Tag / development
Brutalist Boston Map unfolds the story of the city’s most controversial buildings
Brutalist buildings often represent a distinct time period in the span of a city’s life – they are icons of change, modernity and idealism. For Boston, brutalism represents the period of transformation in the 1960s and 70s that was known as New Boston. The latest in Blue Crow Media’s brutalist maps series traces this period with over 40 concrete buildings, unfolding the story of Boston’s most controversial phase of building.
Telling the story are editors Chris Grimley, Michael Kubo, and Mark Pasnik, authors of Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston 1960-1976, who chart the revival and rise of Boston after a mass exodus of factory work to the countryside, which allowed architects to plan infrastructure and design the buildings that still shape public life in Boston today.
The trio bookend the occurrence of New Boston between the arrival of Edward J Logue as a ‘powerful and visionary leader of the Boston redevelopment Authority in 1960’ and ‘the reopening of Quincy Market and..
Groom mates: Benjamin Hubert on his ‘post-Apple generation’ shaving range
London-based industrial designer Benjamin Hubert isn’t interested in becoming ‘a design poster boy’. In 2015, his eponymous studio – once furniture-led and now rebranded as Layer – turned its attention to experience-driven, innovative design for the physical and digital worlds. Instead of creating the ‘next best chair’, its sights are trained on disrupting markets and affecting design change.
We sat down with the firebrand designer, to discuss his foray into men’s grooming...
W*: The prototypes for Offset, your contemporary shaving accessories collection, were unveiled last month. How have they been received?
Benjamin Hubert: Really well. It’s a smaller project than we normally take on, but it felt like the right time to do it. There has been a return to a kind of ritualistic tradition around beauty and facial care, and there has been a huge boom in traditional shaving.
Tell us about Follicle & Limb, your hair-care collaborators.
They’re a little bit underground at the moment – they..
How the Insurance Industry Can Push Us to Prepare for Climate Change
Climate change risk is rising, and yet behavioral economics research argues that we are collectively underinvesting in protecting ourselves. In The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters, Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther point to several personal traits that expose us to greater risk from natural disasters. First, individuals focus on short time horizons and thus underprepare for future threats. Second, when major disasters do occur, individuals are shocked but quickly begin to let their guard down again. Third, people are over-optimistic and thus underestimate their own risk exposure.
And the risks are real: Zillow’s research predicts that $400 billion dollars of real estate value in Florida could be at risk from climate change by the year 2100.
It might seem, then, that private insurance can be of little help in addressing climate change. There’s concern that for-profit insurers won’t want to insure risky properties, and that individuals won’t have the wherewithal to ..
Email and Calendar Data Are Helping Firms Understand How Employees Work
Using data science to predict how people in companies are changing may sound futuristic. As we wrote recently, change management remains one of the few areas largely untouched by the data-driven revolution. But while we may never convert change management into a “hard science,” some firms are already benefiting from the potential that these data-driven techniques offer.
One of the key enablers is the analysis of email traffic and calendar metadata. This tells us a lot about who is talking to whom, in what departments, what meetings are happening, about what, and for how long. These sorts of analyses are helping EY, where some of us work, by working with Microsoft Workplace Analytics to help clients to predict the likelihood of retaining key talent following an acquisition and to develop strategies to maximize retention. Using email and calendar data, we can identify patterns around who is engaging with whom, which parts of the organization are under stress, and which individuals are m..
A Survey of 19 Countries Shows How Generations X, Y, and Z Are — and Aren’t — Different
In the near future, three of the most studied generations will converge on the workplace at the same time: Generation X, the age cohort born before the 1980s but after the Baby Boomers; Generation Y, or Millennials, typically thought of as those born between 1984 and 1996; and Generation Z, those born after 1997, who are next to enter the workforce.
In a survey of 18,000 professionals and students across these three generations from 19 countries, we found some important differences in their aspirations and values. We hope that results from this survey, conducted by the INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute, Universum, and the HEAD Foundation, will be useful to companies seeking to retain, develop, and attract employees from these talent pools. However, it’s important to note that our findings are a snapshot of where these employees are at this moment in time; employees’ needs and expectations often evolve over the course of their careers, and we hope future surveys will update these findi..
