The remarkable, Lake Wakatipu

This is a shot of Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand outside of Queenstown that I took back in 2005. We were on our way to going canyoning (which turned out to be scarier than the bungy jump we had done the day before). Mt. Aspiring National Park might be visible in the far distance in this photo. The hills on the left shore of the Lake might be part of "The Remarkables," so named because they are aligned in a North-South orientation which is apparently remarkable for mountains (I didn't know). Really, the whole South Island of New Zealand should be called, The Remarkables.

A Map of the Stanford Linear Accelerator in Palo Alto, CA

I've always been fascinated that I-280 in Palo Alto goes over the top of a particle accelerator. It's not everyday that you can drive over the top of a Nobel Prize winning Physics Lab. I also find the curve of the highway against the accelerator's "straightest building on Earth" geometry interesting so I decided to make this map. As I was looking at the satellite images, I was intrigued by the chaos of buildings at the terminus (right side) of the accelerator. They almost look like they were the victim of a series of particle collisions themselves.

Central Park TypeMap - sketch #2

Central Park TypeMap - sketch #2, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

This is another map in my Typemap series. It is still something of an experiment but I decided it was worth posting. I started working on it about a month ago but it was dancing around in my head for the last six months. There are aspects that looked better in my head but it's getting closer. The effect I'm after is a sea of organic type in a setting or prison of rectilinear streets.

Observations on Surviving a Disaster: A Costa Concordia Concord

I've never been attracted to cruise ship vacations and I'm even less interested now that I've seen the news of the Costa Concordia disaster. But any disaster also makes me imagine what it must have been like to be there. My guess is that the chaos of the evacuation and subsequent rescues were quite typical of many disasters even though the Captain of the Costs Concordia appears to have been especially inept.

Being able to quickly and safely evacuate something as big as a town, particularly when it happens to be in the middle of the ocean seems like a tall order under any circumstances let alone when the ship is sinking. Cruise ship companies say they can evacuate everyone on board within a very short window of time but I wonder if their projections take into account passengers of various mental and physical abilities, the inevitable crew problems, and the fact that escape routes will be changing as the ship sinks. It makes me wonder whether the race to build ever bigger cruise ships is right from a safety perspective. Beyond the specific players of the Costa Concordia, it seems like there are lessons to be learned here for any disaster.

In the critical minutes after disaster strikes, those in charge may be in denial of the scale of the emergency
This certainly seems to be the case with the captain of the Costa Concordia. Passengers may need to question decisions if they don't jibe with what you're seeing. Admitting the problem and calling for an "abandon ship" is perhaps the best and worst thing a captain might have to do from a career perspective so he or she may be reluctant to do so even when all signs point to it's necessity. You should expect a lack of clear communication. Worse, they may also feed bad information to subordinates who will then be feeding it to you. The many calls for passengers to return to their cabins was an example of this. If my cabin was any lower than the top level, I'd be high-tailing up to the open decks to keep my options open.

Drills and exercises may not adequately prepare crew members for the chaos of a full-on disaster
In the face of extreme emergency, almost anyone is likely to be overwhelmed or perhaps experiencing disbelief. Highly functioning organizations like the Navy Seals, the Marines, and fire departments drill over and over so reactions become second nature. On a cruise ship, the crew's normal day-to-day "drill" is running a hotel, keeping guests happy and literally re-arranging deck chairs. Should we really expect them to act as well as a marine or paramedic in the face of death and disaster?

Even well-thought out emergency plans have to change in reaction to the specifics of a disaster
Ever since the Titanic, cruise ships have to carry enough life boats for everyone on board. But what happens when a sinking ship quickly lists to one side? Do they carry twice as many life boats as needed? Life boats on both sides of the Costa Concordia became inoperable when the ship tipped under water on one side and got stuck on the other, high side. Timing is also an issue. Can lifeboats be filled and deployed right away or do denial, chaos and disorganization conspire to delay some boats and send others away half empty.

There are many stories of survivors from other disasters who lived only because they took matters into their own hands and scrambled for exits while others hesitated and died. Perhaps the one smart thing the captain did among the many bad things was to aim the ship for land and beach it close enough for some to jump and swim to shore. This allowed a few brave souls to take matters into their own control. Beaching the boat also seems to have allowed lifeboats and other nearby ships to make multiple trips to and from the ship while others remained incapacitated. There were stories of some crew members unable to steer the boats away from the ship once they were full. Until you're experienced, steering a boat can be counter-intuitive. Yet another example of inadequate training. The drills probably extend to getting the boats lowered into the water but do they include experience once under power?

I hope I never know what it's like to experience a disaster of this magnitude. But if I do, I plan to listen to what officials have to say, decide whether the plan makes sense and then play an active role in my own survival.

In Time, "Form Follows Function"

In Louis Sullivan's classic statement, "Form Follows Function" it is function that is usually seen as the dominant member of this design duality. It was one of the first design tenets that I learned in college and one that remains a core part of my design philosophy to this day. That said, I can't think of a single design project where the opposite wasn't true at least some of the time. The truth is that we are visual beings. We are often quick and astute judges of form. We know when something looks right and when it looks wrong, even if we haven't studied design. On top of this, function can rarely be judged at a quick glance. By definition, you must use the object, building, shirt, service before you can truly judge it's functional quality. The net result of this is that many designs are judged based on their form first and function second… despite Sullivan's admonition.

In my experience, most designers remain faithful to one camp even as they evolve to see both sides of the coin. I see many function-minded designers create mockups that address many of the requirements but result in a design that is awkward and ugly. I also see many form-focused designers who are almost incapable of creating an ugly mark on a page but who excel at ignoring or forgetting key user needs. The best products are the result of hard work at addressing issues on both sides of the fence.

I also notice this dialog happening in my own design process. I remain focused on function in my heart but I've acknowledged how often this has resulted in a proposal that, though more functional has lost out to a more stylish alternate proposal. I find myself removing details from concept proposals to postpone discussions of thorny requirements. As I was pondering this issue while reading some of Don Norman's teachings, I realize I am not the first functionalist to come to this understanding.

