MITPressLog

Monday Eye Candy: Design Meets Disability

In our last Monday Eye Candy post of 2011, we featured photographs from Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht's Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space. For the first Monday Eye Candy of 2012, we present images from Design Meets Disability by Graham Pullin. Design Meets Disability contains 114 color illustrations to show us how design and disability can inspire each other. Why, Pullin asks, shouldn’t hearing aids be as fashionable as eyewear? Here are a few illustrations from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a memorable Cutler and Gross advertisement from the early 1990s
Photo: Platon, courtesy of Cutler and Gross

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aimee Mullins’s carved wooden legs
Photo: Aimee Mullins

 

 

 

 

 

 

chairs designed by a diversity of international designers for the nextmaruni collection
Photo: Yoneo Kawabe © nextmaruni

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tissot Silen-T tactile watch
Photo: courtesy of Tissot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mebox storage with perforated dots that can be punched out to create letters or icons, designed and manufactured by GTF
Photo: courtesy of GTF

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

message wall for O2 by Durrell Bishop and Tom Hulbert at IDEO
Photo: Thomas Stewart, courtesy of IDEO

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday Eye Candy: Helvetica and the New York City Subway System

Last week, we featured beautiful spreads from Kit White's 101 Things to Learn in Art School. Today's eye candy is Paul Shaw's Helvetica and the New York City Subway System. Helvetica and the New York City Subway System contains numerous previously unpublished documents as well as more than 200 photographs, most of them original or never seen before. Here are a few photographs from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

Porcelain enamel station sign. Rector Street (R/W), 1970s. This is the only remaining sign in Standard Medium among a group of stations on the BMT Broadway and Fourth Avenue lines that were renovated with large colored tiles in the 1970s. Regarding the disappearing mosaics, a TA spokesman said at the time, “We didn’t consider these things had any great artistic merit anyhow.” (2008)

Credit: Paul Shaw

 

Porcelain enamel station sign. 242nd Street—Van Cortlandt Park (1). (2007)

Credit: Paul Shaw

 

 

Illuminated sign. 42nd Street—Port Authority (A/C/E), 1980s? Handcut Helvetica Medium. (2009)

Credit: Paul Shaw

 

Porcelain enamel station sign. Beach 36 Street / Edgemere (A). 2010

Credit: Paul Shaw

 

 

Handwritten directional sign. Avenue N (F), 2010. (2010)

Credit: Paul Shaw

 

 

 

 

Monday Eye Candy

While it’s supposed to be unwise to judge a book by its cover, at The MIT Press, we believe that to acknowledge the visual and material appeal of books is not to diminish their content. In spirit of this belief, we're instituting "Monday Eye Candy" to celebrate the many MIT Press titles that we feel are beautiful, inside and out.

Today's eye candy is Kit White's 101 Things to Learn in Art School. The cover is a stamped case and each of the lessons in the book is accompanied by a black and white drawing that illustrates the point made by referring to an historical or contemporary work of art. The drawings, produced by the author, act both as referrals to well-known works that students should study, as well as demonstrations of the difficulty of successfully capturing the subtleties of art works when copying them in order to decipher their secrets. Feast your eyes on these spreads from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Font Fight: Helvetica’s Battle to Gain Control of NYC Subway Signs

 

In celebration of the 107^th anniversary of New York City’s first official subway system, let’s take a look at seven facts about how its iconic signs came about from Paul Shaw’s Helvetica and the New York City Subway System:

1) The first “signs” in the New York City subway system were created by Heins & La Farge, the architects of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), when the IRT, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT), and the Independent (IND) lines merged in 1904. They are the same mosaic tablets seen today in both serif and sans serif roman capitals. Although created in the same architect’s studio, none of the signs have a uniform lettering style.

 2) George Salomon, frustrated by the labyrinth of distinctions among the IRT, BMT, and IND lines, suggested creating five color-coded lines identified by a letter and eleven branch lines a derivative letter/number combination. Only the color-coded route map was adopted by the Transit Authority, and Salomon’s subway map was published in 1958. 

3) Many subway sign systems around the world experienced many issues with consistency of style, except for London. Calligrapher Edward Johnston created the Johnston Railway Sans font for Frank Pick, the publicity manager for London Transport in 1916. In the 1960s, the font Airport, first used in The Oceanic Building (now Terminal 3) at Heathrow Airport.

4) The font Helvetica, created in Switzerland, didn’t catch on so quickly in the United States until Mergenthaler Linotype in Brooklyn aligned its original German Linotype mats with American ones.

5) MIT was one of the earliest three places to incorporate Helvetica into award-winning designs and advertising.

6) Helvetica became the official typeface for the New York City subway system signage in December 1989. Forms of Helvetica Medium were used for the Metro-North, Long Island Railroad, and New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA).

7) Desktop publishing software helped prompt the complete switch from the font Standard to Helvetica. It was the only font available in the equipment and systems listed the 1989 MTA Sign Manual.

