Urban Experiences - Soft Maps

Haptic Lab brings us these AMAZING quilted city maps - quite possibly the best way to interact with a map ever!

Haptic Lab was started by Emily Fischer, a Brooklyn-based architect and designer. Soft-Maps started in 2002 as an academic experiment in tactile wayfinding; the quilts were inspired by Emily’s mother Peggy who had begun losing her eyesight.

The website has quilts, baby SoftMaps and even custom maps available. I am dying to own one of these someday!! If you join the mailing list you can be entered to win a free quilt :)

What a great way to reimagine a city.



Related awesomeness -

Map and topography pillows can be found here.
CityFabric where you can get awesome maps on shirts and canvases.

Urban Experiences - Fifty People One Question

"Fifty People One Question" is a series of films created by Benjamin Reece of Deltree and Nathan Heleine of Crush+Lovely. By asking one question, such as "Before the end of today, what would you wish to happend?", fifty people need to think of their own answers to the camera. This experiment exploring the connections through people and places, and discovering dreams, losses, stories and secret from person to person.

This is one of the films that took place in Brooklyn, NY, and the question was:
Where would you wish to wake up tomorrow?


Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

Another interesting question was:
"what's your secret?"
When asked by this question, most people felt shy and might be a little bit embarrassed to answer. Surprisingly there were still lots of people being opened to the question and tell the truth, and it was kind of fun that we can share our little secrets with strangers on the internet.


PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God from Frank Warren on Vimeo.

Urban Experiences - Minature Art Installations

Slinkachu is a UK based artist who does these great installations of miniature model train characters around London.

He says: "My 'Little People Project' started in 2006. It involves the remodelling and painting of miniature model train set characters, which I then place and leave on the street. It is both a street art installation project and a photography project. The street-based side of my work plays with the notion of surprise and I aim to encourage city-dwellers to be more aware of their surroundings. The scenes I set up, more evident through the photography, and the titles I give these scenes aim to reflect the loneliness and melancholy of living in a big city, almost being lost and overwhelmed. But underneath this, there is always some humor. I want people to be able to empathize with the tiny people in my works."

Check out more of his works on his blog or see all of his work/exhibits/books etc on his website.




































































Buy his book Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu here - its great...and another must have for coffee table browsing. Again...I have this book and can definitely recommend it!

All Slinkachu photos are from the website.



Another of my favorite artists working with mini people is Vincent Bousserez. He's an all around amazing photographer but his miniatures are spectacular! He has them all posted to his Flickr account here and here. And here is a great article on his work in My Modern Met. Below are two of my absolute most favorites!!








































Photos from Vincent Bousserez's Flickr stream.

Urban Experiences - I LEGO NY

Brought to you by designer and illustrator Christoph Niemann "I LEGO N.Y." is an endearing little book that shows bits and pieces of New York rendered with legos. Yep, its as good as it sounds. From taxis to wasabi, the Holland Tunnel to a stack of $20 bills, all are made from Legos and completely adorable. This book makes an excellent coffee table book ( I can attest to this because it currently is sitting on my coffee table)

Lego photos from here
Book photo from SwissMiss

This video is pretty ridiculous but shows a lot of the book with a catchy little tune :)

Urban Experiences - Ethnicity & Tourism Mapping

Eric Fischer has beautifully mapped hundreds of cities. He mapped racial and ethnic divisions in over 100 US cities based on the 2010 census results. These maps reveal such an interesting natural of cities. Some are pretty homogeneous while in others, strict divisions are visible. New York City's map to the left is so interesting to me - you can see Chinatown in downtown Manhattan - and its got a great mix of all different ethnicities. The key for the maps is red is white, blue is black, green is asian, orange is hispanic, yellow is other, and each dot is 25 residents. His whole collection of Race and Ethnicity Mappings is available on his Flickr stream. I think one of the most interesting maps is Detroit - the division from one side to the other around 8 Mile Rd (think Eminem) is pretty intense.

Another of his projects is Locals and Tourists where he mapped photo locations based on geotagging from public Flickr and Picasa search APIs. The photos are then colored coded as locals, tourists or unknown. Multiple photos in the same city over a period longer than a month classified the photographer as local. Its interesting to see the series (130 cities sorted by highest number of local photos) because it shows which cities really are mostly just tourism focused, and which cities have photos by locals too. London is at the top of the list for photos by locals, followed by NYC, San Franciso and Paris.

