Blog / Nadeem Haidary

Alphabet City

While traveling a few years ago I had a dream about a city where all streets were named for the category of businesses located on that street. On Automotive Avenue, for example, you might find a Honda dealership, Jiffy Lube and a Pep Boys. This obviously isn’t a new idea, and you see it especially in cities outside the United States. Although it wasn’t named such, in China I came across a street where every merchant was a sign maker and merchant, most of them selling the exact same goods.

But what if you took that idea one step further. Instead of these specialty streets existing in isolation, perhaps they exist in a gridded urban environment where the intersection of two streets might be represented by companies who’s identity spans two industries. The Apple Store, for example, might exist on the corner of Circuit Street and Fruit Way, with Best Buy the neighbor on one side and Edible Arrangements on the other. A ZipCar might be parked at the intersection of Automotive Ave. and Fashion Lane, and eBay’s offices might be at corner of Electronics Road and Liquid Lane. Like Denver, Colorado, the street names on both axis would be in alphabetical order, in this case to facilitate finding or exploring certain business categories.

Furthermore, the empty lots at certain intersections might provide the impetus to imagine new types of products or business models (or at the very least more creative company names). Is there a market for a new kind of store that might sell comfortable chairs (Furniture Road) while you get your keys cut (Hardware Heights)?

I’m open to ideas and suggestions.

1847 Lower Manhattan map, via Wikimedia Commons.

Japa\ippon

Six
from
Japan.

Downtown Tokyo, a contrast in Meiji-era and post-war modernist aesthetics.

Who is my boss?, asks Shibuya.

Yes, in addition to bullet trains, electronic toilets and vending machine eateries, the houses in Japan are made of gold.

In the woods, I came across a shrine, dedicated to the mammary glands.

Tsukiji Fish Market, 6:00am. Cutting fresh tuna with a meter long knife. This picture has an illicit feeling to it, like the guy is in the Yakuza, practicing his knife skills.

Red octopus. Not Photoshopped.

Dali and Le Corbusier

“Karl Marx suffered from the same kind of illusions as poor Le Corbusier, whose recent death filled me with an immense joy. Both of them were architects. Le corbusier was a pitiable creature working in reinforced concrete. Mankind will soon be landing on the moon, and just imagine: that buffoon claimed we’d be taking along sacks of reinforced concrete. His heaviness and the heaviness of concrete deserve one another. [....] …because of his reinforced concrete and his architecture,the ugliest and most unacceptable buildings in the world. All the same, if god exists, He’d expect me to act like a gentleman. So I ordered some everlasting flowers for the anniversary of his death, next year, and I cried out: ‘Long live anti-gravitation.’”

-Salvador Dali

(via Yen Huang)

Hiatus

It’s been a while since I posted to this blog. I spent two months traveling and now have started a new job. While I can’t really cover the entire trip, I would like to share some images. This first set is of the Chinese topography.

The city of Guilin in southern Chinese region of Guangxi. Stark limestone hills contrast the drab, rectilinear buildings.

A minority village nestled between the Longsheng rice terraces.

Hiking through the Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Mountains in Yunnan, near the Gorge.

The Great Wall snaking atop the mountain peaks.

Micronesian artifacts

I’ve been making intermittent visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an attempt to cover the museum’s vast galleries. The most striking work so far has been the artifacts of Micronesia. In contrast to the rest of Oceanic art, 19th century Micronesian art is streamlined, spare and practical. One might call it modern. The bowl here, called and apie nie, is used to collect coconut milk.

“Bowl (Apia Nie) [Wuvulu or Aua Island] (1979.206.1428)”. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-;. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/11/oci/ho_1979.206.1428.htm (April 2008)

Generally, hand-crafted objects gain value with applied decoration, especially in places where resources are scarce. Care and meaning are visually embodied in the decoration’s complexity. So its strange and unique that Micronesia used decoration sparingly. In this case, it seems like the apie nie bowl’s smooth surfaces and high level of finish (in part due to residual coconut oil) convey a sense of craft.

The museum also had a navigational stick charts, used by the people of the Marshall islands as a diagram to study ocean currents and the intersection of wave swells while on land. If like me, you’re having trouble reading the charts, I should note that navigational techniques were kept secret within families and that a chart like this might only mean something for its creator.

