By an S-Market grocery store in Helsinki.

Some choice findings at the local Finnish supermarket.

This is what the sidewalks look like during Vappu, the Finnish May Day celebration where students dress like race car drivers (academic jumpsuits color-coded by university department) in sailor hats (graduation caps)…

and everyone drinks large quantities in public space…

until the next day, when it’s capped off with a “quaint” picnic in Kaivopuisto Park with the rest of Helsinki…

Remarkably, the gruesome sidewalk residue of broken bottles, vomit, confetti and corks disappears within hours. A local told me they spend somewhere around 100,000 euro to clean the city after Vappu, and urban legend says they even lift each car and sweep under there. It’s an impressively streamlined mission and a talent they should outsource to other cities. How many people make up the cleaning department? When do they do it? How do they delegate the tasks? It would be enlightening to follow a few of these guys around for a day and see how the magic happens. By Monday it’s as if Vappu never happened and the girl I saw crawling on all fours licking a puddle of beer was but a fever dream…

Rachel Abrams, Creative Director of Turnstone Consulting, wrote a cool article “Five Ways to Redesign a City” for the UK Design Council magazine about ways interaction designers can tackle urban issues in various cities around the world. She includes good ol’ Helsinki and its public transportation-tracking tools with a little Atari reference from me. Watch the buses move in real time! An arrow notes the direction and the icons jolt every few seconds like a city version of Asteroids. And that’s just gravy because the trams, buses, and subway here are impressively precise. If the schedule says the bus is coming at 9:23 it comes at exactly 9:23. Low, predictable vehicular traffic makes this easier, plus an unsympathetic attitude towards stragglers. If you’re a second too late, the driver shuts the door and burns rubber past your puppy-eyed face. It’s the dust-eating price for reliability.

I’m so happy and honored to be a 2009 TEDGlobal Fellow! Yay! The inspiring conference features some of the world’s biggest thinkers and doers and I’ve spent many mind-churning hours glued to my laptop watching videos that include Bonnie Basler on how bacteria talk, Malcolm Gladwell on choices, Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia, Kwabena Boahen on a computer that works like the brain, and Nicholas Negroponte on touch-screen interfaces (in 1984).

TED recently launched a fellows program to help others join the community and gain some mentorship. After applying, twenty-five people were selected and we’ll attend the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, UK in July, exchange ideas, form a greater social network, and share our ongoing experiences on the TED blog throughout the year. I don’t know how I was able to slip into this impressive crowd that includes a leading female Kenyan software developer, a Jamaican robotics expert, and a next-generation Burmese human rights activist, but I’m excited to meet them and the lesson learned is - throw yourself out there! I look forward to good times ahead and check out some more of my favorite TED talks here. View more info and the press release for the 2009 TEDGlobal Fellows.  And if you’re interested in becoming a TEDIndia fellow in November, you can still apply until June 15!

Two of my projects, Million Dollar Blocks New Orleans and the Guide to Street Vending in New York City, are currently featured in the NYC exhibition The Global Polis: Interactive Infrastructures. Curated by Nader Vossoughian and organized by the Center for Architecture, the exhibit awesomely highlights communication tools as just as important of an infrastructure system as roads, housing, and sewer systems. Check it out if you can! Here’s an excerpt from the exhibit description:

What is infrastructure? For much of the twentieth century, the answer to this question was guided by the ideology of functionalist urbanism, a school of thought that said that all healthy cities served four major needs – work, housing, recreation, and transportation. Today, we no longer take this view for granted, for it is a perspective that makes no provisions for community, identity, or history.

Global Polis: Interactive Infrastructures documents a series of contemporary experiments in planning, architecture, and design that treat cities and their environments in holistic terms, as a complex social, political, and ecological matrix. Infrastructure cannot be divorced from the structure of democracy, from the environment at large, and the contributions to this exhibition highlight the important role that community, communication, participation, and the sharing of knowledge play in understanding the urban fabric.

Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place
New York, NY 10012
Open 9am – 8pm Monday – Friday and 11 – 5pm on Saturdays
Admission is free

NYC’s Urban Omnibus generously gave me the floor to write about the process of working with the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) and The Street Vendor Project to create a fold-out poster demystifying the regulations of street vending in New York City. None of it could have happened without CUP’s Making Policy Public program, which pairs designers and advocates to collaborate and make information on public policy truly public: accessible, meaningful, and shared.

I spent five months collaborating with these guys, better understanding the rough-and-tumble challenges vendors face, and speaking with vendors like Munnu (above) who sells hot dogs and pretzels at the corner of Lafayette and Reade. He moved to NYC from Bangladesh and has been a street vendor for 17 years, but it hasn’t been easy. Simple violations like parking your cart more than 18 inches from the curb or not “conspicuously” wearing your vending license can lead to steep fines. “One time I got a ticket because my jacket covered my license, and then I have to pay $1000 fine,” he said, “Do you have $1000 in your pocket? You don’t have it! I don’t have it! This hand makes money and the other hand finishes it very fast. How do they think I can give so much?” Check it out here!

Behold mammi, a traditional Finnish Easter pudding made from rye flour and malt that tastes like the dregs of your cereal bowl and is better served in mood lighting. How does the color of food affect the way taste is perceived? Food coloring is a common ingredient in chicken mcnuggets, salad dressings, sandwich buns and more to make processed foods the color we expect them to be. In a 1970s experiment flavor researchers served people seemingly normal-colored steak and french fries under colored lights. Once the disco lights came off and the steak turned out to be blue and the fries green, people threw up. And how much is color acceptance acquired? Isn’t snarfing Mammi as seemingly gross as drinking something black and bubbly like Coke? More about taste and color here…

When companies are trying to make the Latest Thing, there are lots of rules about keeping things on the hush hush. Nokia House, the headquarters just outside downtown Helsinki, is ripe with security. Every door in the ginormous complex can only be opened with a personal electronic gadget, and the design floor is even off-limits to employees from other floors.

This makes for running into lots of glass doors and psychologically feeling like you’re doing some top secret stuff. But it’s not all secretive and a lot of projects benefit from the spirit of open-source collaboration. Field work and user studies are common here, but they’re still short-term and limited in locations and number of people involved. How can we work way beyond these glass doors?

1 in 4 workers has been with their employer for less than a year. 1 in 2 has been there for less than 5 years (from this video of fun facts). What does it mean to “work for a company”? What if people worked a little bit for a lot of companies (or there were no companies at all)? This could be a potential source of income for lots of consumers-turned-proactive collaborators, including residents in Johannesburg townships who almost all use Nokia phones, are looking for economic opportunities, and whose continuous feedback would greatly improve the tools Nokia is trying to make. There are emerging efforts like  Redesignme.com and Txteagle to co-create with companies (which could, at the very least, prevent juice packaging backlashes), and there are more peer-to-peer tools like Shorttask and Otetsudai that allow individuals to work for and with each other on a short term scale. We still need to develop the methods to compensate lots of people in lots of places for longer periods of time. In the spirit of crowdsourcing and microfunding, how can we facilitate crowdemployment and microsalaries? - with the hopes that all of your microsalaries add up to something macro…

Article all about the street vendor guide!

And check out my project page for more photos of the guide and the distribution to vendors!