One of these posters I made will be in the exhibit Poster4Tomorrow, a global event highlighting the censorship that still muffles citizens around the world. I got a first-hand schooling from TED Fellow Esra’a Al Shafei who can’t have her picture taken/posted for fear of being identified by various Middle Eastern governments. Her organization MideastYouth.com is an unfiltered platform that facilitates freedom of expression and constructive discussion amongst youth in the Middle East (with provocative video mashups to boot), but they have to constantly get their nerd on and rewire their internets in order to keep their lines open to the rest of the world. At least not as bad as in China, she said, where the internet police are even more sophisticated in their nerdy ways. Spread that. The exhibit of 100 posters from designers around the world launches December 10th in 20+ cities including Beirut, Belgrade, and Buenos Aires. Latest news here. If you want to print them out you can download big versions here and here.

By an S-Market grocery store in Helsinki.

Some choice findings at the local Finnish supermarket.

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.

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…

No free streaming tv here! Hello bit torrents…

U.S. magazines cost as much as books! Now eating while reading Time is for fancy days…

There’s no peanut butter and people think PBJ sandwiches are grody! Gots to tell people what time it is…

How do you feel comfortable in a city? For me, part of it is knowing what direction I’m facing. This was an easy thing to do in NYC where I was always aware I was walking north on Mott or west on Spring. As one of the first planned cities, Helsinki actually has a grid too, but they decided to make it hard and rotate it 45 degrees in a major part of downtown:

I live all up in the angle so I’m directionally-challenged out the door. What I imagined as west-ish is other people’s north-ish, and the calculated person’s northwest. It’s not so easy to give directions this way - add a few northeasts, southwests, and street names like Ruoholahdenkatu, and it turns into soup real fast. Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s interesting theory on why Asians are good at math (from his book Outliers) - Chinese number words are so brief and can be said so quickly that a Chinese person is almost always likely to quickly remember a sequence like 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6 while an English-speaking person only gets it right half the time. And numbers beyond 10 are all logical (12 is literally ten-two) so math is made easy while English-speakers need a split second more to translate “twelve” in their mind.

So here, like in other places, landmarks and geography come more into play - go “away from Kamppi” or “towards the water,” which reminds me of Shawshank Redemption when Tim Robbins tells Morgan Freeman to find the funny rock in the stone wall near a big oak tree that looks like something out of a Robert Frost poem. Maybe this will make for a more poetic understanding. Or just more glancing at my mobile phone map.

Crashstat.org combines Google maps with DMV stats on pedestrian and biking accidents so you can see which NYC intersections are danger zones. Since 1995, there have been 35 injuries and 2 fatalities just two blocks from my old apartment. And that doesn’t count tramplings-by-fellow-pedestrians on Canal Street… Made by Transportation Alternatives.

Etherea record store, NYC

When played enough times, songs will become forever bonded to a particular place and time in your life. Bel Biv Devoe’s Poison reminds me of my parents’ home (it was the radio, not them ha). Giorgio Moroder’s The Chase reminds me of my first NYC apartment. Nico’s These Days takes me back to Johannesburg. And now I think I’ve solidified a song for my first month in Helsinki - California Dreamin’ by The Mamas and The Papas. It’s my emotional artillery to stave off the cold…

If you’re in luckier weather in Los Angeles, the New Media Caucus is hosting an exhibit called “@” at Sci-Arc this week that includes a participatory L.A. version of my Post-it Notes for Neighbors project. It coincides with the College Art Association Annual Conference, which looks like a neat gathering about the visual arts and includes a screening of The Cool School, a PBS documentary about how a few renegade artists built the L.A. art scene from scratch.

New Media Caucus Reception for the Exhibition “@”
With live cinema by Be Johnny and Potter-Belmar Labs
Thursday February 26 9:30 pm
SCI-Arc: 960 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013

Big thanks to xtine for helping arrange the gallery show!

NYC’s Architectural League recently launched an inspiring online project called the Urban Omnibus that showcases design and activism in the City. They were kind enough to feature my thoughts behind my Post-it Notes for Neighbors public art project. Check it out here!

Big thanks to Cassim Shepard and the Omnibus family!