In Barry Lopez’s short story, The Mappist, the narrator meets an elderly cartographer who has spent his life drawing exquisitely detailed maps of cities all over the world. He has worked independently and under a pseudonym for decades, after being dismissed from his US government job for approaching his task with too much care and commitment to the art of mapmaking, and too little loyalty to bureaucratic efficiency.

At the end of the story, the narrator, a geographer, goes to visit the nearly 90-year-old mappist at his home in rural North Dakota, which is filled with his work. The geographer marvels at the human life in the maps and remarks that nobody has time any more for the field work required to produce them, to which the cartographer responds, “That’s unfortunate, because this information is what we need, you know. This shows history and how people fit the places they occupy. It’s about what gets erased and what comes to replace it.”

The mappist is characterized, whose dedication to his country manifests through his work. In the twilight of his life, it’s clear that the changes he’s seen through his observations of landscapes and people have made him deeply reflective, and maybe a little jaded, about the human condition. “I am obliged to shoulder the history of my own country,” he tells the geographer, “I could show you here the whole coming and going of the Mandan nation, wiped out in eighteen thirty-seven by a smallpox epidemic. I could show you the arrival of German and Scandinavian farmers changed the composition of the topsoil, and the places where Charles Bodmer painted, and the evolution of red-light districts in Fargo—all that with pleasure. I’ve nothing against human passion, human longing. What I oppose is blind devotion to progress, and the venality of material wealth. If we’re going to trade the priceless for the common, I want to know exactly what the terms are.”

This short story, which was originally published in 2001 in the collection Light Action in the Caribbean, is republished as the foreword to a new monograph of photographer Victoria Sambunaris, Taxonomy of a Landscape (Radius, 2014). Unlike traditional forewords, though, it’s not printed in the first pages of the book, but rather on a pamphlet tucked into a pocket on the back cover. Which means, if you’re reading left to right, you have already traveled through Sambunaris’s imagery when you arrive at The Mappist, and you can’t believe the precision with which it speaks to these photos, most of them taken after the story was written.

The reader is left to infer that Sambunaris has stepped into the cartographer’s shoes as a 21st-century documentarian of human presence in the American landscape. The photos in this book, taken during half a dozen road trips over more than a decade, capture the massive scale of modern industry — mines, dams, freight trains, highways and logistics centers; the pipelines of Alaska and the Mexican border fence. She spent a particularly long period photographing Nevada, Utah, and the town of Wendover, which straddles the state line. She recorded the steam that rises from the ground at Yellowstone National Park, hinting at the massive volcano that sits beneath it. Each image conveys the tension between the epic timescale of geological features and the blink-short span of modern infrastructure’s tenure.

Sambunaris is a kind of mapmaker, displaying the layers of material and the layout of space that compose a particular geographic region. Almost always the photos include the fingerprint of industry, which sometimes appears so light that it suggests human frailty, and other times shows up heavy and ruthless. It’s exactly what the cartographer said a map ought to be: the information we need; the history and how people fit the places they occupy; what gets erased and what comes to replace it.

Re:form was fortunate to interview Sambunaris about her new book, and to receive a copy of the artifact itself, which is beautifully designed. In addition to the featured photos, the rear pocket contains a secondary book of images showcasing the books she read, rocks she collected, journals she kept, and personal objects she carried throughout the solo road trips during which she built this body of work.

In the introduction, Natasha Egan (director and curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography) talks a lot about monuments — the notion that shipping containers or trains or warehouses or dams or mines can “be read as monuments to human achievement.” But while we pay visits with great intention and even reverence to official monuments like the Statue of Liberty or Mt. Rushmore, we fly by industrial sites without even considering them. What are you aiming to communicate by making pictures that frame these places as monuments?

I’m not intentionally framing these places as monuments. Rather, I’m observing the way we inhabit landscape, our relationship to it and considering the suggestion of what fills our lives. Our relationship to landscape says a great deal about our culture.

There is a wonderful quote by geographer Peirce Lewis, “If we want to understand ourselves, we would do well to take a searching look at landscapes. The human landscape is an appropriate source as self knowledge because it’s our unwitting autobiography reflecting our tastes our values our aspiration and even our fears.”

It’s like a mantra for me.

Egan also mentions the idea of “technological sublime” (“fascination with immense human-made projects…awe inspired by marvels of human engineering”). Can you say a bit about your own experience of encountering — and trying to photograph — human creations of such scale?

I am drawn to landscapes of human manipulation and geophysical occurrences. When I catch a glimpse, I’ll go after it. These sites are anomalies. Exploring and investigating these particular landscapes gives meaning to everything around me and the world I live in. It’s humbling to see something of this scale.

The first mine I encountered was the Bingham Copper Mine near Salt Lake City, Utah in 2002. It transformed me. It is one of the largest open pit copper mines and when looking down into it, the size of this hole in the earth is staggering. I think about all that goes into mining and our everyday products that require metals, minerals and petroleum that are extracted. How long can we continue to do this?

Another memorable moment was in Alaska, driving up to the North Slope on the Haul Road that parallels the Alaskan pipeline. The Brooks Range was the backdrop for a photograph of the pipeline snaking through the landscape. The experience was sublime and I nearly didn’t take the photograph feeling that one cannot capture this feeling in a single photograph. I’m glad I didn’t walk away and shot just one sheet of film after traveling so far to find it.

Some of the your images — particularly the aerial shots of mines — carry echoes of the Earth Art movement, in which land was manipulated into a massive work of sculpture. How do you see the relationship between land art and the markings of industry? Are they spiritual opposites?

There are definitely many parallels. Occasionally, I mistake some of the industrial sites I encounter for an art piece. In 2005, I was travelling through Mexican Hat, Utah. While driving away from the town, I saw through my rearview mirror what I thought was a lake in a red desert landscape. It didn’t make sense so I went back to have a closer look. At first, I thought it was some sort of Land Art piece. There was a vast expanse of rock sculpted to look like a lake but, in fact, it was a deposit of Uranium tailings buried at the site. The scale and the illusion had me fooled. So often one might bypass such sites and never question what it is but my intent is to bring these curiosities to the forefront for my own satisfaction.

Another example of mistaken identity was an enormous boulder field in Pennsylvania that was a glacial deposit that happened 20,000 years ago. These landscapes whether Land Art or industrial site or natural occurrences are often in remote areas and are monumental in size. However, Land Art is a reaction against commercialization, industrial sites a means to it, and natural landscapes just are which I guess, makes them spiritual opposites.

I find a certain satisfaction in the regularity and symmetry that’s often found in industrial landscapes. The little consecutive openings at the copper mine, for example, or the perfectly distributed tiers of the quarry. Does that resonate for you? Is the regularity satisfying or jarring? I suppose this is a way of saying: do you feel like you fall on the side of “nature” or “industry,” if such a question can be asked?

My work parallels both nature and industry. For all of the intensity I feel when looking at the flares in the night sky of an oil refinery, I find solace in looking at a pristine untouched view from a mountain top. I look at how sites are organized and structured in order to make sense of all of the chaos that surrounds us whether it is the perfect tiers of a mine, the symmetry of aligned and numbered trucks at a dock or the layers of a rock formation that tell its history. The entire experience of being on the road alone for extended periods of time is meditative but whether I stumble upon an industrial site or a natural geological phenomenon, the experience is phenomenal. And the totality of the entire experience of looking, observing and experiencing the country and all that it has to offer keeps me intrigued and curious.

I was so interested in the anecdote about you getting to Alaska and discovering you’d be granted more access than you expected to industrial sites because of the Libertarian attitude up there. Can you say a little more about how that sense of freedom from authority enabled/empowered your artistic pursuit there?

When I’m looking over my shoulder to see if law enforcement or some other authority is going to accost me, it takes away from my concentration and focus. It happens more frequently than you can imagine and especially after September 11th. There is so much suspicion and paranoia whether I’m down on the US/Mexico border or driving through a small town in the middle of the country — I’m constantly followed and questioned.

In Alaska, I experienced an unexpected laid back attitude that felt different from anywhere else. People were friendly, helpful and enthusiastic about what I was doing. It enabled me to look for a long time and to wait for the right moment to shoot.

I was also interested in the mention of your experience of the light in Alaska being almost artificial/surreal. What were the qualities that made it so for you? Can you describe it more and talk about how it affected your photography?

Above the Arctic Circle, the sun never sets between May and August and never rises between November and January. The midnight sun allows for all kinds of activity throughout the night, there are many 24 hour golf courses in Alaska. When I arrived in Fairbanks, the first thing I noticed was an incredible quality of light that is difficult to describe. I would see it late at night—almost a glow, dreamlike and artificial. Nothing I’ve experienced before but all photographers are observant of light. Around 10pm, I would take to the streets and walk around with a smaller hand held camera reacting to that light shooting mostly neighborhood houses and cars. I photographed a gold mine north of Fairbanks that operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in the summer months. I started at 11pm and worked until about 4am just when the sun was coming up from the horizon and hitting the mine. It’s a photographer’s dream to have such light and also have that freedom to work.

I want to just have you talk a bit about a few of the photographs that I’m planning to include and that I found really interesting to read about:

Hercules Gap

This is near Ely, Nevada taken in 2004.

I think about the history of place when I encounter a site. In 1859, JH Simpson leading a US Geological Survey team encountered the gap in the Egan Range and noted: “I call the place the Gate of Hercules, on account of its stupendous walls”. In 1873 it became a mining camp and today, a small road snaking through the walls leads to the Ely Maximum State Prison.

Wendover, Nevada

Wendover is a town on the Utah/Nevada border, I-80 runs right through it, and the state line crosses through the center of town with cheap motels and gas marts on the Utah side and liquor stores and casinos on the Nevada side. There was a military base there in the 40’s and it was the training site for the bomber group that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I have frequented Wendover many times over the years in 2002, 2004 and 2007, each time seeing it differently. Wendover is full of history and intrigue and in this photograph, I consider Wendover’s physical and historical transformation over the years. The small houses at the base of the outcrop evokes a feeling of transience and our fleeting time here.

In 2008, I was exploring the Yellowstone caldera and the Snake River Plain considering the geologic history of this landscape. The largest active volcanic system in North America is situated below one of our most popular national parks and that volatility is a curious notion. Most interesting is the volcano has gone into major eruption every 600,000 years and we are near that point again now, so any day it could blow and it will drastically change the landscape and our habitation. When traveling the Snake River Plain, I was seeing evidence of past volcanic eruptions such as lava fields, buttes and crater rings that evolved from the Yellowstone volcano. When looking at a topographical map of southern Idaho, one can see crescent shape depressions in the earth from the activity and force at Yellowstone but have shifted due to the North American tectonic plates that are moving west and south — another reminder our short existence in geological time.

How did you come to select the Barry Lopez story to accompany this? Was it something you’d read long ago and carried with you thinking about its connection to your work, or did you seek it out once you were already in progress on the book? It’s amazing how much it speaks to your own lifelong documentation process.

The Barry Lopez short story came to me from my friend and writer, Maria Jerskey, who had heard it on Selected Shorts. She asked me several times if I had listened to the podcast yet, apparently there was some urgency! Shortly after, I was at her house for dinner and we listened to it together. Afterwards, we looked at each other in amazement. The Mappist is a wonderful story that speaks about vision, conviction and cultivating what is personally important. It spoke to both of us and I believe all artists. It had to have been a year later when David Chickey of Radius and I were discussing the writing for the book. I wanted a piece of literature included since literature is so much a part of the work process. David read the story and his only word: “Perfect.”

