[00:00:00] Hi, I’m Rob Walker from the Hypothetical Development Organization. We’re devoted to urban storytelling about implausible futures for unpopular places. Hypothetical Development, Design Fiction and the Noun Project. Today’s program is about construction. And also about design, but not in a bricks and mortar or ink and paper kind of way.

[00:00:30] Hello, Anthony Fennell here, and this is Future Tense. Here’s Cameron Tonkin Wise, the Associate Dean of Sustainability at Parsons, the new school for design in New York. Uh, design originally sort of came from these fantasists, you know, people like Raymond Lowy and, uh, Norman Bel Geddes, the famous kind of streamliners, who spent all their time.

[00:00:52] fantasizing about totally impossible devices. And it’s a very boyish tradition, particularly in industrial design. And I certainly find that that element to design has disappeared these days. That students find it unfashionable to be fantasists. They find it unfashionable to daydream. They find it unfashionable to doodle and imagine very different kinds of situations, very different kinds of futures.

[00:01:20] It’s, it’s a little uncool on the one hand, and on the other hand, they, I think they’re very constrained by the fact that they I only like to imagine what they can actually make. Designers have a strong commitment to wanting to sort of make something and have it as evidence that they’ve done something.

[00:01:35] Whereas dreaming the impossible means that you can’t possibly make it. There’s going to be no artifact. They won’t be able to have anything concrete other than a doodle or a sketch or a daydream. And so I think this is a real problem in design education these days, that students are just not dreaming enough.

[00:01:51] I’m not finding them to be free enough. Either because of this cool factor, or because they’re self limiting in relation to what is buildable. It’s about thinking outside of the box, I guess. Allowing yourself to imagine a very different future. And Julian Bleecker, the founder of the Near Future Laboratory in Los Angeles, says one way to do that, the way he advocates, is to incorporate elements of science fiction into the design process.

[00:02:20] An approach that works. If you were to design a widget, someone could say like, well, that’s not possible because we haven’t invented the manufacturing techniques to produce it, or that doesn’t make any sense because that violates the laws of physics. With science fiction, those kinds of critiques don’t become possible because people immediately assume that, oh, okay, well, it’s science fiction, so we’re allowing our mind to wander in a way, and it’s quite an effective tool.

[00:02:44] of a literary form, um, and it might even be the only literary form that’s able to have that kind of freedom to, to explore things that transcend what we conventionally think of as possible. And so the thinking is, myself and a number of other, other designers, is that if we could take that same sensibility and make it a part of design, we would have this other kind of practice that, you know, which is called design fiction, the hope being that it allows one to sort of break the bonds of that constrained.

[00:03:12] Typical product design or even, you know, sort of innovation work because it, you know, confronts these boundaries and hits these brick walls that say that’s not possible for any number of reasons, including it could be a practical reason like it violates the laws of physics. It could be a manufacturing constraint, or it could even be a business constraint.

[00:03:31] And so the thinking is that if you can sort of leap over that hurdle and say, like, look, we’re going to put those kind of critiques to the side, and we’re going to allow ourselves Ourselves to explore and see what happens if we bent some of the rules in a way, and then allowed that kind of creative thinking, that innovation thinking to them hopefully feed back into, uh, what can become possible and what we can actually actually make.

[00:03:52] So, so, so it’s pushing those, extending the boundaries, extending those boundaries, but still wedded to reality in the sense that, that you want this to be a, a process that informs. Actual design, the actual design of products or buildings or whatever. Yes, that’s right. I think one of the sort of basic approaches that I generally take, there’s no hard and fast rules, but the approach that I generally take is to just imagine a world within and allowing myself to sort of, you know, move forward 15 years in my imagination to say like, look, a lot of things could have changed and this could become entirely possible.

[00:04:28] So it does do that kind of, a little bit of a play on convention in that way. And there’s a link to storytelling, isn’t there? The telling of stories. Absolutely, because I think those are, you know, the sort of fundamental way of communicating, of course. Um, thinking about the story writing craft as a way in which you can sort of really get into the nitty gritty of the world that might surround This, uh, fantastical object or the science fictional object.

[00:04:52] So it’s not just the object and its features and how fast the processor runs in these kinds of usual sort of engineering metrics, but it’s really like, how does this thing live in someone’s world? What do they do with it? How does it go in their pocket? Whatever circumstances in which it works for them and whatever circumstances in which it doesn’t quite work because we all sort of know that technology is never quite perfect and it gets us upset and frustrates us and so forth.