I remember hearing Don Norman speak at TED about his revelation that function was not everything. If I remember it correctly, he talked about a response to his concerns about light switches and burner controls on a stove. In both examples, the mapping of the controls usually relates poorly if at all to the mapping of the actual lights or burners. So, in order to prove his point, he redesigned the light switch for his living room so it featured a floor plan with the switches placed in close relation to the light switch it controlled. The result was highly functional but one of the most ugly light switches I've ever seen. Apparently his wife agreed and told him she hated the switch and wanted the old, less functional one back. I remember seeing the light switch in his book and thinking it a monstrosity of design. I recall a similar scenario with train schedules in Edward Tufte's first book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

Mies Van der Rohe was such a big proponent of "form follows function" that he is often credited with penning the quote. Mies is famous for his simple, Germanic designs both in elevation and plan. Details are all thought out but as minimal as possible. A skyscraper is a series of vertical I-beams with Windows in between each I-beam. Mies' belief in this tenet was so strong that he broke his own belief on his design of the Seagram Building to make the point. Though I-beams are a basic element of every skyscraper, it is rare that the beams are left exposed. Most of covered in fireproofing and then hidden behind a cladding or wall. Mies Van der Rohe's answer to this on the Seagram Building was to basically add a decorative I-beam to the outermost edge of his facade. These I-beams are pure decoration… no different than the heavy rustication used in Renaissance villas or the highly ornate terra-cotta tiles on many of Louis Sullivan's early skyscrapers.

All of this makes me think of the original statement. Mies started the building with the best of purely functional intentions. But he knew in his heart that there was an aesthetic to what he was proposing and that he sometimes needed to stray into the realm of form to make his functional ambitions clear. Sullivan's early skyscrapers are known as much for the heavy use of ornament… maybe as a way to soften the shock of the sudden appearance of tall structures in the urban landscape. Perhaps his strong belief in his own statement took for granted that ornament (one type of form) would always be present. As one element of a building, ornament should be applied in a way that follows the lines (function) of the building rather than in an otherwise unrelated pattern.

Since I am grounded on the functional side, I can not speak for the process of those that are on the form side of the equation. For me, I start with function, then proceed to adjusting the form to make a more visually pleasing solution. So, from a scheduling perspective, form does follow function. My success is for others to decide but that is my process.

A Map of the Border Between the USA and Canada as it Passes Through the Town of Derby Line, Vermont

A Map of the Border Between the USA and Canada as it Passes Through the Town of Derby Line, Vermont, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

The story of Derby Line Vermont begins with a mistake and ends with an intentional act inspired by the mistake. For most of it's 2000 mile length, the USA / Canada border follows the 45th parallel. I have already written about the exception at the Northwest Angle in Minnesota that was created due to an error about how far North the Mississippi River went. Here in Vermont, the surveyors were intending to follow the 45th parallel, they were just a bit sloppy in their work and unintentionally marked the line too far North. The Town developed along the line along with it's sister town, Stanstead Quebec on the Canadian side.

Sometime in the latter part of the 1800s, Carlos Haskell an American met Martha Stewart (not that Martha Stewart) who had grown up on the Canadian side. They married and settled in Derby Line. Sometime around the turn of the century, they decided to honor the town's erratic border by building a library and opera house right on the border so that Americans and Canadians would both be able to use it. If I were erecting such a monument, I think I would have aligned the building so the border passed symbolically through the middle. Not so with the Haskell Free Library as it came to be known. The border passes diagonally through the building. The line is marked in the floor (you can see pictures of the interior at the CLUI link below). The line was requested by the insurance companies so they would pay only for damages to their part of the building.

In the library, the reading room is on the US side while the stacks are on the Canadian side. In the upstairs opera house, most of the seats are on the US side while the stage is on the Canadian side. This has prompted locals to call it alternatively, "the only library in the USA with no books" and "the only opera house in the USA with no stage".

Having such a small town straddles an international border invites a different perspective on international relations. The Center for Land Use Interpretation has an essay about the town on their website. The author makes the comment that two kids having a game of catch across the border would be perfectly legal. However, each time someone caught the ball they would have to walk over to the customs office to declare the ball.

When the Haskell's built the library, their intention was that people from both sides of the border would be able to use it. There are doors on the Canadian and USA side to enable this. The town also has several small roads that cross seamlessly across the border. All of this is threatened in the post-9/11 world because open, fuzzy borders make the US Department of Customs and Immigration nervous. There have been talks to tighten the links but, according to Wikipedia at least, the Haskell Free Library remains free and open to American and Canadian alike.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_Line,_Vermont
http://web.archive.org/web/20070618080148/http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/26/border.quirk.ap/index.html
http://www.clui.org/lotl/v29/m.html

The Border Between Egypt & Sudan at the Wadi Halfa Salient

The Border Between Egypt & Sudan at the Wadi Halfa Salient, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

See the 52 villages in the map? No? That's because they were flooded by the damning of the Nile and the creation of Lake Nasser (known as Lake Nubia in Sudan). The strange bulge (known as a salient in cartography parlance) along this portion of the Egypt-Sudan border was originally surrounded the villages that dotted this section of the Nile.

Egypt and Sudan have 3 areas of land under dispute and a fourth that neither country claims. The original 1899 border between the two countries ran straight along the 22nd North Parallel line with no deviations. In 1902, Britain amended the border to account for some tribal and administrative issues. There were 52 villages where the Nile River crossed the 22nd Parallel. It was decided that these villages would be easier to maintain from the Sudanese side of the border so the border was changed to how it appears above. There appears to be a stretch of rough and desolate terrain North of this area that separates it from the next set of villages in current maps.

Egypt now claims this area along with the other two areas (Bir Tawil and the Hala'ib Triangle) in dispute. They maintain a military presence in the other two but not here as there is little of interest to guard. My map of Bir Tawil and the Hala'ib Triangle is here.

I've also made a map of the area showing the location of the former towns and ruins based on a 1953 British survey map.