You can follow Sarah Rich on Twitter at @sarahrich. Subscribe to re:form’s RSS feed, sign up to receive our stories by email, and follow the main page here.

Taxonomy of a Landscape was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A look at the theatrics guiding user interaction

By Karen Levy and Tim Hwang

Here’s a speculation of science fiction that is rapidly manifesting into a real nuts-and-bolts design debate with wide-ranging implications: should self-driving cars have steering wheels?

The corporate battle lines are already being drawn on this particular issue. Google announced its autonomous car prototype last year, drawing much attention for its complete absence of a steering wheel. The reason for this radical departure? The car simply “didn’t need them.”

That is not an opinion shared among everyone racing to build commercially available self-driving automobiles. At CES this past January, Mercedes showcased its F015 autonomous prototype with a steering wheel, observing that it was still needed in “occasions when the driver wants to drive.”

But, the luxury (and boredom) of manual driving isn’t the only reason that Mercedes — alongside traditional car manufacturers like Audi and GM — is keeping the steering wheel in their self-driving car. These companies have followed a gradualist approach towards autonomy for years, facilitating the replacement of the human driver in piecemeal steps rather than in a single radical change. This includes the introduction of technologies like adaptive cruise control, but also more recently features systems like parking assist and automatic braking. The result has been a campaign that “slowly but surely break[s] down…potential consumer concerns while slowly but surely vetting the technology.”

For now, regulators have taken action to resolve this specific debate. By decision of the California DMV, companies will have to include a wheel when testing their vehicles on public roads to allow for “immediate manual control.” Other states are expected to follow suit.

Take a step back: a steering wheel implies a need to steer, something that the autonomous car is designed specifically to eliminate. In a near future of safe autonomous driving technologies, the purpose of the steering wheel is largely talismanic. More than actually serving any practical function, the steering wheel seems bound to become a mere comfort blanket to assuage the fears of the driver.

This is a classic problem. Consumers refuse to adopt a new technology if it visibly disempowers them or departs radically from trusted patterns of practice. This is the case even when the system is better at a task than a human operator — as in the case of the self-driving car, which is safer than a human driver.

The solution? Allow the interface of your technology to engage in a form of design theater.

An object can assume the form of something familiar and accepted, in line with the status quo, even as the real capabilities of the technology undergo radical change. After all, the truly functionless steering wheel in the autonomous car would simply replace a steering wheel that already keeps up the myth that it is connected to physical mechanisms within the vehicle, rather than providing a digital input to a series of computers.

These design theaters abound in technologies both new and old. Sometimes, theaters help guide us about how to use a (physical or digital) system. Skeuomorphs are design features that evoke past iterations of the same artifact to help us figure out how to use something, or to help us to understand its function — an e-reader with “pages” that “turn,” the shutter click on a digital camera, a cigarette filter printed to look like it’s made from cork. These features can give a new system temporal continuity by retaining previously functional design characteristics as ornaments; they’re a nod to past design and the cultural legacies of technology use.

Other design theaters are aimed not at providing direct usability cues, but at smoothing technologies’ entry into social life by increasing their acceptability. An early example is the Horsey Horseless, an 1899 vehicle design intended to coexist with horse-drawn carriages. Horses were spooked by the strange new cars on the road; the Horsey Horseless was, essentially, “a car with a big wooden horse head stuck on the front of it,” which doubled as a fuel tank. It’s not clear that the Horsey Horseless was ever produced, nor that it would have worked as planned, but its intentions were clear — to present a misleading social cue (to horses!) that would help make this new contraption less scary and easier to live with.

“Placebo buttons” — buttons that look functional but actually have control over nothing — are a great example of another flavor of design theater: the theater of volition, which leads the user to believe that she has more control over a system than she actually does. Theaters of volition are everywhere: at crosswalks, in elevators, and even in your office thermostat.

What’s the point of these nonfunctional design features? They make users more comfortable with a new technology by giving us a sense of control, even if that sense is ultimately illusory.

The oft-cited urban legend that instant cake manufacturers had to add an unnecessary step — the addition of an egg — in order for housewives of the 1950s to feel like they were still “cooking” pays homage to exactly this type of theater in the design of objects. Similarly, in neurological experiments, animals show fewer signs of stress response to an uncomfortable situation if they’re given a lever to push so they feel like they’re in control — even if that lever isn’t actually connected to anything. Sometimes, we need the illusion of being in command of something to feel comfortable with it — and new technologies are no exception.

Theaters abound in the digital as much as they do in the physical. While Facebook and Google exert a powerful influence in mediating the content that you receive, they engage in the theater of the passive. By design, these systems appear as compliant agents, merely responding to queries and browsing without revealing the data they collect and the extent to which an algorithm influences the experience of a site. The fact that these technologies create “filter bubbles” which mask as much as they reveal is left unexposed to the user.

How should we think about the various forms of design theater? The answer might lie not in the contemporary world of machine learning algorithms and robotics — but in mid-century sociological theory. Erving Goffman was one of the preeminent social theorists of the modern era; his work made huge contributions to how we understand how people communicate with one another day-to-day. In 1959, Goffman published his best-known book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which introduced the concept of dramaturgical analysis of social exchange. Goffman suggested that our social interactions can be thought of in the same terms as theatrical performances, in which there’s both a performance on the “front stage,” geared toward a particular audience, as well as a “back stage” that isn’t readily observable. Very often, front stage performances involve misrepresentations or false impressions — some of which stem from malicious intent, while others are “white lies” intended to save others’ feelings. It’s bad social form (and illegal) to pretend to be a police officer; it’s considered polite to pretend to enjoy a friend’s band.

Goffman’s theory was concerned with human-to-human interactions — how people behave and portray themselves to one another in everyday life. But Goffman’s dramaturgy holds some lessons for how we think about and understand machines, too. Just as people do, autonomous systems present themselves in certain ways, for socially strategic purposes. For machines, we might think of the back stage as the “guts” of the system — the physical and algorithmic structures that determine its underlying capabilities. The front stage is the machine’s dramaturgical performance, aimed at smoothing its social interactions with humans.

A machine’s front stage performance gets enacted through design. Just as a human provides front stage cues through her appearance and behavior (for instance, by talking with a certain degree of formality, or wearing a uniform), design provides signals for how the people around a machine should understand and interact with it. Sometimes these cues are relatively forthright: press this button to start, plug me in here. But just as humans can provide social cues that mislead others about their “true” nature, the design of a system or artifact can invoke deception: a machine, like a person, can lie, omit, or mislead.

“Design lies” can serve a number of purposes, and aren’t necessarily nefarious — sometimes they’re just about making social life possible.

How should we think about the ethics of design theater? Our initial reaction might be that misleading consumers about the nature of a technology is always wrong. In lots of areas, we enforce the idea that people have a right to know what they’re buying (consider rules about honest packaging and labeling, from knowing what ingredients are in our food to being informed about the possible health consequences of exposure to certain substances). But just as humans’ front stage performances are necessary for social life to function, it’s important for technologies to integrate into social life in ways that make them usable and understandable. Though some designers find skeuomorphism ugly or aesthetically inauthentic, it’s tough to find a serious ethical problem with a design feature that’s genuinely intended to guide usability.

There also doesn’t seem to be a tremendous ethical problem with theaters designed for certain laudable social purposes, like safety and protection. Nothing makes this clearer than artificial engine noise. Because modern electric cars are so much quieter than their internal-combustion predecessors, it’s much harder for pedestrians to hear them approaching. Since we’re used to listening for engine noise as a safety cue, a silent vehicle can more readily “sneak up” on us and cause accidents. Over time, if all vehicles become silent, many of us would no doubt lose this subconscious reliance — but the consequences of losing the cue altogether can be very dangerous in the shorter term, especially for pedestrians with visual impairments. (In fact, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration considered requiring hybrid and electric vehicles to play back a recording based on the noise made by an internal combustion engine; regulations about exactly how these quiet cars should audibly alert pedestrians about their presence are currently pending.) Law professor Ryan Calo describes these design theaters as a form of “visceral notice” intended to protect and empower people. We might understand these theaters as forms of socially benevolent deception — design lies that ultimately serve positive social ends.

But there are cultural aspects to design theaters like these, too, which can lead some users to feel unduly deceived. For instance, some muscle cars layer synthetic engine noises onto (quieter) real ones, in a nod to the nostalgic preferences of aficionados; Ford had Mustang fan clubs help it select the right aural mix for its newer models. But some die-hard fans are offended by what they see as a “lip sync” by car manufacturers: “The bellowing roar of a tire-roasting fastback on the brink is the stuff of which kids dream…Sound is part of the appeal of motoring, and when it’s not entirely real or honest, something’s lost.” Says another: “For a car guy, it’s literally music to hear that thing rumble…It’s a mind-trick. It’s something it’s not. And no one wants to be deceived.”

Theaters of volition pose the thorniest ethical questions. On one hand, we could posit that there are social benefits to the proliferation of certain technologies in society, and without certain misleading front-stage presentations, these systems wouldn’t get the social traction they need. We might all be safer and more productive if self-driving cars become the norm, and if we need a little design “help” to get there, so be it. But of course, this kind of justification runs a strong risk of paternalism and opacity.

Volitional theaters can be attractive opportunities for system creators to manipulate behavior, as well. As described by Natasha Dow Schüll in her ethnography of the gambling industry, Addiction by Design, designers of machine gambling have actively toyed with visual representations of slot reels to make the probabilities of winning seem larger than they actually are. Sometimes, digital slot machine will present a high number of “near misses” to encourage players to keep playing. By presenting an interface that merely appears to behave like a traditional slot machine, the system engages in a theater that assures the gambler that they have more control over the probabilities of the game than they do.

Objects and algorithms are inescapably political and their designs represent policy choices that can be very difficult to identify and interrogate. They are, sometimes literally, black boxes — so we have no choice but to rely on front-stage cues to figure out “who they are.” When these cues affirmatively misrepresent themselves to us, it can be impossible to have informed conversations about how these machines fit into social life, and how we should build policies around them.

Machines are likely to become increasingly dramaturgical, and the theater of volition will be perhaps the most popular performance in the near future.

The reason for this is simple: our technologies are increasingly intelligent and proactive. From the algorithmic outputs of a search engine or social network to the physical robotics that eliminate the need for a human operator, systems can and will outpace human proficiency.

As commercial products, companies will be forced to find ways of driving adoption even as these systems claim ever larger proportions of control and knowledge over the relationship between user and object. More often than not, the solution will be to ensure that these technologies perform the rituals of less proactive, less complex, and less powerful machines. They will reassure users of their understanding and influence even as these systems may strip them away.

Given these financial incentives, the upshot is a world in which we must think critically not only about the back-stage mechanics of the technology itself, but the types of theater that are permissible, as well. In the case of the autonomous vehicle, perfecting the algorithm to be safe and effective for the passenger is only the first challenge. Goffman presents the second challenge — to permit and distinguish benevolent deceptions from the maladaptive and manipulative ones. As these backstage technical challenges continue to be resolved in systems across a range of different arenas, the battles will increasingly rage around their presentation in everyday life.

