Assignment: Thoughtless Acts

Collaborators:

Assignment: Thoughtless Acts
Collaborators:

Drying Clothes

Residents of apartment buildings in large cities rarely have the real estate to dry clothes. To tackle this problem, they usually resort to a makeshift clothesline by their windows. When the windows are grilled, it is common to wrap garments around the patterns on the grill and to which they are clipped. When then are no grills in the windows, it seems like anything from a twine (that is fastened to the sides of the window) to clothes hangers can be used. Picture 1 shows a typical SF apartment building with a clothesline by the window. Picture 2 shows a makeshift clothesline made out of twine. Picture 3 shows clothes wrapped around the patterns of the grill.

All the images in this category are Google images.

Design Solutions: Have an indoor clothes drying rack that will let you dry clothes in the comfort of your bathroom such as this one: http://www.core77.com/greenergadgets/entry.php?projectid=23. You no longer have to worry about clothes being blown away or ugly building facades!

Billboards

A lamppost-billboard across the road from where I live in Berkeley.

This was a huge wall I came across in downtown Seattle that had posters all over it. All these posters turned out to be advertisements for a movie.

Street graffiti is a popular art form in India. They are an inexpensive alternative to hoardings and the street walls are used to display ads, announcements, and for election campaigns. The first is an election cartoon and the second, an election campaign. (These two are flickr images)

I posted this because I thought these two images were very interesting in the context of using artifacts in the street to depict information. Street graffiti is more of a tradition in India, than a thoughtless act and consequently, I do not see any design solution to prevent the recurrence of this act.

However, for the lamppost billboard and the poster wall, a design solution might be to designated spaces in the downtown or in every block of the street for people to post their notices and ads.

Bikes

When then are no parking stations for bikes nearby, all bikers have to do is chain their bikes to any railing they see..

…or a tree.

The first bike picture was taken at Pike Place Market in Seattle and the second, at the Blue Grass festival in San Francisco. In the first case, bikers had fastened their bikes to a railing in the first floor of the market and in the second, a group of bikers had chained all their bikes to one another and the entire set then to a tree. The sheer ingenuity of this act makes me wonder if it is really thoughtless?

Design Solution: Make temporary bike parking stations available during festivals and such. Bikers could also have a portable bike station that they fasten their bikes to. This device could plant itself to the ground and the bikes can be hooked on to it. The docking station could also have the provision to be secured with a lock

More. I couldn't resist not posting these pictures.

This picture was taken on Bancroft and Telegraph. A man holding an ad placard had hung his backpack in the nearby traffic light while he was at his job.

A woman stuffs various items such as jackets and other small bags in her child's stroller so she dosen't have to carry them seperately. I took this one at the Seattle Airport.

A man prays in the sidewalk during the Spice of Life Festival in Berkeley.