Larry Leifer, extraordinary pioneer in design practice and design research, passed away yesterday August 29. Larry was a key figure in what I had hoped Stanford might stand for when I arrived in 1999. He welcomed me into The Learning Lab, Stanford Center for Innovation in Learning, Center for Design Research (CDR), and the Hasso…
urban futures
Infrastructural imaginaries
Chris Ford and I are in a conference in Cambridge UK. The archaeological imagination applied to urban architecture, planning, design. Hosted by the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, this global conference on Situated Imagination and Imaginaries of Urban Futures brings together over 70 scholars, practitioners, and artists from around the world for a day to…
Over your cities grass will grow
Sensitive light-touch upcycling of an old locomotive works. Curated rewilding and planting for biodiversity. Working with the past, bridging past and present. Designing landscapes with sensitivity to ecosystem. Manifestations of an archaeological sensibility and acting-with nature [Link]. The opening in 1998 of the bridge across the Storebaelt, connecting the two biggest islands in Denmark, brought…
Boijmans Collections Depot – teaser
The revolutionary new collections depot for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam opens later this year. Here is en evocative glimpse of the roof top. More about this remarkable project – [Link] [Link] [Link] [Link]
the valencies of Neo-Classical
I have been avoiding giving any attention to the last days of Trump. Jody Maxmin, however, directed me to an executive order this last weekend concerning classical architecture. Here’s the report in the New York Times: Trump Makes Classical Style the Default for Federal Buildings An executive order stopped short of banning modernist architecture, but…
Futures Literacy: how to decolonize the future
December 8 – 12 2020. Tamara (Carleton) and I were at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit [Link] representing our research group – Foresight at Stanford [Link]. We are standing for design foresight and what we are now calling creative pragmatics (in our forthcoming book – [Link]). Competencies, tools and techniques, mindsets not for predicting the…