Back Stage at the Machine Theater was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The design and aesthetics behind Japanese cuisine

A few weeks ago I was sitting with Sylvan Mishima Brackett, chef and owner of the recently opened San Francisco restaurant Rintaro; the restaurant’s name means woods-boy in Japanese. The restaurant was largely built by Sylvan’s father, the noted carpenter Len Brackett, and the food and the space resemble one another in their attention to detail and their combination of simple elements to produce complex effects. “Rintaro” recalls both Sylvan’s rural upbringing outside of Nevada City, California, and, in a punning way, Sylvan’s dad’s craft, honed over many years of traditional apprenticeship in Kyoto, Japan (traditional Japanese carpenters are, to a great degree, also architects).

From our perch in one of the restaurant’s booths, Sylvan pointed out some of the design features of the space. The bar is a single, enormous piece of Port Orford cedar, and Sylvan knows the tree’s biography as if it were a member of his family. The cedar fell in the 1930s, and Len picked it up in the 1970s, storing it for a special occasion. Sylvan points out that the wood is smooth, though it hasn’t been sanded. “It’s planed with a hand-plane,” he explains, “and it took my father a day and a half to do it.” The bar is gorgeous, as are the booths. Light slants into the space (a one-time machine shop) from high windows, and there’s a sense of having subtly slipped from San Francisco into Kyoto — as if, as Sylvan joked, “San Francisco were a city in Japanese-controlled California.”

I came to Sylvan, who is an old friend of mine, because I knew that I had misconceptions about the central role of design in Japanese food. On my shelf at home is an impossible little piece of writing, The Book of Tea, first published in 1906, whose author, Okakura Kakuzo (also known as Okakura Tenshin), expounds at great length about what he calls “Teaism,” “a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence… The Philosophy of Tea … is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.” [1] I didn’t derive my earliest impressions of Japanese food from Okakura, but he does a wonderful job of articulating them. His phrase “moral geometry” captures much of what I thought I knew about Japanese design and aesthetics — my assumption that there were hidden rules behind all of the artifacts of Japanese culture I saw, from temples to bento boxes. The logic of the world spilled out everywhere in shapes, contrasts and figures.

Okakura doesn’t speak for Japanese culture at large; he was an aesthete, and a strange one at that, who wrote The Book of Tea while serving as Curator of Oriental Art at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, during the first decade of the twentieth century (when phrases like “Oriental Art” were still in widespread use). His language of “teaism” was meant to describe an elite style of life, something available only to a tiny minority of Japanese — and his work went on to fuel art-historical Orientalisms, bundles of stereotypes and assumptions about the “essence” of a culture, that can survive any amount of education and refinement. An even more abstract version of the same idea comes to us from the French literary theorist Roland Barthes, in his much later book, the 1983 Empire of Signs. Japan, Barthes thought, possessed an “empire of signifiers” so immense that it was in excess of speech.

I somehow came to think that design was the first principle of Japanese food culture, or more precisely, something called me de taberu, “eating with the eyes.” But after many years of eating Japanese food and after many trips to Japan, I knew how incomplete this story was. I wanted to recalibrate, to move beyond Okakura’s “teaism” and my own constant attention to the surface of things. So I went to talk to Sylvan.

Years before our interview at Rintaro, when we were neighbors in Oakland, I had the privilege of eating Sylvan’s home cooking. Then, he was working at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, first as an assistant to Alice Waters and later as Creative Director. I know the level of thought Sylvan puts into everything he does, and knew that Rintaro would reflect that kind of care. I also knew that Sylvan could help me better understand the place of design in Japanese food culture: an important one, but one far more modulated and subtle than I had thought. Rintaro is, notably, an izakaya, a style of Japanese restaurant/bar in which food tends to be relatively casual, intended to delight patrons but also bolster them for a night of drinking. I might have gotten very different answers had I gone directly to someone who makes kaiseki meals, those incredibly careful and formal meals that originated as preambles to the tea ceremony, and that now stand as the most refined version of Japanese cooking.

Ben Wurgaft: So, we’re in Rintaro, and we’re talking about design in Japanese cuisine, but also about the design of the space, and that seems like a good place to start. We were going to talk about your dad’s work in home design.

Sylvan Brackett: A lot of the feeling I was trying to create comes from the house I grew up in, which is out in the woods in the Sierras, outside of Nevada City. My dad bought the land, cut the trees, built the house, and it was really, really far from any utilities, didn’t have regular electricity, we had generators. Until I was about 12, we had an outhouse and we had to re-dig it every couple of months. It was pretty rural. Kerosene lamps. The house my dad built was basically a 16th-century Japanese house in the California woods.

BW: One of the things I remember reading is that when he began to take on clients, he found that people didn’t want to live in quite a 16th century house. And he had studied as a Japanese temple architect first, right? What about the distinction between the carpenter, the builder and the architect?

SB: The thing in Japanese construction is that the head carpenter will most often also be the head architect, and mechanical and structural engineer. It’s this idea of craftsman-as-designer, so although my dad is an architect, he calls himself a carpenter, because in order to design the building you have to know how it’s going to be put together. Especially in Japanese architecture there are all sorts of particular relationships and ratios and if you try to dream up some arbitrary design it won’t work. You can’t force it.

BW: Is there some understanding of the materials themselves that’s needed — say, you need to know what this kind of wood “likes to do”?

SB: Yeah, the strengths of various species of wood. As with so many Japanese things, there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it, and most of the time it’s based on something real.

BW: How has your dad’s work influenced yours?

SB: If you have a beautiful piece of wood and you don’t screw it up, you can have something beautiful. Similarly with food, if you have beautiful ingredients, and you don’t do something bad to them, they will still be delicious when you serve them. So that kind of sensibility. But that’s also a general cook’s rule of thumb, and also a Chez Panisse thing, pretty heavily emphasized there.

BW: You’ve had the unique opportunity to have several strong influences you can draw upon, and I was always curious to ask where Chez Panisse, as a kind of house style, intersects with the kind of Japanese cooking you’ve been interested in, and how it doesn’t.

SB: I definitely have thoughts about that. In terms of my father’s work — it’s not particularly flashy, only in that it is something that is well done, with good materials, and carefully put together in a particular way. So it’s creative but it’s not artsy. In the same way, the food here is not uncreative but it’s not “chefy,” so we have things like the kabocha korokke, (croquettes of kabocha squash, fried in a light tempura batter) such a basic homestyle dish, but if you use very good potatoes and very good kabocha, and you cook them properly, and you season it with good curry powder, and you coat it with very good panko, and you do each step perfectly, you can end up with something pretty extraordinary, even though it’s a basic kind of dish. And we serve it with snowy shredded cabbage because it’s fresh and it’s light and you have to shred the cabbage in a very particular way in order to achieve that, otherwise you get this rough coleslaw-y texture, which is not special at all.

So we use a lot of hidden technique to do something that looks fairly effortless. There’s something similar in [my father’s] work. The tool that he used to hand-plane the bar is very simple — a blade and a block — but of course it’s super subtle because sharpening that blade, keeping it square and adjusting the plane, takes a lot of training. So he made a big, long, smooth bar, that’s nice to touch and that’ll be smooth forever, and that’s because at a microscopic level the wood is cut flat and clean. If you were to look at the same piece of wood that had been sanded, even with very fine-grit sandpaper, at a microscopic level it would have little hairs, it would be rough. As we wipe this wood it will become darker and richer and more beautiful over time. But just looking at it you wouldn’t have any idea of all of the labor that went into it.

BW: One thing I’ve been curious about — and maybe I came to this topic because I had this assumption I wanted to question — was the emphasis on visual presentation in a lot of Japanese food. I’ve been curious about all the invisible labor that goes into food that ends up seeming effortless.

SB: I worked at a place in Tokyo where we would cook the soybeans, and peel the soybeans — like, take them out of the pods, boil the soybeans, and then peel each individual bean — then turn it into a soup. It was absolutely ludicrous, because it was a waste of time and money, just very finicky. Then there’s a lot of very carefully and beautifully done carrot garnishes and the like, and I tend to shy away from that. First of all, I don’t really know how to do all of that stuff very well, and secondly it doesn’t really fit with the kind of vibe I’m going for, which is trying to be a little unpretentious and straightforward.

But that said, there are a lot of techniques for cutting, for example, a beautiful piece of sashimi. It’s not an easy thing to do. If you ever buy a piece of fish and try to cut sashimi, it will not look right unless you know how to do it. This was one of my early discoveries when I was working at Chez Panisse. I would try to take a kind of Chez Panisse approach to cooking Japanese food before I had much training. I would get a beautiful piece of fish and cut it, and it would be good, but it wouldn’t be extraordinarily good.

BW: So one of the things I’m trying to focus on is the distance between the stereotype of Japanese food — the centrality of some aesthetic vocabulary items like asymmetry, for example — and the way Japanese people eat every day. And I wanted to ask for your thoughts on the way design either figures or doesn’t figure, here, as a big deal in everyday Japanese cooking.

SB: There’s Japanese cooking and then there’s Japanese cooking. Because of my father’s experience being an apprentice, I have a lot of respect for the training it takes to do something at a very, very high level. I don’t pretend to do that kind of cooking. The kind of cooking I do is, I would say home cooking-esque, but it’s definitely advanced. Unless you were a very good home cook you couldn’t find all the ingredients and make it at the level that we’re doing it.

I do pay attention to some norms, like I don’t serve four of something, I serve things in odd numbers usually, I like stuff to look fairly natural on the plate so there’s not a lot of lined up pieces or squirts of sauce. I want it to look like it was done by somebody who wasn’t worried about the way it looked, except that they managed to do it perfectly.

BW: In many places, you would see people coming into Japanese restaurants and thinking, “I need to know the rules, so that I know how to appreciate it.”

SB: I think that there’s this kind of old-school Japanese restaurant, where you have chefs who come from Japan, they serve American customers who douse all of the rice in soy sauce, and they — the chefs — just get super frustrated, and they react to that by putting up signs that say “soy sauce by request only,” or the kind of “Sushi Nazi” thing where they’re yelling at you for putting the wrong thing on the wrong thing, because Japan is very particular. But I think that by being kind of aggressive and trying to enforce rules, you’re going against a more important tenet of hospitality in Japanese restaurants. In Japan, the service tends to be quite fabulous and you’d never have anyone talking to you like that.

I’m in a unique position because I grew up here, though my mother is Japanese, and I understand both cultures pretty well. I can explain Japanese food to an American audience without making the food lame, as in the teriyaki chicken of the world. Although you can make beautiful teriyaki chicken.

You have to keep the integrity of the thing you’re doing, but you don’t want to do something so obscure that people don’t know what the hell it is. So we have kind of a mix on the menu. We have the korokke, which every four-year-old in the country would probably be happy to eat it; and then we also have natto go-an, which is really good natto (fermented soybeans), and house-made umeboshi (pickled plum) paste, and its a very advanced taste. We try to do both things, because Japanese food contains all that.

BW: You can see contrast within a single dish — say, between a thing and its sauce — but it’s harder to see this between dishes. The idea that there might be a conversation between the things on your plate is usually less obvious.

SB: Yeah, and cold things and hot things and steamed things and fresh things and crunchy things and soft things.

BW: Like that old idea behind the combination of foods in a bento box: something from the mountains and something from the oceans and something from the plains.

