideal place.

Monocle’s manifestation is a reaction to the ‘spread of the bland generic high street’ or ‘clone town’.  But the curious thing is that it comes across as just a different version of what they despise.  Clone Town 2.0

The monocle high street, like any mass produced product, targets a specific sector of the population.  Those who value ethically sourced food, exclusive fashion, cutting edge technology, art, antiques and eccentricity.

The extent to which this is a superior value system  generating and economic system which thrives on creativity, progress and self-awareness is a different question.

Monocle’s High Street might be very nice at a glance, but it fails to truly engage with the principle behind what creates the so despised clone towns – the lack of fluidity and unexpectedness.  This could be ‘designed in’ by having a particular unit which changes hands every month or including shops selling things which are targeted for others, such as a Religious Iconography shop or afro caribean fashions

If one was to target a high street for people more like me it would not be complete without a pound shop selling underpriced factory surplus goods.

This is what gun crime is all about.

Tibet is the equivalent to the animal activists cute puppy for the human rights movement.

Problem:  25 people a year die in Jakarta a year commuting on the roof of trains.  They avoid paying their tickets and cause a general nuisance.

Solution:  Spray the roofs of the trains with paint several times during the journey so as to identify the ‘train surfers’ when they get off at their destination.

via Boing Boing

I’ve been thinking about ways to connect the massive social networks people are developing on the internet to the real world.

Before Facebook reached tipping point i was thinking of developing a Bluetooth Myspace Frind Finder (BMFF). This would be a small application you download onto your phone and uses its bluetooth capabilities to find people who you are networked with as you move through real space.

A few months ago i read this article about how some people in Bath and a group called Cityware are developing a very similar thing for facebook. The facebook application can be downloaded here, i’m not sure how it works yet – but will try it out soon.

A couple of years ago we did a competition entry for a landmark for the East of England. Our proposal was very similar to this story about strange carvings appearing around Yorkshire with riddles on them.

Our idea was that the landmark would be a cultural phenomena over and above a physical alteration to the landscape. We carefully designed objects to instigate as many conflicting explanations as possible and the mystery they’d create would become intrinsically associated to the place.

This is exactly what these carvings have done – it’ll be interesting to see how the mystery changes over time.

The sweets vending machine is now at Tottenham Leisure Centre, in the kids gym. This is the perfect context for it, the decision between 40p or 50p will be a big one every time.

Thanks to Russel Davies Radio 4 blog, Speechification, for reminding me of a nice programme on jingles a few days ago.   Team are going to look into the implementation of Aurea, a project about neighbourhood jingles,  and are lookign for potential clients who might be interested in developing it.

We were interviewed about our vending machine on radio 4 but don’t know if they ran the interview or not. It was the night before the recent Foot and Mouth outbreak so the cows might have stolen our limelight – if anyone heard it let us know.

According to the BBC police officers in Bangok are made to wear Hello Kitty armbands if they don’t adhere to their code of conduct.

Are Hello Kitty actually making these armbands and selling it to the Thai police ?
Will this have any effect on the Hello Kitty brand, after all it is as effective as product placement?

Surely this will completely undermine the authority of the police when dealing with the public to the point of making them ineffective.

Some time ago Team discussed how to make ASBO’s more effective. We considered creating armbands to “tag” people who had an ASBO over them, but realised that these armbands would probably be re-appropriated as fashion items amongst certain groups…. i’d definitely like to get a hold of one of these Hello Kitty armbands

This weeks Thinking Allowed had an interesting section on Complexity Theory, where one of the interviewees explained that the complexity comes from the fact that each individual agent will react differently as the context changes, in turn influencing the way in which the context changes ad infinitum.

A slightly banal example of this occurred to me the other day where i decided against joining the crowds in the lido in London Fields. The decision was based on the fact that the context had changed to what i had been expecting and acted as an individual agent and decided to go and do something else.

In London there is a tipping point to how full a place can be before is ceases to be enjoyable. Some places have a higher tipping point than others. This is in tokyo.

I recently watched Jonathan Harris talk about his project We Feel Fine on the TED Talks website. Although the project is already a couple of years old it’s still quite amazing.