[00:05:15] And stories seem to be great ways in which you can sort of move out of the ideal scenario that is often used to describe some future technology and just get into like, if it was a little bit beat up, if it got a little bit old, if the battery started going a little bit flat. What would that thing then be?

[00:05:30] And the story becomes somehow more engaging. It seems almost more real in a way if you can sort of take those things that we understand about new devices and gadgets or services or experiences and just really sort of make them seem like they would be a part of this thing if it were a common everyday object.

[00:05:48] There’s something to be said for an approach that doesn’t see, quote, violating the laws of physics as a significant problem. And that other idea of building stories into design and our understanding of the built world, the urban environment, is at the heart of the work done by Rob Walker’s hypothetical development organisation.

[00:06:06] What came about was that I was on a walk in my neighbourhood. I live in Savannah, Georgia, which is an old city. Sort of on the east coast of Georgia and has, I live in sort of a transitional neighborhood where there’s a lot of nice houses, but also a lot of vacant retail and things like that. Old buildings that have been just sort of sitting there empty for a long time.

[00:06:25] And there are these kind of real estate signs advertising some sort of, you know, what’s coming soon kind of signs. You’ve seen these signs and it’s, they’re always sort of advertising like, Oh, this is going to be this. This crummy looking building is going to be rebuilt as these boutiques and condos and things like this.

[00:06:44] And there was just one day when I walked past one of these buildings that I walked past on a regular morning walk of mine and I realized, like, wow, I’ve been looking at that same building with the same sign for four or five years now. And, you know, the economy has collapsed, real estate has collapsed.

[00:06:58] And I just had this thought that, well, that future being promised on that building is. You know, essentially a fiction, sort of a hypothetical future, and wouldn’t it be fun to come up with kind of crazy ideas and put those onto signs and put those onto underused buildings or the kinds of buildings that we overlook.

[00:07:18] And, you know, you sort of use that as almost a storytelling medium. Somewhat inspired by Claes Oldenburg and the way he used to do this feasible monument. In the shape of a pencil eraser and things like this. Uh, that was kind of what I had in mind at the time. And that was, that was the inspiration. Now you decided to focus on buildings in New Orleans, obviously because of the, uh, the impact of Hurricane Katrina, I presume.

[00:07:43] Well, we had lived in New Orleans previously, and even before Hurricane Katrina, there was always a large stock, shall we say, of underappreciated real estate, in the sense of, there were always, even before the hurricane, there was a lot of vacant space, there was a lot of underused, just sort of buildings that had been abandoned, blight was a big problem in New Orleans even before Katrina, and certainly after Katrina, it was kind of even worse.

[00:08:11] And I don’t know that we were trying to say anything about Katrina per se, but we knew the city really well, having lived there, and we had a contact there, our third partner. The partnership is me and my wife, Ellen Susan, and our partner in New Orleans, G. K. Darby. And he was there and had, you know, he was a great scout for finding buildings that would be appropriate for this.

[00:08:35] There were other cities we could have done, because I don’t want to sort of make it sound like New Orleans is the only city in America that had this kind of blight. There are many cities we could have done it in, and we have had many, many inquiries from people in cities all across the country about where to do the sequel, and there’s no shortage of opportunities.

[00:08:56] So just to be clear, what’s important to Rob Walker and his colleagues is that notion of fantasy, of thinking in, how should I put this, A highly creative ways about urban structures. We’re not altering the buildings and we are trying to come up with ideas that are provocative but not necessarily realistic.

[00:09:16] Like a few examples, one of the things that we did in New Orleans, there was a building sort of in the museum district of New Orleans and we decided we would make like what would be interesting and maybe a museum of the self, right? Like something that, who’s the most important figure of the 21st century?

[00:09:34] So it has like mirrors all over it and a big thumbs up sign like from Facebook. And then another one was the loitering center. Because there are certain cities in America where all over the place you see these no loitering signs, you know, painted everywhere. And we thought, well, what about a place that would just be, the whole point of it was you could come in and loiter.

[00:09:55] That’s obviously a very unrealistic idea. There’s no commercial support for that. But, that was kind of our point. Is we were trying to do things that were provocative, engaging, maybe funny. That would, when you see the sign, make you kind of do a double take. And hopefully, you know, ideally, maybe open up people’s imagination to think about, First of all, making them see a building that had been totally overlooked, the kind of building that you almost see through.

[00:10:24] It’s almost invisible because it’s so neglected. And then second, have a really imaginative response to like, well, what could it be? And while our solutions aren’t really practical, we like to think that they open up the doors of creativity. And so the, the representations that you and your team make then of, of those buildings, of what their future potential could be, they’re posted in, uh, picture form, if you like, on the front of the building, but they’re all, you’ve also had a, an, an exhibition of, of several buildings and the representations.