SB: Exactly.

Sylvan jumped back into the kitchen after our chat and I dawdled a bit at Rintaro, continuing to look at the midday San Francisco sun making its way through the fog and then into the high-beamed ceiling. I made arrangements to come in for dinner, hoping the sensory experience would help me with my quandary more than simply puzzling things through on my own. But before I ate at Rintaro, I interviewed Merry White, an anthropologist at Boston University (and, as it happens, my mother) who has spent much of her career conducting fieldwork in Japan, and who writes on Japanese foodways. She is well acquainted with the idea that cultures — including cultures of design — are far more complex and ambiguous than any analogy with language would suggest. In particular, I hoped she could help me to understand the idea of “eating with the eyes” itself.

Ben Wurgaft: To start off, what’s the significance of me de taberu in the way non-Japanese often encounter Japanese food?

Merry White: I find that right from the beginning, one problem with telling people that Japanese food has “principles,” is that people focus upon the principles and forget that it’s much more fun that that. When I take people who are earnest and well-meaning and smart to a Japanese restaurant, they assume there’s a right way of eating there. They’re glad I’m there to explain everything to them, because they think that without the explanation they can’t organize their experience, understand and enjoy the food.

BW: What role does visual presentation play here?

MW: Well, I suppose visual presentation gives them a hook for their understanding — it’s about being pretty, emulating or invoking nature, which is one of the great principles of Japanese foodways: an aesthetic of seasonality. But it’s not only about the visual. It’s a multiple experience in which all the senses are invoked. Flavor itself is only one dimension — it’s broader, it can even be about your companions, which is a big deal in Chinese and Japanese cuisine both, and the literal meaning of “companion,” from the Latin, is the person you eat your bread with — com-panion.

One aspect of me de taberu is diversity, the use of different colors for contrast, across all the different possibilities and variables of flavor as well as sight and sound — asymmetry is also an element. The important aspect of kaiseki is diversity and seasonality and attention to creating a specific mood, the importance of place, the importance of the meal itself, but also its transience. The moment a menu or meal gets codified, its raison d’etre is lost. Often these meals do involve a stylized imitation of nature: for example, nature is controlled by reducing it to, say, a pine branch with two needles, one of which pierces a gingko nut. Not that kaiseki is supposed to be fussy! There’s a casualness about it, a way that even these very special things are presented as if they’d just fallen on the plate. Now, I need to point out that most Japanese don’t get one of these meals in their entire lives. Sushi in Japan, too, is a rare experience. In Japan you don’t get sushi in supermarkets, generally speaking. It’s very special. Which is why Japanese wonder at how we have sushi all the time!

The kaiseki aesthetic developed through the rejection of the gaudy court art of China, at a time when Japan’s leaders were looking for something that would say “we are Japan;” this in the 1600–1700s, a time of peace, when the Shogun and the Daimyos [lords serving under the Shogun] could spend more money on the arts, showing things off to one another and bringing in the best ceramicists from Korea. Daimyos would even steal one another’s ceramicists. The art itself could be very restrained; this is also the time when the concept of wabi-sabi [an aesthetic, broadly, of imperfection, impermanence and incompletion] came in, and the tea ceremony was rusticated, the images were very simple and evocative and slightly melancholy, restrained, and there was competition to be more restrained in a Zen-like way, a slight feeling of mono no aware, that is, the feeling that everything is transient, everything passes, everything dissolves, and this is important in food because of course everything does — this is where Buddhism and food culture meet.

And I’ll just reiterate that the kaiseki meal is something that most Japanese never experience, even among the wealthy, if they don’t seek it out. And of course I should give the usual warning that there is no such thing as “Japanese food!” It’s as regional, if perhaps not as explicitly so, as Italian food. And kaiseki isn’t the only part of Japanese food that pays attention to aesthetics — another great example is the bento box that mothers pack for their children’s school lunch. If you look up “kawaii bentos” [cute bentos] online, you’ll be astounded. But part of the ploy of the bento box is to make the food attractive so that the child will eat it, and specifically eat “something from the mountains, something from the plains, and something from the sea.” When my daughter and I lived in Japan and I would pack her bento, she had this wonderful expression, “it’s like a dollhouse for food.” But I weep for the women who think they have to make them.

Something I need to point out is that the idea of “rules” in food aesthetics would be foreign to many Japanese; they’d probably say, “what rules?” Japanese food aesthetics can be very democratic. The noodle guy on the street will place those pork slices off-center, in an artful manner, with some consciousness behind his actions.

BW: But doesn’t that really lead us back to the question of whether or not there is an underlying rule?

MW: I don’t want to use the word “rules,” it sounds too top-down, as you might understand this in the West. Say instead that it’s an aesthetic that’s shared across society, rather than a trickle-down from elites to masses. It makes you feel that there is a shared expectation of what food should look like, of what food should be — food should possess the elements of asymmetry, seasonality, all those things we mentioned.

BW: Can I ask where the emphasis on asymmetry comes from?

MW: Obviously you find asymmetry in nature, you see this on TV shows about nature, and that’s lovely. In a paradoxical way, isn’t the interest in nature also an interest in the unpredictable, the thing over which you don’t have control? Maybe asymmetry is about humility and it’s about what you can’t control.

BW: You’re engaged in a new project on the “work of food” in Japan. How has attention to the ways in which foods are made influenced your understanding of how Japanese foods are designed?

MW: All of it adds to a bigger picture of the experience of taste — it includes, for example, the way tea is whisked, but it isn’t a scripted ritual, it’s a way of doing it that has proven to please all aspects of the experience. I took tea ceremony lessons in Japan for a whole year, five hours a week, and you know, I tried to not ask American questions like “Why are we doing this,” but my teacher sensed it, and she said, “The reason we do all this is to give a friend a nice cup of tea.”

BW: What do you take from that?

MW: It’s a human exchange, it’s about omoiyari, sensitivity to a moment in a relationship, and you are sensitive to all aspects of the room, the mood of the person you’re with, and what they like and what they don’t like. You can translate omoiyari as sensitivity to others, or anticipation of the needs or desires of others. What will make them happy. There’s meaning in the transaction between host and guest.

My friends and I arrived at Rintaro at 6:30 on a warm Saturday evening, walking through the courtyard past a log Sylvan had hollowed out for pounding mochi. I tried to put the interviews out of my mind to make room for the experience itself.

Delicious smells came from Sylvan’s kitchen — miso, fish, chicken, onion — but I noticed that they didn’t mask the scent of the wood Rintaro is made from; the walls are hand-packed clay, and the interior of the restaurant is defined by hand-made wooden beams (most things are beveled; no sharp edges), and by that beautiful long bar made out of a single piece of wood.

I noticed that everything seemed to float: not just the things that usually do, like the simple but elegant floral arrangement, but also the booth we were sitting in (raised a few inches from the floor), the latticework of non-load-bearing beams, upon which various objects were perched.

We ordered an array of sakes and then much of what was offered on the pleasantly short menu: Bergamot Tofu; Na No Hana To Aka Kabu No Shira-Ae, a plate of rapini and turnips with a dressing of tofu and walnut; Maguro Namero, a yellowtail tuna Sashimi dish flavored with ginger, lime sesame oil and miso; and then beautifully grilled skewers of chicken and mushrooms. Kabocha Korokke arrived — those croquettes of kabocha squash with snowy cabbage on the side, followed by a plate of Nishin Nanban, or “southern barbarian style” herring with a spicy vinegar. There was also Dashimaki tamago, a folded egg omelette that was one of my own childhood favorites, and rice with steelhead roe harvested by members of the Quinault Nation in the Pacific Northwest, with wasabi from nearby Half Moon Bay. Dessert was a soy sauce-flavored crème brûlée, served with a sesame cookie, and a matcha pave — green tea and white chocolate cake with a candied kumquat. Finally there was buckwheat tea, accompanied by deep satiation and contentment.

I remembered Sylvan’s insistence that he really doesn’t care if guests notice the handmade clay walls, the beveling of the wood, or any other detail, so long as they enjoy themselves. I could see what he meant about the subtlety of technique — his food isn’t showy, or “chef-y,” as he put it, and the dishes are relatively simple — but simple the way a perfectly cut jacket is simple, or the way his father’s work with a hand-plane is simple: grounded not by elaborate formulas or theories, but by an appreciation of the basic properties of things, and of the complexity they can produce in combination.

[1] Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea (Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1956) 4.

Photography by Aya Brackett

A Precise Imprecision was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How a new perspective on an ancient occupation could give small farmers a leg up

by IDEO.org

A common narrative about smallholder farmers in the developing world is that they’re desperately poor, have limited access to quality seeds and fertilizers, few skills, little entrepreneurial or creative drive and no real shot at outplaying the miserable hands they’ve been dealt.

It’s a pretty dim view of an estimated 2.5 billion people, one made all the more depressing considering that smallholder farmers — those working small plots of land and who rely primarily on family labor — produce about 80% of the developing world’s food.

At IDEO.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of poor and vulnerable communities through design, we’ve heard this story a lot. And after working with smallholders across the world, we just don’t believe that it’s true.

Here’s why.

On a recent project in Zimbabwe, two of our designers met the Muteros. A married couple living in Mazowe, the pair works three acres where they grow tomatoes, potatoes, and raise a few cattle, goats, and chickens. The Muteros consider themselves “serious farmers,” those dedicated to steadily improving their craft, and the middle-aged couple does it in just about the same way that your favorite tech behemoth might optimize its efforts: they collect and interpret data.

For years, the Muteros did it the old-fashioned way, keeping studious notes in an old ledger about what they planted, when, how it fared, any news of the animals, and how they made their income. After years of this practice, the Muteros have dialed in their approach and put themselves on the path to a steady income. Recently, their daughter sent them a basic smartphone and they quickly realized that the Notes app could liberate them from the heavy book, suddenly making distant markets and far-off fields new sites for gathering more data.

What’s so inspiring about the Muteros’ approach, and the reason that it upends what we hear so often about smallholders, is that it shows not just a desire to innovate, but a clear capacity. And the pair is doing it with basic tools.

So the Muteros, and loads of other farmers we’ve met after years of working in agriculture, have us asking why, when the international aid community and social sector have devised so many farm products, business tools, and training methods aimed at improving the lot of smallholders, aren’t more of them thriving.

We think it could have to do with how smallholder farming is perceived. And not just by the aid community and social sector, but by farmers themselves.

After looking across our portfolio of agricultural design projects, and sitting down with industry leaders like Technoserve, we’ve come to the view that designing a more compelling vision of farmers’ futures might actually spur them to respond to innovation, to test new ideas, and to adopt new in-field techniques. Moreover, that same story could drive a shift in behavior from the organizations looking to help.

We’re talking about redesigning the brand of smallholder farmers.

Imagine the power of a new narrative, one that lionizes people like the Muteros as creative problem solvers who are comfortable with risk, who adopt technologies like mobile phones and mobile money and use them access networks of markets and suppliers. We’re talking about farmers who choose farming not as a profession of last resort, but a career that they develop and refine over a lifetime.

We’ve seen new narratives drive new opportunities before. The green collar jobs movement in the US has outlined a promising path for American manufacturing — one of innovation, social good, and redressing the harm industry has done to the environment. Rosie the Riveter was a potent symbol of women in the workplace during World War II, and today, Teach for America tells a story not of how recent college grads can gain work experience, but the future of American education itself.

