or you could always type it in: http://www.thefunctionality.com/blog/

Have a great day, This site will be off line by the end of next week. 

Warmest regards, 

Andrew of The Functionality.

courtesy of www.sizesmayvary.com

Sizes May Vary is a content book for graphic designers. It has an incredible amount of page to container relationships. Where once there were a series of sheets, templates or forms that paired sheet-size to envelope-size, Mark Boyce has created a compelling illustration of those systems. 

Apparently the editors at Grafik Magazine have a fetish for paper:

If formats get you feeling a bit frisky, fresh graph paper gets you misty-eyed and a diagram of international paper standards is, for you, nothing short of frame-worthy artwork, then this book should work like vectorised Valium on your graphic erogenous zone. Subtitled “A Workbook for Graphic Design”, Mark Boyce’s creation (published by Laurence King) is part sketchbook, part reference manual and, yes, part graphic porn.

At The Functionality we think that a book like this is not only beautiful its effect could be bountiful. By my estimate if each of the 336 pages contains at least 5 useful comparisons each book saves 1,344 sheets of paper or envelopes from being bought be designers needing to test how their sheets fit in some envelopes.

The project runs for about 5 weeks, and the artists are encouraged to staff their shanty and interact with the public audience in this informal atmosphere (as compared to a typical gallery).  After the project’s duration, the shanties are disassembled before the lake thaws and often stored for the next year’s installation.  This project provides a great example of opportunistic adaptation, reuse, community, and unique site application.

Editor’s Note: Alexei Othenin-Girard is an on-line game designer living in the bay area. He thinks,

“games are just starting to develop their own language of design, and are borrowing pretty heavily from visual arts (Braid is basically an impressionist video game,) and also trying to move past that to find their own language.” 

Today he brings us a special article about a new game that, as architects, designers and artists concerned with our built environment, proposes a truly terrifying urban scenario.

I am fascinated by virtual worlds. Mirror’s Edge is an interesting case, it’s a virtual world with an emphasis on virtual architecture. Mirror’s Edge contrasts the smooth, surfaces of the facades and landscapes of public architectures in the game (plazas, malls,) with the bumpy, hidden architectures (alleyways, rooftops) that make up the majority of the environments that players actually traverse. It’s not the first game with good art direction, but it may be the first game with a coherent (and meaningful) sensibility of interior and exterior design.

Through cropped views and impersonal vistas, the game imagines a surveillance society where civil liberties have long been abandoned in favor of perceived safety. It’s the unwatched parts of the city that allow the player to move freely across the face of the city, literally jumping from rooftop to rooftop, escaping the cops.

What’s interesting is that the “public” architecture doesn’t look much different from what you’d see in any given downtown city. The Shard, especially, which is the center of the “public” power structure, is a faceless glass monolith that manages to look both imposing and generic. You could imagine walking past it daily without noticing, which is precisely why it works as a symbol of the implacable, authoritarian control that proliferates under the guise of “safety.”

In today’s climate of fear and paranoia  the only locations where we can be truly free from observation are the places in a city that are behind the scene or somehow off limits to our everyday existence

Editor’s Note: This post is from The Functionality’s resident music-editor-at-large. Now and again, The Functionality will feature articles focused on the intersection of music and technology, we love music and we know you do too…

It’s a cliche at this point, but laptops open up an arsenal of options for casual and professional noise-making. Using Serato or Ableton‘s Live suite, artists and DJs can blend multi-layered compositions, or just gin-up remixes on the fly. One of Ableton’s secret weapons is its patches, which can let you dice audio into component tracks which then trigger like instruments with the touch of a midi-controller. Isolate an arpeggiated bassline and then drop it on a crowd with the flick of a switch. With all the possibilities that opens up, some breathless folks forget that cut-and-paste has long been hardwired into pop music’s DNA. Software just flattens the learning curve. Case in point: a 1986 cassette-only 60-minute megamix by Dr. Dre, sold at the Roadium Swap Meet in LA. Part 1 is a hip-hop mega mix with healthy helpings of classic rock and top 40; part 2 is serious electro. Throw on your hightops and jumpsuit, and do the cabbage patch.

Mag-Lev Wind Turbine

As the parade of next generation consumer wind turbines continues, here at The Functionality, we present the MagWind turbine, a “Magnetically-Levitated Axial Flux Alternator with Programmable Variable Coil Resistance, Vertical Axis Wind Turbine”. In other words, its a vertical blade that rotates above levitating magnets.

