News

What does ‘design’ mean anymore? Alan Davies. May 4, 2012

Once upon a time buildings, clothes, kettles and the layout of newspapers were things that were ‘designed’. We could even refer to ‘the design professions’ and be very confident everybody understood we were talking about visual disciplines.

Designers used to be people who worked out optimal ways things could be configured – things like buildings, clothes, graphics, and functional objects. They were the professionals who figured out ahead of time the most efficient trade-offs between useability, manufacturing cost, safety, recyclability, cost of materials, marketability, aesthetics, and more.Continue reading

Too much faith in developers, Sydney Morning Herald, January 31, 2012

IN THE maze that is Sydney property planning, let’s start with the incontrovertible. There is not enough housing. Demand grows by 25,000 homes a year but only about 18,000 are built. That helps keep housing prices out of the reach of many, particularly the young.

Next, whatever the strengths and flaws of past policies intended to free up housing supply, they did not work, or did not work enough. There is little sense in persisting exclusively with a policy or suite of policies that do not do the job.

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Planning chiefs hail smarter, simpler scheme, Kelsey Munro Urban Affairs, December 7, 2011

Rowan Moore, Kevin McCloud’s grand design for British Housing, Guardian 19 Nov 2011

‘The Triangle is in a tradition of model villages beloved of aristocrats, princes, of Brad Pitt in New Orleans and the Bordeaux sugar-cube manufacturer who commissioned workers’ housing from Le Corbusier. Such places can be over-scripted, too much about fulfilling their makers’ picture-book fantasies about contented communities. There is a whiff of this with Hab’s gooey talk about “making people happy”, although they are conscious of the need not to over-control. “If they decide they don’t want to grow food and just want to park cars, we’d be a bit upset,” says Isabel Allen, but in the end it will be up to the residents. Maggie Lowton sounds a note of caution by citing other communities in Swindon that started well but went downhill. No amount of forethought and attention to detail can guarantee the success of the Triangle. But at the very least it is an imaginative and well-designed project, which achieves about as much as can be done with its budget. It focuses on what matters most and gives itself the best chance of success. Which is far more rare than it should be in British house building and a much better application of celebrity philanthropy than most.’

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