read the report of the 13 trends breaking through in 2013 by Patricia Martin, including a contribution by Samar Héchaimé of factors ( see trend number 13 – cities become more human by design)

‘The 2013 report focuses on cultural trends poised to break through in the year ahead. It’s designed to inspire anyone wanting to communicate more effectively across touch points.

While the impact of the Internet can be felt in nearly every aspect of consumer life, our focus revolves around its impact on the fabric of society—families, communities, business, education and civic life. This report presents key trends and macro themes that reveal deeper shifts in how people are making decisions and adopting new behaviors that affect how your brand is perceived. On every page is a glimpse of the turning tides that a rising generation of digital natives portends.

Our research yielded 13 break-through trends that open opportunities to build stronger bonds between people and brands: customer loyalty, knowledge transfer, digital rituals, media consumption and consumer expectations around a healthy planet. LitLamp’s consulting team spoke with experts including top researchers, pollsters, designers and creative technologists to better understand the implications; their representative comments are included.

The report wraps up with seven clearly stated ways to use the findings to advance your brand into the future. Progressive, motivated marketers should find inspiration on every page.’

13ThingsBreakingThrough.htm

ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands – Rotterdam/ Amsterdam- based urban planning firm, Stipo B.V., just released their new book ‘The City at Eye Level: Lessons for Street Plinths’ and will be available for free download or hard-­‐copy via website on 11 January 2013. The book, a collaborative effort of five editors and 43 professional contributors from the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Demark, USA, UK and Germany, (including Samar Héchaimé of factors) delves deeply into the concepts, philosophy, and strategies behind planning the ground floors (“plinths”) of urban environments. Interviews, case studies, and first-­‐hand stories highlight important examples of best practices from cities in the Netherlands (in particular, Rotterdam) as well as Copenhagen, Antwerp, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

This books shows that good plinths require a smart strategy supported by many players including the city, the owners, the renters and the users, and introduces a host of new vocabularly to help define this innovative planning strategy. A great city at eye level requires a strategy based on three domains: software (use, the experience, the functions), hardware (design of plinths, buildings, streetscapes, hybrid zones and principles of sustainability) and orgware (organisation of functions and portfolio maintenance). The 215-­ page book offers ideas, solutions and examples of the best ground floors and ground-­‐level planning from cities across the world. The concluding chapter proposes 75 specific lessons for good plinths.

On 11 January, 2013, Stipo launched the book to the world in the city where it all started: Rotterdam. About 230 guests, including urban planners, entrepreneurs, housing associations, local civil servants, neighbours, and interested parties, all came together to celebrate. Hosted by several partners (EDBR, AIR, Deltametropool, Gemeente Rotterdam) the launch was open to the public and included a Plinth Safari for all guests-­‐-­‐parallel visits examining the best plinth planning practices in Rotterdam-­‐-­‐as well as a chance to meet a few of the book’s co-­‐authors who were also present for the evening. John Worthington, co-­‐ founder of DEGW and Director of The Academy of Urbanism in London, gave the keynote speech. He focused on how the book is relevant in an international context, in international cities.

The book is available through the publishing house Eburon and will be on bookshelves and Amazon.com in the coming weeks. It is also available for download at www.thecityateyelevel.com.

Museums. They are in our cities. They are gateways to our culture, to our past, to our future, to our history, to our ingenuity, to our sorrows, to our triumphs, to everything that has made us human or has connected us to the nature and the universe we live in.

Museums are the soft power to our cities and to our countries. They have the power to shape perceptions and ideas. To influence and leave a mark. They are an immersive and engulfing experience that works passively at educating and forming points of views. Museums have the power to engage our emotions like very few places can, and the more they enthral us the more lasting their mark is going to be on us.

As cities go London is very well positioned with a wide-ranging arsenal of such soft power, from the public to the privately run. London holds a treasure in its midst that makes other cities envious. Nevertheless the perception and reaction to these treasures is as mixed and diverse as there are people giving their opinion. To some Londoners these museums are part of their past, their school day memories, and they have not been there since the field trips they have been dragged into by the educational institution they belong to. To other Londoners museums are where you go when you have visitors and otherwise they are places you avoid. Then there are those who have children and are grateful to having the museums that have free general admission as they provide easy and cheap grounds to entertain their toddlers, which in a way is commendable as these toddlers will hopefully grow up with an appreciation of culture, science etc and of shared heritages. To a few it is a constant inspiring destination that allows us to remember the power of dreams, with the unequivocal enchantment that we have such wealth under our fingertips (of course there might be a debate on who has the right to these treasures but this is a different discussion). To the visitors these museums are part of the checklist of things to do in London, and their experiences vary from the ticking of a check next to a list entry to the loss of oneself in a world and subject they are passionate about.

