Nothing succeeds like excess

BBC London last night (still available but not for long) featured a small segment by Sarah Harris about a boat, placed on the roof of the Royal Festival Hall on the south bank, available for people to stay in overnight and enjoy unrivalled views of London.

“People on the South Bank were doing a double take as they looked up, but no, it  really is what looks like a boat perched on the very edge of Queen Elizabeth Hall’s roof.  Not only that but in a triumph over health & safety restrictions people can actually stay in it.”

She doesn’t qualify this comment, so I can only assume it’s another one if those lazy throwaway lines that the media love, to have a pop at the perceived excessive Health & Safety culture, which David Cameron is so keen to stamp out.  Let’s have a think how this might be a “triumph over Health & Safety”.

This must mean that they’ve ignored any advice, law or building regulations that might be relevant to this situation, and that at *no point* during the planning has anyone done a risk assessment, putting guidelines in place to assure the safety of the occupants or passers-by.

Therefore this implies:

• The boat is unsecured or someone has judged it heavy enough that it probably won’t sway or topple over onto the pavement below.
• The roof weight limit has not been checked.
• Occupants access the roof and boat on their own, either by climbing the outside of the building, parachuting in, or unguided via maintenance areas.
• No additional lighting has been provided to guide them back to the inside of the building in the event of an emergency.  In such an emergency, they’ll just have to take their chances as none of the nearby fire marshalls will check that area.  The only emergency exit is to jump off the roof.

If the boat was constructed there, I can only wonder how it was put together e.g. who did the wiring and heating?  If the boat was already built, how did it get up there?  Jedi mind levitation?  Using a crane would be cheating, as that would require a whole other set of considerations, including weight, stabilising the crane, rope strength, how it was lashed together.

Would you want to stay there?

The above points are what I would expect the Health & Safety officers involved to consider: looking at each situation as the plans were developed and implemented, based on their experience, established best practice, advice from the fire brigade and building engineers, using appropriate and certified equipment.

And that’s what we refer to as a culture of Health & Safety – is that so excessive?  If this seems like common sense, can the media, press and politicians stop perpetuating those ridiculous myths and stop bashing at people trying to do their job?  This is actually a triumph for all the Health & Safety people who’ve been involved in getting this to float.

Design for (student) life

Amongst my many interests, I’m an armchair enthusiast of architecture & design.  Whilst I’d heard of the futuristic 1960′s architecture group  Archigram in passing, I’d not heard of founding member Sir Peter Cook, who presented a Lunch Hour Lecture at UCL yesterday.  His talk was on “Designing for Students”, a peek inside some former and current projects in educational spaces.

He began by highlighting the way the young people tend to arrange themselves informally, but are then frequently taught in controlled, grey concrete boxes that don’t necessarily promote the open discussions and creative that we’re trying to develop in our students.  The building also needs to take into account the work practices and the rituals of the academic community, such as posters, art installations and demonstration areas.

In his buildings, Cook uses flowing, organic concrete shapes, blending these in with plants, and places small breakout areas throughout.  He showed a current project for the School of Architecture at Bond University, Queensland, to demonstrate the shapes and space, as well as the construction and design compromises needed to deal with glaring sunlight.

To illustrate the way in which the students and staff might use the space and have a relationship with the building, Cook drew a series of wry vignettes of academics & students in typical conversations and situations around the campus.  We might recognise some of them: a rather snooty academic questioning a student’s approach to a topic; a student who’s more likely to be seen in the bar than in the lecture theatre; a showcase event to promote the institution.   With financial and spacial constraints, such beautiful design is not always attainable, and even on this project a workshop area had to be moved to some “tin sheds” round the back of the building rather than in the core where people could observe the activity.

But when considering the teaching and intersitial spaces we should think about how people work and share, and how it presents the organisation to visitors and prospective students.  Coincidentally, this came up only yesterday morning as we debate the usage of our department’s lobby areas.  Do we maintain a clean space, a calm area for breakouts, or an open area where our students can test and demonstrate their programmable robots?

It could be that our emphasis on space and organisation here is a reflection of our Engineering disciplines – a desire to optimise and maximise efficiency.  But are we missing opportunities to foster creative and interdisciplinary work, and advertise ourselves to the wider academic community?

