For those of you who aren’t in the loop, TEDxAdelaide hosted a dedicated TEDxCity 2.0 event last October. The licensee and curator, Kristin Alford of Bridge8, is what we call a ‘futurist’ and as such a very apt host for the day. The program gathered the very best of urban thinkers and social entrepreneurs of Adelaide (and this includes the Lord Mayor of Adelaide, Stephen Yarwood) in an intimate setting. The event was developed to coincide with the IDC’s closing statement, the 5000+ Collaborative City exhibition at Tuxedo Cat on North Terrace, a great way to retire the IDC’s role within DPC and the State Government.

I had been involved in the Moving City Forum, once of the 5 or 6 forums that formed the basis of the consultation and collaboration between public and private sector to imagine the future of Adelaide and to develop speculative strategic projects throughout the city that would promote integrated design. At the forum, I was asked to speak about data in cities and how movement in cities extends beyond the movement of goods and people into flows of invisible data. It was an Urban Informatics 101 that, I think, challenged the thinking for some of the attendees. You can have a look at my talk here. I would also encourage you to browse the other talks and resources that have been compiled on the 5000+ website, a great compendium to use as an educational tool.

The Moving City Forum was a good introductory piece for the TEDx talk which went one step forward and built on the argument that data is also moving through our cities capture by sensors, analysed by computers and fed back into the urban realm to establish that invisible information shapes the way we design and use our cities. You can view the whole talk here.

My talk was called ‘City of Bits’, a title that was not of my choosing but that was an apt reference to William J. Mitchell’s eponymous book of 1996.  A visionary piece of literature that foresaw the logic behind cities and people connected to one another through the platform of the World Wide Web.

For TEDx, I couched my argument in an obvious analogy, pointing out the shortsightedness of relying on the tangible and visible as inputs into the design of our cities. I used the analogy of Charles Booth’s mapping of London under the cholera epidemic to show that small and invisible thing such as bacteria, once visualised and understood, reshaped forever our understanding of the connection between water, sanitation and built form. A bit of a retro argument to make a point about the digital age but seemed to illustrate my premise adequately.

This established the discipline of data visualisation as a strategic activity in urban analysis, not only a cool art form that will fade with time. I looked to the work of CASA at UCL, SIDL at Columbia University, and now the recently founded Civic Data Design Project at MIT as research institutes that are establishing data visualisation as a strategic discipline.

There has been some debate in the past few months around the fact that data visualisation and infographics in general have been trivialised and are, in many instances, not as statistically sound as they should be, and used as a way to make an argument or a dataset more convincing that it really is. This is an issue that mapping and statistical analysis in general suffers from, as both of these can be, in fact, deeply political and subjective toolsets.

I feel it is important to acknowledge the limitations of this discipline and the need for spatial analysis to be grounded in sound methodologies as well as intuitive ways of presenting complex information. This is something that the Data team at the Guardian does so well. Only yesterday I was looking through their forensic work on the London Riots which looked into the detail of how social media helped create and quash rumours.  The interactive interface is also nothing short of awesome. The team explains how they built it here.

Back to Adelaide and the City 2.0, my argument then moved on to establish that there are 6 ways in which invisible data impacts the way we design and use our cities. I rushed through some of these on the day so I thought it worthwhile to spell out my thinking on this in written form.  These are:

1. Data as a primary input shifts the discipline of urban design into the realm of service design where the urban experience is created spatially but also in a layered fashion through the data about that space that you can query at any one time. Whether through augmented reality applications such as the Museum of the Phantom City, or through location- based services such as Evernote’s Hello or Highlight, our experience of a particular space in the city is something that we can tune in and out of. This is impacting on the way city makers are thinking about the role and programming of public spaces: why should urban design elements of a city be fixed when it could be looked at as a platform for renewable programming, supported by the basic infrastructure of power and data? This is a theme I had already explored on Arup’s Thought Leadership Blog a few months earlier.

2. The second way in which data changes the way we use our cities is in the possibility of gaining mass insight into the way cities are used. For this I used the example of the interactive visualisation project Arup did for the City of Melbourne which looked at understanding on a city scale the patterns and frequency of noise complaints throughout the city. Rather than looking at this data as a series of incidents that are seemingly unrelated, the interface help policy makers think about the relationship between complaints and council-led activities and permitted uses.

3. The third is the exponential growth of Digital Public Space which refers to digitally connected spaces that are emerging across cities globally. Wi-Fi is indeed fast becoming a basic public amenity, yet one that is still marred with a lot of confusion and unresolved governance. The concept is to make of  public spaces both physical and virtual commons that can be used as a third space. Through our work with the State Library of Queensland, the State Library of NSW and others, we have found that digital public spaces are amongst the most popular offerings of some of these institutions and that these drive visitation numbers in unexpected proportions.

4. But all this data unfortunately doesn’t just live in the cloud with no impact on land use and the environment. Through the spatial dissociation of where data is created and where it has a physical and environmental impact we have created a disconnect between the creation of data and where that data needs to be stored, in a very similar way to the way we have created a disconnect between meat and where is comes from. Every single tween, every single instragram needs to be stored somewhere on a server, in a data centre that is a highly energy, and therefore carbon intensive, facility. Carbon (In)Justice refers to the urban and land use impacts of these data centres as a proliferating urban use that has really never been planned for that impacts on energy demand, co-location, urban heat and so many other environmental factors in their direct vicinity. This highlights that, to our great despair, the cloud cannot be the answer to our environmental woes: what goes into the cloud has to come out somewhere….

5. In terms of how increasing data is impacting the design of our cities, data and our expectation for large and instant amounts of it is also driving a particular infrastructure agenda around the design and delivery of fibre optic networks. The NBN is currently being rolled out in Australia, which under the Labor government, connects fibre to the home (the Opposition plan, proposes to connect fibre to street corners and then use the existing Telstra copper infrastructure to connect to homes, a subpar solution in my humble opinion). The intention behind the roll out of the NBN is that it will drive the growth of a digital economy (which it probably will), but this economy will also continue to demand ever improving infrastructure, or in other words, Hyperperforming Infrastructure. The NBN’s currently proposed speeds are probably fine for domestic use, but the use of fibre in commercial contexts, where instant access to data is a matter of profit or loss, is actually driving locational choices in cities. As Frank Partnoy explains in his book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, locational decisions for stock trading firms in New York City are driven by the need to be able to wait as long as possible before making a decision on whether to buy or sell stock. And we are talking milliseconds here. Which is where the demand for not only high performing, but hyper performing infrastructure is coming from. It is banking and high frequency trading that is driving that agenda today. What sector will be next?