This project is a derivative of his Geotaggers World Atlas project - which is, of course, also awesome :)





See the full Racial and Ethnicity Mapping project here
See the full Locals and Tourists Mapping project here
See the full Geotaggers World Atlas here

Urban Experiences-Project "Play it, I'm yours"

Last summer when I walked through Times Square, I noticed there was a crowd gathering and thus aroused my curiosity. There was a piano placing right on the street and there was a guy playing. After all I realized that was an art project called “play me, I’m yours”, and the project put more than 60 pianos around the city for people to play whenever they want. For people that usually didn’t have a chance to play, or people that had good piano skills and wanted to show off a little bit, or people just got curious, that was definitely fun to give it a try. Let’s take a look of this project from the “Without Border” Film Festival in Rome, 2010.


youtube video uploaded from frisonec

“The piano is like a facebook resource, like a blank canvas, for people to share their creativity with one another.” Luke Jerram, the creator of this project says his inspiration was from waiting for the bus. Luke notice that people got bored and had no conversation while they were waiting, so he thought he could do something to help people to interact with one and another.

Play Me I'm Yours from quentinhasny on Vimeo.

Because of the interaction that brought to the cities was so successful, this project has been keep going on since 2008. The “play me, I’m yours” project will be held at Austin, Texas during April 1–May 1.

Extended reading:

http://www.artallianceaustin.org/play-me-i-am-yours.html

http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/play-me-i-m-yours-piano-project-in-new-york-33284

NYC, 2010

Pecs, Hungary, 2010

London, UK 2009

pictures from www.streetpianos.com/press-area

Urban Experiences - Explorers

Like straight out of a movie, Steven Duncan explores the underside of hidden urban spaces going into sewers, to the tops of bridges and even along subway tracks. He calls it Guerrilla History and Urban Exploration - I call it plain old crazy and brave. Duncan says he's "peeling back the layers of a city to see what's underneath." To see NYC's strangely gorgeous sewer system, the first (closed) subway station and a breathtaking view of the city from the top of the Williamsburg bridge, watch the video below. My fear of heights kicks in on the bridge part and I felt like I was watching an action movie

UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo.

Duncan also sells these INCREDIBLE photos from all of his journeys which include cities all over the US as well as London, Berlin, Paris, Rome and tons of others.

Urban Experiences-Graffiti Art

If we think about the subculture in NYC, graffiti art is the most substantial thing that we we see it everyday in our lives. But when and how did graffiti start spreading over the city? The curiosity project brings you back in the old days to the 1970's–a video from Jon Naar's view about graffiti art in New York.

Stussy - Jon Naar from Stussy on Vimeo.

Jon Narr is a photographer in New York who enthusiast about graffiti photography, and he published "The Birth of Graffiti", which was his photo collection of graffiti.



It is incredible that subway trains was still full of graffiti in the 1980's. The documentary film "Dream City"(1987) depicted the graffiti culture at that time: some graffiti writers were busy creating their new pieces during midnight, and some of the artists tagged their names on every train that they wrote. Until 1989, The Clean Train Movement started and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) begun a program to eradicate graffiti on the subway trains.

Bansky graffiti in Bethlehem

Banksy - Soldiers

Cork Graffiti arist, Cork Corp

graffiti in NYC

graffiti on the street

pictures from:
www.onextrapixel.com/2009/06/17/38-marvellous-graffiti-art-and-street-art-that-will-blow-you-away/

Urban Experiences - Ork Posters

Ork Posters are amazing type based "city neighborhood posters" by designer Jenny Beorkrem. She started with a Chicago poster back in 2007 and they have exploded since then adding an additional 15 cities, as well as two human organs!

I have the Manhattan poster in my living room finally, after pining after it for years. It certainly did not disappoint and I highly recommend these to any urban map/typography lovers.













































All images from the Ork Posters website
Learn more about the company here

Urban Experiences - Manhattanhenge

Manhattanhenge is one of the best little known facts of New York City in my opinion. Twice a year the sun sets in exact alignment with Manhattan's east/west street grid.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (the guy who coined the term) says that "Manhattanhenge may just be a unique urban phenomenon in the world, if not the universe." The alignment of the grid, coupled with the shear verticality of the city create this phenomenon in NYC unlike any other city.

This year Manhattanhenge will take place on Tuesday May 31st at 8:17 pm and Monday July 11th at 8:25 pm. A half sun will also be visible May 30th and July 12th. Mark your calendars!

For your best view, go as far east in Manhattan as possible while still being able to see New Jersey. The wider two way streets like 14th, 23rd, 34th and 42nd are recommended for even better views.

Read more here and here







Photo 1 via wlphoto and photo 2 via ManicMaurice

***Side note***
Welcome to the second theme of The Curiosity Project - Urban Experiences. The last two weeks we brought you fun/random/crazy inspirations focused on being passionate. If you missed any of those posts, we'll be uploading a poster soon that shows a little bit of each of them.