Design with Intent | Architecture

News from Runnymede

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 20, 2007 ⋅ 3 comments

All sketches from John Thompson & Partners’ ‘Runnymede Campus Community Planning Broadsheet’ and photographs of the public presentation. Apologies for the variations in image quality and colour balance.
This post’s overdue but I wanted to have some real news (and images) rather than pure speculation.

Review: Architecture as Crime Control by Neal Katyal

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 18, 2007 ⋅ 5 comments

Review: Katyal, N. K. “Architecture as Crime Control”, Yale Law Journal, March 2002, Vol 111, Issue 5.
Professor Neal Kumar Katyal of Georgetown University Law School, best-known for being (successful) lead counsel in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case dealing with Guantanamo Bay detainees, has also done some important work on the use of design as a [...]

New, more concrete opportunities

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 14, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

School of Engineering & Design, Tower A, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex.
After a month of lifting and shifting boxes, frantic cleaning, driving lots of different vehicles, and dealing with bureaucracy, I’ve now moved house and started my PhD at Brunel; with broadband now set up, and enough space to sit with a laptop amid the not-yet-unpacked [...]

(Anti-)public seating roundup

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 24, 2007 ⋅ 13 comments

Single-occupancy benches in Helsinki. Photo by Ville Tikkanen
Ville Tikkanen of Salient Feature points us to the “asocial design” of these single-person benches installed in Helsinki, Finland. In true Jan Chipchase style, he invites us to think about the affordances offered:
As you can see, the benches are located a few meters away from each other and [...]

The Terminal Bench

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 6, 2007 ⋅ 19 comments

Mags L Halliday – author of the Doctor Who novel History 101 – let me know about an ‘interesting’ design tactic being used at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. From the Guardian, by Julia Finch:
Flying from the new Heathrow Terminal 5 and facing a lengthy delay? No worries. Take a seat and enjoy the spectacular views through [...]

Deliberately creating worry

By Dan Lockton ⋅ June 15, 2007 ⋅ 5 comments

Swedish creativity lecturer Fredrik Härén mentions an interesting architecture of control anecdote in his The Idea Book:
One of the cafés in an international European airport was often full. The problem was that people sat nursing their coffees for a long time as they waited for their planes to depart. The café asked itself: How can [...]

archiPWNED

By Dan Lockton ⋅ May 24, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

Image from archiPWNED portfolio entry (PDF)
Scott Nusinow, one of Cory Doctorow’s students in his University of Southern California class, ‘PWNED: Everyone on Campus is a Copyright Criminal‘, carried out an architectural concept project for the design of a Los Angeles library. He’s specifically addressed ‘architectures of control’ in the contexts of encouraging the public to [...]

Anti-user seating in Oxford

By Dan Lockton ⋅ March 6, 2007 ⋅ 24 comments

Top two photos: A bench on Cornmarket Street, Oxford; Lower two photos: A bus stop seat perch on Castle Street.
While from a very narrow specification point-of-view ‘they do their job’, what utter contempt for users these two seating examples demonstrate! The benches on Cornmarket Street are clearly intended to prevent anyone lying down on them [...]

Friday quote: Super-Cannes by J G Ballard

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 26, 2007 ⋅ 3 comments

J G Ballard, Super-Cannes, chapter 29:
Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.
Re-reading Ballard’s excellent Super-Cannes, since the way the winter afternoon sunlight suddenly caught a building a few days [...]

Some links

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 17, 2007 ⋅ 2 comments

First, an apology for anyone who’s had problems with the RSS/Atom feeds over the last month or so. I think they’re fixed now (certainly Bloglines has started picking them up again) but please let me know if you don’t read this. Oops, that won’t work… anyway:
‘Gadgets as Tyrants’ by Xeni Jardin, looks at digital architectures [...]

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