Source: Wikipedia

A Map of the Strange Border Between New York & New Jersey on Ellis Island

A Map of the Border Between New York & New Jersey on Ellis Island, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

For so many immigrants, stepping off a ship onto Ellis Island was synonymous with arrival in New York City. Many years later, after the immigration station had closed and the buildings lie decaying, the US Supreme Court would decide that Ellis Island, with one small exception, was part of New Jersey.

The original colonial land grant for New Jersey defined it's border as the waterline of New York Bay and the Hudson River, meaning that the water and all islands within it belonged to New York. Most treaties place borders in the middle of natural borders like lakes and rivers. New Jersey tried to fight the claim starting in the early 1800s. In 1834 a compact between New York and New Jersey and ratified by the US Congress set the border as the middle of the Hudson River. This put jurisdiction and bragging rights over the island completely in New Jersey which they were quick to assert and claim in a court filing. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. New York fought hard but in the end was awarded only the small 3.3 acre section of the original island. Since that border follows the island's original shoreline it appears quite random today and passes through the middle of numerous buildings. The majority of the current island (most of it created by landfill from the digging of New York City subway tunnels) is now officially part of the State of New Jersey. Payback for Jersey's actions and perhaps the best argument for custody came from then Mayor Rudy Giuliani who remarked that his Italian father "never intended to emigrate to New Jersey."

In the pre-colonial days, Ellis Island was one of several, oyster-rich islands on the western tidal flats of Upper New York Bay. Other nearby islands included Liberty Island (originally Bedloe's Island and site of the Statue of Liberty) and Black Tom Island (named after an African-American that lived on the island according to local legend). Before becoming known as Ellis Island, it had been known as Dyre's Island, Bucking, Gibbet (Gibbet's being cages for displaying the dead bodies of convicted pirates), and lastly, Little Oyster Island. Samuel Ellis acquired the island during the American Revolution and first tried to sell it in 1785. New York State leased the island in 1794 until the Federal Government bought the island in 1808 and began expanding it before opening it as an immigration station in 1892.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_island & Google Maps

Via Flickr:
For so many immigrants, stepping off a ship onto Ellis Island was synonymous with arrival in New York City. Many years later, after the immigration station had closed and the buildings lie decaying, the US Supreme Court would decide that Ellis Island, with one small exception, was part of New Jersey.

The original colonial land grant for New Jersey defined it's border as the waterline of New York Bay and the Hudson River, meaning that the water and all islands within it belonged to New York. Most treaties place borders in the middle of natural borders like lakes and rivers. New Jersey tried to fight the claim starting in the early 1800s. In 1834 a compact between New York and New Jersey and ratified by the US Congress set the border as the middle of the Hudson River. This put jurisdiction and bragging rights over the island completely in New Jersey which they were quick to assert and claim in a court filing. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. New York fought hard but in the end was awarded only the small 3.3 acre section of the original island. Since that border follows the island's original shoreline it appears quite random today and passes through the middle of numerous buildings. The majority of the current island (most of it created by landfill from the digging of New York City subway tunnels) is now officially part of the State of New Jersey. Payback for Jersey's actions and perhaps the best argument for custody came from then Mayor Rudy Giuliani who remarked that his Italian father "never intended to emigrate to New Jersey."

In the pre-colonial days, Ellis Island was one of several, oyster-rich islands on the western tidal flats of Upper New York Bay. Other nearby islands included Liberty Island (originally Bedloe's Island and site of the Statue of Liberty) and Black Tom Island (named after an African-American that lived on the island according to local legend). Before becoming known as Ellis Island, it had been known as Dyre's Island, Bucking, Gibbet (Gibbet's being cages for displaying the dead bodies of convicted pirates), and lastly, Little Oyster Island. Samuel Ellis acquired the island during the American Revolution and first tried to sell it in 1785. New York State leased the island in 1794 until the Federal Government bought the island in 1808 and began expanding it before opening it as an immigration station in 1892.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_island

A Map of the very strange border(s) between the Netherlands and Belgium at Baarle-Nassau

A Map of the very strange border(s) between the Netherlands and Belgium at Baarle-Nassau, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

Without going into excruciating detail about allegiances to dukes, lords and kings, it is hard to explain the origin if this rather unique set of international borders. Suffice it to say that the land was bought, sold, and loaned through many generations to the point where the current land owners felt allegiance to either the Dutch or Belgian side of the border. When it came time to make the border official as art of the 1843 Treaty of Maastricht, 5732 separate parcels of land had to have their nationality laid down separately.

Fortunately the borders are all friendly. In fact, there were several opportunities to clean things up in subsequent treaties and negotiations that the residents refused to act on. The residents of Baarle-Nassau seem to enjoy their quirky borders and the ramifications they present.

There is at least one border line that passes directly through a building. With borders sometimes passing through the middle of properties, taxes were sometimes a challenge in the area. To clarify matters, the Dutch government set the rule that taxes would be paid to the country your front door opened up on. With taxes being higher on one side of the border than the other, the ruling was an invitation for creative renovations. If shop keepers didn't like the taxes they were paying, they were known to just move their front door so that it opened on the other country.

The primary border between the two countries lies about 5 kilometers south of Baarle-Nassau... just a short distance beyond the bottom of this map. What is truly unique about this set of borders is that it happens completely inside the Netherlands border. These are Belgian exclaves inside the Netherlands. But even more amazing is that there are Dutch exclaves completely inside the Belgian exclaves. The smallest plot, identified as H12 is just 28,331 square feet (a bit more than 1/2 an acre) in size. With all of the dysfunction between Israel and the Palestinians over land swaps, it is nice to see two countries getting along so well that there's no need to swap.

Sources:
Google Maps
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/baarle.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau

A Map of the Former Town of Monticello, CA in Relation to Today's Lake Berryessa

A Map of the Former Town of Monticello, CA in Relation to Today's Lake Berryessa, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

Where Lake Berryessa now stands there once was a fertile valley full of farms, orchards and the small town of Monticello, California. Before Monticello there were the Adobe buildings that were part of the Mexican-owned Rancho de Los Putahs. And before the Spanish arrived, there was the Patwin village of Topaidihi. All of this is now lost below the waters of Lake Berryessa.