Installing Child 2/2

There’s been a meme floating around on Twitter and Facebook about “uninstalling dictator” and I can’t be sure now whether I was using it before this to track the progress of my second child.  Being of a geeky nature, I have a spreadsheet to calculate the percentage for a given date, should all go to plan  (if I was a real techie I would have a Perl script for this).   As of today she is 90% complete, and due in a month’s time.

I’ve thought of some other computing/baby analogies:

• You may have planned to install this product, or you may have just found the product installing itself one day.
• In the future you may be able to do a custom build of your product.
• When it gets to 100% it will stall for a while saying “Extracting Files” (thanks to Lewis for this one).  So you may have no idea when it’s actually going to be ready.
• Once completed, the system will spend some time cleaning up your product.
• You need to register your product within 30 days in order to receive benefits
• You will spend all your time talking about and showing off your product, even though millions of other people also have one, or more of the same.  You will ignore all criticism of your product.
• It’s recommended that you install an antivirus package, but you will still likely need regular fixes and patches.
• Training courses and manuals abound, offering conflicting advice for problems.
• You may also find some problems just go away after a while, or can be alleviated by the many leisure and productivity accessories that are available to buy.
• You can apply various themes, but eventually you will have no control over these.  For example version 1.0 has suddenly come home with the Hello Kitty theme.
• There are constant updates, each of which consumes more and more resources.
• If you have the same type of OS on each product, you can reapply the updates to the second one.
• There may be conflicts with other products, so it’s best to partition them off.
• Eventually, the product will uninstall, but leave lots of little files around and you may later find further child processes in your system consuming resources.

Any more, please add them!

 

The Microsoft & Nokia love-in starts here.

I am not surprised at all the snarky comments on the Microsoft and Nokia alliance but I cannot understand why there are only a handful of people that seem to be seeing the massive potential here.

Nokia had close to 40% market share in 2007 when the iPhone was released,  this was still the case in January last year. They were King of the World for several good reasons:

Evolution of Nokia handsets, 1982-2007. Newlaunches.com

Design:
The above chart  shows Nokia designs from the early days of the cellular phone up to 2007.  We saw the handset evolve from black plastic bricks, to shiny, multicoloured fashion accessories.  Whilst I never went for the bling excesses of some of the designs, there was always something to suit different people.

The functions on Nokia phones always outperformed other manufacturers, whether it be the FM radio, rudimentary music playing capability, or the camera,  And they managed to churn these out cheap enough that anyone could have them without a crippling contract.

They also played about with a variety of different physical formats, such as the flipout keyboard of the 6820 or the swivel of the 7370 (my wife had both of these), not always successful but still they led the way.  And look at the comments on the above chart – many models remembered fondly or seen as futuristic at the time.  I recall the excitement (yes, sad I know) in 1996 of seeing someone telnet into a server in the middle of the street using a 9210 Communicator.

Compare that chart, with all it’s colourful, zany designs, to the current offerings.  What do you see?  Pretty much identical plastic smartphones, all black, same size, with a rudimentary camera on the back.

Interface:
I got my first phone (a Nokia 3110) in 1999, and despite higher resolution, screen sizes, and more features, the menu system remained pretty consistent even to my last Nokia, the xPress music 5310 in 2008.  It was simple and it worked well, even on a small screen.  In later models I could also choose a icon based navigation which suited the way I used the phone, but my wife had the same model with traditional menus.

Other manufacturers never seemed to get the interface right, always having some counter-intuitive location for fairly obvious settings, or features that didn’t quite connect.  For example one year I went for a Panasonic clamshell which had one of the best cameras at the time, but unfortunately there wasn’t an easy way to get the photos off.

There are also plenty of people for whom that simple interface is fine: my Gran uses her phone to call and text.  Touchscreens, cameras or ability to run Spotify and Angry Birds are not really important to her, and I bet there are millions out there who feel the same.

So what do Microsoft bring?

Microsoft have 85% of the desktop market.

Forget the snide comments, this is how it is.  For ordinary people, who don’t have the expertise to manage Linux, or the money to throw at Apple, Windows works for them.

With almost ubiquitous 3G/WiFi, there may not be much need to physically connect the phone to the desktop like the old days, when you needed a special cable to back up your photos or install an application.  But reducing the barrier between them may make the smartphone even more useful to a wider market.