6. Finally, data about the way we use our cities and its analysis is shifting design from a predictive discipline to an adaptive discipline. This is an idea that Dan Hill and I used to discuss a lot when he was still at Arup (and I am sure he won’t mind me using the diagram created to explain this): a concept that challenges a lot of what we hold true about architectural design and practice as a way of anticipating activities and behaviours in a space. Adaptive design looks first at the evidence of behavioural patterns to then intervene in space and thus creates a practice of urban prototyping of services and spaces that is much more nimble and flexible than the way we currently procure our built environment.

This quick and imperfect write up and hopefully a good way to translate what my thinking was on the day, especially given the limited time I had to present on the day (more TED speaking training needed here!) and is also the foundation for the interview I did on ABC by Design for Fenella Kernebone and Janne Ryan only shortly after.

I will soon be doing a write up of the #digitaldisruption talk presented by Siobhan Toohill (@verdantflaneur) of Westpac, Shauna Coffey of Deloitte, Rachel Dixon of Viacom and myself. Stay tuned and enjoy the weather!

As a consultant, you apply your time to fulfilling the objectives of a brief that has been handed to your by a client. The ‘strategy’ briefs are quite common and understandably so: the objective is to set out a framework for action over a protracted period of time. Strategies lay out the conceptual foundations to justify action in the future in a particular area. But as with all projects, the way the project is framed, the way in which the client conceptualises his/her needs is crucial to the success of these projects.

Of late, I have been involved with the development of digital strategies for local councils here in Australia. The advent of the NBN has initiated a local government conversation about what their role in the roll out of the NBN is but also, on the longer term, what are the public sector reform priorities that stem from high speed broadband. It is a very interesting field as more reliable and fast digital infrastructure is allowing the sweeping transformation of business models, service delivery models and engagement with the community.

So the impact of the NBN as piece of infrastructure, another pipe in the ground if you will, actually potentially has an impact on each and every aspect of a council’s operation. The breadth and depth of change it can engender is often misunderstood at a local level, where anything that is ‘digital’ is construed as only having relevance to the IT department.

Being in my line of work, helping clients navigate the impacts of the information age on their project or organisation, this is problem that is recurrent. There is no telling where the impacts will stop, and therefore a document intended as a digital strategy can end up including organisational change and culture change recommendations. Upon reflection, gains in efficiency, innovation, effectiveness are all things that clients are after when they approach us for this type of work. But often they are not fully prepared for the strategy that questions most of the organisation’s activities.

This is what Dan Hill found when working with the City of Melbourne on the C40 Melbourne Smart City strategy. A stellar piece of work, lots of work went into making the initiatives tangible, graspable and likeable through high quality visualisation of new urban information systems that could be deployed as a result of Melbourne harnessing the power of digital information as the connective tissue that binds all city operations together. Dan reflected on his work after leaving Arup and wrote up his thoughts in this post.

He reflected on the fact that his brief had been to focus on the physicality of internet-based services in the urban environment. But having attended the recent CoMConnect Unconference, an unconference designed to crowd source a digital strategy for the City of Melbourne, it became apparently very quickly on the day that as brilliant and well executed as Dan’s report had been, it had also been a ‘clientless’ brief. Because of its focus on the paradigm shift needed to rethink internet or real-time based services, the strategy cut across most of council’s operations without having a natural home within one of the departments and as such, is incredibly hard to implement once handed over. Fundamentally, there is a mismatch between the cross-disciplinary and cross-department collaboration a strategy such as Dan’s would require to be successfully implemented and the client’s organisational structure .

One could argue that we only have ourselves, as consultants, to blame for this mismatch: we should have studied the implementation potential of this strategy before we delivered it. Whilst this is probably true in many ways, any meaningful innovation in public service delivery at a local government level, the level which thrives at the coalface of community, will have to come through significant organisational and structural change. Digital thinking focuses the thought process on the information flows and centres this on the user. A user doesn’t care where all the data comes from, which department is responsible for what. Users have expectations of systems, and these expectations are applied to public services as much as they are to other services.

So what does this mean for the future of digital strategies? What could be more effective ways to work with councils (and other clients) to help them transform themselves to meet new user expectations? These were the exact questions I asked Emile Hooge in Paris when I was last there. Emile is pretty much my counterpart in Paris, he works for a Foresight and Innovation firm based in Lyon called Nova7 and he pointed out to me the value of prototypes to clients. Prototypes are the live, tangible proofs of concept that can demonstrate the benefits of cross-silo collaboration. It is a focused labour and a focus of participation and engagement within an organisation. And when operational, a prototype can build capacity as well as  an incredible sense of pride and teamwork to the team that delivered it.

So in the end I think there is a good case to advise clients to embark on a prototyping journey rather than developing a strategy, especially since so little of our urban environment is properly prototyped before it is implemented. If unsuccessful, just remember the consultant’s golden rule: ‘there is no bad client, there is only bad consulting’.

I am back in my hometown, getting to know the place again. I don’t know if any of you ever feel this, but the first couple of days of being back, I feel like I am in a movie, people don’t look real, places look like movie sets. I’ve just gotten over that feeling now and am well and truly back in the swing of things.

Paris is impressing me (weather aside), I am finding a bunch of little innovations left, right and centre that I perhaps never would have noticed had I lived here uninterrupted for the past 10 years. The most noticeable is ‘auto lib”, the electric vehicle equivalent to velib’ which the world, with the exception of Parisians, regard as a quite successful bike sharing program. I’ve used it a few times and if you’re a member, it is a pretty smooth process. You can tell JC Decaux are struggling to keep them all in working order though. My friend Martina from Boston was using one yesterday with a couple of her friends and between broken gears and floating toilet paper caught in the wheel, you never quite know what you’re gonna get with Velib’.