Berryessa comes from the Basque family name of the early Spanish settlers of the valley (Berelleza was the likely original spelling).

Berryessa Valley as it came to be known, was first settled by the Patwin and Pomo Indians who lived there for thousands of years. A 1948 archaeological survey of the valley found the remains of approximately 150 Native American villages. They lived easily off the abundant trees, plants, and animals of the valley and surrounding hills. According to ome history, bears roamed the hills and, over time, created trails that were later used by the Berreyesa family to get their cattle up and over the mountains and into the valley.

The first Spanish settler in the valley was Nicolas Antonio Berreyesa who was born in 1761 in Sinaloa Mexico of Spanish parents. He arrived in Northern California as part of the 1776 De Anza Colonization Expedition. In 1779, Nicolas married the daughter of Gabriel Peralta, one of Anza’s soldiers. They had nine children together including, Nasario Antonio who would eventually establish the first ranch in Berryessa Valley.

Two of Nasario's sons, Sisto and Antonia, were in the Mexican Army and based in San Francisco. In 1838 they married the Higuerra twins, Nicholasa and Maria Anatasia and moved up to their father's rancho in the valley a short time later. In 1843, the two sons became the official owners of what came to be known as Rancho de la Putas through a Mexican land grant.

There are several possible origins regarding use of the word Putas in the rancho name. One is that the local Patwin tribes engaged in "licentious behavior" and the river became known as the Rio de los Putos (putah being the word for prostitute in Spanish). Another version says that the name evolved from, "puta wuwwe" (grassy creek), the Miwok name for the creek. In that telling, any similarity to the Spanish "putah" was coincidental. I tend to believe the latter as while they may have used an unflattering name for the Indians and the creek, it seems less likely that they would intentionally name their ranch, Ranch of the Prostitutes.

By 1866, most of the original Berryessa family had died, been killed, or had sold the land to pay off family debts. Most of this seems associated with the transition of California from Mexican to U.S. territory. Knowing the valley's reputation as perhaps the most fertile in the country, developers bought up the land and cut it up into many small plots. A year later, the valley was full of productive farms.

The town of Monticello was established shortly thereafter. A hotel was then built as a stopover point for the stagecoach that ran between Napa and a large mining operation in Knoxville, north of the valley. Monticello was known for it's annual rodeo that had grew out of a tradition at one of the valley ranches.

Although the farms and orchards of the valley thrived, discussions of building a dam and flooding the valley occurred as early as 1906. It became official in 1954 under President Eisenhower and construction started the same year. The residents of the town and valley tried to fight the movement but were unsuccessful. Life Magazine sent Dorothea Lange to document their plight but never published the photos or story. The town was bought up and leveled. The town cemetery was dug up and moved to Spanish Flat in the hills just West of the lake. There is also a small museum in Spanish Flat that was created by surviving family members with a number if photos and artifacts from Monticello.

In one of the historical accounts I read, a local farmer was quoted as saying, "they took our land away like we were Indians." I'm not sure he was aware of the irony of his statement. Perhaps if the bears could talk, they would complain of their loss of habitat. The Indians have surely complained with rarely anyone willing to listen. History describes the Berryessa family as doing themselves in through gambling debts and the like but i doubt it was that simple. With the land changing from Mexican to American hands there were bound to be conflicts and new claims of dominion. Alas, not even the white man's land is safe in the evolving landscape now seemingly a picturesque, tranquil lake.

Sources for the Map & History
http://nrs.ucdavis.edu/quail/natural/Human_Berelleza.htm
http://www.bellavistaranch.net/suisun_history/berryessa1-delaplane.html

A Map of the Strange Kentucky Border at the New Madrid Bend in the Mississippi River

A Map of the Strange Kentucky Border at the New Madrid Bend in the Mississippi River, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

The border of Kentucky at what is known as "The New Madrid Bend" owes it's strangeness to the serpentine path of the Mississippi River. The River was supposed to define the western edge of the state of Kentucky and the Southern edge of Missouri. The result is an exclave peninsula of land in Kentucky that is completely surrounded by Missouri and Tennessee. To drive here from the rest of Kentucky, you must leave the state, drive through Tennessee and come back into Kentucky.

This spot along the Mississippi River is also the site of several historic events. Most notable is the "Battle of Island Ten" in the Civil War where Confederate Troops occupied Island Ten (now mostly part of the shoreline at the southern-most part of the bend in the map). The plan was to block and defeat the Union Troops coming down the Mississippi from the North at a slow point in the river. The plan didn't work so well. Although this was a potentially vulnerable spot in the river, Island Ten was also remote and could only be re-supplied by a single road through swamp and marsh land (the Union eventually succeeded in cutting off Confederate supply lines).

Mark Twain wrote about the area in his book, "Life on the Mississippi" and in particular about the feud between the Darnell and Watson families. One family was from Kentucky, the other from Tennessee. According to Twain, the two families attended the same church at what is/was known as Compromise Landing. The Church straddled the border between Kentucky and Tennessee enabling the families to walk up the aisle on their side of the church and attend services without stepping into the other state.

Lastly, New Madrid was the epicenter for several of the strongest Earthquakes ever felt in the United States in 1811 and 1812. According to Wikipedia, the earthquakes were so disruptive that they reportedly reversed the course of the Mississippi River around the area.

Read more...
New Madrid Bend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_Bend
Battle of Island Number Ten: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Island_Number_Ten
The Earthquakes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1812_New_Madrid_earthquake

A Map of "The Five Points" neighborhood in New York City and its relationship to today's streets and the old Collect Pond.

A Map of "The Five Points" neighborhood in New York City and its relationship to today's streets and the old Collect Pond., a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

This is my first attempt to try to render the story of "The Five Points" Neighborhood in historical layers. The neighborhood or more aptly, slum was also known as Paradise Square was always notorious but was made famous more recently as the setting for Martin Scorcese's, "Gangs of New York" film.