[00:10:55] Yeah, what we did is that the, we printed each sign, because the sort of fundamental form in which this was expressed was a, a sign. And we printed each sign in, uh, Very traditional, three foot by five foot, printed on Coroplast, like a regular real estate development sign that was put on the building. And then we made duplicates of each sign at the same time on a thinner paper that could be shown in a gallery.

[00:11:23] And we had a gallery show in New Orleans. And we also put them on the web at hypotheticaldevelopment. com so that people who aren’t in New Orleans can see them also. And you talk about this being a form of urban storytelling. In what way? When I look at that sign that I first saw that kind of inspired the whole project, I sort of saw it as like, well, that’s kind of a form of story.

[00:11:47] It’s not really going to happen. This building in my neighborhood is never going to be condos. The economy has collapsed. That’s not going to come true. It’s just a story. So once you kind of recognize these signs as a form of story, then the challenge becomes, well, can you tell an entertaining story so that when someone sees it They don’t just sort of say, eh, more condos.

[00:12:09] They sort of stop and say, what in the world is this? And there’s kind of a moment of wonder and awe and engagement of what something could be. There’s a term, I guess, that Bruce Sterling coined called architecture fiction that I think that we didn’t know about it when we started, but this is kind of what we’re doing is architecture fiction is kind of using buildings as a medium for Dreaming up some fun, imaginative tale and kind of adding it to the urban environment.

[00:12:39] Just as pure enjoyment for the passer by and ideally under the very best of circumstances. a spark to thinking about the built environment in a new way with new eyes and seeing things that maybe the passerby would have overlooked.

[00:12:58] You’re with Future Tense, available as a podcast via iTunes or ABC online, or more conventionally across the airwaves on ABC Radio National and Radio Australia. And on Twitter, our name is rnfuturetense, all one word. I was modelling buildings for fun in Google SketchUp, and I heard about Second Life, and it intrigued me, so I went in there to see if I could, what that was like to build models in there.

[00:13:27] And I started with a Frank Lloyd Wright building. I built it. I liked it. I sold it. People wanted to buy it. And, uh, Professor Alison Gill at Arkansas State University brought my Frank Lloyd Wright building to use as a library. for their virtual campus. And the relationship began from there. Pretty soon they started commissioning me to build the actual campus and the work started to expand and has been expanding ever since.

[00:13:55] David Hollywood is a designer and builder in Second Life. The virtual reality platform. He’s a virtual architect, if you like. And his partnership with Arkansas State University now sees him involved in a project to preserve the state’s architectural heritage. The digital form allows them to communicate their story across the planet to anybody.

[00:14:18] They can telegraph their story that way. They have a number of sites which are spread out across Arkansas. And it’s not high on people’s radar, Arkansas, as a destination. So, the chances of many, many people visiting these sites is fairly slim. So, something like Second Life provides them with another channel, another avenue that they can use to broadcast the story of Arkansas.

[00:14:45] So they’re not doing this as an alternative to preserving the actual buildings themselves. This is done in conjunction with that real time preservation. Definitely. It’s in conjunction. There’s a project going on right now, which involves the restoration of the Dyess colony. Now, Dyess was one of the New Deal colonies that was founded by FDR in the 1930s.

[00:15:10] Some famous people got to live in these colonies, and in particular, the one that we’re looking at, key resident was Johnny Cash. Now that project, the colony and his home, is currently being restored. And as it’s being restored, there are numbers of attacks, I guess, being launched into digital areas, into book form, into other forms of communication, which will tell the story.

[00:15:36] Now are the buildings that you’re constructing in Second Life? Virtual replicas of the physical structures that they’re modelled on? Yes. They’re virtual replicas based on the plans and photographs that were taken of those buildings. And how difficult is that? I mean, how, how intricate can you be in replicating those buildings?

[00:15:56] It’s quite easy to get right down to the very, very particular in Second Life. I can replicate a glass vase in immaculate detail, if it’s important to do so. An example of this would be in the Pfeiffer residence, which sits alongside a studio that was used by Ernest Hemingway. The Pfeiffer residence was built in 1910.

[00:16:21] And, what’s unique about it is that it has within its heart a chapel, a Catholic chapel. Because Mary Pfeiffer would only move from Missouri to Arkansas if her husband built a chapel inside the house, so that she had a place for her prayer. Now, I can recreate everything about that chapel, even things that do not exist in the real world anymore.

