Re*Move

The debacle of Denmark Hill station

A few years ago I met the legendary designer John Maeda. "As social media links people and ideas together in unprecedented new ways, and as design tools become accessible to many", I asked him, "are we about to benefit from a world with a thousand times as many active designers?" "Great question!" he replied.

It's fair to say that very little design or engineering talent has been applied to my local station Denmark Hill since Queen Victoria was alive. I use this place a lot. It's the primary mass-transit feed to Kings College Hospital, one of London's most important hospitals, which is five minutes walk away. It's used for 3.1 million passenger journeys each year. So the equivalent of about a twentieth of the entire British population stumble through this little inner London railway station each year.

And stumble they must. Despite a refurbishment in the 1980s, it's been woefully inadequate for as long as most people can remember. All four rail platforms must be reached by steep wooden steps, all of which are in poor condition. Water pours through the roof during rain, directly onto these steps and all passengers are filtered through a narrow inner and outer doorway, via a 19th century booking hall. At peak times during the morning and evening, exacerbated by timetabling that means many of the half hourly train services arrive within minutes of each other, this Victorian grouping of steps gets badly overcrowded. Many of the users of the station are visiting hospital, so the demographic skew of passengers is towards the elderly or the physically impaired.

I wonder what the Victorian engineers who built the place would think about the reconstruction project that started to affect public access to the station this week.

Work is underway to provide much better access to the station - on paper the plans look great, or at least the reporting of them (plans are not easy to find online, nor made available at the station - if you find them let me know).

A lesson in poor design

Work has begun but the implementation hasn't been thought through. I'm particularly surprised by the lack of attention paid to access - the service experience for users - during the transition phase. It can only confuse passengers who use the station (many are occasional visitors, exacerbating this) and it provides even worse accessibility during the construction work, which seems expected to last about a year.

- On Wednesday the existing station access bridges and staircases, which have always channeled passengers through the booking hall, were closed. Now passengers use a temporary scaffolding-based bridge and network of staircases that is if anything more overcrowded than the old (deeply inadequate) arrangement.

- Passengers exit onto a side access road, Windsor Walk. However, this new entrance is very poorly signposted.

- Inexcusably, no Oyster card readers are installed at the new entrance, or on the platforms. London's Oyster card system requires all rail users to "touch in" and "touch out" on arrival and departure, and not doing so will lead to a daily cap fine being imposed of about £5 extra. Last night, in the warren-like confusion of the new exits, I completely forgot to touch out and had to call Oyster today to get my fine reversed. I am absolutely sure I'm not alone here.

- Now users are expected to walk right around the station into the old booking hall, to touch in or out after each journey, far from the new temporary entrance and exit. This imposition seems absolutely at odds with the project's goal, which is, a year from now, to provide dramatically improved accessibility.

- Communication about the changes is poor or non-existent. There are some basic posters but no detailed project plan is available online. Nor are progress updates being posted. I'm working with organisations who do far better updates building toilet blocks in Africa. There's a Wikipedia entry about the station and that would be a great place to link to formal plans and timelines. The lack of status updates reduces my confidence that the project is well-led. Or even led at all. I think the original Victorian designers would be amazed that with the advances in technology, we can't do better.

Some years ago I dipped once before into the planning of Camberwell's local infrastructure. A grim, vicious public meeting about the Camberwell Grove railway bridge (beautifully captured in all its misery by the Guardian's Peter Preston) left me disillusioned by the limited ambitions of those who are employed to improve London's public infrastructure.

As 21st century designers, we can do much better. Designing and redesigning stations is about more than just engineering work. Clearly, little thought has been applied to the interim needs and experience of the unique demographic that uses this station. There's an army of kids out there without jobs, and many have been trained in media, design and communication. With the right support, they could run rings around these efforts. Maybe, it's time we got them involved.

More about Mark Charmer here.

The trouble with eight-point plans

As a fair-weather cyclist - the kind that wonders why everyone else is in such a rush - I'm really at a loss with London's "coordinated" attempts to sort itself out as a great cycling city. Here's the latest campaign, to tackle theft:

LCC's eight-point campaign plan:

1. Creation of a police anti-theft squad A dedicated police team must tackle cycle theft, engaging in pro-active ‘stings’ to find persistent offenders and gangs.

2. Tougher action against selling stolen on websites Websites need tough rules on ID, and sellers must be made to provide real photos and frame numbers.

3. Code of practice for bike shops Bike shops must make proper checks on seller ID and bike provenance. A new code of practice will enable those that sign up to it to demonstrate their good standards.

4. Tougher action against street markets Well-known locations for selling stolen bikes such as Brick Lane market must be policed much more aggressively.