Back on auto lib’ though, it’s pretty amazing as a system. You sign up, very much like Go Get in Sydney, except that the cars are electric therefore silent and non polluting! The only downside I can see is that you don’t hear the cars when you’re crossing the street without looking, which happens to me a lot.

The design of the stations is quite unique, with semi-spherical pods popping out in the street every-so-often. The site boasts 1740 cars and over 1100 stations throughout the city by the end of June 2012. You pay a flat fee per year and then a ‘consumption’ fee of 5 euros per 30 mins. I would imagine that that takes care of insurance and all that jazz. I have yet to use it but I like the idea and the commitment by the Ville de Paris to something this radical. Parisians are not huge car users overall, most people use the reliable metro system but if you are to use a car, you might as well go green…

Speaking of urban innovations in Paris, I (briefly) attended Futur en Seine yesterday at le 104 in Paris’s north. Le 104 is a newly created ‘creative cluster’ that has been converted from its former life as a municipal morgue into a cultural centre. It started out quite artsy fartsy as the stage for Philippe Starck’s UK TV show called ‘Design for Life‘ but has now realigned its mission statement to be more integrated into the local community’s life. It’s now the stage for a number of artistic projects including performances, a restaurant, a gallery and temporary event and workspace. For Futur en Seine, le 104 even hosted a Fab Lab. It’s quite extraordinary how le the 104 hosts an event like Futur en Seine as well as a hip hop rehearsal and a Tai Chi class, all at the same time!

Futur en Seine is a festival of digital ideas for the city. It gathered architects, industrial designers, programmers and innovators of all sorts in a two day extravaganza to show wares and share ideas. It was a bit hit and miss, a lot of ideas were still in prototype stages, which is a good thing. Large companies such as SNCF and EDF were there too to showcase their innovations, but their section of the expo was largely under patronised. A couple of projects resonated with me, others I found a bit gadgety but I suppose these kind of events are about testing out the appetite, viability and commercialisation potential of a lot of ideas.

I went to Futur en Seine with Emile Hooge, of Nova7 in Lyon, a local consulting crew that helps clients navigate service design from a user-led perspective. They work on transport and urban projects amongst other things. It was great to finally meet Emile, we’d been interacting for months on Twitter and finally got together to discuss the informatics and service design landscape both in Paris and Sydney. Interestingly, Emile had a lot of experience working with local government here in France and was sharing some interesting thoughts on the merits of prototype over strategy which is certainly a thought I will be bringing back to my practice. He argues that prototyping a service or a product, using industrial and service design methodologies can often offer the ‘proof of concept’ needed to engage in a full-blown digital strategy. It’s tangible, solves a real problem and often demonstrates the cross department collaboration needed to bring good projects to fruition without automatically entailing a full-blown organisational restructure. Start small and nimble is the message I got from our chat.

Amongst the piles of gadgets and toys that we found all over the place, there were a few projects that stood out for me, wearing my urbanist hat. First off was a project that built off the success of ‘Ville sans limite‘ (city without limit) a collaborative urban design tool and consultation process that has been used in several French cities. The idea is to use augmented reality as a platform for collaborative design of specific urban sites across the city. I didn’t think it was that successful as a design tool, but I was interested in its potential as an educational tool. The users can adjust their designs according to 5 sets of criteria that include greenery, density, diversity and ‘knowledge’ (whatever that means) as they hold the iPad up to view the site in question. Unfortunately you can’t pan and view a whole street, you’re restricted to viewing the one intersection or site but the idea is that people can view in real time the impact of certain values and decisions on the urban environment. The guy at the stand was telling me that this is used by Nantes and Paris as a consultation tool to engage local communities on the future of certain sites. I found the engagement with the delivery of urban outcomes a bit superficial, having more trees does not in itself constitute a good outcome, but like I said, I think this kind of tool can be used to educate the public on possible futures and engage in a debate about local values and priorities. A good conversation starter.

A second iteration of this project was called ‘Evolving Cities‘, a simulation environment that again, looked at a specific site, and allowed users to express their preference for the building in question by adjusting various parameters as in the previous project. The project they were currently working on was a school in the outer ring of Paris and the team was trialling this platform as a way to engage with a user’s perspective and gain ideas and input from the students themselves. The project focused largely on architectural considerations, mostly workspaces, trying to gauge how open plan they should be. Again, I thought the parameters were limiting and only dealt with the surface of the issues at stake when designing education spaces. I think there is potential to use this more as an adaptive tool, to test designs and layouts rather than projecting possibilities that are determined by various combinations of five parameters. This is the criticism I often level at parametric urbanism in general: I find it a simplistic and form-driven method of thinking about the city, which is, in reality, less about form and buildings and more about what people do in them.

We then met up with the guys behind a great project called Museomix, a kind of hack day for museums, where teams of designers, programmers and curators get together and look at new ways of presenting, sharing and relating to collections using digital technologies. This is run by Nod_A, a Paris-based innovation collective, that has been looking for museums to run a second iteration of Museomix. If anyone out there is interested, especially in Sydney, get in touch. They’re keen as mustard to trial something internationally. The first round was held at the Musee d’Art Decoratifs in Paris and some of the ideas that came out of the hack day have been pursued internally as a result of the event. Now that’s the kind of collaboration that is worthwhile…

Out of the process came ‘kaleidomix’ a social geolocated platform that allows museum goers to connect whilst in the museum. It follows a lot of the principles Dan Hill had suggested when working with various clients in Australia, the idea is to get a real time view of what people connect with and why. The prototype is still clunky but the end goal is to get a large dashboard type installation is certain galleries in the museums so that people can sign in and interact with other visitors and with the collection in a socially augmented way. The dashboard displays comments and votes for favourite pieces in the gallery and allows you to see who else is interested in the same things you are. Once you leave the gallery, your data is no longer visible to the public and any personal information is deleted. The advantage of a project like this, although still in prototype stage, is that it also allows curators to understand what resonates with visitors and why and develop new ways of helping visitors interact with the collection. In my opinion, this back of house, analytical mode is somehow more interesting, as it could yield quite large datasets and allow for exhibition designers and curators to understand, in real time and across a statistically significant population, the impact of their design. Again, it moves design away from a predictive tool into an adaptive tool that is strengthened by behavioural data.