What if the farm tools, business services, and advanced farming techniques that the social sector works so feverishly to devise came paired with a story of promise and opportunity? We propose a narrative starring smallholders across the world sharing their stories of innovation and success. It’s time to flip the smallholder script, reframing the efforts of billions of people not just for the social sector but for those who live it every day.

There is any number of stories you could tell to improve the lot of smallholders, and though we have a few ideas, what we’re certain of is that the current story just isn’t working. Imagine national campaigns targeted at creating pride in local farmers, the importance of farming to the economy, and innovation driving smallholder agriculture. The UN reports that in Africa some 200 million people are between the ages of 15 and 24. How might a new narrative around farming harness the energy and drive of that demographic?

Here are a couple ideas:

National Product, National Pride

Certain crops have outsized impact in the way we imagine a nation’s production. Think of cheese in France, coffee in Ethiopia, or acai berries in Brazil. Whether his vineyard is 10 acres or 10,000, every vintner in Napa Valley benefits from the perception that his region produces some of the world’s very best wine.

Imagine a rebranding of broken rice farming in West Africa. Not only could a newly desirable product help feed more West Africans, but it may it find its way onto European plates too. Could it become a brand unto itself, a crop that not only fuels a region, but breaks down national borders as a coveted export? And no one better represents the promise of broken rice than the farmers who grow it every day.

Off the Farm

Another story — one that we’ve seen work, but rarely heard told — focuses on a wider ecosystem of opportunity adjacent to the farm. Processing crops, working logistics, teaching new techniques, and providing access to markets all offer the chance for a bright future. By rebranding agriculture as a career with many paths, how might we encourage struggling farmers to make good by putting down their plows and getting to work in the industry at large?

In our project work at IDEO.org, we’ve seen smallholders innovate, take risks, and chase new opportunities. In Senegal we met a group of women who, with minimal investment, formed a juice-making cooperative, processing fruit that would otherwise spoil. Restless innovators, the women swiftly saw that they could make their materials stretch further by cutting and repackaging the straws that come with the juice that they sell.

With the right narrative, one supported by the lives and livelihoods of smallholders from across the globe, today’s farmers will see themselves differently and embrace the tools and technology needed for change. Buoyed by compelling stories and the energy and support of the aid community, is it too much to imagine a new generation of smallholders emerging? They’re younger and better networked; they’re at home with mobile money and access to market information thanks to new technologies; they’re creative and entrepreneurial, finding ways to mitigate the risks inherent to their trade.

Skilled-up, savvy, and optimistic, this new crop of smallholders will have every reason to bet on its future.

Illustration by Jess Zhang

Rebranding the Business of Farming was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Sam Dean

Portland, Oregon has a municipal water system a lot like any other in the country. A bunch of big, four-and-a-half foot wide steel pipes contain water flowing down from a reservoir system in the nearby mountains, and those eventually feed into smaller and smaller chunks of pipe, which eventually lead to your home. There are some valves and grates along the way, but it’s pretty straightforward stuff.

But one chunk of pipe, inserted into one of the city’s four-and-a-half-foot wide water mains, is different. It’s called a Lucid Pipe, it’s painted bright blue, and it feeds electricity drawn from all that water back into the grid. Four whirling turbines along the inner bore of the pipe spin as the city water flows by, cranking the generators that poke out towards the surface along the length of the tube. A small amount of the generated electricity powers computers housed alongside each generator, and those computers can control the speed of the turbines and collect data on the flow rate and chemical composition of the water rushing past — data that Water Department techs can then download over the Lucid Pipe’s wireless network.

This is all pretty cool. Generating power from the manmade underground rivers we’ve already built into our cities seems like a supremely elegant eco-urbanist plan, the kind of thing a nerdy kid from the ‘90s might assume would be happening by 2015, integrated into the renewable-energized City of Tomorrow (Portland!).

In other words, it’s one of those inventions that seems obvious once it exists. But the elegance of the Lucid Pipe idea, the neatness of the energy-conservation circle, obscures the century-long flow of hydroelectric thinking that needed to be reversed before it could come into being. Because most hydropower comes from dams — structures that almost completely stop water from moving — but the Lucid Pipe is part of a system, the municipal water pipe network, whose only purpose is to transport water at pressure over long distances, to people’s homes.

So how does it work?

Well, first lets get back to the basics. For as long as there have been rivers, people have thought of ways to put them to work. Little waterwheels pulled power from waterfalls and streams to turn millstones (or whatever), then the first phase of textile factories used water turbines to run their vast looms, redirecting the river’s flow through matrices of pulleys and drive belts.

Soon after that, the advent of electricity meant that any factory, or any home, could draw on the power of the river from hundreds of miles away, as turbines housed inside dams were used to crank electric generators, whose power was zipped into the grid.

Each advance in hydropower has been more efficient at making rivers work for us, but energy is a zero-sum game. A megawatt of electricity generated is a megawatt of energy sucked from the river. To pull the maximum power from its flow, you have to stop the water, pile it up behind a dam, point it past the turbines and then let it out as a trickle on the other side.

That works great, if all you want to do is make electricity. But massively enervating the river destroys the native ecosystem, which in turn messes with the ecosystem of the surrounding landscape and the ocean at its mouth, which, in turn, makes some people think that there might be a different way to do things.

Which is where the Lucid Pipe got its unlikely start, as the researchers who eventually created Lucid Energy tried to figure out how to slurp up power from a river in Indiana while still leaving it wild.

The problem with standard hydroelectric turbines is that, like the dams that house them, they present an almost entirely solid obstacle to the water flowing through — not a great format for minimal impact on a river. So the original Lucid team started out working with a kind of helical turbine that had been developed in the ‘90s. Josh Thomas, Lucid’s engineering program manager (and Lucid’s longest-serving employee), said these turbines looked like “hydrofoils wrapped around the surface of a cylinder, like strands of DNA.”

Compared to the solid-wall dam turbines, there isn’t much material in the helical turbine to block the water’s flow. And instead of being turned by the brute head-on impact of the water, they used the power of lift — the same principle that makes windmills turn and planes fly — to spin and generate electricity as water flowed past the blades.

These turbines worked great in theory, but in practice, in the burbling, variable, debris-filled world of a real river, Lucid found that they couldn’t quite cut it as reliable sources of energy. So the team tried taking a page from the classic hydropower handbook and built a little sluice that routed some of the water through a boxy, square-edged pipe, the kind you’d find at old-timey goldmine museums.

This was the first time that anyone had tried using this type of turbine in an enclosed environment, with all the weird turbulence problems that come up in the process, but it worked like a charm — it had minimal impact on the river, and generated enough power to be useful to a small consumer, like a remote research station or a little cabin.

The only problem left was one of basic geometry: their helical turbine fit in a rectangular pipe. That might sound a little weird, but look at a strand of DNA from the side, and you’ll see that the outer edge of the double helix describes a rectangle. With their proof-of-concept data in hand, Lucid Energy had already approached the biggest water pipe manufacturer in North America, the Vancouver-based Northwest Pipe, to see if they’d be interested in working together to mass-produce their system. Northwest was into it, but only if Lucid could figure out a way to circle that square and fit the turbine into a normal pipe.

Thomas, the longtime employee, says that there really isn’t a good way to wrap a helix into a ball (and even thinking about it can make your head hurt), so the design team went for a more hands-on approach. They took the blades, already curved for lift like an airplane’s wings, tilted them at a slight angle, and bent them to form the outline of a sphere. Then they just attached that whole blade-ball to a couple of hubs and tried it out in a pipe.

And it worked! The earlier helical system had had all kinds of problems with turbulence — it could get so bad at high spinning speeds that the blades would start audibly bending under the pressure. The round turbine, on the other hand, “not only was very smooth operating,” says Thomas, “but it was more efficient.” That kickstarted development, Lucid picked up a grant from the Department of Energy, and the partnership with Northwest was sealed. Once Portland expressed interest, Lucid picked up and moved there, too — with the added bonus of being closer to the manufacturing mothership.

Now, the Lucid Pipe is churning along under the pavement at Portland’s SE 147th Ave and Powell Boulevard. It’s supposed to generate an average of 1,100 megawatt-hours per year, enough to power 150 homes, while only skimming 1–5 PSI off the water pressure. Most water agencies promise to deliver 40 to 60 PSI to customers’ taps, and many have excess pressure in the system, so Lucid Pipe’s take is just a little dip in the stream.

Lucid Energy CEO Gregg Semler says that the company is working on new projects in California and Arizona, and has been talking with water bureaus in other cities in the region to install the Lucid Pipe.

The company’s focusing on the West thanks to the laws of nature and geography. Thermodynamics dictate that skimming electricity from water you’re already pumping (with electricity) is going to be a net loss, so the system only makes energy sense in situations where the water is flowing downhill. The West has a lot more mountains than the East (let alone the Midwest), so that’s where Lucid’s looking for its first wave of customers.

Even in Wichita, though, Semler believes there’s hope for municipal-scale Lucid Pipes. Mountains make the job easier, but many water systems use a workaround to put gravity to work as much as possible: At night, when electricity from the grid is cheaper, cities pump water up to higher-altitude reservoirs nearby, or even to water tanks on the roofs of big apartment buildings. Then during the day, when electricity is pricier, they let gravity do the rest on demand. As long as the gravity feed from that hilltop reservoir or rooftop tank is supplying more pressure than necessary, the Lucid Pipe could still help recoup the cost of the pumping power from the night before.

But Semler says that the company is already looking beyond the big-bore Lucid Pipe market: “we’re definitely going down in size.” Circling back to Lucid’s original purpose, when it was just a couple researchers trying out helical turbines in a river in Indiana, the company is working on making Lucid Pipes small enough to power a network of little sensors across the nation’s water infrastructure. “You could put a little turbine ahead of your water meter,” he says, “so you could be constantly monitoring the quality of water, powered by a battery that can run forever.”

And when the power cuts out (unless you rely on a pump to run your faucets), your little Lucid could still be whirring away, generating enough juice to light a bulb or charge a phone. Sipping energy from the tame water running into our homes might not be quite as epic as damming whole rivers and extracting their power, but it sure seems like the future.

Light From a Pipe was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After a history of marginalization, product design is finally catering more directly to left-handed users

by Sarah C. Baird

For every family of a left-handed person, a moment arrives when it becomes clear that the way of the right-handed masses is just not going to cut it.

The moment of reckoning for my unsuspecting parents arrived on my first birthday, when they repeatedly attempted to shove a tiny fork into my right hand in order to eat a baby-sized ceremonial birthday cake. After throwing it on the ground repeatedly in frustration, instant-replay style, I grabbed a hunk of cake with my left hand and squeezed it through my fingers like a tiny Hulk, mauling it around in my gummy mouth. VHS tape evidence shows a kitchen full of relatives gaping in horror. That day, it became official: I was an ornery lefty.

In both longstanding myth and modern urban lore, there are quite a few adages and assumptions about what it means to be a left-handed person. Over the course of my life — like most lefties — it seems as if I’ve heard them all. (Spoiler alert: they’re almost all negative.) The root of the word “sinister” derives from sinistra, the Latin term for “left.” In the Bible, those who displease God are sent to his left side, while those who he holds in high esteem are sorted to the right. Australians often refer to left-handed people as “cacky-handed” — which also indicates a degree of clumsiness. The cross-cultural connection between left handedness and varying degrees of assumed evil and idiocy is strong.