Here’s the story...
The area that was eventually to become the Five Points was originally a spring-fed fresh water pond known as the Collect Pond. It shows up clearly on British maps of Manhattan around the time of the American Revolution. The pond was a major source of drinking water in the colonial era. There was also an area of the pond known as “Cow Bay” where farmers would bring their cows to drink.

As lower Manhattan grew, several breweries and tanneries set up shop near the Collect. This included Coulter’s Brewery which was built in 1792. Coulter’s building would eventually become known as “The Old Brewery,” perhaps the Five Point’s most infamous tenement. The breweries and tanneries no doubt benefitted greatly from their proximity to the Collect Pond’s fresh water but it was not a mutually beneficial relationship. Over time, the pond had become quite polluted and smelly and the city made plans to fill it in. The Canal that gave Canal Street it’s name was built, in part, to drain the Collect and it’s surrounding marsh. The City backfilled the collect with garbage and debris around 1811 and began allowing buildings to be erected. The pond however had been poorly filled and was still being fed by the underground spring. The area remained wet, muddy and mosquito infested. As a consequence of this, anyone that could move out of the area did. In the 1830s, more and more tenements were built on the soggy ground and began to settle and lean almost as soon as they were completed. Little Water Street, which had once been the footpath to Cow Bay was now a dangerous, crime-infested alley. There was a building at the northern end of Little Water Street known as “Jacob’s Ladder” because the front steps were badly rotten, broken and misaligned.

Eventually only the poorest of the poor chose to live in the area known initially as Paradise Square and later as Five Points. This included freed black slaves and a group of immigrants arriving from Europe. The Potato Famine had hit Ireland in the 1840s prompting a huge exodus. As they arrived in New York poor and destitute, many ended up in the Five Points. As many as a thousand may have lived in “The Old Brewery” which had been broken up into tiny, one-room “dwellings”. It was said that there was a murder every night in the brewery for months on end.

The emergence of The Five Points as a crime-ridden slum feels like destiny in action. Had the Potato Famine happened a decade later, the Irish might have ended up in a different neighborhood. If the Collect Pond had not become polluted then drained and backfilled, there would not have been the cheap, undesirable land to build on. Had the buildings not been built on soggy, marshland, they might have been more stable, desirable and able to charge more rent.

With all of the above conditions in place, in came the poor and the crime associated with so many scrambling to scratch out an existence. The area was famous for numerous gangs including the “Dead Rabbits” featured in Scorcese’s movie. The neighborhood had many alleys like “Bottle Alley” and “Bandit’s Roost” that were gang hangouts. Some gang members eventually ended up at “The Tombs” prison after being convicted of a crime. The Tombs was built in 1838 in the Egyptian Revival style in the hopes its ominous appearance would be a natural deterrence against crime. It too was built over the Collect Pond and suffered as a result. The foundation sank and leaked eventually forcing the building to be destroyed. The Tombs was replaced twice with newer buildings. The current nearby detention center is still referred to as The Tombs by some law enforcement officials.

Despite the seedy history of the Five Points, some good did come out of the area. There were a number of dance and music halls in the area. One came to be known as Almack’s Dance Hall. Both the Irish and African Americans living in the area frequented it creating a mix of African and Irish dance traditions. It is said that this combination led to what eventually became what we know now as tap dance.

A Map of the Strange Border Between Sweden and Finland on Märket Fyr

Scary Skerry… A Map of the Strange Border Between Sweden and Finland on Märket Fyr, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

How did I not find this awesome border sooner. An island less than 1200 feet long with a border that takes more twists and turns than a Stieg Larsson novel. It is now possible to walk the length of this short island and cross an international border three times. However, despite the strangeness of the border, Sweden and Finland have always agreed on shared ownership of the skerry (a Norse word for rock in the sea) and the serpentine border results from an effort to correct Finland's accidental siting of the island's lighthouse on the Swedish side of the border. The island is otherwise a textbook example of international cooperation and agreement.

Market Island or Reef (Market Fyr in Swedish) is part of the larger Aland Island chain that lies between Sweden and Finland. According to Wikipedia, ownership of the islands has been shared ever since the Treaty of Fredrikshamn in 1809. Prior to the building of the lighthouse, the border between the two countries passed down the middle of the skerry so that half the island's land mass was in Sweden and half was in Finland. When it was discovered that Finland had accidentally built the lighthouse on Sweden's half of the island, a fix was necessary. The resulting zig-zag border allows the lighthouse to be in Finland while retaining the 50/50 split in land area and avoids any changes to the maritime border. Any alterations of that would have resulted in a change in fishing rights… Perhaps the one thing that might have caused strife between the two herring-loving nations.

Newt Gingrich on Libya

Newt Gingrich on March 7th:

"Exercise a no-fly zone this evening."

Newt Gingrich on March 7th:

"I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Gaddafi."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/23/newt-gingrich-attempts-to_n_839816.html

Seeing patterns where others see none... the brilliance and madness in pattern detection

Although I didn't plan it, this post is related to my previous post on "Seeing Variety". Both posts explore perception.  

Behind the brilliance of Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" lies the idea of pattern recognition. Successful designs respect the patterns that enable people to feel good in a space or building. As a visual species, pattern detection is something we are all do. It happens when we recognize a familiar plot in a TV sitcom. It happens when a doctor starts to recognize a pattern of symptoms prior to making a diagnosis. We all see patterns in our daily life but some see more than others. 