It’s important to remember, these are prototypes but what’s interesting to me is that Nod_A uses pretty broad ranging tools to engage with end users and curators in this context. They bring everything, from laser cutters and printers, computers, toolboxes and so on, opening up the range of possibilities and enabling participants to prototype rapidly, learn from mistakes and refine the concept.

Great morning at Futur en Seine and good to see innovation in action in Paris!

First off, apologies for the quiet time, I’ve been travelling internationally and have just gotten over the jet lag over here in Paris, tough gig I know. I am on leave for 3 weeks, a great opportunity to kick off my blogging again, and to become a Parisian again…

Before I get too deep into Paris again, I wanted to use this opportunity to capture some thoughts on TEDx Sydney, which happened on May 26th at Carriageworks. I’ve got to admit, I never thought I could feasibly sit through 12 hours of back to back presentations but for a strange reason, it did not feel as intense as it could have. I often have trepidation going into a 2 or 3 hour performance but there was a very different feel about the day at TEDx.

I don’t mean to glorify TED and TEDx, let’s be honest, it’s a great concept, it’s brought some really interesting thinkers onto the world scene and really streamlined the idea of using video content as a reference source (come on, how many times has someone sent you a link to a TED talk!) but it’s ultimately a business, a commercial operation. The underlying concept though, is incredibly powerful, the idea of sharing homegrown ideas, on a global social network.

Having said that, there is something about the way in which the talks are framed that feels a bit unresolved: it’s about sharing an idea, not a business plan, or achievements and experiences. And in that sense, the talks tend to let you hang a little. Combined with the coaching that all the speakers get to homogenise the presentation style, there is an air of authority about the talks that is perhaps not always warranted. I say this full well acknowledging that it was amazing to have Brian Schmidt, the guy who determined the size of the universe and won a Nobel Prize for it, amongst the speakers and that his talk was actually based on a bit more than an idea, a lifelong’s effort actually!

So not everyone starts on an equal footing, or with the same amount of research to back up their idea, but that doesn’t bother me. It just goes to show that ideas, creative thinking comes from a number of places such as business, social entrepreneurialism, community, scientific practice and is not the preserve of the academic world alone.

As we say in French, the talks ‘jump from the rooster to the donkey’, there’s no theme, it is pure intellectual gratification and ideas download, which again, doesn’t bother me in the slightest. As I recently found out through my Myers Briggs test that I took a couple months back, something as unstructured, random and wide-ranging as this is bound to appeal to my preference as it complements and completes my arsenal of seemingly unrelated facts that I can draw from when in conversation. It comes in handy at cocktail parties, believe me.

So what is it about TED that makes it so contagious? In my humble view, TED actually helped me reconnect with a city I sometimes feel like a stranger in. It highlighted in no uncertain terms the strength of Australia’s academic community on the global stage, the amazing talent of Australian artistic talent such as Lynette Wallworth and Katie Noonan, and brought some more emerging profiles to the fore too.

I particularly enjoyed ‘Rekindling Venus’, Lynette Wallworth’s masterpiece of coral reef footage that has been recorded and formatted to be presented throughout the country’s planetarium in honour of the transit of venus. It was one of those moments where you get goosebumps it is so powerful. The combination of the music composed for this purpose and the bright colours of the ocean reefs was a truly unparalleled experience. It finishes on a track by Anthony from Anthony and the Johnsons, an eerily comforting and destabilising voice at the same time.

I also enjoyed seeing Gerard Reinmuth of Terroir and Anthony Burke of UTS and Offshore studio  steal the show by reintroducing the public to what architects do and why they’re important. It’s again highlighted a distinctly Australian strand of architecture, which is, in Gerard’s case strongly influenced by the poetry of Spanish architecture and the pragmatism of Danish architecture. They argued in favour of the architect as the spatial thinker that can bring much more to the world than buildings, interiors and finishes. The architect has a truly strategic role to play but needs to strengthen the value of spatial reasoning in urban decision-making. These guys will be rocking it at the Venice Biennale as Creative Directors for the Australian Pavilion with their exhibition called ‘Formations’, that looks at various modes of practice across disciplinary boundaries.

To get back to the TED, the genius of it is that the TED network is built on the understanding that collaboration and sharing creates value. It connects people to people, people to projects, projects to projects and it does so on a platform that is so perfectly local and global at the same time. It is a prime example of how people don’t use the ‘web’ but they are the web, the connections and nodes that allow for new ideas to sprout up here or across the planet.

It’s no surprise that Chris Anderson is capitalising on this one big time, he’s recently launched TEDed, a similar platform for lessons to be broadcast and shared around the world.

I will be looking into going to TEDx Sydney again next year, and maybe dropping into a couple of other events around the globe, who knows!

Australia doesn’t have an amazing history and culture of sharing spatial data, so when I found out that I could view a set of 1943 aerial photographs of the city, I was properly excited. I know what you’re thinking, but being a geek has never killed anyone.

The discovery came as I was trying to look into the history of the very average 1960s building that I live in in Paddington. By all accounts, this 8 storey wonder is an exception to Paddington’s fine grain 19th century terraced fabric. I knew it had not been there since the dawn of time (clearly) so I became eagerly interested in how anybody thought that it would be a good idea to knock terraces down and put this thing up. I realise that Paddington was not always the upper middle class abode it is today but I gathered that there must be a story behind how the land was cleared and made available for a block of flats that consists solely of studios and one bedroom apartments.

My working hypothesis is that this housing would have been built for single women working as nurses at the nearby St Vincent’s hospital. Of all places, I remember reading on those weird bronze pavers in Kings Cross, that single occupancy tenancies were quite common for single women in post-war Sydney as the idea of being able to live independently without having to be married started to settle in.