 

Stata - Finally getting some respect

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings and Grounds blog, Lawrence Biemiller flags a reappraisal of MIT's Stata Center by James Russell of Bloomberg News. When it opened in 2004, the Frank Gehry-designed building came in for its share of criticism; John Silber, formerly the president of Boston University, even went so far as to put it on the cover of his book Architecture of the Absurd: How "Genius" Destroyed a Practical Art.

But, says Russell, Stata's unusual design and intellectually driven layout seems to look better and better as time goes on. Money quote:

Is Stata frivolous? Walk with me through the ground-floor “student street,” a popular campus shortcut with ramps circling overhead, lit with shardlike skylights. You are likely to see people talking over laptops or scribbling on blackboards. Symposia often spill into the hallway as passersby stop to see why the chatter is so animated. Up a level or two, Gehry all but banished hallways. You move past lounges, open two-story seminar spaces, and eddies of whiteboard-equipped space often occupied by impromptu collaborators.

Stata’s beehive quality is intentional. At the furthest edge of research, working within the old disciplines no longer makes sense. Gehry’s team designed a building of laboratory “neighborhoods” to support communities of researchers. At Stata, linguistics, artificial-intelligence and computer scientists work together, but more boundaries need to be crossed. Stata throws people together so that every researcher has a shot at encountering the person he never thought of who turns out to have a skill that’s needed.

The construction of the center was detailed meticulously in Nancy Joyce's Building Stata, and Russell's description dovetailed nicely with a quote from Gehry that shows up early in the book:

The building reflects the culture of the groups inside it. They are all going to be colliding with each other intellectually over time. That's what gives it strength. That's what it's all about. For the rest of their lives here they are going to discover things because of nature. The sun and the light change and when they do, with these cracks and spaces where light comes in, that's going to change the people. There are going to be some miracles here.

Russell's whole article is worth a read, as is Biemiller's Chronicle post.

Casual Friday - Ode to the Barcode

This morning's Shelf Awareness pointed to a New York Times story about the 35th anniversary of the barcode.   Designed to speed up checkout and control inventory, the committee at MIT who reviewed the barcode thought it wouldn't last more than a few years. 

Boy, were they wrong.  Today, barcodes are used for most products--including the books we publish with our sophisticated 13 digit ISBN. A colleague here at MIT Press laughed as he recalled the controversy surrounding the decision to put barcodes on all of our books.  Now something that we barely notice, many designers and authors were upset about the barcode disrupting the design of their jackets. We've even managed to make them part of the design of our jackets on some occasions. 

Reimagining Stata

Via the Boston blog Universal Hub, a fascinating set of photos of MIT's Stata Center by photographer Richard Beaubien. Stata is the ambitious, furiously debated, Gehry-designed building that can't seem to stay out of the news very long.It's also a few blocks away from our offices; its design was the subject of this book. Beaubien's photos seem like a creative rethink of the building's modernist feel - sometimes fantastical, sometimes downright ominous.

The whole thing is well worth a look.

Wednesday Blog Watch - Design

Designers, do you know that September 4, 2007 to September 10, 2007 is Istanbul Design Week?
Boxes and Arrows, an online journal devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design, maintains a calendar of design events all over the world.  The journal also recently posted a review of Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions.

Another major current event for designers is the recent launch of a programming manual for designers: Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists.  The Processing language, for audio and visual designers, is easy to learn and use, and has been developed as an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas.  According to a post on the mercurious blog , "Originally created as a learning tool, [Processing] is maturing through a Beta phase currently while winning tremendous support within the academic and design community. It appears to be emerging as the Sketchpad of the future". 

More details from the Processing website:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

A cluster of blog entries discussing the Processing language can be found here.

To see an example of Processing in action, have a look at this mesmerizing video created by Casey Reas.  More sample programs, videogames, movies, and audio files can be found in the exhibition section of the Processing website.

John Thackara's Open House

Open House: Architecture and Technology for Intelligent Living envisions the house of the future as a place for new spatial experiences, new systems of sustainability and new sensory enhancements. It encourages creative individuals to imagine how we will live in the future. The traveling exhibition was organized by the Vitra Design Museum in collaboration with Art Center College of Design, and opened in Essen, Germany, in August 2006. It includes a multi-faceted research initiative, incorporating Art Center research studios, as well as a series of public programs.  The exhibition is currently at Art Center of College and Design in Pasadena, in The Wind Tunnel on South Campus.  It will run through July 1st.  Admission is free. 

Tonight at 7:30, John Thackara, author of In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World addresses how European and American approaches to green design differ and what they should learn from each other. Thackara is director of Doors of Perception, a design futures network that involves visionary designers, business, the public sector and grassroots innovators in collaborative projects.  The talk is also free.  More information can be found here. 

PS: In John Thackara news unrelated to his talk tonight, we just noticed a Bruce Sterling post on Wired's Beyond the Beyond telling us that he's looking for some practical feedback on the Doors of Reception Report.  Thackara will take one lucky survey respondent (and a guest) to lunch at a time and location that suits both parties.  I guess there is such thing as a free lunch.  Take the survey here.