[00:16:48] In the past, there was an altar in this house. We’ve had photographs of that altar taken, and we’ve been able to replicate it inside the house. Two, Impeccable detail, right down to the level of the doors of the sacristy. So in that sense, what you create in Second Life is in many ways better, or can be better, than the actual real experience for, say, a tourist.

[00:17:13] Yes, and the main thing that is better is that we’re able to bring together a number of sites that have stories across periods of time. And we’re able to Concentrate them all together, and it makes this for a very dense experience so that you can get a true sense of the story of Arkansas in a very condensed place.

[00:17:36] Now, if you’re going to that level of detail with your constructions, how much time does it take? It takes an inordinate amount of time, and if I was to really seriously think about how much time I spend creating these places, I think I would not do it. We’re at early stages of developing these kinds of forms for people to experience.

[00:17:57] We’re still not really at a stage where these places are really, you know, Suited to broad engagement, they really appeal to other designers, people involved in the visual arts, people who might be interested in archaeology, and so on, because we’re still trying to find the language that will work in a digital way, so that we can fully immerse the viewer or the participant.

[00:18:24] In the experience, so that’s that’s an important point, isn’t it? Because I would imagine that you’re not only construct a building in a virtual world, but you can also then embedded with story and narration. You can bring other kinds of digital forms all into that space into that virtual space. So that as you arrive, onto the porch of the Pfeiffer home, you can be greeted by a simulation of a person from 1910.

[00:18:52] They can talk to you about the history of the house. They can take you through the house. You can sit at the piano and play Debussy if you wish. So there are many ways in which you can have literal story being told to you. As you move through the space, but you can also have implied narrative in the way that the building’s been constructed and what it sits alongside.

[00:19:17] Whether it’s viewing another building of, of a similar period or, or so on. Well, David Hollywood, thank you very much for joining us and telling us about the project. Well, thanks, Anthony. Thanks for having me.

[00:19:34] My name is Edward Boatman, and I’m one of the co founders of The Noun Project, which is a free, easy to use online collection of all the symbols and icons that form the world’s visual language. We just launched in December, and we’re continuing to grow. Now, the intriguingly named Noun Project isn’t about urban design, as we’ve just heard, but it is about the signs and symbols that fill our urban environment, collecting, preserving, and making accessible the global language we rarely think about, but which impacts on our everyday lives.

[00:20:09] So here’s Edward Boatman speaking with my Future Tense colleague, Andrew Davies. It’s one of those ideas that grew over time and has multiple layers, but I think a good starting point would be my sketchbook and if you would go through my sketchbook, you’d see there’s a lot of very simple pictograms and symbol drawings that I’ve done.

[00:20:30] I’ve always been fascinated by them and When I worked in an architecture firm during projects, I would have to find high quality symbols for my presentations, and I was always frustrated that I couldn’t find a great resource to locate these symbols very quickly and efficiently. And I got laid off. And so I decided to act on my idea, you know, convince my wife, who’s kind of the business brains behind the operation that, uh, we should, we should go for it.

[00:20:57] And I brought in one of my old friends, Scott Thomas, who was the design director of the Obama presidential campaign. And he’s a really talented user experience designer, and we got him to work on the website. So that’s kind of the short story of, of how it came about. Now the mission of the project is to quote, share, celebrate and enhance the world’s visual language.

[00:21:19] What can you tell us about the sorts of visual language you collect on the site? There’s a couple different, I think, categories you can kind of look at it. First there’s, there’s these symbols that are kind of universally recognized at this point. I, I would say like the recycling symbol is one of those, the radiation symbol, the biohazard symbol.

[00:21:36] And even though these symbols are. They are universally recognized and they’re very, you know, they’re scattered throughout society. They’re still, believe it or not, you know, hard to find online, a high quality vector image online. So there’s the very universal ones, and then there’s, there’s other symbols on there for objects that one would think that you might not need a symbol for, like a safety pin, but I think it’s just an interesting exercise to try to describe the essence of what That object looks like, and so I, so I kind of break those down, you know, into those categories.

[00:22:12] Now, is it correct that you not only take some of the visual signs and language that are freely available from other public domain sources, but you also encourage people to create others from scratch, if you like? That’s correct. So again, the, the recycle symbol, the biohazard symbol, uh, these symbols are on the public domain.

[00:22:29] So I’ve, in some, some cases borrowed them from other collections. I’ve recreated some of them, but then the other ones I’ve created myself. And the, the way you can distinguish those on the site is the ones that are in the public domain there, of course, they’re licensed under public domain. The ones I’ve created myself are, are under a license called Creative Commons Attribution, which essentially allows a designer to use these symbols in their projects.