5. A central repository for recovered bikes A central location where people could recover stolen bikes would make it easier to unite owners with the large number of bikes that are recovered.

6. Regular stakeholder meetings Cyclists, police and politicians must meet regularly to ensure that cycle theft is given sufficiently high priority.

7. Increasing secure parking provision Thousands more secure cycle parking spaces need to be built for homes, estates, shops, educational institutions, workplaces and transport hubs.

8. Better education for cyclists Cyclists must be given sensible information to help them protect their bikes, such as registering the frame number online, buying insurance, and using strong locks. They also need tips on avoiding buying stolen bikes.

Why is secure parking for bikes item number 7? An eight-point plan is useless, unless it's set in order of priority. And right now secure infrastructure is item 7. First will come police squads, dealing with cyber crime, canvassing shops with codes of conduct, chasing market holders, building a database, meetings. Unless of course, this list isn't prioritised.

In the Netherlands the reality is that cycle theft is rampant, but most people ride cheap bikes and are used to it, albeit irritated. London's bike boom is a consumer boom as much as it's about getting around - people buying smart bikes and worrying about where to put them. There isn't really any good storage - in Dutch cities there are manned parking stations, there are safe places to park at work and there's plenty of places to hook your bike outside where you need to be. It's not perfect, but it's probably (quite seriously) a five million times better situation than we have in London.

The list, indeed the London Cycling Campaign site, smacks of lots of time spent in brainstorms, or on "advocacy", and no role to play in building infrastructure. The absolutely most important thing that matters if London is to be a great city to cycle in is that infrastructure is reprioritised towards bikes. Most crucially bikes must take priority over pedestrians and cars (which is basically the way it works in Holland - get out of my way, I'm on a bike).

Almost all the lessons we need are close by, in countries like Holland and Denmark. Indeed a study two weeks ago argued that Dutch children were the happiest in Europe - it's not measured, but I have no doubt that a contributing factor is that most cycle to school. Or ride to school with their parents.

Trying to define this stuff ourselves, how London should work as a cycling city, as some kind of exercise in original thought, is a bit like making your own nails to build a fence. Or building your own web browser to display web pages.

We need to gather the best practice lessons fast but step forward, onwards. We don't have the right infrastructure - pathways and storage - and if we're going to build it quickly, when there's no money around, we need to be smart. The London Cycling Campaign website could be about infrastructure and every decision should be visible. Every junction, pavement, post, ramp. Where are improvements planned? What do people want? Which companies are helping co-fund secure storage (in, for example, each office lobby)? Which council budgets, and which taxpayers, are paying for what? Instead we have people trying to change behaviour. In what sounds to me like meetings that will have intangible outcomes. Seven, in fact.

Related reading: If Lincoln Cathedral is architecture, what is a bicycle shed (by Joe Simpson) A lesson in business from the French (by Mark Charmer)

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

The journey to Veloces of Barnet

As I travelled this lunchtime from Bermondsey to New Barnet, to collect my car from the garage, I fancied snapping photos of the various places I changed transport. So here we go. Click 'continue reading' below to see the full set.

Tottenham Court Road

Tottenham Court Road tube station has a really interesting atmosphere right now. This granddaddy of tube stations is about to be engulfed in a huge redevelopment project in preparation for London's Crossrail. It's pretty dilapidated and today there were some amazing distressed billboards, in no-man's land between ads.

Soho, London, 6 August 2009.

There's a New Daddy in the Luxury Motor Market

The new Jaguar XJ, Saatchi gallery, Chelsea, London - July 10th 2009

Sticking with our Callum brothers theme today, Jaguar chose Chelsea in central London as the place to launch its new XJ last week. This big cat is what Jaguar's design boss Ian Callum calls a return to the values of Jaguar during the William Lyons era - to "produce the most exciting cars in the world". Callum, impressive and passionate, described the launch of this new car as a "tipping point for the Jaguar brand - one Britain should be proud of".

Tipping points are tricky to pinpoint and if I was asked what was tipping right now, I'd say it was luxury car sales - off a cliff. But Jaguar is buoyant and claims modest recent sales growth, while other makers universally tanked. 

But while the wealthy car buyer is feeling rather less flush, he or she now has something entirely new to angst about. Despite looking from assorted angles like a Maserati Quattroporte, an XF, a Lexus SC (ouch), a Citroen C6, Granada Scorpio, Hillman Avenger and a Morris Marina Coupe, the Jaguar XJ is a quite lovely thing. In a great BBC TV moment this April, writer Michael Smith's documentary "Me and My Car"  featured a scene where Smith sank into the passenger seat of a vintage Jag saloon and said "I'd like to get pissed in this car". Clearly Callum was listening. "People are gonna have a good time in a Jaguar" is his boast. I'd get pissed in the back of this car any day of the week.

