“But I loved the puzzle-like nature of working in sixteen-by-sixteen and thirty-two-by-thirty-twopixel icon grids, and the marriage of craft and metaphor.”
I just came across this new documentary “Design Canada” coming out soon, it looks really interesting:
Through the lens of graphic design, Design Canada follows the transformation of a nation from a colonial outpost to a vibrant and multicultural society.
“There is no danger that Titanic will sink. The boat is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the passengers.”
Phillip Franklin, White Star Line vice-president, 1912
Excitement about the impending opening of Scotland’s first design museum, the V&A Dundee, is growing. Many a passer-by has recently stood outside the Heras fencing and stared at the building as it nears completion.
Some of those people will have noticed with anticipation the stone benches and ledges of the mirror pool and contemplated not just their aesthetics but also their functional use. Skateboarders tend to view cities and architecture differently than the average person walking through a town centre, seeing potential for skating in the various objects and structures encountered in the urban environment.
Benches and ledges of the mirror pool outside the V&A Dundee.
Benches outside the V&A Dundee.
Benches outside the V&A Dundee.
Benches outside the V&A Dundee.
Benches and ledges of the mirror pool outside the V&A Dundee.
“Skaters by their very nature are urban guerillas: they make everyday use of the useless artifacts of the technological burden, and employ the handiwork of the government/corporate structure in a thousand ways that the original architects could never dream of.” ~ Craig Stecyk
As the quote above by Craig Stecyk suggests, very often the creators of architectural surfaces have not had in mind some of the ways that people ultimately interact with them, skateboarding, bmx, parkour, all make use of the urban environment in alternative ways. Walls that were intended to contain or guide people become something to jump over, grind and slide on.
This latter point is what raises a concern about the benches, ledges and the general surrounding area of the V&A Dundee. Has the “skateability” of the surrounding street furniture been a consideration when it has been designed and built? Is this going to be a surprise consequence and result in the deployment of hostile design measures to prevent anyone trying to skate any element of Kengo Kuma’s creation?
Skateable by design – Glasgow Museum of Transport
In 2011 Glasgow’s £74m Riverside Museum of Transport, designed by renowned architect Zaha Hadid, was opened to the public. From the outset the museum was designed to have a multi-functional open plaza area intended for hosting events and to be specifically skateboard-friendly. Lawrence Fitzgerald, Project Director for the museum describes the intentions:
“Rather than discourage the informal use of the hard landscape by skateboarders and cyclists, the Riverside museum provides an undulating and kerb-free space for this hard-to-attract young audience. Inside the museum, teenage transport is further validated through displays on Glasgow skateboarding, BMX and chopper bikes.”
So from the outset skateboarders have been encouraged to skate parts of the building itself and in the area surrounding the building. Rather than attempting to prevent this usage they instead have embraced and actively encourage it, and in turn to encourage a younger demographic to have a reason to visit the museum. Their commitment to this has continued with the hosting of various skate competition events and also in the summer of 2017 with the addition of purpose built concrete features to provide even more opportunities for skateboarders.
One of the design briefs for Glasgow's Riverside Museum of Transport was to make a skateable area, so the metal blocks out the front were designed and built to be skated. (Image credit: Glasgow Museum of Transport)
New additions to Riverside Museum of Transport under construction in 2017. (Image credit: Concreate Skateparks)
New additions to Riverside Museum of Transport under construction in 2017. (Image credit: Concreate Skateparks)
New additions to Riverside Museum of Transport under construction in 2017. (Image credit: Concreate Skateparks)
New additions to Riverside Museum of Transport under construction in 2017. (Image credit: Concreate Skateparks)
Completed additions to Riverside Museum of Transport. (Image credit: Concreate Skateparks)
For a Museum of Transport there would obviously have been quite a degree of irony if they had chosen to actively fight against these activities.
Unskateable by design – Bristo Square, Edinburgh
In a fairly stark contrast to the approach of actively embracing skateboarding from the outset there is the example of Bristo Square in Edinburgh. A public space within the University of Edinburgh’s campus which many people passed through and home to many skateboarders, as well as a few homeless people. This was a prime urban skate location for decades, skateboarding was never actively encouraged in Bristo Square before the refurbishment and it definitely wasn’t an activity that was considered in its design, but it was an extremely popular location and visited by many skaters from across Scotland.