1. mag-lev means no exposed rotating axis to lubricate/maintain. Magnets at the outside tip of each blade float directly above the coils that generate electricity.
2. Because it is frictionless, it is highly efficient and therefore optimal for urban low-wind situations.
3. The “Roof effect:” A roof with a 10-foot vertical rise and a 30% angle will provide nearly a 200% increase in the amount of wind energy that is available to be turned into electricity. Compared to the same turbine just sitting on a pole, the roof effect increases the power yielded by operation of the wind turbine dramatically.

Windscoops in Hyderabad, Pakistan

#3 begs the question: how with the rooftops of the future look, as we begin to optimize their form in order to aid in the generation of electricity? Will our cities begin to look like Hyderabad, Pakistan, with its wind scoop-ed skyline? From April to June the temperature in Hyderabad can exceed 50° C, but the wind always blows from the same direction, so the position of rooftop windscoops are fixed and define the image of the city. What are other implications of sculpted rooftops?

“In multistoried houses they reach all the way down, doubling as intramural telephones. Although the origin of this contraption is unknown, it has been in use for at least five hundred years.”
- Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1964

Other specs on the MagWind turbine:

• Productivity: 1100 kWh/month in a 13 mph average wind.
• ROI: If current bill is $300 per month or more, then ROI 3 years or less.

Cover of Volume #18 courtesy of Volume

We’re on a literary kick here at The Functionality, today we bring you Volume an architectural journal that is as cheeky as it is savagely intelligent. The most recent issue of volume begins with,

Originally a wacko, hippy-esque ideology, ‘sustainability’ – aka ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘green’ – has now become globally accepted. But as what – an environmental urgency, a political issue, a technical problem, a historic destiny, a new world order? And what are the consequences of this acceptance? 

Like Polar Bears not having an ice burg to stand on, what unexpected consequences will our adoption of a more holistic environmental approach to design have? We just don’t know yet. 

But the concept of a holistic approach to design or sustainability is one that is meant to tie together environmental systems to have a positive effect. Like individual windmills atop our houses or an energy producing dance floor, new technologies that are supporting ideas of aggregate energy production are incredibly exciting. 

We aren’t saying that energy isn’t political, just that its possible that when you get a lot of people changing a little bit it really adds up!

Swift turbine mounted to side of residential building (credit www.swiftwindturbine.com)

Sick of paying your electricity bills? Ever wondered how to harness some of the wind’s energy on a local scale without having to work around zoning restrictions on tall, stand-alone poles?  We are intrigued by the Swift Wind Turbine that mount onto any structure and offer instantaneous power.  Each unit generates about 2,000 kWh of electricity per year, enough for about 20% of an average home’s electrical needs.  Multiple units can be combined to increase output.

In addition, the product claims to become carbon/energy positive within four years of use and it is capable of operating at noise levels that are practically inaudible.

Make Magazine is a fantastic publication that does just that for the everyday tinkerer. What differentiates this magazine from that of a standard trade publication is not only its graphic design, but the design of the hand made objects it contains. These aren’t your typical DIY objects, they are well crafted items. 

In some ways its the hard-tech open-source revolution that is typically so far behind the open-source coding software world that most of us exist in today. 

Thomas Edison holds 1093 patents and not a college degree. We can all prototype and fabricate a bit more these days thanks to Make Magazine

Like those engineers in the GM design lab, drawing is often still done by hand today

Felice Varini does amazing drawings, with his hands, that blur the lines of reality. He plays with the whole medium of Tromp-L’oeil, a renaissance  tradition of depicting space on a 2-dimensional surface. What makes Varini so unique is that his drawings are in space and the surface is often a photograph or the idealized location of the viewer in that single location.

Like Holbein’s The Ambassador,viewers who wish to experience the full effect are locked into a single location to view this spatial drawing. A great book that describes the development of vision devices is Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer. It presents a great history taking the reader from the Camera Obscura to Virtual Reality, developing an incredible argument about how powerful the device itself is in the control of what it is viewing.

All this is a long winded way of saying how excited I am to see Make Magazine’s Blog entry about a drawing machine that responds to sound:

Have speakers, robot arm, some engineering can draw!