This is Josh. He’s ten years old. He can light up a rugby pitch, climb to about grade 5c/6a and strike a cricket ball with such Gower-like sublime beauty I get tearful. What he can’t do very well, or at least doesn’t really enjoy very much, is reading. This is far from unusual for us boys of course (many of us can’t be bothered with it until we’re in our teens as a rule) but with Josh it always seemed particularly unappealing to him. We didn’t let it worry us too much given that he is, like I said, a boy who on the whole prefers to be running and jumping rather than sitting and reading; but every once in a while I’d catch a glimpse of a look on his face when he was staring at a page that suggested there was more to it than that. Watching closely you’d catch a look in his eyes that suggested he was momentarily experiencing what’s probably best described as some weirdness, and for a split second he’d have to wait for the world to right itself again.

As you’ve probably guessed we’re now coming to the conclusion that he may be slightly dyslexic. Two separate tutors have raised it over the last year so we’re convinced enough to ask the school to look into it and in the next few weeks he’s going to be assessed by the local authority. It’s probably a quite mild case but it’ll be valuable to know if we need his upcoming secondary school to give further support.

This week I realised something about one of the few books he has enjoyed reading that I think is worth sharing publicly, hence the off-topic post here.

One of the only books he’s ever really enjoyed and enthusiastically read is the series by Jeff Kinney called Diary of a Wimpy Kid. At first I put it down to the fact that he was simultaneously enthused by the movie – we got him the first one after a trip to the cinema last year – but now I realise that it’s very likely the layout and the typeface that has made the difference. He got another for Christmas and once again he’s started reading without encouragement from us or protests from him. Looking through it with him a few days ago I suddenly clocked what had been staring me in the face for months: the handwritten font.

I think dyslexia is a little different for everyone, but one aspect of it is the way it can cause letters to appear mirrored. This gets particularly confusing with letters such as d and b which are easily mirrored on the vertical axis. The video from StudioStudio, designers of what seems to be one of the few specialist font projects in this field explains it further.

Here’s a page from Diary of a Wimpy Kid:

The varied angles of the handwritten font could very well be doing a great job of reducing the mirroring problem. Also, the notebook-like design with the line under each line of text combined with the page being broken up by sketches is probably dramatically improving his ability to keep track of each sentence.

Could it be that simple for someone with a mild case? A font choice and careful layout design? If so then the opportunity to explore this in modern eBook readers such as Kindles, Kobos or iPads seems ridiculously easy. An extensive investigation about Diary of a Wimpy Kid, fonts and ebooks (i.e. 30 to 40  seconds in Google) demonstrates two things: 1) that I’m not alone in noticing this but 2) that there’s surprisingly little comment about it.

I found a couple of mentions in some forums by people noticing how their dyslexic child enjoyed the book and also a blog post from August last year from a father who made the same connections and has seen results by combining a Kindle with an overlay; but beyond that there appears to be little debate.

With the appearance of beautifully crafted reading apps such as Readmill, the step from there to an additional visual setting designed to assist dyslexia sufferers is surely very small. It would simply (?) need some varied font choices of less perfect, more varied form (guaranteed to irk the purist typographers) combined with line by line support through a staged reveal or other visual aids and perhaps even some investigations into colour choices and brightness (such as those found in palettes like Solarized). An equally intensive investigation of the app store provides a few results regarding dyslexia but they appear to focus on diagnosis or spelling assistance, rather than just reading support.

So, if you’re an app developer and you fancy looking at this more, maybe we should have a chat? Better yet, if you actually know something about dyslexia and can put my armchair/googled understanding straight that would also be much appreciated.

In the meantime, there are things that can be done to test this further and craft something at home. In an hour or so over the weekend I’d managed to create Josh another book with a similar layout approach using Proboscis’ self-publishing system bookleteer.com, some text from Project Gutenberg, a font made from my own handwriting (made using Fontifier a few years ago) and some help from a certain Mr Kipling.

We can view the online version with an iPad or on a laptop, and after some quick folding I’ll be giving him the paper copy later today (PDF link – A3 format).

If he thinks there’s any discernible difference I think it’ll be worth pursuing further, although keeping his attention with only the classics available on Gutenberg could be tricky. Let’s hope someone in the publishing world looks into this further. We’ve yet to have the formal assessment so it’s possible the results will tell us he doesn’t have the condition at all, either way it’s pretty clear from his enthusiasm for the design of Diary of a Wimpy Kid that a more child-like approach to writing and design can make a big difference to child-like eyes.