A 2013 New Yorker article even pointed to early 20th-century research by Cesare Lombroso (the grandfather of modern criminology) that indicated lefties as a group might be more prone criminal behavior. “I do not dream at all of saying that all left-handed people are wicked, but that left-handedness, united to many other traits, may contribute to form one of the worst characters among the human species,” Lombroso wrote in 1903.

For a dedicated group, these sociocultural stereotypes have served as a call to action. The people behind the Bloomington, Indiana-based Handedness Research Institute are so concerned about the centuries-old bias against “alternative handedness” that they founded an entire non-profit research organization to “advance the scientific understanding of handedness…and help alleviate the social and educational discrimination of left-handers worldwide.”

While I have a hard time believing that my handedness makes me more likely to be an ax murderer than my right-dominant counterpart, there’s a kind of solidarity among left handed people that feels almost like a secret handshake. When (lefty) Jimi Hendrix flipped his guitar behind his back and upside-down to play it, when southpaw boxer Manny Pacquiao delivered an unsuspecting hook with his left fist, when Ned Flanders successfully reopened The Leftorium on The Simpsons — it felt almost like a victory for all of us. Every time a left-handed person succeeds, it’s like a giant, global (left-handed) high five.

Day in and day out, though, the biggest hurdle faced by lefties isn’t discrimination — it’s mundane, basic functioning. Almost all facets of society, from ink pens to urban design, are crafted and structured to support, abet and cater to the right-handed majority. For lefties, functioning means a constant, conscious consideration of how they can reverse or modify their natural behavior in order to most effectively move around in the world.

Over the past 20 years, baby steps have been taken in the design landscape to begin building a stable of products that better serve our 11% minority. For the first time, left-handed design is being approached in a way that is based less around lefties as a trivial (perhaps, humorous) novelty, and instead as a target demographic looking for items that actually work to meet their needs.

“For the longest time…there wasn’t really enough market for [left-handed products] for even the mid-sized manufacturers to make in bulk, so when we would find a left-handed spatula or computer mouse, we’d get real excited about it,” said Lucia Howard, co-owner of the Florida-based Lefty’s Left Hand Store. “Then, they’d stop making them because they weren’t selling enough. We’ve really had to get a lot of our own products made. We’re making our own scissors now — for kids, youth and adults — as well as little embroidery scissors that are shaped like a stork. We started making our own left-handed notebooks. It’s our bestseller.”

Lefty’s — which originally opened in 1978 — was the first outlet devoted specifically to left-handed products in the United States. The store shuttered in the 1980s, but reopened after a 30-year hiatus in 2008 and has since witnessed rapid expansion and growth. Today, Lefty’s has a thriving online business, a satellite location in Kissimmee, Florida and kiosks throughout Disney World hocking left-handed notepads to miniature, Mickey Mouse-loving southpaws.

“For 30 years, there would be calls from people who said, ‘I need to get my left-handed notebooks for school! I need my scissors! Please bring it back!’ From the moment we opened the doors [in 2008], it was wall-to-wall lefties or people buying presents for lefties. It was really astonishing to see how appealing it was to lefthanders to finally have a place that was just for themselves.”

After centuries of second-class citizen status, lefties today might finally be witnessing the sea change towards greater functionality they’ve so desperately craved.

This national movement in favor of more efficient, lefty-friendly design is most visible in the diversification of products for school children, from pens, to notepads, to desks. Until the mid-1980s, classroom items made with lefties in mind were all but absent from schools, with “alternative handedness” largely regarded as a defect. Left-handed students were forced to make do with the tools given to them or — in extreme cases — forced to switch their handedness or adapt ambidextrous traits. You’d be hard pressed to find a southpaw adult who can’t recall the struggles of wedging their thumb awkwardly into a pair of right-handed scissors for cutting construction paper, or getting the dreaded “inky pinky” after dragging the side of their hand across a page full of freshly written notes. Even standardized tests — with the question text on the left and bubbling form on the right — tailor to the dexterity of right-handed students. For lefties, even seemingly mindless steps in the classroom often required an extra helping of energy or thought.

Schools today are more sensitive about making accommodations for all students, catering to the needs of an individual child — whether it’s a tree nut allergy or writing with one’s left hand — rather than forcing lockstep conformity. Differences are seen less as flaws and more like distinctive traits that should be approached with empathy and understanding. What’s more, classroom product designs are now more ergonomic across the board, functioning for both right and left handed children with a greater degree of fluidity and ease.

“Designers are really trying to make things ergonomically and are more aware of the left-handed need and will promote it,” said Howard. “This is particularly true with kids, and probably springs from learning more about developmental stages in kids and industrial design. We have some really nice triangular crayons, which are much easier for both right- and left-handed children. You wouldn’t have seen that 15 or 20 years ago.”

In addition to the increase in ergonomics, the rise in support for handcrafted, artisanal products also behooves lefties. Even with increasing left-handed market demand, large scale manufacturers will never be trucking out shipping containers full of left-handed whisks or stitching southpaw baseball gloves by the millions. Instead, small businesses (those focusing on specialized, high-quality versions of a single product) have the distinct opportunity to make life a little bit easier for left-handed people with their commitment to specification and quality over quantity. These companies — from ambidextrous coffee mug company Grandma Hoerner’s to the Shun Classic left-handed knife — not only celebrate distinctiveness, but understand the appeal of a tool crafted with its user firmly in mind.

Lefty’s has also found its way into the artisan market, tapping into a subset of makers that’s been decades ahead of the curve in crafting products suited for the individual. “We carry a really beautiful set of cherry wood [kitchen] tools made in Pennsylvania that are handcrafted. There’s a tradition there that comes out of the farm country that everything is handmade and…designed for specific people. They’ll have things that are made small and bigger — or even left-handed — because that’s what they’ve always done for 150 years.”

Unfortunately, this quickly becomes a double-edged sword for craftspeople looking to make a living via specialty product. If an item, such as a set of gardening tools, is expertly designed and made with the utmost care, there is little reason to ever replace it. With lefties comprising such a relatively small percentage of the population, “one and done” purchases (such as knives or garden tools) that don’t require regular upgrading or replacement means that no artisan company will likely ever be able to focus exclusively on left-handed versions of a single product.

While the dedicated, old school tinkering of craftsmen on behalf of underdog lefties may seem downright romantic, new technologies are also revolutionizing access to and the creation of left-handed products. In the world of firearms, in particular, the left-handed market is booming.

“The big impetus in left-handed firearms for the past few years has been in rifles and shotguns,” said Steve Fore, who served for 16 years as sales manager for Antique and Modern Firearms in Lexington, Kentucky. Fore is also a National Rifle Association-certified instructor for handguns, shotguns and patrol rifles and, as luck may have it, he’s a lefty.

“This uptick in left-handed guns has been spurred by market demand, of course, and the benefits of modern machinery,” he said, “The rise in CNC [computer numerical control] mills and machines that can mirror image a [fire arm] piece for a left hander without a great deal of difficulty — and in the same amount of machine time — has really spurred the growth of left-handed bolt action rifles, primarily for hunting.”

Of course, Fore also believes no company could possibly ever focus exclusively on left-handed firearms. “It’s kind of like buying a refrigerator,” he laughed. “You only do it every so often, so the market’s probably not there. Lefties like us still make up a relatively small chunk of the population.”

While advances in technology, a push towards ergonomics and celebration of artisanal products may ensure that small batches of lefty-friendly gear will continue to be cranked out at a faster clip, there’s no denying that we still operate in a world that is not designed with a lefthander’s best interest in mind. Instead, we’ll continue to live as if peering into a looking glass, waving in front of the world’s mirror with our left hand and watching ourselves — begrudgingly — wave back with our right.

Design for South Paws was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How Dutch design students are helping prisoners transition back into life on the outside

by Mona Lalwani

Unlike their American counterparts, Dutch prisons have room to spare. This summer, a prison in Veenhuizen, a quaint and quiet village in northern Holland, will occupy some of its vacancies with 242 Norwegian prisoners, hosting the inmates for three years while their own facility is renovated. This isn’t the first time Holland has opened its prison gates for foreign prisoners. The country signed a similar rent agreement with Belgium in 2009.

Veenhuizen is the detention hub of the Netherlands. The Penitentiary Institution of the village includes two prisons — Esserheem and Norgerhaven. The vacant cells in their facilities are representative of the declining incarceration rates across the country. But the penitentiary system is not without its problems. While the system exemplifies rehabilitation and social integration, recidivism rates continue to soar.

Fortunately, because the prisons have such a prominent local presence, the culture around them has given rise to progressive programs designed to keep recidivism in check. Even students from the renowned Design Academy Eindhoven, located nearby, have become involved in prison-related work. About a year ago, two design students, Eléonore Delisse and Laura Ferriere, set up a social project called The White Building, a rehabilitation home that facilitates re-entry for prisoners who are close to the end of their sentence in Veenhuizen.

Delisse and Ferriere devised the project as a combination of creative stimulation and work experience that they believe could prove to be a beneficial rehabilitative exercise. Their project aims to reconnect inmates with the outside world through design residencies that encourage interactions between participating inmates and creative professionals.

While going from a regimented prison to a life of freedom and possible productivity seems rewarding, the stigmatization, instability, and lack of work choices obstructs normalization of offenders. But The White Building offers individualized re-entry. It provided a safe space for self-discovery, the result of which, they hope, will more secure footing in the outside world and less chance of a relapse.

After a month of exhaustive presentations for permissions and access, and extensive reviewing of prisoner testimonies, the first practical task was to choose a space that would put the participating inmates at ease. The designer duo went with a three-story white home, an anti-squatters building made available and affordable by the Dutch government. The Design Academy rented the place in the village and allowed access to the students for their pilot program.

In contrast to the constraints of the prison, the exterior of the building, with large french windows on one side and bay windows on the other, has no barriers to restrict entry or exit. Inside, Delisse and Ferriere transformed the ground floor into a makeshift design school—they use a spacious “process room” for group activities and exhibits, an “interaction room” for brainstorming, and they turned the living room, which was connected to a garden, into a casual space for coffee and lunch breaks. They set up their living quarters upstairs and stayed through the span of one year and seven residencies. And also converted an attic on the top floor into a mini-library for recreational reading.

Both creators carefully auditioned the creative partners who would lead the residencies. “We cast them according to their work, they had to be able to think and design creatively, but also for their human values,” said Ferriere. “They had to understand the trust and equality involved.” The coterie of professionals who made the cut included a product designer, a performance artist, a chef, a sound artist and more.

In selecting participants, they zeroed in on Esserheem (an all-male prison) and decided to work with 48 repeat offenders housed in the facility. “Most of them haven’t worked a day in their lives,” said Ferriere. “They’re not the most dangerous but they’re the toughest in their minds.” The project was designed for equal access, irrespective of criminal backgrounds. Still, at least half of the repeat offenders couldn’t volunteer to participate in the creative experience because of their addictions or lack of permissions to go outside.

The program steered clear of prison-style hierarchy. During their time at The White Building, the only indication of the participants’ inmate status was the presence of a guard who escorted them back and forth from the prison to their temporary white home on a daily basis. In a close-knit set up, over time, the inmates learned to interact freely with the small team of project creators and residency leaders. Together, they moulded or built products with materials like porcelain, metal and wood, or worked with moving images for a movie and played with dimensions of sound.