The car's got some neat, really focused technology, too - without getting silly. As the great Jean Jennings said to us recently, "If it doesn't make me drive better, make it go away." All of the dash instruments on the XJ (the bit in front of the driver with the speedo, etc) are a screen, with the dials all digitally rendered. In demos it looked fantastic and it's a flexible place where info like where to turn left and what music is playing appears. It's also the place where prompts appear for the voice command features. This is infinitely preferable to putting that stuff in the centre console, as Joe and I had to endure recently in the nervous-breakdown-inducing Ford Sync system.

There's other cool stuff, too. A huge 'dual angle' video screen in the centre dash which can display two different images at the same time, with each appearing clearly to driver and passenger. Which is, well, just so much fun.

The body is aluminium, so is as light as its smaller, steel sister, the XF. The 3.0 V6 diesel is claimed to do more than 40 miles per gallon, gets to 60 mph in 6 seconds and emits 184 grams of CO2. Which is pretty impressive.

Jag has also focused on making the hi-fi sound really good. While recognising you will probably bring your iPod along. But it has a hard disc that rips CDs uncompressed and has a Gracenote database.

But back to those looks, which have thrown the cat amongst the pigeons. Although Jaguar has been saying for months that the new XJ was radical, no one was totally prepared for this long, fast-back look, complete with blacked-out D pillar and a rear end that marks a complete departure for Jaguar design.

Never before has an aspect of a Jaguar's design caused so much kerfuffle...

There's an old adage which says never judge a car's design purely from photos; wait until you've seen it in the flesh, and even then - make sure you see it moving, on the road, and in traffic before you make a true call on the design. This is truly a design to which this applies. I sat at the launch breakfast on Friday morning riveted to the thing rotating in front of me, trying to decide whether it was beautiful. I've concluded that the XJ is quite a looker - with much less of the heavy, lumpiness around the rear three quarters than seems in the photos and with a rear haunch that does, as Callum claims, make it very coupe-like. 

If you, too, fancy staring open mouthed at the thing revolving, you can watch this video I took. And below is a (car-nerd-level) outline by design director Ian Callum talking us through the design.

And if you still haven't made your mind up about whether that rump works or not, check out some of our detailed shots in this photoset (click anywhere on the photos to link through to the original flickr set):

Mark Charmer is a founder of The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

Vehicle Designers of the future at the RCA

CCS, Art Center, Coventry, Pforzheim. To those in the car industry, and specifically the design part of it, these names will be well known. They represent the handful of educational establishments with dedicated automotive, or transportation design courses that exist around the world. It's likely that the person heading the team of designers who designed the car you're currently driving, attended one of these schools.

Perhaps most renowned of all the educational establishments teaching vehicle design though, is the Royal College of Art in London - whose graduates include Peter Stevens (McLaren F1), Peter Horbury (a multitude of Volvos), Peter Schreyer (TT), Marek Reichman (Aston Martin) and Martin Smith (recent European Fords). Which is why half of the auto design industry appears at Kensington Gore, every year, on one (typically hot and sweaty) night in late June, as the current year's crop of MA students graduate, showing off their final projects.

This year, their challenge of securing a job in one of the world's handful of automotive design studios is made all the more challenging by the economic meltdown - which has seen car makers go bankrupt, selling 30% fewer cars than a year ago, and shutting down design outposts. This year, two of the most interesting projects on show come from Magdalena Schmid and Hong Yeo - and we captured their projects, and the conceptual thinking behind them on video. They're well worth checking out... (yes I know we would say that) but these models are the result of many months of hard labour, and are quite beautiful objects in their own right. More than that though, what these designers have to say, and their respective attitudes towards the industry, gives hope that the flagging auto industry could still have a bright future. Oh, and if you know of a job going in a design studio near you, then they'd love to hear from you! (their email addresses are at the end of their respective videos).

Magdalena Schmid's BMW "Pixie" concept:

Hong Yeo's VW "Build your own car" concept:

Hopefully, we'll have some more coverage of other projects at the show before too long, so watch this space...

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 30th June 2009

Disclosure: Joseph Simpson is a visiting lecturer on the Vehicle Design course at the RCA, and graduated from the college with an MPhil in Vehicle Design in 2009.

Riversimple: launching a new kind of car (part I - overview)

Today, on the terrace behind London's Somerset House, Riversimple launched the culmination of nine years research and development - their new open source, hydrogen powered city car. Like Local-Motors in the US (more on whom soon), Riversimple are utilising open source principals to design and develop a new car. But that's only half the story. Riversimple have, in effect, today launched a blueprint for how the car industry could reinvent itself - with wholesale changes to the way vehicles are designed, how they're fueled, where and how they're built, and how they're sold.

