I’ve gone slightly obsessed by this picture lately. This is a picture of NASA mission central after the latest rover touched down on Mars. Teams of hundreds of scientists spent years carefully crafting a remote laboratory that could survive the extreme conditions. They altered their body clocks so that they could operate it more […]

“Disjointed incrementalism’ characterises public service design: where services are altered and adapted by changing political drivers, professional fashions, shifting institutional norms and boundaries, and the biased lessons of past experience” Restarting Britain 2: Design and Public Services All the usual disclaimers aside (few would argue that this report isn’t needed, nor that it contains a […]

This is spit. Red spit to be precise. Its a feature of many cities, created by chewing a mixture of tobacco and highly coloured spices. I’ve noticed it in Bethnal Green for years, knowing it was a by product of the local Asian community that live here without knowing how, why or thinking much of […]

This chicken shop It is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is filled every day, not with people who don’t want to cook, but with people who cant afford to cook. A chicken burger costs £1.75. Cheaper than you could cook it for at home. Waste is created when any information […]

This week I saw Erik Kessels talk about ‘In Almost Every Picture’, a series of found photo books that show one thing, by a fluke of documentation repeated in almost every picture. One book is famously full of pictures of Oolong the Japanese rabbit balancing things on its head, another tells the story of a […]

The slogan “if your minicab’s not booked it’s just a stranger’s car” makes sense on the surface of it. Until you realise that, of course, any taxi car is probably a ‘stranger’s car’. The thing that makes your booked car not a stranger’s car is that it is part of a system, and one that […]

  When things move on, something will always get left behind.

A person has to design the way that a machine thinks, but how often do we know who that person is? They are anonymous, collective and almost completely unaccountable. It’s just so easy to sleepwalk into these leaps from connected technology to surveillance because although you get to vote about significant changes to human systems, […]

We’re getting bigger, but our houses are getting smaller. The fact that you rarely hear these two things mentioned together says a lot about our approach to city planning. In a bid to house New York’s growing number of single occupant and ‘pre family’ households, Mayor Bloomberg recently commissioned a competition to design a new […]

A small chaotic pattern protecting a large, ordered one.