While prison life is marked by carefully monitored routines and inmates are accustomed to taking orders, life in The White Building was about flexibility and self-reliance. The inmates had the option to volunteer for one or more residencies. Each residency spanned four weeks and was split into design phases. The first phase was research, a quest for personal interests and ideas that would inform the remainder of the residency. It was a seemingly simple but insightful round of looking at random pictures — hundreds of pictures— and working through the instinct of being drawn to one over the other. It helped instill confidence in their ability to make a choice.

The next step involved conceptualization: Making collages from the selected pictures or learning to create small models of bigger ideas. At this point, the residency leads introduced a technique, moulding or welding for instance. Concepts were then translated into structures or services, and an implementation phase led to the production of a prototype. The design phases culminated in a final exhibit open to visitors from the village and families of the inmates. At the end, a week was spent in conclusion, to meditate on the learnings and formulate future goals for life after prison.

The program, as intended, went beyond the existing ways of social integration which, in Holland, already include skills-based education in prison and government support on release. It wasn’t designed to provide an inmate-analysis or psychological support as an extension of the prison. Instead it focused on the needs of the inmates and gave them a glimpse into the many possibilities of every day communal life after prison.

“The prisoners wanted to make sure we weren’t psychiatrists,” said Delisse. “They talk so much with them, they’re tired of it. They were happy to talk human-to-human, like in normal life.”

A non-judgmental environment helped achieve the essential goal of empowerment. It provided a breather from the constant vigilance of a prison where every move is reported and every word recorded in the “trajectory” of an inmate. “What happens in The White Building, stays in The White Building,” she said. “This brought us closer and helped establish trust.”

Bili Regev, a multidisciplinary designer originally from Tel Aviv, moved in to the building to run a residency late last year. She first heard about the project from Delisse and Ferriere, her classmates at Eindhoven. “I thought it was insane,” she said. “I know the Dutch system, I know the municipalities and how hard it is to get approvals. It’s hard for me to understand how they managed to find this path in the system.”

But she saw the potential and designed one of the more abstract themes for a residency called Unique Random. While some residencies had a goal, conceptualizing a food and layout for a new restaurant or building furniture, Regev instigated introspection through an open-ended residency — the participants were free to create anything with a technique of their choice. “Design students are very aware of themselves,” she said. “You constantly reflect on yourself and ask how can you give to others. You learn about yourself and what you’re good at and that works for this system too.”

Inside the Building, Regev was quick to readjust her expectations. During the first “mood round,” a morning and evening ritual where inmates would share three things about their day or their state of mind, she saw the inmates opening up about their lives. “They were so gentle,” she said. “I wasn’t surprised because they were prisoners, but because they were macho men and they could really talk about their feelings.”

Through the year, Delisse and Ferriere stayed sensitive to the moods of the inmates. They handled outbursts with care. During one of the sessions, when an inmate was asked to put out his cigarette to respect the no-smoking rule inside the house, he screamed at the room. “It wasn’t to do with the program. Those guys are under pressure,” said Ferriere. “We can’t imagine their daily lives. Sometimes a phone call or news can make them anxious or happy. It was important to know how they are so we could adapt through the day.”

Their patience was rewarded with transformations. “One inmate, who stayed with us for a long time, had trouble dealing with groups,” said Ferriere. “He had trouble facing someone, to look in the eyes of someone. But he blossomed in a few months. He took on a lot of responsibility, practiced time and group management. His family was able to visit after every residency…For this person, this project had most value.”

Design students from Eindhoven flock to Veenhuizen. But the village is favored by inmates, too. “Not in the least because of the views from prison — they can see nature, wide open spaces, the sky,” says Kiki Hehemann, head of collections and education at the National Prison Museum in Veenhuizen. “But also because personnel seem more laid back…Probably because prison life has been part of the culture of this community for so long.”

For close to two centuries, the village has been marked by a complex history of poverty and punishment. In 1823, the Benevolent Society created the village as one of its seven colonies to serve as a reform housing society for vagrants. The excessively poor were coerced to work on rough, desolate land in the colony. Neatly laid out, landscaped farms are indicative of that agrarian history.

In the decades that followed, the private society lost its money and ability to sustain disciplinary operations in the village. Veenhuizen was eventually handed over to the Ministry of Justice. It transformed into a prison village and remained closed to the rest of the world until 1984: The only people who entered the village were inmates, personnel, or prison visitors.

Now three decades later, the dread and gloom expected of a village built to imprison people is largely missing from any conversation around Veenhuizen. With 130 buildings (including Esserheem prison) classified as monuments in the village, the site, along with the remaining six colonies, are collectively nominated for UNESCO’s world heritage status. Remnants of the detention history are cleverly disguised as tourism spots: the National Prison Museum has attracted over 100,000 tourists every year since 2009.

The village showcases its problematic history with pride. The Dutch penitentiary system, at large, demonstrates the advantages of a progressive approach that offers a mix of detention, punishment and rehabilitation. It’s as much a productive enterprise as it is a punitive program. A national penitentiary program, In-Made, provides packing and manufacturing services from in-house prison factories. About 8000 prisoners are employed: They make furniture, bikes or paintings based on their skillset. Last year alone, the program made 4.4 million euro from the prison production company. “Instead of losing money on the prison system, we make money,” says Jaap Oosterveer, spokesman for the Ministry of Justice Netherlands.

“Not every prisoner wants to work,” Oosterveer explains . “And that’s fine. But there are people who do, so we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better to invest in people who are motivated. Everybody gets the same chances, but there’s more chances if you want to do something.”

While The White Building’s operations seem in line with the productive nature of the prison system in Holland, the project was more than a manufacturing unit in a prison. It differed both in process and intent. In-house prison units are like factories: The inmates have a designated work station and a predetermined product to create. The system is designed to keep the inmates occupied and the system profitable. The White Building, on the other hand, was not about passing time; instead, it utilized prison time to reveal latent potential that could translate into passion for work in the outside world. Through the design process, inmates discovered analytical skills and created tangible products that could be replicated in the future.

When Delisse and Ferriere set out, they were told that they’d learn how not to get attached. “But we never wanted to learn that,” says Delisse. “They’re human, you know. Prisoner is just a label you put on someone. We saw them differently — as people that they actually are, not just as prisoners.” They continue to visit the inmates to check in on them and ask about their families.

Late last year, the creators won a social design award during Dutch Design Week. The next iteration of The White Building is scheduled to start next month in Eindhoven, this time in conjunction with a halfway home with a different target population further along the way toward social reintegration.

Projects like The White Building don’t shield the inmates from the stigmatization that awaits them on the other side of prison life. “Once you’ve been to jail, it will always be a part of your future or your discussion,” says Ferriere. But the intersection of design and labor gives them an opportunity to rebuild trust — in themselves and others.

The White Building was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With urban cycling on the rise, cities are trying out a every imaginable configuration for bikes parking

by Paul Lukas

As cities around America continue to add bike lanes, launch bike-share programs, and generally encourage an increasingly cycling-centric transportation culture, all of those bikes have to be parked somewhere, which has led to a corresponding explosion in the installation of bike racks. But bike racks aren’t just increasing in quantity — they’re also providing a case study in design diversity.

My own neighborhood in Brooklyn is instructive. The scores of bike racks that can be found within a half-mile radius of my apartment come in a wide range of configurations. The standard inverted U is the most common, but there’s also a pole with a small hoop; a pole with two large hoops; a large hoop with a horizontal crossbar; a squiggly sine wave; a pair of truncated diamonds; and more. At the Barclays Center, home to the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, there’s a bike parking lot featuring a rack design called the Flo. A few blocks away, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, there are two racks designed by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, made of metal letters that are periodically swapped out and rearranged to create different messages. One currently spells “Brooklyn”; the other, “Wildwonk.”

And that’s just a small sampling. Search for “bike rack” images on Google and you’ll find a near-endless array of designs, ranging from the simple to the fanciful. In fact, it’s hard to imagine another product or product category that offers so many different solutions to such a seemingly straightforward design challenge. It’s all miles away from the old-fashioned “wheel-bender” racks that many of us grew up with.

Richard Hartger, founder and president of a Michigan bike rack manufacturer called CycleSafe, says there are several explanations for the all the different designs.

“For one thing, there are no national standards, no group out there that certifies bike racks, like a UL for electronics,” he says. “Also, there’s very little barrier to entry. Anyone with a Pines bender and a welding torch can make a bike rack, so you see a lot of different products rolled out by small, entrepreneurial outfits.”

In addition, bike parking is all about the interplay of negative space. Think about it: A bike frame and wheel are mostly negative space, and so is a bike lock (whether U-shaped, a coiled cable, or a chain). Toss in the bike rack, which is also primarily negative space, and you end up with a complex spatial interaction that allows for a broad range of design possibilities.

Still, some of those designs are more successful than others. Every industry professional contacted for this article said the key aspect to any bicycle rack is that it should support the bike’s frame at two points, so the bike doesn’t fall over. A surprising number of designs out there, especially the wave-shaped configurations, fail this basic test.

Moreover, as urban cycling has become more popular, bike racks are no longer mere additions or accessories to the urban streetscape — they’re now essential components of that streetscape and are increasingly expected to reflect and even enhance their surroundings, aesthetically as well as functionally.

“Bike racks are now becoming part of the identity puzzle for many communities,” says Kit Martin, Vice President of Marketing and Design for the design firm Landscape Forms. About a year ago his company launched a product line called MultipliCITY, which includes a simple bike rack with a wooden ledge on top. The ledge gives the rack added functionality: A cyclist can put her bag or helmet on the ledge while she’s locking up, and pedestrians can put their coffee or lunch on the ledge when the rack isn’t being used for bike parking. In addition, the ledge is customizable. “If we ship the product to, say, Brazil, the people there can apply their color scheme or species of wood to the basic casting and make it regionally specific or relevant,” Martin explains. “It’s a simple, mass-produced building block that can be customized to look like it comes from that region.”

At the other end of the spectrum are one-of-a-kind designs that double as public art. Those David Byrne racks at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example, are two of several Byrne-designed racks, each one a playful sculpture of sorts, that are scattered around New York City. Other cities have ended up with similarly whimsical racks by holding public design contests.

“I support communities having fun, having contests,” says Brett Hondorp, president of the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals, an organization that promotes better cycling and walking and publishes a list of suggested guidelines for bike rack design. “If you just want functionality, the inverted U is the simplest, the least expensive, and it’s perfectly fine. But if you’re in Austin and you want to have guitar-shaped bike racks, go for it — that’s reflective of your community. And besides, the best streets have elements that aren’t just single-purpose. Something can be a planter and provide seating. And something can be a bike rack and be public art. As long as the rack meets the functional requirements, go ahead and have fun with it.”

But don’t have too much fun. “The ‘artistic’ designs can be confusing,” says Hartger, the CycleSafe founder. “A lot of times they don’t look like bike racks, so people don’t even realize that’s what they’re for. And some of them look so nice that people don’t feel comfortable chaining something to them.”