But what was here before this yellow brick tower? This is where the 1943 photographs come in. It shows that in 1943 (let’s remember, this was wartime) there was a large, double frontage house on the plot the tower is now standing.

What happened to this house, how it changed hands and what stroke of genius made the punters of the day think that building a strata title tower would be the way to go, I have no clear idea yet but this is only the start of my investigation. But what is more interesting to me (at least on the short term) is how much the city has changed since 1943. I would encourage you to browse around and have a look at your favourite city hang outs to see how much they’ve changed, but it’s truly incredible.

One example is Woolloomooloo. We all ‘know’ that the area has its roots in an industrial past but these photographs brings that past right back to life. Admittedly, we were in the midst of the largest war ever known to mankind, hence all the warships, but it is staggering to realise that this used to be very much an industry-focused harbour and really, very far from being Russell Crowe’s pied-à-terre.

It’s also fascinating to see that the city had much fewer trees in many of its residential neighbourhoods. I am not sure sure why that is but it is definitely something for further investigation. The cars also crack me up. I might take this to the next level and have a look at some of the State Library’s collections to shed some light on the past of this little bit of city.

Have a look yourself, it’s free and available for anyone to have a look at. The dataset extends all the way from Bondi Beach to Katoomba. Really worth a little browse. Enjoy!

I hope the last couple of weeks have been good for all, certainly getting much closer to winter down here, a time of the year I love to loathe even though I am, every year without exception, reminded by my fellow northern hemisphere buddies that this thing they call winter down here is a joke. It’s true. It’s not the temperature that gets to me, it’s the short days!

As I log onto wordpress to get the next blog post drafted up and ready to publish, I’ve developed the habit of looking through the ‘comments’ section on the admin interface. It won’t surprise you that I don’t have that many legitimate comments, i.e. from real people in the universe somewhere, but instead I seem to be the recipient of a whole stack of nonsense sent through a variety of spam machines throughout the world. The alleged email addresses these come from are pretty telling ‘buy viagra now’ (hummm… I hadn’t thought of that), or ‘rent kinky video’ or ‘low rate porn’ are a pretty big giveaway but I do get the odd automatically generated email from roofers and plumbers. There is clearly much about the world of spam that I simply do not comprehend…

Now back on track, I would like to write a bit about what I’ve been finding around the traps in terms of retail in Sydney. I opened the ‘News Review’ section of the SMH Saturday week end paper to find, yet again, that retail figures are down, downtown. The article contrasted this with the rise in capital expenditure in the mining industry, a boon that seems to have no end in sight (not true). To be honest, the juxtaposition was a bit misleading, they were actually comparing investment in mining with percentage growth in retail. You can’t really compare apples with pears, but the article still tries. Anyway.

Retail. Ah, the forgotten sector, the poor cousin, the unloved industry. Publications multiply on the topic. Why do our retailers have it so hard? What should we be doing to boost retail figures? When will the retail slump end? In all fairness, they’re quite good questions but I fear we’ve got answers for many of these. There was a feature in the unmissable Wentworth Courrier last week about Bondi and Oxford Street retailers. One man in particular, who had owned a shop on Campbell Parade for the past 38 years and had not changed a thing about it in that time, could not comprehend where he had gone amiss. I could imagine him telling the jour no: “I don’t get it, I haven’t changed the formula, why did it stop working?” Well sadly my friend, not changing the formula and expecting people to buy shoes today, on Campbell Parade, the same way they bought them 38 years ago is a bit naive. It’s not only the stock though, and the quality and selection of the product, but also the whole experience. I can’t imagine any of the hipster surfers of Bondi would sacrifice their hard earned style for the sake of loyalty to local retail. Fashion just doesn’t work that way these days, does it?

I am also witnessing the retail crisis in person, all along Oxford Street actually, where a total of 34 stores are vacant from Hyde Park to Jersey Road. To my great regret, this also includes the Academy Twin, which I would love to see converted into an indoor market and gallery space, but it also includes a series of pretty nondescript white boxes with a glass front, nothing to go rolling around in the mud for. I admit, I used to feel a pang of pity for the landlords and their overworked real estate brokers when walking past the ‘to lease’ signs but I’ve found that talking to local retailers has actually shed a lot of light on why some shops aren’t leased at the moment.

In particular, the old Puma store, at the corner of Barcom Avenue and Oxford Street, yes, the one with the awesome curved glass window has been empty for a couple months. More recently its neighbours have also vacated, leaving a whole string of tenancies free for the keen shopkeeper. I used to think that this was the direct and scientifically provable effect of breaking retail’s golden rule: locate next to busy shops that sell similar gear to you to pick up their footfall. So I concluded (it turns out erroneously) that one Puma got out, the rest of the stores (some of them shoe stores) just suffered the impact of reduced footfall. Far from it my friends, far from it! The Puma store and all its neighbours up to Sportsgirl are all part of the same property and the owner wants to turn the whole lots into a series of bars and night venues. So what I thought was economic despair was actually more reinvention and investment. How wrong one can be.

In the meantime, the landlords are apparently trying to line up a number of temporary, or pop-up tenants, to utilise the space in the meantime, which I always interpreted as a sign of desperate times for retail landlords. What I am slowly realising is that pop-up constitutes an apt transition strategy from one use to another. It’s low investment, low maintenance, low return. Maybe not such a bad equation after all.

This is what Oxford St Design Store is all about. I can’t for the life of me remember what was in its spot before this pop-up started but I will definitely remember this concept. Their website is pretty basic (they’re working on a new one I am told) but the concept goes as follows:

Established as a unique retail experience the Design Store is a place for local designers, artists, creative and writers to sell their work with one condition – nothing can be sold for more than $20. Get involved! Send your ideas to:submit@oxfordstdesignstore.com.au

So, there are several things I like in this: the idea that it can be a forum to showcase local and affordable design that is not the MCA shop (as much as I love it) or the AGNSW’s shop (good DVDs there) but it also crowd sources products from the local community. Their stock is limited but there were some pretty nice notebooks, posters, t-shirts and lego jewellery in there. Now, let’s be clear, it’s not the best design store in the world, far from it, but the idea is kind of neat. It has been seed funded by the Awesome Foundation I am told and will also include co-working desks, free-wifi, and a screen-printer. I couldn’t help myself, I suggested to the shop manager that she invest in a great expresso machine as a basic and found a way of getting a print-on-demand machine on site as well. Let’s see what she does about it.

