« WALKATHON WEEK. TUESDAY NIGHT LITERATI! | Main | Photoblogarithm: Booker’s Skulls Watch Over Atlantic Yards »
October 17, 2006
IDEO's Urban Pre-Planning
Can the design company's "Smart Space" practice shake up the lumbering world of infrastructure, zoning and public process?
Metropolis Magazine
By Andrew Blum
Forest City Residential West (a subsidiary of Forest City Enterprises) contracted with the design firm that developed the mouse and Palm Pilot to help them create a vision for a 665-unit housing development in Oakland, CA.
At the end of a long day talking in IDEO’s San Francisco office, I rode the BART train to Oakland with Givechi and Andy Williams, an IDEO designer. We peered at the size 11 platform shoes in the window of a store that serves the local transvestite community and had coffee at Mama Buzz, a café where the team conducted interviews. At the building site bulldozers were busily scraping the land flat for the foundations. A billboard advertised the project. Its watercolor rendering showed an utterly conventional-looking apartment complex — the kind of unornamented, decently proportioned colored-stucco housing block rising all over Northern California. It was hard not to be disappointed. For all the nuance of IDEO’s sense of Oakland and all its success at communicating that to Forest City, the project looked like any other project. Its reality was still just an idea.
Posted by lumi at October 17, 2006 8:24 AM