With the recent discovery of the New York City Transit Authority’s “Graphics Standards Manual” for the New York Subway, dating back to 1970, it is clear that impactful graphic design stands the test of time. Bob Noorda and Massimo Vignelli, designers of the manual, had a clear vision for the role of signage, cautioning, “the subway rider should be given only information at the point of decision. Never before. Never after.” Fifty years later, their subway iconography is still a point of civic pride.

As London celebrates the 80th anniversary of its beloved tube map, credit is being given to engineering draftsman Harry Beck. His uncommissioned, spare-time project, was considered “too radical” for not indicating distance between stops, but was quickly embraced by users. Over the decades the tube map has defined people’s sense of the city’s geography.

With the emergence of products like Google Glass, technology is reinventing how we find our way in the world. Google Glass is a wearable technology similar to eye glasses. The glasses project data onto the wearer’s lens, delivering supplemental information, maps, etc. related to the interactions the wearer has with people and environments. Google Glass delivers a revolutionary approach to wayfinding at an intimate, realtime level, tailored for the wearer.

The questions we’ve been asking ourselves is will this next chapter in wayfinding render traditional graphic design approaches obsolete? And will Google Glass capture our hearts and help us navigate our daily lives or lose us along the way?

An online workshop has been set up for you to share your views on topics ranging from housing, transportation, public spaces, built form, and community amenities.

This online tool—available until May 15, 2013—is part of an ongoing campaign of community engagement designed to involve Vancouver in rethinking Oakridge Centre.

Mark Kingwell’s vision of the city is a site of justice where every occupant has an irreducible claim on all the possibilities it has to offer. This “right to the city” concept was originally developed by French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre to describe a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. It holds that a true public good is both non-rivalrous, one person’s use of it will not impede on another’s, and non-excludable, no one can be prevented from using it.

While most public spaces are non-excludable, they are in fact rivalrous due to market dominance and the evisceration of both shared interests and public trust in city building. Kingwell, speaking as part of the Simon Fraser University City Program’s public lecture series, conjectured that public spaces can only become a true public good when the creation of private spaces requires public justification. This shift would require empathy to become the moral value of public life, which would create a shared sense of connection alongside the democratic process. Cities reflect how just societal arrangements are, and Kingwell believes that they would be more just if public space truly become a public good.

Can public space be considered a public good?

Our latest screening, Blue Vinyl, is a documentary on the effects of pollution, bio-accumulation, and plastics on the environment. Billed as “the world’s first toxic comedy”, it follows the story of one family’s search for a more conscious alternative to cladding their house in PVC-based vinyl siding.

My House is Your House, an advocacy campaign tied to the documentary, offers greenbuilding research and options. The Healthy Building Network offers a database of many PVC-free alternatives for multiple applications, including stucco, FSC certified sustainably-harvested wood, and fibre cements for residential siding.

We are continuing our series with Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which examines the complex relationship between art and activism as seen through a Chinese dissident’s life and art. Have suggestions for us? Please post them in the comments.

Watch the trailer for Blue Vinyl.

Henriquez Partners Architects, ISS of BC, and Terra Housing are working together to create a fully integrated regional service hub that brings together a variety of essential organizations, programs, and services that address the needs of immigrants and refugee newcomers to Vancouver.

Resources planned for the new Welcome House Centre include medical services, English language training, trauma care, child care, classroom space, a youth centre, banking facilities and a legal clinic. Also included within the program is the ability to provide short- and longer-term transitional housing through modular bed and unit arrangements, which can be reconfigured to create socially responsive housing.

The facility will be located on Victoria Drive, close to local transit options and is slated to open in the spring of 2015.

Read more about the project.

Crowdfunding, according to the report, can allow architects to work directly with local communities to discuss, develop, and implement design ideas. It can support innovation by making “passion projects,” which are unable to secure funding through conventional ways, a reality. Two recent projects really highlight this potential.

Part of the I Make Rotterdam project, the new Luchtsingel footbridge connects the northern parts of the city, once cut off by traffic-heavy roads, with the city centre. The 350-metre-long bridge was not funded by the City of Rotterdam but rather by citizens who wanted to see it happen. Each of the bridge’s 17,000 wooden planks bears the name of a donor.

The BD Bacatá, soon to be Colombia’s tallest skyscraper at 66 storeys, will be realized with 3,000 people supplying $145 million of the $240 million development cost. These small investors will then own shares of the building, which is being hailed as the “first skyscraper built by common people.”

Is crowdfunding an effective way to realize architectural projects?

The Met posts two new episodes every Wednesday. Click Play Video to see curator Amelia discuss the living room from the Little House in Wayzata, Minnesota by Frank Lloyd Wright in “Modern Living.”

Over the course of a year, students in Studio H are tasked with designing, prototyping, and building a full-scale community development project. The high school design/build program sees integrating design and education as a way to improve the public education system, transform local communities, and arm students with creative, technical, and leadership skills.

Since the program was launched in 2010 by nonprofit design organization Project H, students have realized an award-winning 2,000-square-foot farmers market pavilion in a community that sorely needed better access to fresh food; playgrounds; school gardens; and chicken coops for families in need. They are currently working on building their own learning facilities.

Here in Vancouver, UBC’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA) runs a community outreach studio that focuses on projects in the Downtown Eastside. Students volunteer time and skills to design and build spaces using sustainable and recycled materials. Their projects include a 200-square-foot atelier inside a boutique for local artist Athena Theny and the Women’s Health Centre. Operated by the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective, the centre offers on-site nursing, yoga classes, art therapy, and a number of health workshops and seminars. SALA students recently built two additional treatment rooms at the centre to accommodate its expanding program.

Can design education play a more meaningful role in community transformation?

Architectural essences, meanings, and boundaries are the basis of Encounters 2, a new volume of essays by Finnish architect, educator, and critic Juhani Pallasmaa. These themes are explored from Pallasmaa’s emblematic perspective—an unwavering commitment to an authentic architecture of existential depth and phenomenal appeal.

Pallasmaa’s writings–his other books include The Thinking Hand, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, and Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture—are inspirational for their holistic approach to architecture. He operates from the perspective that architecture should speak to all the senses and frame our experience of the world. For Pallasmaa, architecture is ultimately an existential and philosophical art, and the architect is the supporter of the “mythical dimensions of life.”

There’s been a recent surge in the popularity of open-plan offices designed to promote intensive collaboration among employees. But in her recent bestseller, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain explains how brainstorming can actually reduce creativity because it can make people feel insecure and bend to peer pressure. Intensive solo study, it seems, may actually be the best way to generate ideas. Collaboration, however, has its place in the creative process, too. Group settings are better suited for fostering constructive criticism, problem solving, and the implementation of good ideas.

The implication for office design is that flexibility is key. How can we best design nuanced work spaces that allow for both the solitude necessary for creative ideas to emerge, and the collaboration required to see them through?