In an odd way, it reminded me of Xin Dan Wei, a great co-working space I came across with the help of friend and colleague Xin Gu from QUT. Xin Dan Wei is more about co-working than it is about retail but the flexibility and agility of the model is what both have in common, at the most superficial level.

The real trick with these is really to get a bunch of designers, architects, t-shirt printers, producers and journalists to think about business models. At the risk of sounding militantly capitalist (which I probably am), the true business opportunity needs to be fleshed out for these things to survive beyond the initial seed funding. I think the City of Sydney’s strategy to offer spaces at lower rates is fantastic, don’t get me wrong. Most retail rents are bananas as far as I am concerned, but I think the support perhaps could extend beyond that into business courses, MYOB, advice on how to design supply chains, a retail experience, what overheads are, etc etc etc. This kind of retail innovation is great, but only if we get to enjoy it for a little bit of time.

It actually reminds me of the conversations that were going around at MakeSpace4Architecture last week end in the Rocks. MakeSpace has been awarded this amazing space in a sandstone building on George St but what good is it to have a space with nothing to put in it and nothing to activate it? It’s amazing to realise how much work is invisible in a retail or gallery experience, as Tarsha Finney rightly pointed out. There are months and years of planning, administration and bureaucracy to deal with. It’s not something you can just pop-up overnight.

So I guess, to some extent, I greatly enjoy the variety and surprise of pop-up retail, but I wonder whether it sets unrealistic expectations of the ‘business’ skills needed to run any commercial operation. How do we take this to the next level?

A number of alternatives present themselves here with a few examples in the Oxford Street vicinity itself! A local designer, Sally Smith, left her Glenmore road shopfront a bit over a year ago to set up shop in her own studio on Comber Street. It’s a great experience when she opens it up to the public twice a month. Not only does she unveil the latest and greatest of her collection (often made with vintage fabrics) but she also offers incredibly personalised care. She knows what you bought from her last time, she can take up a dress then and there at no extra cost, she can measure you up to make this perfect top a bit longer and in the colour you’d really been eyeing off all winter. It’s what retail should be. A great experience.

In addition to all that, she also lets you see the process of making, the process of putting a dress or garment together, a craft that has long been lost in dress shops. Call me old fashioned, but I think there is something to it.

In the retail innovation category, there is also good old garage sales. You gotta love those. They’re quite frequent in Paddington and of surprisingly good quality. As they say: “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure”.

On this note, I will leave to ponder about retail. Let’s talk again soon.

The ‘brand’, and by extension the branding conversation, is one Dan and I started having a while back as we were working with Knox City Council on a Brand Strategy. Although only an ancillary piece of thinking to the whole project, Dan could not help but notice how decidedly 19th Century Knox’s coat of arms was. I was more astonished that a council would have such as a thing as a coat of arms in 21st Century Australia, but apparently, that was so very Gen Y of me…

The coat of arms is an aspirational composition of symbols and mottos that is meant to simultaneous define and guide the destiny of a place, person or family, how very similar to the way we use brands! If you stop and think of it, the choice of national emblems on the Australian coat of arms is no exception, the kangaroo and the emu, two distinctly Australian species selected for their inability to walk backwards (as an aside, I may have benefitted from that inability today, having injured myself at the gym by stepping backwards on someone’s foot!). The message is: Australia is moving forward, it biologically, physiologically, and symbolically cannot resist progress. There’s a brand statement if I ever heard one!

Going back to the origins of the coat of arms, these were used to describe people, knights mostly, on the battlefields, when heavy armoury esconded most facial features and the sound of clashing swords made voice recognition near impossible. From a very personal form of branding, these went on to designate whole groups of people, or as they called it then ‘houses’, that rallied under common family origins and values. It was not long before the land that these said ‘houses’ were attached to also came to be designated by coats of arms.

This is how Knox got its motto ‘I move and prosper’, a great brand statement for a largely rural 19th century community committed to rearing cattle and working the land. But how does this fare in 21st Century urban fringe? How does the pre-modern image of a peaceful frontier play with the suburban and car dependent reality that is outer Melbourne? And can Knox promise to deliver on moving and prospering?

Beyond the motto, there are some very deliberate choices of in the heraldry of Knox: two cornucopias and 2 steers, two men each holding a shovel and a rifle, just the symbols a modernising council would be after. But what would be an appropriate 21st Century coat of arms? If we accept that this form of branding can have enduring appeal, how can we recast the heraldry into a realistic, contemporary and relevant set of symbols that embody the area’s current aspirations?

To some extent, I gather that it is the historic value of the heraldry that make it so special and worth coveting. That must also be the reason behind the councillors civic regalia and insignia, another imported medieval tradition.

It begs the larger question that, again, comes from Dan: why do we use medieval, 18th or 19th century institutions and customs to solve 21st century problems? What scope for reform is there within this categorical mismatch? And more importantly, how do we design 21st century institutions and what would they look like?

I’ll let you ponder on that one. Till next time!

I may be setting a new trend here, with two posts in one day. There is much I would like to write about, just too little time. It’s time to update you on what I’ve been listening to lately. Some good, some less good but all interesting.

My new favourite in the podcast space is the BBC Radio 4 Friday Night Comedy Show, which alternates between the Now Show and the News Quiz, both VERY entertaining, both worth the weekly listen. It is possibly the most accessible of all the BBC Radio 4 shows, which can at times seem incredibly opaque and elitist, two qualities I particularly enjoy but I can see how that may not be a mainstream opinion. This show is kind of an audio version of QI, where instead of focusing on a particular theme like Stephen and his mates do, Sandi Toksvig uses the newspaper headlines as the basis for the show and believe me, she need not go very far to point out the absurdity and idiocy of some of the stuff that comes out of those papers. The UK National Government and David Cameron cop a fair bit, but then again, I tend to feel like it is rather deserved.