[00:22:57] It just requires a simple attribution. And what was the thinking behind making all those symbols available in that Creative Commons form? And what’s the advantage of making them available so that people can use them for themselves? I mean, how big an audience do you think is there for the use of signs and visual language?

[00:23:11] I think the audience is, is huge. I think that’s the beauty of a, of a visual language is, is this one form of communication that unites the entire world. And so I think it’s a global audience and I think there’s a need for that. Um, and so that’s why it was very imperative to me right from the get go that these symbols had to be free.

[00:23:28] I don’t want to charge people for using them. I don’t want to create, you know, a login user account. I just wanted it to be as easy as possible to communicate. You know, for designers and artists and teachers and musicians to be able to access our site and use these symbols. That’s why all the licenses are completely free.

[00:23:47] And are there actually any copyright or licensing issues when it comes to, say, a road sign from America or an escalator sign from the UK? I mean, what are the sort of copyright or licensing issues when it comes to visual language and signs? You know, that, that’s, that’s a really good question. And we’re actually working closely with our lawyers to kind of address those issues and kind of bring those to light and try to educate people about that.

[00:24:11] Our current stance right now is if there’s a question, whether it’s copyrighted or not, we just. Don’t put it on there. We want to be, you know, we, we don’t want to get into that area of putting something that’s that’s copyrighted on the site. So if there’s a question, whether or not something is copyrighted, we just don’t even put it on the site.

[00:24:27] Now, an interesting part of the site is that you also have a blog in addition to actually having the symbols and signs that people can see. And One of the examples I saw highlighted on the Noun Projects blog was a design that someone created to actually help save sloths in Venezuela. What can you tell us about that story and what it perhaps says about the importance of visual language and signs on the Noun Projects site?

[00:24:46] Yeah, I think that was, that was one of the more exciting moments that we’ve, we’ve had so far with working with this site is actually a designer from Venezuela. Her name is Gabrielle Gomez. She emailed us and she talked about a local project in her town that she was working on which was to save sloths because a lot of times they would get hit by cars or get stuck in power lines and and she was working with a preservation program in their city.

[00:25:16] And one of her strategies on how they could protect the sloth is to create a sign, a sloth crossing the road sign. And so she was actually a graphic designer and she got the city council to adopt her symbol and make it into a sign. And I just thought that was a great story of someone. You know, seeing a problem, coming up with a solution, and, um, it’s a very grassroots way to solve a problem.

[00:25:43] And now that sign is available for the entire world to use, and so if other towns have the same problem, they can download this symbol and make a sign out of it as well. And just finally, the NAMM project is still in its early stages and there’s more work being done on the site as we speak, but how big is the task ahead of you when it comes to sort of recording and preserving visual language, and what are the goals you have for the site?

[00:26:05] I think I think it’s a monumental task. Um, uh, yeah, there’s definitely a lot of work ahead to be done. Um, some of the features that we’re going to be adding soon are going to be user submissions. And that’s essentially going to allow designers and artists from around the world to contribute to this project.

[00:26:23] And I think, you know, one thing that we’re very, Well, the first thing that we need to be cautious about and we think is very important is, is we need to kind of preserve the integrity of the quality of the symbols that we have on the site. And we need to create a kind of strict design standards for what type of symbols should be submitted.

[00:26:42] curate it correctly, then I think it can lose some of its value. Edward Boatman, founder of The Noun Project, and he was speaking there on Skype with my colleague Andrew Davies. Now, looking ahead to next week, and according to recent figures, Australian homes are on average very large, at least in comparison to similar countries like the United States and New Zealand.

[00:27:03] But they have apparently peaked, and small dwellings are making a comeback, it seems, both here and abroad. The tiny house movement. It’s part ideological and part economic. And one of the people we’ll meet is David Bell. The house is ten square metres. If you think of an L shape, the small wing of the L is a little kitchen.

[00:27:25] And the large wing of the L is the living space. And above that living space, there’s a mezzanine floor built into the roof. That mezzanine floor is the bedroom. The roof is built at a 45 degree angle, so that there’s Plenty of head space on the mezzanine floor. I’m, um, lying back in my recliner chair and looking around my house at the moment, and an essential thing for me is the fact that it’s very beautiful.

[00:28:00] It’s full of books, it’s full of works of art, it’s full of music. That’s all fits beautifully into a tiny house like this. That’s the tiny house movement. Next on Future Tense.