Tag: "design"
Seen any really great parking lots lately?
That’s the question that led Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of landscape architecture and urban design at MIT to write his new book Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking, a badly needed reconsideration of the parking lot: “We all use parking lots, and we all kind of hate them,” Ben-Joseph says. “Yet they’re [...]
Cities & Our Common Future
We’re taking a break from regular blogging this week. We leave you with this TED talk by Alex Steffen, in which he discusses how cities can create a “shareable” sustainable future. Be back next Monday!
Symptoms of Urban Land Use Problems
Over at the Global Urbanist (via Planetizen), Ann Deslandes has a post on informal users of urban space that can range from so-called (and widely celebrated) “pop-up shops” of “do-it-yourself” (DIY) urbanists to the homeless population. She makes the interesting argument that they are positive and negative symptoms of the same urban land use problem: [...]
Design as a Key Skill in the 21st Century
We’ve discussed this before, but over at the New England Journal of Higher Education, Montserrat College president Stephen Immerman makes a case for art and design education to be considered equally important for economic life as disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math: So much of the narrative of our modern world is dependent on [...]
3-D Printing & “Organic” Manufacturing
The Economist had a correspondent at the recent Euromold conference in Frankfurt. They filed an interesting report on how 3-D printing (aka “additive manufacturing”) is not only changing the manufacturing process, but also how products are designed. The process enables fabricators to closely copy design solutions found in nature: An excellent example of deliberately copying [...]
“Build a Better ‘Burb” Website is Launched for Long Island
The Rauch Foundation has launched a new website to help revitalize Long Island, NY. It is essentially an on-line manifesto aimed at transforming this quintessential suburban area to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. The site has useful information and ideas grouped in three areas: housing, regionalism (i.e., government consolidation), parking & transit and [...]
