Frankie Roberto

Links, notes & reblogs. frankieroberto.com

[dezeen]

Snego building blocks are made using salvaged wood and natural dyes »

[frankie-roberto]

From Transport for London’s new Station Design Idiom.

[frankie-roberto]

— Does walking up escalators reduce or increase their capacity? And other important questions.

[frankie-roberto]

I thought this was neat at first — using bike hire docks as a way of affixing temporary signage to the street. But then I wondered — isn't this actually less flexible than just putting things on the pavement (weighed down by a sandbag if necessary)? I mean, what if the bike hire docks aren't quite in the right place, or face the wrong way?

[kickstarter]

“Portals” are gigantic public art installations that let viewers interact with people in other places around the world using immersive, human-scaled video chat.

Currently set up in places like New York City, Havana, and even a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, these illuminating portals allow individuals to interact, collaborate, and connect as though they were standing in the same room together. Now, the creators of this project hope to connect Kabul, Afghanistan to their global network, facilitating artistic collaborations, poetry recitals, concerts, and — most importantly — numerous conversations.

[design-is-fine]

Lego catalogue, 1970. Samsonite Corp., Denver, USA. Also shown: the first Broadway base plate. Back then Lego wasn’t that popular in the States, collector items are rare. Source: Gary Istock

[frankie-roberto]

Spent some time in the British Library today reading this super rare 1958 book from M. C. Escher.

[blech]

Camera Restricta, by Philipp Schmitt (via prosthetic knowledge):

Camera Restricta is a speculative design of a new kind of camera. It locates itself via GPS and searches online for photos that have been geotagged nearby. If the camera decides that too many photos have been taken at your location, it retracts the shutter and blocks the viewfinder. You can’t take any more pictures here.

The European Parliament recently voted against a controversial proposalthat threatened to restrict the photography of copyrighted buildings and sculptures from public places.

The camera could be funded or subsidized by public and private sector institutions with an interest in regulating photography in certain places.

It’s censorship that doesn’t happen after, but before a picture was taken. Think of it like trying to scan a bank note with your flatbed scanner at home: it doesn’t work, software prevents it. Shouldn’t this be just a tool?

The camera creates a sensing ability for this invisible data by translating it to acoustic feedback that reminds of a geiger counter. But instead of warning against radioactivity each clicking noise represents a photo detected nearby.

The noise alerts of “infested” i.e. frequently photographed places and sometimes reveals photos in surprising locations.

Camera Restricta introduces new limitations to prevent an overflow of digital imagery. As a byproduct, these limitations also bring about new sensations like the thrill of being the first or last person to photograph a certain place.

[frankie-roberto]

I'd like to see this, but instead of being a camera and restricting you from taking photos where there are already too many, the device figures out where you are, what you're pointing at, the weather and time of day, and simply saves someone else's picture rather than taking a new one. (Preferably a Creative Commons licensed photo and the 'best' quality one available).

It'd be interesting to see whether someone else's photos could effectively become your memories, or not.

[frankie-roberto]

Dismaland, at Weston super-mare for the next 5 weeks.

[blech]

A2SWHK and Margaret Calvert create new typeface to improve Moscow’s transport from It’s Nice That (via Chris)

[frankie-roberto]

This is lovely.

[frankie-roberto]

The way in which we order museums tells us as much about ourselves as the things they contain. Museums, software programmes and intelligence agencies are all models of the world. Who designs and operates them, whose politics they embody, and whose stories they tell, shape the world we all inhabit. If these institutions really belong to us, they must be more than experienced; they must be understood.

James Bridle, Five Eyes

[littleprinterblog]

A little longer

But my hope is that when the current, old servers do eventually go dark, I’ll have something simpler ready to step in. So that’s the purpose of the next three months.

[frankie-roberto]

Kudos to Matt for doing this.

[frankie-roberto]

This could be amazing.

[frankie-roberto]

We have defined design as the way we turn every aspect of HS2 into a practical reality around the needs of the people who will benefit or be affected by our service. Everything we create is designed and every design discipline is covered in our interpretation of design. To recoin a phrase – we are designing from the pixel to the city – from digital systems to urban infrastructure and so much else besides.

HS2 Design Vision Preview Publication

Not quite sure what to make of this. It doesn’t say much.

[frankie-roberto]

The one thing that I will say is that people have this view that the only innovation in the market comes from Silicon Valley. That’s not the case here. This is a world leading innovation that has come from London and has actually come from a public sector organisation. And I think we need to celebrate that a little bit more and remember that anything that Silicon Valley can do, we can do too.

Shashi Verma, TfL Director of Customer Experience

[frankie-roberto]

Public Review Issue 30 (PRI-30) discussed the question of how to encode Bengali khanda ta. This document reviews some key issues and feedback that was received on PRI-30, which included new information that has bearing on arguments for or against different alternatives. In light of the feedback, a strong case for encoding khanda ta as a separate character is presented.

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2004/04252-khanda-ta-review.pdf

via @pauldhunt, the missing Bengali character mentioned in the I can text you a pile of poo but I can’t write my name article is possibly Khanda Ta (u+09CE), which was added to Unicode, but only after this review from 2004 examining the case for it being a distinct grapheme, and even then, the practical arguments for it being represented as single codepoint rather than a sequence of codepoints.

Language is complicated. Written language, doubly so.

[iamdanw]

A few other characters that were more common historically, though still used today, were also missing for the first decade of Bengali’s existence in Unicode. It’s tempting to argue that historical characters have no place in a character set intended for computers. On the contrary, this makes their inclusion even more vital: rendering historical texts accurately is key to ensuring their survival in the transition to the age of digital media. Furthermore, these characters are still common enough that they were printed in the Bengali reading textbooks and workbooks that we used growing up. Omitting them literally ensures that existing materials for learning to read Bengali will not be universally accessible.

I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name (via iamdanw)

Interesting article examining the inner workings of the Unicode Consortium. Would love to see this become more open and diverse.