(The Isolator found via Anne Galloway’s always brilliant tumblr)

We’ve been using 37signals products at the office for years now. I’m a big fan of their products and their philosophy. For some reason though I remained dismissive regarding the business self-help book Rework they published last year. Probably the fault of that usual suspect: ego.

A reminder on twitter from Nick Grant encouraged me to be a little more humble and give it a try. I’m glad I did;  it’s cheap, easy to digest in one or two sittings and contains a good mix of reminders about well understood truisms as well as a plenty of new ideas. Given that we’re entering an era when so much of the standard architectural service needs to be rethought, now is as good a time as any to consider how to rework work.

Some notes provided in the spirit of the ‘blog all dog-eared pages’ movement:

page 43
Draw a line in the sand: As you get going, keep in mind what you’re doing. Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or a service. You have to believe in something. You need to have a backbone.

page 62
Less mass: Embrace the idea of having less mass… Mass is increased by:

• Long term contracts
• Excess staff
• Permanent decisions
• Meetings
• Thick process
• Inventory (physical or mental)
• Hardware, software and technology lock-ins
• Long-term road maps
• Office politics

page 88
Tone is in your fingers: In business, too many people obsess over tools, software tricks, scaling issues, fancy office space, lavish furniture, and other frivolities instead of what really matters. And what really matters is how to actually get customers and make money… Use whatever you’ve got already or can afford cheaply. Then go. It’s not the gear that matters. It’s playing what you’ve got as well as you can. Your tone is in your fingers.

page 104
Interruption is the enemy of productivity: If you’re constantly staying late and working weekends it’s not because there’s too much work to be done. It’s because you’re not getting enough done at work. And the reason is interruptions.

page 170
Build an audience: All companies have customers. Lucky companies have fans. But the most fortunate companies have audiences… So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos – whatever. Share information that’s valuable and you’ll slowly but surely build a loyal audience.

page 173
Out-teach your competition: Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or outsponsor competitors, try to out-teach them. Teaching probably isn’t something your competitors are even thinking about. Most businesses focus on selling or servicing, but teaching never occurs to them.

page 222
Hire great writers: If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer or whatever; their writing skills will pay off… Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking.

There weren’t many diaries, only at odd moments in my life did I try to keep a diary … the ones I kept as a teenager tend to be completely ridiculous, my opinons are so self-important and ill informed. What I should have done is simply wrote down: ‘Got up at half past seven, had my breakfast, was at school by such and such a time…’, and that would have been really quite interesting.

Actually, as the diaries got on as I got older the length of the diary entries shrink and they turn into something more like engagement diaries, and some of those entries that simply say ’10 o’clock: coffee with so and so, 3 o’clock tutorial…’, turn out to be much more evocative than the long essays. I see those things and whole days come back into my head.

Playwright and novelist Michael Frayn talks to Mark Lawson about his childhood and career, in the light of a newly-published memoir about his father.

For most of the latter half of 2009 I was working on the city’s new housing development project, the Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust. Like many other local authorities around the country, Birmingham hurried to stake its claim for a share of the funding made available directly to local authorities for the first time in many years. Alongside another local practice we had 5 sites to take from nothing to a detailed planning submission in about 6 weeks. This is an insanely short amount of time. Weekly design team meetings with numerous departments ensued and the process was, to put it mildly, intense. Turning to others for moral support, encouragement and inspiration was an absolute must; as was the occasional bottle of Rioja.

Giles Lane helped by offering me a new notebook. Not the regulation issue Moleskine, almost as cliched as the Calvino reference, but a bespoke notebook just for us which we could make with our own bare hands. Giles and Proboscis have been using their Diffusion notebook format in consultation work and arts projects for some time. Printed (crucially) on single sided A4 the format is carefully designed to cut and fold quickly into a small, robust A6 book that can be either landscape or portrait.

Here’s a video showing how to fold one:

Diffusion eBooks from stml on Vimeo.

Got it?

We made a blank one, experimenting with different templates to assist with writing and drawing and I carried it around in my jeans pocket for most of the 6 weeks, proving that the design is perfectly robust enough despite only being crafted from a few folds. What I’m most interested in though is what happens when it’s finished. I can unfold it, and because I can unfold it I can easily scan it in and share it with others or work over it again with other tools. Chunks of it would quickly get extracted and thrown into presentations to the client and ultimately some of the sketches informed the design and access statement that went with the planning application. That’s interesting; the ease and speed with which you can align the analogue with the digital.

