Form, Function or What? | Nov 7th at 3:13pm
The plenary afternoon session, titled “Post-carbon thinking,” had themes of action, information and using data, in that order. AID.
Steffens’ talk was one of the clearest use of ppt slides in recent memory, each slide composed of a handwritten drawing in its center and some handwritten bullet points on a white page. Mostly white space. Your eye was drawn to the drawing and the one or two sentence fragments. Simple, clean, unambiguous, unconfusing. Each was on the screen for a couple of minutes, long enough to read and mostly absorb the point. Then on to the next. The presentation was mainly the associated verbage, with this trim, focused illustration to maintain one’s attention. Content? Something about living post-carbon. Radical transparency. The political economy didn’t fit the presentation style quite as well as the initial action proposals. I am stealing the slide style though, next time I only want one idea per slide.
“Time and distance change. It was insane!” This was a 50+ year old complaint recalled for us by the “information architect” Richard Saul Wurman about a road atlas he wanted to use when driving across the country. Not only were the states in alphabetical order, geography be damned, fitting each page on a single page or two meant the scales were different. He subsequently turned his take on the conventional way information is too often organized into a useful (and hence lucrative) series of products over the decades that organized data “less stupidly.” His current project is 19.20.21 (he claims the starting number 19 is simply a marketing device. Marketing is emerging as a keen angle on the topic of information, no less for urban design & climate change), referring to 19 cities of over 20 million in the 21st century, is a compilation of mapped info at the same scale for this cities.
In these slides, form mostly trumped function. The flash animation was sharp and the type small but certainly quite pretty. The project’s 2 minute promotional video (with its emo/nu jazz soundtrack) would be a great way to introduce world cities to my freshman lecture class, but it is Wurman’s argument for how to see things that was the most distinctive part of the conference so far. Another quote: “We can’t be smug about our facts.” Meaning we think we know but in many cases the “facts” are just place holders until we know better, which will almost certainly happen before we know it. The other side of this observation is that the most obvious is often overlooked, a perspective behind many of his projects.
But it will be the sophisticated, slick, Apple-quality graphics (an Apple ad man is a project partner) that will catch the eye. We’ll have to wait to see how the content compares with the branding. I suppose a valid question is how the difference between brand and content might matter, and how the former strengthens (or weakens) the latter.
p.s. I ran into Wurman later and spontaneously gave him my card and volunteered to work pro-bono on his project. Was that wise?
Randy Crane (PhD, MIT) is professor and vice-chair of urban planning in the UCLA School of Public Affairs, an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, and coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning.