I’ve also been toying with ‘Stuff You Should Know’ run by HowStuffWorks.com and presented by Chuck Bryant and Josh Clark but I am giving it a mixed review. It’s low-key, it’s playful but in my honest opinion, it is a lazier and less well edited version of Radio Lab. The focus is slightly different too. Whereas Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich focus on storytelling as the medium for exposing the facts, the SYSK guys take a more classical encyclopaedic approach, where they list all the things you should know about a given topic. It feels like there is a lot of research behind each version of the podcast but because they don’t interview people and get expert advice, it really falls flat on its face sometimes when Chuck and Josh just don’t have the answers. And sometimes, they get it plain wrong anyway.

Lastly, I am really interested in any podcast, app or any digital medium that has been designed to complement either a museum, gallery or library experience. Alex Byrne, the NSW State Librarian, was telling me how enchanted he was by ‘O’, the app designed for MONA in Hobart. Ever since, I’ve been looking for apps and podcasts that create a meaningful and complimentary experience of physical spaces and collections. Getting this right has been tricky in the past as this article tweeted by Emile Hooge of UrbanBricolage points out (French readers only! Sorry!). Apps and podcasts tend to encourage and very solitary and mobile-focused experience to the detriment of experiencing the space itself. It is also often a digital repository of the artworks/material themselves, rather than a dynamic and interactive interface that allows a customisation of the experience or a personalised record of the experience to be saved. This is exactly the issue with the latest Art Gallery of NSW app, which is a step in the right direction but still needs some work…

So any suggestions or examples you can point to would be great!

So long for now!

Apologies for the long interlude, work travel and projects have been keeping me very busy and stimulated indeed. But with an extra day off work in the bag, it is time to give back to the blogging community and write up a post I’ve been pondering for quite a while now.

There are many drivers behind my desire to write about service design and public sector reform. First is my recent attendance to the Global Service Jam in Canberra and the announcement that a GovJam is taking place in June. Exciting stuff. Second, and perhaps a bit more unexpected, is my recent acquisition of the full ‘A bit of Fry and Laurie’ box set. The link between the two may be tenuous to you, but there’s a chance I can shed some light on how both Fry and Laurie have developed a very pertinent critique of the public sector’s inability to rethink business models and income streams without falling back on privatisation, as if it were completely unthinkable that the public (and let me throw the not-for-profit sector in there) would be able to think financially sustainably.

I start this post by sharing a sketch from ‘A Bit of Fry and Laurie”s pilot episode, when Hugh Laurie rushes into a police station to report the theft of his own car. Fry meets him with the best customer service you’ll ever encounter in a police station and offers him a number of ‘packages’ for Laurie to purchase, which would allow a recently privatised police force to open an investigation for the lost vehicle. It’s understandable that Fry and Laurie would have been interested and indeed keen to comment on the recent wave of privatisation that came under Maggie Thatcher’s government, but this clip, now 20 odd years old, still have enduring resonance in a context where government policy, strategy and services are being privatised or outsourced.

Let’s have a look at this great piece of humour. It’s a personal favourite.

As hilarious as it is, it is also a tad depressing that in many cases, privatisation has been the quickest, cheapest and most efficient way to improve or reform service delivery, taking the onus away from government to think strategically about its services and how best to deliver them and putting that responsibility in the hand of numerous contractors who have no direct accountability to the public.

I am not suggesting that all services should be delivered by government. There are clear limits to what the public sector can deliver which are clearly restricted by resources, and skills. In a recent conversation with one of my clients  (a public sector client) we debated the merits of making those constraints open and transparent to the customer/citizen so as to set realistic expectations and help the public prioritise initiatives delivered by local government. In many cases, there is still a gaping inconsistency between what the customer in us wants and what the citizen in us wants, an incoherence that makes it difficult for local government to remain realistic about what can be delivered and yet sell enough dream to be re-elected.

In the UK, there has been quite a bit of prototyping of open budget initiatives, whereby the customer/citizen can see exactly where the rates revenue is spent and why. The best example of this is Openly Local, an initiative to which many councils across the UK subscribe.

It’s often called ‘Open Government’ and is often presented like an opportunity for the public to get involved not only in budgeting, but in shaping policy. A very different task than asking the public ‘what they want’.  My limited experience has shown me that many consultation efforts go amiss due to the fact that either no debate, or the wrong debate is framed up in these kind of consultation forums. As Henry Ford said, if he’d listened to what people wanted, he would have made faster horses, not cars!

So there is a lot to be said here about the ability to shape the right conversation and a conversation that will get the right level of resolution for the public sector to go away and design services that respond to specific needs. In New South Wales, local government is bound by the State Government to use community consultation and community strategic plans as the blueprint for policy and service delivery, meaning that a badly shaped conversation can yield to much more than funds wastage. It can have perennial consequences on what local government thinks it should be pursuing and how that will go unquestioned until the next election.

This brings me to my main argument: surely there are ways of using simple service design methodologies within the public sector to understand business models, income streams, customer interfaces, customer journey maps and value for money principles before giving up and pawning the whole thing off to the private sector. My recent experience with clients that run either public sector services or not-for-profit services fall in the trap of not focusing on the user, but rather on themselves, as the team delivering a given service. This fundamental miscategorisation of who the service is for leads to loss of patronage, decreased relevance and tighter subsidies, as the value for the user/customer cannot be demonstrated in a model where the delivery team, not the user, is being put at the centre of the service design. And often this means very long gaps between service delivery and evaluation, sluggish responses to feedback, and a lack of general responsiveness to the needs of users.

This is especially true in sectors that are experiencing the major impacts of technological shifts through digital connectivity and the social networks. Change is occurring  at a much faster rate that ever before and keeping abreast of these changes and leveraging them to deliver better ‘post-digital’ services, would require a responsive, private sector-like adaptability, where a service lives and dies by its ability to respond to shifting needs.

To a large extent, the aged care sector is suffering from this at the moment in Australia. I’ve already written about this in a previous post, have a look at how bad market design can lead to absurd consequences.

