Tropes are Tools • tsfennec: thejollywriter: tsfennec: ... Ryan Gravel: How an old loop of railroads is changing the face of a city. Dos and don'ts on designing for accessibility - Accessibility in government. Karwai Pun is an interaction designer currently working on Service Optimisation to make existing and new services better for our users. Karwai is part of an accessibility group at Home Office Digital, leading on autism. Together with the team, she’s created these dos and don’ts posters as a way of approaching accessibility from a design perspective. The posters The dos and don’ts of designing for accessibility are general guidelines, best design practices for making services accessible in government. Currently, there are six different posters in the series that cater to users from these areas: low vision, D/deaf and hard of hearing, dyslexia, motor disabilities, users on the autistic spectrum and users of screen readers. The dos, that run across various posters, include using things like good colour contrasts, legible font sizes and linear layouts.
While this is true, the aim of the posters is to raise awareness of various conditions through good design practice. The team Next steps Do Don't. Worldbuilding with Maps. Concept artist Lorin Wood has launched a new group blog called "Nuthin' but Worlds," about concept art and worldbuilding, an offshoot of his successful "Nuthin' but Mech" blog and books. I'm a contributor, and here is what I contributed for my first post: For me, making a map is the best stimulant for building worlds and telling stories. But there are many kinds of maps. Here are a few types I've developed for Dinotopia. Physical geography map, with emphasis on landform relief. Seafloor relief, shown in perspective, with the island lifted up to show the caves. Expedition route map. Another route map showing a close-up section of the eastern coastline. Antique maps are more convincing if they're made with antique tools.
Here's a close-up of the map above to show the graded hatching of the mountain reliefs, typical of engraved maps of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. City map of Chandara, showing organic street grid and canals. Here's a close-up of the same city in Dinotopia. Human Architecture Needs A Dissident Instinct - Architectuul. “In every civilized community, Architecture has always been the most powerful sociological, cultural and historical cohesive factor; Architecture is the indispensable amalgam of the common life of diverse human beings.” Ljiljana Bakić Pionir Sports Hall in Belgrade. | Courtesy of Dragoljub Bakić Ljubica Slavković and Iva Čukić planned this interview questioning the meaning of the exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 in MoMA.
The talk with Dragoljub Bakić presents a story of love, devotion and architecture of the inseparable Yugoslav architectural tandem Dragoljub and Ljiljana Bakić. Dragoljub Bakić, Ljubica Slavković and Iva Čukić in a garden in the Višnjička Banja neighborhood in Belgrade. Before meeting Dragoljub we have passed through the settlement that the couple designed. DB: It is interesting how there is now a curiosity in what we did in the era of socialism. Plan for the residential area Višnjička Banja. | Courtesy of Dragoljub Bakić DB: Yes. Looking Around: Horizontal Space | McMansion Hell. If there is one truth about the second half of the 20th Century it is that, by all accounts, we started moving out rather than up; horizontal rather than vertical.
Not only through the process of suburbanization, the building of massive highways, and the rapid capital flight from cities, but also in how we designed everything from our homes to our workplaces. It could be said that, since the development of major highways, America has flattened – much in the same way that the invention of both the elevator and air conditioning brought skyscrapers to every major city in the first half of the 20th century.
I-55 Under Construction, 1972. Public Domain. In his 1984 book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, John Brinckerhoff Jackson observes this transition: “Who has not noticed…that in almost every American town the upper stories of the buildings flanking Main Street are being deserted? Jackson attributes this decline in vertical spaces to technological changes. Residential Horizontalization. Part 3. The Origins of Dinotopia: Lost Empires. In 1983, soon after I had begun as a published illustrator, National Geographic magazine took a chance and hired me to paint a picture of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt on the Orinoco River. The assignment was followed by many others, including reconstructions of the legendary voyages of Jason and Ulysses, the kingdom of Kush in Nubia, and the civilization of the Etruscans in Italy.
West Bank, 1987 During those years, National Geographic occasionally sent its artists to meet with the archaeologists on location. A research trip in the summer of 1987 brought me to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem, which gave me a visceral sense of the weight of time and tradition. My first glimpse of an actual lost city came at the end of that trip, when I arrived at Petra, the capital of an ancient Arab kingdom hidden in a red sandstone canyon in southern Jordan.
I climbed up to the top of a cliff and sketched the dwellings carved from solid rock. Untitled. Author’s note: this is the first in a series of articles about how designers use the concept of wayfinding in theme park design. Miller (1992) defines wayfinding as “a goal-directed process of determining routes through an unfamiliar environment” (p. 1), and that is the definition I will use from here on out. It is worth noting, as Lynch (1960) describes, that “it…seems unlikely that there is any mystic ‘instinct’ of wayfinding. Rather there is a consistent use and organization of definite sensory cues from the external environment” (p. 3). As such, the design of the built environment has enormous potential in facilitating this process. What is a “Weenie”? The “weenie” is an architectural concept named such by Disney Imagineering in describing “visual magnets” that draw guests from one area to another (Sklar, 2013). Figure 1: Weenies at three scales, top to bottom; Cinderella's Castle (Queen, 2010), the gateway to Tomorrowland Weenies and Legibility Weenies and Navigability References.
Why Solarpunk, Not Cyberpunk, Is the Future We Need Right Now. It should be no surprise that I’m obsessed with science fiction. Considering that I’m both a graphic designer and work in cryptocurrency, it’s practically required that I pay homage to the neon-soaked aesthetics of Blade Runner 2049, have a secret crush on Ava from Ex Machina, and geek out over pretty much anything Neal Stephenson puts out.