About eight years ago, I was managing a team of designers in a studio in San Francisco. One of my designers was a bright, young, and enthusiastic designer who I initially hired as a production assistant. He would attack everything I assigned him with passion. He was always asking me for more work so, eventually, I started giving him his own projects. Seeing his thought process made me realize you can go too far in pattern recognition. As he presented his designs, I noticed that he was a bit too conceptual. He would make up wild metaphors. You could ask him to talk about basic issues like design requirements, the client, the user, etc. but he would quickly switch back to broad stroke concepts. He would say something like, "Andy, it's all about x". I'd say, "OK, tell me why it's like x." We'd discuss that a bit but then he would lose interest and announce, "Andy, it's really all about y" and then "z" and so on. I enjoyed the theoretical discussions but eventually, I realized I was dealing with what might be described as an attention deficit disorder approach to metaphor. "A is like B... and C... and D, an so on. At the time, I thought it truly had more to do with ADD than pattern recognition. But then, several years later, I was speaking with a woman who had also managed him and she had similar experiences. It solidified the hyper pattern recognition theme.

This all came home for me when I saw the movie, "A Beautiful Mind" about the mathematician, John Nash. There is a scene in the movie where Nash, as played by Russell Crow, starts to see patterns in everything he looks at. The scene is augmented by graphics that show the geometry he is seeing in the words and images of a newspaper or between the pattern of light on his wall and the geometry of the quad outside his dorm room. By this point in the movie, Nash has established himself as a brilliant theorist but one who is also starting to show signs of psychiatric problems so you don't know which mind you're seeing. Sadly, it is the madness at play... a battle with paranoid schizophrenia that he dealt with for the rest of his life. It is only many years later that the genius of his early insights into game theory and mutual cooperation are recognized by the scientific community. His brilliance and victory over illness are represented in a very touching scene where fellow faculty members surrender their pens to Nash. The ritual was entirely fabricated for the movie but it touched me and strikes me as a beautiful gesture.

When I reflect on the experience with the designer on my staff, it seems possible that those patterns did exist and that I was just not capable of seeing them. But if you are designing for the mainstream, you have to reflect what others will see. Consumers will not make esoteric connections and they certainly won't pay you for it even if you point it out. In fact, they are more likely to do their own pattern recognition that will connect your work to something considerably more mundane, maybe that sitcom they were just watching. So with pattern recognition comes the responsibility to discern which ones will connect with your users and which ones just might be the work of a mad man.

The Street

"The street is a room by agreement with walls contributed individually, a floor contributed publicly and a sky contributed by God and nature."
-- Louis I Kahn

Seeing Variety Where Others See None.

Seeing Variety Where Others See None.

There is a desert dwelling community in India with forty different names for clouds. They are experts at gathering water and their interest in clouds, no doubt, stems from their need to know which ones will deliver rain versus those that just blow by. Like the Eskimo's snow, every culture seems to have a vocabulary to match it's passions. But seeing it from the outside usually produces the opposite effect. To someone who's never seen it, all snow looks like snow. I now realize that this happens in our daily lives more often than you'd think.

I took a class in ethnography when I was in college. The professor was an ethno-musicologist and had studied communities in Africa, New York and the jazz and blues communities of the Mississippi Delta. Prompted by a derogatory comment about the Laurence Welk Show (which was big at the time), he interviewed a number of people in the local Polish community about Polka music. When he interviewed people from the general population, he found that many people despised Laurence Welk and his music. "Every song sounds exactly the same" was the characteristic comment he received. However, when he interviewed the Welk fans he found the opposite sentiment. Where some heard a grating monotony, fans heard an infinite amount of variety. They knew there was a familiar pattern... the part that outsiders disliked. But once you got into the music, they felt each song was unique. Hard core fans appreciated the subtle differences in every polka he played.

What the polka community experienced applies to almost any sub-culture. One person's variety is another person's monotony. In college, I experienced the same phenomenon in trying to negotiate music interests with one of my room mates. He was into the Stones and Zeppelin, I was into Steely Dan. He despised Steely Dan. When I asked why he said, "It all sounds the same". What I saw then as just blind (or deaf) criticism I now see as the Laurence Welk phenomenon. Steely Dan has a distinctive sound. From an outsiders perspective it might all sound the same. But for an insider's perspective, I hear a wide range of songs framed by the common elements of Walter Becker's distinctive guitar and Donald Fagan's keyboard and smart vocals.

When I was in an NYC runners group for a few years, I was amazed at how much we could talk about our most recent run. To an outsider it was just a workout but to a runner there is an almost infinite level of detail to review. There is the technique one used on the slight incline versus on the flats and the steep uphills. There's the start of the sprint versus the push to the finish, passing another runner versus drafting, and the list goes on.

I've even noticed having these two impressions when viewing my own work. When I would work on my freehand maps, I would be intensely focused on the quality of my line. My line would waver as the hand tends to do. Sometimes I could even detect the echo of my heartbeat in the waver. So I would worry that the drawing was going to look sloppy. But over time I realized that people didn't feel that way. Thus is partly due to the fact that people like the "life" of a freehand line over a perfect one drawn by a ruler. But it also has to do with the fact that what I was seeing as big wiggles in my line disappeared when you looked at it from a normal viewing distance. It was almost like I had been viewing the map under a microscope.
I don't know what the greater meaning of all this is but it's clearly a part of human culture. Seeing the detail that outsiders miss helps cement the community. Focus sets the craftsman apart from the hobbyist and the fan from the casual observer.

The Medium is the Exploration: A Tribute to Magda McHale

The Medium is the Exploration: A Tribute to Magda McHale

I was fortunate enough to know Magda Cordell McHale while I was a student at University of Buffalo. I took her class and Magda served as an advisor for my Masters thesis. All these years later, the image of Magda that sticks in my head is her at her desk, writing longhand, pen in one hand, cigarette in the other with the ashes falling on her papers. She would write notes on typewritten pages that had been cut into strips, re-arranged, and pasted onto new pages. This was how she worked, the smoking and the constant cutting, annotating, and re-arranging of words. Her office was elegantly decorated… clean, and sparse save the piles of paper and interesting artifacts from her life. Her desk and credenza were full of journals and copies of articles, each dog-eared and bookmarked with notes. As I sat down, she would hand one to me and ask me to read the part that she had circled. As I was reading, she would smile and raise her eyebrows as if to say, “See what I mean? Isn’t life interesting?”.