In summary, they’ve created a piece of software that scans thousands of blogs every 10 minutes for sentences starting with “I feel….” . Each complete sentence is then presented on their website with information on the location, age and gender of the author, as well as a link to the particular blog post.

It’s worth spending 10 minutes exploring.

Not that this should have been censored….but it does have quite a dark side to it. What makes it strong is the knowledge that the auteurs were young public school boys.

The vending machine survived its first night!  Thanks to everyone who came and apologies if anyone is suffering from skittles overdose.  I’ll post some pictures soon.

What happens when farms become obsolete? Here in the UK farmers are consistantly being encouraged to diversify, to develop other uses on their land, from leisure to tourism. Farmers in the town of Inakadate in Aomori do Crop Art.

This is a great tool for regeneration – there could be an yearly competition around particular struggling settlements where local farmers compete to create the most amazing landscapes – it could be called Field Fame.

We have a small retrospective exhibition on at the Blue Elephant Theatre gallery. We are showing most of our work from the last four years. The private view was last friday and we  served everyone Tea.

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A little tweaking still needed.

Here is a snippet from the press release:

“The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London is to host a vending machine designed to make the public re-consider their views on social responsibility.

The Vending Machine Project is the work of Team, a london based design collective set up in 2003 to create products and services which lead people to reconsider their values through interaction with apparently insignificant consumables.

The vending machine puts users in the unexpected situation where you choose how much you pay. The amount will not change the quantity of sweets you get, instead it will change the quantity the next person gets. ”

Come and see it.

There is a good debate on the Guardian Culture Podcast on the relationship between politics and art and their role in society.

The panel includes Antony Gormley making claims that art should “talk the truth” in a “language that people can understand,” seemingly contradicting the work he produces – which as entertaining as it might be dosen’t communicate anything very effectively – or at least not in comparison to what a good advertising creative would do.

Any suggestion that good art should be political ends up defining art as an “instrumentalist” activity – nothing more than advertising, branding or propaganda.

It is the lack of purpose of art which makes it such valuable activity. It allows creativity independent of the cycle of consumption and production creating artifacts which, when analysed, tell us a great deal about our relationship to the world around us.

Steven Landsburg recently published a book which seems to touch on many interesting issues of social responsibility as well as entertainingly controversial solutions for many  of the worlds problems.  The book is called More Sex is Safer Sex  – The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics.  You can listen to him talk to  Mark Frauenfelder on the Boing Boing Get Illuminated Podcast.

Urban design is different to other forms of design in that decisions have very little aesthetic implications. We design the bones of the body, and maybe some of the flesh, but don’t have any influence over the skin.

I usually find that many urban designers aren’t happy with this and want to “style” the places they design – they argue that the “style” communicates the meaning of different elements.

It is true that good urban design needs to communicate roles and importance of streets, buildings and spaces, but i think that you can still communicate meaning without controlling “style”.

Mark Luthringer‘s photos are amazingly effective at conveying a sense of pointlessness in the world of design. It makes one ponder the amount of effort and desperation  we go to to convey distinctiveness as if it were a blanket to hide our very lack of it.

As a measure to calm infuriated would-be night bus passengers as full bus after full bus fails to stop, if the red ticket machines are punched really hard, they dispense a pound coin, in a rather comedy manner, thereby temporarily alleviating the frustration. Well, that’s what happened to me anyway, and it worked. Temporarily

A church in New Zealand decided to supply podcasts of its sermons and call the service iGod. To advertise it they thought it would be a good idea to create pastiche ipod adverts. You can listen to the sermons here if you are that way inclined.

I also came across another iGod on a chat room here .

What would happen to Richard Dawkins reputation if he started an iDawkins anti-god movement?

BAA have recently tested a soundscape of birdsong and crashing waves in their Glasgow Airport terminals. An Economist article suggests that they are looking to increase spending in terminal shops, but i assume that it is also meant to calm users during delays or other airport malfunctions.

The use of sound to alter user behavior isn’t new and has come in the form of music, jingles, abstract sound and noise.

Muzak commodified the idea by selling soundscapes to alter shopping experiences.

