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!

It’s hot off the presses! As part of Making Policy Public, I collaborated with street vendors, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), and The Street Vendor Project to research, compile and design this guide to street vending in NYC. It clarifies the rules so NYC’s 10,000 vendors can understand their rights, avoid fines, and earn an honest living. The thick document of city regulations that vendors have been using is full of intimidating jargon and unformatted lists that would make even the most patient person cry. As a result, vendors are getting fined $1000 for simple things like parking their cart too far away from the curb - a rule that can only be followed if you know it exists. 

We’ve translated the most commonly-violated rules into diagrams and minimal text in English, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish. It also includes a big-ass poster full of fun facts on the history and challenges of NYC street vending, vendor types, personal vendor stories, and policy recommendations.

We’re passing them out to street vendors for free. Unfortunately I’m all the way up in Finland now, but if you’re in NYC and feeling frisky this weekend, please help us out!

CUP Call for Volunteers!

What: Helping with the one-day, citywide distribution extravaganza for Vendor Power! – a new illustrated guide to city vending regulation for New York’s 10,000 street vendors.
When: Saturday, March 28, 11:30 am - 2 pm
Where: We’ll meet at the Street Vendor Project, 123 William St., 16th Floor, in Lower Manhattan. Following a brief press event, volunteers will take the guides and fan out to vendor-dense neighborhoods across the city.

If you can’t make it to Lower Manhattan on Saturday, you can also pick up guides ahead of time at CUP and then distribute them in your neighborhood on March 28.

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…

What are your favorite places in Helsinki? Add it to the collaborative Google map here!

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.