Regardless of what we think of the museums we have to admit that at least in London there is a democratisation to the access to such culture and such wealth, which is definitely something unusual globally.

Yet we are confined to interact with these jewels in only three different touch points. The first touch point is the physical location, the museum itself. The edifice that holds within its walls whatever wonders it has been bestowed upon it to collect, preserve, study and highlight. The second touch point is a virtual one, usually a website, sometimes some twitter accounts maybe a blog and similar web presences. The third touch point is usually an educational presence, a team that collaborates with the local educational institutions to take the museum into schools and bring the schools into the museums.
In my experience with museums and visiting a multitude of them, there are none as engaging and exciting as the museums that are targeting children such as the ‘Science Museum’ in London, the ‘Museum of Science and Industry’ in Chicago, ‘le Palais de la découverte’ in Paris and a slew of similar organizations and institutions. These museums are immersive, and fun. They teach you without lecturing. They put you in the middle of a situation and depending on the choices you make you might get different outcomes, which are clarified, for ease of understanding. You are part of the exhibit, and it does not sit detached and at a distance from you. These institutions are so beloved by their visitors that they take care of them while they are interacting with them. It is not because they are sturdy, because in some of these museums you have exhibits showcasing things as fragile live butterflies. It is because that engagement warrants a sense of respect even from the most rowdy of visitors. The curators and directors of these institutions have understood the power of fuelling the imagination and how that is done through an emotional attachment and a physical engagement. And mostly through fun.

The other day I was on the tube and there was a group of young girls, they were a troupe of brownies, in the same car as me. Their sense of excitement was so palpable. They had their backpacks and knapsacks and they were ready for an adventure. They were counting the stops and negotiating what their plans for the night are going to be. They were so captivating that they enticed the whole car into a conversation, something very rare in the tube in London or any public transport around the world for that matter. It turns out that these girls were heading to a night of camping at the Science Museum. How exhilarating! It is not a novel idea. I know many museums that have such an endeavours and they are always so exciting for the participants.
By the time the troupe had alighted you could feel a sense of common envy. I am sure we were all thinking that we wished we were part of that troupe.
What is interested about that incident is that these girls have offered unintentionally the fourth touch point to the museum, one that the museums have not harnessed its power properly yet. That touch point is the city and its inhabitants. It had infiltrated the living space of the urbanites and had absorbed them into its world even for a brief moment. Many museums as I mentioned do have such events, but mostly the parents drive their children to the museum or they go on a private bus to the museum especially when coming from a suburban area. The fact that these visitors were on the tube made the journey and the engagement with the other people along the way part of the adventure, and it brought the adventure to others who were not even planning on experiencing it. They also inadvertently became the ambassadors making us all want to go and experience the museum one more time.

The museums and the planes of the cities they inhabit should engage more with each other. Of course museums advertise their upcoming events. Some bring out a piece onto the streetscape outside the museum to lure people in. In some instances like in Paris metro stations ‘Louvre’ and ‘Arts et Metiers’, among others, the museum is brought into the public transport to create and interconnection between the museum, the ground plane, the street level, the underground level and those zapping through it on the metro. These work as momentary attention grabbers that don’t leave too much impact.

The conversation that was triggered on that tube car is what museums should strive to achieve it they would like to have a more lasting impact on the fourth plane of engagement. This fuelling of the imagination will would remain with us longer and make us dream much more readily. That conversation should be followed then through inside the walls of the museum to engage us and immerse us like it does with the children, allowing us to understand how what is being exhibited affects and forms our world and how we can use it to instigate positive change within our world. It should grab us so intensely that we live through that immersive experience and come out of it wanting and yearning for more, or maybe the opposite, which is being so turned off by something that we are willing to make the effort to change it.

With the change of our communication along the multimedia superhighways, the attention spans have been shortened and dispersed.

The average viewer will be bombarded with a million message every instant, from billboards to moving screen images to architecture to every type of message and communication we receive. The environments we live in have become highly branded with messages flying at us from every perceived direction that it has become more difficult to communicate. The competition has become extremely fierce.

To counter that attention seeking modern environment, the urbanite takes more and more refuge in isolation. This has become apparent in the amount of people walking the streets with headphones in their ears, a focused determined look and an impenetrable bubble around them.