Then there was Owen Hatherley. I asked Owen to help me fill in the back story for the other team members and make sure we knew where we’d been before we decided where we wanted to go. He wrote a short essay on the history of municipal housing, talking us through projects such as Eric Lyon’s Span housing and Sheffield’s Gleadless Valley. Initially I gave it to Birmingham City Council in standard A4 format, but later when self-publishing a booklet became possible with Gile’s bookleteer.com I could create my own notebook, this time by uploading a PDF then getting it back immediately in the Diffusion format to fold and issue myself. You can download a copy yourself from the diffusion.org library. That’s interesting too, I self-published a book.

More recently, when the dust had settled and it came time to tell other people what we’ve been doing lately at the West Midlands Built Environment and Design Fair I published a newspaper in about 48 hours with the help of newspaperclub.co.uk.

Like bookleteer.com, newspaperclub.co.uk connects a web interface to a production process but this time it gives you the power to command a newspaper printing facility usually reserved for massive print runs. You can upload a PDF of any design as long as it follows the template size or you can use the newpaperclub interface to upload text and images from your machine or source either from other locations on the web such as blog entries or flickr pages.

I’ve rarely seen a web service in early beta stage nail the interface design so succesfully first time. It adjusts the 4 column layout and shows a clear snapshot each time you make an adjustment. I pulled in text from here at no2self.net and lifted images from my practice flickr account and turned out a 12 page newspaper in little more than an afternoon. 2 days and £120 later I had 100 beautiful objects to give away to clients and colleagues. We gave them out along with bookleteers by the staff in paper bags that had been rubber stamped with our logo.

So it’s a useful PR tool and in the same way Moo mini-cards still do after all these years it’ll help me cause a stir in a generally conservative, predictable industry; but what else? What interests me most about tools like newspaperclub is how I might be able to connect it with the hyperlocal debate and the work a practice like ours does with neighbourhoods like Blurton in cities like Stoke on Trent. If I can plug the outputs from amateur community blogging quickly and cheaply into professional looking trusted formats like a newspaper then the credibility, the reach and the power of the voices being supported become reinforced. Not only that but you can leave it on a bus for someone else to read and you’re not likely to do that with an iPad.

Before you wrap your chips in it however, there’s something else you could do when you retrieve it from the bus. The bookleteer experience teaches the value of being able to easily send the paper format you produced with the digital tools back into pixels to be worked on again. There are more layers to be added, further annotation to be inserted and new ideas to be traced.

When I spoke about the blurtonvision.co.uk project at Be2camp Birmingham last year I finished by enthusing about the Walking Papers project created to allow people to annotate simple paper copies of their chosen section of Open Street Map. Once complete they can be scanned in again and traced over thanks to the QR code that aligns the analogue with the digital automatically. Self publishing formats like bookleteer and newspaperclub are perfect for this type of process, flipping constantly between screen and paper (and indeed the experiments at SXSW have begun to explore this), but what I’ve come to realise is that I need the process to take place at many scales. What I need is a walking papers process that works on a building scale.

This collaboration between paper and screen knows no limits. It won’t care about file formats and it couldn’t give a damn if you’re a Mac or that Windows 7 was your idea. There’ll be no more excuses for a lack of communication.

And I’ll be able to go back to writing on paper bags.

Of course back in the day, the oldest and wisest of us knew that instinctively.

(picture circa 1997, taken from 2005 blog entry “Death of a Drawing Board“)

There’s something very satisfying about the way this building keeps facing you as you round the bend. Successfully enfronting the site I think Charles Moore would say.

update:

Yep, enfronting it is:

I’m building a house. I’m attempting to be both client and architect and it’s not easy living this split personality. So I’ve been turning to seminal texts for support – comfort blankets if you like – wrapping myself in them at night and sharing a bath with them occasionally.

You’ll know the books I speak of – Poetics of Space, In Praise of Shadows, The Place of Houses to name but a few.

If you follow my twitter feed you’ll be heartily fed up with it by now. Elsewhere, more discretely, I’ve been noting stuff down for the last year and a half over at home4self.tumblr.com and over the festive season it finally started to fall into place. Gaston started talking to Charles, Junichiro got on better with Peter and the seeds of a home have begun to grow.

Of all the spirits I’ve called on though, it’s the ghost of Charles Moore that has been most supportive. The Place of Houses, written with Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon is the best book on housing architecture I’ve got and the best book you should get. Its influence has been broad and many levelled; for example:

At Ecobuild last year I cited the ‘saddlebag’ technique in my talk about passive solar and it me helped explore the social/spatial benefits of the bolt-on, extra space that sunspaces provide. A buffer zone of many uses that breaks social housing out of its tight regulatory framework and minimum/maximum room sizes.