If you saw her office you might have wondered, why is she in a school of architecture? An architecture historian’s office might look like this, but she wasn’t even writing about architecture. As I was taking her class, I could tell that she was having a big influence on me, but I didn’t know what it was I was learning. With many professors, you just know. Now I understand “x”… structural engineering, Psych 101, Mandarin… whatever it was you didn’t know when you came in, you knew now. It wasn’t until many years later that I finally understood what I had learned. Since Magda is no longer with us, I feel compelled to share what she taught me and why it makes total sense that this happened in a school of architecture.

I took her class in 1982. Harold Cohen, the Dean at the time, had just started the short-lived Design Studies Program. Don Glickman, the Chair of the new program convinced Magda to teach a class. I don’t remember the name of the class but, in the fall of 1982, the eight or ten of us in the program showed up. The first assignment was a book report. Read a piece of fiction and report on it. Again, why was this being assigned in a school of architecture? I chose Charles Dickens’, “A Tale of Two Cities” because of the title and the, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” opening. I was taking a couple of classes about cities at the time and thought Dickens might shine a historical light on the subject.

When it came time for us to report on our books, I remember Magda being wide-eyed and smiling as I described some visceral urban details from the early chapters of the book. After class, she asked to see me in her office, the first of many meetings we would come to have. The first thing she said to me in her unmistakable raspy voice and heavy Hungarian accent was, “Prohl”. My family pronounces this as Prole (as in “rhymes with roll”). Magda pronounced it as they do in Germany with a drawn out “o”… the kind with an umlaut over it. As she said my name, I could tell I was in trouble. “Prohl, I know you didn’t read the book.” She was right, I hadn’t. I’ve always been a slow reader. Not wanting to miss any details, I read every book like it’s a textbook. In the process, I tend to miss the second half of a lot of books. As she spoke, her eyes were looking right through me as if to say, “small town kid, straight, untraveled, Catholic school, insightful but naïve. Searching for meaning.” She was right about those things too.

Most important for this story however, is our final project for the class. The assignment was simple. Pick a topic, and explore it in any medium you choose: painting, music, photography, whatever. Anything we wanted to do, we could. As any professor will tell you, this kind of freedom is a recipe for disaster. “Give a student enough rope and they’ll hang themselves” as the saying goes. By this time, Magda’s penetrating eyes and stern admonitions had put the fear of God in us so we knew we had to perform. I stuck with my interest in cities. I had been reading some books by Lewis Mumford and an article in the New York Times about the character of cities and urban dwellers. My “History of Cities” class revealed the origins of major cities around the world which got me wondering about the very nature of cities. What made a city a city? How were city people different? So I chose the theme “Cities & Time”. The medium I decided to pursue was poetry. I don’t know why I chose poetry. I’ve dabbled in it from time to time but I don’t think I was writing at the time. I might have stumbled on a book by John Cage, someone I think both Harold Cohen and Magda knew. I remember loving his quote, “Every seat is the best seat in the house”. Ostensibly about theaters and performances it is a wonderful piece of philosophy.

So here I was, writing poetry while pursuing a degree in design. It was a revelation to me that the finished poems didn’t spring forth onto the page in their first draft. I went through many revs of typing, editing, and retyping. It was only through tearing some of them apart and wrestling with the words that I arrived at something that flowed. The most creative parts came in the act of editing not in the initial writing. This reminded me of the process of drawing with tracing paper when you redraw on successive layers of tracing paper until you get something you like. More than once in my life, this process has resulted in the discovery of an idea or concept that was not what I was consciously working on. In this mode, drawing becomes the search not the presentation. This is what happened when I was working on those poems. This is also what Magda’s personal process was all about and what I realized I had learned from her many years later. New ideas emerge from the pasting together of existing ideas and your efforts to make sense of them.

In collage, the raw materials are frequently the work of others. Magda’s husband, John McHale was an artist. His primary medium was collage. According to Wikipedia, John McHale was “a founder of the Independent Group, which was a British movement that originated pop art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies.” John made several trips to the US after WWII and was amazed at the rapid growth of our consumer culture. Lots of things were changing after the war and John McHale and his contemporaries struggled to make sense of it. As Magda explained it to me, he would collect magazines on his visits to the US, take them back to the UK, and start cutting them apart. He created compositions that combined paint and the magazine images into visual observations and commentary on a changing world.

Magda was also a founder of the Independent Group. As an artist and writer, Magda saw the social impact of John’s paintings and decided that the same process would work for writing. The class she taught and the assignment I described above clearly grew out of her own experience. If a group of painters could extend their creative process beyond the medium of paint, then why couldn’t she help students explore a range of media. Not everyone who goes to school for architecture becomes an architect and regardless of academic discipline, we all have to find the medium that’s right for us.

My medium has migrated from blueprints to wireframes, websites, and interaction design. Like Magda, I am a student of technology. I work in Silicon Valley, the heart of new technology. This is the birthplace of Intel, Steve Jobs, Google, and the iPhone among many others. Here, technology collides with human innovation perhaps more than anywhere else in the world. Most people working here do not consider themselves artists but much of the work would be familiar to John McHale. Blogging combined the concept of personal journals with a public website. Twitter took the concept of blogging and combined it with the short text messaging behavior of cell phones. The iPod changed the world of music forever by connecting the previously separate worlds of mp3 players, desktop software, and online music store.

On the Internet, the term “mashups” refers to efforts that are quite similar to collage. One of the first to gain attention was a mashup of Google Maps & apartment rentals posted on Craigslist. Two separate sources that yielded new value when combined. This was enabled when Google opened up the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for Google Maps enabling programmers outside Google to use the maps as a building block for their own creations.

Many people, not just designers, are using the Internet to combine and remix digital content into new forms of entertainment. Jesse Dylan’s famous mashup of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech into a music video helped get Obama elected. It then inspired the remixed version mocking Senator John Boehner’s “Hell Know You Can’t” speech opposing the healthcare bill. It should be noted that the ability to create these mashups is not a given. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and commercial interests threaten to prevent this type of experimentation and commentary from happening. Lawrence Lessig has been an excellent spokesperson on this issue. Although a lawyer by training, he believes in the issue so strongly that he has lectured extensively, setup the Creative Commons as an alternative approach, and even argued in front of the Supreme Court on the subject. The Internet is really one big mashup. It needs to remain open so that the Pablo Picassos and John McHales of tomorrow can continue to mix and remix our cultural artifacts.

