Category: design

Move in, people, help is on the way

This just in from Gothamist: reconfiguring the layout of subway car seats might give the cars greater effective capacity with the same number of seats. The thinking is that there are certain behaviors that lead to inefficient packing of subway cars, mainly people’s desire for personal space and preference for holding on at hand level rather than holding on above head level. And I thought all those people standing in front of the door and not moving in to the car were just selfish asshats.

I’m not sure about the idea that riders who know they aren’t getting off soon are any more likely to pack in to the ends of the cars – I often see people standing right in front of the door for many stops even on half-empty trains. But I do like the designs where (at least some of) the doors are staggered rather than opposite. On lines where the doors open on each side of the train at about the same number of stops, this should help move people in and away from the doors at least a little more often.

Until the science is complete and new cars are in place, just remember that blocking the door slows down the train at every stop and that’s a lousy tradeoff for getting out a tiny bit faster when it’s finally yours. Similar logic applies to those waiting behind the yellow line to board the train.

Glitch will be the next Instagram

I’m calling the peak of the Instagram reto “film” filters thing.  Soon enough that visual language will be dead as cupcakes. Recently I poked fun at Apartment Therapy for calling bathroom home offices a trend, and they had three data points to support that claim. I’ve got exactly none, but I’m going for it anyway.

What’s going to replace Instagram as the way to make a boring photo cool? I say what’s next is glitching. Glitch is a movement – or at least an aesthetic:

Glitch art [via Wikipedia] is the aestheticization of digital or analog errors, such as artifacts and other “bugs”, by either corrupting digital code/data or by physically manipulating electronic devices.

Ordinary digital photos, like the ones we take of our lunches every day, are pretty boring, and generally – at least technically – pretty good. Instagram and its ilk put some noise and quirk into regular shots, adding a tiny bit of what film used to deliver – randomness. Glitch can do that too, and it it’ll do it in a native digital language instead of a folksy but ultimately bogus analog one. It’s the imagery of the DIYer, the Maker and the hardware hacker. Glitch shows you how many things have to work just right to make a digital picture show up, by breaking them just a bit.

I think soon enough there will be glitch camera apps, maybe even glitch filters for Instagram. Somebody will make a digital camera that will be to digital cameras as Holgas and Dianas were to film cameras. As a way of easing the transition, here’s a cat photo that’s been glitched and also instagrammed. You saw it here first, trendspotters.

Lucy controls the horizontal

I swear I am not writing this in the bathroom

The usually estimable folks at Apartment Therapy seem to have published their April Fools day item a couple of weeks late with a piece on home offices inside bathrooms.  While the reporting is a gently mocking, the fact remains they’re covering bathrooms so large that they have desks and workspaces in them. Isn’t humidity kind of a problem for your files?

One of the things I like about Apartment Therapy is the focus on smaller homes and apartments. I know hardly anybody with a bathroom big enough for anything extra, and those that have it tend to go for steam showers or whirlpool tubs, not desks and chairs.

Many people enjoy a good read on the toilet (some even take calls there) or in the bathtub, and we all know that LBJ liked to take meetings on the can, but seriously, isn’t this absurd opulence and bathroom fixation just the sort of thing that caused the decline and fall of the Roman empire?

I wonder if the AT crew saw this on SNL just last week…

Wine unboxing

At one of the frequent tastings a Ball Square Fine Wine, I noticed that they now stock Chat en Ouef and I also tasted a nice Bordeaux for a wooden box. Well, most likely from a plastic bag inside that box. But anyway, at $39 for 3 liters (that’s four regulation 750ml bottles) it seemed like a good buy. Here’s the unboxing – and reboxing as it were.

It’s got a convenient carrying handle and sure looks nice with my Vanshnookenraggen MTA subway map posters. I’m sure you know by now that I think wood is the new white.

Chateau Lhorens 2011 Bordeaux

Unless you’re already drunk you can probably manage these directions.

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I was a bit unnerved by the prolapsed wine sack, but everything got neatly tucked back into place.

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Here’s the spout, ready to serve.

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I think putting box wine in a nicer box – with a nice spout – was a great marketing move by the Lhorens team. I’m not really sure you should age wine in a plastic bag, but if you’re not up to drinking three liters at a sit-down, I bet it’ll keep better in there than in a glass bottle with lots of extra air.