After the Stirling Prize was announced it explained to me one of the reasons that I, like the judges, had decided who should win.

And with its words on ‘inhabiting’ in the closing chapter it found a new way to make me think about what I’d been trying to convey in past discussions about legibility and ownership.

The fundamental principle is that in places where people live all space should seem to belong to someone or something; space either should seem to be inhabited, as if it belonged to or could be claimed by particular groups of people, or should be understandable as part of a coherent larger order, such as the natural landscape or the traditional fabric of the town or system of altogether new urban spaces.

So if I get that all off my chest here on this blog then perhaps I can stop sounding like a broken record. I’ll be making no such promises over on home4self though, as I’ll no doubt need plenty of help from Moore and his colleagues to take the sketches you see there and work out the order of rooms, the order of machines and the order of dreams.

Question answered:

cityofsound says:

It was a conversation between Matt Jones and I, wherein he sketched out his idea (using your notebook it would seem) about a kind of perspectival layered data landscape, building up from Dopplr and related web services – in the manner of the classic New Yorker cover on ‘the x view of the world’ …

I think.

Vision-lozells.org represents my first attempt to get closer to the ideas in Dan Hill’s ‘Personal Well Tempered Environment’ concept and the subsequent notes in my own post, ‘Up On The Roof’. I’ve been collaborating with the guys at Slider Studio to develop the next stage in our investigations into online consultation work; but this time, by developing the platform they created for the self-build market, we’ve moved into the third dimension.

You know what I’m into. I want to start plugging it in to stuff. Getting data from the real world in and out of it. The notes below and the Ecobuild presentation I gave start to describe how we might do that using solutions most of you will know well.

I’ll be spending this weekend at our last public open day for ecoterrace.co.uk, followed by an event with the residents of blurtonvision.co.uk to start our version of the Open Street Map / public data mashup. Unfortunately this means I won’t be able to attend the Homecamp event on Saturday and get more connected with the folks developing exactly the ideas I’m pitching here. However I will be able to come along to the next Be2camp and do my bit to draw connections between the social bits, the media bits and the home bits. Come along and criticize/help.

BIM and Social Media

Axis Design and Slider Studio have created a new tool for Birmingham City Council called YouCanPlan Lozells. Slider’s ESP software has been resigned to suit the challenges of the diverse people and places of community consultation work. The software will be distributed via both CD and online to over 2500 households. It can be used both online and offline to ensure it can be used in any venue, but we hope that the benefits of the online mode means that people using it from home can make the most of both the live updates to proposals in the coming months, as well as using survey and chat tools to tell Birmingham City Council what they think about the designs being proposed by the city’s urban design team.

At its first public test during an event in the local park it was well received. In particular by the local teenagers who instantly took to the interface and chat tools. Making contact and building enthusiasm with the younger generations is often one of the biggest challenges with consultation work so in this case we hope that we’ve created something that will help us hear the voices of the future generations and perhaps bring some parents with them, curious to see what their children are using. Whilst the ability to consult with people from the comfort of their own home is huge step towards a more representative mandate from a neighbourhood, we’ve always described this as a tool to supplement the vital face to face debates that need to go on. With that in mind the software can be used in offline environments and the investment in 3D modelling can be used to produce rapid prototyped physical models that match the software .

What of the future and the implications for BIM? How can this tool help us manage data about a building or street? In its current format the model and software is a framework that can take inputs and changes in a top down fashion from stakeholders whose roles are well understood. It will receive new models and designs of steadily improving detail and can display images and links to other sources of info provided by local authorities and RSLs, but what of the community? How do we build a system that allows data rising from the streets – in a bottom up fashion – to manifest itself in the model and record live information about the neighbourhood. Our experience with web 2.0 tools and consultation work tells us that there are tools available to help us and they come under the title ‘social media’. Let’s look at a few examples and then imagine how YouCanPlan could use them to bring BIM, post-occupancy monitoring and community consultation together.

Pachube, developed by architect Usman Haque, is a service that aims to broker data for you. It takes information from physical objects that can record things, tidies it up, then spits out the results in a number of useful formats that you can plug into (or point at) another location. The simplest example is electricity meters. I have a meter at my office recording the number of kW used. It sends the info to Pachube allowing me to access it from anywhere and do anything with it. A number of visualisation methods have already been created by others, allowing me to either simply display the info online or feed it into other tools such as the AMEE carbon emissions calculator, letting me know how many tonnes (gulp!) of carbon I’m churning out.