That was one of the challenges facing officials in Columbus, Ohio, which recently ran a design contest for bike racks that will double as sculptures in several of the city’s parks and recreation spaces. Fourteen local artists submitted proposals, which were narrowed down to eight finalists by a review panel. City residents then selected four winners, which will be installed in eight locations this spring. The winning artists get $1000, plus another $500 if their designs are installed at an additional location.

“We were looking at ways of getting public art out in the community, and this was a rather inexpensive way to do it,” says Lori Baudro, Project Coordinator for the Columbus Public Art Program, who oversaw the project. As for whether residents will recognize the sculptures as bike parking, Baudro isn’t too worried: “If we need to secure a bike to each one, just to show people what they’re for, then that’s what we’ll do.”

Most people in the industry agree that the future of bike rack design will involve high-density parking solutions. “As more people bike, there’s going to be more bike congestion at the end of the trip,” says Hartger. “And as baby boomers keep biking as they age, they may start using more electric-assist bikes, which have bigger frames and sometimes need bigger racks. In any case, cities and mayors, they all want bike-share and bike lanes, so in general I think the market will be increasing.” And that means the diversity of bike rack designs will likely be increasing as well.

What Makes a Bike Rack? was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What your brain gets out of building in the forest

by Heather Hansman

It started as a boxy sketch on a Brooklyn bar napkin, more of a question than a cabin. Like, could we actually build something stable? How hard is construction if you’ve never really built anything bigger than a bike jump?

In New York City, Aaron Flack, Geoff King, and Mac Bishop, were getting restless. Bishop, who had a long-term dream of a cabin, sketched up an idea, and even though they had close to zero building experience, they decided to see if they could design and build a cabin from scratch.

“It’s not that big of a deal, people do this all the time, they build homes in remote places, but we were all working on computers and weren’t getting outdoors as much as we wanted,” Flack said.

So last fall they spent a week in the woods on Bishop’s family farm outside of Portland, Oregon. They guesstimated a Home Depot order of lumber and learned 19 new ways to swing a hammer. None of them had really built anything before, but King’s sister’s boyfriend is a carpenter, and he drove out from Raleigh with a truck full of tools to help. Six days later — after only one near-beheading because of a dropped beam — they had a 200-square-foot cabin, solid enough to withstand Northwest windstorms.

They’re not the only ones who have been slipping away from city life to build cabins in the woods with their friends. Not far away, on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge, Foster Huntington — the guy behind the #vanlife movement who could be the poster child for mid-twenties dude cool— strung up a spiderwebbing series of tree houses in a stand of Douglas firs, above a homemade skate bowl. In Sullivan County, northwest of New York City, Zach Klein, one of the founders of Vimeo, bought a patch of land he calls Beaver Brook. There, he and his friends have built a neighborhood of cabins and started a building school. The same crew runs the website cabinporn.com

Going to the woods to live deliberately hasn’t been news since Henry David Thoreau hiked out of Concord, but the most recent fascination with flannel and timber framing might not just be superficial. We have a neurological need for both natural spaces and productive physical work, and the farther we sink into Snapchat, the more we’re missing it. That’s why building a cabin is appealing.

There’s hard science behind that appeal. Working with your hands in nature slows down your heart rate and boosts up your immune system. It can combat depression and stop tumors from spreading. And without necessarily knowing the neuroscience behind it, the boys are going back to the woods and building things.

We are, statistically, farther removed from nature than we’ve ever been. In 2010, the census showed that more than 80 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas. A study from the National Academy of Science found that nature-based recreation in the states has been on a steady decline since the mid-‘80s. Over the same period, depression rates, especially among young people, have spiked. Anti-depressant use jumped up 400 percent. “It’s not likely that we’ve had any kind of mutation of our serotonin receptors,” says behavioral neuroscientist Dr. Kelly Lambert. “If we haven’t had any kind of neurochemical change, the one thing that’s different is our lifestyle.”

Lambert, who studies the plasticity of the mammalian brain, started to draw the connections between happiness and working with your hands while she was thinking about someone else’s cabin: Ma Ingalls. She was reading Little House in the Big Woods to her young daughters one night, while she was working on a textbook chapter about depression, and noticed some overlap between the story and the science. “Here she was, building her own house, and killing her own food, and I bought what I made for dinner at Costco,” she says.

Lambert had also been reading up on low rates of depression in rural Chinese and Amish societies. She decided to test the theory that malaise had to do with an increasingly sedentary, plugged-in lifestyle.

“Our idea of a prosperous society is one where we don’t have to do anything, but that’s not really making us happier,” she says.

She took it to the lab, where she ran experiments about effort-based rewards on rats. She looked at their stress and resiliency hormones — the equivalent of cortisol in humans — and found that the rats who had to work for the rewards had higher levels of those hormones. They also came up with more creative solutions to problems, and they were more excited to work. She says it’s hard not to anthropomorphize, but they seemed happier.

Lambert says there are multiple factors involved in that happiness. Physical exertion is one of them, but you can’t just exercise your way to happiness. There has to be a tangible finished product, too. “I’m not saying we need to go back to Little House on the Prairie,” she says. “But our brains see that we’re making the effort and there’s a product at the end.”

It’s not just hammering nails that hits those reward centers, and Lambert isn’t the only one who has been studying it. Nature relatedness, or the degree to which people see themselves as connected to the physical world, is directly correlated to well being. Dr. John Zelenski, who researches happiness, says that relatedness has positive impacts on mental heath, outside of any other factor, like social relationships, that makes people happy.

There are physical benefits, too. In Japan, which has globally high rates of suicide and stress, Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, has gained steam as a part of treatments for a range of things from exhaustion to ADD. A study from the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, found that being around trees can increase your number of NK cells, which break down tumors. It also lowers your heart rate and blood pressure and strengthens your immune system.

So why cabins? Zelenski says they combine the mental and physical highs a lot of people feel like they’re missing, but he also thinks it’s tied to a sense of autonomy, and self-reliance.

Aaron Flack says they weren’t consciously thinking about the health benefits of forest bathing when they started brainstorming the cabin, but their disconnect from nature, and lack of hard skills were definitely on their minds. He and his friends work at start-ups. It’s their job to create new things, but they rarely have a finished product that exists outside of a computer. He thinks that’s directly tied to why cabins fascinate him and many of his peers, and why they wanted to build something tangible instead of digital. He thinks that the more time people spend starting at screens, the more they crave wilderness. It’s why almost 100,000 people follow Foster Huntington’s photo stream, and why cabin porn is so appealing. “It’s not a coincidence that it’s getting bigger while Instagram is also growing,” Flack says.

But looking at Internet cabin porn isn’t the same thing, even though cabin-based websites have been exploding in popularity. Zach Klein, who founded cabinporn.com, says he’s tired of talking about why people fetishize pictures of cabins. He says you can’t fully appreciate it unless you do it yourself. You can’t just scroll through Tumblr shots of cabins — you have to do the work to get happy.

Obviously everyone can’t just do that. A secondary living space, even a shared one, implies a level of privilege. You have to have free time and money. A family farm helps. “I definitely think about that,” Flack says. “At what point is it inappropriate or insensitive to romanticize something that’s unrealistic for a lot of people.”

But if you do have the land, the lumber, and the labor force of friends to build a cabin, the science says do it. You’ll be happier and healthier. Even starting from scratch, without any construction skills, is good, because it challenges your brain. If you can’t go all the way to cabin construction, Lambert says, you can get the same neurotransmitters firing through similar physical outdoor activities, like gardening. “It’s kind of baby steps back to feeling a mastery over the world,” she says. “It might even be a false illusion, but we need to think that we have some sense of control.”

Cabin Fever was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Factory I/O teaches engineers how to troubleshoot factory floors by mimicking videogame UI design

By John Pavlus

When a tech-reporter friend first told me about Factory I/O, he described it as “The Sims for supply chains.” That’s not what the app really does, but it’s close. Factory I/O is industrial training software whose user interface was designed to emulate video games. Puzzle games, specifically. Well, one puzzle game in particular: Portal 2, the blockbuster sci-fi title about a clever human trying to outwit an insane artificial intelligence…inside an industrial training facility.

If the irony of this setup was intended by Factory I/O’s designers, they’re not telling. But the parallels make intuitive sense. When something goes wrong in the thicket of automated mechatronic equipment that festoons a modern factory floor, puzzling it out in person could be as dangerous (or, at least, as time-consuming) as fumbling around the test chambers of Aperture Science, the industrial lab that serves as Portal’s setting. Factory I/O lets an engineer or technician model a physical automation system in a semi-photorealistic virtual setting instead. The software can even connect to PLCs, the industrial computers that drive factory robots and other automated manufacturing machinery.

“The PLCs think they are controlling real machines, but in fact they are controlling the simulation,” explains Diogo Vasconcelos, a software engineer at Real Games, the Portuguese company behind Factory I/O. “Everything is a bit simplified, but you can still create a lot of different problems that you’d find in trying to automate a shop floor. You fine-tune your solutions in our software, and when it’s working OK, you can take that solution and plug the industrial computer into the real machinery.”

Here’s what the UI of Factory I/O looks like:

And here’s what the UI of Portal 2's “puzzle creator” looks like:

The two apps are quite similar: they both have a semi-photorealistic visual style combined with an interface that mixes direct manipulation of a 3D environment with a Photoshop-esque menu and file controls. “Factory I/O looks like a video game but has some familiar things to people that use Windows applications,” Vasconcelos says. “The point was to make it pleasant. Usually these industrial software tools have very schematic visuals that aren’t very engaging, and require a lot of technical experience to do simple things. So we looked to video games for inspiration, where the aim is to be very intuitive to use so the player doesn’t get frustrated.”

According to Vasconcelos, a first-person shooter game called Team Fortress 2 also informed Factory I/O’s visuals. The designers of that game (which was developed by Valve, the same game studio that created Portal and Portal 2) started out by developing photorealistic (for the time) graphics, but soon discovered that the abundance of visual detail hampered “readability” of the game’s character design:

Instead, the designers of Team Fortress 2 pivoted to a visual style informed by early 20th-century commercial illustration—“stylization with a purpose,” as they put it. The designers of Factory I/O followed the same playbook, but took their inspiration from Portal 2's environmental design (since Factory I/O has no “characters”). “The first approach we tried was very photorealistic, but there was too much noise in the picture—it was hard to identify different machine components,” says Vasconcelos. “To fix that, we went for a more illustrative style with high-contrast colors, rim lighting on components, and dark strokes on the edges, so everything is very easy to see.”

The result is a training app with a visual vernacular that young engineers and technicians can instantly grasp. “When you put this software in a classroom, the students can usually use it better than the teacher,” Vasconcelos says. Factory I/O is not meant to replace “real” engineering software like AutoCAD and Solidworks, but as a generation of students weaned on video games ages upward into the professional ranks, user experiences more like Factory I/O could become increasingly common—and even expected. It wouldn’t be the first time: football TV broadcasts look more and more like Madden NFL every year, and young quarterbacks even use the video game to learn their plays.

Why should the automated world of factories and supply chains be any different? If anything, these mechatronic systems lend themselves to video-game-like simulation even better than the squishy, messy realms of sports and entertainment. Factory I/O may not be as immersive and dynamic as the sci-fi-like “seeing spaces” that interface inventor Bret Victor imagines that engineers of the near future will rely on—but it’s getting closer. As they say in video game circles: that’s thinking with Portals.

Industrial Training with Video Games was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.