We walk more and more with music, or podcasts or some other sound that we pump into our ears including phone conversation with people who are not present within our physical realm. We forget to let the street and our environment talk to us. We thus are telling people and the city to stay away and not approach us. Trust me I know it is well warranted sometimes. You surely would like to avoid the chatterbox who sees you as a perfect target to rant about their problems hoping to save on the price of a session at their psychiatrist. But most often than not by retreating into our bubble we miss out on some interesting interaction between us and the city, between us and a passer by or even between us and someone we know that we did not notice was around us. It is true that most urban environments are not conducive to that interaction really but you can find a stage anywhere. For example one of my favourite urban parks is Bryant Park. The way this park has grown throughout the years has turned it  into a wonderfully engaging and engaged urban open space. Every time I go to New York I try to spend an afternoon there at least. I head there with my lunch, and a book. Two activities to which this park is so perfectly suited. The central core is open, on one side you have the New York Library and all around you have the high rises of mid manhattan. From those high-rises the scale shifts around the periphery of the park with a layer of trees and shrubbery where you have more intimate enclosed spaced that reopen towards the center. That center is where one night a week in the summer new yorkers converge with their picnic baskets to come and watch a classic movie. On any other time of the day you can take over these wood and steel green cafe chairs and tables and have yourself a quiet reflective time…. or so i always think. It never turns out to be the case. Every time, inevitably, I end up approaching or being approached by a stranger with whom i engage in a conversation about the book in either in our hands or something we overheard the other say in a conversation, maybe even an earlier phone conversation. That conversation most of the time pulls in other people in the vicinity and before we know it our little green cafe chair and table are moved around and we create an outdoor living space. If I am sitting in that same park with my headphones on I am sending a clear message to people sitting around me to stay away. What a pity that is since it would make me miss those wonderful conversations with strangers.

The urban environment used to be experienced through the dialogue that happened between its street level and its skyline. The buildings, which are individual symbolic expression of its inhabitants, are also pieces of the whole skyline. They communicate with each other like individual letters do in a text. Each is a self standing symbol, but the linguistic articulation between them and their negative spaces creates the text or the whole story. So we don’t only see a building alone but also how it is in harmony or clash with its surrounding.

Their street façade has always been more of the window through which you could read the identity of the building or the space, the canvas upon which the brand gets painted.

Theoretically it still works that way. This is why we still rely on that street level to be the space where the brand mainly unfolds and plays itself urbanely. We still work on branding those environments through architecture, interiors, communicative graphics, etc.

Yet we are becoming less effective that we used to be. As communicators we are having more trouble reaching into that self imposed isolation within the urban landscape. The disjunction between voyeur and the object of voyeurism has become so that we are not catching his attention long enough to want to make him come out of the cocoon. We walk the streets without even noticing the differences and the discrepancies of the places and spaces around us. It takes something that screams at us, like a glass box of the Apple store for us to take notice.

The plane where that urbanite breaks his isolation has become the screen, whether it is the television, the computer screen, the movie theater, the pad or especially the smart phone. In the case of the television, we go home and immerse ourselves in the reality of the shows where the brands and then their environments suddenly become our own, and we identify with them as if we belonged to or they were part of our daily lives. For example, the Idol series. It had started as a televised talent show in the UK. Now it has become such a strong phenomenon that it has now gone global, with shows in being made all over the world. When we choose to watch the show we know that we are joined by a million other viewers. Thus the characteristics of community, space and environment get redefined. The community is now dispersed and unconfined by a location, even though it is still somehow defined by time and idea. But we also know that we can safely assume that when we get to the office the next morning will be able to strike a conversation with one or several colleagues about the happenings of yesterday’s show. Thus the community gets extended to beyond the time of the show’s showing, joining like minded individuals in a new manner that has transcended the traditional sense of the meeting, and allows us to get out of isolation every once in a while. What also happens is that people get together, gathered by a community created around someone else’s life, whether fictional or real. I personally have been marginal to those shows. But every morning after the air of Idol, or Project Runway or any of these reality/ competition shows people around me would be talking about it, about what this competitor… Oh My Goodness what were they thinking, singing country on American Idol… that is soooo daring and did you see what she was wearing? And of course that poor thing falling flat on his face as he was dancing… now THAT was what cost him the competition. But i would vote for him. The culmination of all that was the Susanne Boyle phenomenon. An obscure talent who did not have the looks or the presence to be a performer came an wowed the world through one song. All of a sudden everyone identified with Susanne, everyone routed for her, everyone cried tears of joy for her. Everyone, everywhere, around the world. Even those who did not watch the show their space was invaded by it, at least for a few days.

The space where we truly allow ourselves to come out is the virtual communities on the computer screen. Where we go to a virtual community, for example Facebook, we are there intentionally to communicate. We choose to whom we want to talk to, even if they are strangers, by virtue of a selection process that allows us to narrow from a few million to a few hundred… We can browse, chat and create virtual communities that create a network with time being the common bond.