Anti-teenage frequency noise is used to cause physical discomfort to younger people and avoid them congregating in particular areas. (Recently appropriated by the targets and used as mobile ring tones)

Aurea, a project Team did some time ago, uses “jingles” to strengthen the identity and distinctiveness of a place as well as associating itself to positive emotions triggered by sunny days.

An article on thee BBC about virtual child abuse highlights and interesting question with regards to crime.

If the crime is performed in a virtual world, such as Second Life, with no implications on the real world, is it still a crime?

A fight between avatars in World of Warcraft wouldn’t be considered criminal as the “grievous bodily harm” is not real.

In the case of the Second Life article, could a person be charged with child abuse if the owner of the child formed avatar is a consenting adult?  Can the immorality of the act constitute it criminal?

Unlike the ambiguous vision statements which result in bland un-distinctive places, Thames Town in Shanghai is a perfect example of how a simple and to the point vision results in its explicit materialization of the brand – “a historical British town.”

The building is a sub-brand of the street which is a sub-brand of the neighbourhood which is a sub-brand of the city which is a sub-brand of the country. But sub-brands can be as powerful as the brand itself, the BBC brand with all its sub-brands is a good example of how it can work well.

The bbc reported on an old story which highlights some interesting questions regarding the values of vandalism. In summary, civil servants painted over one of Banksy’s most famous graffiti on Old Street, valued at £300 000. A spokesman said “our graffiti removal teams are staffed by professional cleaners not professional art critics”

What is specially interesting about the graffiti/art phenomena is the way in which graffiti is fixed to the city fabric, becoming part of the texture of the public realm. Although conventionally associated to dereliction and vandalism it frequently crosses the line into being considered fine art – at which point the impact it has on the place is very different.

In the case of Banksy, his graffiti can significantly increase the value of the real estate on which it was done – although we’re yet to see an estate agent advertising property featuring genuine Banksy vandalism.

One could even argue that the gentrification of the Old Street was strongly aided by Banksy and other graffiti artists which were responsible for creating the “look of creative buzz ” of the area.

Does this means that graffiti artists can be use to aid gentrification of other areas? Afterall the line between graffiti and public art is as thin as between graffiti and vandalism.

behind the black paint there lies £300 000 worth of vandalism

The BBC recently reported on a growing settlement of Romanian immigrants living in Hyde Park – the  footage can be seen here.

The use of a public park being used as the grounds for a squatter settlements highlights the common issues of the restrictions of certain activities/people from supposed public space.

But what makes this particular event striking is the fact that Romanian immigrants are squatting a British Royal Park – anti-immigrant nationalist lobbyists couldn’t have designed a better stunt themselves.

About a month ago Southampton announced a new project to “re-brand” the city.  Its a 15-mile long laser that will be projected into the sky from the clock tower every night.  The idea is that this will be seen from miles around and increase the awareness and the sense of proximity surrounding communities have towards the city.  Read the unsubtly biased Independent article here or the slightly more objective council press release here.

The radical nature of this landmark project highlights the growing awareness that places have to compete for people  in the same way that commodities compete for customers.  In both cases, at its most basic level, this involves attracting the attention  and establishing a presence.

I’ve posted on authenticity before here, but i’ve just listened to an interview with the authors of “Faking it: The quest for authenticity in popular music.”

I think the interesting thing about authenticity is understanding why people find it important – is it just a different level of interest/entertainment or does it play a more important role?  Here is a blog on the subject by the authors of the book.

Designers have to generalise – mass production implies it. In the early days this was done by dividing users into socio-economic categories, nowadays we’ve become a bit more insightful.

In urban design we categorise users in household types. Young professionals, large family, aging couple, single mum, etc. However there is a lot more to a household than the family structure, not least their socio-economic status.  Whether this extra information is relevant is a different question.

A promotional video for an “extreme gated community” in egypt designed by Fosters.

via: City of Sound

Members of a particular Royal Airforce Regiment have been ordered to grow beards before going to Afghainstan as the local culture associates beards to “strength and virility.” (bbc)

What would happen if a particular culture has associations to people from a particulare race? Would a regiment be made up excluding people on the grounds of their enemies association?

