I have been walking past the giant (and ageing) public housing buildings in Fitzroy over the last few weeks, marvelling at their ugliness to some extent - but also the vibrant community that lives there, the lovely eucalypts that they had the foresight to plant, and more. But these towers, surrounded by park during the … Continue reading Communal living

Several people have contacted me looking for my article "Ruminations While (Audio)Walking" which was published in Extensions in 2009. Apparently it is not available online anymore, but I am more than happy to share the full text here. In fact, I'm chuffed that it is still being read! The original publication had audio clips embedded which I … Continue reading Ruminations [full text]

"the distinction between museums and archives (and by extension libraries) is collapsing in most people's minds." Interesting keynote 'We Were Otaku Before it Was Cool' from Aaron Straup Cope, from Cooper-Hewitt and the Smithsonian, playing with some ideas about curating archives in the digital (within the not so) world. This is interesting to me because it … Continue reading There is no design, only reckoning

'A view with a room' by Elizabeth Farrelly (SMH 14 April 2012) For the traditional city is indeed a pocking of the planet's surface - a teasing and hummocking of its material to create a common nest of sufficient complexity and comfort to satisfy our immaterial needs as well as our physical ones. The familiar … Continue reading From a view with a room

Highly recommend the blogging of the great Vanessa Berry. In particular, she has been blogging about the city of Sydney at Mirror Sydney and for the Museum of Sydney's Public Sydney blog. Recently she posted a farewell tour of the Sydney monorail, and as a long-time big complainer about the monorail I had to comment... You are … Continue reading Schmonorail

Been looking at the work of Canadian designer Ying Gao. Always interested in the way form and volume can be used in wearable objects. And her work oscillates between such objects that might be more commonly called 'clothes' and other, much more odd socio-environmental interactions. Dezeen has featured her gaze-activated dresses which glow with photo-luminescent … Continue reading Ying Gao

Think I might have missed a calling in experience design/ museum display. Bite-sized, idiosyncratic social history... in a disused elevator shaft in New York. “There’s this whole world of artifacts that go unseen because they’re details of everyday landscape,” says one of the founders, Alex Kalman. Read a recent review in the Gothamist.

Moving pod prototypes are proliferating... but how far have we moved on from the Sinclair C5 from 1985? Also check out Organic Transit's Elf.