This idea that public services are designed and delivered completely divorced from an understanding of what customers need or find convenient has come to life again with my most recent dealings with Australia Post. As you all know, I was not inclined to appreciate their customer service after the parcel delivery fiasco I wrote about a couple of months ago but the recent debacle with them (which only concluded this morning) takes this to a completely new level.

As I returned back from Canberra and the Service Jam, I made it home to discover that I had forgotten my glasses at the hotel. The hotel owner was very helpful and offered to send them through to me using a ‘Cash on Delivery’ option, which makes sense. Why should he foot the bill for my forgetfulness? All good up to here.

Learning from past experience, I had opted to have the parcel delivered at my workplace, given I was not feeling in the mood for another wild goose chase. I get a collection ticket in an envelope, sent to me straight from the post office but with two crucial bits of information conveniently missing: a valid phone number and an address for pick up. You’d think that was part and parcel (no pun intended) of the pick up service, but think again.

So I end up having to call the toll free number and speak to a customer service rep who tells me that they are unable to locate the item and that they’ll have to open an investigation. When I ask whether she could give me a call when and if the item has been located, she kindly informs me of the fact that she is not allowed to ring me up, therefore I am going to have to continuously call up until they have news for me. Do I need to tell you how annoyed I was by this stage?

Next, I call back to find out whether my glasses have reappeared from the ether to find out that they are now officially lost and that Australia Post will compensate me to the tune of 100 dollars (thanks heaps for a $450 pair of glasses). The next day, I get another envelope from the post office, this time with a ‘final notice’ ticket and with a post office address where I can collect my item. Therefore, through my interactions with AusPost, my item was simultaneously lost and found. Gee, they’re good. You definitely get enough drama for your money!

On the plus side, having thought that I lost my glasses pushed me to consider purchasing new frames and led me to discover ‘Sneaking Duck‘, a really interesting and innovative online eyewear business that offers the convenience of a retail outlet (within Central Sydney) without having to pay their rent! Very affordable, very cool. My set of 5 frames should be coming through any day now!

But that’s for another post. Bye for now!

It’s been way too long. I kind of dropped off the radar there. Eight weeks back into work and not a moment to spare. Who knew my day job would interfere so much with my newfound hobby! The important part is that I am back, for now at least, and keen to share my insights from this year’s Global Service Jam, which I attended and mentored from Canberra. The results are posted at http://planet.globalservicejam.org/ where all teams from around the world share the services they’ve designed to shape a better world. They’re not all gems, but there was some good thinking going on, that’s the important part.

Although not my favourite city or my usual destination of choice, Canberra was actually a good place to go to attend a Global Service Jam. The room was full of federal public servants of one description or another really keen to apply design thinking, service design and user experience to the design of what government is supposed to do best: write policy and design services. It was a young, enthusiastic and switched on crowd, with representatives from all of the most interesting federal agencies such as  the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy was the most notable absentee, an omission we must address in the next iteration of the Global Service Jam in Canberra.

We got together for a two-day intensive on service design, looking at methodologies, processes and tools that are commonly used both in the public and the private sector. I was part of the mentoring crew with people from Different Solutions, the Immigration Department, service design firms as well as the team from the Inspire Centre, at the University of Canberra. It really was the perfect venue for this kind of thing (even though the building had not been properly opened to the public yet), as a building that is designed to foster co-working and collaboration on how to use ICT to enable learning and teaching. It was surprising to find out that the design was actually by Cox Richardson, they’re known for architecture of monumental scale like the AAMI Stadium (also an Arup job by the way) and all those under-utilised buildings at Darling Harbour. Sorry Cox, I am just being honest (and somewhat blunt).

Together we explored what a service design toolkit could look like, and what the various strategies to get into the psyche of the user are such as personas, customer journey maps and business model canvasses, all of which we had been using at Arup in the Informatics Team. It got me thinking about another way of seeing the business of designing urban experiences, which is what we do: we actually help our clients understand the various interfaces between the urban environment and users and design information flows and urban experiences that are meaningful and useful. So in a way, we are also designing services, but using the city as our canvas.

The GSJ 12 teams came up with some interesting services, a majority of which rely on some form of social entrepreneurialism to exist. This is the first Jam I attend, but I cannot help but wonder whether previous james were always so digital, or whether the shift to social media is a recent one. Many struggled to identify a real need to design for and relied on the manpower and dedication of volunteers. It’s perhaps an optimistic view of the world, but in a way it was quite comforting to think that all teams were spending two days of their free time coming up with a service they thought was for the greater good.

The Inspire building is, in my opinion, quite successful: a double height atrium space is flanked by a variety of flexible working spaces, one of which is fully covered in whiteboard paint, just in case there is that one stray thought you’d like to write down. It is also fitted out with some pretty impressing AV, with the ability to project on all four walls simultaneously. This was our main workspace for the jam. The atrium is the home to a number of informal seating arrangements, from colourful sofas to chairs you can wheel around for ease of congregating. It also has group workstations of the kind I’d only previously seen at UTS in their new den under the Business School. And finally, and not least, there was an XBOX connected to Kinect, which was the funnest part of the week end, let’s just leave it at that.

The building is perhaps predictably plonked in the middle of the University of Canberra’s campus, surrounded by a few other buildings but mainly by native Australian bush and scores of kangaroos. A report I watched on TV upon my return unpacked that mystery for me: kangaroos are fleeing to the city in search of shrubs and lawn to munch on as much of the ACT and that part of NSW has been subject to years of drought. Kangaroos have since colonised the city and become truly urban creatures.

Back to the Inspire Centre, the facade reads as a Mondrian painting, with geometric patterns of primary colours cladding what is mainly a concrete and steel structure. I like the raw use of concrete in this building, it’s treated as a noble material in this context, which it can be when used as more than a structural material. The windows on the northern facade are small and geometric and countered by uninterrupted glazed facades on the other sides of the building. A real contrast that enables good quality natural light, an essential ingredient to good workspace. The timber elements on the facade and in the interior are apparently salvaged timber from a bridge structure in Queensland, a nice use of recycled materials in a contemporary building.

Overall an enjoyable and instructive week end. And most importantly, an opportunity to see another side to Canberra. A creative, young and energised side. Until next time Canberra!