On some websites we can create our own avatars and live alternate lives.

In our real physical world it is not that different, we continuously make choices, even though we do not have an elimination listing system, we do go through the same process but in a different manner. So the interaction between us and the people around us are more defined by the space and time continuum.

That confinement has gone a step further with the smartphones and pad where you can have apps allowing you to ‘check-in’ and where others within your network would be able to know your location and either meet up with you or give you recommendations. Or the apps that allow you to know who in your vicinity would be a potential good suit, or a potential adventure and allows you to connect with them virtually and then physically. Those apps confine us to a pre-set number or characteristics that bind our experience to what the app defines as ‘ours’. Our role of reading the space and scanning through faces and places become minimized to the app we hold in our hands and our ability to read it and use it. It removes the element of play and the unknown, restricting our experiences and our potential experiences while enhancing and reinforcing the ones we know and have experienced before.

Thus the city and the urban landscape have to contend with a very tough competition. The old dilemma raise by Victor Hugo in ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ about the advent of the Guttenberg press is back. ‘Ceci tuera cela, le livre tuera l’edifice’ (this will kill that, the book will kill the edifice).

‘Ceci tuera cela’ was a declaration of the loss of legibility of the architecture due to the spread of the books, thanks to the modern printing press. It was also about the fear of the clergy of loosing power over the masses, since up till then they alone had the power of knowledge and choice given by the book, and the architectural edifice was a manifestation of that power over the population. It was majestic, it towered over the population showing then that through religion they could gain the vertical connection to God and to the heavens. The edifice also offered the gathering space for the community, where they get united to be guided by the choice. The fear of the clergy was that knowledge through the book would offer the population choices, thus diminishing their power, and that the book would create isolation dispersing the masses and again diminishing their power.

Yet architecture never really lost its legibility. It simply acquired a new set of linguistic symbols through which it communicated. It was a language that was alive, changing and timeless at the same time. It reflected the zeitgeist (the spirit of the age). So when we see a certain type of architecture, we can tell what period it was built in as well as what is the message it is trying to convey to us.

The architecture has always been part of a branded expression, that speaks about identity. From the pharaonic pyramids, the temple, the church, the mosque, to the corporate edifice, even passing through residential and vernacular architecture. It is the stamp of identity of a certain group. It helped foster a sense of identity, of belonging, of attachment, a belief, and even sometimes a sense of structure and hierarchy through which norms were set and accountability was determined.

The brand expression was not only in the exteriors but it included the interior and the environment with every piece of it communicating whether iconoclastically or architectonically. In our modern architecture we have not shifted away from that paradigm.

The architecture was never killed by the book, its methods have shifted and altered, but it always finds a way to reinvent itself as communication tool. The book was nothing but an extension of the space to when you are not present in it, especially when it came to religion where the argument originated from. It created a virtual world build through imagination. But it did not have the same power the screen has these days since reading the book was still an individual endeavor.

Architecture is about the community and the connection with the other, while the books are about isolation and refuge.

Will our modern day isolation methods’ impact prove to be similar to those that have been felt by the book, an extension of the physical world, or will it prove to create something completely different where it becomes a alternate world? Will the physical world need redefinition in terms of its paradigm and its messaging in order to keep its stature as a major message giver? It should be able to compete with the Sim-Cities and the Second-Lives out there where people can go live their alternative lives and have more choices. Will this duality and dichotomy redefine our architectural and urban expression? Will it create a new architectonic language that has a different way of expressing, spaces, function, loyalty, power or any of the other expressions architecture and space are so adept at making? In some cases like in China it has. A lot of people there live dual lives, the shown and the hidden. They splurge on what others can see to give the impression of wealth, as well as conformity. Yet in the confines of their homes it is a different story, and on the ‘chinese Facebook’ and qq it is an even more different landscape. They lives lives that are non conforming the requirements of tradition and culture. When trying to communicate to the chinese consumer one has to know on which plane they need to be and how to communicate through it which has been a struggle western, designers, architects and communicators have been facing.

Choice is the key word here. For the corporate world, which in a way equates the clergy at the time of Hugo, there will be a necessity to overcome the stance it has long taken an imposing its values upon its consumer and shift to making the consumer part of the process by giving them more choices. Maybe if the physical environment offered choices that were parallel to the avatars, and the control-alt-delete, the disconnect between the screen and the 3D world would be bridged. Choice that might actually lead us to a more flat and democratic architectural expression. A different type of space that has a capacity to transcend its own physicality and break the traditional social norms.