Power Point - shooting bullets

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint:
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
New York Times

 I have always been told the linearity of thought that powerpoint enforces can limit your thinking process and understanding of complex systems. This is not so reassuring that the people need the most clarity have discovered the same thing...

UPDATED: article:
"...Great presenters employ the basic narrative techniques used throughout history to connect with audiences and move them to action and new understanding. The presentations that work are not the ones with the most data or the most elaborate charts and graphs; the winners are those with the most compelling and convincing narratives.

We're a distracted, multi-tasking society. So presentations need to lure and re-lure an audience simply to keep their attention. Audiences are looking at the clock or fiddling with their handheld devices throughout a presentation. You don't connect with your audience by throwing information at them -- you do it by taking them on a journey toward your perspective..."

Excerpts: 

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”


In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.


Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan. 

(Thanks Lee!)

 

Mapping the Protest in Bangkok

New events in Bangkok highlight the public-ness and private-ness of spaces of protest.
The above mapping highlights the "area" under control of the "red shirts"

The top horizontal line is Rama 1 Road, home of the gigantic malls like Siam Paragon.

Cities all over the world are privatizing their gathering spaces under the guise of consumerism. These become likely sites of protest for this disruption of financial systems - now having international/global repercussions.

Retrofitting Suburbia

Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs
"While there has been considerable attention by practitioners and academics to development in urban cores and new neighborhoods on the periphery of cities, there has been little attention to the redesign and redevelopment of existing suburbs. Here is a comprehensive guidebook for architects, planners, urban designers, and developers that illustrates how existing suburbs can be redesigned and redeveloped. The authors, both architects and noted experts on the subject, show how development in existing suburbs can absorb new growth and evolve in relation to changed demographic, technological, and economic conditions."

Tedx video here

Google mania

Sorry, but too great not to share or to forget:

10 Simple Google Search Tricks

Google Public Data

Great new access to data and mapping.
Leave it to Google:
"Data visualizations for a changing world: The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings."

Pop-Up Spaces

Real Estate Bust - Allissa Walker

When there is lemons, you make lemonade. At this moment of numerous empty store, a growing concept in "pop-up" galleries are taking charge in a number of large cities. Emtpy storefronts become temporary exhibits, empty spaces become temporary buisnesses, classrooms and any sort of mash-up programming a creative type could think of.

Waterfronts

selected articles:
Brooklyn Bridge Park

“Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront” at MOMA
review

Taxi Mapping

Another great New York Times info-mapping of Taxi's in the city

The Foodprint Project

Foodprint NYC is the first in a series of international conversations about food and the city.

The free afternoon program will include designers, policy-makers, flavor scientists, culinary historians, food retailers, and others, for a wide-ranging discussion of New York’s food systems, past and present, as well as opportunities to transform our edible landscape through technology, architecture, legislation, and education.


related link at Urban Omnibus

Cars, Culture and the City

“Cars, Culture and the City,” an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. The show opens on Thursday at the museum, 1220 Fifth Avenue at East 103rd Street, and runs through Aug. 1.

Slumburbia

Opinion Piece by Timothy Egan

"...a few lessons about urban planning can be picked from the stucco pile.

One is that, at least here in California, the outlying cities themselves encouraged the boom, spurred by the state’s broken tax system. Hemmed in by property tax limitations, cities were compelled to increase revenue by the easiest route: expanding urban boundaries. They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users.

Second, look at the cities with stable and recovering home markets. On this coast, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and San Diego come to mind. All of these cities have fairly strict development codes, trying to hem in their excess sprawl. Developers, many of them, hate these restrictions. They said the coastal cities would eventually price the middle class out, and start to empty.

It hasn’t happened. Just the opposite. The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums.

Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live"

photo and article credit

the story of NORCS

Great research on elderly communities of New York City by Interboro.

Landscape of Energy

Landscapes of Energy 

Edited by Rania Ghosn.

Energy infrastructures deploy space at a large scale, yet they remain invisible because the creation of value in the oil regime has long externalized spatial costs, sliding them out of sight and away from design's agency. Contemporary environmental, political, and financial crises have brought energy once again to the forefront of design concerns. Rarely, however, do practices of sustainable design-efficient building skins, islands of self-sufficiency, positive-energy machines-address the spatiality of energy systems. Instead, they tend to emphasize a renewable/nonrenewable binary that associates environmental costs exclusively with the infrastructure of oil and overlooks the geographic imperative of all forms of energy.

Volume 2 of New Geographies proposes to historicize and materialize the relations of energy and space, and map some of the physical, social, and representational geographies of oil, in particular. By making visible this infrastructure, Landscapes of Energy is an invitation to articulate design's environmental agency and its appropriate scales of intervention.

City of Apps

This is a repost from the New York Times Bits Blog
"New York City Names Winners of Apps Contest" by Jenna Wortham

So interesting to see cities taking on the private sector to create transparency, efficiency and localized, dispersed networks. The future of city building...