How to Forget About Work When You’re Not Working
When was the last time you got away from work?
I mean truly got away from it: didn’t think about it, didn’t worry about it, didn’t have a to-do list rattling around in your brain.
Most of us know there are benefits to getting away from work. We know we need time to recharge each day in order to be able to sustain our attention in the office. We know time away from complex problems allows us to find a fresh perspective. We know if we work too many long days in a row we’ll find ourselves doing what I affectionately call “fake work” — sitting at our desks without actually accomplishing anything.
The hard part is that while you may agree with all of these benefits of getting away from your work, you may still have trouble doing it. Even if you do go home at a decent hour in the evening, you may find yourself reading one last report. When you travel for a few days, you may still be attached to your email. When you wake up early in the morning, or lie awake at night, you might find your b..
Swede dreams: max out on minimalism at Arket’s debut store
Occupying a sought-after two-storey corner spot on London’s Regent Street, Arket is the new hotly anticipated lifestyle brand born of Scandinavian behemoth H&M. Positioning itself as the utilitarian sibling of Cos, & Other Stories and H&M, the brand describes itself as ‘a modern-day market place’ with a product offering that encompasses menswear, womenswear, childrenswear and homeware.
The doors to the first London outpost open today, to be swiftly followed by the launch of a flagship in Copenhagen next week, while a Covent Garden location is slated for September.
Two years in the making, Arket eschews trends, and instead aims to offer its customers well-made reliable staples for their homes and wardrobes. The more unusual items that pepper the shelves – such as the traditional Portuguese ceramics or ecological trainers – are supplied by an expertly edited selection of over 40 external brands.
Arket created its own scent concepts for its candles
‘We have less expertise within some..
High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It
“There’s no team without trust,” says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. He knows the results of the tech giant’s massive two-year study on team performance, which revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.
Ancient evolutionary adaptations explain why psychological safety is both fragile and vital to success in uncertain, interdependent environments. The brain processes a provocation by a boss, competitive coworker, or dismissive subordinate as a life-or-death threat. The amygdala, the alarm bell in the brain, ignites the fight-or-flight response, hijacking higher brain centers. This “act first, think later” brain structure shuts down perspec..
How to Work with a Bad Listener
It’s a challenge to work with people — peers, junior colleagues, or even bosses — who just don’t listen. Whether your colleagues interrupt you, ramble on, seem distracted, or are always waiting for their turn to talk, the impact is the same: You don’t feel heard, and the chances for misunderstandings — and mistakes — rise. Are there tactics you can use to encourage your colleagues to listen better? Should you talk to them about their poor listening skills? What’s the best way to deliver the message?
What the Experts Say
“Dealing with colleagues who don’t listen is both hard and frustrating,” says Sabina Nawaz, a global CEO and executive coach. “When someone is not fully present, it erodes the quality of what you say.” The experience might, for instance, “cause you to lose your train of thought” or “suppress what you originally planned to communicate.” It’s also possible that “you could get derailed into the drama of why it’s happening,” she adds. “You might take it personally and thin..
The Creative Founder
Class Write Up: Three Years of Learning Creative Founder is in many way the anti-foundations of interaction design.It has no interest in designing interfaces, or usability (except as a means to an end.) Yet it is the ultimate design class, using design methodologies to understand customers and buyers, and to speak value in their language, and to provide change in their lives.
Creative Founder was the first class I taught at CCA, when it was called Designer as Founder. I suggested teaching a startup class to the chair of the department because I believe designers should understand business. I suspected designers would resist taking a class that admitted it was teaching them business, but would flock to sexy start-up land. It’s been waitlisted every year, though no longer for the original reasons. It has developed the reputation of being ridiculously hard, and the class that gets you ready for thesis, and then for life.
Zhiyou and Jaime working the BMC. The first one was spring of 2014..