Taken to its extreme the same principle can be used to exclude people from most jobs.

Being excluded from working as a doctor for not having “understanding eyes”… or from a telemarketing company for not having the right accent … or from working at a restaurant for not having the right coloured skin.

I guess this isn’t new, but where do you draw the line between acceptability and an employee being “fit for purpose”?

Recyclebank is a service in philadelphia that gives money to people who recycle. In essence this is a service that rewards you for acting in the public interest (of which you are part off).

There’s numerous ways in which we can pay our hard earned money to help others. Giving to charity is one of them, possibly even setting up a direct-debit to amnesty international.

Offsetting the negative side-effects of your actions is another that seems to be growing in popularity. Offsetting your carbon emissions is the most common, but can we extend this to other areas of life? Here is one example.

Compulsory Purchase Orders allow bodies to acquire property without the owners consent. Mostly this involves paying the owner the current market value of the property. CPO’s can only be passed, however, by putting forward a case to show that the acquisition in the interest of the general public. The problem is the definition of public interest – can public interest be geared towards a generation not born yet?

I’m not sure if there is any fundamental contradiction in a funeral parlour offering a live broadcast of their service. I never really considered how funeral parlours compete with each other.

A pedal powered roller coaster in Japan. Its unlikely that there’s much of an overlap between roller coaster culture and green culture. If there is i wonder if the decision on what rides one goes on is influenced by the rides carbon footprint.

Interesting Thinking Allowed this week.

Scambaiters, as the name implies, are people who scam the scammers. I’m not sure if the “hobby” existed before the internet but it seems to be a growing culture.

Scambaiting highlights an interesting issue regarding social responsability – self-policing. To what extent should we be reponsible for enforcing the law? Can anyone challenge people who litter/vandalise/steal/kill or should that be the job of the police?

Some scambaiters succeed in actually getting money out of the scammers others get them to do things….

One way the local community can contributre to the design of their area is by highlighting what they personally find distinctive and meaningful in the area. Designers can then find the common denominator and structure the place to frame and highlight these elements.

In urban design we establish a hierarchy of elements in a place. A church might anchor a high street on one end and a community building on the other. very little thought is put on what are the elements that should be given priority. Is a church more important than a pub or a night club?

This hierarchy reflects the significance a particular culture gives to particular activitities so the decision on what to celebrate should come from understanding the particular culture.

There’s an interesting interview on Smart City Radio with the guy that wrote The Experience Economy – the book behind terms like “experiential marketing,” “brand experience” and “product experience”

But what is interesting is the application of these ideas, which have been embraced by marketing and product design industries, to the design of places.

Brand experience is as important to places as it is to products.

It would be useful to compare the methodology different types of designers use to understand users (focus groups, shadowing, public engagements, consultations, etc.)

There shouldn’t really be any difference between what leads us to design triple coloured toothpaste and the layout of our neighbourhood. In principle, we are all doing the same thing – trying to find out what people want.

Open source is amazing, thousands of people doing what they want when they want…and from the other side producing things that everyone loves.

Which is why companies feel they’re missing out on the winings and are trying to capitalise on it. But what can they do?

They can’t afford to invest on the millions of man hours spent on experimenting and failing which the success of open source relies on.

But could a company do something similar to what Youtube is doing? Providing a platform for “user-generated content” to be shown and splitting the profits?

In this way both developers and host win. Basically something like www.versiontracker.com, that gives some of their revenue to the developers.

What do you do when you have to brand something whose lack of brand is its strongest selling point? By branding it you’ll end up killing its original identity – and loosing your biggest asset.

You get this a lot when looking at the way many cities or neighbourhoods try and commodify their identity.

When originally the haphazard collection of different street furniture and building styles are key to the identity of the place – designers come along and make all the street furniture the same and control any new buildings to look like the vernacular.

How important is authenticity?

Does vintage clothing have to be of their time or can they be reproductions? Was it important that Kurt Cobain meant everything he sang about? Is it a problem that Jazz Clubs are purposefully small dark and damp to look authentic?

It could be that authenticity has just become another form of entertainment to make things more interesting – a challenge.