However, with a once theoretical dystopia now apparently on our doorstep, we should be considering the trajectory of our civilization now more than ever. Suddenly, the megacorps, oppressive regimes, and looming global crises don’t seem so distant anymore. What were once just tropes in our favorite works of science fiction are now becoming realities that are impacting our daily lives. And here we are, wrestling with the implications of our new reality while trapped in our living rooms staring into glowing rectangles straight out of Ready Player One.
Recent events surrounding COVID-19 have put us at a bit of a crossroad. Where are we heading? ️ Cyberpunk: Untitled. Futurology: The tricky art of knowing what will happen next. 23 December 2010Last updated at 02:38 By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Magazine Cheap air travel was among the predictions (illustration from Geoffrey Hoyle's book) A 1972 book which predicts what life would be like in 2010 has been reprinted after attracting a cult following, but how hard is it to tell the future? Geoffrey Hoyle is often asked why he predicted everybody would be wearing jumpsuits by 2010. He envisioned a world where everybody worked a three-day week and had their electric cars delivered in tubes of liquid. These colourful ideas from his 1972 children's book, 2010: Living in the Future, helped prompt a Facebook campaign to track him down. His work has now been reprinted with the year in the title amended to 2011.
"I've been criticised because I said people [would] wear jumpsuits," explains Hoyle, the son of noted astronomer and science fiction author Fred Hoyle. Hoyle's book is a product of its time. Fortunately, jumpsuit proliferation has not occurred as Hoyle predicted. Junktown | Fallout Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia. "Industrial Junk" Junktown is one of the smaller towns in southern California.
It was founded shortly after the War by a soldier named Darkwater.[1] Instead of building on the ruins of an old town, he thought it would be better to begin from the ground up. As the name suggests, it was built after the Great War out of random pieces of junk, mostly from wrecked cars. The town mostly lives off of trading and has a reputation for open hospitality. Background Edit In 2161, the mayor of Junktown was Killian Darkwater, grandson of the town's founder, who also ran Darkwaters General Store. After 2186, Junktown became part of the New California Republic as part of the state of Shady and it was one of the first provisional states, considering it was one of the first (and most trustworthy) of the Shady Sands trading partners during its early formation.
Location Junktown can be found one square east and nine squares south of Vault 13. Layout Junktown is divided into three districts. Entrance Edit Laboratory. A closer look at communities thriving in unexpected places. In Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, nearly 70 percent of the population lives in slums that appear to drape like silk over every hill of the city. Iwan Baan: Ingenious homes in unexpected placesIwan Baan is not as interested in what architects build as he is in the beautiful ways that people appropriate the spaces once the planners are gone.
In today’s talk, Baan — whose breathtaking image of lower Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy hangs on at least one of our walls — shows incredible images from communities thriving in ways that seem quite opposite to the uniformity of suburbs. First, Baan takes us to Chandigarh, India, where people inhabit buildings created by modernist architects Le Corbusier in very different ways than expected. Then, Baan takes us to Caracas, Venezuela, where an abandoned 45-story building has become a miniature city. Baan’s talk will have you marveling at human ingenuity. In it, the photographer shows 154 images. In Makoko, forced evictions are a daily reality. An imaginary city that changed the twentieth century. Yes, it does. It's very weird that a captain of industry like Gillette would come up with such socialist-sounding ideals. You'll note he was a member of this little socialist nutjob group before he caught a clue and successfully marketed the safety razor. Interestingly enough he didn't do very well until he hit upon saving time as a method of selling his safety razors.
People didn't care how save they were but they did care about the time they'd save honing their straight razor. Once he made them disposable, and hence convenient, his business took off. It surprises me how people use things like game theory and mathematical theorems to "prove" that the private ownership of the means of production is a bad thing. 1. 2. 3. Nash totally ignores this, like most socialists do, because if they showed any understanding of how people really act then they'd realize how stupid a one size fits all solution is to any problem. A green roof! Sustainable Green Buildings - Earthship Biotecture. Caves of Wonder. A series of massive caves was recently discovered in Vietnam. The passage into the caves is about 300 feet wide and nearly 800 feet tall. And that's just the lobby. Inside the depths of the largest of the caves sits a real live jungle! This is potentially the largest cave in the world, and it was only recently discovered.
Futuristic Vertical City Holds Plug-In Hexagonal Housing Units. Share on Tumblr Email Malaysian architect Tay Yee Wei recently unveiled a towering vertical city populated with hexagonal housing units that offer a solution to urban population growth problems in Asian cities. The tower itself serves as a scaffolding — as the population of urban areas fluctuates, modular units can be “plugged in” to the structure to accommodate an expanding population. Wei’s Plug-in Dwelling Development was inspired by Le Corbusier’s theory — “a house is a machine for living.” The project essentially rotates a sprawling community into a vertical orientation.
The Plug-in Dwelling project assumes that the development will have a longer lifespan than the city that surrounds it. Via eVolo. Venue design. Around my Sims. Around my Sims. Another characteristic of my towns (yes, it was the same with Sandy Valley) is that I build stuff mostly without knowing the use I'll make of them, except for schools or city halls, or other typical buildings.
But right now, I don't know what kind of shops or restaurants I'll make, nor in which building they'll be. I'll simply adapt my projects to the lot I have built, when I have an idea for it. It's my way to give a more organic (and also maybe more european) look to the town. Then, I'm adding details, like flowers, balconies, urban objects...
Around my Sims. Around my Sims. Many of these lots are still under construction or under tweaking, but it might be the most completed district of Rocheplate so far. La Glisse, the skate-board and surfing-board store, run by Aaron Delport La Friperie, second-hand clothing store, run by Noémie Lafleur The Skateboard park, where an unformal bar should open in a container Some residential buildings. Noémie and Sébastien live in the first one. WIP lot, again inspired by a Sims 4 building There should be there a laundromat, an indian take-out/restaurant and a rock concert scene The airport. Around my Sims.