Another social media tool that takes simple inputs and creates powerful outputs is Twitter. Unless you’ve been living under a particularly analogue rock lately, you’ll have probably heard of this web site. Twitter simply wants you to tell it what you’re doing. No, really, that’s it. Just tell it what you’re doing and do it within 140 characters. I’ve been using it for a couple of years for keeping in touch with like-minded architects and bloggers and more recently using it as a tool for dispatching the lyrics of one of my favourite bands one line at a time. Others, like Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, have found ways to use it for recording more than just bon mots and satirical one liners. By plugging it into all the activities around the house Andy has found a way to make his home twitter. A live feed of building information as devices switch on, doors open and phones ring.

Mapping is an important part of information modelling; the data is most useful when tied accurately to location. However, mapping can be a prohibitive field as commercial restrictions can often make extensive availaibility and re-use of map information costly. Open Street Map allows us to avoid this problem by providing up to date maps that are completely free to use and adapt. The wikipedia of mapping, Open Street Map is by the people and for the people, created by volunteers with GPS devices all over the world. Its open source nature allows us to look at ways of combining the info with other tools such as phonecam sites like moblog.co.uk or flickr.com. Marking the position of a photo – an option increasingly done automatically by some phone models – allows us to track the latest events and activities in a neighbourhood visually. This has been succesfully developed, alongside other services such as planning alerts and transport links, by Tom Chance and Thomas Wood and their interactive map of Sutton.

Tools like these will turn platforms like YouCanPlan into a virtual environment augmented by reality. By allowing the model to plug into other information modelling systems the buildings will convey live information about the current state of a house or street or neighbourhood. The data shown in the model will help local authorties record and assess public information, and the residents will be able to keep in touch with the activities of friends and family and show landlords and local authorities what the most pressing issues are right now. The recording and public display of energy information for a household introduces the possibility of encouraged energy saving through competition. Who has saved the most money in the street this week? Who has created the most carbon?

The successful reduction of carbon emissions in the built environment to meet the targets of 2050 is entirely dependent on an improvement in performance informed by regular post-occupancy monitoring. BIM can continue to play a vital role in this process beyond the completion of the construction and there are powerful social media tools available to help make it happen. A creative approach to the field and an open mind to the power of open data formats will help the profession to share knowledge and avoid the usual debates about interoperability. We need to improve the communication between the designers and users throughout the life of the building, not just as we hand over the keys.

I’m particularly looking forward to the latter of the two as I’m hoping it will give me the chance to bring some be2camp ideas to a more mainstream (?) crowd.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s an interesting article on static caravan parks:

Trailers have long interested Morrish. He likes the simplicity of long, narrow, free-standing structures. Light and breezes come in from either side. If ceilings are pushed to 10 feet or higher, small rooms can feel much larger. And since most walls are exterior walls, the possibilities of adjacent gardens and indoor/outdoor spaces are many.

He had no quarrel, really, with the new urbanist movement. But stacking homes above retail shops along transit corridors can’t happen everywhere. Besides, there’s a “formula” to new urban design that doesn’t appeal to Morrish’s eclectic tastes.

And you thought I was kidding when I cited the caravan as fertile ground for housing ideas.

More from Morrish:

His new book, “Growing Urban Habitats, Seeking a New Housing Development Model,” will be out in June. It begins with a proposal to refashion an aging trailer park in Charlottesville, Va., and ends with a design that interlaces long, narrow structures that are affordable, sustainable and well-suited to the valley just below Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate.

“The project is fairly dense, but it doesn’t just stack units up into the air.”

Ok, point taken. I was exagerating for impact. Yet my drawing does rather neatly sum up the problem. Ask an architect about the opportunities for prefabricated housing and trailer park living and they’ll turn it into a building problem. A Rubik’s cube challenge of Lego-like simplicity.

As I said in the flickr comments for the image above, over at Axis we keep having conversations about housing models that get the balance right between independence and community/neighbourhood and we always end up at trailer parks. When those conversations turn into a live project we need to remember that this is a landscape problem, an infrastructure problem, a state vs. private, freehold/leasehold land ownership, territory problem. Not a building problem that’s solved with a crisp, cutaway axonometric.

This is a competition about information, about communication and above all about making government information more useful.

The government produces masses of information on what is happening around the UK. Infomation on crime, on health, on education. However, this information is often hidden away in obscure publications or odd corners of websites. Data tucked away like this isn’t  of use to the ultimate owner of that information YOU.

The Power of Information Taskforce want to hear your ideas on how to reuse, represent, mashup or combine the information the government holds to make it useful.

Thanks to some great advice from Simon Berry I snuck in a submission of my own on the closing day. Can I rely on your vote?