“It’s a missed opportunity by the university. They could have included the skateboarders in their plans, combining the user groups. Perhaps the university was a bit narrow-minded with its approach. They didn’t even consider skateboarding. It seemed a little bit from their plans as though they were purposely going out of their way to prevent it.”
“Skateboarders have been a problem in the past and regularly return to the area. Consideration should be given to materials such as tactile pavers and landscaping techniques that dissuade skateboarders from using the area. The position and design of handrails on either side of the pavilion should be such that it also discourages use by skateboarders and bikers”
These purposeful design decisions were taken despite the planning application documents also citing a report prepared by the Edinburgh Urban Design Panel in 2012 which considered skateboarding a contributing factor to what made Bristo Square a positive part of Edinburgh’s urban environment:
“The mix of different type of people, including people passing through, students and skateboarders and others that use Bristo Square mean that even though it presents challenges for clarity of pedestrian movement, community safety and so on, the space does contribute positively to the life of the city.”
Whilst this does acknowledge the potential issues of having pedestrians and skateboarders together in the same environment it appears to favour the approach of embracing all potential uses of the space, as opposed to actively trying to prevent them as the resulting redesign of Bristo Square has done. An approach that has worked well for Glasgow Museum of Transport.
Which approach for the V&A?
As the V&A Dundee is a museum of design there is a strong argument that the design of the surroundings and the street furniture around it should take into account the different ways that people might interact with it. As shown from the examples of Glasgow Museum of Transport and Edinburgh’s Bristo Square, people don’t just walk or sit in urban environments.
The creation of the Slessor Gardens open space and the planned waterfront “urban beach” shows some consideration of the need to provide ways to encourage people to spend time in the area. But are we going to end up with attempts to ban and discourage activities like skateboarding and excluding a thriving cultural activity, and an important younger demographic, because it doesn’t fit in with how the area was designed?
A sure sign that these activities were not considered will be if we see some hastily added hostile design “skate-stopper” features added to all the benches and ledges around the V&A Dundee and waterfront areas.
Skateboard urbanism – rise of the intentionally skateable city?
Hull joins other cities around the world like Melbourne, Copenhagen and Malmö who have also declared that skateboarding, and other urban sports, are a key aspect of their cultural heritage, embracing and encouraging the use of city architecture and spaces for these activities rather than attempting to ban and confine them only to dedicated skateparks.
“And so even more welcome is Hull’s plan to provide “skateboard-friendly” areas around public buildings – integrating skateboarding into the everyday public arena is a hugely positive step forward, and follows the example of places like Malmö, Innsbruck, Cologne, etc., who have all made ambiguous spaces which aren’t outright skateparks but are still open to skating. It remains to be seen, of course, exactly what Hull will provide in this area, but the intention is admirable. And if Hull can have a go, why not other UK cities?”
Dundee – skateboarding friendly, by design?
As a city which is the UK’s only UNESCO City of Design there is a great opportunity in Dundee to embrace “skateboard urbanism” and to see how it can benefit the regeneration of the city as a whole. Two of Dundee’s aims as a City of Design are:
“use design as a cornerstone in addressing both social inequalities and opportunities that exist in the city”
“focusing on social design, redesigning public service and community engagement”
With these aims in mind, it would seem that it’s time for a conversation about how skateboarding, and other urban sports such as parkour, BMX etc, fit in to the V&A Dundee, the surrounding waterfront space and the city as a whole.
Earlier in this article I poised a question regarding whether the “skateability” of the V&A and its surroundings was a consideration during the design process. Following on from that it just remains to ask one more question: Will those involved in the development of the V&A Dundee and regeneration of these areas take the skate-friendly approach of Glasgow’s Museum of Transport or the hostile-design approach of the Bristo Square redevelopment?