Windows Phone 7 has had a generally positive reception and there are potentially a huge number of developers, as Conor points out,  so the workload can’t be massive to get this on Nokia’s existing hardware.  Microsoft also bring lots of cash to speed this process along, and the potential to push Blackberry out if they tie in with Exchange.

In short, the design, interface and production pedigree of Nokia, combined with the desktop share and developer community of Microsoft, has the potential to be massive.  So why is everyone so quick to dismiss it as two old dinosaurs reacting far too late?

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

The Lady wife and I spent a lovely weekend in Bournemouth, last chance for a bit of peace and quiet before child #2, courtesy of my kind in-laws. Not having been there before, and not really knowing much about the town, it was just somewhere different for a quick weekend break.

It’s a strange town, with a confused layout, though the lie of the land is probably like many other seaside towns. As you come in to the town on the A35, there are a couple of tall office buildings, which announce Bournemouth as an Important Place, but just past that there’s a lovely Victorian church which looks uncomfortable next to these giants and the busy A-road.

There seem to be dozens of large hotels, which were probably Grand in the 70′s and 80′s when they were first built, but now look shabby and distract from the smaller B&Bs and splendid Art Deco styling in smaller buildings. Many parts of the town centre are neglected, with features like the canopy in Westover Road that would be cherised in towns like Leamington Spa.

Bournemouth Imax, soon to be demolished

On the seafront is the Imax cinema pictured above, which I remember seeing Kevin McCloud’s Demolition programme about buildings that should be demolished.  I can completely understand why it’s such a white elephant as it’s  just in the wrong place, and a look in the local paper shows that it’s only able to screen short documentary films, in comparison to the South Bank BFI Imax that shows feature films.  Even the Imax in Bradford in the 1980′s showed mainstream movies in 70mm.  It now looks set for demolition, but what will it be replaced by?

The town seems to lack a focus, with traffic in the middle of the town breaking up the flow, and pedestrianised areas not really working either.  It feels like new buildings have been allowed to be placed anywhere, and business use for landmark buildings that doesn’t unify the micro-local area.  Take this view for example, just off the main shopping area, wonderfully styled buildings that in any other town would be the centrepieces of a regeneration area, with sought-after apartments and offices above restaurants, not shabby flats above nightclubs.

It was during our weekend that David Cameron made his comments about Multiculturalism and his government also announced plans to move May Day to October in celebration of Britishness.  To my mind, cultural identity and urban planning are connected.

Incoming cultures are perceived as a threat because British people (more the English really) have a crisis of their own identity.  We aren’t defined by a single religion, or costume, or ethnicity, we’re a mix of different histories, that have are preserved by local traditions.  The experience of Britishness for someone from Bradford is different to someone from Hastings.  They have different histories, trades and customs which make them distinct from other towns, but there will be some shared traits with other towns in their region, or across the country.

Culture takes place in a physical space, and when that is not used appropriately, with unrestrained developments and neglect of important sites, culture is weakened.  Town planners surely have an overview of the flow of people and businesses in a town, and should control that appropriately to make sure the story of the town is retained but kept vital.

Castlepoint Shopping a "unique retail experience". Photo by Lewis Clarke

Slightly disappointed by the town centre, we headed out to Castle Point, which the radio announced as a “unique shopping experience”.  This is just a large car park, with two supermarkets at opposite corners and a string of high street shops between them.  A few paper lanterns were strung up to mark Chinese New Year, as they were in the Pavilion Gardens, but this is a sanitised place, with no sense of history or culture or coming together of communities.   Whereas you could have a small parade and Lion dancers in the gardens, which would serve to bring closer the Chinese and British communities, this would be ridiculous at Castle Point.

So my conclusion is this: British culture is something that isn’t easily defined, but exists in our own experiences and places.   If we continue to allow town centres to lose their relevance, and be damaged by bad planning, we will still have this crisis of national identity and integration of other cultures will remain a struggle.

UPDATE:

I stated above that the Imax cinema only showed crappy documentaries, however because I had been browsing the listings on my mobile whilst in Bournemouth I failed to notice that those showings were in 2005, at which time the cinema closed.  Point still stands that they were showing the wrong kinds of film.