We captured a heap of footage at this morning's launch event and we'll get much of it online over the next day or so. Like us, you might be sceptical about the potential of hydrogen fuel cells, or the application of open-source principals in a hardware, rather than software setting. In this first video, Hugo Spowers - CEO of Riversimple, explain some of the principals behind, and answer some of the pressing questions about the car and the company behind it. It makes for interesting watching...

Full photoset by Mark, from today's event (click on photos to go to the flickr page):

Note: All of The Movement Design Bureau's published content - including our videos and photos you see, is creative commons 3.0 licensed. That means you can use it, republish it or mash it up on your own site - just include a link back to this page.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 16th June 2009

Getting to work during a tube strike

London was due to grind to a halt today. Seems like I got lucky...

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 10th June 2009

London Mayor Boris Johnson nearly killed in cycling 'incident'

News broke over the weekend that London Mayor (and big cycling advocate) Boris Johnson, was almost killed in a bizarre cycling incident while out 'recceing' cycle routes. Watch the video for what is quite simply a freakish chain of events. While what Boris endured could hardly be described as an every day occurrence, London cyclists will be familiar with the dangers the Mayor was in. 

The video is proof, it it was needed, that London still has some way to go before it meets his desire to be a truly great 'cycling city'. You'll notice that, along with the parked cars narrowing the flow, the truck itself hits a speed cushion, which actually triggers its rear door to swing open. London has for some years been taking the obstacle-course approach to pathway design - speed cushions, width restrictors, bollards and more. It's debatable whether these make things safer for cyclists, when really the issue is combining bikes with much larger vehicles.

Perhaps the silver lining is that this incident will be permanently imprinted in Boris's head now. Despite his claims that "London's a great cycling city" it's not. Spend ten minutes in a Dutch city and the reality dawns. Cyclists here must share lanes with London's huge buses and the cycle route network is largely an apologetic, indirect, network of side roads and badly laid out pavement alterations. In the Netherlands, the cyclist rules above all others - pedestrians, cars and trucks all cede to the bicycle. In the UK we pretend that the pedestrian has priority, but the reality is, it's always the car - or truck. If there's a spark that will mean London gets real green pathways - clear streets that are only for use by bikes and perhaps the odd other vehicle, this might be the moment that triggered it...

(video initially circulated via The Guardian and then Autoblog)

This article first appeared on Brits on Green - the new green website from The Movement Design Bureau

J Mays: Ford's Global Design Chief on why 'the computer is today's hotrod'

Roland Barthes suggested that cars were the modern day equivalent of Gothic Cathedrals, “the Supreme creation of an era. Conceived with passion by unknown artists”. That's still true to this day. While fashion designers and architects have become household names and outright superstars, car designers are little known, often lost in the cloak of their brand’s identity. Of all the names that the average non-car nerd may have heard of, three are most likely to stand out: Patrick le Quement, Chris Bangle, and J Mays. So with le Quement retiring after 22 years as head of Renault design, and Bangle recently leaving BMW under unclear circumstances, this leaves Mays as arguably the most publicly recognisable car designer in the world right now.

Calm and unassuming in person, you’d never know that Mays was responsible for the design direction of (and for the hundreds of designers behind) Ford’s various brands and nameplates. Up until recently of course, this not only included Ford, Lincoln and Mercury - but Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin too. This led Mays to describe his job as being “about a mile wide and an inch deep.” But with PAG disbanded, and Volvo about to follow Jag, LR and Aston out of the Ford stable door, Mays seems pleased that his job is becoming “an inch wide and a mile deep.”

Clearly, he’s got more time to focus on making Ford’s core products stellar once again (recent cars such as the Flex and Taurus suggest this is already happening), along with giving under-nourished Lincoln and Mercury some love too. It’s the Lincoln C concept – unveiled at Detroit’s NAIAS in January 2009 - that we were primarily in town to talk to him about. Yet while that car is well worth a closer look, it’s the bigger issues facing the car industry and the world of car design that we really wanted his views on.

The Lincoln C Concept in Ford's product development studio

So here, Mays - the man behind VW's famous Concept One and Audi's influential Avus – who now also acts as Ford’s Chief Creative Officer, gives his views on a whole host of design subjects. From why the computer is today’s hotrod, to how he believes Ford is leading the way in user research, and why the skill-set of tomorrow’s car designer might need to be quite different to that of today’s.

As Ford moves forwards with its ‘One Ford’ strategy, it’s likely that many of the things you see from the brand will have been touched by the hand of Mays. So watch the video at the top of the article, to get an insight into how the future of the blue oval might look…

Full transcript follows, link to full unedited interview at bottom of the transcript>>