“Navigational Chart (Rebbilib) [Marshallese people, Marshall Islands] (1978.412.826)”. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-;. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/11/oci/ho_1978.412.826.htm (April 2008)

Speaker / iPod Control

Update on the speaker project. I’ve hacked a third-party iPod remote so that I can control the iPod from the Arduino. Additionally, I’ve started to test out different sensors and inputs–infrared, touch potentiometer–that would be placed behind the speaker cloth.

Speaker

After about a year and a half of not using my Arduino microcontroller, I’ve decided to get reacquainted with it. I’m basically relearning how to build simple circuits, program and solder. It’s going much quicker this time around. These skills will be useful as I’ve begun a new, self-initiated project to design an iPod speaker. I want to keep it relatively simple, but I’ll be exploring how one might manipulate the speaker’s grille fabric to change the volume, track, play and pause. It could just be switches hidden below the surface of the fabric, or it might involve something like a flex sensor.

A sampling of sketches below. As parts come in, they’ll likely be more updates.

These drawings come as I narrow the device down to a wall-mounted design. They also explore the relationship of the iPod to the speaker.

Here, I continue to develop basic forms, as well as consider the ways buttons, potentiometers and lights can distort or hide below the grille fabric.

On government

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth Buckminster Fuller observes how the world has increasingly turned to a division of labor to run a trade-based economic system. Unlike the farmer who had to double as a salesman, construction worker and handyman, at some point, a modern worker generally has to pick a profession and stick with it. The chemist decides to be a chemist, leaving behind the other sciences (and other professions) to concentrate on world of molecules and formulations.

Perhaps the only profession that has a strong impact on all levels of society is politics. The politician has his hand in everything from agriculture to education, health care to transportation. Yet most politicians’ are trained in the esoteric, convoluted, unbending world of law. Is that the right qualification for those who lead and advance society? Perhaps there needs to be a new breed of leader that is able to understand people, work well with other disciplines and effectively deliver solutions: a person with a more “comprehensive” training. I think these new leaders can learn a thing or two from designers.

Now, I don’t mean to say that designers should jump into politics or that we don’t need lawyers. However, with an increasingly myopic government, a human-centered approach coupled with the use of techniques like immersion, need finding, brainstorming and testing could be useful. We need to balance the thinking with doing, and I believe Buckminster Fuller would be a good role model.

Andrew Ellicott’s 1792 revision of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, D.C.

On drawing cars

When I have a pen in my hand, a blank sheet of paper in front of me, and nothing specific in mind, I have two instinctive reactions I’m not proud of. One is to draw boxes, something that’s been with me since a “draw one thousand cubes” assignment my freshmen year. The other is to draw cars.

This one is interesting because I don’t see myself ever becoming a car designer, at least in the traditional sense of an exterior stylist. But at some point I must have, because when I was in high school I used to draw cars in the margins of my notes. They were horrendous, perspective-challenged cars. I would spend five minutes designing a needlessly complex headlight, and then spend ten minutes trying to figure out how to draw a body around it. And the wheels, yeah, these cars didn’t have those. I’d like to say they had an alternate propulsion system, but the existence of wheel wells gave away the fact that I just couldn’t draw them.

Years later I still have an irritating tendency to loosely sketch vehicles in the pages of any design project. I’m not considering any constraints when sketching these, I’m not really thinking about anything; they just happen. My technique has improved, but I still don’t draw wheels. Without wheels, these sketches remain where I want them as an exercise, not an actual, critique-able contribution to automotive design.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

One of those recent car sketches with some Photoshop thrown on.

The Jello Experiment

The other day Defne sent me a recipe for Broken Glass Jello, adding that it would be neat to make an alternate version with “fish”-shaped pieces in blue jello “water.” So, I decided to give it a shot. In hindsight, there’s a lot of things I would change, as fishes were breaking and the “water” turned out to be a disaster. I’ll have to try it again sometime.

I wanted my fishes to create a tessellation, so that the individual color batches of Jello could be cut up into fishes in the most efficient way possible.

I bent a piece of aluminum flashing by hand into the shape of a fish. Without any tools or a mold to bend it around, this was the best I could do. It turned out fine because the jello smooths out little inaccuracies.

I mixed blueberry jello with some unflavored gelatin to lighten up the blue, but it still came out too dark. What’s worse is that when I poured the hot jello liquid into the dish with the fishes, it started melting the fishes, especially the red ones. Later, I had extra green and orange fishes, which I added when the “water” cooled, and those are the ones that feature most prominently, if a bit ghostly. The fish-water ratio is skewed as well.

It tasted good, but I still have to redeem myself with an improved version.