So this is what I learned from her. Experiment with different media. You might find you’re better at one than you expected. Don’t be afraid to find your new ideas in the mix of existing ones. Whether you are combining words, magazine clippings, or materials in a building, we are all collage artists. Even the city is a kind of collage… the result of many “artists” unknowingly collaborating over generations. Any effort to make sense of the world around us, whether on paper or only in our mind is the making of a collage. This is why Magda Cordell McHale belonged in a School of Architecture. She would have been a treasure in any school or department but I’m glad she ended up in ours.

Giving Thanks

I've never been what would be described as a fan of Pearl Jam but I like their music. Perhaps from seeing him in the Sundance "Iconoclast" series, I've been generally aware that Eddie Vedder is a respected musician. But seeing them perform at Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit last night gave me deep new respect for the man and the group. For those who've never been, the annual concert benefits the Bridge School. The school was started by Neil and Peggy Young and works with severely mentally and physically handicapped kids. The concert is also notable in that the kids are up on stage and, along with their parents and caregivers, form a backdrop to the stage. We've been going to the benefit for the last 4 or 5 years and it is always telling to see whether musicians play solely to the audience or to the kids as well. I've never spent much time with someone that was severely handicapped so I have to confess that I would more likely avoid contact for fear of not knowing how. Among the musicians that I remember paying special attention to the kids are Dave Matthews, Gwen Stefani, and now, Eddie Vedder. Other have as well but these are the ones that made an extra effort. At last year's benefit, Gwen Stefani sang a whole song facing the kids with her back to the audience.

 

My wife and I came away from last night's performance personally touched, not just by Eddie Vedder's talent but what seems to be a deep respect for others around him. He started by dedicating his first song not just to the kids, but to one in particular, Cara. You could tell this brought enormous joy to her. Her face was contorting among several expressions no doubt due to her disabilities but you could tell that what she was trying to telegraph was deep, profound joy. Eddie also thanked "Uncle Neil" for helping to launch Pearl Jam's success. Later in the set, he was joined on stage by some classical musicians most likely from here in the Bay Area. As he was wrapping up for the night, he took to time to thank each of the classical musicians by name. Lastly he thanked the "amazing kids" and "incredible parents" of the Bridge School for inviting him to play, something he has done many times over the years. He then told the audience that, "we think we're doing this for them but really, it ends up doing so much for us."

 

Of course, one could be cynical and say that he knows what to say or that he was handed a slip of paper with Cara's name and the names of the classical musicians on it. Whether this happened or not, he spoke the names from memory and with sincerity. Eddie Vedder's voice is clearly the dominant instrument of the band. But on several songs I was struck by his sense of timing in remaining silent when you expected him to sing again. With all of his talent on voice and guitar, he could be forgiven if he became the typical self-obsessed, publicity-seeking rock star. Perhaps in part due to Uncle Neil's example, last night Eddie made it clear that he is a man with great integrity and someone who has earned my respect on many levels.

collaboration: win/win or win/lose?

While looking back on the last six months at my new job, it occurred to me that along with the rise in the level of collaboration with my Marketing, and Engineering coworkers came a feeling of having less control over the design. I was sharing very rough wireframes with the engineers and they were giving me very clear feedback. The engineers had been quite frustrated by the process prior to my arrival on the scene. They felt they were being dictated to and had little say in the design direction. I've always tried to be collaborative but bigger companies have bigger silos so collaboration often means collaborating with your immediate team (in my case among my fellow designers) and then reviewing the design with the engineering and product teams. Design reviews are not the same thing as collaboration.

Now that I have worked on two separate startups and several small product teams, I've experienced what it is like to be part of a small, truly cross-functional team. The benefit to me is that I am often able to see my designs implemented before I've even finished specifying them. Once there is consensus on the direction, the engineers start working on the code even though some details remain open. This was different from my last couple of jobs. But these  small team meetings mean I'm discussing rough designs with engineers and marketers instead of my fellow designers. It also means that I was the only voice representing the interests of design. The bulk of the feedback was technical and marketing. Their feedback also includes thoughts on what they think would most benefit the user but it is still a different type of input than a typical internal design review.

It reminds me of something Tim Barber told me in the early days of forming his design firm Odopod. I was considering hiring Odopod to work on a project for Sony (where I was design director). Tim had just come off a challenging demise to Rare Medium Inc., the web design firm that had grown from its start by three design freelancers in New York City to a firm comparable in size and influence to Razorfish and Sapient. The company gobled up smaller studios in cities where it wanted a presence, (including the San Francisco firm where Tim worked). It was then bought by a company with no presence in the web design space and proceeded to implode. It was a trying time for several amazing creative minds who were there at the time. After a classic Silicon Valley "sabatical," Tim started Odopod with two like minds. They wanted to start from scratch and do things differently. They sought to eliminate the tendancy among design consultancies to "toss it over the fence"... taking elegant but impractical designs and handing them off to the company as "fait accompli". By the time I hired Odopod, they had already worked on several successful partnerships with early Web2.0 companies. What Tim relayed to me about his experience made a lot of sense and cemented my decision to hire Odopod. For Tim, close collaboration meant sharing designs before they really wanted to. It was fine to talk about true collaborations but this was testing their comfort levels. Showing incomplete ideas makes you feel uncomfortable. But doing so inevitably confirms that you're understanding the client's intent (or misunderstanding it) earlier than you would when you work on a design until you feel it's airtight.

So, here I am, six months in and wondering if collaboration is win/lose where you win on collaboration but lose on design control or win/win where the ultimate design will be stronger because of the closer collaboration. Of course I know the answer but we'll have to wait till launch to see what the market has to say.