References & additional information for further reading:
Hostile Design: https://www.bigissue.com/news/hostile-takeover-welcome-public-spaces/ “I’m not sure what I find more offensive – the hidden agenda or the addition, like spikes. It is a bit like adding a swear word into a polite conversation versus saying something polite that has another nastier meaning.” – quote from Iain Borden regarding anti-skate, anti-homeless measures. https://hostiledesign.org
If you use the standard “Instagram Platform API” for anything then it’s worth noting that planned deprecations have just been brought forward as of 5th April 2018. It seems like this is going to cause quite a few apps to break and result in a lot of unhappy developers:
To continuously improve Instagram users’ privacy and security, we are accelerating the deprecation of Instagram API Platform, making the following changes effective immediately. We understand that this may affect your business or services, and we appreciate your support in keeping our platform secure.
These capabilities will be disabled immediately (previously set for July 31, 2018 or December 11, 2018 deprecation). The following will be deprecated according to the timeline we shared previously:
Khoi Vinh’s speaker notes from a talk he gave at The School of Visual Arts in New York is an interesting read:
“So when I consider design thinking, it matters less to me whether it leads to a lot of bad design or not. What matters to me is whether it helps broaden the language of design, if it helps expand the community of design, if it helps build a world that values and understands design better than it does today. If design thinking is making us more relevant to the world at large, leading non-designers to embrace the way designers think, then the net effect strikes me as positive.”
I was watching a documentary about the 100th centenary of the UK’s Royal Air Force today and in particular it looked at the early aircraft used in World War 1.
I was reminded that Dundee has a history of innovation in the early days of flight. Preston Albert Watson built and flew aircraft in and around Dundee, at times from a makeshift runway in Errol. There’s a lot of debate as to when he first flew, some records point to it happening prior to the Wright Brothers first powered flight, however this is largely held to be inaccurate.
Regardless though, Preston Watson is definitely another innovator from Dundee who should perhaps be a bit more widely known.
Back in December 2014 I published a post about a great “llustrated history of Mac OSX” made by the makers of the Git client ‘Tower’ for Mac and Windows Since that time they have continued to update it to include more recent releases (and also the change the title to use “macOS” as Apple’s OS is known as now).
I noticed recently that the team at Tower have now followed up their OSX / macOS history with an “Illustrated history of iOS” which is a great concise history of Apple’s mobile operating system. It’s a nice little run through of the progress of iOS from 2007 until now.
Newscasters! Are you tired of having only a limited choice of words to emphasise the strength or impact of severe snow-specific weather events? Don’t want to use the old chestnuts of “snowpocalypse”, “snowmageddon”, “snowtastrophe” or “snownami”? Then this handy list of alternative neologisms may* just be what you need!
Snowballistic
Snowfliction
Absnowmination
Snowlamity
Snowasco
Desnowlation
Snowlocaust
Snowgedy
Snowbacle
Snowmergency
Snowplexed
Snowcessity
Snowdicament
Snowlemma
Insnowferrable
Snowayitcanbethatbad
Snowmyfault
* Usefulness, accuracy and / or relevance of these alternative neologisms may vary, contents may have settled during transit, batteries not included.
I’ve used many different hosting companies over the 20+ years I’ve been working on the web (and blogged about the poor state of hosting in the UK compared to the US going back quite a few years!), recently I have looked to consolidate a few personal project sites onto a VPS of their own so I thought I’d check out Digital Ocean and see how they stack up to other services I’ve used.
So far my experience has been really good, quick to spin up server instances, or droplets in Digital Ocean’s terminology. Even better is that since middle of January they have at least doubled the specifications that you get for your money. I opted for the $20 a month droplet which gets me 4GB ram and 80GB of disk space and 2 vcpus (previously 2GB ram and 40GB disk space). So overall that is pretty great value for money.
I’m currently working through the process of migrating all my personal sites (including this blog), a bit time consuming but good to get all of my site projects (such as Twitterative.com, isittimetogetupyet.com) and various other bits and pieces.
If you’re interesting in checking out Digital Ocean for hosting they actually offer a referral scheme so if you sign up via this link: https://m.do.co/c/5d661dba3f12 you’ll get $10 credit, so go check it out if you want a few dollars credit to check out out and see if it suits your needs.
